From Daniel Wilde:

here are some more quotes from physicists and scientists take on this

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.

Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

– Max Planck, German theoretical physicist

“There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction…

The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad… Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singular,

all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves.”

• Erwin Schrodinger, Austrian physicist

“The entire universe must, on a very accurate level, be regarded as a single indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as idealisations permissible only on a classical level of accuracy of description.

This means that the view of the world being analogous to a huge machine, the predominant view from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, is now shown to be only approximately correct. The underlying structure of matter, however, is not mechanical.

This means that the term “quantum mechanics” is very much a misnomer. It should, perhaps, be called “quantum nonmechanics”

. – David Bohm (theoretical physicist), Quantum Theory

“Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter . . . Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven ,

just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation.”

• David Bohm, American theoretical physicist

“According to Bohm, the ground of the cosmos is not elementary particles but pure process, a flowing movement of the whole.

Within this implicate order, Bohm believed, one could resolve the Cartesian split between mind and matter, or between brain and consciousness.”

• F. David Peat, researcher

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much:

There is no matter as such!

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together

… We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind.

This Mind is the matrix of all matter.” – Max Planck, German theoretical physicist

“The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.

Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter”

– Sir James Jean, English physicist

“It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness”

– Eugene Wigner, Hungarian-American theoretical physicist

“It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality”

– Eugene Wigner

“The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul is no longer adequate.” – Werner Heisenberg, German theoretical physicist

“The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.”

• Bernard d’Espagnat, French theoretical physicist

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms.

For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”

• Erwin Schroedinger

“What quantum mechanics tells us, I believe, is surprising to say the least. It tells us that the basic components of objects – the particles, electrons, quarks etc.

– cannot be thought of as “self-existent”. The reality that they, and hence all objects, are components of is merely “empirical reality”.

This reality is something that, while not a purely mind-made construct as radical idealism would have it, can be but the picture our mind forces us to form of … Of what ?

The only answer I am able to provide is that underlying this empirical reality is a mysterious, non-conceptualisable “ultimate reality”, not embedded in space and (presumably) not in time either.”

• Bernard d’Espagnat

“…the contemporary understanding of material is very different now from the way it used to be. If we consider what matter really is, we now understand it as much more of a mathematical thing…

But I think that matter itself is now much more of a mental substance…”

• Roger Penrose, English physicist

“[Is mind] primary or an accidental consequence of something else?

The prevailing view among biologists seems to be that the mind arose accidentally out of molecules of DNA or something. I find that very unlikely. It seems more reasonable to think that mind was a primary part of nature from the beginning and we are simply manifestations of it at the present stage of history.

It’s not so much that mind has a life of its own but that mind is inherent in the way the universe is built.”

• Freeman Dyson, American theoretical physicist

“The notion of a separate organism (a body) is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.”

David Bohm, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory