(1) From an interview:
Philip Clayton:
Would you, then, be inclined to have some sort of realm of truths that were not fully scientific, some realm remaining for the religious or spiritual?
Andrei Linde:
I think that this area does exist, but traditional science doesn’t want to recognize it. The idea of physics is that eventually it will have all its explanations in itself, but this is not what is actually occurring with the development of science. There are always windows for expansion. The main goal of science is to make it a closed science, i.e. a self-sufficient science explaining everything. But there is no theorem saying that closed science does exist. There is one area where it might be manifestly non-closed, and people just do not want to look into it because they have good reasons to think that this is irrelevant for most of their purposes. This place is the description of consciousness. Some scientists think that consciousness is just a manifestation of matter, not something separate–that my thought is just the motion of electrons in my brain. From my perspective this is a very naive attitude which is simply a consequence of being too focused on the success of the materialistic model of the world.
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2) From his essay, “The universe, life and consciousness”:
The universe and consciousness
Finally, let us turn to consciousness. According to standard materialistic doctrine, consciousness, like spacetime before the invention of general relativity, plays a secondary, subservient role, being considered just a function of matter and a tool for the description of the truly existing material world. Let us remember, though, that our knowledge of the world begins with perceptions, not with matter. I know for sure that my pain exists, my “green” exists, and my “sweet” exists. I do not need any proof of their existence, because these events are a part of me; everything else is a theory. Later we find out that our perceptions obey some laws, which can be most conveniently formulated if we assume that there is some underlying reality beyond our perceptions. This model of the material world obeying laws of physics is so successful that we too readily forget our starting point and come to think that matter is the only reality, and that perceptions are only helpful for its description. This assumption is almost as natural (and maybe as false) as our previous assumption that space is only a mathematical tool for the description of matter. In fact, we are replacing the reality of our feelings with a successful theory of an independently existing material world. And the theory is so successful that we almost never think about its limitations until we are forced to address those deep issues which do not fit into our model of reality.
It is certainly possible that nothing similar to the modification and generalization of the concept of spacetime will occur with the concept of consciousness in the coming decades. But the thrust of research in quantum cosmology has taught us that the mere statement of a problem which might at first glance seem entirely metaphysical can sometimes, upon further reflection, take on real meaning and become highly significant for the further development of science. At this point, I would like to take a certain risk and formulate several questions for which we do not yet have any answers.
Is it not possible that consciousness, like spacetime, has its own intrinsic degrees of freedom, and that neglecting these will lead to a description of the universe that is fundamentally incomplete? What if our perceptions areas real (or maybe, in a certain sense, are even more real) than material objects? What if my red, my blue, my pain, are really existing objects, not merely reflections of the really existing material world? Is it possible to introduce a “space of elements of consciousness,” and investigate the possibility that consciousness may exist by itself, even in the absence of matter, just like gravitational waves, excitations of space, may exist in the absence of protons and electrons? Will it not turn out, with further scientific developments, that the study of the universe and the study of consciousness will be inseparably linked, and that, ultimately, progress in the one will be impossible without progress in the other? After the development of a unified geometrical description of the weak, strong, electromagnetic, and gravitational interactions, will the next important step not be the development of a unified approach to our entire world, including the world of consciousness?
All of these questions might seem somewhat naive, but it becomes increasingly difficult to investigate quantum cosmology without making an attempt to answer them. A few years ago it would have seemed equally naïve to ask why there are so many different things in the universe, why nobody has ever seen parallel lines intersect, why the universe is almost homogeneous and looks approximately the same at different locations, why spacetime is four-dimensional, and so on. Now, when inflationary cosmology provided a possible answer to these questions, one can only be surprised that prior to the 1980s, it was sometimes taken to be bad form even to discuss them.
It is best not to repeat old mistakes, but instead forthrightly to acknowledge that the problem of consciousness and the related problem of human life and death are not only unsolved, but at a fundamental level are virtually unexamined. It is tempting to seek connections and analogies of some kind, even if they are shallow and superficial ones at first, in studying another great problem that of the birth, life, and death of the universe. It may yet become clear that these two problems are not so disparate after all.
Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/209845079/sci-n-spi
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3) From the article “Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?‘’:
Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde believes this quantum paradox gets to the heart of Wheeler's idea about the nature of the universe: The principles of quantum mechanics dictate severe limits on the certainty of our knowledge.
"You may ask whether the universe really existed before you start looking at it," he says. "That's the same Schrödinger cat question. And my answer would be that the universe looks as if it existed before I started looking at it. When you open the cat's box after a week, you're going to find either a live cat or a smelly piece of meat. You can say that the cat looks as if it were dead or as if it were alive during the whole week. Likewise, when we look at the universe, the best we can say is that it looks as if it were there 10 billion years ago."
Linde believes that Wheeler's intuition of the participatory nature of reality is probably right. But he differs with Wheeler on one crucial point. Linde believes that conscious observers are an essential component of the universe and cannot be replaced by inanimate objects.
"The universe and the observer exist as a pair," Linde says. "You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words — it looks like it was here— for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device? In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead.
source: http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse#.UykApfl9aSp
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4) Here’s a recent interview, “Why Explore Consciousness and Cosmos?”:
http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/Why-Explore-Consciousness-and-Cosmos-Andrei-Linde-/874
