By Victor V. Motti*
The mind, then, is not a private possession locked inside the skull. It is better imagined as a node within the universal stream of consciousness, inseparable from the greater flow, yet distinguishable by its participation. Consciousness is not merely contained—it is enacted, radiated, shared. Each thought, perception, and awareness is a ripple in this cosmic current.
In this cosmopoetic vision, every conscious being—human, animal, plant, and perhaps even emergent artificial intelligences—can be understood as a kind of white hole. If a black hole consumes and conceals, the white hole releases and reveals. Each being radiates awareness in its own manner, serving as a locus where intelligence and meaning erupt into the field of being. What accounts for this radiance remains a mystery, though one might speculate that it emerges from singular geometric properties of spacetime itself, shaped by the intricate energy-momentum configurations of the brain—or analogous structures in other living and non-living systems.
This vision pushes us beyond metaphors toward a profound demand: the search for a new mathematics, a new geometry, capable of integrating all scales of reality—from the subatomic to the stellar to the sentient. The quest is not merely technical but existential. Without such a unifying structure, we remain fragmented in our sciences and philosophies, unable to grasp the deep continuity of being. With it, however, we may begin to perceive how the same principles that organize galaxies also pulse through the firing of neurons, the blossoming of a flower, and the birth of an idea.
To embrace this perspective is to recognize consciousness not as an accident of evolution or a byproduct of matter, but as an ontological radiation—an essential mode of being. Each of us, in our smallness, is a window through which the universe gazes back at itself.
* Victor V. Motti is the author of Planetary Foresight and Ethics