Awareness Beyond Time and Space: Hilbert Space and the Mystery of Consciousness

By Ashkan Farhadi

Sep 2025

The Brain’s Limits

Our brain is an extraordinary machine. It processes information, forms memories, and generates our thoughts and actions. But it is still bound by the physical world: time flows forward, space limits movement, and matter wears down.

Yet awareness, the feeling of a yellow color or pain, the spark of “what it is like” to see, hear, or feel, doesn’t neatly fit into these limits. A clear example is dreaming. When one dreams awareness seems to float free of time and place, yet there is no sense of self or even consciousness. How can this be?

A Mathematical Home for Awareness

Here is where mathematics offers a surprising clue. In quantum physics, the possible states of a system are described in an abstract arena called Hilbert space.

Hilbert space isn’t physical like your desk or your brain. It’s a mathematical space, an infinite “library of possibilities” that exists beyond time and space. Physics uses it to describe how quantum fields and particles behave.

The Quantum Trilogy Theory of Consciousness (QTTC) suggests that awareness could find its “home” in this kind of space. While the brain operates in time and space, awareness may reside in a Hilbert-like space of possibilities, interfacing with the physical world through the brain.

The Universal Awareness Field

QTTC imagines awareness as part of a Universal Awareness Field (UAF), similar to the quantum vacuum of physics.

  • The brain interacts with this field, selecting and shaping possibilities.

  • Awareness arises as excitations or ripples within this abstract field.

  • These ripples are not material particles but units of experience, called noëtons.

In this view, awareness belongs to the mathematical domain, while consciousness emerges when the brain and body anchor awareness into time, space through intention that travels back into brain and together with awareness creates a sense of agency or identity in the form of self-reflection that translates into consciousness.

Hilbert Space vs. Physical Space

Think of it this way:

  • Hilbert space is timeless, limitless, and absolute. A perfect container for awareness.

  • The brain is physical, local, and temporary, the processor that anchors awareness into lived experience.

Just as physics relies on Hilbert space to describe possibilities before they become actual events, QTTC suggests awareness exists in a similar abstract domain before being shaped into personal, conscious experience.

Why It Matters

This shift has profound meaning:

  • Awareness is not trapped by the brain. It exists in a timeless mathematical space.

  • Consciousness is an interaction. When awareness meets the brain, it becomes tied to time, choice, intention and finally selfhood.

  • Mathematics provides a bridge. The absolute nature of Hilbert space allows us to model awareness without reducing it to chemistry or mysticism.

A New Way of Seeing Ourselves

The QTTC invites us to think differently:

Awareness may live in the timeless realm of Hilbert space, while consciousness arises when that awareness is anchored by the brain within time and space.

By placing awareness in mathematics itself beyond physical limits, we open new ways to explore the relationship between mind and matter.

Perhaps the language of equations and Hilbert spaces can one day help us answer the most human question of all:
How does the spark of awareness become the story of a conscious life?