Max Planck: Consciousness is fundamental

This post is regarding Planck's idea of Consciousness. However, it all started when I tried to understand Planck's constant.

During my research about Max Planck's Nobel Prize I found the following:

In 1900, Planck was trying to solve the "black-body radiation" problem: explain the observed spectrum of radiation from a heated object, which classical physics badly predicted (the "ultraviolet catastrophe" — classical theory predicted infinite energy at short wavelengths, which is absurd and didn't match experiment). Planck found a formula that fit the experimental data very well essentially by mathematical trial — he found a formula, then worked backward to justify it.

To make that formula work, he had to assume that energy is emitted and absorbed only in discrete packets ("quanta"), each of size E = hf (energy equals a constant, times frequency), rather than continuously as classical physics assumed. That constant, h, is what we now call Planck's constant. So it wasn't "proven" in a deductive sense — it was introduced as a mathematical necessity to match observed data, and Planck himself was reportedly uneasy about it, treating it initially as something close to a calculational trick rather than a statement about physical reality. He spent years trying to derive it from classical assumptions and failed.

It was actually Einstein, in 1905, who took Planck's quantum idea more seriously as physically real — proposing that light itself is quantized (photons), which explained the photoelectric effect and effectively validated Planck's constant as a fundamental feature of nature, not just a mathematical fix. Planck initially resisted this extension of his own idea; he took a while to accept that quantization applied to light itself, not just to the emission/absorption process.

Planck introduced/discovered the constant and the quantization hypothesis (this launched quantum theory, and won him the 1918 Nobel Prize), but it was more a bold ad hoc empirical fit than a "proof," and it took Einstein and later Bohr, Heisenberg, and others to establish that the quantization was a real physical fact about the world, not just a useful formula.

The above is pure 'Physics' from Planck. But some of us may not know about Planck's view on Consciousness. He said Consciousness is fundamental, and Matter is a layer on top of it. Imagine a Nobel Prize for Physics winner talking about Consciousness! Not only about Consciousness, he says in the following interview with the newspaper Observer in 1931 that Space and Time are temporary concepts and they will be transcended.

I extracted part of the interview from a scanned copy of Observer from January 1931(see the image of the date below). Words which I couldn't decipher from the scanned copy, I have left as ellipsis, that is, (...). But I think we can easily grasp his whole idea even without the undeciphered words.

Part of the Interview:

Interviewer: Do you think that consciousness can be explained in terms of matter and its Laws?

Max Planck: No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Interviewer's summary on Planck's idea of Space and Time.

Free Will and Phenomena

In reply to another question concerning the ....difficulties that beset modern physics, particularly in the ....of light, where we apparently have to use two set of ideas that are in contradiction to one another, I ...that Professor Planck considers that these difficulties arise simply because we regard certain concepts as being objective realities. Thus we assume that everything that exists in nature exists in space and time. The material universe, we assume, is something that exists in space and time. When we regard certain modern ...riddles, e.g., the light quantum, from this point of view, they seem to possess contradictory properties. Thus certain experiments show that the light quantum is very large and other experiments show that it is very small.

Planck suggests that the light quantum is something in which the ... of spatial and temporal do not apply. Men ... learn to regard space and time, ... as objective realities in which everything must conform, but experiments which in this ... phenomena ... must be transcended. They are not objective realities, independent of consciousness, and perhaps none such exists.

I found however that he does not share the belief held by some of the younger physicists, that nature does not form a rigidly determined system. He admits that in the present state of research, the so-called Principle of Indeterminacy, which puts something like free-will at the basis of phenomena, is a useful scientific tool, but he regards it merely as a temporary device, and not as a discovery concerning the ultimate character of of the material Universe.