The title of the note derives from the question that Douglas Adams posed in his wonderful book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In that book a giant computer is asked: “What is the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything?” and the answer, given after millions of years, is “42.” In this note I answer my version of the question: “What is the Answer to Everything?” It’s slightly longer but at least it’s not “51.” 

I want to stress that what comes out of the note is not a theory. It’s just a belief system.

My interest in consciousness began in 1993 after reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, a book about which the American writer John Updike wrote, in The New Yorker magazine: “When Julian Jaynes … speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C., men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence.” and wondering, “Where in space and time did those hallucinations come from?”

My layman’s interest in theoretical physics had started long before that as an extension of my interest in science-fiction.

I started my independent inquiry into the nature of consciousness in November of 2002 when my interests in theoretical physics and consciousness collided and I had the thought: “If gravity could leak to our universe from another universe, why couldn’t consciousness?” I had come across discussions in theoretical physics about gravity leaking into our Universe sometime earlier.