Science and physics have never fully explained the reality we live in. Spiritualism often borrows their language to claim credibility it hasn't earned. The truth is simpler: we don't yet understand our own reality. Dewfog is a research project that follows science and physics as far as they can go, while taking spiritualist claims seriously enough to test them rather than dismiss them — investigating one open question: could consciousness be fundamental, rather than something the brain merely produces? From there, quantum physics, neuroscience, and the question of who you even are all become different angles on the same open investigation. If consciousness turns out to be part of the fabric reality is built from, rather than just a byproduct of it, it would change how we read all of it — that's the question being tested here, not a conclusion this project starts from.
Your brain is made of the same stuff as everything else: protons, neutrons and electrons, the same particles that make up a rock, a river or a star. Arranged one way, they make a stone. Arranged as roughly 86 billion neurons trading electrical and chemical signals, they seem to produce something no stone is thought to have — the felt experience of being you: the redness of red, the ache of loss, the taste of coffee. Neuroscience has mapped, in growing detail, which brain activity goes along with which experience. What it hasn't explained is why any of that activity should feel like anything from the inside at all, rather than running in the dark. Philosophers call this the hard problem of consciousness. Either experience somehow switches on once matter is organized in the right way — and no one yet knows how, or where that line would be — or it was never entirely absent from matter to begin with, or the question itself rests on a mistake about what experience is. Which of those is true is the question this project keeps returning to.
Where does the evidence behind these signals point: consciousness made by the brain, or consciousness as fundamental? One rule decides every score: only evidence that tells the two views apart counts — a result the two views predicted differently, which came out in favour of one. A finding both views predict equally, however striking, scores 0 — including anything a brain acting as a filter would explain as well as a brain producing consciousness. Evidence against a narrower claim that only some versions of one view make (surviving death, rebirth, perceiving from outside the body) counts at most ½.
0 — nothing yet tells the views apart (or the finding only removes an assumption; stacking open questions doesn't add up to evidence). ±½ — distinguishing evidence exists but is weak: a single study, uncontrolled data, or an untested explanation. ±1 — distinguishing evidence from replicated controlled studies or a systematic review. Minus leans towards the brain producing consciousness, plus towards consciousness being fundamental. Scores follow the matching chapter of the book and its sources, and change only when new evidence does.
For context, not evidence: in the 2020 PhilPapers Survey of academic philosophers (mostly from English-speaking countries), 51.9% accepted or leaned toward physicalism about the mind, 32.1% toward non-physicalism, and about 16% were undecided or held another view. That is what philosophers think, not scientists, and a majority opinion doesn't settle the question.
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