Posted on 04/25/2021 5:21:05 PM PDT by ETL
As humans, we know we are conscious because we experience and feel things. Yet scientists and great thinkers are unable to explain what consciousness is and they are equally baffled about where it comes from.
"Consciousness — or better, conscious experience — is obviously a part of reality," said Johannes Kleiner, a mathematician and theoretical physicist at the Munich Center For Mathematical Philosophy, Germany. "We're all having it but without understanding how it relates to the known physics, our understanding of the universe is incomplete."
With that in mind, Kleiner is hoping math will enable him to precisely define consciousness. Working with colleague Sean Tull, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, U.K., the pair are being driven, to some degree, by a philosophical point of view called panpsychism.
This claims consciousness is inherent in even the tiniest pieces of matter — an idea that suggests the fundamental building blocks of reality have conscious experience. Crucially, it implies consciousness could be found throughout the universe.
If the researchers can answer how our brains give rise to subjective experience, there's a chance their mathematical model could extend to inanimate matter too, they said.
"A mathematical theory can be applied to many different systems, not just brains," Kleiner told All About Space via email. "If you develop a mathematical model of consciousness based on data obtained from brains, you can apply the model to other systems, for example, computers or thermostats, to see what it says about their conscious experience too."
Some prominent minds lend weight to the view of panpsychism, not least renowned Oxford physicist Sir Roger Penrose, who was among the first academics to propose we go beyond neuroscience when looking at consciousness.
He says we should strongly consider the role of quantum mechanics and in his book published in 1989 "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics" he argued that human consciousness is non-algorithmic and a product of quantum effects.
This idea evolved in collaboration with anesthesiologist and psychologist Stuart Hameroff into a hypothesis called Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR).
It claims consciousness is likely due to quantum vibrations in microtubules deep within brain neurons as opposed to the conventionally held view that it is due to connections between neurons.
Importantly, however, "Orch OR suggests there is a connection between the brain's biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe", according to a statement published in the March 2014 paper "Consciousness In The Universe: A Review of the "Orch OR" Theory", written by Penrose and Hameroff in the journal Physics of Life Reviews.
And it's on this basis that Kleiner and Tull are working. They are also inspired by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, distinguished chair in Consciousness Studies at the University of Wisconsin.
Tononi's theory of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), published in the journal BMC Neuroscience, is one of a small class of promising models of consciousness. “IIT is a very mathematical theory,” Kleiner said.
IIT says consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality; that it exists and is structured, specific, unified and definite. A core idea suggests consciousness will emerge when information moves between the subsystems of an overall system: to be conscious, an entity has to be single and integrated and must possess a property called "phi" which is dependent on the interdependence of the subsystems.
In other words, you could have a bunch of coins on your desk, on top of each sits a bunch of neurons. If information which travels along those pathways are crucial for those coins, then you've got a high phi and therefore consciousness.
If those coins could operate perfectly well as subsystems without information flowing to and from other coins, then there is no phi and there is no consciousness. The greater the interdependency between subsystems, the more conscious something will be.
"Integrated information is an abstract quantity which you can calculate if you have a good detailed description of the system," Kleiner said, adding that the system does not have to be biological.
"The result is a number, denoted by phi, so if you have an apple, you can ask how much integrated information is in there, just as you can ask how much energy is in there. You can talk about how much integrated information is in a computer, just like you can talk about entropy."
IIT backs panpsychism to a great extent because even a proton can possess phi, according to the theory. And just as an apple, thermostat and computer can possess it, so can your chair and your desk all manner of other things across the universe.
"When it comes to experimental evidence, there are several independent studies which point at a correlation between integrated information and consciousness," Kleiner said.
So do the subsystems have conscious experience? No. Are all systems conscious? No.
"The theory consists of a very complicated algorithm that, when applied to a detailed mathematical description of a physical system provides information about whether the system is conscious or not, and what it is conscious of," said Kleiner.
"The mathematics is such that if something is conscious according to the theory, then the components which make up that system can't have conscious experiences on their own. Only the whole has conscious experience, not the parts. Applied to your brain, it means that some of your cortex might be conscious but the particles that make up the cortex are not themselves conscious."
"If there is an isolated pair of particles floating around somewhere in space, they will have some rudimentary form of consciousness if they interact in the correct way," said Kleiner.
So according to IIT, the universe is indeed full of consciousness. But does it have implications for the physical part of the universe? The math of the theory says it does not. A physical system will operate independently, whether it has a conscious experience or not.
Kleiner gives a computer as an example, saying that IIT's math shows it may have consciousness but that won't change the way in which it operates.
"This is at odds with the metaphysical underpinning of the theory which is strongly idealist in nature,” Kleiner said. "It puts consciousness first and the physical second. We might see some change in the mathematics at some point to take this underpinning more properly into account."
This is what his and Tull's study seeks to resolve. Emergentist theories of consciousness tend to claim physics is all there is.
(Related: The problems with modern physics )
"They would reject the idea that consciousness is separate from or more primary than the physical and they would say consciousness is nothing but a specific physical phenomenon which emerges from the interaction of the fundamental physical quantities in certain conditions," said Kleiner.
His and Tull's math version of IIT, on the other hand, is intended to be what could be called a fundamental theory of consciousness. "It tries to weave consciousness into the fundamental fabric of reality, albeit in a very specific way," said Kleiner. And if it's shown that the universe is conscious, what then? What are the consequences?
"There might be moral implications. We tend to treat systems that have conscious experiences different from systems that don't," said Kleiner.
And that really is something to bear in mind.
Additional resources:
That the basis of the material world is non-material is a transcription of the fact that the properties of things are determined by quantum waves, - probability amplitudes which carry numerical relations, but are devoid of mass and energy. As a consequence of the wave-like aspects of reality, atoms do not have any shape - a solid outline in space - but the things do, which they form; and the constituents of matter, the elementary particles, are not in the same sense real as the real things that they constitute.
Rather, left to themselves they exist in a world of possibilities, “between the idea of a thing and a real thing”, as Heisenberg wrote, in superpositions of quantum states, in which a definite place in space, for example, is not an intrinsic attribute. That is, when such a particle is not observed it is, in particular, nowhere.
In the quantum phenomena we have discovered that reality is different than we thought.
Visible order and permanence are based on chaos and transitory entities. Mental principles - numerical relations, mathematical forms, principles of symmetry - are the foundations of order in the universe, whose mind-like properties are further established by the fact that changes in information can act, without any direct physical intervention, as causal agents in observable changes in quantum states. Prior to the discovery of these phenomena information-driven reactions were a prerogative of mind. “The universe”, Eddington wrote, “is of the nature of a thought. The stuff of the world is mind-stuff”.
Mind-stuff, in a part of reality behind the mechanistic foreground of the world of space-time energy sensibility, as Sherrington called it, is not restricted to Einstein locality. The existence of non-local physical effects - faster than light phenomena - has now been well established by quantum coherence-type experiments like those related to Bell’s Theorem. If the universe is non-local, something that happens at this moment in its depths may have an instantaneous effect a long distance away, for example right here and right now.
By every molecule in our body we are tuned to the mind-stuff of the universe. In this way the quantum phenomena have forced the opening of a universe that Newton’s mechanism once blinded and closed. Unintended by its creator, Newton’s mechanics defined a machine, without any life or room for human values, the Parmenidian One, forever unchanging and predictable, “eternal matter ruled by eternal laws”, as Sheldrake wrote.
In contrast, the quantum phenomena have revealed that the world of mechanism is just the cortex of a deeper and wider, transcendent, reality. The future of the universe is open, because it is unpredictable. Its present is open, because it is subject to non-local influences that are beyond our control. Cracks have formed in the solidity of the material world from which emanations of a different type of reality seep in. In the diffraction experiments of material particles, a window has opened to the world of Platonic ideas.
That the universe should be mind-like and not communicate with the human mind - the one organ to which it is akin - is not very likely. In fact, one of the most fascinating faculties of the human mind is its ability to be inspired by unknown sources - as though it were sensitive to signals of a mysterious origin. It is at this point that the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.
Ever since the discovery of Hume’s paradox - the principles that we use to establish scientific knowledge cannot establish themselves - science has had an illegitimate basis. Hume was right: in every external event we observe conjunction, but infer connection. Thus, causality is not a principle of nature but a habit of the human mind. At the same time, Hume was not right in postulating that there is no single experience of causality. Because, when the self-conscious mind itself is directly involved in a causal link, for example when its associated body takes part in a collision, or when the mind by its own free will is the cause of some action, then there is a direct experience of, and no doubt that, causal connections exist.
When this modification of the paradox is coupled with the quantum base, a large number of pressing problems find their delightful solutions.
Like the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge is counter-intuitive, and not at all like the automatic confidence that we have in sensations of this phenomenon. The basis of knowledge is threefold. The premises are experience of reality, employment of reason, and reliance on certain non-rational, non-empirical principles, such as the Assumptions of identity, factuality, permanence, Causality, and induction. Where do these principles come from?
Neither from an experience of external phenomena, nor from a process of reasoning, but from a system program of the self-conscious mind. By being an extension of the mind-like background of nature and partaking of its order, mind gives the epistemic principles - those used in deriving knowledge - certainty. Since they are not anchored in the world of space-time and mass-energy but are valid nevertheless, they seem to derive from a higher order and transcendent part of physical reality. They are, it can
be assumed, messengers of the mind-like order of reality. “
___________________________________________
Lothar Schafer
Biography: Lothar Schafer is a [now retired] quantum chemist and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arkansas.
Schäfer and his coworkers are interested in applying computational chemistry to the structural and dynamical properties of proteins. Recently we developed an algorithm that allows predicting backbone bond lengths and angles in proteins from first principles (i.e. ab initio calculations of peptides) with accuracy similar to that afforded by high resolution protein crystallography. In cooperation with Prof. Kris van Alsenoy of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, an investigation is under way to study the normal modes of vibration of proteins as a basis of modeling protein folding mechanisms.
In a second project, the general quantum nature of molecules is explored as a basis to support the pre-Darwinian view of evolution by natural law. Pre-Darwinian biologists believed that life forms are necessary and not contingent, and they wanted to explain the diversity of life forms by natural law, not by natural selection.
https://www.closertotruth.com/contributor/lothar-schafer/profile
Nowhere is it written that hairless apes have the capacity to fully understand the universe.
We are really good at lying, though.
This guy could benefit from reading some Thomas Aquinas -- or the popularizations of him by Edward Feser.
I particularly like this passage...
“That the universe should be mind-like and not communicate with the human mind - the one organ to which it is akin - is not very likely. In fact, one of the most fascinating faculties of the human mind is its ability to be inspired by unknown sources - as though it were sensitive to signals of a mysterious origin. It is at this point that the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.” —Lothar Schafer
Thanks,
I’ll give it a try.
Thanks.
Fred Hoyle was the guy who coined the term “Big Bang”.
However, he meant it in a demeaning way, because he didn’t believe it. He was a proponent of the “steady state” theory of the universe.
The Buddhists are right. And nicer than most believers of any other religions.
Peruse later.
Garbage in garbage out
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