From Towards a Science of Consciousness 3 CogNet Proceedings Module
What is the realityæspace and timeæin which we find ourselves? Two types of answers to this question have gone back and forth since ancient Greece. Democritus claimed that empty space was an absolute void, whereas Aristotle suggested some type of background pattern or "plenum." In the nineteenth century Maxwell proposed a "luminiferous ether" to explain the propagation of electromagnetic waves through a vacuum, however the Michelson-Morley experiment seemed to disprove such a concept and the conventional wisdom reverted to an absolute void. Einstein's special relativity with its nonpreferential frames of reference upheld the absolute void context, but Einstein's general relativity with 4-dimensional spacetime curvature swung the pendulum back toward an underlying "plenum ," or pattern in basic realityæthe spacetime metric. Since then various descriptions of a fundamental quantum sea, vacuum, foam or spin network have been used to describe underlying spacetime geometry. Is this relevant to the understanding of consciousness? Could phenomenological inner space related to the nature of space everywhere? Historically, panpsychist, pan-experiential and pan-protopsychist views suggest that consciousness, or its raw undifferentiated precursors, are fundamental to the universe (somewhat like mass, spin or charge) accessed by brain processes. If so, qualia may be found at basic levels of reality at which quantum theory holds sway. The chapters in this section address these issues.
Panpsychist, pan-experiential and pan-protopsychist views imply not only that conscious qualia are fundamental, but that somehow the living stateæthe condition of being aliveæis also fundamental. In "What does quantum mechanics imply about the nature of the universe?" physicist Shimon Malin asks the questions: "Is the universe alive?" Conventional physics unavoidably answers "no." Malin explains how the philosophical approach of Alfred North Whitehead gives a qualified "yes." Whitehead (e.g., 1929) perceived the universe as a process of events, at least some of which are imbued with a mental quality ("throbs, or occasions of experience"). Malin draws parallels between Whitehead's view and modern quantum theory, a connection also developed by Abner Shimony (1993). The connection begins a bridge between physics and philosophy of mind, what Chalmers (1996) calls a "psychophysical law."
The psychophysical bridge is fortified in the following chapter, "Quantum monadology." Kunio Yasue begins by reviewing three views of Roger Penrose that have angered conventional scientists and philosophers. The first such view is Penrose's (1989, 1994) arguments regarding the need for noncomputability in conscious thought. Viewing this dispute as irreconcilable, Yasue moves to a second claim of Penrose that macroscopic quantum states exist in the brain. Critics often dismiss this notion out of hand because of the apparent problem of thermal noise causing decoherence. Accordingly technological quantum devices generally involve near-absolute zero temperature to avoid thermal noise and decoherence (though "NMR quantum computing" occurs at room temperature). Yasue (referring to earlier work with Mari Jibu) describes how quantum field theory can enable macroscopic quantum states at physiological temperature. Moreover, he argues, these quantum field effects address both the famous "hard problem" of conscious experience, or qualia, and Penrose's third unpopular claim of a Platonic realm. Yasue makes his psychophysical connection through the ideas of Whitehead's predecessor Gottfried Leibniz who saw the fundamental elements of the world as "monads." Yasue elaborates on the ideas of Nakagomi who put Leibniz's nineteenth-century monads in the context of modern quantum field theory to arrive at "quantum monadology." This synthesis is indicative of a number of approaches linking philosophy with physics at the fundamental level of reality.
In the third chapter in this section "The interface in a mixed quantum/classical model of brain function" Scott Hagan and Masayuki Hirafuji elaborate on quantum field theory in relation to consciousness. They relate differing mental states with differing condensates of the underlying quantum vacuum, and deal further with the thorny issue of how seemingly delicate quantum events can occur in seemingly noisy biological systems. Hagan and Hirafuji describe a necessary 2-way feedback: 1) quantum signals can influence meso-scale neural function, and 2) some level of neural information can translate into quantum encoding. Surveying available biomolecular structures and biophysical mechanisms Hagan and Hirafuji build their psychophysical bridge between ordered dipoles (e.g., in microtubules) and differing condensates of the quantum vacuum.
The chapters in this section reflect the physics of reality meeting the philosophy of mind. Another piece of the puzzle may be information theory, coming to grips with the possibilities of quantum computation. Unlike classical computers in which information is stored as binary bits of either 1 or 0, in quantum computers information can exist in quantum superpositioned "qubits" of both 1 AND 0 that may interact in quantum computation and reduce, or "collapse" to classical, definite states as the output of the computation. As quantum technology arrives as the vanguard of computation, comparisons between the conscious mind and the quantum computer will be inevitable.
As quantum computation involves reality itself, the chapters in this section illustrate why such comparisons may have validity.