With the growing relevance of the so-called complexity sciences, a speculative, purely materialistic view about consciousness has emerged. Proponents of this view argue that, although individual neurons and relatively small systems of interconnected neurons are akin to computers and do not have consciousness, if the complexity of the system is increased with the addition of more and more interconnected neurons, there will be a point when the system as a whole will somehow become conscious. Consciousness is then seen as an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system exhibiting a particular structure. Nobody knows what that structure is or what level of complexity is complex enough. The problem with this argument is that it requires the appearance of a new property in a system that is not explainable by, nor related to, the properties of the added components of the system. Indeed, the idea of a computer suddenly becoming conscious at the moment enough processors have been added to it is akin to the idea of a stereo turning into a TV set when enough speakers are connected to it; or that of getting a motorbike to fly by equipping it with a bigger engine. The same way that more speakers affect the properties of a stereo in a manner that is totally unrelated to the property of displaying images, so the simple addition of more neurons must affect the properties of the physical brain in a manner that is unrelated to the property of being conscious.
A vocal proponent of the view that consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex material systems is the renowned inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil.5 In a debate between Kurzweil and Yale University professor David Gelernter in 2006, Gelernter countered Kurzweil’s view on consciousness by stating that “it’s not enough to say [that consciousness is] an emergent phenomenon. Granted, but how? How does it work? Unless those questions are answered, we don’t understand the human mind.”6 Gelernter chose the most intuitive, basic, and straight-forward way to counter Kurzweil’s position. Today, the materialistic argument that consciousness is simply an emergent property of complex material systems cannot be substantiated. It is an appeal to an unknown rather than an argument. Therefore, we remain with the explanatory gap: nothing that we know scientifically today satisfactorily explains why or how subjective experience arises.
An easy thought experiment to help you gain some intuition about the explanatory gap is this: imagine a hypothetical universe identical to ours in every way except in that consciousness does not exist in it. In this hypothetical universe, none of our current scientific models of nature and its laws would break down. In fact, a universe without consciousness is entirely consistent with all of our current scientific models. However, if you did the same exercise with any other known property of nature, be it a fundamental property like mass or an emergent property like chaotic system behavior, many of our scientific models would need to be revised. So clearly there is something missing in our understanding of nature as far as consciousness is concerned, and the explanatory gap is real.
In the thought experiment above, the hypothetical universe must be identical to ours in all observable ways, including the presence of people in it. People in this hypothetical universe would be indistinguishable from people in our own universe, as far as you could observe from the outside. However, from the inside, there would be nothing it is like to be those people. They would be like mechanical zombies, lacking consciousness entirely. As a matter of fact, those zombies would claim to be conscious. They would report on love, pain, and all conscious experiences familiar to you, but they would do that like highly sophisticated biological computers programmed to do so under certain circumstances. The point of the thought experiment, imagined this way, is to highlight that science could conceivably explain all structure and behavior, as manifested by people when observed from the outside, but it fundamentally says nothing about the subjective experience of being a conscious person. Indeed, the form and behavior of the zombies in our hypothetical universe would remain entirely consistent with all of our science, and science does not make statements about anything beyond that.
Everything that anyone has ever felt or experienced, including all joy, suffering, insight, awe, etc., has always been subjective objects in consciousness. We reasonably postulate the existence of an objective world outside of ourselves but, very strictly speaking, that is an assumption. In his “Discourse on the Method”, René Descartes introduced the idea that the only thing whose existence we can be absolutely certain of is our own consciousness. He captured it in his now famous dictum “cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). Beyond that, we only have access to what comes to us through our five senses, and cannot ascertain its objective reality without doubt. As brain scientist Dr. Andrew Newberg put it in an interview, “The most basic question is what is the fundamental nature of reality and how do we come to experience it. The problem is that we have a block between how we perceive the world and how the world really is. We’re trapped by our brain, by our inability to go beyond thinking and perception.”7 This notion is taken to an extreme in the philosophical position of solipsism, the idea that one’s own mind is all that exists. While I do not intend to endorse solipsism, I do think that the rationale behind it gives us a valid perspective regarding the primacy of consciousness in our perception of reality.
In the normal operation of our brains, inputs from our sensory organs are processed by complex networks of connected neurons, leading to neural correlates of objects in consciousness. Since, at least in regular conscious states, we have no direct access to an objective truth outside of our brains, we assume that the neural correlates of consciousness correctly mirror an external reality that exists independently of ourselves. We do that by comparing our conscious perceptions with what other individuals, themselves assumed to be conscious, report about their conscious perceptions. It is the overwhelming consistency among these reports that cements in our minds the conviction that there exists an objective world we live in.
For instance, if I stand on a beach watching the waves and people around me report on their experience of being watching waves as well, I must then very reasonably assume that there are indeed waves out there, even though I have no direct way to experience that assumed truth. You may argue that I could jump into the ocean and come in “direct” contact with the waves, but all that would accomplish is to expose additional ones of my five senses to the water, like my sense of touch. All contact I would have with the assumed truth of objective waves “out there” would still be through the electrochemical signals that my sensory organs send to my brain, thereby producing neural correlates of objects in consciousness.
In a sense, your entire world is “locked up” in your head. The example above may sound artificial to you, as an adult whose brain is already wired with established models of reality, but would be a lot less obvious to an infant growing up. It is only over time that our brains wire up mental models to reflect the objects, properties, and behaviors that are consistently experienced by ourselves and reported by others. We will explore this in a lot more detail in subsequent chapters.
As discussed above, although reasonable assumptions can be made about an objective reality outside of us, ultimately all of our perceptions and thoughts exist only as objects in consciousness. While solipsism seems to be an unreasonable position to take, given the overwhelming consistency of reports about the perception of reality of different individuals, we must be cautious about attributing unreserved ontological truth to perceived elements and properties of that objective reality, for we do not have direct access to it. This way, as far as we, as conscious beings, are concerned, consciousness is the sole ground of existence. A universe without consciousness would be like a concert without an audience: could the orchestra even be said to play if there is nobody listening? As a matter of fact, this is a question that modern science has put to the test in a very objective manner.
Quantum mechanics, the most accurate scientific theory ever devised by man, is a model of nature where two fundamental processes are at work. The first process is a linear, determini
stic process described by the so-called Schrödinger equation. All you need to know about it, for the purposes of our argumentation, is that the Schrödinger equation describes an envelope of possibilities, or of potential realities, called a “wave function”. This envelope changes over time, propagating like a wave in a very predictable way. At any moment in time, armed with the correct wave function, we could, in principle, determine what the possible “realities” of that moment are. However, the wave function does not determine which of the possible realities actually manifests; it just tells us what the alternatives are in potentiality. In other words, the wave function does not describe reality as we consciously observe it, but simply establishes boundaries on what can potentially be observed.
The second fundamental process of quantum mechanics is an apparent “collapse” of the wave function. It is through this apparent collapse that the envelope of possible realities turns into a specific, manifested reality. This is not a deterministic process, in the sense that there is no way, even in principle, to exactly predict which of the possible realities actually manifests to our observation upon apparent collapse. All we can experience as conscious beings is the non-deterministic reality emerging from an apparently collapsed wave function. Everything else within the original envelope of possibilities described by the wave function will have been just abstract potentials that never came into existence in our universe.
The above are known and accepted concepts in orthodox science, but they can be interpreted in different ways. Only two general interpretations of quantum mechanics appear to be plausible today, as stated by physicist Erich Joos.8 The first is the so-called “many worlds” interpretation, attributed to physicist Hugh Everett III. In this interpretation, the collapse of the wave function is not real, but merely an illusion. All possible realities comprised in the wave function actually manifest, but each in a different, parallel universe. This way, the universe is thought to be constantly “branching out”, like a tree, into different versions of itself, each manifesting a different one of the possibilities of each moment. Since we ourselves are part of reality, multiple versions of ourselves are postulated to occupy different, parallel universes. The memories you hold right now reflect the “path” this version of yourself took along the different branches of the tree. For instance, in the branch of the tree you occupy right now, you have picked up this book and are now reading it. In a different branch of the tree, in a parallel universe, another version of you is doing something else right now, with no memory of having picked up this book.
If you are not a physicist, your first impulse might be to discount the “many worlds” interpretation as laughable. That would be understandable but unwarranted. Indeed, starting from the mathematical framework we know to be true, “many worlds” seems to be the interpretation that follows in the most direct way. However, from a scientific perspective, the main problem with the “many worlds” interpretation is the lack of parsimony. An accepted rule-of-thumb in science is that a good theory is one that requires the least complex explanation for an observed phenomenon. The “many worlds” interpretation, from a certain point of view, proposes the most complex explanation of nature that can be conceived; namely, that everything that could possibly happen actually does.
The appeal of the “many worlds” interpretation to orthodox physics is its role in preserving a form of deterministic thinking, a core value of orthodox science. A deterministic universe is one where the present and future would have been entirely determined at the moment of creation. To be a little more formal about what I mean, a deterministic universe is such that all its future states could be, in principle, exactly calculated from a complete knowledge of the universe’s present state and its laws. In such a universe, everything you think, every decision you believe to make, everything you experience, would be the inescapable consequences of a predictable interplay of subatomic particles. The universe, and everything that happens within it, would be predetermined the same way the trajectories of balls in a billiard game are entirely predetermined at the moment the cue stick hits the cue ball. But with quantum mechanics, any real wave function collapse would violate determinism, since the reality that actually materializes at each moment cannot be predicted even in principle.
With the “many worlds” interpretation, on the other hand, there is no real wave function collapse but just an appearance of collapse from the point of view of an observer traversing particular branches of the tree of splitting universes. By postulating that every possible outcome predictably does happen, though in different and inaccessible parallel universes, the “many worlds” interpretation rescues a form of literal determinism, albeit defeating the spirit of determinism. The price to pay for this precarious rescue is the most dramatic departure conceivable from another core value of science: parsimony.
The other plausible interpretation of quantum mechanics is that the wave function, for some reason, triggered by something, actually does collapse. To this day, it is a mystery what the causal agency of wave function collapse is. Indeed, since no material reality manifests until after collapse takes place, it seems that whatever causes collapse must come from outside material reality. This is what led renowned mathematician John van Neumann, Nobel-laureate physicist Eugene Wigner, and many others, to postulate consciousness as the causal agency of wave function collapse. After all, as we have seen when discussing the explanatory gap, consciousness has an immaterial quality that seems utterly unrelated to the properties of matter. As a matter of fact, consciousness is the only property of nature we know of that has this immaterial quality. It seems to be the only obvious, observable (at least from “within”) property of nature that remains outside the scope of our scientific models, including quantum models themselves. As such, it could hypothetically cause wave function collapse from outside the known, material aspects reality.
Such a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics is often referred to as “Wigner’s interpretation”. According to it, without conscious observation the entire universe would be just an amorphous, abstract realm of possibilities and potentials with no material reality. Things only “pop” into material existence upon an observation by a conscious observer. Therefore, still according to this interpretation, objective reality “out there” depends upon objects in consciousness “in here” for its existence. Interpretations of quantum mechanics that consider wave function collapse to be real recognize a single universe. However, they require us to part with the notion that such single universe is deterministic.
Today, there is no scientific basis to decide between the “many worlds”, “Wigner’s”, and even a few other interpretations of quantum mechanics. So we have a choice. My own choice is Wigner’s interpretation that consciousness causes real wave function collapse. I believe it to be the most natural, simple, and logical interpretation of what we observe in experiments. The only other serious contender, the “many worlds” interpretation, is unreasonably inflationary in my view. Moreover, the main counter-argument used against Wigner’s interpretation is that it is “unreasonable” to postulate that consciousness can play any causal role in determining objective reality. To me, this is simply a prejudice that reflects a natural inertia in replacing an age-old thought framework with a new one, but has no logical or empirical basis beyond that. On the basis of everything we know today, there is nothing unreasonable about inferring that consciousness plays an on-going decision role in determining reality. Indeed, with Wigner’s interpretation, such an inference is possible without violating reason, logic, or the known laws of physics.
From two different perspectives, namely, a philosophical hypothesis derived from the science of perception and an interpretation of quantum mechanics, consciousness seems to play a primary role in determining what exists in reality. A universe without consciousness would be like a stage play without an audience. Philosophically, we cannot say that the stage play exists when not correlated to objects in consciousness. Physically, Wigner’s interpretat
ion states that, without a conscious audience, the stage play would forever remain in an amorphous, abstract realm of potentials, outside of material reality.
Such primacy of consciousness in grounding existence allows us to infer that a process of universal enrichment, as postulated in the previous chapter, should be a process of consciousness enrichment. Under this framework, the as-of-yet unrealized potential of the incomplete universe is the degree, reach, or quality of consciousness in it. If this is correct, then the meaning of existence, its ultimate purpose, is an enrichment of consciousness.
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