Rationalist Spirituality

by Bernardo Kastrup

  Still according to Stapp, it is this emanating consciousness that chooses whether any particular signal between two neurons actually gets across or not. Therefore, this model entails that the neural processing in much of the brain is the result of quantum wave function collapse triggered, and chosen, by an emanating consciousness. This literally is downward causation, and entails the “reception” of causal influences from consciousness by the brain. So here we have a physiological structure to enable the “receiver” part of our “transceiver” model of brain-consciousness interaction.

  Since the brain contains myriad neurons, the relative probability of a communication taking place or not between neurons must obey the probability distribution entailed by the Schrödinger equation, irrespective of downward causation. Signals from our senses also feed this neural processing with raw data, influencing the possible realities within the envelope of the wave function. Therefore, the material structure of the physical brain, the inputs from the sensory organs, and the external world that feeds the sensory organs with information, all impose stringent boundary conditions on the neural signal processing that can potentially take place in the brain. Consequently, the emanating consciousness is given only a well-defined and limited “menu”, so to speak, of possible perceptions and alternatives for action that are determined by material structure. This entails the “transmission” of information from material reality to consciousness, tackling the “transmitter” part of our “transceiver” model of brain-consciousness interaction.

  We have now postulated a detailed mechanism for a two-way interaction between brain and emanating consciousness that is analogous to how mission control operated on Mars through its robotic transceivers.

  Notice that Stapp’s model entails that consciousness not only causes wave function collapse, but is also the agency that chooses which of the possible realities within the envelope of the wave function actually materializes. Other authors have proposed different agencies of choice for wave function collapse in the physical brain. Mathematician Roger Penrose, for instance, has proposed an abstract world of platonic values as the agency of choice. However, Stapp’s postulate that consciousness itself is the agency of choice is the model that requires the least number of assumptions for the thought-line of this book, so we will use it from this point on.

  Chapter 6

  Science does not claim to explain it all

  We have talked extensively so far about the role of consciousness in our perception of reality, such perception being the only reality we can know to exist. We have also talked about the causal role of consciousness in influencing neural processes in the physical brain. Finally, we have inferred that consciousness emanates from yet unknown aspects of reality. All of this may lead to valid, rational questions: can there possibly be such unknown aspects of reality? Why have we not detected them yet? Have we not already measured, and can we not already explain, all phenomena through our science? If we could, there would be no “room” for unknown aspects of reality where consciousness could emanate from, nor would there be room for consciousness to play any causal or explanatory role. After all, everything is supposed to be explainable in terms of the position and momentum of subatomic particles. In other words, our “theory of everything”, developed to model the behavior of nature at a microscopic level, should supposedly be sufficient to explain all macroscopic phenomena we observe, like rocks, trees, brains, people, and stars. This would leave “immaterial” consciousness out of the picture, as well as contradict our entire argument. More broadly, this would close the door on spirituality, since spirituality always entails some form of not-yet-understood aspect of reality playing a causal role in the known material world.

  The idea that science may obviate spirituality is tempting because our science and technology have been spectacularly successful in modeling and engineering nature. We have a natural bias to assume that, already today, science can explain the whole of nature in a causally-closed manner. In other words, we believe that science can so completely explain everything we observe that it leaves no room for other, yet unknown explanations, phenomena, influences, elements, or dynamics. As a matter of fact, it is this bias that leads us to assume some form of “supernatural”, ontological substance dualism when we talk of consciousness emanating from unknown aspects of reality. We tend to think that, in our own “plane” of reality, everything has been satisfactorily explained and there is no room for anything “non-material”. But this bias is not justifiable by the current status of scientific development. Not only do we know for sure that there is a lot we do not know, we also have not yet closed the gap between much of what we do know and the things we observe. In other words, we have not yet fully explained the variety of observations we make, even the trivial, everyday ones, on the basis of the fundamental laws of physics we know to be true. We just assume that such explanations must exist and will lead to no surprises. It is outside the scope of this book to catalog all instances where our scientific knowledge is known to be incomplete but, to impress my point upon you, I will mention a couple of examples.

  In the field of cosmology, observations of gravitational and acceleration effects on visible matter, like stars and galaxies, at a cosmological scale, have strongly indicated the presence of an extra type of “matter” and an extra type of “energy” in the universe that cannot be seen or detected by any direct means. Such “extra” matter and energy came to be called “dark matter” and “dark energy”, respectively, because we cannot see them.1 Today, we barely know how to think about “dark energy” and can only infer its existence from the accelerated rate with which galaxies are moving away from one another. Regarding dark matter, we know that it does not interact at all with the known electromagnetic spectrum. As such, it does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, being entirely transparent. Clearly, it is not made of atoms.

  An understanding of the nature of dark matter and of dark energy has remained elusive to science. In plain language, we do not know what the stuff is. What we do know from indirect measurements is that more than a staggering 95% of everything in the known universe seems to be dark matter or dark energy. In other words, we have very little idea about what more than 95% of the stuff out there actually is, but we know for sure that it is there.

  Now, often people tend to assume that this “dark matter” is somewhere out there in space, far removed from our immediate environment. But scientists have reason to believe that we are actually immersed in the stuff. Huge amounts of dark matter may be filling the room where you are sitting right now, coming and going through walls, and passing through your body. It is just that dark matter seems to be so non-interactive with normal matter that we cannot see, feel, or even detect it with instruments through any direct means. Think about that for a moment.

  Moving on to the field of physics, today we have a very successful model for the behavior of matter at microscopic scales, called the “standard model”. However, we have a very different model, called “general relativity”, to explain the behavior of matter at large interplanetary scales. These two models are sometimes known as the “theory of the very small” and the “theory of the very big”. Both are very accurate in their respective scales, but are very different. We cannot expect nature to simultaneously conform to two inconsistent sets of rules. Moreover, from the theory of the “Big Bang” we know that the entire known universe was once compressed in a microscopic scale, so we cannot satisfactorily explain the universe’s evolution from very small to very big unless we reconcile these two theories. If and when we finally succeed in that endeavor, our understanding of physics may depart significantly from the framework we have today.

  Attempts are now in the works to capture the essential dynamics and properties of the “theory of the very big” in new versions of the “theory of the very small”. This way, science hopes to derive a “theory of everything” at a microscopic level. With this microscopic “theory of everything”, science hopes to explain all phenomena in th
e universe, even the very big ones, based on the properties and behavior of the smallest building blocks everything in the universe is assumed to be made of. As a taste of things to come, the latest attempts in this direction, like superstring theories and M-theory, seem to indicate that the universe has many more than the three dimensions of space and the one dimensional of time that we can observe.2 In fact, M-theory suggests that the universe has eleven dimensions; that is a lot of room for properties and phenomena we cannot begin to intuit today.

  In particle physics, relatively simple phenomena are studied in an attempt to model them at the most basic level of nature, that of subatomic particles. In the field of biology, on the other hand, the level of complexity of the phenomena under study becomes so high that it is completely impractical to model them at the subatomic level. Scientists then operate on a higher level of abstraction: instead of taking subatomic particles as the underlying building blocks of bottom-up models, they directly model larger structures, like cells and tissues, from a top-down observation of their compound behavior and properties. We assume that the known laws of physics, demonstrated to hold at the subatomic level, are solely responsible for the observed behavior and properties of cells and tissues in a causally-closed manner. In other words, we assume that there is nothing in the properties and behavior of tissues and cells that cannot be explained by the properties and behavior of subatomic particles. But today we cannot check this assumption because we do not have the capability to perform a subatomic-level simulation of a cell to compare to the observed behavior and properties of a real cell. So we just do not really know if everything we observe at a macroscopic level would turn out consistent with a “theory of everything” derived from observations at the microscopic level. As acknowledged by Mile Gu and his collaborators, “The question of whether some macroscopic laws may be fundamental statements about nature or may be deduced from some ‘theory of everything’ remains a topic of debate among scientists.”3

  Indeed, if we start from our most fundamental, microscopic-level theories and associated equations, we cannot simulate even slightly larger microscopic things like protein molecules, let alone macroscopic things like the human brain. As Robert Laughlin and David Pines so eloquently put it, “predicting protein functionality or the behavior of the human brain from these equations is patently absurd […] We have succeeded in reducing all of ordinary physical behavior to a simple, correct Theory of Everything only to discover that it has revealed exactly nothing about many things of great importance.”4 There is much room for the unknown as we journey from the most fundamental levels of nature to increasingly more complex levels of abstraction: from atoms, to molecules, to cells, to tissues, to systems, to organisms, to societies, and so on. Scientifically speaking, we almost certainly do not know all causal forces that influence the observable behavior of things and people.

  Let us look at this in a bit more detail. In 1967, Konrad Zuse postulated that the whole universe could be modeled as a so-called “cellular automaton”.5 The idea is that the substrate of nature is analogous to a kind of cosmological computer and the phenomena we observe are the results of computations performed in such computer. The substrate is postulated to be an immense array of so-called cells, where each cell can be loosely visualized, for the sake of intuition, as a microscopic cube of space. The fabric of the universe could then be loosely visualized as an incommensurable array of gazillions of these little cubes, or cells, one next to the other. Each cell is postulated to hold a state at any moment in time, the state representing the properties of the universe in the particular location of the cell. Computations, that is, the phenomena of nature, are then modeled as changes in the states of the cells. So-called state transition rules govern how the state of each cell changes over time. If Zuse was right, all the fundamental laws of physics discovered at a microscopic level can be modeled algorithmically as particular state transition rules. In fact, a whole new field of physics, called “digital physics”, has emerged to study this possibility.

  Since most of the known physical interactions in nature are local, the next state of any given cell is postulated to depend only on nearby cells. We then say that the evolution of the state of any given cell depends only on a relatively small “cell neighborhood” comprising nearby cells. Such an assumption of locality is entirely consistent with most experimental observations, since those observations take place under controlled conditions that eliminate, by construction, the potential influence of larger configurations of states of more distant cells. Although a lot of potential causal effects are left out of the experiments this way, the assumption of locality is not unreasonable. After all, the theory of relativity tells us that information in nature can travel no faster than the speed of light. Therefore, a cell cannot possibly exert immediate causal influence in the state evolution of another cell when they are sufficiently far apart.

  However, it is a speculative possibility that the number of potential cell states in a cellular-automaton-like model of nature may be larger than what most scientists today assume. This would lead to a richer, more nuanced and complex state evolution dynamics than those entailed by the known laws of physics. It is also a speculative possibility that the true size of the “cell neighborhood” may be considerably larger than we think. The neighborhood may comprise significantly more cells over significantly longer distances. It may even span more than the three dimensions of space we normally experience and encompass more aspects of reality than the ones we have objectively detected today. For instance, the neighborhood may encompass all eleven dimensions of space-time suggested by M-theory, as well as cell states corresponding to dark matter and energy. The state transition rules may reflect very nuanced and subtle arrangements of cell states across these relatively large neighborhoods. Indeed, the speed of light seems to be high enough that causal influences could conceivably take place over relatively large scales if the right configuration of states is present. Moreover, careful experiments performed in physics laboratories around the world have already shown that non-local instantaneous interactions at a distance somehow do occur in nature. 6 So the relevant “cell neighborhoods” could, in theory, be infinitely large, potentially comprising the whole of the universe.

  We may be tempted to conclude that more nuanced, longer-distance causal influences entailed by large cell neighborhoods and yet-unknown cell states cannot exist because science has never observed them under controlled circumstances. But then again, the practical limitations of the experiments that can be carried out may prevent scientists, by construction, from ever triggering those influences in the first place. In practice, one cannot sufficiently control all the conditions and monitor all the parameters that may be relevant to microscopic-level experiments entailing large potential cell neighborhoods and varied state configurations. One also cannot test all the permutations of experimental conditions and state configurations necessary to trigger unexpected, new effects. Finally, one does not have the ability to simulate sufficiently complex macroscopic phenomena from microscopic first principles, so we just do not know if our microscopic “theory of everything” is sufficient to explain the observable world.

  It is thus logically and naturally conceivable that there are state transition rules in nature that operate on the basis of very large cell neighborhoods and various subtle cell states. If this is true, there may be unknown laws of nature out there directly influencing, right now, the phenomena we observe every day, the things that happen in our lives, and perhaps even our own thoughts and behavior. While speculative, this is not at all inconsistent with known science. Notice that I am not talking about the emergence of a certain property of nature (like consciousness) out of components whose properties are inferred to be totally unrelated to it (like individual neurons or computer chips). Instead, I am only talking about as-of-yet unknown, subtle, and nuanced causal influences that may co-govern the dynamics, behavior, and evolution of aspects of nature, including ourselves.

  As a matter
of fact, some scientists have already acknowledged that certain phenomena do not appear to be explainable by microscopic “theories of everything” in very fundamental ways. In 1972, Nobel Laureate physicist Philip Warren Anderson has addressed this.7 His work has later been expanded upon by Gu and collaborators.8 Anderson and Gu list a number of observable, measurable phenomena for which a microscopic explanation based on subatomic particle behavior does not seem to be sufficient in a very fundamental manner.

  We seem to live under a collective hallucination that science already has, or claims to have, fundamental explanations for everything in our lives, even though it may not have worked out all the details yet. As I hope to have impressed upon you, this is far from the truth, even for most of the “trivial” everyday phenomena. Such a statement is not an attempt to diminish the success of the scientific endeavor: progress has been enormous, and the improvements it has led to in our lives speak for themselves. But it is not scientific to implicitly infer the dominion of existing scientific explanations upon phenomena for which such explanations have not been demonstrated to be sufficient. There is much room left for things we do not know about, and may not even imagine today.

  Chapter 7

  The role of intelligence