Consciousness as an active part in modern physics

[vanesch]

I am going to knitpick here: *I am aware that I am conscious*; I thought awareness was a state of the brain which is not influenced by consciousness.

The problem is of course that you want me to give a materialistic or behaviouristic definition of something that is not materialistic, and that you then attack my tentative definition on these grounds.
However, you are right that the "I am aware that I'm conscious" was slippery. "My subjective experience" should do it. You really should read a few of the dualist objections to materialism in the link I gave you, they try to pinpoint exactly that problem ; here it was:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/consciou.htm

Now, I try to tell you all the time that I feel conscious too, my mother feels conscious and my brother does when I ask them (you should really do the test). The miracle is that all the humans I meet in this world guarantuee me that they are conscious, that they experience subjective experiences.

As I said, there's no problem with that, let them have their consciousness. You then simply have to accept that with one body, there go many independent subjective experiences, namely one for each state. I found that the zombie analogy would do best because I already had that idea even before studying quantum mechanics - that it was fundamentally impossible to know whether another person is or is not having subjective experiences.

I will ask you: imagine that your brain state is scanned, and written down on a (high-density :-) CD. Is that CD now conscious too ?

So are these all zombies which are cheating upon me, or do they just have the illusion they are conscious, or are they really conscious ?? So that is why you have to explain consciousness are define ``subjective experience´´ and ``I´´ as an entity.

As I said, there's no point in trying to define this for something else than yourself.

This is also why you can say you preserve unitarity, because you are not taking into account interactions with other human body states.

But that's not true: I can of course have interactions with other bodystates. There's no difficulty with that.

** I don't see where the *fundamental* difficulty comes from: this is already the case, even in a classical view, no ? **
No, the classical view is expressed in terms of binary numbers. No problems here... (there is a clear ontology to binary numbers and it is not associated to a partial consciousness state in my view)

Well, as a materialist as I would say then that you need to give me a mathematical definition of consciousness (but that is just not possible since consciousness is subjective and a materialist point of view is objective).

That, on the other hand, is not difficult to do, and I did it. It is an asteriks on a body state, which jumps from state to state according to the Born rule.

Let us take our poor cat again, and let us assume that joe and me are both conscious scientists, for a change:

|joe_scientist*> |me_scientist*> (a |live cat> + b |dead cat>) |world1>

I look at the cat:

|joe_scientist*> (a |live cat>|me_seecatalive> +
b |dead cat>|me_seecatdead>) |world1>

And, because I entangle with the cat, I have to choose a new brain state associated with my consciousness, for instance, with probability |a|^2:

|joe_scientist*> (a |live cat>|me_seecatalive*> +
b |dead cat>|me_seecatdead>) |world1>

Now let joe look at the cat:

(a |live cat>|me_seecatalive*>|joe_catalive> +
b |dead cat>|me_seecatdead>|joedeadcat>) |world1>

Joe also has to choose now, and say that he takes the dead cat with probability |b|^2:

(a |live cat>|me_seecatalive*>|joe_catalive> +
b |dead cat>|me_seecatdead>|joedeadcat*>) |world1>

Quickly this gets entangled also with the environment:

a |live cat>|me_seecatalive*>|joe_catalive>|world2>
+ b |dead cat>|me_seecatdead>|joedeadcat*> |world3>

Now, imagine I ask Joe's body about what he found about the cat on the blackboard: |joe_catalive> will write "I saw a live cat" on the board, and "joedeadcat" will write "the cat was dead"

a |live cat>|me_seecatalive*>|joe_catalive>|"Isawlivecat">|world2>
+ b |dead cat>|me_seecatdead>|joedeadcat*> |"thecatwasdead">|world3>

If I now look at the blackboard, because of the orthogonality of world2 and world3 under about all possible unitary evolutions, there will be no interference terms between the "dead" branch and the "live" branch, so I will read on the board "Isawlivecat".

So, for all practical purposes, to me, the world state looks like:
|live cat>|me_seecatalive*>|joe_catalive>|"Isawlivecat">|world2>

and it is as if an effective reduction took place. The only way for me to find out whether that "other" world exists or not, would be to show some interference with that other world. That almost never happens. It only happens in perfect EPR experiments in fact, and then I DO find (ideally) the interference I expect through the EPR correlations.

Now, nothing stops me from assigning a NEW consciousness to "joe_catalive":

|live cat>|me_seecatalive*>|joe_catalive#>|"Isawlivecat">|world2>

What difference does it make ? This new consciousness will now ALSO evolve according to the Born rule and all that. If you prefer others to be conscious, just say so, and we deliver

That is how science works, many ideas are plausible but only few survive temporarily. So, you might make advance in the game how to decide wether people in your world which claim to be conscious too are lying or not (and explain me why you are not in a real one world picture and thereby maintaining only one term in the Schroedinger wave). And this is de facto impossible in your framework. It seems much more meaningful to convert to a Penrose like scheme of objective reduction (although this might have causality problems.)

I entirely agree with you, that would make the ontology-consciousness map again much easier. We'd still be saddled up with the philosophical problems entailed with the materialist viewpoint, but we could again hold our materialist-scientist nose high and relegate them to philosopher's chat.

The problem with all the *other* speculative ideas is that they are changing the quantum formalism. I'm trying to make sense of the current formalism with unitarity and so do about all people who work on quantum gravity related areas. So touching upon unitarity should still be shown to work. In the mean time I SHOW you a way how we can make sense of the existing formalism of quantum theory.

So, I ask you : how did it get entangled to your brain at birth ? Does it die with you ??
Classically, we speak of awareness, not of consciousness.

Again, my consciousness DOES NOT GET ENTANGLED with my brain, it is ASSIGNED TO a brain state. How did it get there ? You could have a lot of speculation here, but the simplest is again: by using the Born rule !
(but this time "out of the blue", and not starting from a previous state).

|pregnant_mother> |world1> + |not_so_pregnant_mother>|world2>

evolves into:

(a|beautifulbaby> + b|uglybastard>)|mommy> |world1> + |not_so_pregnant_mother>|world2>

* BING* Assignment of consciousness, with probability |a|^2:

(a|beautifulbaby*> + b|uglybastard>)|mommy> |world1> + |not_so_pregnant_mother>|world2>



But nothing stops you from assigning also a consciousness to the uglybastard. It doesn't matter. I "happen to be" the beautifulbaby.

 

[Careful]

** The problem is of course that you want me to give a materialistic or behaviouristic definition of something that is not materialistic, and that you then attack my tentative definition on these grounds. ***

Naa, I am not that an uglybaby and definately not the type that destroys brave attempts because I am too frustrated that I do not have any original ideas of my own. I invite you to try, your ego shall not suffer from that To my feeling this should be the purpose of the discussion; the only chance you have to heat up my tolerance is by making some concrete proposals. I shall read the link through tonight... then my credentials go up again.

**I will ask you: imagine that your brain state is scanned, and written down on a (high-density :-) CD. Is that CD now conscious too ?**

No, but the CD player is aware of the CD's content.

**As I said, there's no point in trying to define this for something else than yourself. **

But then as I mentioned in our PM; hell has gotten loose. That is :everyone can make his favorite consciousness theory and come up with his own physical theories/predictions. Where is a kind of objectivity principle in your consciousness theory?

Sure you can claim to preserve unitarity, but actually that is not necessary at all in your framework (you can just remove everything which has no consciousness assignment). The same interpretation and results would flow out if you drop this - that is why I keep on repeating that this is perfectly isomorphic to ordinary Kophenhagen with collapse of the consciousness state in this respect. I agree that you preserve causality (apart from the length of the firecracker). You did not have to explain the rest (that is easy stuff), I was just knitpicking upon your insistence of U (for me it is Kopenhagen).

** Now, nothing stops me from assigning a NEW consciousness to "joe_catalive":
|live cat>|me_seecatalive*>|joe_catalive#>|"Isawlivecat">|world2>
What difference does it make ? This new consciousness will now ALSO evolve according to the Born rule and all that. If you prefer others to be conscious, just say so, and we deliver **

Ah, I see I am in the consciousness business here... the difference here is that # and * satisfy only one born rule (and there is an effective collapse of the physical state).


Moreover, you should work a bit on your magical BING which makes consciousness born Like this it sounds like consciousness comes right out of the magnetron!

Also the Penrose OR theory is an objective improved version of Copenhagen so it does not change quantum theory that much.

That in the QG society unitarity has not been given up yet is the perfect explanation why the program did almost not evolve on its crucial points. Also, I can assure you that nobody involved in QG would dream of solving the cat by using consciousness ! LQG proposes copenhagen reduction and causal dynamical triangulations merely contents itself with calculating expectation values of some *global* geometric observables like we do in QFT (no reduction, no consciousness).

 

[vanesch]

But then as I mentioned in our PM; hell has gotten loose. That is :everyone can make his favorite consciousness theory and come up with his own physical theories/predictions. Where is a kind of objectivity principle in your consciousness theory?

Nowhere, of course. The only point I wanted to make is that such a view allows you to give some meaning to the concepts in QM.

Sure you can claim to preserve unitarity, but actually that is not necessary at all in your framework (you can just remove everything which has no consciousness assignment).

Well, that's the great part of it ! We already know that if we can use state reduction, that QM works very well. Only, we don't have any physics (yet!) that DOES state reduction for us. I'd be very happy if we could find something, and I've often repeated that if gravity could do that for us, that would be fine. I'm all in favor of something like Penrose's proposal (although I should dig deeper into it to understand what he means). But for the moment, that's not yet up and running, and maybe it won't. So we better find some explanation for what we have right now, which is strictly unitary QM (and which might, or might not, stay with us). Only, strictly unitary QM does not allow for state reduction ; nevertheless we need it to make sense out of QM (and we do that in practice with every QM calculation). So the idea was simply to get the state reduction "out of the physics and in the mind".

The same interpretation and results would flow out if you drop this - that is why I keep on repeating that this is perfectly isomorphic to ordinary Kophenhagen with collapse of the consciousness state in this respect.

Well, thank you, that was the idea. But you cannot reasonably expect my MIND to change the ontological state of the universe, can you ?

I agree that you preserve causality (apart from the length of the firecracker). You did not have to explain the rest (that is easy stuff), I was just knitpicking upon your insistence of U (for me it is Kopenhagen).

Well, it is Copenhagen for the mind, and it is unitarity for the physics out there. And that's exactly what we needed, no ?

Moreover, you should work a bit on your magical BING which makes consciousness born Like this it sounds like consciousness comes right out of the magnetron!

Ok, I agree that that was to get the religious right on my hands
A lot of effort in the MWI community is done to make this Born rule come out more naturally. I have to say that most actually try to "derive" the Born rule, but I'm profoundly convinced that in any case you'll need to add a postulate concerning perception (conscious perception). Interesting as this activity may be, the essence is that in the end the Born rule is there, so I think it is sufficient to just postulate it. If that leads to redundant postulates and a less esthetic construction, that doesn't matter. That's cosmetics.
So there are two ways out: the physics way, or the conscious way. Or, a non-unitary physical process is proposed, or something of the kind I've been presenting here must be accepted if QM is to stay in some form or another. I have of course nothing against the first, but as in any case I'm not a materialist (I've been convinced by dualist arguments since a long time, even before I learned about QM), you can understand that modifying the consciousness-physical ontology link from a link with a physical object to a link with a state, for me, is not such a big step.
Anyways, I think I'm going to stop with the discussion here. My aim was to make you see this possibility of having state reduction without physically introducing collapse. You may not accept it, you may not like it, my aim was not to convince you, but to make you see what I meant.

 

[vanesch]

I just fell of my chair: EXACTLY the reasoning I presented here, put together from different sides, can be found in this paper by Zeh:

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908084

Amazing how this exactly fits what I wanted to say here...

 

[Careful]

I just fell of my chair: EXACTLY the reasoning I presented here, put together from different sides, can be found in this paper by Zeh:
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908084
Amazing how this exactly fits what I wanted to say here...

What conclusion should we draw from this ?

 

[quantumcarl]

Yes, and as such, they redefined the subject. They are studying the physical relation between stimuli and reaction of a brain, that's all. It is very useful, but it has not much to do with consciousness. They study the physics of the brain, in all its behavioural aspects. But subjective experience has no behavioural consequences. Objective (physical) "awareness" does, of course: the physical state of the brain is altered by external stimuli, and that brain then reacts to these stimuli. But we're not one iota further in the subjective experience that goes, or doesn't go, with it. You can of course, and that's what neurologists do, try to rely on testimonies from people on which you do certain brain experiments, of what they tell you they "consciously experienced". But that testimony is only a behavioural result of a brain function: there's no way to know whether this corresponded to a subjective experience or not! You could even go further, and say that if you knew perfectly well the entire physics of the brain, you could PREDICT what words that person would utter during its testimony.
But this is a slightly different debate (called the dualist-materialist debate). You need a certain form of dualism to understand what I'm talking about. I still hold on to the psycho-physical link, but I'm just changing the link: the link is not anymore between a *physical object* and the subjective experience, but between "a term in the quantum state of the physical object" and the subjective experience. This is, what I called from the start, the non-trivial link between consciousness and the physical ontology.
I don't introduce it (well, I'm not the first one of course, these ideas are floating around since quite a while, Everett of course being the originator in the 50ies) for the sake of talking about consciousness, but because it can solve a riddle in QM, which is: by strict application of its rules, body states necessarily end up in "different classical worlds", while we only seem to experience ONE of those worlds - something that is then put in by hand by claiming that conscious (or not) observation reduces the state of the universe to just that single state that happens to be observed. However, if we take quantum theory seriously, there is NO PHYSICAL MECHANISM that can operate this (technically, this comes about through the postulated unitarity of all physical processes, which, as such, can never give rise to a projection).
If we *postulate* that we only consciously are aware of ONE of the classical states of our brain (and not to all of them) then this solves the dilemma between the prescriptions of "unitary quantum theory" on one side, and the so-called "projection postulate" that singles out ONE term in the end, because it brings then in agreement our subjective perception of a classical world with the quantum description that would imply that several of these worlds are simultaneously "there".

Our awareness or consciousness results in our observations of our environment.

The scope and scale of our observations are the parameters by which we are able to measure our environment. Our scope and scale of observation is retarded by boundaries that are created by the brain's primary objective which is... survival.

If it seems that our observations limit or enhance the mechanisms of our event horizon, in the quantum sense, it's because we are only able to observe the events which our awarenesses or our consciousnesses are capable of observing.

While we are limited in what we are conscious (aware) of we are also a part of the relative and quantum universe. This could create an unconsious awareness or an unaware consciousness of the simultaneity occurring between the GR and QM. Here one might be tempted to discard with one or the other theory because one of them seems to be the foundation (QM) and the other the window-dressing (GR).


I do not subscribe to dualism, however, because dualism is, metaphorically speaking, like exclusively acknowledging West and East... when there is always North and South and an overly large number of points thereby residing hitherto betwixt each direction therein of a compass's curcumference.

 

[vanesch]

What conclusion should we draw from this ?

That I'm sloppy in my reading-up
(and also, that I'm not the only nutcase thinking along these lines )

 

[selfAdjoint]

I just fell of my chair: EXACTLY the reasoning I presented here, put together from different sides, can be found in this paper by Zeh:
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908084
Amazing how this exactly fits what I wanted to say here...

From the paper:

To most of these states, {sc. of neurons} however, the true physical carrier of consciousness somewhere in the brain may still represent an external observer system, with whom they have to interact in order to be perceived.

As to "somewhere in the brain" have you been following the "EM fields, a plausible correlate of consciousness" thread on the new Mind & Brain Science forum? If we replace EM with QED or even Electroweak theory, might we be able to put some meat, in the form of physical relationships, onto these bones?

 

[quantumcarl]

If we replace EM with QED or even Electroweak theory, might we be able to put some meat, in the form of physical relationships, onto these bones?

We could look at consciousness as a defence shield build by the brain. It is like a first line of defence in the brain's attempts to protect its fragile state... next only to the structure of the boney cranium.

Consciousness (awareness) appears to be developed early on in evolution. When you look at some of the first, uni-celled animals or plants. They are accutely aware of the type of lighting conditions in which they find themselves. Their seeminly aware reaction is an immediate withdrawl or advance toward or away from the photo-stimulation depending upon its survival needs.

Conversely we could imagine an inverse cause of consciousness that transends evolution, time and physicalities. We could, perhaps, see consciousness and awareness as a result of an unseen and metaphysical force that is expressed in a resulting physical event.
We could also attribute a seemingly crafty goal at a soccer game to luck rather than expertise.

We have these choices but, in order to efficiently share our ideas with other people we need direct evidence that leaves little room for doubt about the choices we make and the ideas we have.

Conversely, moreover, it may be wise to keep one's ideas to one's self and believe what one believes regardless. There really is no reward in cloning our ideas in brains other than our own.

Shoe companys and soft drinks have bought real estate in your consciousness and they show up everyday in the same place. This is an example of ideas being cloned and planted into your awareness.

People possesses a tendency and capacity to create a homogeneous consciousness generated by their population and corporations. A collective consciousness appears to be one of the prime-products of society in general and it is perhaps a necessary one. It may act as a field of awareness that serves with the self-examination of the society as well as the observation of the society's environment in general.

 

[sameandnot]

if i fold a CD, we say that i have consciously folded a CD. why do we not say that the CD was consciously folding? is it because we sense it to be impartial, inanimate, without will of its own? we said, earlier, that a CD player is aware of the contents of a CD. how can we say that the CD was not aware if the action occurring? it certainly responded to my will to fold it. must a thing have awareness in order for there to be a response by it?

 

[fuzzyfelt]

Hi,
I've read this, and you're links, and have been enjoying the 'why not knowledge' thread. I didn't want to interrupt that thread, but as my eyes are hurting too much to re-read again, and I'm not sure if I am following precisely, I wonder if you wouldn't mind clarifying a couple of things for me. Firstly, are you talking more about a many minds idea than many worlds interpretation, in both this and the other thread? It strikes me that you are with how you talk about perception. The second question is probably ridiculous, but, could a different way of looking at either many worlds or minds be- giving time extra co-ordinates?

 

[vanesch]

Firstly, are you talking more about a many minds idea than many worlds interpretation, in both this and the other thread?

I never could really figure out what's the difference ! What you have, in all these different "flavors" is that the quantum state of the world has your bodystate entangled with other stuff, and "you" are clearly only aware of only one of these states. In fact, if you didn't state this, I would presume that you are aware of your *entire* bodystate (distributed over all those terms), and that you would have a kind of mega-quantum experience (experiencing all those different states "at once").
So I don't see how one can talk about a "many worlds" interpretation without having "many minds", or at least one mind, attached to one term, which is yours. The entire discussion is then on how to link the different states to a "probability for it to be YOUR state". When we say "many worlds" or "many minds" it seems almost implicitly that they have to be counted, and that you are "one of them" with equal probability.
And the problem is that these wordings give the view a much more mystical sound than it is actually meant to be (at least, for me).

The original name, "relative state interpretation", seems to be much more free from all these extra considerations.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

Thank you, I was probably mistaken, thinking the difference between them was that the many minds interpretation (forgive my simple terminology) split the one mind into, firstly, a (or many) subjective reciever(s) of quantum information, which in recieving- entangling, allowing, secondly, the other part of the mind to objectively percieve classicism. The difference being this subjective recieving/objective percieving split. I realize there is a lot more to the whole hypothesis than concerning this little point, regardless!
I see that the terms are terrribly confusing, I hope I haven't read anything mystical into it, and I do see that my second question was, as expected, ridiculous.
'Relative state interpretation' does seem clearer, I guess, yet I haven't figured out how it is relative!
Thanks again for your help.