Information survival: Ruickbie excerpt #30

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:   

     Stuart Hamaroff MD and Sir Roger Penrose      

If brain is the receiver of consciousness, then it needs some means of receiving. Descartes proposed the pineal gland, and whilst this idea still crops up, modern medical research has thoroughly scotched it. Instead, quantum physics provides some possibility of a mechanism to bridge mind and matter. There is evidence for quantum effects in a range of biological processes, naturally researchers have wondered whether brain function could find answers there, too. Several theories of mind as a quantum process have already emerged. The most well-known is Oxford physicist Sir Roger Penrose and Prof. Stuart Hameroff's explanation using quantum gravity and vibrations in fractal protein structures (microtubules) in neurons to argue that the microtubules function as quantum computing devices. This is especially convincing in light of recent experimental findings in its favor.

In quantum computing, bits of information (qubits) exist simultaneously in an ‘on’ and ‘off’ state called superposition (this is what Schrödinger’s Cat is all about: being dead and alive until observed (measured)) before being unified into a single ‘calculation’ or ‘decision.’ Penrose and Hameroff argue that this takes place in the neuronal microtubules as an ‘orchestrated’ spacetime modification or ‘objective reduction’ of superposition. Hence the theory is known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR). Hameroff described it as being like an orchestra, by which he meant that coherent meaning (the sound of the music) is created by vibrating structures (the playing of the instruments), with the musicians’ decision to play/not play being the objective reduction.

The quantum state represents an information process: both one thing and the other, in the way light can be both a particle and a wave, until measurement causes a collapse of the wave function and it becomes one or the other. By modulating electromagnetic waves (light, infrared, radio, etc.) we can encode information; Mother Nature seems to do this with quantum states. This is the ‘bridge’ between cloud consciousness and the physical body.

Penrose and Hameroff both saw the metaphysical implications of this. Hameroff made it clear that: “The connection to space–time geometry also raises the intriguing possibility that Orch-OR allows consciousness apart from the brain and body, distributed and entangled in space–time geometry,” and that “quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.” Mathematical physicist Henry Stapp has also been working on quantum theories of consciousness and similarly concluded that “aspects of a personality might be able to survive bodily death.”

Support comes from another area. Grappling with the problem of how to define information in physics, Oxford physicist Prof. David Deutsch, a pioneer in quantum computing, proposed Constructor Theory. This describes a deeper level of physics more fundamental than particles and waves, and spacetime. Deutsch had been working on the premise that “the quantum theory of computation is the whole of physics,” i.e., it is the underlying level, but realized that, although quantum computation can simulate any other object, including its characteristic programs, it cannot relate which program connects with which object, which requires another level of explanation. Constructor Theory answers this by being more fundamental as it concerns the laws governing what is possible and what is not – it is a law about physical laws.

Information seems abstract but only a physical object can compute information and that for the theory of information to work within physics, then it must have a physical quantity; yet physical information is independent of the physical object that contains it. As an example, take the writing of this essay: the words are formed in my mind, transferred through nerves to my fingers where they are expressed as kinetic energy hitting the keyboard and stored as digital information on my hard drive, this is then transferred across the internet to be reconfigured as the text you are now reading, a light signal received by your eyes and interpreted by your brain to produce the sensation of hearing these words in your mind.

The information has crossed biological and man-made systems, it has been electrical, electromagnetic and kinetic energy at different times. At every point in the process the information has been something and resided in something, but the two were not dependent – the only constant in this process was the information, so we must think of the information as more fundamental. If information is independent of the system, and that information is consciousness (as quantum states of qubits) and the system the body, then the death of the body does not mean the end of consciousness. 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.