Chief Judge: I need more evidence and call for a second opinion.
Two entangled physicists, Dr Chaoticus and Herr Dr Dr Prof Quantiger along with Professor Lumina of the mathematical neuroscience department. Hoping to discuss the state of the art of their sciences on the topic they discover their need for a new kind of science altogether, if they want progress with a science of consciousness.
Chief Judge: Welcome, please take a seat and let us start without any ado, my question to you is does consciousness survive physical death?
(Drs Chaoticus and Quantidger miraculously occupy the same seat in superposition and start talking in a confusingly simultaneous way.)
Chief Judge: Please end your entangled state and let’s do things as classically as possible. I cannot follow a discourse based on quantum logic.
Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Sorry, sorry, your honor, it is an occupational habit. ... Now, concerning your question, according to prevailing standards of materialistic orthodoxy, the brain is the seat of consciousness and the self, so if we write down the governing equations of the Hamiltonian for information and quantum entropy in a ...
Chief Judge: Please hold, I call Prof. Lumina for her testimony. I see her objection.
Prof. Lumina: Yes, your honor, in my field things are not so naively easy (Satel & Lilienfeld, 2015). No one has an equation for the brain. Moreover, the mainstream idea that the brain is the seat of consciousness or that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, an emergent property of neural activity, has been challenged from the early days of neuroscience. Severe brain injuries, brain deformations and more importantly veridical experiences that defy space and time as we know it (out of body experiences “OBEs”, cognition during coma, Near Death Experiences “NDEs”, "ADEs" and End of Life Experiences) point towards a more holistic view of consciousness. As we saw earlier, and the brain as the seat of consciousness has been challenged as a “mereological fallacy” recently (Bennett et al., 2009).
Chief Judge: By mereological fallacy, you mean? ...
Prof. Lumina: This fallacy is to assume that a whole is a mere addition of its constituting parts and that studying a part in detail can tell us all about the whole. In neuroscience, in the case of the brain/consciousness debate, this is an implicitly assumed hidden assumption that has been uncovered and highlighted by Bennett, Hacker and others (Bennett et al., 2009).
Chief Judge: So, you say that to ascribe thinking or consciousness to the brain when it applies to the whole animal is committing a form of the so-called “mereological fallacy”.
Prof. Lumina: Exactly, a holistic approach, on the contrary, would attribute consciousness not to an organ or behavior but to the animal as a whole.
Chief Judge: Then the question arises as to where to draw the line in the animal kingdom. Are our pets conscious? The lower mammals?
Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Your honor, you cannot stop there. How about the animals without a brain or even nervous system, like Physarum and Amoebas? Some colleagues of ours have demonstrated problem solving and decision making, a clear sign of intelligence, in such complex systems (Schumann, 2020; Trewavas, 2015). So would it not be legitimate to attribute consciousness or pre-consciousness to all physical entities in the universe, as the many schools of panpsychism (Skrbina, 2005; Tarnas, 1993) try to? If so, do non-physical entities qualify too? If consciousness is nonlocalized where is it? Is it localized in a wider space, the whole animal? Is it spread out in a vast environmental and social container or its interactions? In the cosmos? Or is it really beyond space and time?
Chief Judge: Order, order, the task at hand is not to solve the consciousness conundrum but to access whether self, human-self, survives after death!
Prof. Lumina: Well, your honor, they do have a point. What they suggest can be a working hypothesis leading us to ask what the necessary conditions are for a localized consciousness such as ourselves, that ensure survival after physical death and disintegration.
Chief Judge: For that you need to elaborate on localization and locality - things that I was taking for granted seem elusive now.- ..Please go on. What does physics tells us about this?
Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Yes, we know all about it! The nonlocal nature of quantum reality is the hottest topic these days (Bell & Gao, 2016; Bohm & Peat, 2010; Nadeau & Kafatos, 2001; Penrose, 1994). In order to address this problem, we need to discriminate between the different qualities of the meaning of nonlocal and nonlocality. First by locality we mean interaction and relation of spatial proximity. A step further we consider the global as distinct from the local, i.e. a whole consisting of parts that occupies a larger space than its parts. By classical nonlocality we mean that there exist correlations and relations that connect parts to the whole in larger space and time scales. But also we have quantum nonlocality where events and relations are not contained in space-time at all, they too are nonlocal but in addition they are non-spatial or non-temporal or both.
Chief Judge: Let’s see how to understand that. Say, I live far from my brother’s family and while I am asleep my niece is born which makes me an uncle instantaneously although I am not aware of the reality of this connection. Is this relation nonlocal in the classical or in the quantum sense?
Dr. Chaoticus: Classical! Dr. Quantidger: Quantum! (looking at each other intensely and nodding at once)
Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Sorry your honour, we got far too disentangled for a moment. Well, actually this is not a physical relation, it is more legal or conceptual. But we know now that concepts are behaving more like quantum entities under the laws of quantum probabilities rather than classical entities that follow the Aristotelian, Boolean, logic (Fuchs & Khrennikov, 2021; Aerts et al., 2018).
Prof. Lumina: This is the new and fast developing field of ‘Quantum Cognition’, not to be confused with theories of ‘quantum mind’ or ‘quantum consciousness’. In addition to the meta-modern reality of quantum theories, new experimental facts of how concepts are constructed and interact reveal a striking similarity with quantum entities.
Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Yes, exactly, we deal with a whole that is different from its parts, and which cannot uniquely or fully be deconstructed into independent parts. Both realms – quantum cognition and quantum physics – share the same mathematical and probabilistic structure and underlying logic. A non-Boolean, non-Aristotelian, logic where complementarity (“none-and-both”) rather than binary (“either-neither”) is the rule. Quantum Cognition provides a novel understanding of the roots of decision making, i.e. the role of hidden assumptions, and the context-based bias of otherwise unobserved, or sub-conscious, conditioning (Basios & Gunji, 2017). We see that clearly if we consider an orthocomplimentary lattice endowed with an associative ring algebra of ...
Chief Judge: Order! Order! Stop! No equations are allowed in my court. Argue with your ideas not your published results! Give me an idea of classical and quantum nonlocality.
Prof. Lumina: If I may, your honor, The global relations within a whole are the domain of investigations of complex systems and complexity science (Nicolis & Nicolis, 2012). We have established by now that the whole - classical or quantum - is more and different than its parts. We understand that there are emergent properties that can only be ascribed to the whole and not to the parts. Most statistical properties, like the temperature, are like that. Classical systems’ patterns that emerge during self-organization are another (Prigogine & Stengers, 2018). Nonlocal classical correlations are also the kind of relationship that two classical objects share when at a distance. The classical fields (electromagnetic, gravity etc) are such nonlocal entities. But also, for example, a pair of gloves, where one of them was forgotten at home and another taken on a trip, still share parity connection (one is still left-handed the other is still right-handed).
In the quantum world though, we experience another kind of nonlocality that does not depend on the spatial distance at all. In quantum reality the observed phenomenon and the act of its observation are intrinsically linked. The fact of quantum nonlocality is exemplified best in the phenomenon of entanglement (Gilder, 2008). Entangled pairs of quantum entities share observable qualities independently of their spacial relationship. But here, in contradistinction to the classical pair of gloves, their parity, left-right handedness, will be created instantaneously for both when either one of them is observed. Here we have a whole (the entangled pair) that is not only more and different than its parts but also indifferent to its spatial extension. John Bell has mathematically analyzed the statistics of entanglement and has proposed tests, the ‘Bell tests’ (or ‘Bell inequalities’) which quantify precisely the effects of nonlocal interactions (Bell & Gao, 2016; Gilder, 2008). So far they have been verified again and again. Entanglement constitutes a very well documented phenomenon and is a paradox for the other great contemporary theory of physics, that of General Relativity.
Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: And recently leading physicists suggest that entanglement is related to black-holes communicating via their singularities, like wormholes (Adam R. Brown & Susskind, 2018)
Chief Judge: Stop or you will be fined for contempt of court. We are talking about the Self here!
Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Apologies your honor... Anyway, what we want to point out is that the real Self might not be located in space-time; it might be a pure state that coordinates its localized “avatar” the ever-changing but coherent spatial-temporal pattern of physico-biological entities that we comprehend as our localized self from ‘somewhere’, where there is no here or there.
Chief Judge: It seems to me that you either want to throw equations on my face or talk in an esoteric and apocryphally obscure language that only you understand.
Prof. Lumina: If I may your honor. Actually there are manifestations of nonlocal Consciousness. The novelist Aldous Huxley called nonlocal Mind “Mind at Large”. In often quoted “Doors of Perception” he writes:
“Mind at Large has to be funneled
through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at
the other end is a measly trickle [...] of consciousness” (Huxley, 1954).
 |
| Russell Targ |
As Emilios Bouratinos puts it: “Mind then understands because it is able to stand under the things it is preoccupied with, while actually observing them from above. The non-local components of reality illumine their local manifestations” (Bouratinos, 2018).
From the perspective of local interactions we tend to be astonished how nonlocal connections arise in a world of separate entities and how such evidence can even be possible. We can change perspective and along with quantum theorist David Bohm (the one who inspired John Bell to come up with his tests) we can ask “since everything in the world is interconnected, how come everything looks so separate?” Bohm’s theory accounts for many conceived anomalies such as the influence of mind over matter (Bohm & Peat, 2010). Evidence on that and the possibility of a nonlocal consciousness operating, remotely, in the physical world has been accumulating ever since Bohm asked such questions.
Chief Judge: You say it has been accumulated but I see very little of this evidence reported in the mainstream literature. I can sense that you are using an argument that would ascribe the separate self as a local instance of some cosmic nonlocal higher Self. Is that so?
Prof. Lumina: Indeed, your honor, but first let me answer your hesitation with an analogy. You probably know about the origin of the “Whorfian hypothesis” (Hunt & Agnoli, 1991). You see in Liberia , the aborigine tribe of ‘the Bassa’ have only two words for their ‘colors’, they comprehend and categorize all objects as, say, light or dark. These people cannot recognize any other color; although physiologically they do not suffer from color blindness! The physical filter is the same as ours yet their mental filter is not. And modern anthropology testifies to this with a plethora of other examples. Is their reality different?
Like the Bassa tribe we cannot see what is beyond our conceptual radar although evidence is shining clear. It took almost half a century for the quantum physicists’ tribe to accept nonlocality as a working hypothesis and test it. Maybe, hopefully, it will take less to observe the nonlocality of consciousness.
Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Yes! To put it in another way in defense of our esteemed colleague: The relation between symbolic language and the dynamics of thinking is still problematic and at this stage the need to consider context, meaning, attention, focus, and the role of emotions and feelings is becoming obvious. A materialistic-reductionist perspective tries to abolish all such complex interplay as mere illusion, trickery, and/or fallacies of judgement. But the bilateral feedback between reality and the construction of reality takes a central place in our ‘meta-modern’ contemporary physics. This relation cannot be dismissed simply attributing it to the idols of group-thinking, needing to conform to the norm, sensory illusion or cognitive bias. It is a fundamental interplay between the subjective and objective that calls for an expanded view of both
Looking at data with the wrong paradigm we arrive at paradoxes yet we can never separate data from context construction, and we can never observe raw, unconceptualized, content. As Isabelle Stengers observes, and quoted in (Bouratinos, 2018):
“for finite knowledge, there will always be a gap between what comes into existence and what can be defined.”
It might seem contradictory but it follows that reality is on a par with Leibniz’s “Principle of Sufficient Reason” which stipulates that the Universe embodies the necessary and sufficient conditions for anything to be as it is, including its logic. That’s why pushing ahead with a Self-Reflective Interdisciplinary Science of Consciousness needn’t wait for the full working out of its theoretical tenets, justifications, and specific implications ("Galileo Commission Report", 2019). It’s 100% OK if we still struggle with an uncertain emerging picture of reality. This is preferable to an illusory certainty.
Chief Judge: Hmm we are reaching the end of this session and your evidence points to deeper ontological and epistemological considerations. You made a crack to my reality filter for sure. Let’s see if light will shine through on our case.
Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Right! That’s the key here Light! The possibility that Self is a coherent indestructible quantum-like Monad, something like a superposition of pure states of light-like q-bits, (Kauffman & Radin, 2021; D’Ariano & Faggin, 2020) can be traced if we could launch a project that would just probe the random event field anomalous cross-correlations (Nelson, 1998; Nelson, 2019) in a framework of ...
Chief Judge: Order! Order! Session closed! Session closed! Go back to your entangled state, Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger!
“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern. The complete essay with footnotes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
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