Entangled Consciousness

Entangled

Could the answer be quantum physics after all? Various people have suggested that the mystery of consciousness might turn out to be explicable in terms of quantum physics; most notably we have the theory championed ny Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, which suggests that as-yet unknown quantum mechanics might be going on in the microtubules of neural cells. Atai Barkai has kindly shared with me his draft paper which sets out a different take on the matter.

Barkai’s target is subjective experience, or what he defines as the consciousness instance. We may be conscious of things in the world out there, but that kind of consciousness always involves an element of inference, explicit or not; the consciousness instance is free of those uncertainties, consisting only of the direct experience of which we can be certain. Some hardy sceptics would deny that there is anything in consciousness that we can be that sure of, but I think it is clear enough what distinction Barkai is making and that it is, as it were, first order experience he is aiming at.

The paper puts a complex case very carefully, but flinging caution to the winds I believe the gist goes like this. Typically, those who see a problem with qualia and subjective experience think it lies outside the account given by physics, which arguably therefore needs some extension. Barkai agrees that subjectivity is outside the classical account and that a more capacious concept of the universe is needed to accommodate it; but he thinks that quantum entanglement can already, properly read, provide what is needed.

It’s true that philosophical discussions generally either treat classical physics as being the whole subject or ignore any implications that might arise from the less intuitive aspects of quantum physics. Besides entanglement, Barkai discusses free will and its possible connection with the indeterminism of quantum physics. If there really is indeterminism in quantum physics; on this and other points I simply don’t have a clear enough grasp of the science to tackle the questions effectively (better informed comments would be welcome).

Entanglement, as I understand it, means that the states of two particles (or in principle, larger bodies) may be strongly connected in ways that do not depend on normal classical interaction and are not affected by distance. This means that information can in theory be transferred any distance, instantly and infallibly, which opens up the theoretical possibility of quantum computing, delivering the instant solution to computable problems of any finite size. Whether the brain might be doing this kind of thing is a question which Barkai leaves as an interesting speculation.

The main problem for me in the idea that entanglement explains subjectivity is understanding intuitively how that could be so. Entanglement seems to offer the possibility that there might be more information in our mental operations than classical physics could account for; that feels helpful, but does it explain the qualitative difference between mere dead data and the ‘something it is like’ of subjectivity? I don’t reject the idea, but I don’t think I fully grasp it either.

There is also a more practical objection. Quantum interactions are relevant at a microscopic level, but as we ascend to normal scales, it is generally assumed that wave forms collapse and we slip quickly back into a world where classical physics reigns. It is generally thought that neurons, let alone the whole brain, are just too big and hot for quantum interactions to have any relevance. This is why Penrose looks for new quantum mechanics in tiny microtubules rather than resting on what known quantum mechanics can provide.

As I say, I’m not really competent to assess these issues, but there is a neatness and a surprising novelty about Barkai’s take that suggests it merits further discussion.

39 thoughts on “Entangled Consciousness

  1. A quick note on the application of quantum mechanics to neural phenomena. Time scale for quantum events is several orders of magnitude faster than for neural events. In the space of time of a single neural event millions of quantum level events have occurred and averaged out with no single or small cluster of events having direct influence.

  2. This remains essentially a reductionist approach. I suggest that conciousness is toto caelo distinct from what we currently describe as physical phenomena. Now quantum field theory is another thing, since quantum fields are likewise completely unlike their particle manifestations. I think it is at least conceivable that consciousness itself could be a quantum-field phenomenon (directly, not through brain events). Possible QTF is capable of encompassing what we currently describe as mental and physical.

  3. Thank for highlighting this paper, Peter. Since I come from a quantum Information background, this is right up my alley.

    I’ll have to take a Look at the paper itself before I can really comment, though; from your description, I don’t see what the big novelty is that QM is supposed to provide over classical mechanics. Most of the metaphysical novelty of QM depends on how you interpret it, so I would be surprised to see something that doesn’t include some pretty strong caveats.

    That you can use entanglement to transmit information isn’t quite right, though. There’s a famous result know as the ‘no-communications theorem’ that entail that you can’t use manipulations on one part of an entangled system to send a message to the other. Think about two envelopes containing either a red or a blue card: you finding out that your envelope contains the red one means that mine mist contains the green one, but that doesn’t allow me to send any message to you.

    Entanglement is more than that, in the sense that there’s no pre-defined fact of the matter regarding which card is where (and also, that you can’t only check along the red-green axis, but, say, also along blue-yellow and orange-purple axes). Still, since there’s no way to force what will turn up, you’ll only get random outcomes.

    However, the correlations themselves contain information. Indeed, one way to think about entanglement is to consider the information contained in a system not to reside within any of its parts, but rather, smeared out across the total system. In classical physics, knowing the state of all subsystems entails knowing the state of the total system; that’s no longer straightforwardly true in quantum mechanics. Such a thing sounds superficially similar to the oft-quoted holism of the mind, and to things like Tononi’s integrated Information, but I’m skeptical that one can really build a theory on this basis.

    I don’t really see the size of the macroscopic (or similar considerations) to be a great obstacle to QM-based explanations of the mind, however. After all, we’re not necessarily asking for macroscopic quantum phenomena, but merely for quantum explanations of macroscopic phenomena. And of those, WE already have many: the soliditiy, extendedness and stability of matter is ultimately rooted in quantum phenomena, such as Pauli exclusion.

    So QM already explains what Descartes thought to be the characteristic feature of his res extensa; why should it be so weird if it likewise explained res cogitans?

  4. It is hard to see the “error in the data” that causes us to resort to quantum mechanics to explain the working of the human brain. I think the source of the mystery of consciousness, besides not having a detailed understanding of how the brain works, is a brain thinking about its own processing. What should we expect that to feel like? We have only one data point, our own experience. We should accept consciousness, for now anyway, as what it feels like when our own brain thinks. Let’s get on with figuring out how the brain works in general. After that, if consciousness is still a mystery, we can look at it again.

  5. I mean it’s a good idea to look to see if quantum biology might justify itself to the point of having something to say re: Neuroscience.

    Whether QM gives us some final explanation…well we need that first part to come through before we worry overmuch about metaphysics.

  6. Paul asks the extremely right question: “a brain thinking about its own processing. What should we expect that to feel like?” In particular, contrast a brain *undergoing* a painful experience (let’s hypothesize that that is possible), with a brain *thinking about a brain that is* undergoing a painful experience. Is there any reason to suppose that these operations would be the same? Not at all. In fact there’s a great deal of reason to think that they would be highly dissimilar. For one thing among many, our brains cognize brains using mostly visual information, while they cognize pains using mostly non-visual information.

    So, one brain is thinking “I have a toothache that hurts like hell”. Another is thinking “toothaches activate the neural pathways in …”. These brains are in radically different states, so by the physicalist hypothesis, they should be feeling different things. And lo and behold, they are.

    Can you refute a hypothesis by *confirming* its predictions? An awful lot of philosophers of mind act like you can.

  7. ‘better info’ might be…our environment (our place in earth’s environment) is a (quantum) affect of our solar system, a solar system an affect of a galaxy, so on…

    Farmers and Scientist like things that repeat themselves, but Some of them wonder if there are any other places in the universe with people who are like them…

    The more philosophy presents life as it is today, here now, as an affect of the universe, the better…
    …this kind of thinking alludes to the subjectivity and objectivity of functioning (quantum mind-mechanics), without bias …

    …Farmers and Scientist, we all want more…Is our experience, as an affect, a value to our cosmos…

  8. To even conceive a brain thinking about pain or anything else would need to get past the hurdle of explaining Intentionality. Alex Rosenberg figures thoughts have to be illusory under physicalism, because no clump of matter has aboutness.

    This seems like a bigger issue than Subjectivity, where we simply add qualitative properties to the world.

  9. Peter, thanks for sharing this.

    I am still trying to come up with a reasonable 10,000 view of the ideas presented in the paper, which would hopefully clarify the core proposal and the reasoning behind it — without introducing too much additional confusion.

    I think it is best to start by discussing phenomena much more trivial than consciousness:

    The world is full of regularities, of patterns which manifest again, and again, and again.

    For instance, consider gravitation under Newtonian mechanics.
    When you let go of a rock — it always falls down to the ground. When you “let go of a planet” — it always orbits its sun in an orbit approximating an ellipse.
    We can study the regularities characterizing such systems with increasing precision, and discover additional structure underlying them (for instance, a rock does not merely “fall to the ground”, its trajectory also approximates a parabola; and a planet’s orbit does not only approximate an ellipse, an imaginary line connecting the planet to its sun sweeps-out equal areas during equal time intervals — satisfying Kepler’s 3rd law).
    The distillation of all such regularities down to their minimal, irreducible form, is what we call (under the Newtonian framework) Newton’s law of universal gravitation: Fg = G*M1*M2 / r^2.
    When considered alongside Newton’s laws of motion, this simple equation accounts for all of the structure described above — and much more.

    Now, evidently, nature also harbors regularities which (very crudely) may be characterized as relating “consciousness” to “matter”.

    What sorts of regularities? Well, for starters (philosophical nitpicking aside), it seems that those clumps of “matter” we call “human brains” are always associated with “consciousness”, at least while awake.
    Once again, we can get increasingly precise: for example, we know not only that a “consciousness instance” is associated with a human brain during every waking moment, but also that the structure of this “consciousness instance” is somehow isomorphic to the sensory information processed by the brain at that moment (when your eyes absorb photons originating with a drawing of a triangle, “your” consciousness “sees” a triangle).

    You can then ask the question: what is the *minimal, irreducible* form of those regularities of nature which relate “consciousness” to “matter”?
    For instance, what counts as “a brain”? What counts as “processing sensory information”?

    This is the variant of the Hard Problem which the paper attempts to tackle.
    Note that the paper does not attempt to answer the question “why does the consciousness instance exist?” — no more than Newtonian mechanics attempts to answer the question “why does the particle exist?”. Rather, taking as a given the existence of the “consciousness instance” (as a structure which exists in our universe), it asks: how does this structure relate to other structures which exist in our universe? What is the best way to describe this structure under a model of the universe?

    Now, to answer this question, we must possess a model of the universe which contains objects which satisfyingly… er… model the consciousness instance.
    You couldn’t describe the regularities relating the motion of a body to its mass if your model was blind to any notion of mass.
    As Peter writes, I suggest that this, ultimately, is the source of the Hardness surrounding the Hard Problem, as we implicitly attribute to consciousness 2 characteristics which are fundamentally incompatible with any classical model.

    The paper identifies certain primitive constraints which must apply to any reasonable “consciousness-modeling” object.
    From those constraints, it derives emergent properties which must characterize any “consciousness-compatible” universe: effective indeterminism and non-locality. These are precisely the manifestly non-classical properties characterizing physical systems exhibiting quantum mechanical entanglement.
    You might say that “quantum entanglement” looks an awful lot like what we would expect consciousness to look like — from the outside.
    Crucially, the conjectured relation between consciousness and quantum mechanics is not assumed a-priory — it is deduced.

    From then onwards, the paper begins to construct a bridge between quantum mechanics and our notion of consciousness, suggesting that an explicitly consciousness-compatible account of quantum mechanics would illuminate not only the psycho-physical parallelism, but also many of the oddities and outstanding puzzles characterizing quantum mechanics. I won’t try to summarize this part of the paper here.

    Please take this summary with a grain of salt, as it glosses over some of the intricacies and subtleties addressed in the paper itself.

    I could make a few more specific notes about points raised in the post, but I’ll leave that to another time.

  10. Atai Barkai:

    Thanks for commenting! I’ve been skimming your paper, and I find that there are a couple of points where I don’t (yet) completely understand how quantum mechanics is supposed to deliver what classical mechanics can’t.

    First, a general point: in principle, a quantum universe could be simulated (to arbitrary precision) using classical computers. It would take a long time, since such simulation generally incurs an exponential slowdown, but still, there’s nothing that prohibits such a simulation in principle. In this simulated universe, would there still be ‘consciousness instances’? If so, then it seems we can rebuilt using a classical ontology what quantum mechanics does for us regarding consciousness.

    Also, you write that you require both non-locality and apparent indeterminism. I’m not completely convinced by your arguments regarding why, as I understand them, but I’m going to take that at face value for the time being. However, very few interpretations of QM actually feature both—while Bohmian mechanics is non-local, it’s explicitly deterministic; many worlds is both local and deterministic; Copenhagen is (depending on whose reading you favor) generally considered local, but indeterministic (although some might argue it to be non-local, I think it’s more reasonable to construe it as preserving locality). In fact, I can only think of minority approaches, such as objective collapse theories (which aren’t really interpretations so much as modifications), ensemble interpretations and Nelsonian statistics that might tick both boxes.

    I sense you may have something different in mind with the qualifier ‘apparent’, though. You say that there might be ‘hidden’ elements of a state that could cause the physically accessible parts of a state to evolve distinctly, even though these parts are identical. This seems to drive at something like a quantum state augmented by Bohmian particle positions: the same wave function, but different particle states. One problem with this is that, in the Bohmian case, the particle positions don’t back-react on the wave function; i. e. you don’t get your desired different evolution of the ‘physical’ state based on the hidden part of the state. The Schrödinger dynamics is valid in every case, and would necessarily be violated if you started out with a wave function \psi_i and evolve, depending on the hidden state, either to \psi_f1 or \psi_f2.

    But then, that just means that the physically accessible part of your state can’t be the wave function. You call it the ‘classically-specifiable substructure’. I’m not exactly clear on what you mean by that. One possibility would be the accessible values of classical properties (since you can certainly write those down): location, momentum, and so on. In Bohmian mechanics, those are exclusively a function of particle positions—we can get rid of the wave function entirely, which is why some proponents propose it has the metaphysical status of a law, instead of a physical state. But then, every measurement made is in fact a measurement of the ‘hidden’ state, and we can actually experimentally deduce these values.

    Indeed, the case you discuss would seem, to me, exactly to be a precondition to measurement of these hidden parts—you start with two systems in the same ‘physical’ state (letting them undergo the same preparation procedure P1), let them evolve, and find upon measurement a different physical state—which tells you that the complete state must have been different in the first place. So now you’ve extracted information about the ‘hidden’ part of the state.

    Also, a quibble with Bell’s theorem: it doesn’t prove that no local model is compatible with the observations from a Bell experiment (after all, many worlds is completely local, and violates the—often unstated—assumption of unique measurement outcomes instead). What Bell’s theorem proves, from a mathematical point of view, is that there is no joint probability distribution governing all the variables of an experiment, such that the experimentally observed distributions can be recovered as its marginals. One way to produce such a situation is, indeed, if experiments on one side influence the outcome of experiments on the other—then, you can’t write down any joint distribution, since the probabilities obtained on one side would depend on observations on the other.

    But one may also ask whether it is reasonable to expect that such a joint PD should be possible. After all, it contains probabilities for experiments that are physically impossible, such as observing simultaneously the x- and y-spin of a given particle. What could the physical significance of that probability be? And if there is none, why require it in your description?

    But if you say, well, maybe there’s no such joint distribution, then you also have no reason to invoke non-locality. But as a consequence, not all of the experimentally observable values can be predetermined: since if they were, you could always write down a joint probability distribution by simply counting the frequencies of value tuples in the experiment. This yields the second out from the conclusions of Bell’s theorem: the denial of what’s often somewhat awkwardly called ‘realism’, which I prefer to think of as ‘value definiteness’.

    Anyway, before my comment here approaches the length of your paper, I better stop. It makes for interesting reading, but I think there are several points in the argumentation where things need some clarification.

  11. But without including oneself in a quantum world there is nothing…
    …’Reciprocal determinism’ is work in child psychology…

    Philosophers are adults who can move from reciprocal determinism to ‘Reciprocal teaching’…
    …Intentionality may some day become recognized as essential for all interactions, to be as reciprocal teaching…

    Is our universe cosmos a structure of reciprocal teaching…
    …the relativity of things…

  12. 12–A field of amenablenism would be subjectivity, a field of intentionalism objectivity…
    …Embracing these fields as one field seems the value of QBism…

    I think there is someone in India embracing people…embracism hmmm, thanks

  13. Jochen:
    Those are excellent questions.

    You will find answers to most of them in the paper, but this might be a good opportunity to attempt a 10,000-foot view of the other side of the consciousness-QM “bridge”:

    Let me begin by making it clear that the proposal does not leave our current conception of QM untouched.
    Rather, it (begins to) construct a novel ontology, containing novel structures, which relate to one another in a way that gives rise to a world which looks a lot like the one described by QM (potentially, minus the kinks).
    The emerging ontology indeed describes a hidden-variables account of sorts of QM, and therefore shares some similarities with other hidden-variable accounts of QM (such as Bohmian Mechanics).

    I am hesitant to call this ontology a new “interpretation” of QM, as it makes testable predictions regarding the structure of one’s brain (during any given moment).
    Moreover, it hints that the Schrodinger equation may indeed have to be modified — in a way which would leave the time-evolution of physical systems unitary.

    The novel structures introduced under the ontology may be crudely characterized thus:
    1. They harbor complex internal structure — which is always *interacted with as a whole* — deeming it fundamentally (and verifiably) integrated
    2. Only a portion of the structure is classically-describable.

    Said structures (existing in the model) are then identified with consciousness instances (existing in reality).

    What does it mean for substructures of the consciousness instance to be classically describable/indescribable?
    Crudely but intuitively, consider the consciousness instances associated with 2 individuals (brains) gazing at the same photo — where each consciousness instance consists of color-associated qualia not found in the other (“do we all experience the same sensation in association with the color ‘red’”?).
    That which is the same across the 2 instances (i.e. the structure captured by the photo itself) makes up the classically-describable substructure of the instances.
    That which is different — the particular color-associated qualia making up each instance, makes up the classically-indescribable substructure.

    Since you cannot *write down* any expression capturing the structure of a consciousness instance in its entirety (what expression would describe the quale you currently call “yellow”?), and since this the classically-indescribable substructure of a consciousness instance is posited to be causally significant — you cannot predict with certainty how a system interacting with a consciousness instance would behave.

    The ontology indeed describes a deterministic universe — yet one that is also inherently unpredictable given any written description of an experiment’s initial state (and is thus “apparently indeterministic”).

    You made a great point regarding the deducibility of the supposedly “hidden” (classically-indescribable) substructure of a given system (through measurement). This is addressed in section 7.2.3 of the paper.

    Now, concerning your question regarding the simulatability of consciousness instances:
    Suppose you have a sealed black box which is said to contain a bunch of uranium, with a computer monitor serving as an interface allowing for the preparation of experiments and for the observation of their results.
    It is true that in a sense, you cannot tell whether this box truly contains uranium atoms — or merely a computer simulating the behavior of uranium atoms.
    However our model of the universe of course draws a sharp distinction between a box containing a uranium-simulating computer, and a box containing uranium.
    The physical system we call a “uranium-simulating computer” behaves *effectively* like real uranium atoms, in that a substructure of the former is isomorphic to the structure of the latter. However a detailed study of the structure of both systems would of course reveal stark differences between them. In other words, you can always open the box and look inside, and find different structures.

    The case is similar for consciousness instances described under our emerging ontology: you can simulate the behavior of consciousness instances, i.e. create a system devoid of complex consciousness instances — which effectively behaves like a system consisting of complex consciousness instances (with some caveats). However a consciousness-instance-simulating computer would not give rise to a consciousness instance any more than a uranium-simulating computer would give rise to uranium atoms.

    Which leads to the crucial point regarding Bell’s theorem: it teaches us that the behavior of physical systems which are apparently localized (and hence apparently independent from one another) [such as spin-1/2 particles] cannot be regarded as truly independent from one another, i.e. that the result of an experiment carried on one particle is dependent on experiments carried on all of its entangled counterparts. Thus, it teaches us that the state of the universe contains complex structure which is inherently and verifiably integrated; this remains true under the MWI.
    Therefore you can always experimentally tell simulations of consciousness instances apart from real consciousness instances described by the model.

    Lastly, note that the emerging ontology described in the paper is still very much a work in progress; the discussion chapter outlines apparently promising directions of inquiry (starting with the development of a mathematics of classically-indescribable structures).

  14. I think where I have a problem is with the psychology part of this paper. I still don’t have the faintest understanding of the specifics of what the speculative physics actually solves. Like, is there any advantage to understanding intentionality and reference in terms of quantum mechanics? Do we get predictions about consciousness of other animals, or of human babies, or the effects of consciousness altering drugs, or the ins and outs of synaethesia, or brain lesioning, or between-individual differences in terms of everyday conscious experience (eg intensity of visual imagery qualia – a friend of mine always visualised a written shopping list), or the limits of short term memory and attention? I can understand the kind of computation the tumbling E Coli is doing – I believe it is not using doing quantum computation even though there must be evolutionary selective advantages to doing so, and it does contains structures of the right size to take advantage of quantum effects (consider photosynthesis).

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  16. Atai Barkai:

    Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!

    I can accept that you’re trying to build a new ontology for quantum mechanics—after all, none of the old ones are really satisfying.

    If a little bit of self-advertising is permissible, I do have my own thoughts (preprint version) on the matter, which also figure in my ideas regarding the hard problem—indeed, they’re not so far, perhaps, from some of yours, if we replace ‘classically indescribable’ with ‘noncomputable’. Basically, I argue that the (mental) models that we apply to try and explain, predict, or understand the world are essentially computations, but that the world itself is noncomputable; this mismatch essentially leads to a maximum amount of information that can be extracted about physical systems (for the more detailed argument, see the paper). Moreover, these computational models must be rooted, on pain of infinite regress, in something noncomputational themselves—which I argue is a good candidate for qualia, with the hard problem resulting from the impossibility of producing a computational model of these noncomputational entities.

    But enough about my own confusions! In your answer (I still haven’t been able to read your paper in full, sorry!), these two parts seem difficult to reconcile, for me:

    Since you cannot *write down* any expression capturing the structure of a consciousness instance in its entirety (what expression would describe the quale you currently call “yellow”?), and since this the classically-indescribable substructure of a consciousness instance is posited to be causally significant — you cannot predict with certainty how a system interacting with a consciousness instance would behave.

    The case is similar for consciousness instances described under our emerging ontology: you can simulate the behavior of consciousness instances, i.e. create a system devoid of complex consciousness instances — which effectively behaves like a system consisting of complex consciousness instances (with some caveats).

    The latter seems to describe essentially an epiphenomenal conception of consciousness: there are systems that are behaviorally isomorphic to systems associated with consciousness instances, yet lacking these. However, in the former quote, you are attributing causal significance to consciousness instances—a system’s physical evolution, depending on the classically indescribable substructure associated with consciousness, will differ, leading to apparent indeterminism. Both, it seems to me, cannot be correct—either, consciousness instances exert causal influence: then, a simulation lacking these will differ observably from ‘the real thing’. Or, a simulation on a classical computer lacking consciousness behaves indistinguishable from a properly quantum instantiation of a system; then, for some reason, the classical simulatability of the quantum world must fail (and we’re talking of a much larger modification to physics—something like Penrose’s noncomputable gravitational collapses).

    My intent in asking the question was a little different, by the way—I pointed to the possibility of simulation as demonstrating that we can always find an ontology that is essentially classical that forms the substrate of our world; i. e. whatever processes and entities are instantiated in the classical computer to simulate our quantum world, could be (isomorphic to) processes and entities instantiated in the real world giving rise to an apparent quantum universe. So it’s difficult to point to quantum mechanics as necessitating the sort of ontology you want to build.

    Thus, [Bell’s theorem] teaches us that the state of the universe contains complex structure which is inherently and verifiably integrated; this remains true under the MWI.

    Again, I’m not sure I really agree with this. There are explicitly local ontologies that can be written down that nevertheless violate Bell inequalities. The simplest version is superdeterminism: if the measurement you choose and the property-values for the quantum system you are investigating are set by some common cause in a suitable way, you will see a violation of classical statistics. You can do this on two isolated computers, for instance: program a predefined sequence of measurements, and a sequence of particles with particular spin values on each, and, if you’ve done things right, you will get a violation of the appropriate Bell inequality; yet the two computers are clearly isolated from one another.

    Of course, superdeterminism is a rather unattractive option (despite ‘t Hooft’s apologism), since it essentially calls the feasibility of science as a whole into question; but there are other options. One could think about a pseudo-MWI in which each local system comes decorated with basically any possible measurement outcome, together with a key that determines which ‘part’ of another system to interact with: so if you make a measurement on a spin-1/2 particle, there’s a part consisting of (sees up, spin up) and another part with (sees down, spin down). Only when you meet up with the other experimenter do these pair up with the appropriate frequency: i. e. your (sees up, spin up)-part only interacts with the other (sees down, spin down)-part, for instance. Again, you can build things such as to obtain Bell inequality violation in this case (this is basically Mordecai Waegell’s ‘parallel lives‘-ontology).

    But I don’t think one needs to get this baroque, even. As I said above, nonlocality only comes in if we require a joint probability distribution governing every possible value; thus, only if we attribute simultaneous values to non-simultaneously observable outcomes (such as spin values along orthogonal directions). If we don’t, then there is no need for any violation of locality. Bell’s theorem then is not a statement to the effect that there is inherent integration to distinct systems, but merely, that there is such integration if we require for every observable to have a definite value.

    Now, some have taken the EPR-argument to demonstrate that there are such pre-existent values. But EPR requires counterfactual definiteness: take Schrödinger’s analogy of the fatigued student, who only gets the first question right, whatever that may be, and then just answers randomly. Naturally, she must know the answer to every question, in order to be able to behave that way. Similarly, it’s claimed, since we could have made every measurement, and would’ve obtained appropriately correlated answers, there must be an ‘element of reality’ associated with every possible observable. Given this, nonlocality would be an appropriate consequence to draw from Bell’s theorem.

    But it’s not completely clear that we have licence to reason in that way. In a classical world, there is a clear meaning to ‘could’ve done otherwise’; that’s not necessarily the case in quantum mechanics. To put things in perspective, consider how certain questions in special relativity (such as whether two events are simultaneous) only become answerable once you’ve specified a certain Lorentz frame. In the same way, a proponent of Copenhagen QM might answer, certain questions in quantum mechanics only become answerable once you have specified a proper ‘experimental context’—i. e. the question of what a given measurement produces only becomes sensible once you’ve specified the conditions under which you perform that measurement. And in that case, you can’t simultaneously talk about the results of ‘unperformed’ experiments. Consequently, the EPR criterion of reality asks us to combine incompatible stories; hence, the conclusion is suspect.

    Indeed—this is nothing else but leaving out probabilities for experiments that could never be actually performed.

    Of course, the theory itself is silent on which metaphysics to choose—nonlocal values or complementarity. You’re certainly free to try and build your own ontology that meets your needs. If it happens to be one that makes the existence of consciousness, and its connection with the world, more natural, that’d be a rather large point in its favor. But I think one should be clear about the options on the table.

  17. I forgot to mention, too also, when philosophy sometimes considers Quantun and Qualia and Wholeness…
    …It becomes a moving-interacting triad for one’s mind…

    The idea that subjectivity objectivity neutrality can appear-be experienced…
    …thus furthering understanding the need to be here, with our feet on the ground, now…

    One last, Happy New Year…

  18. Jochen:

    Before delving further I want to say, this back-and-forth has been a lot of fun! These are precisely the kinds of discussions I had hoped to have while writing the paper.

    I was not familiar with the existing work on quantum epistemic horizons — but I certainly wish I had been. I have only read a portion of your linked paper so far, but even properties of Spekkens’ toy model indeed seem to bear a striking resemblance to some of the properties of the “consciousness-compatible” ontology. I find it exciting, dare I say suggestive, that qualitatively similar ideas have independently emerged by looking at quantum information science in isolation from the matter of the psycho-physical correspondence.

    The notion of “classical-indescribability”, while under-defined, indeed seems to intuitively evoke thoughts of non-computability. However there are toy systems exhibiting explicitly non-computable dynamics, yet which are manifestly “classically-describable”: consider a universe consisting of a bit string evolving such that it is appended with a ‘1’ if a certain universal TM halts with this string as input, or with a ‘0’ if that TM does not halt. The dynamics of this toy universe are non-computable, however its states are manifestly isomorphic to strings of classical bits (each state *is* a string of bits).
    That is not to say that notions of non-computability and classical-indescribability are necessarily entirely distinct. I have purposefully left such comparisons out of the paper since they are still premature, but ideas along this front (and others) are more than welcome.

    As for the simulatability of the dynamics of consciousness instances:
    What I meant is that the dynamics of consciousness instances appear to be “as simulatable” as standard QM. That is, there is nothing about the emerging ontology (as of yet) that suggests any difficulty computing a probability distribution over possible measurement results of a given experiment (but not the actual result obtained); a Penrose-style modification to the laws of physics to support non-computable dynamics does not seem necessary.
    If you more stringently require simulations of an experiment to produce the *actual* result of the experiment, then (e.g. Copenhagen-style) QM is also (trivially) not simulatable by a computer — not even by a quantum computer (since systems considered identical to one another may evolve differently upon “measurement”).

    An additional point, which veers even further into the philosophical: at many points in the development of the ontology, matters of “personal taste” surely influence the directions of inquiry pursued (as they must, for brevity’s sake if nothing else). For instance, “no conspiracy” is tacitly assumed. This rules out super-determinism [which I like to think of as super-conspiracy; it is all nice and good to say that one’s “choice” of which measurement to perform is pre-determined. But if one “chooses” one’s measurements based on a cryptographic hash of a high-speed video recording of an explosion, happening on a distant planet (or some other esoteric, highly chaotic procedure) — and said choices just so happen to reproduce violations of Bell’s inequalities, then this resolution seems to me to count as a law of physics concerning the initial conditions of our universe — a law which is even more conspiratorial than simply presuming one’s self to have hallucinated quantum mechanics altogether. To be frank I even suspect super-determinism to be inconsistent, but that’s another matter].
    One might say that no-conspiracy rules out the possibility you alluded to, that our own universe is simulated, but just for fun, I’ll note that the consciousness-compatible ontology is not entirely silent on this matter: it suggests that if our own universe is simulated, the substrate it runs on, i.e. our “parent universe” (ad-infinitum, if we consider an Elon-Musk-style infinite simulations) CANNOT be classical, and indeed must resemble to an extent the quantum mechanical universe — since this substrate must ultimately support the consciousness instance.

    Lastly, I maintain that *barring a conspiracy*, Bell’s theorem teaches us about the integration of complex information in our universe. It teaches us that “the substructure of the universe which produces the result of measurement A cannot be unrelated to the substructure of the universe producing the result of measurement B”. Under local MWI-style interpretations, “the substructure of the universe producing the result of measurement A[B]” simply extends all the way from the location of the “A[B] system” to the far-off location of the “comparison” of the results of measurement A and B.

    There are certainly many remaining open questions, concerning Bell’s theorem as well as many other aspects of physics. The paper aims “merely” to make suggestions (and testable predictions) — not to definitively point at God’s truth. I more than welcome comparisons with other alternatives, I find them illuminating as well. For whatever it’s worth, I personally suspect that further inquiry would serve only to significantly increase the number and depth of open questions (I make some allusions to that effect in the discussion chapter of the paper).

  19. Utilizing a model like QM, a model in itself that is egregiously misrepresented and misunderstood to explain another model (consciousness) that is shamefully misrepresented and misunderstood is an albatross. The paradigmatic models of consciousness and causality share the same underlying form, so the hard problem of consciousness is the same thing as the hard problem of causality.

    Any model that does not address nor accommodate causality is a red-herring. Good luck with that one…

  20. I liked “notions of non-computability and classical-indescribability”…thanks

    Example: we design and build a bridge over a river, but only half way…
    …because we don’t know-what is on the other side, we halt/stop..
    …an ontology would be, for philosophy, we also know-what is on the other side…
    …we design and build a bridge over a river from one side to the other side…

    That entanglements halt (have limits) could speak to the locality of spacetime…

  21. @ Lee: Could you go into more detail regarding this statement:

    “The paradigmatic models of consciousness and causality share the same underlying form, so the hard problem of consciousness is the same thing as the hard problem of causality.”

    I also see strong relations between these two Hard Problems, but I’d have hesitated to say they are the same thing so curious as to why you assert equivalence.

  22. @ Sci…
    All of my models are grounded in the immortal principle which is essentially transcendental idealism revision 1.0. The immortal principle is an “ideal” model because it overcomes the built in paradox of the “thing-in-itself” being unknowable. The immortal principle clearly, concisely and succinctly demonstrates what the qualitative properties of the “thing-in-itself” actually are. The immortal principle identifies this ontological primitive which is the convergent point of singularity for both causality and consciousness.

    To be clear, I’m not an idealist, nor a materialist; and consciousness is “not” the ontological primitive.

  23. @Sci…
    I appreciate your interest. “The Immortal Principle: A Reference Point” is a book I’ve written that has not been published. Unless or until my theories are published and protected by copyright laws, I will not disclose my intellectual property in a public domain such as this website.

    “Unless or until” are serious concerns for me to consider, because my models represent a potential paradigm shift that rivals both the geo-centric universe and the flat earth syndrome. To be honest here, it’s a potential fire storm that I’m not certain I want to participate in, let alone be the cause. My models are crazy, but they are the kind of crazy that will either get one excommunicated from the church of reason or a noble prize in Oslo, there isn’t much room for it in between those two extremes.

    A year ago, I had a book contract with John Hunt publishing, but due to the content of my book, they recommended a university press as the correct venue for my work. I took their advice and did not accept the contract. To date, I still have not determined whether I will make my work public. Currently, my personal feeling are weighted heavily in favor of not publishing.

    I am more than willing to discuss consciousness, but not the ontological primitive. I hope you can appreciate my position.

    Thanks,

  24. @Sci…
    I concur… Rosenberg is definitely on target. According to my models, consciousness is the “carrier” of Causation, but consciousness is “not” causation. Consciousness is the continuous, linear platform that the discrete systems of appearances run on. In order to avoid any form of dualism, there has to be an ontological distinction drawn between Reality and the Appearance of reality because they are not the same. And this is where idealism runs off the track, because idealism makes no such distinction.

    Consciousness may be seen a feature of the “thing-in-itself”, but consciousness is not an underlying qualitative property. The qualitative properties of the “thing-in-itself” are “radically indeterminate”. In spite of that insurmountable obstacle, there are features that can be isolated and subsequently identified. Those features would be intrinsic to (R) and would have to correspond to the universal theory of (R) and not contradict in any way. The only features that correspond to the universal theory of (R) would be features that are “indeterminate”. The linear manifold of consciousness is the only model that will satisfy that criteria.

  25. Well .. it seems to me you can’t tackle a semantic shortage in physics with yet more syntax, even with the latest quantum buzzwords attached.

    No amount of entanglement will account for the semantic shortfall in physics, because QE is still expressed in terms of standard physics metrics – mass,time,energy etc. Syntax plus syntax is .. more syntax.

    A syntax of qualia needs to be incorporated into physics to make it work in the only way it can, which is as a syntax-churner into which metrics are provided on input and extracted on output. And that means – to put it simply – having metrics with different units to the usual ones -mass, time etc. but which correspond – in some way – to some quantifiable aspect of qualia which – it seems to me – is still far away

    JBD

  26. Is it possible, thru philosophy, when realizing there is more in nature…
    That the dualism of sensation, the dualism of emotion, the dualism of mentation…
    Could become a standard beginning approach to understanding consciousness…

    Then do we begin, also to see-find ourselves, “as a Result of constant interaction”…

    post modern philosophical ‘syntax’ towards post modern meta-physics…thanks #28

  27. @ Arnold: You lost me at “That the dualism of sensation, the dualism of emotion, the dualism of mentation”

    What are these dualisms? Do you mean the dualism of the third-party description of the biological structures and the actual experience?

    If so exactly how would acknowledging these lead to a “standard beginning”? Do you mean acknowledge the dual views as equally valid, equally fundamental?

  28. @ JBD: Regarding

    “to some quantifiable aspect of qualia which – it seems to me – is still far away”

    How would we get closer to quantification than examining the matter that makes up the body + environment?

    Curious of where you see us starting to make progress, and what that progress would look like?

  29. …”(conscious entanglements) merits further discussion”, our host last words…

    Isn’t that our lives are composed of entanglements, that begin and end…
    …and consciousness is just one of the entanglements, comme si comme sa…

    Can philosophy begin again and again, for our being here, in a entangled world, thanks #30

  30. Atai:

    Sorry for taking so long to respond, we’re still in the process of settling in after moving, so I don’t always have the time I’d like to devote to considering your replies in depth. But don’t let my tardiness give you the impression that I don’t enjoy this exchange! So I’ll dive right in:

    However there are toy systems exhibiting explicitly non-computable dynamics, yet which are manifestly “classically-describable”: consider a universe consisting of a bit string evolving such that it is appended with a ‘1’ if a certain universal TM halts with this string as input, or with a ‘0’ if that TM does not halt. The dynamics of this toy universe are non-computable, however its states are manifestly isomorphic to strings of classical bits (each state *is* a string of bits).

    True, but this model still isn’t entirely classically describable, since you couldn’t write down an algorithm for the dynamics.

    In fact, it can be shown that any noncomputable function can be represented by an algorithm augmented with a random number (‘random’ here in the sense of ‘algorithmically incompressible’, not a number drawn from a hat). So, the best any being in a noncomputable world trying to create a model of that world by computational means could do is to find an algorithm compressing a certain part of the dynamics, which then has to be augmented by randomness at certain points—which is exactly the sort of two-tiered dynamics we see in quantum mechanics.

    (One counter-argument here is that for any finite series of observations, there is always a finite algorithm that produces that data. This is true, but in general, that algorithm will not significantly improve over the trivial one that just outputs that data. However, there may be an algorithm that significantly compresses a part of the data, appealing to randomness only intermittently—in this way, such a partial law could indeed be discovered, and indeed, it seems to have been.)

    As for the states being classical information, well, you can also (in principle) encode quantum states (to arbitrary accuracy) within classical information—either by giving the complete density matrix, if that’s all there is, or by adding, say, Bohmian particle positions.

    The latter is also how you can, in principle, simulate quantum mechanics even with definite measurement outcomes—from ‘within’ the simulation, measurement outcomes simply look random because not all the information about the prior distribution of particles is accessible.

    Another way to simulate the universe, which also possesses an explicitly classical underpinning, would be to have the fundamental ‘arena’ not 3D space, but rather, 3N-dimensional configuration space (for an N-particle system). Then, the wave function is simply a field over this space, and the state of the universe (as a whole) is given by a single point in this space.

    I got this idea from Peter Lewis’ recent ‘Quantum Ontology: A Guide to the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics’, which I found well worth reading and carefully argued. He considers the notion of Humean supervenience (basically, that the world is entirely determined by local matters of fact), and whether QM tells us anything determinate about it. Essentially, his conclusion is ‘well kinda, but not really’; that is, there are ways to rescue Humean supervenience, but they are metaphysically costly—whether it is considering space to be 3N-dimensional, or assuming a grand conspiracy.

    Another option which has struck many as more natural is to allow backwards causation—that is, measurements performed in the future determine property values in the past. Allowing for that suffices to explain Bell inequality violation without giving up on Humeanism.

    Me, I still don’t quite see why I should assume that there are well-defined probabilities for in-principle unobservable measurement outcomes—and if I don’t, then Bell inequalities simply don’t yield bounds on anything real.

    Still, I do consider the step towards an ontology featuring an intrinsically integrated notion of reality perfectly justifiable, taking quantum mechanics as a guide. I don’t think this choice is quite forced upon us, but that’s why we’ve got this whole philosophy thing in the first place: scientific theories will always underdetermine metaphysics, thus, we must look to other avenues if we want to get a plausible idea of what’s really going on below, as Leonard Cohen put it. Your way of combining reflection on what sort of metaphysics would allow for meaningful conscious experience with what sort of constraints scientific theories place upon metaphysics seems a promising starting point, to me.

  31. John Davey:

    Well .. it seems to me you can’t tackle a semantic shortage in physics with yet more syntax, even with the latest quantum buzzwords attached.

    I’m with you on that point, but I don’t think that Atai is really doing that. If I understand his project (I may well not), the claim is not that quantum mechanics adds some magic dust to make the transition from syntax to semantics (or from the structural description of science to the phenomenal description of conscious experience), but rather, that quantum mechanics opens up the possibility for having meaningful conscious experience, which is, while part of the natural world, not part of the scientific (‘classically describable’) image of it.

    So the aim is not to create semantics from syntax, but rather, to show that quantum mechanics allows for the right kind of syntax to encompass the semantics of our conscious experience.

  32. I’m with David Duffy (#15) – I have a problem with the psychology part of this paper. Specifically, neither apparent indeterminism nor non-locality seem like psychological facts that must be captured. Of course, if “apparent indeterminism” meant “apparent to the average Joe, a non-physicist” then I would agree, but obviously here it means something much stronger than that. Likewise for non-locality: there is a common-sense version, something like “I am aware of both what my eyes and my ears are telling me, and can compare them in a single thought.” But this is a far cry from non-locality as understood in physics papers about EPR experiments.

  33. I think there’s a strong argument that non-locality has to be captured.

    Consider Dennett’s famous “Where Am I?” (https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Dennett-WhereAmI.pdf) . Your consciousness, whatever it is, might arise from the stuff inside your skull, but it “isn’t there”. You can’t find the redness of red by opening someone’s skull up and mapping out the connectome and neuronal firing patterns- the quale (the CONTENTS of consciousness) seem to be obstinately private and this doesn’t square with a classical picture of reality.

  34. I don’t see why the redness of red *should* be apparent when opening someone’s skull. On what theory is *witnessing* a person’s brain supposed to feel the same as *being* that brain? None that I know of. We don’t need non-locality to account for a difference (witnessing a brain feels different from being one) that every theory of the mind-brain relation already predicts.

  35. I don’t see how quantum processes in the brain gets us any closer to explaining subjective experience. Trying to reduce experience to quantum events doesn’t look like any less of a category error than trying to reduce them to classical physical events.

    It’s either dualism or idealism for me. At least, I don’t think such explanations are any more extraordinary than arguing that consciousness is literally identical to brain processes, despite the fact that that would make such an identity the only one in all of science where there are two complete descriptions of the exact same thing that have absolutely nothing in common.

    And they’re certainly less crazy (and infinitely more coherent) than claiming that consciousness is an illusion…an illusion experienced by…an illusory experiencer. In other words, a non-existent thing experienced (but not really) by another non-existent thing.

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