Consciousness, Biology and Fundamental Physics

Contents

INTRODUCTION

SECTION 1

SECTION 2

SECTION 3

SECTION 4

SECTION 5

SECTION 6

REFERENCES

GLOSSARY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

In writing a book of this kind, it is difficult know what level to pitch it at and what degree of detail to bring in. On the one hand, experts in particular fields may ridicule the superficial nature of the description and arguments here, while at the other extreme some would-be readers may find even the opening sentences baffling. I have two recommendations for dealing with these problems. Firstly, I would advocate a pick and mix approach to the offerings here. For instance, those not particularly inclined to wade through user-unfriendly material relative to physics, biology and neuroscience might prefer to go straight to the final section 6, rather arrogantly entitled ‘A Theory of Consciousness’. This gives the main conclusions as to how consciousness might arise and its function. If this looks at all interesting it is then possible to go back and see how I have attempted to substantiate the proposals have made in this section.

The same general approach can be applied to the other chapters, in skipping over things that are either too difficult, or are too well known to need revisiting. The first few pages could be comfortably missed as they give an outline sketch of conventional consciousness ideas, and the objections to them. I do not believe that these theories have any explanatory value and it might be possible to skip to the ‘Consciousness as a Fundamental Theory’ a few pages later.

There is perhaps a word of caution relative to this approach. The section on physics emphasises the problem areas in quantum physics, which may be played down in more mainstream discussion. The sections on both quantum biology and neuroscience emphasise research work in very recent years that can be argued to have reversed some assumptions that are still commonly held in consciousness studies.

The detailed structure of the book may also require some explanation or even excuse. As I am neither a physicist, neuroscientist or biologists, and as this area is often the target of dismissive, if badly researched, accusations of pseudoscience, I have relied in many places on summarising the work of affiliated and usually peer-reviewed researchers. This can involve a degree of overlap or repetition, which may be tedious, but should be taken as demonstrating the scientific pedigree of various ideas. This is particularly applicable to the quantum biology section.

The main inspiration for this attempt at consciousness theory are the ideas of Roger Penrose (1.& 2.). Unfortunately, I have over more than twenty years come to the opinion that the vast majority of modern consciousness studies is profoundly misguided, and that in time Penrose may come to be seen, as being alone as a deep thinker on the subject, in our benighted period.

The dark night of the mind: Another thing for which I will not apologise is that much of this book may seem difficult. One thing that does often amaze me in consciousness studies is the proportion of people who expect to come on a quick easy solution. Inspite of a huge outpouring of books and papers from the scientific and philosophical communities in the last two decades, we appear no closer to a convincing consensus theory. David Chalmers called consciousness the hard problem, and this looks even more justified than when he coined this description back in the 1990s. If we do want to establish a theory of consciousness, it looks very likely that we will have to come to a hard place in terms of unravelling biology, neuroscience and probably physics.

This book attempts an amendment and simplification of the Penrose/Hameroff Orch OR scheme, and also an attempted updating in line with very recent developments in biology. It is tentatively suggested that a less complex approach to the function of consciousness than that provided by the Gödel theorem can be attempted, and similarly that in the brain, quantum consciousness might be based on shorter-lived quantum coherence in individual neurons, rather than the longer-lived and spatially distributed proposal put forward by Hameroff. The possible need to amend the original concepts are the reason for my moving from merely commenting on quantum consciousness topics to outlining a more personal version of the consciousness theory.

SECTION 1

THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

DEFINITION OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Consciousness is defined here as our subjective experience of the external world, our physical bodies, our thinking and our emotions. Consciousness is also defined in terms of it ‘being like something’ to exist and have experiences. It is like something to be alive, like something to have a body and like something to experience the colour red. In contrast, it is assumed to be by most not like something to be a table or a chair. Further to being like something conscious also gives us the experience of choice or preferences. In philosophy, this opens up the controversial topic of freewill, but at a more mundane level we have the something it is like to choose types of beer, or between a small amount of benefit now or a more substantial benefit in the future. Another special characteristic of subjective consciousness is privacy, in the sense that we have no way of knowing that our experience of the colour red is the same as someone else’s, and no way of conveying the exact nature of our experience of redness. These subjective experiences are referred to as qualia. The problem of qualia or phenomenal consciousness is here viewed as the whole of the problem of consciousness.

THE HARD PROBLEM

The problem we have to address here is how consciousness, subjective experience or qualia arise in the physical matter of the brain. Even this simple question raises some queries as to whether consciousness does in fact arise from the brain, although the arguments in favour of this position do in fact look strong. The classic argument is that things done to the brain such as particular injuries or the application of anaesthetics can remove consciousness.

DUALISM

The main challenge to the ‘brain produces consciousness’ hypothesis is dualism, or the idea that there is a separation between a spirit stuff and a physical stuff that together make up the universe, with consciousness being part of the spirit stuff, but inhabiting a physical brain and body. This had probably been the most popular idea since ancient times, but it was formalised by Descartes in the seventeenth century. The idea has a certain beguiling simplicity, since at a stroke it gets rid of the need to worry about how the physical brain can produce consciousness, or all the difficulties this gives rise to in terms of biology and physics.

Unfortunately, the problems of dualism appear to be of the serious kind. This is principally the question of how the physical stuff and the spirit stuff can interact. If the spirit stuff is to interact with the physical stuff it would appear to need to have some physical qualities, in which case it would not be true spirit stuff. The same applies in the opposite direction in that the physical stuff would seem to need some spirit qualities to interact with the spirit stuff, and would therefore not conform to conventional physics.

We are thus left with the problem of how the physical stuff as described by science can produce consciousness. The philosopher, David Chalmers, labelled this the ‘hard problem’ (3.). The problem here is really a problem of specialness. The brains of humans and possibly animals are the only places in the universe where consciousness has been observed, so the question really is as to ‘what is special about the brain’, and the answer to this tends to be that there’s nothing special about the brain, because it’s made of exactly the same type of stuff and obeys the same physical laws as the rest of the universe. The brain comprises the same carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and other atoms that are found in the stars and planets and the objects of the everyday world around us.

At first sight this might not seem too much of a problem. The brain is considered to be the most complex thing in the universe, and surely something in such a system can manage to produce consciousness. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case. In a conventional neuroscience text book, which will emphasise the fluctuation of electrical potential in the neurons (brain cells) and the resulting movement of neurotransmitters between neurons, we are presented with a causally closed information system, which does not require consciousness in order to function, and offers no physical mechanism by which consciousness could be produced.

Since consciousness ceased to be a taboo subject for academic research twenty-or-so years ago, several theories that seek to explain how consciousness could arise within classical/macroscopic physics have been advanced. It would take many hundreds of pages to discuss these adequately, so I will here summarise the main ideas, and where they look to fail. For those who find any of them plausible, there is a huge and expanding literature out there working to reinforce these theories.

CONSCIOUSNESS AS AN EMERGENT PROPERTY

Possibly the most plausible attempt to explain how the brain could produce consciousness within the concepts of classical and macroscopic physics is the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain’s physical matter. Emergent properties are an established concept in physics. The classic example is that liquidity is an emergent property of water. The individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms or their sub-atomic components do not have the property of liquidity. However when the atoms are combined into molecules and a sufficient number of these are brought together, within a particular temperature range, the property of liquidity emerges.

The problem with the emergent property idea, when it comes to dealing with consciousness, is that where emergent properties do arise in nature, physics can trace them back to the component particles and the forces that bind them. Thus the liquidity of water can be explained by the electromagnetic force acting on hydrogen and oxygen atoms. But in many years of the emergent property idea being promoted by parts of the conventional consciousness studies community, no one has been able to propose a microscale emergent mechanism for consciousness in the brain, comparable to the explanation of how liquidity emerges from water.

FUNCTIONALISM

In much of the late twentieth century consciousness studies was dominated by functionalism. This theory proposes that consciousness is a function of the brain’s information processing system, and that the biological matter of the brain is irrelevant to consciousness. This means that any system that processes information in the same way as the brain will be conscious regardless of what it is made of. Therefore a silicon computer of sufficient complexity would flip into consciousness at some point, and future systems using still other materials would do likewise. This is because the system, rather than the stuff from which it is made, is seen as being the thing that produces consciousness. The underlying weakness of functionalism is that it does not actually explain the mechanism of how consciousness arises in the brain’s systems in the first place, nor how it might physically arise from silicon computers or other machines.

This is a crucial problem regardless of whether the brain or system in question is made of biological tissue, silicon or anything else. It is generally agreed that the computer on the desk is not conscious, but that brains are conscious. The question we are left with is what changes between the computer on the desk and the brain, and similarly between the computer on the desk and any future super computer that might actually become conscious. There may be a vague assumption that more and more of the same initial complexity does it. But the physical world doesn’t work like that. The problem of butter not cutting steel is not resolved by adding lots more butter, but by finding something with different electromagnetic properties from butter.

IDENTITY THEORY

Identity theory is similar in tone to functionalism. It says that consciousness is identical to the brain or at least parts of it. The problem with an identity theory is that it needs to specify a particular object, or more plausibly a particular process in the brain that is physically identical to consciousness. It is not enough to show that the axons of neurons spike, or that there is a gamma oscillation between the cortex and the thalamus, when conscious processing occurs. These things are correlated to consciousness, but that is another thing from saying they are identical to consciousness. The distinction between identity and correlation is crucial here. Thunder and lightning are correlated, but they are not the same physical process, even though they have the same ultimate cause. In contrast, the morning star and the evening star are identical, because they are both names given to the planet Venus, a single physical object. Astronomy has conclusively demonstrated this identity, because the behaviour of a point of light in the morning and evening sky can be completely explained by what we know about this planet Venus. However, neuroscience has not demonstrated that the behaviour of any particular physical process in the brain that is identical to, or can completely explain the behaviour of consciousness, as opposed to being merely correlated to it.

In addition to this, more recent neuroscience has at least qualified identity theory. Expositions of identity theory tended to be rather simplistic in applying to the whole brain, while recent neuroscience has demonstrated consciousness as correlated to both particular neuronal assemblies and to single neurons, albeit on a temporary basis with activity correlated to consciousness shifting from place to place in the brain.

HIGHER ORDER (HOT) THEORIES

The basic idea here appears to be that a level or perhaps