I recently met someone investigating physics for the first time, and they asked what I thought of Paul Davies’ book The Mind of God. I thought I’d post my response here, not because of my views on Davies, but for the brief statement of outlook trying to explain the position from which I’d judge him.
The truth is that I don’t remember a thing of what he says in the book. I might look it up tomorrow and see if I am reminded of any specific reactions I had. From what I remember of his outlook, I don’t think it is an unusual one for a philosophically minded theoretical physicist. The sensibility of theoretical physics is a problematic mixture of materialism and platonism. On one hand, you can break everything down to fields, particles, space and time, in an amazingly precise way. On the other hand, your worldview has these entities in it like “physical laws” and “fundamental equations”, and there’s also those basic questions like, why does anything exist, and why is it like this rather than some other way. So your materialist physics is haunted by a mathematical metaphysics, and this gives rise to a certain sort of musing.
I have my own attitude to these issues. I don’t have an answer at all to why the universe exists, but I think we can first take an extra step forward in understanding what exists, and after we have taken that step, we can look again at the first-cause problem and see if it looks any different. We already took a big step in the past when modern physics was invented. We went from everyday conceptual consciousness to a highly mathematical and objectified view of reality. Everyday consciousness is still there in the background but now there is the idea of reality as nothing but fundamental physical objects in interaction, backed up by experimental and technological success. But now consciousness itself is a conceptual problem. We understand it has something to do with the brain, and we have all sorts of metaphors (e.g. brain is computer, mind is program) and anatomical results (your visual neurons fire when you see things), but there is still a fundamental disconnect between subjective and objective. The disconnect assumed its current form when physical science developed, and the next step I’m talking about will change or remove the disconnect by explaining how subjectivity fits into reality without just denying its existence (subjectivity’s existence, that is).
Just to be specific. It’s often said now that what you experience (through your senses) is like a virtual reality in your brain. Actual reality is a sort of colorless neverending storm of atoms, but some little part of your brain constructs a picture and that picture is what you live in, subjectively. I belong to a school of thought which accepts that analysis but wants to adjust it and make it more precise. Basically I want to say that the thing in the brain which is conscious, and therefore the thing which is you, is a sort of holistic quantum subsystem of the brain; and also that what we are experiencing is how it actually is. I.e. subjectivity is objectivity when it comes to consciousness. You may interpret your consciousness wrongly (e.g. think you are awake when you are asleep), but there is a level at which consciousness is exactly what it seems to be. So if the self is also part of the brain, then when we experience things, we must be seeing an aspect of that part of the brain. But normally we would understand the brain in terms of physics, an arrangement of molecules in space, which is nothing like experience as such. Therefore, we need to understand physics in a new way, so that something (this quantum subsystem) can look like this (like life) when “experienced from inside”.
That’s my opinion about what the next big step in science and human awareness must involve. There may be any number of future technical adjustments to physics and science—a new equation for string theory, new discoveries in the molecular causality of the brain—but the big step has to be the one dealing with the relationship between subjectivity and objective reality. That’s my philosophy, i.e. my fuzzy opinion that is not yet a precise theory, and it determines how I approach all the other still-unanswered questions that physicists have opinions (rather than knowledge) about. Paul Davies, as I recall, is still in the quasi-dualistic mindset of theoretical physics (materialism versus mathematics), and so to the extent that his opinions are determined by that framework I will disagree with them.
I find myself nodding along in agreement to this until I get to “Basically I want to say that the thing in the brain which is conscious, and therefore the thing which is you, is a sort of holistic quantum subsystem of the brain” which at the same time seems to be both too specific given how little we know, and at the same time too vague, with absolutely no explanatory power. In particular “quantum” and “holistic” both seem like empty buzzwords in this context, along the lines of mysterious answers to mysterious questions, or along the lines that “consciousness is weird, quantum mechanics is weird, therefore quantum mechanics must be involved in consciousness”.
Of course, this is being a little unfair—a proposed solution needs to be more specific than what we as yet know, and a solution that is not fully worked out by necessity has vague areas. But the feel of each of these is towards the decidedly not useful portion of either side. You sound pretty convinced that something quantum must be going on without saying what, if anything, it brings to the picture that classical descriptions don’t. And, well, given how warm, wet, and squishy the human nervous system is, I flatly would not expect any large scale quantum coherences. (Though the limits are often overstated).
Again, “holistic” doesn’t add much; heck, I’m not even sure what sorts of mechanisms it would rule out.
I posted here so my correspondent could see a second opinion, by the way, so thanks for that.
You sound pretty convinced that something quantum must be going on without saying what, if anything, it brings to the picture that classical descriptions don’t.
First proposition: if you try to bring consciousness into alignment with standard physical ontology, you get a dualistic parallelism at best. (Arguments here.)
Second proposition: the new factor in QM is entanglement. I defined my quantum holism here as “the hypothesis that quantum entanglement creates local wholes, that these are the fundamental entities in nature, and that the individual consciousness inhabits a big one of these.”
I can explain technically what these “local wholes” might look like. You should think of a spacelike hypersurface consisting of numerous Hilbert spaces connected by mappings into a graph structure. Each Hilbert space contains a state vector. Then the whole thing evolves, the graph structure and the state vectors. This is, more or less, the QCH formalism for quantum gravity(discussed here).
The Hilbert spaces are the local wholes (the “monads” of a previous post). My version of quantum-mind theory is to say that the conscious mind is a single one of these, and that the series of experiences one has in life correspond to the evolution of its state vector. Now, although I started out by saying that standard physical ontology is irredeemably unlike what we actually experience, I’m certainly not going to say that a featureless vector jumping around an abstract multidimensional space is much better. Its advantage, in fact, is its radically structureless abstractness. It is a formalism telling us almost nothing about the nature of things in themselves; constructed only to be a predictively adequate black box. If we then treat conscious appearances as data about the inner nature of one thing, at least—ourselves, our minds, however you end up phrasing it—they can help us to interpret the formalism. What we had described formally as a state vector evolving in a certain way in Hilbert space would be understood as a mathematical representation of what was actually a conscious self undergoing a certain series of experiences.
In principle, you could hope to use experience to reveal the reality behind formal physical description at a much higher level—for example, computational neuroscience. But I think that non-quantum computational neuroscience presupposes an atomistic, spatialized ontology which is just mismatched to the specific nature of consciousness (see earlier remark about dualism resulting from that framework). So I predict that quantum coherence exists in the brain and is functionally relevant to conscious cognition. As you observe, it’s a challenging environment for such effects, but evolution is ingenious and we keep finding new twists on what QM can do (the latest).
Thanks. Though I’m still highly skeptical, this gives me much more to engage with. This will take me some time to process though, and it might take me a while as I’m preparing for a conference this week.
I recently met someone investigating physics for the first time, and they asked what I thought of Paul Davies’ book The Mind of God. I thought I’d post my response here, not because of my views on Davies, but for the brief statement of outlook trying to explain the position from which I’d judge him.
I find myself nodding along in agreement to this until I get to “Basically I want to say that the thing in the brain which is conscious, and therefore the thing which is you, is a sort of holistic quantum subsystem of the brain” which at the same time seems to be both too specific given how little we know, and at the same time too vague, with absolutely no explanatory power. In particular “quantum” and “holistic” both seem like empty buzzwords in this context, along the lines of mysterious answers to mysterious questions, or along the lines that “consciousness is weird, quantum mechanics is weird, therefore quantum mechanics must be involved in consciousness”.
Of course, this is being a little unfair—a proposed solution needs to be more specific than what we as yet know, and a solution that is not fully worked out by necessity has vague areas. But the feel of each of these is towards the decidedly not useful portion of either side. You sound pretty convinced that something quantum must be going on without saying what, if anything, it brings to the picture that classical descriptions don’t. And, well, given how warm, wet, and squishy the human nervous system is, I flatly would not expect any large scale quantum coherences. (Though the limits are often overstated). Again, “holistic” doesn’t add much; heck, I’m not even sure what sorts of mechanisms it would rule out.
I posted here so my correspondent could see a second opinion, by the way, so thanks for that.
First proposition: if you try to bring consciousness into alignment with standard physical ontology, you get a dualistic parallelism at best. (Arguments here.)
Second proposition: the new factor in QM is entanglement. I defined my quantum holism here as “the hypothesis that quantum entanglement creates local wholes, that these are the fundamental entities in nature, and that the individual consciousness inhabits a big one of these.”
I can explain technically what these “local wholes” might look like. You should think of a spacelike hypersurface consisting of numerous Hilbert spaces connected by mappings into a graph structure. Each Hilbert space contains a state vector. Then the whole thing evolves, the graph structure and the state vectors. This is, more or less, the QCH formalism for quantum gravity (discussed here).
The Hilbert spaces are the local wholes (the “monads” of a previous post). My version of quantum-mind theory is to say that the conscious mind is a single one of these, and that the series of experiences one has in life correspond to the evolution of its state vector. Now, although I started out by saying that standard physical ontology is irredeemably unlike what we actually experience, I’m certainly not going to say that a featureless vector jumping around an abstract multidimensional space is much better. Its advantage, in fact, is its radically structureless abstractness. It is a formalism telling us almost nothing about the nature of things in themselves; constructed only to be a predictively adequate black box. If we then treat conscious appearances as data about the inner nature of one thing, at least—ourselves, our minds, however you end up phrasing it—they can help us to interpret the formalism. What we had described formally as a state vector evolving in a certain way in Hilbert space would be understood as a mathematical representation of what was actually a conscious self undergoing a certain series of experiences.
In principle, you could hope to use experience to reveal the reality behind formal physical description at a much higher level—for example, computational neuroscience. But I think that non-quantum computational neuroscience presupposes an atomistic, spatialized ontology which is just mismatched to the specific nature of consciousness (see earlier remark about dualism resulting from that framework). So I predict that quantum coherence exists in the brain and is functionally relevant to conscious cognition. As you observe, it’s a challenging environment for such effects, but evolution is ingenious and we keep finding new twists on what QM can do (the latest).
Thanks. Though I’m still highly skeptical, this gives me much more to engage with. This will take me some time to process though, and it might take me a while as I’m preparing for a conference this week.