Nick, that final step leads to a quantum-mind theory in which the Cartesian theater of consciousness is a single irreducible tensor factor of very high dimension. The notion may make more sense if you look at a paper like this. Physical reality is modelled as a “quantum causal history” in which one has a partially ordered set of events, each event being characterized by a Hilbert space and a state therein. The partial order gives you causality, but if you take a spacelike cross-section of the history, it need not reduce to a set of spatially localized events. In a formalism like that, you can represent an EPR pair (of spatially distant entangled particles) as a single entity, and the quantum state of the universe on any such spacelike cross-section is just the direct product of all the individual states. So I would propose to recast physics in that fashion, and then ontologically interpret it as I described. To be distributed here would mean to be implemented using many of those tensor factors at once, and the whole idea is that the instantaneous global state of consciousness is (formally) described by just one, very big, tensor factor. The rest of the brain would indeed be performing distributed computations, which (in physically ultimate terms) would consist of large numbers of simpler (lower-dimensional) tensor factors; but they would be causally coupled to the big central one, which would be an objectively existing self.
The standard notion of consciousness in neuroscience, insofar as there is a standard notion, is that some (possibly changing) subset of the brain is the “neural correlate of consciousness”; it’s the physical entity whose state is my current state of consciousness, and somehow it contains that representation of external reality which is the direct object of my experience. What I write above is exactly the same, except that I propose that the place where it all comes together is one of these physically elementary tensor factors, rather than some loose set of coarse-grained mesoscopic neurocomputational states. The advantage of my idea is that there is no fuzziness regarding the boundary of the “correlate of consciousness”. The disadvantage is that it would seem to require that macroscopic quantum coherence exists in the brain and is functionally relevant, something for which there is no evidence. (I should add in passing that Tegmark’s well-known calculations are far from conclusive, as there are many other ways to look for entanglement in the brain, and a variety of possible coherence-protecting mechanisms.)
It is unlikely that my particular ideas are correct, but it’s vitally important to show that detailed alternatives to the existing way of thinking are possible, because even people who agree that consciousness is somehow a problem are conceptually frozen in place, and more inclined to think that the problem arises from some personal incapacity rather than from a defect in the conventional wisdom.
Nick, that final step leads to a quantum-mind theory in which the Cartesian theater of consciousness is a single irreducible tensor factor of very high dimension. The notion may make more sense if you look at a paper like this. Physical reality is modelled as a “quantum causal history” in which one has a partially ordered set of events, each event being characterized by a Hilbert space and a state therein. The partial order gives you causality, but if you take a spacelike cross-section of the history, it need not reduce to a set of spatially localized events. In a formalism like that, you can represent an EPR pair (of spatially distant entangled particles) as a single entity, and the quantum state of the universe on any such spacelike cross-section is just the direct product of all the individual states. So I would propose to recast physics in that fashion, and then ontologically interpret it as I described. To be distributed here would mean to be implemented using many of those tensor factors at once, and the whole idea is that the instantaneous global state of consciousness is (formally) described by just one, very big, tensor factor. The rest of the brain would indeed be performing distributed computations, which (in physically ultimate terms) would consist of large numbers of simpler (lower-dimensional) tensor factors; but they would be causally coupled to the big central one, which would be an objectively existing self.
The standard notion of consciousness in neuroscience, insofar as there is a standard notion, is that some (possibly changing) subset of the brain is the “neural correlate of consciousness”; it’s the physical entity whose state is my current state of consciousness, and somehow it contains that representation of external reality which is the direct object of my experience. What I write above is exactly the same, except that I propose that the place where it all comes together is one of these physically elementary tensor factors, rather than some loose set of coarse-grained mesoscopic neurocomputational states. The advantage of my idea is that there is no fuzziness regarding the boundary of the “correlate of consciousness”. The disadvantage is that it would seem to require that macroscopic quantum coherence exists in the brain and is functionally relevant, something for which there is no evidence. (I should add in passing that Tegmark’s well-known calculations are far from conclusive, as there are many other ways to look for entanglement in the brain, and a variety of possible coherence-protecting mechanisms.)
It is unlikely that my particular ideas are correct, but it’s vitally important to show that detailed alternatives to the existing way of thinking are possible, because even people who agree that consciousness is somehow a problem are conceptually frozen in place, and more inclined to think that the problem arises from some personal incapacity rather than from a defect in the conventional wisdom.