This morning I read a brilliantly simple exposition of the main narrative of Roger Penrose’s case for consciousness being a phenomenon of quantum mechanics. See this link. Between consciousness and physics is by no means a clearcut discipline, and its implications on human meaning and human spirituality are enormous. For in the fuzzy domain of quantum physics, conventional causality is transcended, or at least scientists utterly fail to offer an account of quantum mechanics by means of conventional causality. In this deep realm abounding with paradoxes and mysteries, spirituality becomes normative to scientific understanding. The real world, at a certain level, is not itself predictable or discernable. A naked understanding cannot on the one hand tout empirical studies of quantum mechanics and then seriously scoff at the wild (or schizoid) world of religious and spiritual people. We have reached a point where scientific secularity and spirituality can publicly embrace. They aren’t that different after all.

Obviously, I’ve been thinking about physics and consciousness. I might actually be able to provide some meaningful insights, from my nest along the bosom of California, San Luis Obispo. So, I’m going to start a series about physics and consciousness. (Side note, I have several other series-posts going on: Correcting Christian Errata, Reflects, T.Malick, Converging and Diverging Realities.) Buckle up, buttercup.

Roger Penrose’s argument is tenuous at best. He says that consciousness “reeks of quantum physics.” Stephen Hawking, a long-time colleague, says, “His argument seemed to be that consciousness is a mystery and quantum gravity is another mystery so they must be related.” David Chalmers, writer of the earthshaking (and easy-to-read) paper “Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, thinks consciousness is derived from laws of physics as yet unknown. Others think that subjectivity cannot be explained by means of science.

Qualia vs. Quanta
Surely we can say that the qualia of experience are really different from quantized forms. What the hell does that mean? Imagine a daisy. Now could you reconstruct a daisy in someone’s mind just from literal descriptions of its details? To some extent, every conceptualization carries with it some attachment to sensible details. If you give someone an incredibly dry analysis of a daisy, they could actually get a good sense for what a daisy is. You could tell them about the yellow center, the white lobed petals, the relatively tall stem, the flat lawn green leaves with jagged edges, the dry corny smell of daisy pollen, the smooth petals, the sticky stem, the fluffy then hard flower center, the juicy green sound when you split the base of the flower. That person has knowledge of colors, shapes, sizes, smells, sounds, textures, and from that simple palette of impressions they can imagine things they’ve never sensed before—inaccurately, of course, but with approximation, similitude, enough that they could identify a daisy based on those dry facts.

Even so—the dry facts are not the same thing as the special qualia of those sense details! Imagine trying to explain a rainbow to a color blind person—or to a blind person. The facts would fall utterly short of something mysteriously dependent on the ability to perceive certain kinds of sense impressions, in this case visual impressions. For those disposed to see colors, the dry facts of a rainbow are immediately made wet by the implicit knowledge of perceptive forms. Moreover, dry facts about color become irrelevant or untrue to a colorblind or blind person. They live in a different world, so to speak.

Against sense intuitions, pure qualia, raw feels, are then juxtaposed abstract conceptual forms. And among analytical concepts, mathematics is the chief of abstraction. Perhaps nothing is more abstractly generalizable than mathematics. Mathematics can reduce phenomena and their behavior into simple rules and be used to yield accurate predictions. If that’s not straight magic, I don’t know what is. You can tell the future about real things—things with an astounding variety of weights, sizes, smells, sounds, colors, tastes, movements, changes, reactions—using tiny scribbles on a page. That’s magic; I digress.

When we talk about how feelings are different from thoughts, we could look at this as a duality between qualia and quanta. On one side of the ring, we have Qualia, the raw sense perceptions before any conceptual categorization, explicit or implicit, occurs. On the other side of the ring, we have Quanta, the utmost representation of conceptual categorization in itself. Spirit and form, grace and law, heart and head, body and mind, sense and number. These are manifestations of the same duality between qualia and quanta. Two things to note.

One, I’m not going to explain these yet. Spirit and form, grace and law? That’s for future work. For now, just note that the prior things in the list refer to faculties dealing with the specifics to experience that require no abstraction to sense. Take it on an intuition that these follow a pattern.

Two, I have not opposed art and math because these are human practices that really involve both sides of the duality. The artist has to organize media together in order to make art, and in this way they rely on the faculties dealing conceptual form. The mathematician has to use their qualitative, imaginative faculties to understand the meaning of a theorem, to build counterexamples, off-cases, to relate theorems together. Qualia and Quanta are ambassadors, representatives, heads of state for those cognitive faculties—they are not the condensed entirety of their respective faculties, nor do their differing faculties typically operate independently of each other. Most of the time, the dualities of life are soft. They are representations of generic patterns that do not behave as discretely as they are represented. Qualia and Quanta are themselves conceptual abstractions. Of course, they are not purely concepts, because you have experience of these. You know that sound and color aren’t the same thing and you can infer that there is something that accounts for why they’re different kinds of senses, and that could be called qualia. You also know that analysis can become so “dry,” so abstract that something is lost and it becomes meaningless. Yet that abstraction can be used to plan a schedule, count an inventory, organize how people act, predict physical phenomena in engineering. That underlying form could be called quanta.

This duality has massive ramifications for understanding the human condition, for making good decisions in practice, for becoming a happy person, for understanding the entire universe. My goal is not to go into that here. I will offer my explanations of how this duality relates cognition to the objective world in a future post of this series. The relevance here is with regard to quantum physics. The fact that quantum physics involves so much indeterminacy would suggest that it is the realm where quanta meets qualia. One would not have to go much further to connect the dots and say that quantum physics is the mechanism generating consciousness.

Quantum Consciousness?
I am not sold on Penrose’s argument that quantum mechanisms are the vehicle of consciousness. Of course, I’m not very familiar with it. I’m totally making a reductive claim here, but to try and get farther with the conversation about QM and consciousness. If I was actually going to talk to him, I wouldn’t be doing this this way. Here are some of my thoughts on making a case for the relation between QM and consciousness.

Synchronicity happens. People experience it all the time, sometimes as mere happenstance, sometimes as more than that. I’ve done lots of personal investigation experimenting into the nature of synchronicity. It’s real. There’s plenty of evidence for synchronicity and telepathy. It’s just not something you can easily test for, because it’s so spontaneous. Yet it’s more than just randomness being understood as meaningful. Plenty of people will interpret randomness as being meaningful. Those are red herrings. There are still instances when people are aware of something happening or say the same thing at the same time. This is something that is more than similar dispositions, i.e., same inputs given to different systems with the same response mechanisms will result in the same outputs. There is actually such a radical degree of specificity to some coincidences that believing systems (e.g. the human brain) strictly operate locally and independently itself becomes an absurdity. There may be some sort of implicate order responsible for causing the resonance between various events, i.e., spontaneity may be unpredictable determinism. There may also be nonlocal phenomena that allow for synchronicities to occur, like electromagnetic fields or entanglement. One bit of evidence: birds flying in murmurations have been shown to react to their flockmates within a fraction of the time required for neural reactions, and there is no set leader.

It is not enough to try and use the most modern theories of science to explain the underlying reasons for phenomena like consciousness. The perennial lesson on scientific paradigms is that knowledge is continually updating, to some indeterminate end. To become excited about QM for its bizzarities and attribute consciousness to it based on a similarity between those mysteries is not sufficient. It is absolutely helpful to study QM in relation to consciousness because thoughts and neural activity seem to be very small. Moreover, the kinds of rules that quantum physics abides by is not that different from the rules that world spiritualities propound. The ancient religious texts describe our world in strange, vivid terms that to a scientist who sternly retracts from the chaotic world into a private and controllable abstraction would appear as mere superstition. Sure, religions have plenty of superstitions, but the fact is that they knew about the sorts of rules that describe quantum phenomena long before the scientists did. That says something about the nature of mind, of spirit. Perhaps it is possible to access quantum phenomena through meditation and spirituality. Or perhaps the outside world is entirely mediated by the structures of the human psyche and therefore the soul and the world will be understood to follow similar patterns. Nevertheless, to say that the new idea on the block will answer all your questions is just a fad. It’s appropriate to get excited about the potential there, but the likelihood of other untapped realms existing is nearer to certainty than QM is to resolving the questions of consciousness.

I do think that QM plays a significant role in consciousness. That it is a fuzzy science suggests either that we do not understand it well yet or that we’re experiencing a myopia of awareness. What would an eye see if it tried to focus on itself? Well, nothing but blurrings and failures. It’s not possible for an eye to see itself directly. Since QM involves plenty of phenomena that consistently cross the border of reality into impossibility, it seems necessary to do one or both of two things. One, account for unconventional realities. Two, account for QM as being the threshold past which the mind can no longer penetrate directly, because it is a key structuring element, a necessary condition of mind itself, beyond which nothing can be observed directly by mind.

On that note, I don’t think that we are bound to the world at or above the depth of QM. Just as one can alter assumptions in a model to get around limitations, i.e. look at something from a different “angle,” I think it will be possible for us to utilize tools and strategies to circumnavigate the impenetrable lava barrier of QM’s conditions on positive knowledge. I will suggest that it is possible to teleologically emulate the patterns of diverse potential realities and by understanding how going back and forth between the potential and the actual worlds affects knowledge, it can be possible to work around limiting conditions in positive knowledge. It is a shadowy positive knowledge. As Nietzsche says somewhere, “It is better to go about searching for light in the dark world underneath it.”

Future Work
There is much I would like to study in this field and there will be more I share with you all. One thing is the relationship between domains of physics and the cognition of denotation and connotation. Another thing is the difference between Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer’s theories of why and how objects relate to the observer.


October 11, 2020
Arroyo Grande