Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics

Real scientific frontiers, replete with extravagant bullshit

In my teaching, I try to only refer to the process descriptions of the cultural edifices of mind, emotion, spirit, or the soul. So I talk instead of thinking, feeling, and relating. It helps my students to focus on the actual (primary) sensory and motor processes, which as a Feldenkrais Method teacher is easily justified. For all the complicated cultural notions around the mind, and around individuality, for all the thoughts that can swirl around in some minds, there can be only a small set of intentional movements they are connected to. Practicing orienting on simple sensations, and how they are affected by deliberate movements, is the “Feldenkrais way” to mindfulness (sans meditation!)

Along similar lines, I avoid, fairly scrupulously, talking about consciousness. The term is culturally loaded, and clearly blends into similar notions, like thinking and awareness. Here I survey some popular takes on the science of consciousness, with special attention to quantum consciousness, which I’ll (generously) summarize as theories of consciousness that make reference to underlying quantum mechanical phenomena.

First of all, let’s acknowledge the problem of consciousness, which is really the problem of subjective (first-hand) experience, which is well-approximated as the hard problem by David Chalmers. This is the issue of primary experiences or qualia. Namely, when two people look at the same object, the mechanisms of vision and mental representation can be objectively characterized with neuroscience and optics. Those objectively-characterizable aspects of “two people seeing the same thing” reflect the “easy problem” of consciousness: two people seeing the same thing at the same time, do so because they have the same underlying physiology.

However, the actual experience of seeing the same thing — how do we know the experiences are the same? We don’t know that, and to some extent we can’t know that; the raw, direct experience of an individual is private to them, in Chalmer’s framing. There are three flavors of more-or-less scientifically plausible responses to the hard problem of consciousness.

Strategy 1: One can ignore the problem, stating that there are no interesting or meaningful differences between the objective and subjective descriptions of mental processes, other than the details in an individual’s genetics and life history leading to different neurological configurations (so, the hard problem is an issue of specifying the complex details of the easy problem). In this view, consciousness is an epiphenomenon, a kind of cultural interpretation of something more fundamental, which is simply the “experience of a living nervous system.”

Strategy 2: One can treat consciousness as intrinsic to matter itself. This view, called pan-psychism (or pan-experientialism), acknowledges that there’s something interesting or meaningful to subjective experience, but it’s built-into all matter. So, in this view it’s meaningful to consider the awareness of a non-living system, the awareness of single cells, and the awareness of a person. (I currently hold to a version of this.)

Strategy 3: One can treat consciousness as extrinsic to matter itself. This view is best-called Cartesian dualism, namely that there are (at least) two primary types of stuff in the universe. One type of stuff can be roughly labeled matter. The other type can roughly be labeled mind. The scientific description of this reality would would characterize mind and matter as separately existing things. How mind and matter get unified in a living person, then, would remain the challenge of scientific explantions.

Onto these three, largely incompatible ways of viewing the relationship between matter and consciousness, we can superimpose a world of researchers, teachers, therapists, and hucksters. Everyone tries to make sense of the world as they know it. And some people have more or less awareness of a world that includes the body of theoretical physics called Quantum Mechanics (QM).

QM is the most-correct scientific theory. It explains more of reality than the other major theory, General Relativity, but neither theory is a complete description of reality. In explaining much of reality, QM uses a mathematical framework that is difficult to harmonize with human experience. But the whole point of science is that the objective truth may not be the same thing as what one experiences or knows as their subjective truths. If you don’t believe in objective reality, then you don’t believe in the possibility of science itself; you believe whatever you think is true. My work here is probably not for you, unless you’re interested in considering other viewpoints.

I am trained in QM; my PhD work focused on using NMR spectroscopy, which is a scientific technique (same basic physics as the MRI scanner used in hospitals) that is entirely based on quantum mechanical phenomena. To be clear, I’m not saying that reality is based on QM, I’m saying that NMR spectroscopy is. Other spectroscopies, like optical absorbance spectroscopy, were developed entirely before the discovery of QM, and can be modeled using classical physics. Not NMR: everything about NMR is quantum mechanical. So I say this to credential myself, towards the following point: QM is not bullshit, and it’s also not magical; it’s a predictable feature of material reality that scientists (and laypersons) use all the time.

QM is not bullshit, but it sure attracts it! I will probably expand more on this in other contexts, but luckily, we all have some brilliant exchanges to orient on. I’m particularly happy with the exchange documented here, in Physics of Life Reviews. To start off, the truly impressive thinker Roger Penrose (along with Stuart Hameroff) explain their current (as of 2014) view of their theory of consciousness. Their beautiful, bold thesis is that neurons contain structures (microtubles) that host long-lived QM-based informational processes (coherences) that are the actual elements of consciousness. Note how they outline three types of explanations for consciousness. Their three categories aren’t identical to mine; they group pan-psychism and dualism together, when I would put pan-psychism (at least my flavor of it) in the same category as their own theory. (My flavor of pan-psychism is also derived from A.N. Whitehead’s philosophy, which they take as being in the same category as their own theory.) But I completely agree with them, that any sort of Cartesian dualism is the same as a supernatural explanation for consciousness: if mind is completely different than matter, then it’s also “outside” the natural world as described by science.

So after their incisive review of their own theory, a number of challenges/bolsterings of the theory are published in the same edition of Physics of Life Reviews. And then Hameroff and Penrose get to respond to their challengers! Here is their reply-to-the-responses.

In terms of my intellectual history, my challenges to their theory would be closest to those of Jack Tuszynski, a famous and famously creative scientist I admire, and who’s a bit out of his depth [as I would be] when arguing QM foundations with Penrose. I find their responses to him interesting and worthy of further consideration.

But I’m both amazed and dismayed when Deepak Chopra shows up! This famous medical orientalist (I choose the phrase carefully and pejoratively, with full respect for the religious traditions Chopra strip-mines towards his own fame) has previously rolled out his own version of “quantum consciousness.” It’s the Chopra-type quantum consciousness proponents that seemingly don’t care about what QM actually says (and doesn’t say). They use real QM ideas like non-locality and the observer effect to pretend that “mind moves matter” or that “consciousness precedes matter.” I can’t tell if Deepak Chopra is primary guilty of appropriating religious and spirtual truths towards making scientific bullshit, or appropriating scientific truths towards making spiritual bullshit. But man-o-man, what nonsense abounds in Chopra’s contribution. An excerpt:

The potential for reconciling science and consciousness was first glimpsed during the quantum revolution a century ago when several of the greatest physicists, including Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Planck, and Pauli, surmised that consciousness might be so fundamental that it can't be gotten around. This line of inquiry proved uncomfortable, however, and although the observer effect and the measurement problem brought consciousness to the fringes of experimentation, the Eastern view that reality is best explained through investigations into human awareness – our vehicle for knowing reality – was steadfastly ignored.

Misstating the positions of intellectual giants like Schrödinger (distorting it to the point of abuse), speaking so flatly for “the Eastern view” of reality, is intellectually criminal. I lack (but am cultivating) the composure of even the most exemplar smirking rationalists, in the face of such opportunistic hucksterism. Unlike myself, Hameroff and Penrose both dignify and neatly discard Chopra’s nonsense by acknowledging that there are real things left to explain (like subjective experience, and the relationship of Platonic Ideals [like the abstract notions of “triangle” or “love”] to reality) but that his view indeed places consciousness outside of material reality itself.

I’m not here to say that supernatural beliefs are bad (they often are, but that’s not my point). My point is, supernatural beliefs cannot be changed into naturalistic (scientific) beliefs by simply invoking quantum mechanics. QM is a product of science, a theory of material reality, and if it is ever elaborated towards accounting for consciousness, as Penrose and Hameroff propose, it will explain how consciousness and matter are interrelated. The theory of QM is naturalistic and is not a valid way to inject supernatural beliefs into the scientific narrative of reality.

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IMAGE CREDIT: By Jcfisica - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3824867