There’s no shortage of theories trying to explain the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and consciousness often gets dragged into the mix. Some even claim it has a special role in state vector reduction—those quirky “quantum jumps.” Roger Penrose is one such advocate, but he’s not alone. When you ask these consciousness enthusiasts if physics behaves differently on the far side of the Moon (where no one’s watching) or if atoms over there just stop jumping, the answers get...let’s say, "evasive."
Who's Consciousness Is It Anyway?
Now, I'm not here to knock anyone’s ideas. Everyone is entitled to their opinions. But, honestly, this view feels a bit like trying to peer through a foggy window. I mean, whose consciousness are we talking about here? When John Wheeler, another big name in the "consciousness club," was pushed on this point, he eventually said it was “consciousness in general.” Sounds poetic, right? The problem is, no one knows what “consciousness in general” actually means.
And let’s be real—science knows more about quarks and gluons than it does about human consciousness. So, no, I don’t think consciousness is irrelevant, but I do think it’s being overhyped in quantum mechanics.
Is the Universe Watching Itself?
Measurements and observations in the universe happen, whether we’re looking or not. The cosmos doesn’t wait for us to wake up in the morning to start its business. Atoms are constantly observing other atoms, cats are keeping tabs on mice, and things happen regardless of our awareness.
This brings me to my simple, no-nonsense perspective: consciousness doesn’t create reality, it just interprets it. Consciousness, in my view, is there to give meaning to what we observe. The more complex the consciousness, the deeper and richer the meaning.
The meaning of it all?
The Meaning of Consciousness
Here’s the kicker: the higher your level of consciousness, the more meaning you can extract from an experience. A cat sees the world differently than bacteria, and we humans have the potential to see meaning on levels a cat can’t even dream of. This ability to find meaning ties into free will—we see meaning in something, and it allows us to make conscious decisions, changing ourselves and reality. It’s like designing your own narrative rather than just playing out some mechanical script.
So, no, I don’t believe in consciousness collapsing wave functions. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless—it’s just not responsible for playing referee in quantum mechanics.
Gravity vs. Consciousness: The Final Showdown
Now, if consciousness isn’t out there reducing wave packets, then what is? Gravity, maybe? Some theories suggest gravity might be responsible for collapsing quantum states. But here’s the twist—what if wave function collapse actually explains gravity? It’s one of those chicken-and-egg scenarios, except the chicken is quantum mechanics and the egg is the entire fabric of spacetime.
I don’t claim to know the definitive answer to what reduces wave packets, but I do know how to describe the process. And that’s what matters. A simple, quantitative description that satisfies both quantum theory and the observations of a humble peasant (equipped with the finest metaphorical pitchfork, of course).
In the previous section I covered, very
briefly, Philip Goff’s arguments for the Value Selection Hypothesis. He used the “Fine Tuning” argument bolstered
by a series of Bayesian arguments that were fairly extensive. I’m not re-writing Goff’s book here, you’ll
have to read it to get all the detailed discussion there. He dealt with the Many Worlds or Multiverse
hypothesis and was apparently convinced by his own arguments that the Value
Selection Hypothesis is the right way to go.
His next move is to bring in Consciousness
as evidence for purpose in the Universe.
He states that “The reality of consciousness is a fundamental datum over
and above the data of public observation and experiment.” Goff’s view is that of Panpsychism . So, let me set out some definitions here.
Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is fundamental and present everywhere
in the natural world. This entails that
at least some kinds of micro-level entities have mentality, but not that
literally everything has a mind. That
is, a rock does not have mental properties even if the fundamental parts of the
rock do.
Dualism is the view that mind and matter are fundamentally different kinds
of things.
Physicalism is the view that everything is matter and consciousness arises as
an artefact of physical processes.
The various views have been around for a
long time. The Presocratic dilemma was:
Either mind is an elemental feature of the world, or mind can somehow be
reduced to more fundamental elements. If
the view is that mind is reduced to more fundamental elements, then one must
explain how the reduction happens. If
one takes the position that mind is an elemental feature, then one must explain
the apparent lack of mental features at the fundamental level of material
reality.
Bernardo Kastrup writes in “The Idea of the World”: “Many people implicitly take every aspect of reality to be either
mental (e.g. thoughts, emotions, hallucinations), or physical (e.g. tables and
chairs), mentality and physicality being polar opposites in some sense.”
This view has dominated Western thought
since the early 19th century.
From the early 20th century, a number of more nuanced
theories were proposed including the idea that mind and matter each represent
half of reality which makes the implicit assumption that they have comparably
epistemic status. This is a pervasive
assumption in Western culture, i.e. that matter is as confidently knowable as
mind.
Among philosophers, this material/mental
dualism is considered to be unparsimonious.
For this reason, philosophers have attempted to explain one member of
the matter/mind dichotomy in terms of the other. Idealism attempts to reduce all sense data to
mental content, while materialism/physicalism attempts to reduce all mental
content to material dynamics. Idealism posits that mind is nature’s
fundamental ontological ground and everything else is reducible to, or grounded
in, mind. Materialism/physicalism posits
that nature’s fundamental ontological ground is matter, independent of mind,
everything else being reducible to, or grounded in, matter. The Western cultural assumption that mind
and matter have comparable epistemic status has led to the philosophical
conclusion that idealism and physicalism are structurally equivalent mirror
images, just reversed.
Kastrup points out that the important
epistemic consideration is that we do not – and cannot – know matter as
confidently as we know mind. The
epistemic cost of materialism/physicalism is thus too high.
Everything we know – or think we know –
presupposes mind. What we refer to as
physically objective matter is not actually an observable fact but rather a
conceptual explanatory device abstracted from the patterns and regularities of
what we call ‘observable facts’. That is to say, physically objective matter is
an explanatory abstraction.
But I digress. Back to Goff. He noted, as quoted above, “The reality of
consciousness is a fundamental datum over and above the data of public
observation and experiment.” That is the
same as saying that physically objective matter is an explanatory abstraction,
but Goff does not seem to want to go entirely in that direction. So, he introduces us to “Meaning Zombies”. He writes:
“Your consciousness is what it’s like to be
you. If you ask a scientist or a
philosopher for examples, you’ll standardly get a list like the following:
Pain,
Seeing red,
The sensation of itchiness,
The taste of chocolate
These kinds of sensory experience are
certainly the most vivid and easy to grasp examples of conscious experience. There is more to human consciousness than
these raw sensations. Human
consciousness is also permeated with meaning and understanding… my
understanding of what things are or mean is built into the character of my
experience. … My claim is not about how things are in reality but about how experience
suggests things to be. … an understanding of what things are or mean … is part
of the character of human experience. I
will call this aspect of consciousness ‘experiential understanding.’”
He then develops the difference between
experiential understanding and ‘functional understanding’. This latter is defined as the behavior of a
system and its parts. Goff uses the
chess playing computer program that beat Garry Kasparov as an example. The computer does blindly what it is
programmed to do, it does not have experiential understanding of chess. Its programmers may have had such understanding, but they reduced that understanding to a series of "if - then" code statements.
In the 1950s, Alan Turing proposed a way to
determine whether a computer thinks or not and this became known as ‘the Turing
test.’ Basically, a human being is
engaged in a conversation with two hidden others, one a computer and the other,
another human being. The challenge is to
figure out which is which. If the
computer can fool 70% of the interlocutors into believing it is human in five
minutes, the computer passes the test.
Does passing the Turing test mean that a
computer can think or has understanding?
Turing blew off that question and simply declared that to think is to
pass the Turing test! That is, Turing
defined functional understanding. And
this idea of functional understanding predominates in cognitive science. Goff writes:
“Understanding a mathematical proof, or the
punchline of a joke, or the solution to a puzzle, is the ‘ah ha’ moment when
one ‘sees’ what the answer is. A
non-conscious computer understands nothing in this sense. No matter how
sophisticated its functional understanding, it totally lacks experiential
understanding.”
And finally, here we come to the Meaning Zombie proper.
“The word ‘zombie’ is something of a technical
term in consciousness research. We don’t
mean the lumbering, flesh-eating monsters we know from Hollywood movies. We’re rather thinking of an imaginary
creature which, in terms of its behaviour and the physical processing it its
brain, is indiscernible from a normal human being but which totally lacks
conscious experiences. … A philosophical zombie is just an unfeeling mechanism set
up to behave like a normal human being. ….
meaning zombies have conscious experience.
But the conscious experience of a meaning zombie is restricted to
meaningless sensation: colours, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. A meaning zombie has no experiential
understanding of the world.
“The 19th century psychologist
William James referred to the consciousness of an infant as a ‘buzzing,
blooming confusion’. As the infant develops cognitively, its meaningless
experience is gradually transformed into a world of people and things. In contrast, as a meaning zombie grows up,
although it develops in terms of its behaviour and the information processing
it its brain, eventually behaving just like a normal adult human being, its
experience remains the blooming, buzzing confusion of the infant. When the meaning zombie looks around, it just
experiences meaningless colours and shapes. … A meaning zombie has functional
understanding, indeed it would pass the Turing test with ease. But it has no experiential understanding.”
Goff is quick to assure us that he is not
suggesting there actually are any real meaning zombies in our world, he has
just brought the concept up to ask the question: Why didn’t we evolve as
meaning zombies?
“Natural selection is only interested in
behaviour, as only behaviour matters for survival. A meaning zombie, by definition, would behave
just like a real human being, and thus would survive just as well as a real
human being. Natural selection has no
interest in the quality of your inner life, so long as you’re going to do the
kinds of things that’ll make you live longer and pass on your genes. On the face of it, therefore, we cannot
explain in evolutionary terms why we are not meaning zombies.
“This is a profound challenge. Perhaps more than anything it is experiential
understanding that makes us human. It is
our experiential grasp of what things are and mean, including the thoughts,
feelings, and emotions of others, that connects us so deeply to reality. … It is experiential understanding that makes
life worth living, and yet it’s hard to see how our standard scientific account
of how we came into existence – Darwinian natural selection – could explain the
existence of experiential understanding.”
And it is right here we see Goff’s dilemma: he is a confirmed,
dyed-in-the-wool Darwinist, and he needs to build a theory that will explain
experiential consciousness which, apparently, no Darwinist has satisfactorily
done up to this point. Goff writes:
“On our standard scientific picture of
things, what a human does is fully determined by the particles making it up,
where the behaviour of those particles is fixed by the basic laws of
physics. … If my experiential
understanding is an emergent feature of my brain, that it too may have a
bearing on what my brain does. Still,
what that emergent feature does will ultimately be traceable to facts about the
particles making up my brain, acting in accordance with the basic laws of
physics.
“In other words, our standard scientific
view involves the following commitment:
Micro-Reductionism: What a human being does is ultimately fixed
by the fundamental particles making them up, and the behaviour of the
fundamental particles making up a given human being is entirely determined by
the basic laws of physics.
“If micro-reductionism is true, a meaning
zombie will behave just the same as an actual human being, so long as the
ultimate story about the particles making it up is the same as that of an
actual human being.”
Goff then goes on to reassure us that meaning
zombies are not real. He assures us that
when we encounter evolved organisms with high-level functional understanding,
those organisms also have experiential understanding. This puzzles him and he asks: “what is it
about our world that ensures that the evolution of functional understanding has
gone hand in hand with the evolution of experiential understanding, given that
the two notions of understanding are very different?”
Well, apparently, Philip Goff hasn’t spent
any time studying psychopathology or he would know that there do appear to be
meaning zombies in our world, i.e. psychopaths and other personality disorders. Psychopaths have often been described as
having a sort of semantic aphasia: they functionally understand the words, but
don’t get the meaning.
We’ll come back to that later. For the moment, Goff determines to solve the
meaning zombie problem. He asks
provocatively:
“But how could experiential understanding ‘override’ the laws of
physics in the sense of producing behaviour that is new and unexpected from the
perspective of the basic laws of physics?
Actually, there is a way of interpreting physics that can allow states
of experiential understanding to bring about novel and unexpected behaviour
without in any way ‘violating’ the basic laws of physics.”
Because, of course, one must never violate the laws of physics. (Never mind that it seems to happen a lot anyway.)
The dead/undead cat is coming up next, so stay tuned.
