Of Consciousness and Will within the Universe

Lent 2018: Day Nine

Stuart A. Kauffman throws us a philosophical challenge. "Are We Zombies with, at Best, Witnessing Minds?" This is what the deterministic physics of reductive materialism would boil us down to.

Kauffman's answer is that we are not. We have the will, the consciousness, to turn the Possible into the Actual. His reasoning is new - this is not Aristotelian, nor Newtonian nor Darwinian - this is post-quantum thinking. Here goes...

"I will propose a new Triad: Actuals, Possibles, and Mind, where mind acausally observes mediating quantum measurement, transforming Possibles to new Actuals, which then acausally enable new Possibles for mind to observe again, hence in a continuous status nascendi. This Triad, I will propose, includes quantum variables, such as electrons exchanging protons, consciously observing and measuring one another, and acting with free will, and human conscious, free-willed mind. This will lead to a radical panpsychism; wherever measurement occurs so do consciousness and free will... [T]he proposal that mind acausally 'mediates' measurement is in principle testable. One way would be to show that human conscious attention nonlocally, hence acausally, can alter the outcome of measurement."

Wow. Strong stuff... many scientists might indeed argue - flaky stuff, bordering on paranormal studies. Especially in that Dean Radin, who Kauffman quotes several times in this book, is not someone that conventional science takes all that seriously (from Wikipedia: "Radin's ideas and work have been criticized by scientists and philosophers skeptical of paranormal claims.") But let's move on. Kauffman also quotes Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff who associate quantum measurement with flashes of consciousness and choice. "If this is testable... and confirmed... we will have to consider that consciousness and free will did not emerge with life, but as part of the universe, like pressure and temperature, was used as life evolved, possibly sentient and acting from the start, and that consciousness became ever more integrated and refined and diversified, as we ourselves experience."

Let that sink in for a while. Consciousness - not something that came as a result of an evolving biosphere, but predating any form of life, out there from the very beginnings of the universe.

Panpsychism. The notion that consciousness pervades the entire universe. Panpsychists see themselves as minds in a world of mind.

I kind of came to this conclusion myself, last September, my copy of Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe by my bedside, unread beyond the prologue. I wrote (here) in an entirely unscientific manner, that I see "consciousness as a part of the universe, along with matter and energy".

That was just my intuition, something I felt, not a hypothesis observed, measured, tested repeatedly and peer-reviewed. Gut feeling. But here's another scientific voice... Adam Frank puts it thus: "Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. "

This suggests that science is moving into areas hitherto considered flaky because conventional Newtonian explanations fail to hold water at either the subatomic level nor at the cosmological level. What is this Dark Energy that makes up nearly 68.3% of the energy in the known universe? How many more subatomic particles are there for us to discover? It is this stalemate of classical physics that Kauffman and others are attempting to break through. This would change our view of the universe and its ultimate purpose.

This time two years ago:
The Devil is indeed Doubt

This time three years ago:
Are you aware of your consciousness?

This time four years ago:
"Why are all the good historians British?"

This time six years ago:
Central Warsaw, evening rush-hour

This time seven years ago:
Cold and getting colder

This time nine years ago:
Uwaga! Sople!

This time ten years ago:
Ul. Poloneza at its worst