1 Consciousness and the Universe Roger Primrose

Introduction What used to be in the domain of philosophy and metaphysics, the so-called mind-body problem, or how consciousness arises, should be approached by using the methodology of science. Any scientific theory should be based on the scientific language of mathematics and should at least account for observers interacting with objects of perception, in other words with nature. This no one would dispute. However, how can this be accomplished and what scientific theory is required, is quite unknown even today. This is clearly an embarrassment to modern science. Despite the great successes of theoretical physics, the advances of molecular biology, and the advances in brain phenomena, many to the service of human health, to name a few, we still dont have a comprehensive theory of consciousness. It is even worse than that, we cannot agree on a common framework, whether the answers are scientific or philosophical, and even what sets of working definitions should be adopted. We now know from quantum measurement theory that observational choices determine the context of what is to be observed. In the participatory quantum universe, the observers choices play a fundamental role. The observer is an integral part of the process of what is to be observed. Here, we propose utilizing the fundamental role of mathematics, to create a theoretical framework of how consciousness operates in the universe. This framework may become a blueprint in order to develop an understanding of consciousness or at least to begin to develop the right path towards that understanding. We discuss different aspects of conscious processes, including awareness of objects, as well as self-awareness; sentience (which applies to the entire living world), etc. We emphasize that the framework cannot say anything about the ontology (nature of being) of consciousness. This, we believe, is the root of the problem of a lot of confusion in the field of consciousness. What consciousness is can only be directly experienced. However, how (rather than what is) consciousness operates can be put into a framework. The hypothesis is that universal Consciousness is the foundation of the universe and as such the universe itself is steeped in consciousness (where the capital C refers to universal, rather than individual, consciousness). This hypothesis not only resolves a host of problems in consciousness studies but may also be the next stage of development of a unified quantum-based physical theory. The alternatives lead to a series of never-ending loops of assumptions that become totally unpalatable and increasingly non-converging and non-consistent. The framework has to accommodate the qualitative nature of qualia. Qualia which is Latin for qualities, are the everyday qualities of experience.

2 Specifically, consciousness is not just a challenge for science. There is not even a general consensus on the definition of what consciousness is. Most workers in the consciousness field identify consciousness with neuro processes in the brain, i.e. they presume that consciousness is a derivative of neurophysical processes. Also, a prevalent view is that by consciousness we mean the awareness of objects. Lets begin with a working definition for consciousness, one can get from Wikipedia: Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, sentience, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives. These working definitions (because there are several of them captured in the above passage) are themselves limiting and when we discuss the possibility of universal Consciousness, a simpler and more encompassing way to describe it will be presented. There are two clear choices for consciousness: Either human beings alone are conscious; or there is consciousness everywhere. Conventional neuroscience takes it for granted that conscious awareness is an epiphenomenon of brain activity, a product of physical processes (called physicalism). However, as Nadeau and I discussed in the Conscious Universe more than 20 years ago, the measurement problem in quantum theory puts the observer (of everything in the physical universe) at the center of reality, not necessarily an observer in the human sense. If the universe itself is conscious, the dichotomy of humanbased versus universal Consciousness is resolved in fact, it never existed. Equating consciousness with processes in the human brain, is just not tenable. We know from experience that higher forms of life, primates, dolphins, whales, to name a few species, have brains similar to humans. Are they conscious? Or are they not? At what point do we stop? With domesticated animals? With Birds? With all animals? What about cellular life? How do newborn mammals know how to be attached to their mother? How do flocks of migratory birds know how to travel thousands of miles and find the exact location where they gather? If we are to have a different theory for each animate behavior, we will not have a coherent picture of what life is. How do electrons in a solid find themselves in the most appropriate configurations? It is much simpler and rational to put forward the view that consciousness imbues everything in the universe, that living entities are connected at some fundamental level and that so-called inanimate objects still have a fundamental way to respond to their environment. The question where consciousness resides leads to many other questions about defining it, seeing how we can measure it objectively, ultimately what is consciousness after all? Did it arise after billions of years of evolution of the universe in a far planet from the center of the Milky Way galaxy called Earth? The question what consciousness is, forms the most important questions in todays world. In a recent

3 survey of scientists about the most important questions of science, this was the second most important (the first being what is the universe made ofactually the two of them may be the same, as we will see here). In fact, it always was the most important question but now a plethora of fundamental problems that may spell the end of civilization, perhaps even challenging the very existence of humans, require that we seriously take a look at who we are and how we fit in the scheme of existence. We must take a serious look at how our own consciousness may be collectively driving us to a point of no return. Asking one question after another relating to consciousness quickly leads to a host of interrelated questions, all equally hard to grasp within the confines of present-day science as we know it.

Can the Study of Consciousness be Scientific? Can we study consciousness scientifically, just as any other field of science? Or is consciousness fundamentally different that science can only explore it up to a point but never wrap its hands around it, in the way that the so-called objective phenomena can be studied? Despite the usual, underlying assumption of modern day neuroscience, that conscious experience is a derivative of neuronal processes in a physical brain (what we may term the physicalist view), no theory exists whatsoever that would allow the precise, minimal exploratory power that can be repeated, and which would withstand the test of falsification (as any truly scientific theory should). A theory, for example, to explain in principle the difference in experience between seeing red color and seeing green color, or for that matter any experience associated with sensory input, or any experience of what solving a differential equation is, etc. It is quite embarrassing for modern science to have produced all the vast amounts of neuroscience correlates, an understanding of the firings of neurons, and to have mapped the complex architecture of the brain, yet still not have any idea of what an experience is. If science cannot produce explanations that are testable and can be falsified, one may wonder, why is the field of consciousness so important? Could it be that it has doggedly refused to be subjected to the traditional methodology of science, where the observed object can safely be separated from the observer and her apparatuses, in an objective way? The first person which is part and parcel of consciousness cannot be taken out. Subjecting consciousness to third person methodology leaves out the subjective experience. Moreover, qualities associated with consciousness, the so-called qualia1, cannot be reduced to physical laws and principles such as the electromagnetic theory of light and even quantum physics. This is the famous hard problem of consciousness studies, how to account for subjective experience: There is nothing in physics or any physical theory that can account for why a rose is experienced as red.

Chopra, Tanzi and Kafatos, present volume

4 Beyond the issue of whether consciousness study can be subjected to the full panoply of scientific methodology, is the obvious fact that the sense of awareness of our own existence is with us throughout our lives. No one can convince us that we are not conscious. That question doesnt even make any sense. It is the one sense of awareness that we are born with and carry with us to the very day we die which is undeniable, the subjective self-awareness. And extending from this inner awareness and beyond it, we are aware of other objects, other beings out there. Even the most hard-core materialists know they are selfaware. Unfortunately, that is where most conventional scientists stop. Since consciousness challenges our cherished ideas about identity and world outlook, they choose to ignore it, sweep it under the rug, and claim that it does not matter. This outlook yields to a promissory note that one day, somehow, science will resolve the issue of consciousness. The ever existing sense of identity is so close to us that we often take it for granted. The reason that it causes angst among those who believe that only an external reality exists, is that it challenges cherished ideas about ones own identity. Humans tend to prefer the comfort zone so we dont have to face the implications of a reality that is all-encompassing and beyond individual personas. Many of us, particularly intellectuals and scientists, identify ourselves with our own ideas. The implication for such people who have identified their existence with their ideas, means that this new view of reality, which denies those cherished ideas, might deny their own existence. But if consciousness turns out, as proposed here, to be the same as existence, then such intellectuals deny universal existence because existence denies their own sense of existence. It is indeed a vicious circle for such people! In moving forward, the emergence of the new science of consciousness will not only allow a profoundly new way to view ourselves and the cosmos around us, it will have tremendous implications for humanity in general. Indeed, it may be the only way to address the impasse that human societies have found themselves in. In fact, we believe that unless science evolves to the new, emerging science of consciousness, humanity itself is at risk of extinction. It is as serious as that. The new science of consciousness will emerge by fusing what appear as contradictory (but in fact they are complementary) ways of dealing with reality, recognizing the unity of everything that has been known and accepted in ancient times. The last four hundred years, of denying the role of observation and assuming an independent reality over which we have little control, are actually an aberration in human experience and thought. Quantum theory ushered in the view that whatever existence or reality may be, it is participatory, non-local, entangled and with infinite potential of manifestation. And that existence is us!

Views of Consciousness

5 Even though many physicists are trying to deny it or find alternatives, the fact remains that orthodox quantum theory, as developed by John von Neumann, is the gold standard2. As result, any alternative has to also be able to account for quantum observations at least as well as von Neumann quantum theory does. Therefore, several theoretical arguments about alternatives are rarely about discussions of observational outcomes of quantum theory, which have been tested in the laboratory to an accuracy of one part in 1 followed by 16 zeroes. Rather, they are about interpretations, about the philosophical outlook of these alternatives. Many physicists, as I have pointed out in the Conscious Universe, take for granted their own world views without ever questioning the origins of their ideas and much less their own prejudices. Practically speaking, it really comes down to two fundamentally different schools of thought: One, which is based on the classical world view where the observer is separate from the observation and the observing objects, dominates the practice of many science fields today, including neuroscience. This view of separation, tacitly assumes that there is a physical reality out there and everything reduces to that physical reality. As such, consciousness, in this view, arises in brain processes, most often associated with neurons but not exclusively. This is a gigantic conjecture as no one has actually proven that consciousness arises in a physical medium, the brain, or through physical processes alone. Clearly, consciousness interacts with the brain (and the body) but to assign consciousness to the physical brain alone would be equivalent to claim that a movie arises and is produced in the movie projector; or that a computer image is produced in the integrated circuitry of the computer. The software is not put together in or by the hardware, it is a mental product that utilizes the hardware. Armed with evolutionary biology, or their interpretation of it, most neuroscientists believe that consciousness arose after hundreds of millions of years of biological evolution, in physical brains, it is a derived phenomenon. If that is the case, then consciousness is an epiphenomenon, a derived quality of certain living species, modern man, and maybe higher mammal species. Modern neuroscience and its sister fields, neurology, computational neuroscience, etc., have achieved great successes, in treating neuronal disorders, injuries to the brain, understanding visual fields, etc. We hope that particularly challenging disorders such as Alzheimers, will be cured in the next several years. Yet, despite the advances, neuroscience is at loss to account for the hard problem, the origin of consciousness, or where consciousness can be found. Again, the somewhat simplistic analogy could be drawn that opening the TV and taking it apart will not reveal anything about a particular news story broadcast through the TV. It is not our task to go through the many theories of consciousness that are based on a physicalist world view. Most of conventional neuroscience just takes for granted such a point of view. Although

Good references to von Neumann quantum mechanics can be found in several works by Stapp, see Further Reading.

6 many of these works are very useful in terms of practical outcomes, they reach a dead end to account for even the simplest of experience. The second school to which many of us subscribe, is that consciousness is fundamental. There are many shades and interpretations of this general world view, spanning views such as quantum processes giving rise to consciousness, to panpsychism3, to universal consciousness being the fundamental reality. In most of them, it appears that quantum theory has a lot to say. And the main reason for this, as I have stated in the Conscious Universe, is that quantum theory introduced the fundamental role of the observer. Classical physics could not and cannot account for this by its very nature, since it assumes that the role of observation is secondary to an ever-existing, independent, external reality. Here, we also cannot possibly cover even the majority of different interpretations of the second school, that consciousness is fundamental4. We, therefore, limit ourselves to a few, which we believe are either representative, or have something fundamental to describe. In his work Founding Quantum Theory on the Basis of Consciousness5, Efstratios Manousakis undertakes the bold step in claiming that quantum theory derives from consciousness, and not the other way around. He extends the idea of the so-called streams of consciousness, which are usually assigned to conscious beings, to a Universal stream of conscious flow of ordered events. The ontological nature of consciousness, in his view, consists of a mathematical entity called an operator, which acts on the state of potential consciousness in order to create, or to modify, the possibility of later events to occur, and become part of the Universal conscious flow. Donald Hoffman of the University of California, Irvine, on the other hand developed the theory of Conscious Realism6. In his view, consciousness creates brain activity and all objects and properties of the physical world, not the other way around. Hoffman developed the Multimodal user interface which holds that perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world but they are sort of a filter through which we perceive reality as external. This filtering mechanism provides a simplified, species-specific, user interface to the world. In his Conscious Realism world view, the world consists of conscious agents and their experiences. Objects are conscious experiences of observers, and as such they are not fundamental. In fact, I can add here that qualia ought to be examined in the Hoffman picture as they are precisely that. Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose are known for their theory of Orchestrated Reduction (OR). This theory ties unknown quantum gravity mechanisms to the famous collapse of the wave function7,
3 4

See Theise and Kafatos, 2013 for an exposition of panpsychism. The present book provides an excellent kaleidoscope of many views assigning primacy to consciousness. 5 Foundations of Physics, 36, pp. 795-838, 2006. 6 Mind and Matter, 6(1), pp. 87-121, 2008. 7 See Kafatos and Nadeau, 2000.

7 which can be understood as the reduction of the state of the quantum system following an observational choice. Although Hameroff claims that this is a quantum theory, I believe it is really a theory of derivation of consciousness: In the OR view, quantum superposed states develop in microtubules in the brain (the R aspect); while collective effects in neuronal dendrites give rise to conscious awareness (the O aspect). Microtubule subunit proteins (tubulins) remain in a quantum coherent state. As such, consciousness is tied to the fundamental space-time geometry, presumably arising from quantum gravity. For clarification, they use the term consciousness as object awareness, and they are not addressing fundamental Consciousness in itself, which I address below. Manousakis picture has the advantage that it uses quantum mathematics (known in jargon as Hilbert space mathematics) to describe the operation of conscious observers. However, to claim that quantum mechanics derives from consciousness, will require a lot more formal work. His basic premise is correct. Similarly, Hoffman8s models, particularly his view that objects are not fundamental, ring of truth. The speciesspecific creation of reality is clearly taking place, but general species-independent reality must also be out there. Perhaps this species-independent creation of reality is what Theise and Kafatos describe as sentience9. The sentience of simple cells, by which we mean that they are able to sense their environment, interact with it by making autonomous decisions and move about in order to survive and in some sense prosper, that sentience must be quite widespread. Hoffmans mathematical modeling tied to computer science concepts is appealing as one can use familiar information science tools. There is also always the danger to reduce consciousness to familiar, discipline-specific concepts (e.g., from information science), no matter how appealing they are. It is encouraging to follow Hoffmans views and see where his theory will eventually lead. Hameroffs and co-workers experimental results of quantum effects in the microtubules are very exciting and most likely correct. They must also not be unique, for example ion channels show quantum coherence as well. They are probably ubiquitous in living matter and the emerging science of quantum biology will undoubtedly provide new scientific vistas: Microtubules exist everywhere, not just in the brain. It may be that organization of many microtubules creates the right conditions for wave-function collapse to occur, but the specifics are not clear and placing bets on the, still, undeveloped theory of quantum gravity may be premature.

8 9

See also Hoffman in the present volume. See next section.