Superposition v coherent superposition

Physicists often focus only on coherent superposition, i.e. the superposition of two wave functions whose phases align. That is where we see the funky quantum effects such as in the two-slit experiments, or in entanglement in the EPR (Einstein-Podelsky-Rosen) thought-experiment, or in quantum computing. As soon the superposition decoheres by interacting with the environment, the behaviour looks classical. Then it becomes boring to physicists. Except John von Neumann (1903-1957), who was concerned with how the superposition collapses into a single state: this is the so-called quantum measurement problem. Decoherence was discovered in the 1970s, and many people seem to think that it puts the quantum measurement problem to bed. It doesn’t. The problem von Neumann addressed is still there. This is because the superposition does not expire at decoherence, it just passes on into the measuring device and hence the environment.

Von Neumann had a kind of non-theory about quantum measurement. Consciousness sweeps in from some other realm and, bingo!, it collapses the superposition. That’s it, no further details. Now, mental monism is a philosophical position that has its own solid grounds within philosophy, and I have gone over the defence of mental monism elsewhere. I just want to stress that I am not invoking mental monism in order to solve the measurement problem. I am already committed to mental monism on philosophical grounds, and then I am saying, “By golly, mental monism also gives us a handle on the measurement problem.” (I know that some of the more vociferous readers will simply not read this, and say, “Ha ha, Lloyd thinks the answer to the measurement problem is to abolish the physical universe.” Whatever.)

In mental monism, the measuring device and the experimenter’s brain are virtual objects rendered by some background consciousness (the ‘metamind’). Their being in superposition is a fact registered in the corresponding data structures of the metamind. To collapse a superposition, the personal mind sends a signal to those data structures, telling them to delete all but one branch of the wave function. That’s it. Very sketchy, but I think it has to be correct if we accept mental monism. There are lots of details to be worked out. Here I want to focus on an objection that conflates superposition with coherent superposition.

Is decoherence too fast for consciousness?

A common argument against theories that link consciousness to quantum processes in the brain is that the brain is such a thermally noisy environment that any coherent quantum states that arise will decohere far too quickly to play any role in neural activity.

A few years ago, Max Tegmark very publicly slammed Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose for their ‘Orch OR’ theory (Tegmark 2000). Tegmark asserted that the coherent superposition in microtubules, which is a key part of the Hameroff-Penrose theory, could last no more than about 10^-13 to 10^-20 seconds. He ridiculed the idea that quantum coherence could be maintained in the “warm, wet and noisy” environment of the brain. In fact, Tegmark’s calculations were out by ten orders of magnitude as he had made incorrect assumptions about the microtubule model. The correct value is around 10^-3 seconds, which is in the same ballpark as neural activation (Scott, Hameroff, & Tuszyński, 2002). In fact there have been reports of much longer coherences in microtubules. Hameroff & Penrose have defended their theory robustly against often quite hostile attacks. Attacks by Tegmark and others has, however, reinforced the common belief in many quarters that quantum-linked theories of consciousness are infeasible. The same criticism has been made against the mental monism / portal theory, as the coherence times in DNA are expected to be around 10^-13 to 10^-15 seconds—but, in fact, this is a different category of theory, which does not require coherence.

Pre-aggregation and post-aggregation

In any theory of quantum-linked consciousness, there must be an aggregation function. It would be absurd to suppose that communication between the mind and the brain is limited to a single neuron. Each conscious perception or volition likely involves thousands of neurons. How does that relate to a mind-brain channel of communication? How aggregation is done is different between portal theory and the Penrose-Hameroff model.

• In Penrose-Hameroff, a large number of neurons’ microtubules are ‘orchestrated’ to go into superposition at the same time. When a critical mass is reached, according to Penrose’s theory, the superposition collapses and somehow this yields a moment of consciousness. The superpositions have to remain coherent over a finite time as the aggregation builds.

• In mental monism, the conscious mind is a separate information processing system that can carry out computations independently of the brain. So, instead of the pre-aggregation of the Penrose-Hameroff theory, mental monism allows post-aggregation. That is, during a perception, individual neurons can set up superpositions that can be collapsed by the mind one-by-one, and the mind receives a signal from each one; the mind can then aggregate those signals over some interval of time. The personal mind might look for a threshold of signals over a millisecond, say, or it might take an average, or some other aggregate statistic. The precise mathematical form of the aggregating is to be discovered. Hence the time spent in coherent superposition is not relevant, what matters are the statistics of the collapse events over an interval of time.

In the case of volition, this scheme seems quite natural: neural circuits in the motor cortex set up superpositions in DNA in multiple neurons: if they collapse into state A, there is no action; but if they collapse into state B, they release a sequestered protein, which changes the firing disposition of the axonal synapses. In the latter case, it leads to the desire action mediated by muscles. If the mind wants to perform the action, it primes the archetypes of the DNA molecules, so that as soon as each superposition is signaled from the molecule to the archetype of the molecule, the mind will collapse it toward the required state. The aggregation on the mind side produces a phenomenal experience, while post-collapse aggregation on the brain side causes a muscular contraction or relaxation. For example, say 1000 neurons control a certain movement, and the mind primes their archetypes to flip to state B: say 750 of them go into superposition, and are flipped to state B; that reaches the threshold for a moment of experience; and the flipped neurons send signals to produce the muscular action.

One implication of this model is that the mind cannot initiate an action: the brain must set up the possible action, and the mind either vetoes it or triggers it.

In the case of perception, I want to suggest that that the same collapse mechanism is used, but with two differences: (a) the afferent collapse takes place in the sensory cortex rather than the motor cortex and (b) the afferent collapse is not under voluntary control, whereas the efferent collapse is. So, the proposal is that the brain’s sensory cortex sets up a number of DNA superpositions; the mind detects them and renders them internally as phenomenal experiences, and then collapses them. Again, with the same kind of aggregating as in the voluntary action.

Why does perception require quantum collapse?

This seems a bit odd: why go through the process of collapsing a wave function if this is not a voluntary action? Why doesn’t the mind simply access the state of the DNA without using a superposition? Why does conscious perception involve quantum collapse?

• Vestige hypothesis: One possibility is that this is a vestige of the evolution of organisms’ access to consciousness. I imagine that in the primitive organisms that first embodied consciousness, the mind performed a one-step stimulus-response: a perception would be followed by an action. As brains evolved into more sophisticated cognitive systems, they acquired the ability to store and cogitate on information without immediate action. But rather than inventing a new type of portal just for perception (without using collapse), organisms just reused the existing type of portal (with collapse) but without the voluntary action. This is obviously purely speculative but it is a plausible possibility. It does, however, leave us with some loose ends. What if life had evolved to use a different method of doing conscious perception, without collapsing wave superpositions? In such a counterfactual world, what would happen if a physicist ran a quantum measurement in the laboratory? Would the device and hence the experimenter stay in superposition permanently (or until some voluntary action is performed)?

• Initial conditions hypothesis: It would be absurd to think that evolution produced perception-by-collapse in order for us to collapse quantum experiments in the laboratory. Is there any quantum process in nature that would require organisms to evolve perception-by-collapse? Well, yes, the Big Bang. Precisely what happened in the Big Bang is not well established because it is outside the range of applicability of known laws. But the general view is that the physical universe was compressed into such a small space that quantum superposition was everywhere. In order for any ‘observer’ to collapse those superposition, the observer must be outside the spatiotemporal universe, which means of course a conscious mind. So … if organisms did not use perception-by-collapse, then the whole physical world could not be actualised. At this point the physicalists roll their eyes, laughing: “So, you’re saying that when the first vertebrate opened its little eyes and consciously perceived the world, the brought into existence 13.8 billion years of cosmic history?” Kind of. As the universe is only a construct anyway (in the framework of mental monism), the years before the first conscious being never actually happened. Those 13.8 billion years are notional, not actual. Precisely how much modelling the metamind carry out of the mindless physical universe’s behaviour over those aeons is anyone’s guess. Did the metamind run a detailed simulation of every vibration of every quantum field? Or did it just run aggregate models of large-scale structures? These are questions we may never answer. Nevertheless we do know that the universe was not actualised until conscious observers started observing it. Is this really any crazier than the mainstream MWI (Many-Worlds Interpretation) that the universe is still in the superpositions that it had in the Big Bang, and will remain in those superpositions forever?

I think we have to run with the ‘vestige hypothesis’ as it is the only causal explanation. I don’t know what to make of the dangling counter-factual, i.e. what would the world be like if nature had evolved conscious perception without quantum collapse?

BTW These are all new thoughts I had today, so I don’t have settled opinions on them yet. I’m just bouncing ideas around. Criticisms welcome.

References

Tegmark, Max (2000) “Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes”, Physical Review E (Statistical Physics, Plasmas, Fluids, and Related Interdisciplinary Topics), 61 (4) 4194-4206. April 2000. 10.1103/PhysRevE.61.4194, 10.48550/arXiv.quant-ph/9907009

Hagan, Scott, Stuart Hameroff, and Jack A. Tuszyński (2002). "Quantum computation in brain microtubules: Decoherence and biological feasibility". Physical Review E (Statistical Physics, Plasmas, Fluids, and Related Interdisciplinary Topics). 65 (6) 061901. arXiv:quant-ph/0005025. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.65.061901.

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When I first heard about Donald Hoffman’s theory of Conscious Agents (Hoffman 2019), I was quite excited, as it seemed that he was putting forward a serious account of how an idealist theory of consciousness could develop. But as more of his theory has emerged, we can see that it is heading for the same roadblocks that derail panpsychist programs.

Hoffman & Prakash (2014) offer one of the few attempts in the literature to account for the interface and architecture of consciousness within a mental monist framework. Their program is largely aligned with one described in this series of posts and my other publications (Lloyd 1999a,b; 2020a) namely to build a model of the world from a consciousness-only basis—but there are differences in the conceptualization of the mental world.

Any successful theory of idealism must tackle the basic problem of explaining how the laws of the (virtual) physical world emerge from the underlying conscious world. In the 18th Century, George Berkeley outlined an approach that was remarkably prescient of how computers render VR (Virtual Reality) environments, and how we may imagine the background consciousness of the universe renders our everyday world. I don’t want to waste time chasing labels for the background consciousness (God, Saguna Brahman, the Urgrund, the LCS (Larger Consciousness System), the metamind …), so I’ll just use the same cringeworthy word I thought up when I was a young man back in 1999, the “metamind”. Berkeley’s idea is that the metamind (which he called God) contains ‘archetypes’ that allow the metamind to render in human minds our perceptions of the manifest world. He compared this to the way a musician renders tunes from a musical score using an instrument, even though the visual symbols in the score bear no resemblance whatever to the sounds of music. That is, metamind contains compact data structures (‘archetypes’) of the observable characteristics of macroscopic bodies. It is rather like the object-oriented database of a VR system. These archetypes are then used by some mental instruments—‘rendering engines’ in computer jargon—as directives to generate our perceptions. The rendering engines are not necessarily separate: they could be implemented as ‘methods’ of the archetypes. So the physical world is understood as a simulation, coded in mental structures, and we act in it though our virtual avatars.

Any theory, such as Hoffman’s, that places consciousness in a fundamental role underpinning the physical realm faces the challenge that there is no substrate below the conscious realm that could account for features in consciousness. In Hoffman’s case, the buck stops with the Conscious Agents. This is different from, say cellular automata such as John Conway’s Game of Life. Conway’s game comprises an infinite grid of cells, each of which can full or empty, and simple rules for how the cells change from one time-step to the next. This is already a very sparse ontology, but even so the substrate of the grid provides a spatial metric against which relations and interactions are defined. When consciousness is fundamental, the ontology is even more sparse. Basic units (such as Hoffman’s Conscious Agents) are not in any prior space: they are not near to, or far from, each other. These units are neither neighbouring nor remote. There is no medium through which they can travel or communicate. Everything has to be built up from the consciousness itself. I have explored one way to approach this in my paper in the journal Entropy: Modelling Consciousness within Mental Monism: An Automata-Theoretic Approach (Lloyd, 2020a).

The bprimitive element in the model I presented is the ‘experientia’, a single instance of volition and phenomenal sensation, on top of which archetypes are assembled. In contrast, Hoffman’s primitive element is a probabilistic finite-state automaton, the conscious agent (CA), which contains a set of possible experiences and a set of possible actions. Missing from Hoffman’s account are:

1. An explanation of the internal mechanisms of the CA—in what concrete medium are the possible experiences and actions present?

2. What mechanism drives the probability distribution of the input-output relation?

3. How do CAs communicate with one another, given that there is no non-mental substrate that could convey signals?

4. What holds a CA together, to stop it leaking into other CAs?

I don’t think these are minor details, but foundational concepts. While Hoffman’s model might be valid at a high level, the lower levels also need to be fleshed out for the model to work as an account of consciousness, and that lower-level fleshing out seems to be missing.

In addition, there are certain assumptions that are different from what I have concluded in these Substack posts:

5. An assumption that the CAs are Markovian, that is, the state at any moment depends only on the state at the previous moment, whereas the model I have suggested is maximally non-Markovian.

6. An assumption that the behavior of a CA can be modelled by fixed probabilities of state transitions and outputs, while one would reasonably expect them to be time varying in complex ways, at least in the larger CAs such as human minds.

There is tension within mental monism between micro levels and macro levels. On the micro side, Hoffman has recently proposed that micro-CAs work together through abstract geometries (‘amplituhedra’) to generate spacetime and elementary quantum fields (Hoffman, 2024). On the macro side, he has long said that what we take to be physical objects (neurons, brains, planets, …) are merely icons within the MUI (Multimodal User Interface). This leads to two problems:

• First, the familiar ‘combination problem’ that blocks panpsychists from forming a tenable theory. According to Hoffman, when two CAs fuse, the resulting experience set is not simply the union of the experience sets of the two merging CAs. Rather, the fused experience set contains new experiences relating to the operation of the new CA. This would be plausible if CAs were just mathematical descriptions of the functionality of some entities, but they are supposed to describe systems of actual phenomenal experience. What is it like to be a CA undergoing fusion nor fission? This question is particularly acute when it comes to our familiar human minds. In cases of local anesthesia or cortical oblation, a swathe of CAs would be knocked out, but the remainder of the sensorium is unchanged. So, it appears that the experience sets of larger entities (such as human minds) are simply the unions of the experience sets of antecedent entities. The latter is what Lloyd (2020a) has proposed: that there is a universal set of experientiae, and a private mind is formed by partitioning that universal set by closure under access.

• Second, if CAs literally make up elementary physical entities (vibrations in quantum fields is the latest), then they have spatial location. This is so, even if it is the CAs that generate spacetime. This cuts against Hoffman’ long-standing claim that spacetime is just part of the ‘headset’ (his metaphor for the physical construct). If his CAs are, effectively, in spacetime, then Hoffman is going to hit the relativistic binding problem. The contents of a conscious mind have an indubitable time sequence but the neural activity of a brain that occupies a volume of space are subject to relativity of time, which gives a strong contradiction (Lloyd, 2020b).

No portals?

Finally, Hoffman does not investigate the portals that must exist between a conscious mind and its avatar in the physical construct. This is the area where we are most likely to develop falsifiable hypotheses, and develop an engineering of consciousness. Hoffman dismisses correlations between phenomenal experiences and neural activity as merely a reflection of the underlying business of CAs. While that is true, it misses the point that the brain tissue, like the rest of the physical construct (which he insists on calling a ‘headset’) is subject to rules that we have collated as laws of physics. So, while neurophysiological activity is entirely driven by what the CAs are doing, that activity is constrained to fit into the laws of physics. This immediately confronts us with the ‘portal problem’: where, in that neurophysiological activity, is there a gap in the causal chain that the CAs can exploit to exert volition in the brain? The solution that I have proposed in this paper is that consciousness acts by collapsing superpositions in DNA molecules, but Hoffman does not address the portal problem and therefore does not propose a solution.

Hoffman’s output is prolific, and I have just touched on some of the key points of comparison here. There’s a lot more to Hoffman’s theoretical account.

References

Hoffman, Donald (2008), “Conscious realism and the mind-body problem”, Mind and Matter 6(1), 87-121.

Hoffman, Donald (2010), “Sensory experiences as cryptic symbols of a multimodal user interface”, Activitas Nervosa Superior 52(3), 95-104.

Hoffman, Donald, and Chetan Prakash (2014). Objects of Consciousness. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577

Hoffman, Donald (2019), The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, Allen Lane.

Hoffman, Donald, Robert Prentner, and Chetan Prakash (2023), “Fusions of consciousness”, Entropy 25(1), 129 (40 pp). https://doi.org/10.3390/e25010129

Hoffman, Donald, Chetan Prakash, and S. Chattopadhyay (2024), “Traces of consciousness”, Preprints 2024, 2024101305. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202410.1305.v1

Prentner, Robert, and Donald Hoffman (2024), “Interfacing Consciousness”, Frontiers in Psychology 15, 1429376. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1429376

Hoffman, Donald (2024), “Spacetime is doomed: time is an artifact”, Timing & Time Perception, 12(2), 189-191. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134468-bja10096

Lloyd, Peter B. (1999a), “Consciousness and Berkeley’s Metaphysics”, privately published.

Lloyd, Peter B. (1999b), “Paranormal Phenomena and Berkeley’s Metaphysics”, privately published.

Lloyd, P. B. (2020a). Modelling Consciousness within Mental Monism: An Automata-Theoretic Approach. Entropy, 22(6), 698–730. https://doi.org/10.3390/e22060698

Lloyd, Peter B. (2020b), TSC2020 - C3 Idealism, Panpsychism & Neutral Monism, recording: YouTube

[Thanks to for challenging me to look into this question.]

According to the oldest interpretation of quantum mechanics (generally attributed to John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner), a superposition of quantum states is collapsed into a single state in an act of observation by a conscious mind. This certainly has a lot of plausibility. The Schroedinger wave function has no built-in means of making sudden jumps, so when a particle such as an electron strikes a detection device and is thereby decohered, the device becomes entangled and hence goes into superposition itself. No other physical system can trigger the collapse, as any such system just slips into the same superposition: the collapsing agent has to be something non-physical, and the conscious mind is the obvious choice. (The only competitor theory is ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’, which has the fatal flaw that is requires consciousness to be non-existent, or at best epiphenomenal.)

Fine. But, in the philosophical framework of idealism — which I have been advocating throughout these Substack posts — the real world consists exclusively of conscious minds. According to this theory, there is a vast background consciousness, a kind of mental operating system, than controls everything in the world except our free will. Following Berkeley’s nomenclature, this metamind (which he called ‘God’) comprises a great matrix of ‘archetypes’, which store (in some phenomenal form) all the information about each object. These archetypes supposedly operate like miniature minds. So, for example, my chair has an archetype within the metamind, which is rendered in my visual and tactile perceptions. So have the two-slit barrier and the detection device in the double-slit experiment. But that poses a problem. If idealism says that the distinct components of the two-slit experiment embody conscious minds—then, why don’t they collapse the wave function?

It appears that there are two kinds of archetypes: ones that can collapse a wave function and ones that can’t. My further speculation is that both of the two roles of collapse-by-consciousness in the brain—namely perception in the sensory cortex and action in the motor cortex—go together. That is, archetypes of the agentic class can generally trigger the collapse of a superposition in a portal: whether that power is used afferently or, under voluntary control, efferently probably just depends on where the portal is situated in the brain and in what flow of information processing it is embedded.

Of course, I realise that this looks like an arbitrary kludge to get the model to fit the facts, rather than something you’d expect from first principles, but I think it makes sense in retrospect. We have no idea when or how the metamind got started, but we might suppose that, at first, it just evolved some environmental structures using non-agentic archetypes, and then it budded off some agentic ones, which used the matrix of regular archetypes as a medium through which to communicate in a virtual three-dimensional world. Maybe the agentic archetypes got started as random mutations but then found they had a competitive advantage and multiplied in larger numbers. This is pure guesswork, but my point here is that we can a least imagine possible evolutionary pathways through which agentic archetypes could become common.

So the proposal is that passive, non-agentic archetypes just ‘go with the flow’, and accommodate entanglement with whatever superpositions come with it. But agentic archetypes, because they can act volitionally in the (virtual) world, need to be able to exert themselves and that can be done consistently only by collapsing superpositions. By ‘consistently’ I mean consistent with the laws of physics that are programmed into the physical construct.

This diagram illustrates what happens when you observe the result of a quantum detection device such a radioactive decay. Within the physical construct there is a ‘shadow causation’, the device causing the observation. But in the actual causation, the non-agentic archetype of the device causes the non-agentic archetype of brain tissue to harbour a superposition; the agentic archetype of the personal mind then causes the superposition to collapse.

I remain troubled by the seeming inelegance of the hypothesis of two classes of archetypes, but as far as I can see there is no way to avoid it. On the one hand, we need the structural stability of non-agentic archetypes; on the other hand, the fact that our own brains embody volition shows that there must also be agentic archetypes at work. So it goes.

I really don’t know where, in the phylogenetic tree, agentic archetypes start embodying in living organisms. From anatomical and behavioural similarities, I’d wager that mammals are all conscious. Cephalopods plausibly might embody conscious minds (see eg Mather, 2008). Conceivably every DNA-based organism might carry consciousness, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Even if an agentic archetype could collapse superpositions, could it also get into superposition itself? Well, only for the moment that it takes the archetype to detect the superposition and squash it. As it will be wanting to use its power of voluntary action to manipulate its environment (to acquire food, shelter, mates, and so on), there does not seem to be any advantage in going into a passive mode.

This will all firm up once we get to engineering artificial archetypes, and building artificial conscious minds. These could be embodied in machines, or—in principle—disembodied. BTW Disembodied agentic archetypes are reported in the non-academic literature. In studies of lucid dreaming, there is evidence that some some dream characters are sentient (Foley 1989). In DMT experiences, there are frequent reports of encountering seemingly autonomous entities (see e.g. Luke & Spowers, 2022). In the literature of chaos magic, there is a concept of ‘servitor’, which is essentially a free-ranging agentic archetype (see e.g Hine, 1991).

References

Jennifer A. Mather (2008), “Cephalopod consciousness: Behavioural evidence”, Consciousness and Cognition, 17(1), 37-48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2006.11.006

Paul Foley (1989). “Consciousness and Abilities of Dream Characters Observed during Lucid Dreaming”, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 68(2), 567–578. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1989.68.2.567

David Luke and Rory Spowers (2022), DMT Entity Encounters, Simon & Schuster.

Phil Hine (1991), Chaos Servitors: A User Guide.

[A second excerpt from my twin papers submitted to the Open Journal of Philosophy a few days ago.]

The ‘interaction problem’ concerns this question: how does a non-material mind interact with a tangible brain? and, specifically, how does it do so without breaking any of the laws of physics that govern the physical realm? It’s a question that inevitably arises with the philosophical positions of substance dualism and mental monism.

For mental monism, there’s another question that bugs people: if everything is just mental, then how come doing things to the brain affects the mind? Taking psychotropic drugs, or suffering brain damage, or even death: it looks like interventions in the brain cause things to happen in the mind. So … this means that mental monism is bullshit, right?

No. What it means is that you have to reflect carefully on what causes what.

Overall model of mental causation

In mental monism, there is a vast background mind, like a mental operating system, that runs all the natural processes that are not under personal control. I call this the ‘metamind’. (This is Berkeley’s “God”.) The component of the metamind that drives a particular object in the manifest world is, in Berkeley’s terminology, the ‘archetype’ of that object. The archetype is of the same nature as a mind. Think of it as an agentic mental structure, inside the metamind.

The theory posits a universal set of minds U = {E₀, E₁, E₂, …} where E₀ is the metamind and E₁,… are whatever other minds exist, including people, animals, inanimate objects, and disembodied minds. Causation operates within and between these minds. A subset comprises minds that are rendered as observable objects, U_obs ⸦ U, with an archetype E_i rendered as a physical entity P_j = ren(E_i). That is to say, the archetype of any physical object, animate or inanimate, is a component of the metamind that controls the rendering of the object in personal minds. There is a close analogy to the object-oriented architecture of artificial virtual-reality software. What appears within the manifest world as causation between physical entities is actually a rendering of the real causation in mental world. It is the ‘shadow causation.’ In rough terms, the scheme is as follows. Suppose E_m is my mind, ren(E_m) is my brain, E_LSD is the archetype-mind of a tab of LSD and ren(E_LSD) is the tab of LSD itself. Ingesting the LSD allows E_LSD to act causally on E_m, producing hallucinations. A third-person observer will see ren(E_LSD) entering ren(E_m) and consequent changes occur in ren(E_m), namely different brain activity and reports of hallucinations. See Figure 1.

The brain is the mind’s avatar in the physical construct, and it needs two interfaces. On the one hand, it has the sensory and motor organs plus the brain tissue that carries out pre-conscious input processing and post-conscious output processing. On the other hand, it has the physical correlate of consciousness, which acts as a ‘portal’ to the conscious mind. Thus the brain is an interface between virtual transducers and actuators on the one hand and the correlate of consciousness on the other; and this interface must operate within the laws that rule the physical construct, hence it has to be a physical object with specific characteristics.

The portal navigation problem

The two theories, substance dualism and mental monism, have a peculiar problem that simply does not arise with property dualist theories such as panpsychism: namely, the Portal Navigation Problem. A ‘portal’ is the mechanism that allows the exchange of information between mind and brain. Theories of property dualism, such as panpsychism, have no need for portals, so a fortiori they have no portal navigation problem. An early example of a portal is Descarte’s ridiculous idea that the pineal gland is the portal between mind and brain. For the past century, essentially all theories of substance dualism and mental monism propose some kind quantum mechanical process as the portal. So, we have Popper & Eccles’ quantum tunnelling across synapses, and Penrose & Hameroff’s quantum collapse in microtubules, and my quantum collapse in DNA (see below). Gordon’s (2022) mental monist account proposes quantum mechanical portals, but fails to address the navigation problem. Whatever the choice of portal, the navigation between the mental and physical sides of the portal is a crucial and but largely ignored problem.

Whether you regard the brain as ontologically real (substance dualism), or just a virtual object in a construct (mental monism), you are still faced with the fact that your conscious mind possesses no spatial location. Your mind is not literally in your head, or any other place. As it’s not in your head, how does it know which head to use for sensory input and motor output? Your mind receives sensory perceptions from some brain, and sends motor commands to that brain. But, which brain? Why does my mind exchange information with my brain, not yours, given that my mind is not actually inside my brain, nor inside any other brain?

Approaching this from the physicalist perspective, you might want to say that there is no navigation problem. You might claim that brain connectivity commits a portal to a particular mind. That is, if there is a neural connection between portal 1 and portal 2, then they will map to the same mind. That, however, will not work because any such connection will occur after the portals have done their communicating with the mind. Suppose a portal needs to tell its mind that light of wavelength 625 nm has impinged a particular part of the eye. How will it know which mind to send this data to? Post hoc connectivity is too late. The identification of the target mind must be something inhering in the portal at the time of transmission.

So, we need a brain structure that is (a) small enough to be put into quantum superposition in the midst of a thermally noisy brain, and (b) common to all neurons in one brain, but (c) not shared by any other individuals.

Hameroff & Penrose (2014) proposed microtubules, which apparently meet criteria (a) and (b) but not (c). The microtubule is a structure built of tubulin proteins, and these proteins are the same all individuals. There is no personal biomarker in the microtubule. So, if a conscious mind were linked to microtubules as portals, then the mind would map equally to microtubules in everyone’s brain. A microtubule is a microtubule is a microtubule: a mind would have no way to tell which microtubules constitute its personal doorway into the correct brain.

I think the solution must be that the physical side of the portal needs to have some unique biomarker, so that the conscious mind can connect to just the proper portal, and hence it can latch onto one particular physical person.

Lloyd (1999) suggested that the portal is the DNA molecule, not the microtubule. The DNA ticks all the boxes: it is unique to each individual, and present in every neuron; there are biologically plausible molecular pathways from the dendrites to the nuclear DNA, and from the DNA to the axon; the DNA molecule is about 40,000 times longer (about 2 m) than the longest microtubule (0.00005 m) and therefore has vaster computational power; and there is circumstantial evidence in its favour from twins and split-brain patients. Figure 2 shows this schematically.

Superposition is a virtual phenomenon that exists in the physical construct. The metamind must represent this somehow. My tentative suggestion is that the archetype contains in some form all the information of the quantum density matrix of the object. A (virtual) superposition of coherent waves would be represented by an archetype of the joint entity, with child instantiations of the two states. Within the physical construct, a quantum measuring device (e.g. a two-slit experiment) would go into superposition, and entangle with the observer’s brain. That is a ‘shadow causation’, as the real causation is in the mental domain.

When a personal mind makes a quantum observation, it sends a signal to the archetype of the portal in the brain, telling it to select one state, and to render that state. From the point of view within the physical construct, it is as if the immaterial mind has reached into the physical world as tweaked the superposition to force it collapse.

This is all a very different way of thinking from the normal physicalist way. But if you think of it all as a VR game in which there is a simulation of quantum superposition, then it is actually a very natural way of conceptualising the whole shebang.

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Gordon, B. L. (2022). The Quantum-Theoretic and Neuroscientific Foundations of Reality. In J. Farris & B. P. Göcke (Eds), The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism (pp. 536–575). Routledge.

Hameroff, Stuart, & Penrose, Roger (2014). Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory. Physics of Life Reviews, 11, 39–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002

Lloyd, Peter B. (1999). Consciousness and Berkeley’s Metaphysics. Self-published.

[It’s been a while since my last post. This is because I have been writing two long papers for submission to the Open Journal of Philosophy, and sent them off on the weekend. The first one was an improved version of my 2018 paper that has been languishing in ResearchGate. The second was a compilation of my SubStack posts, including ones I hadn’t written yet. Such as this one. It’ll be good if OJP publishes them, but nothing is certain in this world.]

The quantum measurement problem

The problem of quantum measurement, which is at the core of the portal theory of conscious embodiment, can be stated simply: the Schrödinger wave equation describes the dynamics of a quantum system in a precise, deterministic way, while a measurement of the system involves an abrupt change triggered by an observer, but neither the observer nor her act of measurement are understood in physical terms.

In the classical understanding of the physical world, reality is made of particles—atoms and suchlike—flying around in space, bumping into another and subject to force fields, plus waves of energy. In the quarter of a century from 1900 to 1926, that world view was uprooted and replaced by a wholly new conception. Werner Heisenberg (1902-1976) wove the nascent strands of thought into the new worldview in a paper in 1925. Building on this revolutionary framework, Max Born (1882-1970) published the last major component of the foundation of quantum mechanics: the Born Rule for computing the probabilities of different outcomes of measuring any quantum system. He was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for it in 1954. It irreversibly brought consciousness into the heart of the modern physics, but also thereby created an acrimonious dispute among physicists and philosophers.

Some of the founders of quantum physics—Max Planck (1858-1947), John von Neumann (1903-1957), Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), and later Eugene Wigner (1902-1995)— recognized the central role that consciousness has to play in quantum physics. They did not, however, provide a cogent theory of what consciousness is, nor of how consciousness does this. Von Neumann, in particular, was vague about where the intervention of consciousness occurred in the combined system of measuring instrument plus human brain. This led physicists to adopt a policy of “Shut up and calculate” (sometimes attributed to Richard Feynman). That is, just use the equations of quantum physics, and disregard the conceptual foundations. As physicist Sean Carroll has recounted, research into quantum foundations was for many years a taboo and, even now, is not well favored in mainstream physics.

Some physicists were dissatisfied with this policy of “Shut up and calculate” but could not bring consciousness into science. Some proposed that physical systems just spontaneously executed the Born Rule; others concocted a tale of infinitely many parallel universes that split off every time we make a quantum measurement. Henry Stapp (1928-) was one of the few major physicists who maintained there was a causal role of consciousness (Stapp, 1999, 2001, 2017).

In quantum mechanics, the constituents of the physical world are wave functions. Protons and electrons are no longer particles existing independently of observers, but wave functions. When a measurement is made of one of the observables of that wave function, we do not observe the wave function itself, we find only a specific value. The wave function defines the distribution of probabilities of those individual values, but not which specific value will be found in any given measurement.

Already, we see something paradoxical. The wave function evolves smoothly and deterministically in time. But when a measurement is made, it ‘collapses’ to one value in whichever observable was observed. Now, if this is a proper scientific theory, there should be an account of precisely when and where the collapse occurs, and how. Measuring, say, the position of an electron involves a macroscopic instrument plus the brain of the experimenter. Where, in that complex system of machine plus brain, is the collapse? Quantum mechanics was silent on this. Likewise, it said nothing about how the collapse occurs. This so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics was good enough to carry out calculations, but inadequate as a conceptual picture of reality.

Candidate Theories of Quantum Measurement

The candidate interpretations look broadly like this:

• Simple Copenhagen Interpretation: what counts as a measurement is ill-defined, and the outcome of a measurement is random, except for the probability distribution as defined by the Born Rule.

• Observerless collapse: the collapse just happens by itself, not because of a measurement. In this group we have the Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber (GRW) theory of spontaneous collapse and the Penrose theory of gravitational collapse. These theories leave no opportunity for consciousness to operate causally upon the world. Yet, we know from everyday life that the conscious mind can report its experiences, and exercise free will. It could not do that if the collapse were under objective control.

• Consciousness-driven collapse: Karl Popper and John Eccles (1977) proposed that a nonphysical consciousness exercises free will by means of quantum tunnelling in the synapses between nerve cells. They address only free will, and not the quantum measurement problem, nor the problem of consciousness perception, nor is there any attempt to model the architecture of the conscious mind and how it might actually interact with the physical world.

• • Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI): This was developed by Hugh Everett (1930-1982) in his doctoral thesis as the ‘Relative State Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics (later tagged ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’). According to this theory, there is no actual collapse of the wave function. Whenever a measurement is made, the universe branches and stays that way forever. As the branches are decohered, there is no scope for interaction between them, so it is as if they are separate, classical worlds. Hence the ‘many worlds’ tag. But they are not really different worlds in any normal sense of the term: there is just one universe, and these are different superposed branches of the universe’s wave function. As the other branches (‘worlds’) cannot, in principle, be observed, and as they can have no effect on our branch, the existence of these branches can never be tested, which violates Popper’s (1934/1959) principle of falsifiability. They are indistinguishable from fictions. The defense made by Many Worlds advocates is that the existence of these branches is implied by the mathematical equations of quantum physics. This is a non sequitur: the fact that one part of a mathematical structure matches reality simply does not imply that other parts do as well. Recall Pythagoras’ theorem from your school days. For a right-angled triangle with hypotenuse a, Pythagoras tells us that a² = b² + c². So, if b = 3 and c = 4, then a = ± 5, but the negative solution -5 is discarded as non-physical. Likewise, we should jettison the other branches of the wave function other than our own. The empirical fact that is observed is that the wave function collapses non-deterministically. To suppose that it doesn’t really collapse but instead yields an infinity of unobservable branches is unscientific. Moreover, if MWI were true then the physical universe would be wholly deterministic, and there would be no way for consciousness to act upon the world: we could not report our conscious experiences or exercise free will. Without consciousness, the universe is characterized by Tegmark’s (2014) Mathematical Universe Theory, just mathematical structures devoid of any distinction between reality and unreality, and in that case MWI makes sense. That line of thinking, however, is clearly inapplicable to the real world.

In some quarters of the physics community, you will find quite an aggressive dismissal of the proposition that consciousness is involved in quantum physics. Here, for example is the highly regarded physicist, author, and podcaster Sean Carroll:

“Almost no modern physicist thinks that consciousness has anything whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics. There are an iconoclastic few who do, but it’s a tiny minority, unrepresentative of the main stream.” (Carroll, 2016, Chapter 21)

It should be borne in mind that Carroll is committed to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, which inherently excludes both consciousness and the collapse of the wave function. He is also committed to the notion that consciousness has no fundamental existence but is only a high-level emergent property of the brain. Both of those positions are philosophically untenable. Only about one in five physicists believe in the Many Worlds Interpretation (Gibney, 2025), and the rest of them don’t hold positions with any firm view on the involvement of consciousness. The dominant view, as Carroll has acknowledged elsewhere, is “Shut up and calculate”.

Decoherence

Many people (even some physicists) say that decoherence explains away the measurement problem. This is incorrect. Decoherence occurs when a target quantum system (such as an electron) that is in a coherent superposition of states interacts with a larger system (such as a measuring apparatus), with the result that the phases of the component wave functions of the target system (the electron) are scrambled. The target system (electron) remains in its superposition of states, and in fact drags the interacting system (measuring device) into superposition too. What has changed is that measuring the target can no longer yield an intermediate state but only one of the base states. For example, if you are measuring the position of an electron then, without decoherence, you might (per impossible) observe the electron smeared over a volume of space. As the measuring device is large, however, you will always decohere the target system and never see it smeared over space. De-smearing it does not collapse the measured observable into one outcome. There is something else going on in the act of measurement, besides decoherence, that selects one specific outcome out of all the possible outcomes that were represented by the target system’s initial wave function. That is the hard part of the measurement problem, and it is the part that needs the involvement of consciousness.

Physicists who say that decoherence clears up the Measurement Problem are mostly followers of Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation. But MWI itself already abandons the measurement problem by denying the existence of conscious observers. Without conscious observers, there is no actual observation, no actual collapse of the wave function, and no actual reality. On this view, the physical universe is just an abstract mathematical structure: it has no Measurement Problem because there is nobody in it to make measurements.

The Physical Part of a Portal is Nondeterministic

If the physical universe were wholly deterministic, then it would be impossible for a conscious mind to affect it. At each time t, the state of the universe would be determined by the combination of its state at an earlier time t’ and the dynamical laws. There would be no gap in that causal chain for the mind to change the course of events. We would have causal closure.

It is clear from everyday experience that the human mind regularly affects overt behaviour and therefore must be affecting the brain. Therefore, the physical part of the output portal must be a nondeterministic process. There appear to be only two candidates. One is the initial condition of the universe (i.e. the Big Bang), the other is the measurement of a quantum superposition. The initial conditions model is feasible, but not plausible. We will therefore consider only the quantum model.

Quantum mechanics is clothed in many misunderstandings, one of which is that at the microphysical level the physical world is seething with randomness and uncertainty, with particles being in more than place at the same time, all that sort of thing. This is wrong. Any physical system, including the universe as a whole, evolves with determinism and certainty, in accordance with Schrödinger’s wave function—until an observer measures it, at which point any observed superposition collapses to a single state. For example, an electron passes through a two-slit apparatus as a deterministic wave until measurement, at which point it will render a particle at one definite, but unpredictable, location. The Born Rule defines how to compute the probabilities of different possible outcomes, but there is no physical law that tells us precisely which outcome will be measured on any occasion. It is a common belief that the selection of one outcome out of the two or more superposed states is purely random, modulo the Born probability distribution. Physics says no such thing. (In fact, it is not a clear how one could even give a satisfactory definition of pure randomness.) Physics gives us the probability distribution, but the individual outcome is simply not determined: it is not ‘random.’ Since the conscious mind clearly affects what the brain does, and the only gap in the deterministic evolution of the Schrödinger wave function is the act of measurement, we are led to hypothesise that a volitional act by the conscious mind is embodied by choosing the outcome of the collapse of some quantum superposition in the brain.

Recall that the physical part of the portal is, like the universe generally, virtual. The archetype-mind of the portal signals to the personal mind that its physical rendering is in superposition, and the personal mind responds by selecting which outcome is to be rendered in what is, in effect, an act of quantum measurement by the mind.

Ockham’s razor suggests that there is only one kind of portal: the brain creates some quantum superposition, and the mind detects this, and collapses it. There is no obvious need for a separate kind of portal for efferent and afferent signals, although that is an empirical question. A single kind of portal would make sense in the context of evolution, as perceptions arose to allow advantageous action rather than for idle contemplation. One difference would be that the efferent collapses would be situated in the motor cortex and be under voluntary control, while afferent collapses would be in the sensory cortex and not normally under voluntary control.

Mental Monism and the Portal Theory

The theory that I am proposing is that the conscious mind is an autonomous, nonphysical, nonlocal information processing system comprising only phenomenal consciousness, with no non-conscious substrate; that the physical world is a construct and the human body an avatar that allows the mind to operate in the (virtual) physical world; and the (virtual) channel of communication is a nondeterministic quantum process in the brain, which I shall call a ‘portal’, for which the best candidate appears to be macromolecule specific to the individual. This theory addresses the three key issues:

• The Measurement Problem: where, when, and how does an observer collapse the wave function? The wave function is collapsed collectively in the instances of the designated macromolecule, and it does so when the sensory input from the observation reaches the relevant part of the brain. It is achieved by an operation in the formal automaton of the conscious mind, as outlined by Lloyd (2020). That action manifests in the physical world through the portals that have been described above.

• The Perception Problem: How can a non-physical conscious mind pick up on sensory input? By the same mechanism. The brain places the macromolecules in superposition in the sensory cortex, which the conscious mind detects.

• The Volition Problem: How can a conscious mind exercise free will in the physical world? By the same mechanism, but in the motor cortex. The brain creates an opportunity for conscious intervention by placing the designated macromolecule in a quantum superposition, and the conscious mind collapses the wave function and selects an outcome, which then affects neural firing and hence behavior.

It seems reasonable that all three issues be resolved by the same model of an interface between the (virtual) brain and the conscious mind. It would be queer if you needed a different model for each one. In principle, this is a falsifiable theory. Obviously, a lot more detail needs to be worked out, such as precisely what aspect of the huge macromolecule functions as the portal. And what exactly is the information architecture of the mind.

Even if you buy into the arguments about the portals, you might think that a less extravagant ontology might be sufficient: such as some kind of property dualism (for example, panpsychism), or maybe even substance dualism (for example Cartesianism). Why go to something as outrageous as mental monism to solve the Measurement Problem? Well, the first point is that mental monism is not being invoked in order to solve the Measurement Problem: that is a straw-man argument. Mental monism has a philosophical basis, outlined above, that makes no reference to the Measurement Problem. It just so happens that mental monism also provides a platform for solving the Measurement Problem.

How mental monism provides a neat solution to the Measurement Problem will become clearer as I expand on the internal mechanisms of the portal. Essentially: because the physical brain is (according to mental monism) a virtual system and is underpinned by conscious structures of the same type as the conscious mind, we do not need to invoke magic or brute psychophysical laws (as David Chalmers has recommended). Instead, we have single ontological playing-field governed by a single set of mental laws. Mental monism can achieve an economy and theoretical elegance in the mind-brain interface that is unattainable in dualism.

Quantum Entanglement and Volitional State Reduction

If we provisionally accept the experimental results of micro-telekinesis experiments, then we need to think outside the box to find a logically possible mechanism.

The more interesting micro-telekinesis experiments use quantum tunnelling and radioactive decay as the source of randomness in inherently non-deterministic quantum events. (See experiments by Schmidt (1987) and PEAR (2007).) The source system will go into a superposition (of, say, emitting a radioactive particle or not). When it is measured, the measuring apparatus will be entangled into the same superposition. Likewise, when a human looks at the read-out from the device, the human brain will also go into superposition. Everything that interacts with the apparatus will also go into superposition, which basically means the whole universe. (Ignore people who say that decoherence explains the apparent collapse. It doesn’t. Decoherence limits the wave function to a superposition of ‘pointer states’, that is, states that are macroscopically sensible. But it is still a superposition. A further ingredient is needed to trigger the collapse.)

It may seem outrageously weird that the universe goes into superposition because of one quantum event. But that’s what mainstream physics has been telling us for many decades. What happens next, however, is a matter of acrimonious debate. According to the standard Copenhagen Interpretation of the quantum mechanics formalism, the superposition will suddenly collapse into just one branch when an ‘observer’ measures it. The details of this were never clear in the Copenhagen Interpretation: Precisely what counts as an ‘observer’? Precisely where, when, and how does the superposition collapse? The general view among the founders of quantum mechanics was that the consciousness of the observer did the collapsing, but as there was no specific theory of consciousness or how it did this trick, the problem was put into abeyance by those who proclaimed “Shut up and calculate!”, in other words, use the equations but don’t ask what they mean.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation is that the universe stays in this superposition forever. It can be dismissed as it precludes the operation of free will, and we are left with the Copenhagen Interpretation. So, each time one of the random digits, 0 or 1, is produced, the universe forms two branches, and the conscious mind somehow reduces this superposition back to a simple state. The Born Rule defines the probabilities of the different outcomes from a quantum measurement, but it does not say that the outcome must otherwise be random. The conscious mind could temporarily adjust the Born rule for a limited time, and then correct the imbalance. Or, alternatively, it could adjust the Born rule and just not bother to reset the balance. In which case a statistical imbalance would be observable, which is precisely what is reported in telekinesis experiments on RNG (random number generator) experiments.

Normally the collapse of superposition under voluntary control occurs only in the motor cortex. In the sensory cortex, it is haphazard. But, what if you could train yourself to control the collapse in the sensory cortex? Then you would be able to affect not just the portal but the choice of collapsed superposed state of the whole universe. That, I propose, is how telekinesis is done.

New research by Cucu

While I was doing the final proofreading my papers, I came across the remarkable work of Alin Cucu, who has has suggested that it is not just the Born rule, but the conservation of energy that could be violated if consciousness were to intervene in the collapse of a superposition. It seems to me, however, that the alternative states that are in superposition must each be already compliant with the conservation laws in order to be valid pointer states. Nevertheless, I am going to do a deep dive into Cucu’s work, as it is a very incisive analysis of precisely this problem of conscious collapse of the wave function.

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Convergent evolution happens when organisms from different species tackle the same environmental problem in similar ways. Convergent engineering emerges when engineers from different traditions work out similar solutions to the same task. Human software engineers and the universal sub-mind (or God or Brahma, if you prefer terms embedded in tradition) face the same problem: how to run an immersive, multisensory, three-dimensional virtual world? In effect, we want to reverse engineer the sub-mind, so a plausible starting point would be to suppose it might have an architecture similar to that used by human engineers. So, I want to explore the hypothesis that the sub-mind is an object-oriented information processing system that generates the construct that we call the physical world and renders it in a sensorimotor manifold in our personal minds.

As you will have gathered from my previous posts, I am looking at this in the context of subjective idealism, the philosophical theory that only conscious minds exist. I am not going to repeat the justification for that here: you can read the earlier posts if interested. The intention here is: if we assume that idealism is true, what can we say about the architecture of the sub-mind?

I don’t think we will be able to get a definitive answer to this until we have tools to probe the sub-mind. In the meantime we can explore possible architectures that are suggested by the way artificial virtual realities are programmed, as these address the same information engineering problem. Think of this as formulating a ‘toy model’ just to get a view on the potentials and problems of this approach.

The most common way to program VR systems is using Object-Oriented Architecture (OOA). There four main pillars of this kind of architecture:

• Abstraction: The software comprises ‘objects’ (hence the name, ‘object-oriented’) that encode the abstract properties of virtual objects. For example, the virtual objects around you - your desk, your chair, your laptop - have some abstracted properties in common: they occupy a fixed volume of space, they are opaque and tangible, they resist motion, you cannot put your hand through them, they require a push to move, they fall to the ground with gravity, and so on. These general features are encoded in a ‘parent’ object, which is instantiated in ‘child’ objects. Each child object adds in specific attributes to the generic parent. (This hierarchy of properties is superficially similar to that of Platonic Forms.)

• Encapsulation: The software ‘objects’ are self-contained and include data and methods, which are functions specific to that object. An object’s data and methods may be private or public. ‘Private’ means only that object, or instantiations of it, can access them, whereas ‘public’ means that other objects can access them. The human mind is obviously encapsulated, insofar as it is a self-contained system with private contents. But it does have public ‘methods’, i.e. functions for sensorimotor input/output. When you dream, the characters and inanimate bodies that you encounter in your dream appear to be encapsulated sub-systems, as their inner workings are opaque to you as dreamer, even though they exist within your mind. And they evidently have built-in public methods, as you can perform actions upon them in accordance with their affordances: you can talk with people, open doors, climb steps, jump into water. So, as an explorative first guess, we might suppose that the whole of the sub-mind is built up from encapsulated objects composed of conscious experientiae.

• Inheritance: The world is made up of objects that have many instantiations. The physical construct contains vast numbers of small things, down to atomic and sub-atomic scales. It would be a simplifying assumption to supposes that the common attributes of these things are defined just once, in a parent object, and each physical instance (of, say, a proton) is an instantiation of that parent object, containing a representation of its particulars (position and momentum), and inheriting the common features. One important clue is that, in idealism, there is no ontologically real space: the mental entities cannot move around and bump into one another. The only way that they can communicate is by possessing some inbuilt linkage. If all objects in the domain of consciousness inherit from common ancestors, this provides the necessary inbuilt linkage, a means of connection without invoking the notion of proximity in space. For example, if the mental objects corresponding to elementary particles are instantiations of a parent object, then any interactions (scattering, or attraction, or repulsion) would be transmitted via private data or methods of the parent object. This is, of course, a radically different way of understanding interaction from the one we find in physics, where a spatially distributed field (gravity, electric, magnetic, etc) affects particles that are spatially localised. In the mental world, there is no space, hence no fields and no localisation. That, it seems to me, is a natural and economical way to achieve inter-mental communication in a substrate-free system.

  Inheritance is also crucial feature for persistent structure in an idealist architecture. As I discussed in my previous post (https://consceng.substack.com/p/what-is-the-motive-force-of-consciousness), there does not appear to be any obvious analogue of physical energy in the domain of consciousness. Instead, I suggest that the persistence of structure is achieved by inheritance from parent objects to child objects. As I suggested in an earlier paper (Lloyd, 2020), the base layer of the domain of consciousness operates like a substrate-free cellular automaton, with a creation operator but not deletion operator. So, the universal cellular automaton grows perpetually, always inheriting features from parent objects, tracing back to an initial root object, which we might regard as ‘pure consciousness’ (to use the language of eastern mystical traditions)

• Polymorphism: this refers to a feature of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) languages, in which an operator can have multiple forms depending on the object it is acting on. Now, if the sub-mind were a detailed ‘simulation’ of the physical construct, then there would be little or no need for polymorphism in our model of the domain of consciousness. To put it informally: if the sub-mind is thinking about every elementary particle in the universe, in a comprehensive model, there is no role for polymorphism as the simulated microphysical actions do all the work. But there are reasons to believe that that the architecture of the sub-mind is different from this: that, in the majority of cases, the mental objects in the sub-mind correspond to macroscopic aggregates. If that is correct, polymorphism would be required in the inter-mental messaging.

So, the ‘toy model’ comprises an originating root object (pure consciousness) which gives rise to successive child objects, comprising experientia as atoms of phenomenal experience and volition, these objects functioning mostly as ‘mini-minds’ that render the furniture of the world, and personal minds, such as ourselves.

In subsequent posts, I will endeavour to flesh this out, working toward a formal model. We will examine how this model meshes with quantum entanglement of particles with coherent wave functions.

Reference

Peter B. Lloyd, “Modelling Consciousness within Mental Monism: An Automata-Theoretic Approach”, Entropy 2020, 22(6), 698; 22 June 2020 (33 pp). doi.org/10.3390/e22060698.

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In the idealist framework, only minds exist, and we must face the question, what mental force drives the mental operations? I have been puzzling for a while about this. I don’t yet have an answer, but I wanted to record some thoughts I had recently. My (very) tentative thinking aligns with some other people have been saying, so this is not new.

In the physical domain, we know that energy makes the world go round. In the simple Newtonian model, we can think of atoms as billiard balls that travel through space because they have kinetic energy and when they bump into other billiard balls the energy is conserved, so the balls continue moving at determinate speeds, with the direction determined by the conservation of momentum. In the post-Newtonian world, energy is still conserved, and we have a number of new conservation laws. In the domain of consciousness, we do not have physical energy. So what makes the world of consciousness tick? Is there some mental conservation law?

Let’s pause and go back to the Newtonian toy model for a moment. I wrote above that “billiard balls travel through space because they have kinetic energy”, which sounds a very natural way to express what is happening but in fact is anthropomorphic nonsense. The ball’s moving through space is the same thing as having kinetic energy. The energy does not ‘power’ the movement, nor does it ‘make’ the ball move. In the physical construct, objects have relative positions, and those positions change, and the so-called ‘energy’ is an abstract way of quantifying the motion that happens to be conserved. As is momentum. In a collision between two billiard balls, velocity V is not conserved, but moment MV and energy MV² are conserved. This leads us to reify momentum and energy: we think of them as things, almost like magical fluids, even though nobody has ever seen any momentum or energy. Yet they are just abstract ways of describing motion, which lend themselves to reification because they are conserved.

So, when we think about the domain of consciousness, we should stop looking for ‘mental energy’ and think instead of conserved or persistent features that could provide structure among phenomenal experiences, so that they don’t disintegrate into chaos.

For reasons that I will try to articulate in subsequent posts, I think that what is conserved is the whole set of experiences. Think of it as like a mental blockchain. In conventional blockchains (Nakamoto 2008), each transaction is retained perpetually, and new transactions added like a palimpsest. The conscious mind retains all previous experiences, even though they are not readily accessible, and those experiences constrain what is possible going forward. In the sub-mind (Berkeley’s ‘God’), the laws of nature exist as constraining prior actions that persist in perpetuity.

Back to the Newtonian toy model. In the macroscopic, everyday world, from the simplicity of billiard balls emerges statistical mechanics and entropy. If two balls are fragile, say hollow glass billiard balls, they may shatter on impact. Entropy increases: the world continually becomes more disordered. It is easy to see how this Second Law of Thermodynamics emerges. A macroscopic structure such as a glass ball comprises incalculable numbers of atoms. If the forces keeping them in place are broken, all the individual atoms will jiggle around according to their kinetic energy in random directions, still preserving energy and momentum in each interaction. This is seen on the macroscopic scale as an inexorable increase of entropy and in fact this is the great engine of our world. This is what drives life forms: low-entropy energy from the sun is converted into higher entropy of waste products and eventual corpses of plants and animals.

In the proposed model of the mental domain, the basic constituents are not free to wander in space, but are constrained within the mental blockchain. So we do not see a perpetual increase of entropy in the mental world (in whatever way we might define ‘entropy’ of consciousness). The disintegration of large structures into flocks of small structures, which is a characteristic feature of the physical world, does not occur at a fundamental level in the mental world.

As new experiences occur and add onto the great mental blockchain, in each interaction the ‘entropy’ will either remain the same, or decrease as structure is permanently added to the ensemble. Therefore, overall in the mental world, entropy tends to decrease. The mental world becomes more structured.

Yes, I know that this utterly vague and hand-waving, but I think this line of thinking is going in the right direction. I will try to formalise it in subsequent posts.

Why does any of this matter? Well, because without a correct conception of the fundamental dynamics of the mental world, there is no chance to develop an engineering of consciousness.

I don’t want to sound like a closet believer in Intelligent Design, but this tendency of consciousness toward lower mental ‘entropy’ might play a role in evolution. I have no problem imagining that all of life has evolved through random mutation and natural selection. But the fact that that is imaginable, and definitely plausible as the sole mechanism of evolution, does not mean that random mutation really is the sole mechanism. Nagel, in his book Mind and Cosmos (2012) speculates along similar lines. Maybe conscious reduction of entropy accelerates evolution by guiding mutations? I have no evidence for this, but it’s a wild thought.

References

Satoshi Nakamoto (October 31, 2008), “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Thomas Nagel (2012), Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Oxford University Press.

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Free will is a philosophical problem that gets some otherwise sensible people saying very silly things, while the rest of us stare blankly at the question: Obviously, we have free will, but — how does it fit into our understanding of the nature of reality? The answer to the riddle was already available to us in the Advaita Vedanta, the 8th Century philosophical movement led by Adi Shankara. Easily accessible to Western minds, it was not.

Within the theory of mental monism, aka subjective idealism, the correct solution to the conundrum falls out as a natural consequence of some straightforward premises. And yet, even George Berkeley, the chief advocate of idealism in Western philosophy, did not see it. Dan Kolak is one of the few modern philosophers to get it.

Deniers of free will performed some astonishing mental contortions to present their theories of denial. ‘Compatibilism’ was the worst offender. Essentially the compatibilists threw the Law of Excluded Middle out of the window. This Law simply says that any given proposition, p, is either true or not true. There is no middle ground between true and not true. The compatibilists said yes, we have free will—but, no, we are completely determined. This is a clear case of doublethink that defies rational exposition. Related to the compatibilists are the ‘redefiners’, who want to redefine free will as something other than free will. For example if a chain of deterministic cause and effect runs through some agent X, then we can pretend it has free will. For example, consider these two cases: (a) You kick a robodog across the room. (b) The robodog decides to cross the room according to its programming. The latter is supposed to be free will because the behaviour resulted from something inside. This is rubbish. The robodog’s program was implanted by an external agent, namely the computer programmer. Its behaviour was determined by outside forces in both cases: either my boot, or the programmer’s fingers tapping out code on a keypad. There is no free will in either case, and it is ridiculous to suppose otherwise. Another absurdity is the legal argument: if we didn’t have free will then the notions of responsibility and guilt would be void, but we need them as supports of justice, so we have to pretend that we have free will while at the same time believing that we are deterministic meat-machines.

Benjamin Libet’s experiments

In the early 1980s, Professor Benjamin Libet at the University of California in San Francisco, conducted a series of experiments that supposedly tested whether we have free will. His results are very widely quoted as proof that free will is an illusion, and yet the experiments actually say nothing at all about free will.

In the most cited experiment, a subject has to press a button whenever s/he felt like it. Libet attempted to cross-reference the time of volition with the time at which the neural process of pressing the button started. For the former, he asked the subject to watch an dot moving around an electronic ‘clock’ display, and make a note of when "he/she was first aware of the wish or urge to act". Let’s call that the ‘Noticed Time’. At the same time, Libet would monitor the subject’s brain activity with an electroencephalogram (EEG), and note the start time of the electrical activity in the motor cortex that would lead to the finger press. He found that the electrical activity started about 300 ms before the Noticed Time. Libet, and his many followers, interpreted the result thus: the brain makes a decision to act and, a third of a second later, the mind picks up on this and mistakenly believes that it was responsible for the decision.

The obvious flaw in Libet’s experimental protocol is that he is not measuring the time of volition itself. He is recording when the subject becomes aware of the volition, but obviously the volition must precede the awareness of the volition. Duh.

The time-line is like this:

• T=0

  • The conscious mind exercises volition to decide to press the button.

  • This flips a quantum superposition in a portal in the brain. (I have argued in earlier posts that this is in the DNA molecule.)

  • This triggers a sequence of electrical activity in the motor cortex lasting 500 ms.

• T= approx. 250 ms

  • The clock reaches the Noticed Time

  • The visual signal proceeds from the retina to the visual cortex.

• T=approx. 300 ms

  • The visual perception of the clock showing the Noticed Time enters the conscious mind.

  • An awareness of the forthcoming voluntary action enters the conscious mind.

• T=approx. 500 ms

  • The finger presses the button.

An act of volition is not an item in the sensorium. It is an action of the subject, not an object of the subject’s awareness. There is no quale of volition. Just as the mind gains an awareness of sensory impressions entering the brain, so it also gains an awareness of incipient motor events. The mind does not perceive the volition itself, it perceives the result of the volition.

There is no way that anything like Libet’s experimental protocol will yield any information about the exercise of free will.

How can we tell when a conscious mind is active in the world?

To get a handle on this phenomenon, we have to go back to first principles. As I have argued in earlier posts, the conscious mind embodies itself in physical objects such as brains by, in effect, measuring and hence collapsing quantum wave functions in what I have called ‘portals’ in the brain. These nondeterministic events reveal the trace of a conscious mind.

This is the only test. Monitor a system (be it a brain, or an artificial computer) and see whether it exhibits meaningful, purposive behaviour that is steered by nondeterministic collapses of quantum wave functions.

Within the physical realm, that is the only way to tell whether a conscious mind is at work. Not by Libet’s pointless experiment that simply does not address the issue of free will.

Free will versus ‘random’ events

A riddle that challenges even those who acknowledge the reality of conscious minds is this: What is the difference between events that are produced by free will and merely random noise?

The massive prejudice in science towards regarding the physical world as the only game in town has led to a very strange concept of the ‘random’. In the physicists’ worldview, everything that happens is either determined from antecedent states and rigid laws of physics, or it happens by random chance. There is no third category. The same dichotomy, we are told, arises in the mental world. A mental event is either deterministic, driven by some laws of consciousness, or it is random chance. What precisely is free will supposed to be, if it is neither deterministic nor random?

Let us consider more closely … what does ‘random’ mean in the framework of idealism? In this framework, all that exists are conscious minds and everything that happens is a mental action. So, any so-called random event is actually a volitional act by some mind, but it is a disconnected mind, not a mind that is engaged in pursuing some purpose. The difference between a mental event that we would describe as ‘random’ and a mental event that we would describe as ‘free will’ is not absolute but a matter of degree. We tend to say that a pattern of events reveals a free will at work if it is meaningful or purposive. But those events are of precisely the same nature as events that we tend to call ‘random’ just because they are haphazard. Deterministic events are also mental actions, which were originally free in their inception but have been carried forward in time.

There is ultimately only one kind of mental event: whether we classify it as random or volitional depends entirely on context.

As I alluded in the beginning: this understanding of all events in the universe being driven by a mental force was found in the Advaita Vedanta. "Thou Art Brahman” and “Thou art that” are two of the Mahavakyas or ‘great sayings’, and they mean that everything that happens - be it ‘random’ or willed by a person, or determined by laws of nature - is an act of the universal consciousness, or Brahman.

We do have personal free will; and as we are numerically identical to Brahman, our actions are also the free will of Brahman. It all boils down to the same thing, really.

References

1. Libet, Benjamin; Gleason, Curtis A.; Wright, Elwood W.; Pearl, Dennis K. (1983). “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential) – The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act”. Brain. 106 (3): 623–642. doi:10.1093/brain/106.3.623.

2. Libet, Benjamin (1985). “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action”. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 8 (4): 529–566. doi:10.1017/s0140525x00044903.

Illustration: The original 1964 experiment that discovered the readiness potential (Bereitschaftspotential) prior to voluntary finger flexion and one of the participants hooked up to an EEG. Photo from the original experimental setup used in Kornhuber and Deecke). Photo source: Lüder Deecke, Nature

Previously in this substack: I suggested a theory of how a non-local conscious mind could be embodied in a brain (or a computer for that matter) via mind-brain ‘portals’; and then I suggested that the same mechanism might provide a simple, naturalistic explanation for the supposedly ‘paranormal’ phenomenon of micro-telekinesis.

In numerous laboratory experiments, parapsychologists have reported evidence that the a human subject can affect the sequence of 0s and 1s issued by a quantum-based Random Number Generator (RNG). According to the standard Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, each time a non-deterministic quantum event occurs, the apparatus and the human brain monitoring it go into a superposition of states (a mix of “0” and “1” in the case of an RNG). When a conscious mind makes its observation of the output, the superposition collapses into a single state (just “0” or just “1”). That much is standard physics. What I suggested is that the conscious mind can exert its will to decide the outcome of the collapse. This would be an addition to known physics, as it would imply that consciousness can modify the probabilities of outcomes that are computed from the Born Rule.

One implication of this theory is that whoever observes the superposition first will collapse the wave function, and therefore get to influence the outcome.

A possible experiment

With that in mind, we can imagine the following variant of the standard micro-telekinesis experiment. Instead of just one subject, we have two (or more) subjects. Each subject will see the same display, which is some visual representation of the outcome (0 or 1) of the random-number generator. But only one subject sees the outcome straight away. The other subject(s) will see the outcome slightly later, say two seconds later. The selection of who gets to see the outcome first is not fixed, but changes on each cycle according to some pre-defined pseudo-random sequence. So, with two observers, Alice and Bob, we would have:

• 1st cycle: Alice sees the outcome first.

• 2nd cycle: Bob sees the outcome first.

• 3rd cycle: Bob sees the outcome first.

• 4th cycle: Alice sees the outcome first.

• 5th cycle: Bob sees the outcome first.

• and so on.

If this theory right, then whichever subject who sees the outcome first will collapse the superposition, and - if mentally focused - can influence whether it is 0 or 1.

After concluding a large number (N) of tests, we add up the number N1 of successes that Bob had when he saw the outcome first (should be above 50%), and we add up the number N2 of successes that Bob had when we was not first (should be just 50%), and we perform a statistical test of whether N1 is greater than N2. If we find that N1 is not significantly greater than N2, despite N being huge, then the hypothesis is falsified, and the theory is rejected or modified in some way.

The experimenter effect

One odd thing I’ve noticed in most parapsychological experiments is that there is no allowance for the possibility that it is the experimenter, not the subject, who is doing the work. After all, if the premise is that telepathy and telekinesis are real, then what is to stop the experimenter unconsciously affecting the outcome? In the case of micro-telekinesis with RNG, who knows whether it is the experimenter or the subject who is affecting the output? With the experimental protocol outlined above, we can pretty much exclude the experimenter by ensuring that she always sees the delayed outcome.

Is this feasible?

The proposed protocol is only a technical variant of the usual RNG experiment. It is not rocket science. As far as I know, nobody has so far done this experiment. I have no laboratory and no funds, so I can’t do it myself. But I hope that someone, somewhere, will.

Text by human author, not AI. Illustration: manual collage of royalty-free images. Photo of RNG device: ImagesCo.

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Caveat: I have not conducted any of the experiments that are referred to below. I am not an experimentalist and I am not expressing an assessment of these experiments. The question I am addressing is: If micro-telekinesis is a genuine phenomenon, then could the theory of mind-brain portals offer a framework in which we might develop a naturalistic theory of the phenomenon?

The ‘mind-brain portal’ theory is what I have been discussing in my previous posts. It asserts that the conscious mind is a non-physical, non-local information-processing system comprised exclusively of phenomenal consciousness, which interacts with the physical brain via quantum-mechanical processes that act as portals between the mind and the brain.

By ‘naturalistic theory’ I mean a theory derived from explicit fundamental principles, which is, ultimately, experimentally falsifiable.

Anomalous effects of conscious minds

There is a general class of phenomena loosely termed ‘anomalous’ or ‘paranormal’, in which conscious minds apparently bring about observable results that should not be possible by any standard physical account. Three principal phenomena are telepathy, telecognition and telekinesis. The conventional, pre-scientific definitions are as follows: telepathy is the transfer of thoughts between minds; telecognition (aka remote viewing) is the transfer of perceptual information form a remote target to a conscious mind; and telekinesis is the remote causing of physical changes by a mind. None of these definitions are satisfactory because they already presuppose a mechanism, which is not part of what is actually observed and, I shall argue, is not likely to be the actual mechanism.

In this post, I will consider only telekinesis, and specifically micro-telekinesis, which is evidenced in random-number generators. (‘Macro-telekinesis’ is moving visible objects such as cups, or bending spoons. ‘Micro-telekinesis’ is affecting electrical circuits, normally random number generators, aka RNGs.)

The usual protocol is that the the subject sits with a machine that outputs 1s and 0s on a genuinely random basis produced by a quantum process. The subject tries to change the ratio of 1s and 0s away from the physically predicted ratio of 50/50. Results have been reported in which there is a statistically significant deviation from the null hypothesis of purely random 0s and 1s. Meta-analyses of sets of such studies provide prima facie evidence that there are statistical anomalies being observed in these RNG trials, but unfortunately this field attracts a cloud of commentators who seem to be concerned more with defending preconceived opinions that with doing science.

The naïve conception of telekinesis is that the conscious mind reaches out of the cranium and acts upon the world ‘out there’. In the case of micro-telekinesis, it is supposed that the mind reaches into the circuitry of the RNG (Random Number Generator), figures out the logic gates, and tweaks the flow of electrons so as to yield the required imbalance of 0s and 1s. Rupert Sheldrake would have us picture the mind as a ‘morphic field’, like a kind of squidgy ectoplasm, spreading out from the brain tissue and navigating through other physical structures.

None of these conceptions are even remotely tenable. Any such ‘mental field’ would have to interact with matter to be effective, in which case it would be detectable by physical instruments in the intervening space between the brain and the target, yet no such detection has been made. If the influence is transmitted by some novel kind of energy radiating out from nervous tissue, then it would be subject to the inverse square law, yet one of the few consistent results of parapsychology is that the success rate is invariant with distance. A radiating energy would also be blocked by a Faraday cage, or large blocks of matter. For, if the putative energy can interact with the substance of the RNG device then it would also interact with, and be blocked by, barriers of similar substance. There is no evidence of directionality: the subject does not have to orient her head toward the target, nor even know where the target is. Finally, and crucially, the supposed mind field would have to be smart enough to understand the electronic circuitry and tweak the operation just so as to change the output. In a pivotal series of experiments, research Helmut Schmidt (1987) developed what he called the ‘Equivalence Hypothesis’: the success rate of micro-telekinesis is not affected by complexifying the RNG circuitry. All these factors make the notion of the mind affecting the machine massively implausible.

In one particularly intriguing set of experiments that Schmidt carried out, and others have replicated, ‘retro-telekinesis’ is reported. Instead of the 1s and 0s being observed in real-time as they are generated and the subject is concentrating on them, the binary digits are recorded on a tape, which is stored overnight, and the subject concentrates the next day before the tape is read. This protocol makes no difference to the success rate. Obviously, no influence can go back in time, even though it appears to do so. Instead, this is an extreme application of Schmidt’s Equivalence Hypothesis, and it points toward the locus of action being in the mind of the observer, not somewhere ‘out in the world’.

Regarding ‘mind fields’ á la Sheldrake, there are strong philosophical arguments (discussed in my previous posts) that the conscious mind is non-local, that is, not situated in space at all, and hence certainly not smeared out over physical space in a field.

Dean Radin, a prominent figure in parapsychology, also dismisses the naïve idea that the mind sends forth beams of ‘psychic energy’. Instead, he argues that it is more like a correlative relation than a causal one (Radin 1997, 2006).

Radin has proposed that there is a quantum mechanical basis to micro-telekinesis, but has not offered any specific pointers to what such a theory would look like. In interviews, he has sometimes made comparisons with the quantum entanglement of coherent particles, as in the famous EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) thought experiment. This is a non-starter, as the subject’s brain and the RNG machine are not in a conjoined quantum state to begin with; and, even if they were, the circumjacent air would decohere them extremely quickly. Decoherence scrambles the phases of wave functions, so that the waves become independent. We can therefore rule out coherent entanglement as having anything to do with micro-telekinesis.

Radin also says that quantum entanglement per se is the answer. We are all entanglement with one another, and with the whole universe. Well, yes, but so what? Whichever interpretation of quantum mechanics is favoured, the universe as a whole has a wave function, and our brains are parts of it. But, to go from that basic fact to any account of paranormal phenomena is going to require some theoretical work. Sadly the required theoretical work seems to be lacking from Radin’s many published works.

Radin does, at least, acknowledge that the conscious mind must play an active role in collapsing quantum superpositions:

We would also note that consciousness plays no role in Hameroff and Penrose’s spacetime collapse, so in their model consciousness is not an active agent; it is epiphenomenal. By contrast, our proposal that reality consists in Possibles and Actuals linked by measurement invites a natural place for Mind: it is the means by which quantum potentials are actualized. (Radin & Kauffman, 1997)

Radin leaves the matter in the same vagueness that von Neumann left it: consciousness collapses quantum superpositions, but the questions of where, when, and how it does so are not addressed. He does not even reach any conclusion about the fundamental ontology, instead alluding variously to panpsychism, idealism, and neutral monism. Neutral monism is a bogus theory that is philosophically equivalent to physicalism: physics is already topic-neutral, so proposing an underlying substance that is topic-neutral is just more of the same. And panpsychism does not work because consciousness is not the kind of thing that can be spatially located. (See my previous posts.) Radin sometimes admits this when he is saying that consciousness is nonlocal, so I don’t know why he is still flirting with panpsychism. Idealism is the only coherent solution to the mind-body problem, but Radin seems to be having difficulty grasping that the physical world is a construct.

What is clear is that there is no plausible physical mechanism, classical or quantum, for the conscious mind to act upon the RNG machine. Assuming the phenomenon is real, it is a bit weirder than that.

Quantum entanglement and state reduction

If we provisionally accept the experimental results of micro-telekinesis experiments, then we need to think outside the box to find a logically possible mechanism.

The more interesting micro-telekinesis experiments use quantum tunelling and radioactive decay as the source of randomness in inherently non-deterministic quantum events. (See experiments by Helmut Schmidt and the PEAR laboratory.) The source system will go into a superposition (of, say, emitting a radioactive particle or not). When it is measured, the measuring apparatus will be entangled into the same superposition. Likewise, when a human looks at the read-out from the device, the human brain will also go into superposition. Everything that interacts with the apparatus will also go into superposition, which basically means the whole universe. (Don’t be fooled by people who say that decoherence explains the apparent collapse. It doesn’t. Decoherence limits the wave function to a superposition of ‘pointer states’, that is, states that are macroscopically sensible. But it is still a superposition. A further ingredient is needed to trigger the collapse.)

If you have not been following the past century of physics, it may seem outrageously weird that the universe goes into superposition because of one quantum event. But that’s the way it is. That’s what mainstream physics has been telling us for many decades.

What happens next, however, is a matter of acrimonious debate. According to the standard Copenhagen Interpretation of the quantum mechanics formalism, the superposition will suddenly collapse into just one branch when an ‘observer’ measures it. The details of this were never clear in the Copenhagen Interpretation: Precisely what counts as an ‘observer’? Precisely where, when, and how does the superposition collapse? The general view among the founders of quantum mechanics was that the consciousness of the observer did the collapsing, but as there was no specific theory of consciousness or how it did this trick, the problem was put into abeyance by those who proclaimed “Shut up and calculate!”, in other words, use the equations but don’t ask what they mean.

Some individuals balked at this anti-scientific posture. Of course, scientists need to understand what is going on under the bonnet, not just rattle off equations. One such was Hugh Everett, which put forward the Relative State Interpretation of quantum mechanics (later tagged the ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’). According to this elegantly simple theory, there was no actual collapse of the wave function. Whenever a measurement was made, the universe branched and stayed that way forever. As the branches were decohered, there was no scope for interaction between them, so it is as if they are separate worlds. Hence the ‘many worlds’ tag. But they are not really different worlds in any normal sense of the term: there is just one universe, and these are different superposed branches of the universe’s wave function. One central and obvious defect of this theory is that the other branches are not observable. So the theory cannot even be tested. Another, less obvious defect is that it is wholly deterministic, so there is no way for a conscious mind to act in the world.

Therefore, the Many-Worlds Interpretation can be dismissed, and we are left with the Copenhagen Interpretation. So, each time one of the random digits, 0 or 1, is produced, the universe forms two branches, and the conscious mind somehow reduces this superposition back to a simple state. As I discussed in my previous post, the Born Rule defines the probabilities of the different outcomes from a quantum measurement, but it does not say that the outcome must otherwise be random. The conscious mind could temporarily adjust the Born rule for a limited time, and then correct the imbalance. Or, alternatively, it could adjust the Born rule and just not bother to reset the balance. In which case a statistical imbalance would be observable, which is precisely what is reported in RNG experiments.

Micro-telekinesis and Portal Theory

According to the theory I have been developing in these posts, the conscious mind triggers the collapse in the DNA macromolecule. This would happen at the point in the brain’s perceptual process where the subject consciously perceives 0 or 1.

In the model of consciousness that I presented in my paper in Entropy journal (Lloyd, 2020), acts of conscious perception and acts of volition are ontologically the same. It is just that they play a different role in the activities of the mind. Every perception involves a decision on which branch of a superposition to adopt. So, in the case of an RNG experiment, the brain (including the DNA portals therein) are placed in a superposition of the two outcomes, seeing “0” and seeing “1”. The mind chooses which branch to keep. If this low-level decision-making can be steered by the deliberative part of the mind, then the subject can choose whether there was a 0 or 1.

Notice that this does not involve the mind acting up the RNG device. The quantum mechanics puts the universe into superposition of two states (according to standard quantum mechanics); and the conscious mind collapses that to one state (according to von Neumann’s theory); but that action is volitional and can be deliberatively steered (according to the present theory).

Of course, it seems outrageous to suppose that the subject’s mental intention collapses the wave function of the whole universe, but that’s just the weirdness of quantum mechanics. Suck it up.

What is neat about this theory is that it does not posit any new mechanism to explain micro-telekinesis. The model that I have proposed for accounting for the embodiment of a conscious mind in a brain also serves as a model of micro-telekinesis.

When it is viewed this way, one interesting point of evidence becomes apparent. Namely, we have ample proof of the existence of micro-telekinesis every waking moment of the day. Whenever you make any voluntary movement, your conscious mind causes a change in the micro-electrical activity in your brain, which causes the intended movement. What is that but micro-telekinesis in your own head? Our minds have developed a skill in the specific micro-telekinesis that is involved in controlling bodily muscles, but there is no fundamental reason why it can’t be trained to extend to collapsing the wave functions of external observation, such as RNG data. Whether that is psychologically practicable is another matter: but I do not see any fundamental limitation.

In my next post, I will elaborate on how the automata-theoretic model of consciousness that I present in Lloyd (2020) works in the mind-brain portal.

References

Dean Radin (1997), The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena”, 384 pages, HarperCollins.

Dean Radin (2006), “Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (A Study on Parapsychology)”, 368 pages, Simon & Schuster.

Dean Radin & Stuart Kaufmann (2021), “Is brain-mind quantum? A theory and supporting evidence”, arXiv.

Helmut Schmidt, “The Strange Properties of Psychokinesis”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 1 No. 2, 1987.

PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research), www.pear-lab.com.

Peter B Lloyd (2020), “Modelling Consciousness within Mental Monism: An Automata-Theoretic Approach”, Entropy 2020, 22(6), 698; 22 June 2020 (33 pp). doi.org/10.3390/e22060698.

Text written by human author, not AI. Photo: ImagesCo.

A number of people have suggested that consciousness intervenes in the physical world by interfering with the probabilities of outcomes in a quantum measurement. These probabilities are defined by the Born Rule for computing the chances of getting different results from a quantum wave function. In my preceding posts, I have argued that this is the mechanism for free will and reporting conscious experiences (and, surprisingly, for perception). But a lot of people are vehemently against it.

Every time I propose that consciousness intervenes in the physical world by tweaking the probability distribution in quantum measurements, people who know something of physics become agitated and start telling me that this is nonsense, that the quantum measurements are random and there is no way that a nonphysical mind - even if it existed - could do this. But to the best of my knowledge all the Born rule tells us is the statistical distribution of measurements. It does not say that the measurements are purely random apart from that distribution. (Indeed it’s hard to see how it could say that, as the concept of ‘purely random' is itself problematic.)

I’m not a physicist, so I figured that I should run this past someone more qualified. Sean Carroll is a working physicist with more than 200 published papers. He is one of the best authors and podcasters on the subject of quantum mechanics, as well as on science more generally. His podcast has a monthly slot entitled “Ask Me Anything” where subscribers can pose questions on physics, or anything else for that matter. So, in the September edition, I asked him:

Peter Lloyd: Is there any theoretical reason to believe that apart from the probability distribution that the Born Rule gives us, the outcome of a quantum measurement is purely random. I know that empirically it is reliably random. But does it have to be? Is there anything in quantum mechanics that actually precludes the possibility that a non physical conscious mind could reach into our world and mess with the measurements provided? Of course, it maintains the Born Rule in the long run. I know you don’t believe in non-physical consciousness, but do the equations of physics actually forbid it?

Sean Carroll: Well, the equations of physics forbid it in the sense that the equations of physics say what happens and they don’t include that. You could very easily imagine, just as you said, that a non-physical conscious mind does reach in and picks out one way for things to go rather than the other. That’s just not part of the equations of physics. It’s a different kind of theory, which you’re welcome to explore. It’s a very strange kind of theory because you’re saying you want to overall maintain the ordinary Born Rule distribution of weights of measurement outcomes, which means that if the non-physical consciousness says you’re gonna get spin up the next three times in a row, it has to sort of compensate for that later on by letting you get more spin downs or something like that. But as I very, very often say, if you wanna ask what is possible given everything we know about the universe, many, many, many things are possible.

In short: the laws of physics are silent on the matter. They don’t say consciousness can do this, and they don’t say it can’t do it, either.

Archimedean Probabilities

It’s not so difficult to imagine a natural process that re-balances the statistics after an intervention from consciousness. After all, it is conceptually the same thing that Archimedes found when he sat in his bathtub. The water rose by the same volume of his immersed body. Nature had no difficulty pushing up the correct volume of bathwater that has been displaced by Archimedes’ butt. So, why would nature have difficulty adjusting the quantum probabilities to allow for a conscious intervention?

Take a trivial example. Let’s say some macromolecule in the brain - a DNA molecule, whatever - repeatedly goes into superposition of two states, say A and B, with equal probability, and then the wave function collapses each time. The Born Rules says that as the sample size approaches infinity, the numbers of A and B outcomes are evenly balance. The larger the sample size, the smaller the expected discrepancy from a 50/50 ratio. A sample of 10 might yield 3 x A and 7 x B, a sample of 10,000 might 5,025 x A and 4,975 x B., and so on Now suppose that the conscious mind wants to send a coded message into that brain structure, which then affects motor action such as speaking or writing. So, let’s say it inserts a message of 100 bits and, inside that message the ratio of A and B happens to be 30 to 70. Well, that’s not impossible. But let’s say that these messages come often, many times a second, and they always happen to have more A than B. That’s going to be a detectable anomaly. So, we could hypothesise that after any such intervention, there is some mechanism - maybe arising from the domain of consciousness - that increases the probability of B for a while, so that after this refractory period, the balance of A and B will be restored.

There’s no positive evidence that that is what happens, and it’s not my preferred hypothesis. My point is merely that this is a conceivable hypothesis. Given that the conscious mind clearly can affect the body, there must be a mechanism for it, and this is a legitimate candidate hypothesis. I don’t think it’s an adequate response for physicists to roll their eyes and declare that this could not happen. It could. And maybe it does.

Observed anomalies

I didn’t know this at the time, but back in October 2024, someone else raised a very similar question. Carroll’s answer was roughly the same, but he added one rather contentious claim.

Matt Grinder says, «I listened to your interview with Philip Goff on panpsychism, and I agree with you that any theory of consciousness cannot contradict the laws of physics. So would the following be a way out for the panpsychist? Every time a particle changes state by wave function collapse, a calculation must be made for the particle to decide what to do next, and this calculation involves a qualia. Over time, the calculations via qualia would have to agree with the Born rule. This seems to me not to contradict any laws of physics. Is it just an add-on to physics?»

Sean Carroll: Yeah, this is something that is absolutely conceivable. People have conceived it. David Chalmers, former Mindscape guest, and his collaborator Kelvin McQueen wrote a paper that really looked at exactly this possible idea. I would say a few things.

• Number one, it absolutely is a change in the laws of physics, because the laws of physics as we know them now don’t say that. I should say, I don’t say it’s a change in the laws of physics. We don’t know the laws of physics. I should say it’s a change in what we take the laws of physics right now to be. Okay, because right now we do not say that the probabilities depend on qualia in any way. If you say, yes, they do, you are suggesting that the laws of physics are different than what we think they are. It’s hard to make it work. It’s hard to make it work for whatever you’re saying precisely because, long story short, like you say, over time the calculation would have to agree with the Born rule. Well, what does that mean? Like if the qualia are pushing it all, you have a bunch of spins that are one over square root of two spin up and one over square root of two spin down, if somehow your qualia are making you get spin up every time, then there’s some catch up procedure later where you get a bunch of extra spin downs. Like, it’s hard to make work that way, number one.

• Number two, zero evidence for anything like that in anything that we’ve ever seen in either physics or neuroscience.

• And number three, it would be of zero help in solving the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem is specifically about experience, not behavior. And you’re saying, this theory is saying, things behave slightly differently than you would have predicted by conventional physics. So what? I mean, great. They’re behaving differently. That doesn’t help you explain this thing about consciousness that proponents of the hard problem say cannot possibly be reduced to behavior.

So this is why I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about this stuff other than answering AMA questions.

Carroll’s point number two is that there is no evidence for deviations from the Born Rule. That is factually incorrect. There are many reported experiments of micro-telekinesis with random-number generators that are based on quantum events. There is plentiful evidence that the a human mind can indeed affect the probability distribution that would be expected from the Born Rule.

Now, Carroll might object to those experiments. He might disagree with the experimental method. He might argue that there is selection bias in the non-reporting of negative results. And so on. But to say that there is zero evidence is just untrue. Carroll might dispute the credence to be given to the evidence, in which case he ought to have some rational basis for that credence, not just the fact that the results challenge his physicalist philosophy.

Dean Radin and Roger Nelson carried out meta-analysis of RNG telekinesis experiments, which should definitely increase the credence of the hypothesis that the conscious mind can modify the Born Rule probabilities to a measurable degree. Radin has suggested that there is a quantum entanglement between the RNG and the brain of the subject. There are several reasons why that is untenable. In my following post, I will discuss those reasons, and proposal an alternative theory. This will, I hope, be better than what Carroll dismisses as “dorm room bullshitting level of analysis”.

Dean Radin and Roger Nelson (2000), “Meta-Analysis of Mind-Matter Interaction Experiments: 1959 To 2000”

Text by human author. Quotes from Sean Carroll’s AMA (Ask Me Anything)

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Almost a century ago, Max Born (1882-1970) published the last major component of the foundation of quantum mechanics: the Born Rule for computing the probabilities of different outcomes of measuring any quantum system. He was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for it in 1954. It irreversibly brought consciousness into the beating heart of the modern physics, but also thereby created a festering and acrimonious dispute among physicists and philosophers whose positions on this issue remain deeply entrenched.

As I have argued in my two previous posts, mainstream physics cannot cope with consciousness because of collective inattentional blindness. By focusing on what is going on in the physical domain, physicists have collectively turned a blind eye to phenomenal consciousness, leading them to believe that consciousness is ineffable and unmentionable, that it cannot possibly play a role in physics, and almost certainly does not exist anyway.

Unfortunately for physicalist physicists, consciousness is a brute facet of objective reality, an empirical datum, whose obvious existence is established every moment of our waking lives. And quantum physics doesn’t work without it.

Some of the founders of quantum physics - Max Planck (1858-1947), John von Neumann (1903-1957), Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), and later Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) - explicitly recognised the central role that consciousness has to play in quantum physics. They did not, however, provide a cogent theory of how consciousness does this. Von Neumann, in particular, was explicitly vague about where the intervention of consciousness occurred in the combined system of measuring instrument plus human brain. This “central, disfiguring blankness” (to quote David Mamet out of context) led physicists to adopt a policy of “Shut up and calculate” (sometimes attributed to Richard Feynman). That is, just use the equations of quantum physics, which have turned out to be breathtakingly accurate and widely applicable, and don’t think about the underlying conceptual foundations. As physicist Sean Carroll has recounted, research into foundational problems of quantum physics was for many years essentially a taboo and, even now, is not well favoured in mainstream physics. Who can blame them? If a valid understanding of the Born Rule involves consciousness, but consciousness is a forbidden concept, then physicists are caught between a rock and a hard place.

A few physicists were dissatisfied with the blanket policy of “Shut up and calculate” but rather than thinking outside the box and boldly imagining how to bring consciousness into science, they went down two roads to nowhere. Some proposed that physical systems just somehow measured themselves and spontaneously executed the Born Rule without human intervention; others concocted a fairy tale of infinitely many parallel universes that split off every time we make a quantum measurement. Henry Stapp (1928-) was arguably the only major physicist to maintain the pivotal causal role of consciousness, although somehow he did not connect this with the Measurement Problem.

Basic ideas

Let us pause for a moment to outline the key ideas here, for any readers who have not yet caught up with the physics of the past hundred years.

In the classical understanding of the physical world, reality is made of particles - atoms and subatomic bits and pieces - flying around in space, bumping into another and subject to force fields, plus waves of energy. In the quarter of a century from 1900 to 1926, that world view was eroded and replaced by a wholly new conception. Werner Heisenberg (1902-1976) wove the nascent strands of thought into the new worldview in a paper in 1925. Building on this revolutionary framework, Born added the matrix formulation and, crucially, the Born Rule the following year. In the new worldview, the basic components of the physical world are wave functions. For example, protons and electrons were no longer considered to be particles existing when nobody is looking, but wave functions. When a measurement is made of one of the observables of that wave function, we never observe the wave function itself, we find only a specific value. The wave function defines the distribution of probabilities of those individual values, but not which specific value will be found in any given measurement. Take the position of an electron, for example: the wave function gives a probability of observing the electron in each position in space. When you make the observation, you find the electron is just one place, but you are more likely to find it when the probability distribution is highest.

Already, we see something paradoxical. The wave function evolves smoothly and deterministically in time. But when a measurement is made, it ‘collapses’ to one value in whichever observable was observed. Now, if this is a proper scientific theory, there must be an account of precisely when and where the collapse occurs, and how. Measuring, say, the position of an electron involves a macroscopic instrument with trillions of atoms, and likewise the brain of the experimenter. Where, in that complex system of machine + brain, is the collapse? Quantum mechanics was silent on this. Likewise it said nothing about the mechanism by which the collapse occurs. This so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics was good enough to carry out calculations, but deeply unsatisfactory as a conceptual picture of reality.

Candidate theories

We can roughly consider the interpretations like this:

• Simple Copenhagen Interpretation: what counts as a measurement is ill-defined, and the outcome of a measurement is random, except for the probability distribution as defined by the Born Rule.

• Deterministic or random objective collapse: the collapse just happens by itself, not because of a conscious measurement. In this group we have the Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber (GRW) theory of spontaneous collapse and the Penrose theory of gravitational collapse. These theories leave no opportunity for consciousness to operate causally upon the world. Yet, we know from everyday life that the conscious mind can report its experiences, and exercise free will. It could not do that if the collapse were under objective control. Additionally, we may note that GRW is highly arbitrary, and the Penrose theory continues to be battered by experimental results that make the theory less plausible - such as the recent experiment that placed a crystal of 10¹⁶ atoms in a superposition of two quantum states (Bild et al., 2023) - not quite heavy enough to disprove Penrose, but headed that way.

• Consciousness-driven collapse: Karl Popper and John Eccles (1977) and Henry Stapp (eg Stapp et al. 2004) have proposed theories in which a nonphysical consciousness exercises free will by means quantum tunnelling in the synapses between nerve cells. As substance dualist theories, they are akin to the idealist theory presented in these Substack posts. They are, however, severely limited in scope, addressing only free will, and not the quantum measurement problem, nor the problem of consciousness perception, nor is there any attempt to model the architecture of the conscious mind and how it might actually interact with the physical world.

• Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI): This was developed by Hugh Everett (1930-1982) in his doctoral thesis. It says that there is no collapse: when a measurement is taken, the experimenter and the whole universe branches into different components of the wave function. Because of decoherence, each branch can conveniently be regarded as a complete classical state of the universe, and as these branches cannot communicate, they are sometimes referred to as ‘worlds’. This is often naively misunderstood as meaning that new universes pop into existence every time a quantum measurement is made. Not so. There is one single universe, with one single wave function, which has branches that we may conveniently think of as separate worlds. As an abstract mathematical construction, the Many-Worlds Interpretation is valid, but as a theory of reality it obviously violates the principle of falsifiability, which the philosopher Karl Popper asserted as one of the requirements of any scientific theory. As the other branches (‘worlds’) cannot, in principle, be observed, and as they can have no effect on our branch, the existence of these branches can never be tested. They are indistinguishable from fictions. The defence made by Many Worlds advocates is that the existence of these branches is implied by the mathematical equations of quantum physics, which are themselves proven with exquisite precision. This is non sequitur: the fact that one part of a mathematical structure matches reality simply does not imply that other parts do as well. Recall Pythagoras’ theorem from your school days. For a right-angled triangle with hypotenuse a, Pythagoras tells us that a² = b² + c². So, if b = 3 and c = 4, then a = ± 5, but the negative solution -5 is discarded as non-physical. Likewise we should jettison the other branches of the wave function other than our own. The empirical fact that is observed is that the wave function collapses non-deterministically. To suppose that it doesn’t really collapse but instead yields an infinity of unobservable branches is unscientific and, frankly, ridiculous. Moreover, if MWI were true then the physical universe would be wholly deterministic, and there would be no way for consciousness to act upon the world: we could nor report our conscious experiences or exercise free will. Indeed, for consciousness deniers, MWI is the simplest and most elegant interpretation of quantum physics. Without consciousness, the universe is as Max Tegmark described it, devoid of any distinction between reality and unreality. It’s just mathematical structures. Needless to say, this line of thinking has no merit for real-world science and engineering.

In some quarters of the physics community, you will find quite an aggressive dismissal of the proposition that consciousness is involved in quantum physics. Here, for example is the highly regarded physicist, author, and podcaster Sean Carroll:

“Almost no modern physicist thinks that consciousness has anything whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics. There are an iconoclastic few who do, but it’s a tiny minority, unrepresentative of the main stream.” (The Big Picture, Chapter 21)

It should be borne in mind that Carroll is committed to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, which inherently excludes both consciousness and the collapse of the wave function. He is also committed to the notion that consciousness has no fundamental existence but is only a high-level emergent property of the brain. Both of those positions are philosophically untenable. Only about one in five physicists believe in the Many Worlds Interpretation, and the rest of them don’t hold positions that have any firm view of the matter. The dominant view, as Carroll has acknowledged elsewhere, is “Shut up and calculate”: that is, physicists use the equations of quantum mechanics without holding a position on the underlying conceptual framework.

Decoherence

You will find many people (even some physicists) saying that decoherence explains away the measurement problem. This is incorrect. Decoherence occurs when a target quantum system (such as an electron) that is in a coherent superposition of states interacts with a larger system (such as a measuring apparatus), with the result that the phases of the component wave functions of the target system (the electron) are scrambled. The target system (electron) remains in its superposition of states, and in fact drags the interacting system (measuring device) into superposition too. What has changed is that measuring the target can no longer yield an intermediate state but only one of the base states. For example, if you are measuring the position of an electron then, without decoherence, you might observe the electron smeared over a volume of space. As the measuring device is large, however, you will always decohere the target system and never see it smeared over space. De-smearing it does not collapse the measured observable into one outcome. There is something else going on in the act of measurement, besides decoherence, that selects one specific outcome out of all the possible outcomes that were represented by the target system’s initial wave function. That is the hard part of the measurement problem, and it is the part that needs the involvement of consciousness.

Physicists who say that decoherence clears up the Measurement Problem are mostly followers of Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation. But MWI itself already abandons the measurement problem by denying the existence of conscious observers. Without conscious observers, there is no actual observation, no actual collapse of the wave function, and no actual reality. On this view, the physical universe is just an abstract mathematical structure: it has no Measurement Problem because there is nobody in it to make measurements.

Idealism and the Portal Theory

The theory that I have been outlining in these Substack posts is that the conscious mind is an autonomous, nonphysical, nonlocal information processing system comprising only phenomenal consciousness, with no non-conscious substrate; that the physical world is a construct and the human body an avatar that allows the mind to operate in the (virtual) physical world; and the (virtual) channel of communication is a nondeterministic quantum process in the brain, for which the best candidate appears to be the DNA molecule. This theory addresses the three key issues:

• The Measurement Problem: where, when, and how does an observer collapse the wave function? The wave function is collapsed collectively in the DNA of neurons, it does so when the sensory input from the observation reaches the relevant part of the brain. It is achieved by an operation in the formal automaton of the conscious mind, as outlined in my peer-reviewed paper, Modelling Consciousness within Mental Monism: An Automata-Theoretic Approach. That action manifests in the physical world through the portals that have been described in earlier posts.

• The Perception Problem: How can a non-physical conscious mind pick up on sensory input? By the same mechanism. The brain places the DNA in superposition that the conscious mind detects.

• The Volition Problem: How is it possible for a conscious mind to exercise free will in the physical world? By the same mechanism. The brain creates an opportunity for conscious intervention by placing the DNA in a quantum superposition, and the conscious mind collapses the wave function and selects an outcome, which then affects neural firing and hence behaviour.

It seems reasonable that all three issues are resolved by the same model of an interface between the (virtual) brain and the conscious mind. It would be a bit fishy if you needed a different model for each one.

In principle, this is a falsifiable theory. Obviously, a lot more detail needs to be worked out, such as precisely what aspect of the huge DNA macromolecule functions as the portal. And what exactly is the information architecture of the mind. My previous posts have been laying out an outline of the theory, and I will be expanding on this in subsequent posts. Maybe some details are mistaken and will be corrected, but I have no doubt that this theory is going in the right direction.

Why idealism, specifically?

Even if you buy into the arguments about the portals, you might think that a less extravagant ontology might be sufficient: such as some kind of property dualism (for example, panpsychism), or maybe even substance dualism (for example Cartesianism). What why go to something as outrageous as idealism to solve the Measurement Problem?

Well, the first point is that idealism is not being invoked in order to solve the Measurement Problem: that is a straw-man argument. Idealism has a solid philosophical basis that makes no reference to the Measurement Problem. It just so happens that idealism also provides a platform for solving the Measurement Problem.

How idealism provides a neat solution to the Measurement Problem will become clearer as I expand on the internal mechanisms of the portal in subsequent posts. Essentially: because the physical brain is (according to idealism) a virtual system and is underpinned by conscious structures of the same type as the conscious mind, we do not need to invoke magic or brute psychophysical laws (as David Chalmers has recommended). Instead, we have single ontological playing-field governed by a single set of mental laws. Idealism can achieve an economy and theoretical elegance in the mind-brain interface that is unattainable in dualism.

Summary

The core of the argument that comes to a head in this post is this:

• In order to explain the fact that our nonphysical conscious minds interact with the physical brain, we must posit the existence of portals that exchange information between the mind and the brain by raising a quantum superposition on the brain side, and collapsing it (with defined outcome) from the mind side. Precisely the same mechanism is also what is needed to resolve the Measurement Problem.

Here’s an expanded version of the argument

1. It is indubitable that we possess consciousness, as we are confronted by it as an empirical given every moment of our waking lives.

2. The discourse of physics comprises statements expressed in analytical terms ultimately resting on undefined fundamentals. The discourse of phenomenal consciousness comprises statements expressed in terms anchored by private ostensive definition. These are disjoint vocabularies, which ground disjoint discourses. So, no set of physical propositions can ever entail a mental proposition. Therefore consciousness is nonphysical.

3. We can report on our conscious experiences. In fact, I just did this in point 1 : I referred to my conscious experiences in general. We all regularly do this whenever we talk about our experiences. Although specific qualities are private and cannot be articulated, nevertheless there is obviously there is much we can report.

4. We can exercise voluntary action, generally known as free will.

5. Points 3 & 4 above entail that the conscious mind can act upon the brain.

6. The brain, like any other physical system, is bound by the laws of physics. In order for the nonphysical mind to act in the world, there must be nondeterministic physical processes that the conscious mind can steer.

7. Apart from the initial conditions of the universe, the only nondeterministic activities are quantum processes. Therefore, the conscious mind must act in the world through quantum processes.

8. So, the reportability of conscious experiences, and free will, must be embodied in our brains through nondeterministic quantum processes.

9. The only way the mind can do this without breaking any laws is by modifying the collapse of wave functions that are in superposition. This happens in structures called ‘portals’.

10. That, however, is also precisely the behaviour required to resolve the Measurement Problem.

11. So, the mind-brain portals that are posited to explain the exchange of information between mind and brain in perception, reportability, and volition, also quite naturally provide a mechanism for resolving the Measurement Problem.

12. So, in a way, we get a solution to the Measurement Problem as a free lunch from the mind-brain portals.

Text written by human, not AI. Illustration: Sir Isaac Newton painted by William Blake, with a brain in photomontage.

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Marius Bild, Matteo Fadel, Yu Yang, Uwe von Lupke, Phuillip Martin, Alessandro Bruno, and Yiwen Chu (2023), “Schrödinger cat states of a 16-microgram mechanical oscillator”, Science 380, 274-278 (2023). DOI:10.1126/science.adf7553

Henry Stapp, Jeffrey M. Schwartz, and Mario Beauregard (2004), “Quantum physics in neuroscience and psychology: a neurophysical model of mind–brain interaction”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B doi:10.1098/rstb.2004.1598

Inattentional blindness

When you are dreaming, you normally don’t realise it. Your attention is fully engaged in what is going on, and you would need either a specific technique or a talent for lucid dreaming to step back from the action and realise that it is just a dream. This remarkable mental faculty is an example of what psychologists call ‘inattentional blindness’: you completely miss something that is staring you in the face because you are focusing on something else. The classic illustration is the ‘Invisible Gorilla Experiment’: you are asked to watch a ball game in which two teams, dressed in black and white respectively, pass a ball between themselves, and you have to count how many times members of the white team passed the ball. In the midst of this, a person dressed as a gorilla walks through the scene. About the half the people who do the test don’t see the gorilla even though it is in plain sight. Attention to the ball blinds them to the gorilla. This inattentional blindness in individuals is a normal, well-established phenomenon. I want to suggest it can also work collectively in groups of people.

Whereof we are inattentionally blind, thereof we cannot speak

It seems that most people are, most of the time, in a state of inattentional blindness toward their sensory experiences as such. I believe that this ‘collective inattentional blindness’ has led scientists and philosophers to become convinced that it is impossible to communicate anything about this supposedly ineffable, and possibly mythic thing, consciousness. That belief has, in turn, become entrenched in a philosophical faith that consciousness does not really exist: it’s just mumbo-jumbo like the soul or the elan vital.

It appears that collective inattentional blindness has crippled the study of consciousness for many years. Well, for centuries, really. Philosopher Philip Goff has called it ‘Galileo’s error’, which is not entirely fair as the roots of it run back to prehistory. In everyday life, you are focused on what is going on, and not reflecting on your sensorium, the manifold of sensory experiences that is your only source of information. Only in specialised activities such as sketching or painting do you step back mentally from the world and inspect the contents of your visual field: you look at negative space, and hues and shades. As empirical science evolved from Galilleo through Newton to the present day, this inattentional blindness to phenomenal consciousness (colours, smells, tastes, and so on) bled from everyday life into the scientific worldview. Physical science became extraordinarily successful in giving explanatory accounts of all observed things: one by one, the mysteries of the world succumbed to scientific instruments. Optical microscopes revealed germs and bodily cells; electrical devices revealed the electromagnetic spectrum; bubble chambers revealed subatomic particles, and so on. Everything that was examined was found to be reducible to physical things—at first particles, then fields, then wave functions. Everything that was examined was found to obey strict laws. In the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, the most mysterious things, life and the transmission of genetic traits, were found to be explainable in terms of molecules following basic laws of physics. Owing to the collective inattentional blindness toward consciousness itself, which science had inherited from everyday life, this great scientific endeavour simply omitted from its investigations the contents of our conscious minds. Owing to the success of the physical sciences, in conjunction with this inattentional blindness, an extraordinary ideology took form in the thoughts of working scientists: that the whole of reality is physical. If it can’t be measured in the laboratory then we can’t know anything about it, and it might as well be a fiction. God, angels, demons, ghosts, souls, vital spirit … and the conscious mind itself were all dismissed as folklore or folk psychology. Even dreams were said not to exist.

Philosophers, like scientists, also became entrained by the juggernaut of science and started denouncing conscious experiences as illusions, or as ways of speaking, or as artefacts of high-level descriptions of complex systems. And so on. Any attempt at serious research into consciousness was taboo. A tiny number of philosophers maintained an interest the philosophy of mind, but the intellectual climate was decidedly hostile to anyone who felt inclined to wonder how consciousness is supposed to fit into the physical world. Many adopted an extraordinary position of consciousness denial.

Wittgenstein’s beetle

Some philosophers tried to argue that we could not even talk about private conscious experiences, let alone study them scientifically. The philosopher J.J. Smart (1959) said that mental terms were ‘topic neutral’. This was a technical term introduced a decade earlier by Gilbert Ryle (1949) to mean terms that played a functional role in our language without denoting anything specific. Smart wanted to say that, for example, “headache” does not refer to a phenomenal experience of pain but instead is a topic-neutral term that, although it does not actually refer to anything, it nonetheless plays a functional role in our language. It’s a bit a like figurative expressions. If you say, “John lost his rag” it does not mean that John had a rag that he misplaced: the word “rag” in that sentence does not refer to anything, and Smart wanted us to believe that the word “headache” (and any other sensory word) similarly likewise fails to refer to anything in the world. This perverse re-interpretation of a word whose reference is plain to anyone who has had a headache was done purely for the sake of the philosophical practice of not talking about consciousness. We may assume that whenever Smart had a headache, he had no difficulty labelling it as a “headache”.

Smart derived his philosophical position from Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958), a towering a genius of Twentieth Century philosophy who was nonetheless mistaken about consciousness. Wittgenstein claimed that consciousness is, in effect, ineffable (1958, §243). He introduces this notion with his notorious private-language argument against the possibility of saying anything meaningful about conscious experience. Essentially this is the conundrum that since I can’t know what you actually see when you look at something red (maybe red looks blue to you), so Wittgenstein says that “red” and “blue” cannot refer to anything; and more generally that all the terms that seem to denote conscious experience can’t actually refer to anything at all.

Outside the philosophical community, Wittgenstein’s conclusion against private languages seems egregiously counter-intuitive, but among philosophers it still commands much support. He illustrated it with his beetle-in-the-box thought-experiment, which is easy to grasp, but so opaque that its shadow still darkens the study of consciousness today.

Its experimental set-up gives each person a small box with an indeterminate object, the ‘beetle’, inside it. Wittgenstein rigs his thought-experiment to lead us by the nose to nod enthusiastically that the beetle cannot be referred to in any language because it is knowable only by its owner, and effectively ineffable. His constraint, which I will refer to as C_B, is: “No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle” (§293). Under this constraint, Wittgenstein argues we cannot agree on any terms referring to parts or properties of a beetle because that would require shared observations in which to ground consensual definitions, but constraint C_B prevents shared observations. Without terms whose meaning has been agreed among ourselves, we cannot communicate anything about a beetle-in-the-box. Likewise, a parallel constraint (C_M) says that nobody can see another person’s mind inside that person’s brain, hence we can communicate nothing about a mind-in-the-brain.

This argument is both stronger and weaker than Wittgenstein requires, for it undermines not just private language but all language. For example, if a beetle crawls across the pavement, I can shout, “That beetle is green!” and thereby communicate something about the beetle. The logic of Wittgenstein’s argument, however, casts doubt on whether people see the same beetle (for a Cartesian demon might feed false images into each person’s mind), and whether other people hear my words (the demon makes them hear something else), and hence implies that public language is impossible just as private language is. This nihilistic conclusion—that we should stop pretending to communicate—reveals that Wittgenstein’s private-language argument is stronger than he wants. It is not just a ‘private-language argument’ but an ‘all-language argument’: it entails that no linguistic communication at all is feasible.

In fact, as long as there are no Cartesian demons at play, linguistic communication can work, and this is enough to defeat Wittgenstein’s argument that such communication can never function. Furthermore, the actual existence of a Cartesian demon is such a wildly implausible hypothesis as to be dismissed as a practical possibility. Indeed the vast weight of circumstantial evidence indicates that public and private communication both work and that our universe is at least largely free of Cartesian demons. In addition, the uniformity of human sense organs suggests a uniformity of perception. Hence, when I say “I see red,” I almost certainly know what I mean, and you probably do too. At most, Wittgenstein could argue that we risk mistakes in private languages; but we also risk mistakes in public languages. In other words: communication is fallible. Thus, Wittgenstein’s private-language argument proves to be weaker than he wants.

Therefore, statements about experiences (such as, “I see red”) are not part of an anaemic, topic neutral language, as Wittgenstein implied, but a full-blooded, albeit fallible, means of communication. The fact that it is possible to talk meaningfully about conscious experiences undermines the doctrine of Ryle, Wittgenstein, and Smart. Mental discourse is not topic neutral, it is topic specific, and we are perfectly entitled to study it scientifically.

The collective inattentional blindness cracks

In the 1990s, this wall that isolated consciousness from the machinery of scientific investigation cracked. Some of the pressures against the wall can be identified as growing in the second half the 20^th Century. The Dalai Lama’s exile from Tibet in 1959 led to a great expansion of interest in Buddhism and meditation practices, leading many people to focus on consciousness itself. The psychedelic effect of LSD was discovered in 1943 and the drug was the used in extensive research in the 1950s, and recreational use in the 1960s. Increasing interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics (for example John Bell’s Theorem, 1964) brought the measurement problem, and hence the conscious observer, back into focus. The rise of computing technology introduced the idea of artificial intelligence and, with it, the question of whether machines could think as we do: Alan Turing (1950) introduced his famous test for machine intelligence and consciousness.

Over three decades, the crack slowly reached into academia. Eventually, in 1994, the University of Arizona began a series of conferences initially entitled Toward a Science of Consciousness, which acted as a catalyst for an explosion of theories about consciousness. Two years later, philosopher David Chalmers (1996) published his seminal book, The Conscious Mind. Chalmers did more than anyone to ignite the explosion of interest in the 1990s, distinguished the ‘Easy’ problems of the mind from the ‘Hard’ problem of consciousness. (This terminology belies Chalmers’s background in mathematics: ‘Easy’ does not mean easy, it means solvable by known methods; ‘Hard’ means we have no methods for tackling the problem and don’t even know what a solution might look like.) Chalmers’ central point was that even when all the ‘Easy’ problems were solved, when we had explained how neurons enable us to perceive, remember, and act in the world, we would still face the ‘Hard’ problem: why is this brain activity accompanied by the interior mental experience of phenomenal consciousness? Surely the brain could just do its thing and not bother with having a conscious mind at all?

The collective inattentional blindness was broken. Like a lucid dreamer who suddenly realises she is asleep and dreaming, so scientists all over the world suddenly realised they possessed consciousness and that it did not have any obvious place in the physical picture of reality.

The dominant view remained (and still remains) that our primary reality is the physical world and that consciousness must somehow emerge from, or be reducible to, the physical stuff. Despite three decades of intensive research along many avenues, this reductive approach to the problem has not achieved its goal. In fact, it has achieved nothing. To be sure, neuroscience and cognitive science have made progress, but the core problem—the Hard Problem—of how to connect the brain and the mind within a physicalist framework has not budged an inch.

What has changed is that the crack in the wall of collective inattentional blindness is slowly being forced open. Small but growing groups of researchers are pushing through the gap and presenting serious work that treats consciousness as a genuine, fundamental part of reality. And a small avant-garde cohort of those pioneers have arrived at the correct solution to the mind-body problem, namely idealism.

Text written by human author. No AI input. Photo of gorilla: Daniel Simons. Photo of box containing unseen beetle: Marc and Janis Veilleux.

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(I have made minor changes to the text, e.g. changing the tense of references to Professor Dennett, who sadly died in 2024.)

The celebrated philosopher Thomas Nagel brandished the motto ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ in his eponymous paper (Nagel 1974). This locution has become a locus classicus in consciousness studies. Whenever people want to focus attention on what David Chalmers (1996) called the Hard Problem of consciousness, they will ask questions along the lines of, ‘Why is there something it is like to be a bat, or a brain, or a mole?’

The Hard Problem is a new label for the old Cartesian mind-body problem (Descartes 1641): what exactly is the relationship between the conscious mind and the palpable brain? Chalmers differentiated the Easy Problem, that is the problem tackled by neuroscience and cognitive science—namely, how the brain performs such tasks as recognition and recollection, or hitting a tennis ball in flight—from the Hard Problem, that is, the philosophical riddle that is still sitting in a corner of our minds, grinning at us, after we have explained the brain in its entirety: why is there any conscious, phenomenal content associated with working brain tissue—or, in Nagel’s wording, why is there something it is like to be a brain?

How do you answer such a queer question about a bat, or any other being other than oneself? I suppose you have to start from your own mind, and try to imagine how your experience would have to change to match the experience of another sentient being. For example, we humans have two ears and have a rough idea of where a sound is coming from. Close your eyes and try to navigate your way across the living room: here is the ticking of the clock, over there is the snuffling of the dog as he sleeps and dreams, and in the distance the hum of the fridge in the kitchen. Moreover, with time and training you can learn pretty good echo-location by making clicking noises with your mouth and listening for the echoes from the environment. This skill sometimes arises spontaneously in blind kids, but can be acquired later in life. It is the subject of continuing research to understand the cognitive techniques involved (e.g. Thaler et al. 2018). This human echo-location is not nearly as high-performance as a bat’s, but it enables us to form a plausible guess as to what it is like to be a bat.

I don’t think there is a name for knowing what it is like to be another sentient being, so I will call it ‘interphenomenology’ by analogy with ‘intersubjectivity’. The example considered above is cognitive interphenomenology: what it’s like to have the cognition of a bat.

What I want to do in this article is to look at conceptual interphenomenology: What is it like for someone else to have ideas and propositional beliefs radically different from one’s own? Of particular philosophical interest is the question of what it is like to have contradictory beliefs. More narrowly still, I want to zero in on this one: What is it like to be someone who believes she does not have a conscious mind? Which, I shall argue, is equivalent to the question, What is it like to be a physicalist?

Doublethink

George Orwell, in his political novel Ninety Eighty-Four (1949) described a totalitarian political system that deployed the specific techniques of newspeak and doublethink to control citizens’ minds as well as the more prosaic tools of surveillance, imprisonment, and torture. Although it is often assumed that Orwell was addressing the dangers of the Soviet Union, his ideas apply to any totalitarian system, and he was equally worried about the future of an increasingly bureaucratic England. Orwell premised his dystopia on a powerful central authority, but in the ‘post-truth’ era of the internet, we see that social media is well able to foster a culture of disinformation and the uncritical acceptance of lies and rumours, as well as doublethink, without the need for a central power.

Orwell’s character, Winston, characterized doublethink thus:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.

What is it like to doublethink? Is it an error of omission or commission? My own anecdotal experience of occasions when I have caught myself doublethinking suggest to me that it is a failure to compare two propositions that have been held in different contexts, or at least at different times. We may imagine that all our propositional beliefs are present to us at the same time, but that is not how the mind actually works. It requires a deliberate effort to retrieve beliefs from the memory in order to compare and contrast them. Until that mental action is taken, the beliefs can quite happily sit in the mind with, as it were, latent contradiction.

The Trump era in the USA provides a cornucopia of examples of the political and psychological dysfunctions that were described by Orwell, including doublethink. For example, in the context of jingoistically disrespecting other nations, a Trumpist would believe that Covid-19 was a terrible affliction deliberately inflicted on the USA by China; while in the context of disrespecting the Democrats, a Trumpist would believe that Covid-19 was just the sniffles. Only when prompted, by, say, a journalist, would the Trumpist have to compare and contrast the two beliefs. At that point, blanket denial kicks in to block the question, as in Trump’s standard rebuff, ‘That’s a nasty question. You’re fake news! Next question!’

In religious contexts, where rationality is openly disavowed, doublethink can come out of the closet and even be worn as a badge of honour. Within Roman Catholicism, for instance, the faithful believe that the content of the communion cup is wine and that it is at the same time the blood of Jesus of Nazareth. This act of doublethinking is not only accepted, but regarded as virtuous, and the contradiction termed a Mystery. In most areas of life, however, we are obliged to think in a grown-up way, where doublethink is an embarrassment whenever it comes to light.

Holding contradictory beliefs in different contexts is, therefore, easily imaginable and, in some political and religious climates, commonplace.

Optical illusions

What is more puzzling is holding a belief that is contradicted by one’s experience at the same moment. Optical illusions are a simple example. There are many straightforward examples of illusions in which straight lines seem curved, or parallel lines seem to converge, or grey patches appear in white areas, or colours seem different when they are the same. Just Google ‘optical illusions’ and you will see them aplenty. The familiarity of optical illusions seems to eclipse their strangeness, and we don’t even ask what it’s like to have an optical illusion. But … what is it like to see parallel lines and yet believe you are seeing convergent lines? I think this phenomenon still falls into the same philosophical category as the holding of contradictory opinions. For, the illusion relies on the impossibility of comparing side-by-side distant parts of the visual field. The notion of parallel lines is that they are equidistant, but to tell whether the distance between the lines is the same at each end, you could have to copy and paste one end to the other, whereupon the illusion is destroyed. This is rather like contradictory beliefs forming a ‘short circuit’ when they are juxtaposed—at which point either the contradiction is acknowledged, or a defence mechanism kicks in (Trump’s “That’s a nasty question”).

Anton’s syndrome: blindness denial

Anton’s syndrome is a neurological disorder in which part or all of the visual field is lost but the subject maintains that it is still there, apparently genuinely believing it. What is it like to have a big hole in your visual field, but not believe it is there? The precise phenomenology of Anton’s syndrome is still an active area of research (e.g. Allen-Hermanson 2015), nevertheless it appears that the reported visual content is not hallucinatory but results from confabulation, a spontaneous invention of false beliefs.

This takes us deeper than merely holding contradictory opinions. Doing the latter is possible, I have suggested, because comparing two propositions requires a specific action of retrieving them and considering them in comparison. In the confabulation that occurs in Anton’s disorder, however, the mistaken belief overrides the normal, privileged introspection of the mind. For example: if there is a red patch in my visual field then I can, by introspection, form the correct belief that there is such a red patch, and report that belief in words. Confabulation disrupts this process of introspection: it decouples belief from experience.

Confabulation also occurs in split-brain patients (e.g. Gazzaniga 2015) where the left hemisphere does not know what the right is thinking, and vice versa. When the left (verbally competent) hemisphere is asked about some action taken by the right hemisphere, it will effortlessly make up a story about the reason for the action. Example: a photograph of a sunflower is projected in the right hemifield (and hence the left visual cortex), and a sexually arousing picture is projected into the other hemifield (and hence the right visual cortex). The subject blushes. When asked, the left hemisphere (which knows only of the flower picture) confabulates that the room must be hot.

The evolutionary benefits of confabulation are obvious: the brain runs on incomplete information about the environment but must act quickly to catch prey and evade predators. A brain that fills in the gaps, usually correctly, is a life-saver.

Denial of a perceptual deficiency (as in Anton’s) is clearly pathological. The reverse is not usually regard as a pathology but an eccentricity. To have normal functioning phenomenal content in the visual field of your conscious mind, but to assert that you have no phenomenal content is weird but does not stop you doing anything in day-to-day life.

Dennett’s syndrome: consciousness denial

Galen Strawson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, has been strident in his attacks on philosophers and neuroscientists who deny the real existence of consciousness (e.g. Strawson 2006). In a blistering article in the New York Review of Books, he let rip thus:

What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial—I’ll call it “the Denial”—every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.

The Denial began in the twentieth century and continues today in a few pockets of philosophy and psychology and, now, information technology. It had two main causes: the rise of the behaviourist approach in psychology, and the naturalistic approach in philosophy. These were good things in their way, but they spiralled out of control and gave birth to the Great Silliness.

[…]

Perhaps it’s not surprising that most Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. “Of course, we agree that consciousness or experience exists,” they say—but when they say this they mean something that specifically excludes qualia. (Strawson 2018)

Daniel Dennett was the arch-denier of consciousness. Of course, he denied that he denied consciousness, as he did in his reply to Strawson. His denial of denial, however, rests on the re-definition of the term ‘consciousness’ to be something other than what everybody else means by ‘consciousness’, as in this passage:

I don’t deny the existence of consciousness; of course, consciousness exists; it just isn’t what most people think it is, as I have said many times.

[…]

We [i.e. Deniers] say that there isn’t any conscious experience in the sense that Strawson insists upon. We say consciousness seems (to many who reflect upon the point) to involve being “directly acquainted”, as Strawson puts it, with some fundamental properties (“qualia”), but this is an illusion, a philosopher’s illusion. (Dennett 2018).

It is hard to imagine a more explicit articulation of Dennett’s denialism: he is denying the existence of consciousness in the normally understood sense of the term, while asserting the existence of something that he calls ‘consciousness’ but is different from what ‘most people’ mean by the term.

Although Strawson has done a sterling of job arguing against consciousness deniers, he does not appear to have invested much effort into understanding them. What is it like to be a consciousness denier? What is it like to have the normal sensorium of phenomenal contents but to believe that those contents do not exist? To experience smells, colours, pains, angers, and yet to believe and assert that none of those experiences actually exist?

Confabulation as a model of consciousness denial

Some, such as Chalmers (1996) have suggested that Dennett was a zombie (in the technical philosophical sense), but I am sure that this is meant purely in jest. I see no serious reason to doubt that Dennett has essentially the same kind of phenomenal contents that you and I have.

I would like to draw on the analogy of Anton’s disorder, in which confabulation fills the mind with beliefs based on expectation rather than on introspection.

Dennett seemed to have confabulated the absence of his entire sensory field. Why? How? Why he did this is easier to explain than how. Dennett is driven by the ideology of the physical sciences, which permits only third-person observations as legitimate empirical data. This ideology has deep roots in science’s battle against revealed religion, superstition, scholasticism, and quackery. It is an internalized creed that keeps the scientific community on the straight and narrow, and allows scientific research papers published in any nation on Earth to be understand and assessed in every other culture The adoption of the scientific method and the supporting culture of self-policed rigour is one of the towering achievements of modern civilization. But, when it comes to consciousness, Dennett and other deniers have deformed the scientific method into ‘scientism’, a kind of cargo-cult imitation of bona fide science. Science admits all objective empirical data, whether they be third-person or first-person. It is only Dennett’s scientism that sees fit to wipe out the vast swathe of empirical data that are given as first-person observations. This is not science, but its diametric opposite. To exclude a corpus of explananda because they do not fit an existing theory is anti-scientific and will not get us anywhere. Nevertheless, because Dennett’s scientism privileges third-person data and damns first-person data, he is obliged to deny the existence of all phenomenal contents, and to confabulate the non-existence of his very own phenomenal contents.

But how? With phenomenal contents pervading every moment of his waking life, how does Dennett confabulate their absence? I believe the clue lies in his assertion (repeated throughout his publications and public performances) that neuroscience will someday explain away this illusion of phenomenal consciousness.

… science has discovered good explanations for such heretofore baffling phenomena as reproduction, metabolism, growth, and self-repair, for instance. So while it is possible that we will have to overthrow that science in order to account for consciousness, we should explore the default possibilities first. (Dennett 2018)

This is often referred to as ‘promissory physicalism’. It is the faith that physical science will some day provide a reductive explanation of consciousness, by some means that is at present utterly inconceivable. No physicalist has even the faintest idea of how, even in principle, there could ever be a reductive physical explanation of consciousness. The only two offerings made in half a century of research are: redefinition, that is redefine the term ‘consciousness’ to mean something other than consciousness, such as ‘integrated information’ (Tononi 2004) or ‘quantum collapse’ (Penrose) and then declare the problem solved; or magical emergentism, that is to state ex cathedra that consciousness emerges from the complex electrochemical behaviour of brain tissue.

My suggestion is that Dennett was employing ‘promissory confabulation’ to pretend that his phenomenal contents were not really there. He saw his visual qualia, just as we see ours, but he had an emotional need for them not to exist, because of his scientistic creed of recognising only third-person observations. So, he promised himself that, somewhere in the uncharted realm of future neuroscience there will come a theory that will show that he was not really experiencing these phenomenal contents at all.

Denial of this kind is a common defence mechanism against traumatic experiences, first noted by Freud in hysterical blindness.

So there is, after all, a similarity with the other forms of doublethink that we discussed above. Dennett is able to hold his denial of consciousness because it rests on a promised theory of neuroscience that not only lies in the future, but has its foundations and basic principles in unknown future developments. A theory that exists entirely in a glimmer in Dennett’s eye is unassailable. No scientific criticism can touch the future reductive theory of consciousness because nobody has any idea what it is. So, Dennett can feel safe in his denial of consciousness, as it is a promissory confabulation premised on a theory that will always be in the future. This theory can therefore never be compared with empirical data, and is hence unfalsifiable.

Physicalism entails consciousness denial

As I indicated in the title, my target in this article is: What is it like to be a physicalist? But, so far, we have considered only what it is like to a consciousness denier. Academic philosophers are fond of telling me physicalism (the doctrine that reality is ultimately entirely physical) does not entail eliminativism (the doctrine that denies the existence of consciousness). The academic party-line is that there are both eliminative and non-eliminative physicalisms. The grounds for this seem to be no more substantive than the denial by some physicalists that they are consciousness deniers. We debunked Dennett’s denial denial above, but we can easily show that all physicalisms are eliminative, as follows.

The entire discourse of physics is expressed in terms that are defined analytically, ultimately in terms of undefined fundamentals. For example, bodies are defined in terms of atoms, which are defined in terms of protons, neutrons, and electrons, which are particles of matter, which is an undefined primitive. The undefined primitives are represented numerically in composite entities: thus a particle might have a certain quantity of mass and charge, but what mass and charge ‘really are’ is not defined. Of course, a particle that we thought was fundamental may be found to comprise novel entities, for example protons and neutrons, once thought fundamental, were found to comprise quarks, but the general logical structure remains the same, insofar as the mass, charge, spin, strangeness, colour, and charm of a quark are equally undefined fundamentals.

In contrast, the entire discourse of the phenomenal contents of consciousness minds is expressed ultimately in terms whose meaning is given by private ostensive definition. For example, the phenomenal quality of Post Office Red is defined by perceiving that colour and deciding or agreeing that this will be referred to as ‘Post Office Red’. This term cannot be understood without that experience. Knowing the spectral distribution of the corresponding light does not tell you what you will observe when you see Post Office Red.

Therefore, the terms of the two discourses, the physical and phenomenal, are disjoint. But all the propositions that can be entailed by any set of physical propositions will also be expressed entirely in physical terms, not phenomenal terms. Therefore, no phenomenal proposition can be entailed by any set of physical propositions. Therefore, no phenomenal facts are grounded in physical facts. Therefore, phenomenal facts are nonphysical. Hence consciousness is nonphysical. Hence physicalism is necessarily eliminative.

Conclusion

In conclusion, what is it like to be a physicalist? It is to assert that the physical world exhausts the whole of reality, and to indulge in promissory confabulation to deny one’s very own phenomenal contents for the sake a supposed future reductive theory of consciousness, for which there is no evidence, only faith.

Postscript: is this ad hominem?

I may be accused of writing an ad hominem attack on Dennett and his fellow-travellers, by using psychopathology as a model for his philosophical position, instead of arguing against his arguments. I dispute this. I have written a detailed defence of consciousness as a fundamental part of reality elsewhere in the peer-reviewed literature (e.g. Lloyd 2006, 2020) as well as the grey literature (Lloyd 1999, 2019). There are many other defences of consciousness in the literature, from Chalmers (1996) onwards. I did not feel it necessary to repeat those arguments here.

Dennett is an accomplished scientist of unquestioned standing in his field of cognitive science. He obtained his PhD in philosophy in the University of Oxford in 1965, taught in the University of California, Irvine, for six years, and has held professorial positions in Tufts University for several decades. He has honorary degrees from six universities, and has published more than five hundred articles and papers and numerous books.

When a scientist of Dennett’s stature commits the cardinal scientific sin of choosing to disregard a large body of data because they do not fit his theory, then we are obliged to ask why. It is absurd to suggest that Dennett does not have normal conscious experiences, and offensive and unfounded to suggest he is fraudulently denying his experiences. I have suggested in this article a notion of ‘promissory confabulation’ as an explanatory hypothesis for Dennett’s denial of his own consciousness. I believe the onus is on critics of this article to offer an alternative explanation of Dennett’s extraordinary philosophical position.

References

Allen-Hermanson, Sean (2015). ‘Introspection, Anton’s Syndrome, and Human Echolocation’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly vol 98 pp 171-192. DOI:10.1111/papq.12098

Chalmers, David (1996). The Conscious Mind. Oxford University Press.

Descartes, René (1641). Meditations on the First Philosophy, in Which the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul Are Demonstrated. Translation John Veitch (1901). Dent.

Dennett, Daniel (2018). ‘ “Magic, Illusions, and Zombies”: An Exchange’. New York Review of Books, 3^rd April 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/03/magic-illusions-and-zombies-an-exchange/

Gazzaniga, Michael S. (2015). Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience. Ecco.

Lloyd, Peter B (1999). Consciousness and Berkeley’s Metaphysics. Self-published. http://www.peterblloyd.com/consciousness/1999_cns.pdf

— (2006). ‘Mental monism considered as a solution the mind-body problem’. pp 101-144 in: Alexander Batthyany and Avshalom Elitzur (eds.) Mind and its Place in the World: Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness. Ontos Press. DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.30580.60806

— (2019). ‘Panpsychism and Mental Monism: Comparison and Evaluation’. ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332978948_Panpsychism_and_Mental_Monism_Comparison_and_Evaluation. DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.30580.60806

— (2020). ‘Modelling Consciousness within Mental Monism: An Automata-Theoretic Approach’. Entropy, vol 22 pp 698-731. DOI:10.1515/9783110325683.101.

Nagel, Thomas (1974). ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Philosophical Review vol 83 pp 435-450.

Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg.

Penrose, Roger (1989). The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics. Oxford University Press.

Strawson, Galen (2006). ‘Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol 13 pp 3–31.

— (2018). ‘The consciousness deniers’. The New York Review of Books, 13^th March 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers

Thaler L, R.D. Vos, D. Kish, M. Antoniou, C. Baker, M. Hornikx (2018). ‘Human echolocators adjust loudness and number of clicks for detection of reflectors at various azimuth angles’. Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol B 285: 20172735. DOI:10.1098/rspb.2017.2735

Tononi, Giulio (2004). ‘An information integration theory of consciousness’. BMC Neuroscience, vol 5 article 42. DOI:10.1186/1471-2202-5-42

Text written by human author. Illustration by William Blake, manually PhotoShopped by author. Nothing by AI.

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The problem

Theories of consciousness that take seriously the reality of consciousness can be regarded in a small number of categories.

• Dualism: mind and matter are both real.

  • Property dualism (e.g. Strawson): mind is a queer property of matter.

  • Substance dualism (e.g. Descartes): the mind is an entirely different thing from the brain, but the two somehow interact.

• Idealism (e.g. Berkeley): the physical universe is a construct of conscious minds

Property dualism has the well-known showstopper that there is no credible way in which little bits of consciousness can combine to form a regular human mind. It also has the less well-known showstopper that it makes conscious simultaneity and sequence inconsistent with special relativity (see e.g. my TSC 2020 presentation).

That leaves substance dualism and idealism. For philosophical reasons that I’ve discussed elsewhere (e.g. my ResearchGate paper), I believe idealism is the only correct solution. But my remarks below apply equally both to substance dualism and idealism.

These two theories, substance dualism and idealism, have a peculiar problem that simply does not arise with property dualist theories such as panpsychism: namely, the Portal Navigation Problem. A ‘portal’ is a mechanism that allows the exchange of information between mind and brain. Theories of property dualism, such as panpsychism, have no need for portals, so a fortiori they have no portal navigation problem. An early example of a portal is Descarte’s ridiculous idea that the pineal gland is the portal between mind and brain. For the past century, essentially all theories of substance dualism and idealism propose some kind of quantum mechanical process as the portal. So, we have Popper & Eccles’ quantum tunnelling across synapses, and Penrose & Hameroff’s quantum collapse in microtubules, and my quantum collapse in DNA. Whatever the choice of portal, the navigation between the mental and physical sides of the portal is a crucial and but largely ignored problem.

In a nutshell, the problem is this: if your mind is not inside your head, then how does it know which eyeballs to use?

Whether you regard the brain as ontologically real, or just a virtual object in a construct, you are still faced with the fact that (in substance dualism and idealism) the conscious mind is non-local: it possesses no spatial location. That is, your mind is not literally in your head, or any other place. But, if it’s not in your head, then how does it know which head to use for sensory input and motor output? Your mind receives sensory perceptions from some brain, and sends motor commands to that brain. But, which brain? Why does my mind exchange information with my brain, not yours, given that my mind is not actually inside my brain, nor inside any other brain?

I think the solution must be that the the physical side of the portal needs to have some unique biomarker, so that the conscious mind can connect to just the proper portal, and hence it can latch onto one particular physical person. This is why any theory that claims the microtubule as the doorway between brain and consciousness faces a big problem. The microtubule is a structure built of tubulin proteins, and these proteins are the same all individuals. There is no personal biomarker in the microtubule. So, if a conscious mind were linked to microtubules as portals, then the mind would map equally to microtubules in everyone’s brain. A microtubule is a microtubule is a microtubule: a mind would have no way to tell which microtubules constitute its personal doorway into the correct brain.

A theory that I briefly mentioned in my 1999 book, and have recently fleshed out in more detail in these Substack posts, is that the portal is the DNA molecule. Not the microtubule as many people believe, following Penrose & Hameroff. The DNA ticks all the boxes: it is unique to each individual, and present in every neuron; there are biologically plausible molecular pathways from the dendrites to the nuclear DNA, and from the DNA to the axon; the DNA molecule is about 40,000 times longer (about 2 m) than the longest microtubule (0.00005 m) and therefore has vaster computational power; and there is circumstantial evidence in its favour from twins and split-brain patients.

An analogy

Consider a VR (Virtual Reality) game, which is idealist Donald Hoffman’s favourite analogy. Suppose you put on your VR headset but you find that instead of a continuous stream of imagery from the point of view of your avatar, the screen keeps on glitching between the points of view of other people’s avatars. And when you try to move, you see that your actions are expressed in jerky movements of other people’s avatars. Your connection into the VR world randomly switches every few seconds between arbitrary avatars.

Frustrated, you take off the headset and phone the support guy. “Hey buddy, your system’s broken! I’m getting data feeds from random avatars, not just my own avatar.” The engineer runs some diagnostics and says, “No, the system is running correctly. What portal mapping are you using?” You look confused and ask what the heck he means. He answers, “Each avatar has a unique 20-digit ID number. When you first open an account, you choose an avatar, and you copy that avatar’s ID into your headset. Whenever you login in after that, your headset connects with the virtual POV (point-of-view) of your own personal avatar that has the relevant ID.” You protest that that is precisely the setup process that you went through. The engineer replies, “Wait, what part of the avatar’s body did you upload the ID from?” And you reply, “I specified ‘brain microtubule’, I got the 20-digit number from the avatar’s simulated microtubule and copied it into my headset registry.” The engineer’s face lights up: “See, that’s your problem. Everyone’s microtubule has the same code. Microtubules in meatspace are just strings of identical tubulin proteins. So the simulated microtubules in the avatar likewise use identical object modules. By using a code from the microtubule, you’re connecting to any random person’s avatar, as all the avatars share identical microtubules.”

“So what’s the solution?” you ask. “Oh, you just go back into the setup process and copy the 20-digit number from your chosen avatar’s simulated DNA. Thereafter, your headset will always connect to the data stream from the same avatar”.

Consciogenesis and zygotic DNA

One snag in a simple DNA portal theory is that the genome is not actually identical in all brain cells. Small random mutations in the genome occur during the growth of teh foetal brain, leading to a ‘mosaic’ of slightly different genomes throughout the brain. A solution is to suppose that the link is defined by the DNA atteh time of fertilisation, which creates the zygote.

This makes sense if we think of what happens at ‘consciogenesis’, the create of a new conscious mind. At fertilisation, when the DNA becomes fixed in the zygotic, we must suppose that this triggers some operation in the domain of consciousness, which causes a new mind to bud off from the universal stream of consciousness. That would be a natural point of time at which to forge the link between the conscious mind and the DNA, which is inherited by all descendant cells of the zygote.

This is very speculative, but has the positive feature that it is falsifiable: in experiments such as those of Dr Rita Pizzi, the theory predicts nonlocal communication between monozygotic DNA but not between heterozygotic DNA.

Conclusion

I don’t blame the panpsychist guys for getting fixated on microtubules. For a panpsychist, it’s a good bet. But panpsychists are doomed anyway as their basic ontology is unworkable.

For those of us who are on the idealist road to the correct solution, the Portal Navigation Problem must be addressed. One way or another.

Maybe DNA is the answer, maybe it isn’t, Maybe there is some smaller protein that is still unique to the individual. Maybe the microtubule grabs a unique sequence of ATGC codes from the DNA and represents it dynamically. Nature is full of surprises.

What is for sure is that idealists need to address the navigation problem, as it is a fundamental requirement for making idealism work. We can’t just ignore it.

Text and illustration by human author, not AI.

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In the 1990s, physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthetist Stuart Hameroff formulated a theory, which they have promoted for many years, about how a conscious mind can be embodied in a brain.

There are three distinct components of the theory, which are loosely combined.

• Penrose’s ‘Gödelian argument’: that Kurt Gödel’s Theorem implies that the human brain can do computations that no machine can do. Hence, whatever consciousness is, it is not emergent from neural computation.

• The brain orchestrates placing neuronal microtubules into specific quantum superpositions, which then collapse together.

• Those collapses either are identical with, or cause, moments of conscious awareness, which somehow combine to form a conscious mind.

“Bing” = identity or cause?

Before we get into objections to this theory, I want to draw your attention to a deep philosophical ambiguity. Hameroff often calls the creation of moments of consciousness that are supposed to happen in the collapse of the superposition the “Bing”. He says this collapse either is identical with the conscious experience (the bing), or causes it. Surely this raises a red flag for the reader? There is a profound philosophical chasm between these two options. If the collapse is consciousness then this is reductive physicalism. In that case, the implication is that what we understood to be private, first-person experiences turn out (according to Hameroff) to be public, third-person physical events. This is vulnerable to all the standard anti-physicalist arguments from Chalmers (1996) onwards. The fact that Hameroff is even entertaining reductive physicalism is worrying. If, on the other hand, collapses causes the experience then it implies the conscious experience is some nonphysical thing that is separate from the microtubule, and yet the theory says nothing about the nature of this strange conscious thing.

Hameroff brushes aside this fundamental ambiguity as if it were an inconsequential detail. His focus is on the molecular biology of consciousness, not the metaphysics of it. I will say no more about this here, as the following objections apply to both sides of the disjunction.

The standard objections are mistaken

Hameroff has pushed hard for the theory against sceptics who deny that quantum phenomena could have anything to do with consciousness.

• The first counter-argument is that the brain is a densely connected warm structure in which any quantum superposition that might occur would decohere before it could do any work in a conscious mind. There is, however, enough theoretical and empirical work to support the plausibility of quantum mechanical processes’ being involved in mental processes.

• The second argument comes from ‘collapse deniers’ such as Max Tegmark and Sean Carroll who deny that quantum superpositions actually collapse at all. Instead, they advocate Hugh Everett’s theory, which is often called the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. According to MWI, whenever it seems that a superposition is collapsing in a measurement, in fact the whole universe including the observer goes into a superposition of many ‘worlds’. MWI is philosophical untenable because the ‘worlds’ other than our own are inherently unobservable and therefore indistinguishable from fictions. So, rejecting the MWI, we are back with the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Hence, I agree with Penrose and Hameroff that there are solid grounds for believing there is an objective collapse of superposition in microtubules.

• A common third objection is a straw man argument: that advocates of ‘quantum consciousness’ see that quantum mechanics is a mystery, and consciousness is a mystery, and think that putting two mysteries together will resolve them. This is stupid on so many levels it is not worth debating.

So, the general premise of quantum-based conscious embodiment is, I believe, credible. (And, in fact inevitable, but for reasons outside the Penrose-Hameroff theory, which I have discussed in earlier posts.)

Two fundamental objections

Nevertheless, I would question the details of the theory. In fact, I am convinced that the Penrose-Hameroff cannot work as a theory of how consciousness could be embodied in a biological system. The two basic flaws as I see it are:

• The Penrose-Hameroff theory is epiphenomenal. Their papers make it very clear that the collapse of the wave function in microtubules is driven by deterministic physical processes. They seem to be reluctant to state clearly that the selection of an eigenstate in the collapse is random (as in the conventional understanding of the Copenhagen Interpretation), but given that the phenomenal consciousness is identified with, or produced by, the collapse, it does not make sense to say that the consciousness causes the selection of the eigenstate. (The only way out of that is to propose backwards causation in time, which they sometimes do. Quantum physics allows retroaction only in an unobserved system. But, by hypothesis, what Penrose & Hameroff are proposing is retroaction after the wave function has collapsed. That is something outside known physics and, moreover, is vulnerable to the standard paradoxes of time travel.)

• The Penrose-Hameroff theory entails that conscious experiences are identified with, or supervene on, spatially separable events. Under Special Relativity, this would contradict the absolute temporal sequence of mental events, as I argued in my 2020 TSC presentation. It does not matter that they invoke Fröhlich condensates as an hypothesis for creating the orchestration component of the Orch OR theory: the basic premise of the Penrose-Hameroff theory is that each 'moment' of phenomenal consciousness is localised in a microtubule. That means they are spatially separable, which under Special Relativity means they can be temporally separated and occur in arbitrary sequences relative to observers in different inertial frames, which contradicts the unity of consciousness and the indubitability of the temporal sequence of sensations. Let me unpack that a bit: in your stream of consciousness, you can tell that two sensations in different modalities (say, vision and audition) are happening at the same time or in a sequence. (To avoid hair-splitting about the ‘specious present’, suppose that in the first case the sensations co-occur for an hour; and in the latter case there is an hour’s gap.) But if these sensations are localised then we can (as a thought experiment) consider enlarging the brain until the sensations are space-like separated. Then, according the Special Theory of Relativity, there is no objective fact of the matter whether the sensations are simultaneous or occur in this order or that order. This contradicts the indubitability of the order of the experiences.

Can the Penrose-Hameroff Theory be salvaged?

Could some tweak be applied to theory to make it non-epiphenomenal? Well, not really.

First, could we consider that consciousness intervenes in the physical world and causes the collapse, like John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner said in the early days of quantum mechanics? The first problem is that we are then no longer considering the Penrose-Hameroff theory as such, but a new theory. Both of the authors have ridiculed the idea of a nonphysical consciousness reaching into the physical world and collapsing superpositions.

In this video, Penrose unambiguously states that consciousness does not collapse quantum wave functions. To hammer home the message, he gives an example of a space craft that transmits a photograph of a remote planetary weather system that is in superposition. He says that according to the Copenhagen Interpretation the planet’s wave function will collapse when a conscious observer in Earth looks at the picture. That, he says, is absurd. Which just shows how poorly Penrose grasps the metaphysics of quantum physics, in particular the fundamental non-locality of quantum objects. Locked into an obsolete notion that space is fundamental, he thinks that the physicist and remote planetary weather system are not entangled because they are far away and the physicist’s looking at the picture can have no effect effect on the planet. (Opponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation often object to ‘spooky action at a distance' in entangled systems: but there is no such ‘action at a distance’ in a nonlocal system!)

Hameroff is equally dismissive. He mocks Henry Stapp’s view that consciousness triggers the collapse and chooses the eigenstate, as it implies that consciousness is some weird thing “outside science”.

These comments by the two authors reinforce my reading of the Penrose-Hameroff Theory that the trigger for the collapse is deterministic physics and the selection of an eigenstate is random.

Hameroff has elsewhere said that volition operates by backward causation in time. This goes totally against physics, as backward causation exists only in a quantum system prior to measurement. It is true that Penrose wants new physics, but his Gödelian argument is dubious (see below), and the idea of changing QM while retaining all its correct predictions is extraordinarily unlikely to succeed.

If we modify the theory to make consciousness do the collapsing, then it would no longer be the Penrose-Hameroff theory, but … could we anyway propose a ‘Modified Penrose-Hameroff Theory’ that has the conscious mind collapsing microtubular superpositions, even though Penrose and Hameroff would reject such a theory? Yes, we could but then we have to let go of the notion that the collapse is caused by gravity (Penrose’s big theory) and that the conscious moment is produced by the collapse. Then we have to consider how the conscious mind knows about what is going on in the brain, unless we suppose that the mind is collapsing superpositions at random. There is no mechanism in the Penrose-Hameroff Theory for a nonphysical mind to know what is going in the brain. So … we have to suppose that when a superposition occurs it is signalled by some unknown mechanism into the conscious mind, which then collapses the superposition when and how it wants.

Clearly we have shifted a long way from the Penrose-Hameroff Theory to avoid epiphenomenality. But it gets worse!

As I mentioned above, by closely coupling the conscious moments with collapses of supoerpositions, the theory places conscious experiences in the spatiotemporal manifold. But Special Relativity then wrecks the unity of consciousness and the indubitability of temporal succession. To solve that, we have to reject the notion that conscious experiences are identical with, or supervenient on, the quantum collapses. Instead we have to suppose that these physical events are portals from the physical world into a mental domain that runs in mental time instead of physical time.

Great, so we solved the epiphenomenal problem and the relativity problem, but now we have hit ourselves a new problem. If the conscious mind is not in physical space then how does it know which brain it belongs to? Microtubules are all the sane between individuals: just chains of tubulin protein. There is nothing in a given microtubule to say it maps to your mind or mine.

To solve this problem, we have to suppose that instead of microtubules the superpositions occur in some other intracellular structure that is unique to each individual. The suggestion that I made in earlier posts is the DNA molecule. The DNA is distributed through all neurons and is unique to individuals (except identical twins and split-brain patients, which I discussed in earlier posts).

So the theory we end up with, which no longer looks much like the Penrose-Hameroff Theory, is the one that I advocated in earlier posts. Namely; the conscious mind is a wholly nonlocal information processing system that interacts with the (virtual) brain via portals that are non-supervenient because the mental time dimension and physical time dimension are de-coupled. And, as the mind is nonlocal, the portals must have biomarkers unique to individuals, and my hypothesis for that is zygotic DNA.

Whether microtubules play a role in cognition, and whether they play a role in anaesthesia - I really don't know and don't have the expertise to tell. Whether they are the embodiment of consciousness in the brain - I am sure that that can be ruled out for the fundamental reasons given above.

Conclusion

While I salute Penrose and Hameroff for pioneering the concept of quantum mechanics as being key to the embodiment of consciousness in the brain, my consideration of the above factors force me to adopt a model different from their microtubule Orch-OR theory.

Postscript: Penrose’s Gödelian argument

Kurt Gödel’s famous theorem is explicitly limited to formal systems. So the fact that Penrose is applying it to real-world machines and brains already raises a red flag. Formal logic and automata theory apply only as perfect idealisations to real-world systems. It is just like geometry: geometric axioms and theories apply to perfect shapes and planes. These do not exist in the real world, but serve as useful approximations. For example, in geometric, the angles of a triangle added up to precisely 180 degrees. In any triangle you can actually draw, there will be some error: maybe the angles add up to 180.1 degrees because the line you drew wobbled a bit. So, the theory of formal systems provide a guide to how real machines behave, but it does not always provide ironclad physical laws.

Gödel's first Incompleteness Theorems proves that any consistent formal system that is powerful enough to describe basic arithmetic will always contain true statements that cannot be proven within that system. Penrose argues that a mathematician can nonetheless ‘see’ that a statement is true, even when a computing machine cannot do so because it is bound by the Incompleteness Theorem. And therefore conscious human brains have some superpower that intelligent machines can never attain.

This is plain wrong. Either the mathematician is just guessing that the statement is true, in which case it is not knowledge; or s/he has used some reasoning to reach that conclusion. Any such reasoning could also be learned (or invented) by a machine. Therefore, any knowledge that a human mathematician can establish by reasoning, a machine can also establish by similar reasoning.

Penrose seems to be focusing narrowly on automata that follow deterministic algorithms, which are bound by limits of computability. But a real machine (or brain) can step outside any given formal system into a meta system and reason about the first system. Penrose objects that that a machine for generally establishing all true statements would suffer an infinite regress of meta systems. That’s true, but so what? On any given occasion that a human mathematician figures out that a statement is true, s/he would need to deploy at most a finite number of meta systems. No human can ever establish the truth of an infinite number of Gödel statements; so it is irrelevant to complain that no machine can do so, either. Whatever reasoning a human can do, a machine can do. What no human can do, it is not relevant to the argument whether a computer can do it.

Penrose says that a mathematician can figure out that a statement is true by accessing a Platonic realm of pure forms. Even if such a Platonic realm existed, this method could not yield actual knowledge. In order for a conscious mind to know what stuff is out there in the Platonic realm, it would need to have some ‘Platonic qualia’, some kind of feeling or vision of the Platonic forms of the target statements that somehow appear in the sensorium. Having had that Platonic epiphany, the mathematician then has to check it for veridicality. Platonic epiphanies are just like regular sensory observations: they can be correct or erroneous. It’s like going into the lab and seeing an interesting experimental result. You’ll want to check the calibration of your instruments, repeat the experiment a few times, sanity check the results with some spreadsheet calculations, ask other labs if they can replicate it, and then see how this result could fit into the established body of knowledge. In the case of a Platonic epiphany, you can check it by reasoning about it. In that case, you might as well just do the reasoning and skip the epiphany. If we imagine that the Platonic realm is real, and machines can’t reach it … well, that’s OK, the machines can just do the same reasoning that a human would do to check the epiphany. Machine gets the same answer as human.

You could argue back that maybe the Platonic epiphany is like an inspired guess, and machines can’t do inspired guesses - they can just stumble through large numbers of random guesses. That is a legitimate argument, but it yields a much weaker conclusion than what Penrose is claiming. All that follows from the ‘inspired guess’ line is that a brain can be faster than a computer for some problems. In contrast, Penrose is making the bigger claim that some truths are completely inaccessible to machines. The ‘fast inspired guess’ hypothesis is a falsifiable empirical claim: we can set a cohort of human mathematicians to work on a problem, and race them against a cohort of AI systems with random number generators and see whether human brains are faster. If they are, then we have something interesting: we can then determine the biological mechanism that the brain uses (maybe some quantum trick), and build it into the machine. Then we are off to the races. No need to visit the Platonic realm. Maybe this quantum trick taps into consciousness, in which case it is very interesting indeed, but notice that we are now talking about the creativity of consciousness offering shortcuts that are not available to classical machines. As I said, this is a testable empirical hypothesis, and nothing to do with Penrose’s theoretical claim that the brain has a superpower to compute the formally incomputable.

So, this whole trope of the brain performing non-computable tricks that machines can’t do is bogus. There is good reason for believing that deterministic machines cannot embody phenomenal consciousness, but the limit of computability is not part of that argument.

Text written by human, not AI. Microtubule schematic manually edited from Hameroff’s paper. Thanks to film maker David Field’s probing questions for getting me to think more clearly about the Penrose-Hameroff theory.

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The Science of Consciousness (TSC) conferences, originally known as Toward a Science of Consciousness, have formed a leading series of events for the consciousness studies community for three decades. I have attended about half of them (17 conferences, at 14 of which I gave presentations on idealism). I’m not sure I’ll attend any more. Here, I want to offer some background about why TSC has been significant for me personally, but why it’s probably time to move on.

Before TSC

I became interested in the study of consciousness, and specifically subjective idealism, in the late 1970s. After wrestling with the Cartesian mind-body problem for two years, I suddenly realised in 1978 that George Berkeley was right, and that the ground of all reality is consciousness. Idealism, I was convinced, was the only valid solution to the mind-body problem, but I soon found to my disappointment that this was very much a minority position. It took me three decades to meet another idealist. That was Professor Howard Robinson, at the conference Toward a Science of Consciousness, held in Budapest in 2007. For many years, this TSC series of conferences has been my main point of contact with the small but growing community of scientists and philosophers who are studying consciousness. As the focus of the conference has morphed, and as funding is becoming harder for me to get, I am wondering whether I will attend any more of them. The most recent TSC was held in Barcelona this year, and my funding extended only to watching the livestream version, which covered the Plenary sessions plus the Concurrent sessions that were in the main auditorium. I was disappointed (again) by the content. I don’t know whether I will submit an abstract for the next one, which will be in the TSC’s long-time home of Tucson, Arizona. I want to say why.

After I realised, in 1978, that the physical world is a convenient fiction, I tried to articulate a rational argument in favour of this insight. (I am tempted to say it was an ‘epiphany’ but that sounds like I am alluding to some kind of spiritual thing, which I am definitely not.) This took a while. I was tempted to study philosophy at university, but it seemed like the job market for philosophers was not great, so I took a degree in mathematics with a focus on computer science and automata theory, and then got a job in a university mechanical engineering department. In 1987 I moved to Oxford and enrolled in evening and weekend courses run by Dr Michael Lockwood (author of Mind, Brain, and the Quantum: The Compound ‘I’, 1989). This was my first contact with academic philosophy, and I was shocked to discover that George Berkeley and the whole school of subjective idealism was held in contempt. Nevertheless, Lockwood was an excellent tutor with a strong interest in philosophical and scientific approaches to consciousness. I was very lucky to have encountered him. I did the Oxford University Undergraduate Certificate in Philosophy course that he pioneered, and then move to London in search of contract work in computing.

Starting in the early 1990s, I published four articles in a new magazine, Philosophy Now, including two on idealism, “Dissecting Conscious Brain Tissue” (1993) and “The Physical World is a Fiction” (1994). That was the same year that the TSC conferences were started by the Consciousness Studies group at the University of Arizona.

Going to Tucson

The next year I saw an advertisement for the follow-up conference, on the noticeboard in the Oxford University philosophy building. I cobbled together some funds and attended the TSC in Tucson, 1996. This was an eye-opener, where I heard about David Chalmers’ Hard Problem of consciousness for the first time. I met a few people who were sympathetic to idealism, notably Benny Shanon, the ayahuasca expert who later published The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience.

Early the following year I signed up to the web-based course Dialogs on Consciousness, a pilot graduate seminar, run by the same Consciousness Studies department (May to October 1997). In the middle of that year, I was one of three students from the Dialogs course who were invited to attend a Consciousness Studies Summer Institute in Flagstaff, where I had stimulating conversations with David Chalmers, Marilyn Schlitz, and Christian de Quincey, but found no support for idealism. (By the way, this was part of a program funded by Fetzer for planning a Center for Consciousness Studies, which was formally opened by the University of Arizona the following year.)

For the next TSC in Tucson (1998) I submitted an abstract entitled “The Hard Problem Considered Easy: Berkeley Revisited”, which was accepted for a poster presentation. As I mentioned above, the TSC conferences alternate between Tucson and international cities. In 1999, it was held in Tokyo, where I had a poster presentation entitled “Berkeleian Ontology as a Fundamental Approach to Consciousness”. Later that year, I self-published two books on Berkeley’s philosophy. My conversations with Marilyn Schlitz in Flagstaff had turned around my view on paranormal phenomena, and the second of my self-published books in 1999 was focused on applying subjective idealism as a model for paranormal phenomena. At the TSC 2000 in Tucson, I had a poster presentation, “A Berkeleian Model of Psi”.

I had to skip the Tucson conferences in 2002 and 2004 because of other commitments. But, meanwhile, I did publish a 44-page chapter entitled “Mental monism considered as a solution the mind-body problem” in the book Mind and its Place in the World: Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness edited by Alexander Batthyany and Avshalom Elitzur.

In 2006, I came back to Tucson with an oral presentation, “Individuation of personal minds in panexperientialist models”. It was at this TSC that I met Susan Waitt, a television presenter with whom I organised a conference in Malta, modelled on the TSC format, Metageum 07, which explored Neolithic consciousness, in November 2007. This Maltese conference almost bankrupted me, and turned me off the field of psychedelics and prehistoric consciousness. After this, I refocused on the philosophical problem of consciousness and its embodiment in the brain.

Budapest hosted TSC in 2007, where I had a poster presentation with the same title as my book chapter, “Mental monism considered as a solution the mind-body problem”. In 2008, we were back in Tucson with a poster entitled “Basic Conceptual Problems in Parapsychology”, continuing the application of subjective idealism to paranormal phenomena. In 2010, again in Tucson, I gave a poster presentation, “Logical structure of mystical experiences”. In 2012, I gave another oral presentation on the paranormal theme, “Retrocausality: A Naturalistic Framework in Mental Monism”. I attended TSC 2014 (Tucson) but neither my abstract nor my workshop proposal were selected; I also attended TSC 2016 but it looks like I didn’t even submit an abstract that year.

By the time of TSC 2018 (Tucson), I felt that I had, at last, firmed up my defence of idealism as far as I could, and I wanted to differentiate it from the closely related theory of panpsychism. I gave an oral presentation on this theme: “Mental Monism and Panpsychism: How Substantive is the Difference?” I tried publishing a paper that expanded on this argument, but without success. The paper was too long for most journals. The Journal of Consciousness Studies, which I had always regarded as the key journal of the field, rejected a shortened version on the grounds that they wanted scientific papers, not philosophical ones, especially not idealist ones. Mind and Matter also did not want “outrageous” idealism. So I dumped it on ResearchGate, where supposedly more than a thousand people have looked at it. But, as everyone knows, peer-reviewed journals are the only route to credibility. Fortunately, TSC still let me present my unpopular philosophical arguments.

After that, I started looking at the interface between the conscious mind and the (virtual) physical world. TSC 2019 was in Interlaken and I gave an oral presentation, “Mental Monism: An Interface Model Consistent With Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory”. This continued at TSC 2020 (remote), with a video presentation, “Idealism and Space-Time: Relativistic Constraints on the Interface between Mind and Physical Construct within Mental Monism”. At TSC 2022 (Tucson), there was a side meeting of the Mind-Matter Society, where I gave an oral presentation, “Taking Idealism Seriously”, which brought together my arguments on the interface theory. And in TSC itself I gave a presentation, “Quantum measurement in mental monism: unitary consciousness and its ramifications”, which examined the quantum mechanical aspect of the interface. A logical extension of this was to apply the idea of mind-brain portals to machines, and in TSC 2023 (Encinitas) I gave a video presentation, “AI needs a Revolution in Consciousness Engineering”. Addressing the anti-consciousness challenge of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, at TSC 2024 (Tucson), I presented “The Reportability of Conscious Experience v Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics”.

TSC 2025 (Barcelona)

This brings us to TSC 2025 (Barcelona). No longer having any funding, I could not attend in person, and this year there was no opportunity for remote presentations, so I did not submit an abstract. (These remote presentations had been introduced during the Covid lockdown, but they were not particularly successful, and the organisers rightly discontinued them.) The event was LiveStreamed, but I intended to skip it altogether because of the Conference’s thirty-year long failure to take idealism seriously. Egged on by the film maker David Field, however, I eventually enrolled as a remote attendee the day before it started.

Sadly, I was disappointed again. I hoped that Donald Hoffman would give more details of his theory of Conscious Agents, which sounds idealist even though he never uses that term: but in fact what he revealed was essentially a panpsychist theory. As I have argued at length elsewhere, panpsychist theories are untenable. In the Plenary Session entitled Quantum Fields and Consciousness, Hoffman was followed by Deepak Chopra, the spiritual clown. The third speaker in that session was Federico Faggin, who talked a lot about his personal experiences, but nothing about his theory. I had to buy his book to find out what he was actually advocating, which turned out to be some form of panpsychism. In the 286-page programme, I found one just one idealist, Silvia Paddock. After thirty years of TSC, you’d think there’d a largely representation of the only tenable theory of consciousness!

In the substack posts following this one, I will elaborate in more detail my objections to some of the theories of consciousness that were presented at Barcelona.

I have given presentations on idealism at a few other conferences - Science and NonDuality (SAND) (Amsterdam 2012), Breaking Convention (London, 2017), and Models of Consciousness (Oxford, 2019) - but the ecumenical nature of TSC made it a conducive platform for those of us at the fringes of academic respectability.

TSC, quo vadis?

My reason for indulging in this biographical stuff is just to emphasise that I have benefited a lot from the platform that TSC has offered me over the past three decades. As an independent researcher with no academic affiliation and no doctorate, I’m pretty much out in the boondocks, so I appreciate the opportunity that was given to me. In addition to the presentations, there have concomitant benefits. In the conferences after 1999, I was able to sell copies of my self-published books (Consciousness and Berkeley’s Metaphysics and Paranormal Phenomena and Berkeley’s Metaphysics). I sold almost 300 copies. TSC also impacted my personal life. After the 1997 Institute in Flagstaff, I discovered that most of my family lived in that area. (Back in 1902, my great grandparents emigrated from England to Arizona, leaving behind a sickly two-year-old girl who later become my grandmother. Resenting her abandonment, she never talked about the large branch of the family that homesteaded in Flagstaff.) I mentioned the 2007 Metageum conference, which was modelled on TSC and was a good conference but lost me my finances, my marriage, and my job. A few years later, in 2010, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull exploded at the end of TSC and closed the U.K. airspace with dust. We were trapped in the U.S.A. for a week. Rather than remaining at Hotel Congress in Tucson, I joined science writer Rita Carter (author of The Brain Book) and her artist friend Briony Al-Kapoor for a road trip around Arizona and Utah, during which I endeavoured without success to convince Rita of idealism.

So, while I certainly appreciate what TSC has done for the field, and for me personally, it troubles me that after thirty years of research, it is still dominated by a sterile faith in the reality of the physical universe. As I said in my first presentation in 1996, the Hard Problem can be considered Easy in an idealist philosophy and was solved by Berkeley in 1710. Why are we still hammering the Hard Problem three decades on? Throughout the series of TSCs, I have wandered through the poster presentations, listening to self-evidently wrong theories of consciousness, from Higher Order Thought, through Global Workspace Theory, to Integrated Information Theory. All of them fail to answer David Chalmers’ question: why couldn’t the same physical processes happen without even a glimmer of phenomenal consciousness? Only idealism actually bothers to answer the question, yet it retains only a minuscule presence at TSC.

Imagine attending an astrophysics conference and finding that almost everyone still believes the Sun orbits the Earth! That’s my feeling at every TSC.

I have been advocating subjective idealism for 48 years, and my life expectancy gives me maybe another 20 years to make a mark. It’s time to rethink my approach. With limited time and funds left, I should focus on trying to get more peer-reviewed papers published rather than conference presentations. With journal fees around £2000, even publishing papers will take significant investment, but less than going to Tucson for a week. So far, I have only two peer-reviewed publications in philosophy: although they were quite substantial (44 pages and 33 pages respectively), this publication count in academia is indistinguishable from zero.

TSC 2026 will be back in Tucson, but it’s unlikely I’ll attend. A conference about consciousness whose basic premise is the primacy of the physical world offers diminishing value for idealists. This year, I had an abstract accepted for First Person Science of Consciousness (Mannheim), which seems much more idealism-friendly. Unfortunately, in the end I could not attend. Maybe next year, if the conference continues. Some people tell me that I should stop being a fool and just give up trying to promote idealism. Hell, no.

All text written by human. Photos of the head and tail of the snake bridge, Tucson, by Reka Komoli. No AI input.

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Recap

In previous posts in this series, I have argued for the following:

• Conclusion: the conscious mind is a non-physical, non-local information-processing entity that exchanges information, but not energy, with its host (brain or artificial computer).

• Conclusion: a conscious mind exchanges information with its host via specific, physically non-deterministic ‘portals’.

• Conclusion: the portals in one brain map to just a single mind, but this association cannot be based on neural connectivity—each portal must bear a ‘tag’ or signature of some sort that associates it with one mind.

• Hypothesis: the most likely candidate for the portal mechanism is a macromolecule that is put into a quantum superposition by the brain, and its wave function is collapsed by the mind.

• Hypothesis: the portal tag in a human brain might be the DNA molecule, and the information vehicle might be the microtubule (proposed by Penrose and Hameroff), the portal state is then a conformational superposition of the microtubule bound to the DNA.

• Problem: in split brain patients, the two brain hemispheres share the same DNA but the consciousness is apparently split. Solution: more recent studies by Yaïr Pinto et al. indicate that the consciousness is unitary in this case, which is a phenomenon with no obvious neurological explanation. (See previous post.)

• Problem: monozygotic twins (‘identical’ twins) share the same DNA but they obviously have separate minds. Doesn’t that destroy the hypothesis of DNA as a tag for the portals between the mind and the brain?

The taboo word “telepathy”

Within academic science and philosophy, any mention of telepathy or other paranormal phenomena triggers an ideological reaction of immediate and complete dismissal. This, I believe, is due to the interiorised conservatism that is essential for the maintenance of scientific rigour. It is reinforced by the absence of a theoretical framework into which empirical paranormal data can be fitted. The thinking is: (i) the universe is obviously wholly physical; (ii) there is no conceivable way a physical system can do telepathy, telekinesis, and the rest of this malarkey; (iii) therefore, these phenomena cannot exist; (iv) therefore, people who report these phenomena are incompetent experimentalists, or don’t understand statistics, or are quacks and charlatans; (v) hence it is time wasting even to think about these phenomena.

This really does not cut the mustard. We have seen that the universe is not wholly physical, but contains non-physical conscious minds, which knocks out the premise of the argument. Moreover these minds are non-local, which lends itself to a potential explanatory framework. Finally, we have a plausible hypothesis for portal tagging, which suggests a potential mechanism for telepathy.

These comments may involve a lot of hand waving, but they justify making an effort to think through how the theory of consciousness might offer a naturalistic explanation of telepathy.

Telepathy and twin telepathy

Despite the popularity of the concept, telepathy is not a well-defined phenomenon. It is popularly thought of as the direct transmission of mental images or thoughts between minds. This will not do. The term ‘transmission’ etymologically and logically indicates that the images and thoughts pass through the intervening space between one brain and another. But as we saw in earlier posts, the components of consciousness cannot be ascribed spatial location. Ergo they cannot be said to be transmitted through space. But if they ‘transfer’ instantaneously from brain to brain then they would run foul of non-simultaneity in Special Relativity. (Suppose one telepath ‘sends’ a telepathic message at time Ts and it is received at time Tr by another telepath in the same inertial reference frame. If sender and receiver are spacelike separated then there is some frame of reference in which Tr precedes Ts, which makes a nonsense of ‘sending’ anything telepathically. While we’re critiquing the standard notion of telepathy as some kind of ‘bio-energetic radio transmission’, let us not forget the navigation problem: if the sender’ s brain is beaming out waves of ‘psychic energy’, how the heck is it going to locate the intended recipient, and how will the recipient pick out the sender’s intended messages from those of the billions of other human brains on Earth? The whole notion fails to make sense.

A conception that does make sense is that telepathy involves the sharing of images or thoughts between two nonphysical, nonlocal minds whose portals are co-associated. (The question of relativistic timing we will come back to in a later post. Or you can check out what I proposed in my video presentation at the 2020 Science of Consciousness conference.)

The evidence for telepathy in controlled experiments does not reveal a very large effect size, but it is statistically significant. Sceptics say that it can be ignored because effect size is small. This is a non sequitur. If the effect is real then it doesn’t matter that is small now. We can engineer it to amplify it. Think of the photovoltaic effect: Becquerel’s first photovoltaic cells were 1% efficient; by the 1950s 6% was achieved; now they are 40% efficient. Radin (2003) reports telepathy success rates of 10 percentage points above chance: assuming the effect is real, there is reason to believe it could be engineered to 100% reliability.

The evidence for the relative strength of the telepathic effect in monozygotic twins than in other subjects is necessarily weaker, as we are comparing two statistical effects, neither of which is particularly large. And the smaller population of monozygotic twins limits the options for large, statistically useful trials. For example, Parker & Jenses (2013) studied telepathy in four pairs of twins, but this does not inform us about the effect size. Most of the evidence is anecdotal, and this certainly indicates stronger telepathy in twins. We must await the development of more powerful experimental protocols to get more robust evidence.

Why are twin minds two?

Meanwhile, we can address the twins problem in the theory of tagged consciousness portals. In the portal theory that I have proposed, DNA tags the brain-side portals that associate with a given mind. So, all the sensory impressions in both brains must pass into a single conscious mind. Then, how is each twin aware only of the sensory impressions of one brain?

This is similar in some respects to the split-brain case. In the analysis that has been formulated by Pinto for split brains, the sensorium is split, preventing direct comparisons across visual hemifields, but the impressions feed into a single conscious mind with a single conscious agency. If we suppose that the mind associated with one brain has a body-image, or schema, for a whole body, then the conscious rendering of sense-impressions from both hemispheres will naturally fit into the body image. Assuming that the access consciousness (using Ned Block’s concept) is channelled by the body image, we would expect sense impressions of both hemispheres to be accessible by the unitary mind. In the twins, however, access will be more difficult because of the rivalry of the body images. This, I would suggest, would work like binocular rivalry. Hold your finger up near your eyes and focus on the distant background. The image of the finger is not solid, but patches of it show up against the background. The visual field cannot show two different things at the same time. Likewise the joint conscious mind of the twins cannot place both streams of registrations in a single body images. So the sense-impressions form two exclusive sets. But it appears that sudden, emotionally charged experiences can breach this barrier to access. Then a sense impression can be accessed in both body-images. Experimental work on twin telepathy has focused on this kind of impression.

Yeah, I know this is yet more hand-waving. But it is a possible way forward to reconcile the portal model with the fact that twins have two minds with occasional telepathic outliers. It does not, as yet, lead to any falsifiable predictions. I would suggest, however, that the analogy with binocular rivalry could be fruitful. In particular, deconstructing the topological structure of the body image might make it easier for sense impressions to cross over. For example, suppressing saccadic eye movements.

A telepathy machine?

The astute reader will have realised that if an artificial consciousness is embedded in a machine—using some unique macromolecule (not necessarily DNA) as the tag—then we could transmit data between portals without passing through the intervening space. As a communication device, a telepathy machine would have considerable advantages. It would achieve light-speed communication without hindrance from intervening masses such as buildings or water bodies.

In the next post, we will indulge in some speculations on how portals work, and how we might build artificial portals.

References

Dean Radin (2003), “Thinking about Telepathy”. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231791772_Thinking_about_telepathy

Adrian Parker and Christian Jenses (2013), “Further Possible Physiological Connectedness Between Identical Twins: The London Study”, Explore 9(1):26-31, January–February 2013. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2012.10.001

Göran Brusewitz and Adrian Parker (2024), “An experiment with three studies of physiological connectedness amongst twins and its possible relationship to attachment”, Explore 20(5): 102982, September–October 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2024.01.008

P. Sterzer, G. Rees (2009), “Bistable Perception and Consciousness”, in Encyclopaedia of Consciousness, pp 93-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012373873-8.00011-6

Ned Block (1995), “On a confusion about a function of consciousness”, Brain and Behavioral Sciences 18 (2):227-247. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00038188

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The corpus callosum is a structure that connects the cerebral cortices of the two hemispheres of the brain. In the 1940s, the surgical operation of callosotomy (cutting the corpus callosum) was introduced by William P. van Wagenen as a treatment of last resort for patients with severe epilepsy. Twenty years later, Roger Sperry conducted a series of experiments on these ‘split -brain patients’, which revealed peculiar behavioural features indicating that the two hemispheres were working independently. This gave rise to the popular view that the conscious mind of the patient had been split into two minds, only one of which (in the left hemisphere) possessed language skills.

The notion of two minds in a split-brain patient is entirely consistent with the philosophical theory that the conscious mind is literally situated inside the physical brain tissue. It is harder to reconcile this notion with the rival theory of the conscious mind as non-local entity, which I have been arguing for in my previous posts.

The two-minds notion remained the standard understanding of split-brain patients until 2017, when Yaïr Pinto published new studies that revolutionised the field. In fact, as Pinto pointed out, there had been inconsistencies in Sperry’s original papers from the beginning, but these had been overlooked and the standard view was ‘cast in stone’ in textbooks and review papers.

In short, Pinto showed that there was actually a single conscious mind spanning the two separated hemispheres. There is not, as yet, any plausible theory of how this could happen if the mind is supervenient on brain tissue. But it is what one would expect if the conscious mind were a non-local entity that functions independently of the brain and communicates with the brain via local neurological portals.

The new research

Pinto et al. (2017) first of all observe that split-brain patients don’t notice anything odd, either in their day-to-day lives or in the experimental set-up. They do not report any big holes in their perceptual fields, nor any weird involuntary movements of their hands. But the crucial finding is that the left brain can report (verbally or using the right hand) conscious experiences arising in the right hemisphere, and vice versa. The patients shouldn’t be able to do this if conscious experiences are situated in isolated hemispheres. Moreover, the patients report high subjective confidence in the (correct) judgements about the presence and position of things seen in the other hemisphere. What the split-brain patients can’t do is to make direct comparisons between visual experiences in the visual fields that are associated with the two hemispheres. That is, the left-hemisphere can verbally report the presence and position of a shape in the right visual hemi-field, but cannot say whether it resembles a shape im the other hemi-field.

Further experiments (Pinto et al. 2023) showed that the cross-hemisphere comparisons became doable when the subject was asked to perform some task that involved paying conscious attention to the images. In summary, what the research seems to be showing is that low-level, pre-conscious brain activity is split by the callosotomy, but conscious experiences and actions that are based on separated stimuli to the two hemispheres are co-conscious in one unified mind.

The authors observe that this undermines two popular theories of consciousness—the global workspace theory and integrated information theory. They briefly mention the possibility of a quantum mechanical explanation but this is not tenable as the brain is a large, warm body that would quickly decohere any quantum superpositions over relevant distances across hemispheres.

de Haan et al. (2020) provide a useful review of this evolving experimental field as it was five years ago. Jordan Accardo (2023) has uploaded a very good introductory video, including an interview with Yaïr Pinto. And David Chalmers (2018) has uploaded a video of a debate with Yaïr Pinto, Elizabeth Schechter, and Joseph LeDoux.

The papers referenced below are very readable, and I would definitely urge you to take a look at them, as well as the two online videos.

Relevance

Why this neuropsychological is relevant to consciousness engineering is that it may corroborate the theory that I have been proposing in this series of posts.

My assertion is that the conscious mind is a non-physical, non-local information processing entity that exchanges information with its embodying object (be it a brain or a computer) via portals that are macromolecules uniquely tagged for the individual mind, which can go into conformational superposition that is collapsed by the conscious mind. The secondary hypothesis is that the actual macromolecule in human brains is a microtubule bound to DNA.

In the split-brain experiments, there is prima facie evidence that physical transmission of information between cerebral hemispheres has been blocked. Nevertheless the DNA in both hemispheres is obviously the same, so the molecular tagging of portals is the same. So, by hypothesis, the mind-brain portals in both hemispheres should map to the same mind. Which, apparently, they do.

In summary, what we have is:

• Experimental results with split-brain patients that lack a plausible physical explanation.

• A theory of non-local consciousness that, if true, might provide an explanatory framework for single consciousness in split-brain patients.

The renewed experimental investigation of mind localisation in split-brain patients is still nascent, and the results do not yet prove any model. Nonetheless, the theory of non-local consciousness is a contender and therefore worth developing further.

In my next post, I will consider anomalous communication between identical twins, who of course also share the same DNA.

References

Pinto et al. (2017): Yaïr Pinto, David A. Neville, Marte Otten, Paul M. Corballis, Victor A.F. Lamme, Edward H.F. de Haan, Nicoletta Foschi, Mara Fabri, “Split brain: divided perception but undivided consciousness”, Brain 140(5):1231–1237, May 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/aww358 (https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/5/1231/2951052)

de Haan et al. (2020): Edward H.F. de Haan, P.M. Corballis, S.A. Hillyard, C.A. Marzi, Anil Seth, V.A.F. Lamme, L. Volz, M. Fabri, Elizabeth Schechter, T. Bayne, M. Corballis, Yaïr Pinto, “Split-Brain: What We Know Now and Why This is Important for Understanding Consciousness”, Neuropsychological Review 30(2):224-233, June 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11065-020-09439-3.

Pinto et al. (2023): Yaïr Pinto, Maria-Chiara Villa, Sabrina Siliquini, Gabriele Polonara, Claudia Passamonti, Simona Lattanzi, Nicoletta Foschi, Mara Fabri, Edward H. F. de Haan (2023), “Visual integration across fixation: automatic processes are split but conscious processes remain unified in the split-brain”, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 17, 10 November 2023. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1278025 (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1278025/full)

Jordan Accardo (2023): “Split Brain Research: A Cautionary Tale of Sloppy Science”, Tangled Tangent, 10 June 2023, YouTube link below:

Chalmers et al. (2018). “Debate: ‘Do Split-Brain Patients Have Two Minds?’ (LeDoux, Pinto, Schechter)”, NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness, 25 October 2018, chaired by David Chalmers, with Yaïr Pinto, Elizabeth Schechter, and Joseph LeDoux. YouTube link:

In my preceding posts, I argued that the conscious mind is an autonomous, non-physical, non-local information-processing entity that interacts with its physical embodiment (be it a brain or a computer) via specific portals. But … how on Earth can something as nebulous as that possibly interface with a tangible brain?

The myth of causal closure

A large tranche of scientists and philosophers dismiss this whole concept because of the supposed causal closure of the physical world. This is a doctrine that has been deeply embedded in scientific thinking for about three centuries. It says that the only thing that can cause a physical event to occur is another physical event, or some combination of such events. Things don’t just happen by themselves. Underpinning this doctrine are two conservation laws: the conservation of mass-energy, and the conservation of momentum. These have been verified experimentally. For example, if my computer mouse were suddenly to jump off my desk for no physical reason, it would have magically gained kinetic energy and momentum. That would violate the conservation laws. So the mouse stays where it is.

If there were any processes that violate those conservation laws, in the brain or elsewhere, it is massively unlikely that they would have remained undetected.

Although the conservation laws are solid, the causal closure that is built upon them has two gaps:

• Collapse of the Schrödinger wave function following Born’s rule.

• Chaos-theoretic amplification of initial conditions.

Of these two, the former has received far more attention, and is probably the correct model for mind-brain portals. But I will also outline the latter gap because—who knows?—it might play a role.

Quantum-theoretic model

In classical mechanics—essentially the world as pictured by Sir Isaac Newton— the physical universe comprises a greater number of particles, each one possessing at all times a definite location and momentum. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, new experimental data showed that, at the smallest scale, this model cannot be valid. Instead, the physical world is now understood to be composed of wave functions, each of which is amenable to measurement operators that non-deterministically yield specific values of observables such as position, energy, momentum, charge, spin. The wave function defines the probability distribution of those specific values, but not the specific values themselves. Bell’s celebrated theorem proved that the those specific values are not in any way determined by any hidden mechanism. They are non-deterministic.

Those who believe in the dogma of causal closure often insist on misreading quantum mechanics, and they claim that the collapse of the wave function leads to a random outcome. It does not. What Born’s rule says is that the probability distribution of the outcome is determined by a defined formula applied to the wave function. The value that is observed on any given occasion is simply not determined. Not being determined does not mean being random. Being random is to be disordered, and to be completely random is to be devoid of any order. Unfortunately for the closure folks, complete disorder, hence complete randomness, is impossible (see. e.g. Prömel 2005). Quantum mechanics is silent about the degree of randomness in observed outcomes, and certainly cannot assert complete randomness: all it asserts is the probability distribution of the outcome. Experimentally, for sure, it has been show to a high degree of accuracy that the observed outcome is random, that is disordered, apart from the probability distribution itself. Indeed, this makes quantum mechanical random-number generators (RNGs) very reliable sources of random numbers. That randomness is not, however, guaranteed by the principles of quantum mechanics.

Therefore, it is legitimate to explore the possibility that the non-physical conscious mind could affect the observed outcome. There would seem to be three options:

1. The Born rule might simply not apply to the brain’s portals into consciousness. That is, the conscious mind changes the long-term probabilities of outcomes. This is implausible as it is a violation of a well-established law of physics.

2. The observed outcomes could exhibit short, meaningful deviations from randomness while maintaining long-term probabilities. So, in the midst of, say, a thousand otherwise random outcomes, there is a block of, fifty outcomes that were forced by the mind. In order to maintain the long-term probability distribution, the distribution would have to be adjusted slightly after the mental intervention. Say the outcome is denoted as 0 or 1 (representing alternative quantum states of the portal), and the overall probabilities are 50% and 50% for 0 and 1. Suppose that in the period of mental intervention, the frequencies are 50.1% for 0 and 49.9% for 1. Then the following period must have slightly more 0s to compensate. This is an inelegant model, as it implies some quite intelligent manipulation of the statistics. But it does not violate Born’s rule.

3. The Born rule could be temporarily overridden by the mind while the portal is conveying information between mind and brain. The long-term probabilities will deviate slightly, depending on the actual statistics during the period of intervention. This is an unhappy solution as it breaks a law of physics, but is not as unhappy as option 1, as it does not say there is some special piece of matter that is exempt form Born’s rule. Rather, we are saying that there is another component of reality, another law of nature, that supersedes the Born rule in defined circumstances.

None of these options are ‘happy paths’ but they are all falsifiable in Popper’s sense. When we have determined what exactly the portals are, we can examine the statistical behaviour of their observed outcomes during conscious activity. If the outcomes remain precisely random except for the Born probability distribution, then the theory is disproved. If all three options are disproved then this theoretical approach is invalid. For the record, my intuition says that option no. 3 is the right one.

Chaos-theoretic model

Let us briefly outline the second approach. This is inherently less plausible, and would be worth investigating only if the quantum mechanical approach were to be disproven.

Even in a wholly deterministic world, where the state of the universe at any moment is predetermined by its state at a preceding moment, there is a one gap: the initial conditions. Whenever we assign the ‘initial conditions’—at the Big Bang or whenever—those conditions lie outside causal closure because there is no antecedent state. Now, since we have not observed every fine detail of the universe, there will always be some sequelae of the initial conditions that have not been observed. In chaotic systems (such as the atmosphere, or the human brain), arbitrarily small micro-deviations can be amplified into macroscopic changes. So there are micro-states that have never been observed since the Big Bang, and therefore not subject to causal closure, which could nonetheless have an observable effect. Now, if a conscious mind were to tweak (by some means) these micro-states then it could have macroscopic effects. For example, there could be a particular micro-state of a micro-structure in the brain, that nobody has ever observed, whose state in the mathematically chaotic brain could determine a decision between two alternatives. The mind could change that mciro-state without bringing about any observable violation of the laws of physics.

There are many reasons to regard this as an inelegant theory. As a model of the mind-brain portal, it is less satisfactory than the quantum-mechanical model. So, let us park it as a candidate theory of how portals work. We should return to it only if the quantum-mechanical model fails.

(There is, incidentally, one phenomenon—retrokinesis—which would find a natural explanation in this chaotic theory. We will return to this much later, as there is a lot of fundamental theory to cover first.)

What are the portals?

We do not yet know what structures in the brain serve as mind-brain portals. We need to look closely at what clues we have.

Firstly, we know the portals must involve non-deterministic processes, and we are supposing that these processes are collapses of quantum-mechanical wave functions. That is, the brain asserts a signal to the mind by placing some structure into quantum superposition; and the mind replies by collapsing that wave function.

A significant clue lies in the obvious fact that my conscious mind interfaces with all parts of my brain, but not with anyone else’s brain. If I stand forehead-to-forehead with someone else, then the linear distance between our frontal lobes is less than that between from my frontal cortex and my occipital cortex. Yet, all the parts of my brain map to my conscious mind, not hers. Whatever the portal is, how does it know which mind it belongs to?

The physicalist, of course, will say that it is the brain connectivity that commits the brain portals to point to a particular mind. That is, if there is a neural connection between portal 1 and portal 2, then they will map to the same mind. That, however, is not plausible because any such connection will occur after the portals have done their communicating with the mind. Suppose a portal needs to tell its mind that light of wavelength 625 nm has impinged a particular part of the eye. How will it know which mind to send this data to? Relying on post hoc connectivity is not a coherent model. The identification of the target mind must be something inhering in the portal at the time of transmission.

So, we need a brain structure small enough to be put into quantum superposition in the midst of a thermally noisy brain, and which is common to all brain cells, but not shared by any other individuals, and contains a unique tag for that individual.

My suggestion would be a distinctive macromolecule such as DNA. Every neuron has the same DNA, but almost no other individual has it. But, as far as I know DNA does not have the wherewithal to do much computation on its own. The work of Hameroff and Penrose, however, has shown that microtubules do exhibit the level of computational ability that we would expect of a portal. And we know that microtubules do bind with the DNA molecule. So, here’s my wild speculation: the portal is constituted by the DNA molecule bound to a microtubule: the DNA acts as a tag to identify uniquely the conscious mind with which it is communicating, and the microtubule contains the data. The molecular combination is put into a superposition of conformal states, and the mind responds by collapsing its wave function into one or other of its states.

This model is very sketchy at the moment, and should be regarded only as an indicative illustration. Nevertheless I have a hunch that the correct solution is something along these lines.

What about identical twins? They have the same DNA but they do not share a mind. Nevertheless, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of apparent anomalous communication (otherwise known by the taboo term of ‘telepathy’). So, if I may continue with this wild speculation, we would have to suppose that something else is involved in data transmission across the mind-brain barrier. And what about split-brain patients? The two hemispheres of the brain obviously have the same DNA, yet experiments reveal that the sensory data and motor control are separated. Nevertheless some research by Pinto et al. (2016) paradoxically indicates a single consciousness with split sensorimotor data.

Cerebral rivalry

In my next post, I will explore whether ‘cerebral rivalry’ could explain how portals in twin brains, or in separated hemispheres, could map to the same conscious mind but not yield cross-accessible conscious awareness because of rivalry. I take this idea from the known concept of binocular rivalry: if your two eyes have different optical images, then your phenomenal visual field selects only one of them, and may switch between them. What if the same mechanism operates when two identical twins have incompatible sensory input through identically tagged portals? What if each twin’s mind normally aligns with one coherent set of sensorimotor data from one brain but occasionally there is a lapse and the rivalrous mental content slips in?

This is all very speculative and hand-waving at this stage, but we can be pretty sure that some kind of person-specific portal structure must be needed for mind-brain communication. In the absence of any other theories, let’s explore this one, and see whether we can derive a falsifiable working model out of it.

References:

Yair Pinto, David A. Neville, Marte Otten, Paul M. Corballis, Victor A.F. Lamme, Edward H.F. de Haan, Nicoletta Foschi, Mara Fabri (2016): ‘Split brain: divided perception but undivided consciousness’ in Brain. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/aww358

Prömel, H. (2005). Complete Disorder is Impossible: The Mathematical Work of Walter Deuber. Combinatorics, Probability and Computing, 14(1–2), 3-16. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963548304006674

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