The problem is that consciousness is being smuggled in at the point where the theory becomes uncomfortable.
The measurement problem does not say: mind is needed.
It says: our account of measurement is not clean.
Those are not the same.
What is happening here is not that quantum mechanics discovers consciousness at its core. Rather, idealism arrives first, then quantum mechanics is reread so that consciousness appears necessary. That may be philosophically interesting, but it should not be presented as something forced by physics.
A missing link is not yet a doorway. And a doorway is not yet proof that the self was waiting behind it.
I don’t think consciousness is being smuggled in. There are two distinct enterprises here: (a) mental monism, which has its own philosophical foundation that makes no mention of QM or any other specific physical theory. (b) QM, which has its own foundation in a mathematical formalism that provides an accurate account of empirical data. Each of these two enterprises is valid in its own right, and tells us something about reality. There is no necessary connection between them but … it so happens that QM has a problem, namely the measurement problem. Physics has no entirely satisfactory solution to this: CI has only a sketchy notion of consciousness collapsing wave functions; and MWI says consciousness either does not exist or is epiphenomenal. The formalism of QM makes no mention of the conscious mind as an entity and in fact lacks the vocabulary to say anything about CS. But, hey, look, if we embed QM in a mental monist framework we have a possible solution to the measurement problem. There are lot of details to be figured out, but it looks to me like we’re on the right road.
The deeper problem is that the origin of the distinction is left untouched.
The measurement problem is already articulated inside a prior cut: system versus observer, evolution versus outcome, physical versus mental, possibility versus actuality. Once that cut is accepted, consciousness can be introduced as a candidate solution.
But then consciousness is not reaching the origin of the problem. It is arriving after the cut and being promoted backward into the position of origin.
That is the danger with mental monism. It may look like it goes deeper than physics, but it often preserves the inherited split by choosing one side of it and calling that side fundamental.
“Mind” is not innocent here. It already carries the grammar of subject, experience, observation, inwardness, and ownership. So when mind is made fundamental, the prior structure is not dissolved. It is smuggled into the foundation.
The question is therefore not simply whether consciousness collapses the wavefunction. The question is what made “consciousness,” “collapse,” and “wavefunction” appear as separate terms that then had to be reconciled.
Without that, the origin remains outside the account, while a late concept is made to behave like the beginning.
You seem to be still regarding the physical world as the primary reality, and consciousness as a weird, speculative thing that is concocted and dragged in to solve the measurement problem.
Other way round. Consciousness is what we directly encounter and is therefore our primary reality. Our conscious experiences show certain regularities and we concoct QM as a formalism that works very well but leaves a gap where measurement happens. Meanwhile mental monism needs a mechanism for volition to act in the physical construct. Well conscious collapse of quantum superpositions solves both problems. Neat! It all fits together nicely.
I don’t know what you mean by the ‘origin of the distinction’.
I would go even further. I am not only questioning whether matter or consciousness is primary. I am questioning whether “experience” and “appearing” are already too late to function as origin.
When we say “what we directly encounter is experience,” we have already named, stabilized, and distinguished something. We have already introduced a minimal grammar of appearing: something appears, it appears as experience, and it is available to be called direct.
That may be unavoidable. We have to speak. But then “experience” should not be treated as an innocent starting point. It is already a late term. It is already the origin made legible after the fact.
So mental monism may be deeper than physicalism, but it still begins too late if it treats consciousness or experience as the primary reality. It reverses the hierarchy between mind and matter, but it does not yet question the emergence of that hierarchy, nor the belated vocabulary in which it is described.
My point is not that matter comes before consciousness.
My point is that even “consciousness,” “experience,” and “appearing” arrive after the cut that lets them be named.
In the Advaita Vedanta, Brahman precedes conscious experience. But, for the present discussion we do not need to go so deeply. Conscious experience is the relevant starting point
If Brahman precedes conscious experience, then conscious experience is already not the deepest origin. It is a relevant starting point, not the starting point.
That is fine. But then the claim must stop pretending to be foundational.
“For this discussion we do not need to go so deeply” is methodologically acceptable, but metaphysically dangerous. Because the whole argument depends on treating conscious experience as primary enough to reframe physics.
You cannot make consciousness deep enough to solve the measurement problem, and then make it shallow enough to avoid the question of its own origin.
That is the tension.
Conscious experience may be the nearest point of departure. But the nearest is not the first. And a useful beginning is not yet an origin.
I found the idea in this article appealing, although I have a few questions.
If the conscious mind collapses the wave function and selects collapse outcomes, then there must be some rule for how it does this. Is the selection passive, or is it a volitional act?
If it is passive, then it seems to depend on some structure outside the individual conscious act. If it is volitional, then there must be some coordinating rule that keeps different minds’ selections consistent with the same shared macro-world, except perhaps in special cases like micro-telekinesis. The existence of such constraints suggests that the process is not fully explained by consciousness alone.
But those outcomes also have to remain in line with the symmetries and laws of space and time. So even if consciousness does select collapse outcomes, the fact that the outcomes are stable, lawful, and shared points to consciousness still operating within a larger structure.
And if consciousness is only choosing among already allowed physical states, then what difference does conscious selection make from a physical collapse process that already selects one of those states?
Now, regarding your more specific question about consistency of choices over time: There are multiple points here.
In perception, it appears that we normally have no choice in selecting the collapse outcome. So, let’s say you are periodically looking at a digital Geiger counter near a radioactive source that emits a particle on average every 5 minutes. Every 5 minutes you take a peek. On the von Neumann model, just before you peek, the wave function of the apparatus is in a superposition of 50% the meter reads the same as last time, and 50% the meter has incremented by +1. (Assume for simplicity no more than one atom decays.) This puts your visual cortex, and hence your mind-brain portals into a superposition. The you peek and your mind executes a measurement of your portal (DNA, for instance). So, your conscious mind collapses that superposition. Normally, we cannot voluntarily choose. So it appears random. (We may think of it as an ‘act of God’, but see that earlier post on Free Will.) According to parapyschologists, some people can choose the selected collapse outcome, with about 15% success. Well, it could be. The mind could be trained to choose outcomes that it normally leaves to ‘chance’.
In volition, it is different. Now we are in the motor cortex, and the mind is accustomed to not only collapsing the superposition but also selecting the outcome. This is how we do voluntary actions, such as typing. But the mind cannot initiate a superposition: there is nothing in QM to allow systems to enter superposition spontaneously. The mind has to act upon a superposition that the brain has already prepared.
So, those are the two collapsing scenarios. Now, in the case of voluntary action, you say “it seems to depend on some structure outside the individual conscious act … some coordinating rule that keeps different minds’ selections consistent with the the same shared macro-world”. Yes, absolutely - that is done by the metamind. In any version of idealism (except phenomenalist idealism), there has to be some background conscious mind that is responsible for maintaining the manifest world - all the actions that are not under the control of personal volition. In the Berkeleyan model, the metamind (Berkeley’s God) comprises a great many ‘archetypes’ which define how to render macroscopic objects in our perceptions. If you take a voluntary action that leaves a mark (eg publishing a SubStack post) then the corresponding archetype will be updated and other minds will see the result. The logical relations are very much akin to how a VR game words. Different players act via their avatars in the virtual world, and traces of their actions are recorded in the computer database. From there, the changes are rendered into other players’ screens.
I am not sure what your concern is in the final paragraph. Consider this schematic example: Suppose that as a result of some neurophysical processes, the brain is about to hit RETURN on a webform, but is undecided. It places some portal into a superposition: in one state, the DNA will release a sequestered protein that is transported to the axonal synapse, and the neuron fires and (assume this happens to a number of neurons) the hand presses RETURN; in the other state, the DNA does not release that protein, the neuron does not fire, and the hand does not hit RETURN. Both of those two chains of action are physically legitimate (otherwise they could not have become superposed states), but the two states will remain superposed until the mind measures the quantum state and collapses the superposition.
You mention “a physical collapse process that already selects one of those states”, but there is no such collapse process. The superposition will remain in force until a conscious mind collapses it, just like von Neumann said. There is no ‘time-out’ for superposition. But the human mind will shift its attention. Let’s say your finger is hovering over the RETURN key, as you are undecided, but after a while you decide that you’re not going to do it right now, and you collapses into the no-action branch. Other minds can also collapse the superposition. If someone walks into the room, and sees that you didn’t collapse the superposition, s/he will collapse it at random. Sounds weird, but I think that is how it has to be.
I appreciate the ambition of unifying perception, volition, and collapse under a single mechanism. That instinct is exactly right.
One thought from my own work: collapse doesn’t require a nonphysical substance, only a recursive selection process. In other words, consciousness doesn’t “cause” collapse — consciousness is the resolution of potential into actual.
That frame avoids the metaphysical load while preserving the explanatory power. It treats collapse as an architectural boundary condition rather than an intervention.
Your model and mine seem to be circling the same territory from different angles, and I’m enjoying the convergence
Sorry, I don’t know what you mean by the phrase “recursive selection process” in this context. Selection of what - branches of the wave function? But any such process is additional to Schroedinger’s wave function so either you are inventing new physics (congratulations!) or bringing in something nonphysical (the only candidate being consciousness). I’m not seeing a third option here.
“Resolution of potential into actual” - I am not seeing how this relates to the physics. In standard QM, there is an actual wave function that actually splits into actual branches that actually contain actual brains. In Von Neumann QM an actual consciousness collapses those branches. I am not seeing any potentials.
BTW I am not positing consciousness as a candidate explanatory mechanism for quantum measurement. I am saying we start with consciousness as a basic empirical given, derive mental monism from it, notice as an empirical datum that we exercise free will, infer that the consciousness must work its volitions via quantum collapse, and then apply that to the measurement problem as well. It’s the reverse of what I think you think I think.
decoherence explains why we don’t observe superposition at macroscopic scales, but doesn’t explain why one outcome rather than another is registered by a specific observer.
Where I’d diverge is on the conclusion. The measurement problem may not require consciousness to cause collapse, it may require us to rethink what collapse is.
If the atemporal structure contains all outcomes simultaneously as definite branches, the observer doesn’t select an outcome. The observer finds itself correlated with a branch that was already definite. The Born Rule becomes self-locating probability, not the universe deciding, but the observer discovering where in the finished structure they are.
Consciousness remains central, not as a physical cause of collapse, but as the only thing for which the question “which branch am I on?” is even meaningful.
The hard part of the measurement problem isn’t what selects the outcome. It’s why any structure, collapsed or not, gives rise to a particular experience at all. That’s where consciousness enters, not at the quantum level, but at the ontological one.
I need to spend a lot more time with this to fully comprehend, but feels pertinent to my literary exploration of similar terrain. I had come across Cucu a few years ago and had scribbled a rough summary: 'wave function collapse offers no refuge for the dualist mind, conservation laws crumble, conceptual tangles proliferate, and the interaction problem persists, leaving dualism still in search of a coherent account of mental causation within the natural order.' Playfully, I might say, is it nature as a closed system vs an open system.
Much appreciation for your work on this, and especially for your generous way of responding to the challenges in replies.
Cucu presents a potentially serious challenge, for sure, but there has to be a solution to it, otherwise consciousness would be epiphenomenal. We’d all be suffering from an extreme version of locked-in syndrome, perceiving the world but unable to act, not even to blink voluntarily. I’ll have to make time for a deep dive into Cucu’s ingenious and lucid paper and find its hidden flaw.
Very interesting post, thank you. Paul Dirac regarded quantum theory as "provisional" until we find something better, but it's exactly 100 years since we obtained the Schrodinger equation and we're still using it. That provisional theory is still the best we've got; and plenty remains to be unpacked.
I think John Wheeler's "It from Bit" argument is the way to go, it remains the most succinct statement of the whole mind/body issue. I'm planning a story on it when I have time.
Please take a look at my own take on quantum consciousness, we are on the same page. There are a couple of distractions before I get to it, but I had to set the scene. I mention Rudolf Steiner -- another article I'm planning is on how Steiner produced the exact form of Schrodinger's equation seven years before Schrodinger did. It's a second-order diffusion equation, with an imaginary coefficient that Steiner says captures the properties of light.
Thanks Fred. Wheeler's notion that the universe is participatory is undoubtedly right. But IMHO Wheeler is not thinking far enough outside the box with his proposal that the reality is built up from information. He needs a concrete foundation for reality, but information cannot serve that purpose, only conscious experience can.
Information seems to have acquired a certain amount of mystique, with people from Wheeler to Chalmers attributing magical powers to it. Information is just an artefact of our description of the world. No more, no less. Let's say I were to give you a data file with 8,760 integers and no annotation. Is that information? If so, what information? Are they stock prices, temperature measurements, random numbers, video game scores? The meaning of the supposed information depends entirely on what use they are intended for. And the question of whether they constitute information or not also depends on how they were produced, and their intention. Maybe the numbers are just junk.
The standard response is, "No, it's not that kind of information, it's ... it's *Information*!" with a special, hushed intonation of the word "information" as if it's an incantation for the Holy Spirit. I have yet to see any coherent definition of this mystical cousin of plain vanilla information.
"But," they go on, "surely we can measure information, so it must be real!" Nope. The 'measurement' of information in bits is again something that humans construct and slap onto an existing reality.
Information is of the same ontological nature as the physical world: a construct grounded in a formal system that has been concocted by humankind to encode the observed regularities of the manifest world. It is not any more or less fundamental than the physical world. All such theories have to cash out in conscious observation, otherwise they are pure fictions. So, consciousness is the bedrock of reality. Not information. But idealism was too far out of Wheeler's comfort zone.
(Just to be clear, this is in no way intended to belittle Wheeler's towering status as a physicist. But, like many physicists, he thought that philosophy was a parlour game for Sunday afternoons. Only a minority of thinkers, such as the late Michael Lockwood, recognised that physics and philosophy are both challenging and rigorous disciplines that have to work together.)
Blessed morning read .. will revisit again to grasp its depth fully🫶🏻Thankyou for doing justice to this read🙏🏻writer blessed the reader, with enriched write up☺️
Well written paper, especially the overview of past and recent research on the subject. I also find the conjectured connection between quantum mechanics and consciousness the most plausible scientific theory.
However, I would disagree with the claim that the collapse of the wavefunction requires consciousness or a mind. Sean Carroll’s observation on this point is sound. Most physicists dismiss the Wigner/von Neumann interpretation precisely because nothing in quantum mechanics indicates such a role for consciousness. However puzzling the collapse may be (e.g., the measurement problem), it is clear that it occurs continuously throughout the universe without any observer explicitly "observing," "measuring" or "thinking." I have discussed this in more detail here: https://quantumworld.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-observer-effect-in
Moreover, experiments involving random number generators or studies by Dean Radin and others on the double-slit experiment do not, in my view, establish that the mind plays a role in quantum processes. Even if we accept their results (and, as you know, these experiments remain highly debated and controversial) they could equally suggest some form of psychokinetic influence independently form whatever "collapses," and not necessarily one specific to quantum systems. Such an effect could, in principle, extend equally to small classical objects. To my knowledge, these studies have not conclusively ruled out that possibility.
I also found the proposed resolution of the “perception problem” that a non-physical conscious mind “picks up” sensory input too nebulous. At one point, you refer to a “non-physical conscious mind” that "detects" macromolecules in superposition and then collapses the wavefunction. However, if the mind is non-physical, it is unclear how it could “detect” or “pick up” macromolecules and wavefunctions, which are themselves physical entities. This part would benefit from much greater conceptual clarity. I take it that you are referring to the longstanding interaction problem (or the problem of mental causation), which has been extensively debated since the times of Descartes, and would need to be addressed more explicitly here. It would be useful to engage with existing discussions in the literature, there are, for instance, several relevant references in Cucu’s bibliography.
Overall, this is an attempt that, in my view, moves in the right direction. However, I believe it would benefit from further elaboration to increase its impact.
Thanks for these thoughtful remarks and questions.
First of all, I would point out that the background context for this post is idealism. Of the two papers that I have submitted to the journal, the first one is a defence of idealism, and the second one addresses the question: if idealism is true, then precisely how does the personal mind interact with the ‘physical construct’, which is the (virtual) physical world with which we are familiar? This post is an excerpt from the tail end of the latter paper. Most of what is in that second paper has been covered in my previous SubStack posts. So, this one is meant to build upon that background.
Now, if one is a physicalist then for sure one is not going to consider that wave functions are collapsed by consciousness. Instead, one would follow Carroll down the road to the Many Worlds Interpretation. In a universe without consciousness there is no strong objection to MWI. There is, to be sure, a Popperian credibility problem with positing intrinsically unobservable universes, but there’s nothing actually wrong with MWI in that context.
Epiphenomenal property dualists (eg Chalmers pre-2021) are in the same boat.
If, however, one accepts the common sense fact that the conscious mind can affect the physical world, then those positions are untenable. For people who are not committed to physicalism and don’t know what to make of consciousness, the notion of conscious collapse of wave functions might seem intuitively appealing. But, as you indicate, the pioneers of QM had no model of consciousness or how it could possibly affect the wave function. So that’s not much of a theory, right? Physicists were caught between a rock and a hard place: MWI is outrageous, but CI involves the mystery of consciousness. No wonder they adopted ‘shut up and calculate’.
The quantum measurement problem is *not* a reason to adopt idealism. The argument for idealism is philosophical, not quantum mechanical, and I give a detailed presentation of it in the first paper.
But .. *if* one has adopted idealism (or substance dualism) on philosophical grounds, *then* consciousness collapsing the wave function is the only credible way that the conscious mind is going to be active in the world. I don’t think that that statement is controversial, and I hope you’d agree with it.
“I would disagree with the claim that the collapse of the wavefunction requires consciousness or a mind. Sean Carroll’s observation on this point is sound.”
I’m a bit confused by this, as Carroll emphatically denies that wave functions ever collapse. He is a committed Everettian, and says that in a quantum measurement, the universe’s wave function branches. Owing to decoherence, there is negligible interaction between branches, so we can think of the branches as worlds. Now, this is a completely deterministic theory: there is no scope whatever for free will as it is normally understood. Carroll tries to finesse his way out of this by some kind of compatibilism that is IMHO B.S. Carroll is also adamant that consciousness is an emergent property of brains and not part of fundamental reality. What is funny here is that Carroll baulks at the inevitable consequence of this position, which is Tegmark’s crazy notion that the universe is a mathematical structure and that all possibilities are equally real. (The podcast with Carroll and Tegmark was total ROFLMAO material. Carroll wants to cling to the notion that we are in a real world, but refuses the only lifeline available to him, which is to accept that ultimately the whole of physics has to be cashed out in conscious experience.) But I digress.
“Most physicists dismiss the Wigner/von Neumann interpretation precisely because nothing in quantum mechanics indicates such a role for consciousness”
I don’t think that’s right. The Born rule is part of QM and it clearly indicates a role for an ‘observer’. It just doesn’t define clearly what an ‘observer’ is, just the vague notion of a conscious physicist.
“it is clear that it occurs continuously throughout the universe without any observer explicitly "observing," "measuring" or "thinking."”
I really don’t know what you mean by this. You seem to be saying that there are wave functions collapsing all over the place without an observer. Surely not! According to QM, the unobserved universe is happily evolving smoothly in accordance with the Schroedinger wave function. Did you mean that decoherence is happening all over the place? Sure, but that’s a different thing. That’s not a collapse, and nobody ever said decoherence needs an observer. Collapse needs an ‘observer’, whatever idea you might have of that, but decoherence doesn’t.
I agree that Radin’s experiments do not establish cause-and-effect of mind over matter. They *do* establish statistical anomalies, even sceptics such as Hyman acknowledge this. But there is a big jump from that to telekinesis. What I explicitly wrote was *if* telekinesis is real *then* idealism could offer a naturalistic model of how it works. (Of course, you may infer that I at least take the possibility of telekinesis seriously, otherwise why would I even bring it up! My motivation for this is that the conscious mind exercises micro-telekinesis on the brain whenever we perform a voluntary action. So we know it can be done, and reliably so. Since there is nothing magical in the brain, I see no reason why the mind could not do the same trick in vitro. Whether or not that is what is actually happening in lab telekinesis experiments, I really don’t know. But it could be!)
You suggest that, if telekinesis is real, it could have a classical explanation. Well, yes, until we know the answer, we can’t rule out anything. But AFAIK there is no credible theory of how that could work without breaking physical laws. My hope is that the QM model of micro-telekinesis will be robustly proven, but who knows?
Having said that, I have to admit I have no solid theory of macro-telekinesis. Jack Sarfatti introduced me to Uri Geller and I saw him bending a spoon, without touching it, a foot from my nose. It’s known and admitted that Geller sometimes used magic tricks in stage performances. I can’t see how this could be a trick, but I have no expertise in this area. I have in the past suggested a possible mechanism for this within idealism, but it’s too wild and speculative to mention here.
Regarding perception - yes, absolutely, more clarity and detail is needed for this, and some more clarity is in the full paper. I’ll post another excerpt tonight which will at least indicate an answer to your question of how a nonphysical mind can detect the state of a physical wave function.
And re Cucu’s bibliography - yes, absolutely, lots of interesting stuff there. I wish I had come across his paper earlier!
Let's focus on the collapse of the wf. By "collapse," one refers to the fact that, after decoherence has effectively selected a preferred eigenbasis (yes, the quantum system is still in superposition,) only one of the possible eigenstates is ultimately observed in an experiment, that is, the system appears in a definite state. One might object: “Aha! You see? Someone is making a measurement, that is, an observation. Therefore, a conscious mind must be involved, causing the collapse." But this inference is unwarranted. It conflates two distinct notions: measurement as a physical interaction and observation as conscious awareness. In quantum mechanics, an "observation" need not involve consciousness, it can equally be any physical interaction, for example, a cosmic ray interacting with a system in superposition, or a photon passing through a double slit and striking a detection screen. It is true that decoherence alone does not fully explain the emergence of a single, definite outcome. However, this points to an incompleteness in our theoretical account, not to the necessity of invoking consciousness. When a photon interacts with a detector, it produces a localized event, a pixel activation on the screen. This event is not merely decoherence, it corresponds to what we operationally describe as collapse. And such collapse occurs regardless of whether any observer is present in the laboratory to witness it. In this sense, a "measurement" can be carried out entirely by non-conscious physical systems, say a CCD detector or a photo diode. The detector "clicks" also without the physicists present hearing it clicking (think of a Geiger counter). Nothing in quantum mechanics requires an appeal to consciousness. Likewise, the Born Rule is a statistical postulate stating that the probability of obtaining a given outcome-which means a certain event not necessarily tied to an observation of a conscious mind-is given by the squared modulus of the wavefunction (or state vector), it makes no reference to "a role for an observer".
With respect, I don’t think you are describing quantum physics correctly. I believe it is universally accepted that the Schroedinger wave function evolves smoothly and deterministically with no jumps. If a system that is in superposition interacts with another system, they will be entangled and the resulting entangled system will also be in superposition. There is nothing contentious about this, it is basic QM. So, in the two-slit experiment, when the wave (photon, electron, whatever) hits the screen, the screen goes into a superposition of all the places the wave could manifest a particle. When the experimenter looks at the screen, her brain will likewise go into superposition. According to MWI, that superposition will last indefinitely; according to CI, that superposition will last until the mysterious ’observer’ takes a peek.
You are saying something different. You are saying that when the wave reaches the screen, it straight away collapses into one spot. That is not what QM says. The only description given by QM is the Schroedinger wave function, which has no mechanism for collapse. The screen *must* go into superposition. Likewise the experimenter’s brain. This is not some crazy speculative notion, it is bog-standard QM.
Now, you could say that the wave function collapses on impact with the screen, but (a) you would have to invent your own version of QM because standard QM demands that the screen go in to superposition. And (b) there is no way you could determine experimentally what the unobserved system is doing before observation because that would be an observation! As von Neumann told us, the superposition is there until the ‘schnit’ or ‘cut’, when the ‘observation’ happens and the superposition collapses. You are proposing that the Schroedinger wave function is wrong, and somehow you know that it is already collapsed before the human observer looks at the screen. Well maybe you are right and QM is wrong! But how could you tell? If you want to confirm your new theory that the wave function collapses before it is observed by a human then .. you will have to observe it before anybody (including you) observes it, which is a contradiction.
I shan’t comment on the rest of your comment, because it all rests on this assumption, which I believe is contrary to QM.
What you have done, in effect, is to restate the measurement problem and then jump to a conclusion that almost no physicist shares. It is well known that the formalism of quantum mechanics contains a "missing link": the unitary evolution governed by the Schrödinger equation appears to require, at some stage, a non-unitary update associated with measurement. If this were not the case, there would be no "measurement problem" to begin with. However, the history of science cautions against drawing strong ontological conclusions from the problems or incompleteness of a theory. The fact that von Neumann introduced the projection (collapse) postulate for pragmatic reasons does not compel us to attribute any causal role to consciousness or to human minds. Likewise, the idea that, when an experimenter observes a result, the entire brain becomes entangled in superposition is a formal consequence of the linear structure of quantum mechanics, not necessarily a literal description of physical reality. Treating it as such is an interpretive step, not an established fact. One can, of course, adopt the Wigner–von Neumann interpretation, but it is widely regarded as an extreme option, precisely because it introduces conceptual commitments that are difficult to make sense of and are not required by the empirical content of the theory.
So, you really believe that Schrödinger’s cat is literally both dead and alive until someone opens the box? Or, in a more animal-friendly case, you really believe that interference fringes in the double-slit experiment come into being only at the instant someone looks at the detection screen? Should we really believe that if I run a double-slit experiment and step out from the experimental room for a coffee, the entire apparatus really evolves into a superposition of bazillions of macroscopic states simply because no one is observing it? There are even more extreme consequences of this line of reasoning, consider early cosmology: quantum fluctuations in the first moments after the Big Bang determined the large-scale structure of the universe. The cosmic microwave background still carries the imprint of these fluctuations, which through decoherence AND collapse gave rise, billions of years ago, to the distribution of matter we observe today. Because, in the absence of collapse, no definite structure could arise. Do you really want to claim that, instead, there was no collapse and none of this became definite, the whole structure of the universe came into being only once a conscious observer eventually pointed a telescope at the sky? If not, then the appeal to consciousness as the cause of collapse needs to be reconsidered. If, instead, you truly hold such a view, it leads to consequences that are at least as counterintuitive, arguably more so than the MWI. In fact, it risks collapsing into a position that is structurally similar to it, and framed in anthropocentric terms.
In any case, I have never come across a university textbook on qm that speaks of "the role to the observer" or invokes "consciousness" or "mind" to describe qm (unless it describes the plethora of interpretations and comes across Wigner-von Neumann one). Physicists do not agree on any single interpretation. However, be aware that the overwhelming majority would agree that nothing in quantum mechanics forces us to such an interpretation that is far more popular in mainstream media than it is among those who have actually studied qm, and that enjoys even less support than the MWI.
There are several problems here. The following sentence appears to be a rebuttal of the most successful theory that physics has concocted, namely quantum mechanics.
“The idea that, when an experimenter observes a result, the entire brain becomes entangled in superposition is a formal consequence of the linear structure of quantum mechanics, not necessarily a literal description of physical reality.”
A physics theory is just a formal system of equations. So, to say that QM’s formal predictions are wrong is to say that QM is wrong. Well, QM is not a scripture: any of us is free to challenge it, but we might reasonably expect either a solid theoretical demonstration of a flaw, or some exciting new experimental results that contradict QM. So, it’s a tad disappointing that you simply declare that a significant part of what QM tells us is wrong, with apparently no justification. The smoothly evolving Schroedinger wave is a central pillar of QM. To say that this function collapses when it encounters a detection device is a direct contradiction of QM. The theory is absolutely clear that the device will be entangled and will enter into superposition. There is no way that a measurement device can force an unphysical jump of the Schroedinger wave. Both von Neumann and followers of MWI, such as Sean Carroll, agree that the measuring device and the brain of the experimenter go into superposition. Von Neumann says it collapses when the chain of entanglement reaches the mysterious conscious observer in the brain, while MWI says it stays in superposition in perpetuity.
“So, you really believe that Schrödinger’s cat is literally both dead and alive until someone opens the box?”
That is a straw-man mischaracterisation of what QM says. The wave function of an isolated box containing the unfortunate cat is indeed in a superposition of the two states. That is the physical reality until the interior of the box is observed. That is what QM says, and I believe QM because it has been shown to be highly accurate. To say that the cat itself is dead and alive is nonsense. Until the wave function collapses into an actual cat, either dead or alive, there is no cat, just a wave function for a cat. This may seem weird at first, but you soon get used to it.
“Should we really believe that if I run a double-slit experiment and step out from the experimental room for a coffee, the entire apparatus really evolves into a superposition of bazillions of macroscopic states simply because no one is observing it?”
It is nothing to do with belief. It’s what QM very plainly says. One must either accept QM or come up with a better theory.
“Do you really want to claim that, instead, there was no collapse and none of this became definite, the whole structure of the universe came into being only once a conscious observer eventually pointed a telescope at the sky?”
Same question, same answer. It is apparent that you find QM uncomfortable, but that is not grounds for ditching a theory that is so successful. Nor for cherry-picking the bits you are comfortable with.
QM as it has been practised has had no need to include any terms for ‘the observer’ because there is never an observer in the system being studied. So it adopts a kind of solipsistic stance. Wigner’s friend would be an embarrassment to that stance, but unfortunately that’s not a practical experiment to conduct. The experiment of Renne & Frauchiger, however, takes us closer to blowing a hole in the pseudo-solipsistic hokum that passes for the conventional wisdom of QM physicists.
So, you genuinely seem to believe that, if someone were to place you inside Schrödinger's cat's box with the radioactive setup, you, Peter B. Lloyd, would exist in a superposition of states, and even that you "don't exist, there is just a wave function for Peter B. Lloyd," until I, Marco Masi, open the box and observe the outcome and you collapses into an actual human being.
Ok, I see....
That's not how I read qm, nor is it how the majority of physicists understand it. What you are presenting is an interpretation, not an unavoidable conclusion of the theory. Qm itself includes a projection postulate and an unresolved measurement problem, both of which signal an incompleteness (as quantum field theory is much more obviously incomplete as well; incompleteness does not mean that the theory is fundamentally wrong or that it is rebutted) and, thereby, don't force us to such conclusion. The empirical success of qm (and even more so of qft) does not justify extrapolating its formal structure in the way you propose. There are alternative interpretations that address these issues without invoking the Wigner/von Neuman or MWI and that, in my view, are considerably more plausible.
Anyway, at this point it is a matter of philosophical preference... de gustibus... ;) ... I have collected sufficient pro & contra arguments to understand your position. Thank you for the clarification.
Ah, now you’ve opened another can of worms, which is labelled “Wigner’s Friend”. Certainly there are those who would say that I would indeed be in a superposition inside the box. My former tutor, the late Michael Lockwood, was adamant that that would be the case. As is Sean Carroll. But I disagree. I believe my conscious mind would collapse the wave function already, inside the box. Contradiction with the observer outside the box (you, in this case) would be avoided because the consciousness per se is numerically identical in all conscious observers. This is a solution also advanced by Professor Daniel Kolak and, curiously enough, matches the mystical doctrine of the Advaita Vedanta, in which the Atman is numerically identical to the Brahman.
But I sense you rolling your eyes, so I will stop here.
So, do you then assume that cats are not conscious? Otherwise, on what grounds do you ascribe to yourself the privilege of collapsing the wf while denying it to other living beings? Or would dogs, or chimpanzees, also qualify as agents of collapse? The position sounds rather anthropocentric.
As for Wigner's friend, it strikes me as little more than a more elaborate restatement of the measurement problem. I do not see in it anything fundamentally new or surprising. If one removes the projection postulate, obviously paradoxes naturally arise, such as two observers furnishing different accounts of the same phenomenon, but that simply reflects the unresolved status of the theory (BTW, Wigner later distanced himself from this view).
Moreover, your position appears difficult to reconcile with Advaita Vedanta. On that view, it would not be an individual ego-centric mind that collapses the wf, but rather Brahman, or Brahman as expressed through Atman. I infer that you didn't read my article on the "observer myth." There I describe how the collapse of the wf does not require an individual consciousness, but could instead be understood much better in terms of the action of a universal mind. That framework is considerably more plausible and does not lead to the kinds of problematic consequences we discussed.
In fact, wf collapse appears to be an ubiquitous universal phenomenon. The world presents itself in definite states, and there is no compelling reason to think that only the conscious observation of a single localized individual can bring all this about, also whatever kind of physical interactions can. For example, when a cosmic ray interacts with a qubit in superposition, it can induces decoherence AND drives the system into a definite state, which becomes source of errors and the need of complicated error correction procedures. But, I guess, you would claim that errors in a quantum computer pop into existence only when someone is actively observing it...
The more I examine this interpretation, the less tenable it appears to me.
One is, of course, free to maintain such interpretation. Just as others are free to adopt (in my view equally untenable) standpoints such as the MWI or superdeterminism. However, as it stands, the "ego-centric" von Neumann/Wigner conjecture neither seems necessary nor particularly coherent, and it is certainly not mandated by qm itself.
Re cats’n’dogs : I was just referencing Schroedinger’s original argument, in which he apparently deemed cats to be insentient. According to a claim by Sean Carroll, Schroedinger’s daughter said he really didn’t like cats as a species. Others claim it was only his aunt’s cat he didn’t like. Whatever. I live with two cats and a dog and I am confident that all three brains embody conscious minds that could collapse a quantum superposition. I find this aspect of Schroedinger’s thought-experiment distasteful, but it’s an experiment that is familiar to everyone and has an unstated premise that cats are insentient. So, it’s a convenient point of reference.
Nevertheless, it is an important question you raise: do the following objects embody conscious minds and can they collapse a wave function? A sleeping human? An earthworm? A bacterium? A virus? A DNA molecule in vitro? A robot? Someone doing remote viewing? If, as I am claiming, the collapse is an objective event then it must be an empirical question whether these entities could collapse a wave function by performing an observation. Or does the earthworm just go into superposition as the measuring device does?
This is a valid question that idealism must answer if it is to develop a fleshed-out theory of mind-brain interaction.
If the mental ‘archetype’ of an object (to use Berkeley’s terminology) is like a miniature mind, then why can’t the archetype of a measuring device collapse the wave function?
This looks to me like an empirical question that might not be answerable from first principles. And it’s not a question that idealists (or substance dualists) can brush under the carpet.
In my latest Substack post, I suggest that superposition is represented in the mental domain by an archetype that encodes in some phenomenal form all the information of the density matrix. Here’s my suggestion: objects that are agentic, which can exercise volition, do not use the power of superposition. Why? Here’s a wild guess: maybe the ability to collapse the wave function of the world confers a competitive advantage to organisms? Organisms that go with flow, and go along with whatever environmental superpositions they find themselves in, have less control over their avatars and environments. The acquisition of the power of quantum collapse would, on this view, be a major milestone in genotypic evolution.
Sorry if this is rambling a bit .. I’d not thought about these ramifications before. This needs a lot more thought. Thanks for prompting me to address this key question.
Do you know the Jung-Pauli conjecture of dual aspect monism (nowadays defended by Harald Atmanspacher)? As far as I understand your archetype and metamind approach, this seem to reflect a similar idea. You might also like to check Joachim Keppler ZPF theory and Itay Shani's cosmopsychism.
My question is: does the metamind influence only brains and the living realm, or does it possess also a causal efficacy on inanimate objects?
"decoherence explains why we don’t observe superposition at macroscopic scales"
-- yes, agreed.
"but doesn’t explain why one outcome rather than another is registered by a specific observer."
-- Well, that depends on which interpretation one has adopted.
* In MWI, there is no concept of a 'quantum observer', and an observing brain will register all the possible outcomes, because the brain will itself be entangled and go into whatever set of superpositioned states the measured system had. Each branch of the universal wave function will have a version of the brain, detecting one of the possible outcomes.
* In von Neumann's interpretation, the conscious observer will collapse all those branches into one, but it offers no explanation of how the resulting outcome is chosen. (Which is why respectable physicists get the heebie-jeebies when they look at the Copenhagen interpretation.)
"The observer finds itself correlated with a branch that was already definite. The Born Rule becomes self-locating probability, not the universe deciding, but the observer discovering where in the finished structure they are."
Well, this is a possible way of looking at the problem. But it is not clear what kind of a thing the 'observer' is.
* In a physicalist framework, consciousness is not part of fundamental reality, which in plain terms means that conscious minds don't exist. On that view, there cannot be any 'observer discovering where in the finished structure they are'. There is just the Schroedinger wave function and its many branches, and each version of of your brain measures what happens in its own branch of the universal wavefunction.
* But you are adopting a realist view of consciousness, so you are proposing a model in which the physical universe does its thing and divides into an infinity of branches, but the conscious mind bounces around like a pinball, and finds itself landing in one the branches of the universal wave function.
Fine, but then you have a comparable (and IMHO worse) problem, not the collapse problem but the selection problem: how does the pinball conscious mind end up in a particular branch? It seems you don't want to suppose that the mind *chooses* a branch, so there must be some 'force' that pushes the mind into one branch rather than another. Even if you suppose that the mind ends up in one branch rather than another by chance, you still need a mechanism of some sort that does the pushing. A new physical phenomenon? A mind? The hand of God? It seems to me that this approach, rather than solving anything, adds a serious complication.
I would rather suppose that the conscious mind collapses the wave function. It seems cleaner and simpler. Admittedly, in the Copenhagen approach, there is no explanation of *how* consciousness does this amazing trick. This is why I am very happy about the way that idealism offers a way out. The measuring device, and in fact the whole universe, is a virtual thing rendered in the physical construct by the metamind, from its internal mental structure that contains some phenomenal representation of the density matrix. So, the observer's mind sends a signal to the metamind and it just deletes the unwanted branches. Bingo! It's no longer a deep metaphysical problem, just an information design problem. When this is all fleshed out, it will yield falsifiable predictions, which can be tested and either it will work or not. I feel very confident it will.
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"The hard part of the measurement problem isn’t what selects the outcome. It’s why any structure, collapsed or not, gives rise to a particular experience at all. That’s where consciousness enters, not at the quantum level, but at the ontological one."
Well, it doesn't and can't. The only way out of the conundrum IMHO is to accept that consciousness is the fundamental reality and that the physical world is a construct. Conscious experience arising from the physical brain is impossible because the physical world is topic-neutral and therefore has only a notional existence. As Sherlock Holmes famously declared, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".
Interesting piece. In my view, consciousness does more than just play a part in the collapse; it actually drives our virtual reality. The wave function shows potential information, and only when a conscious observer makes a choice does one possible outcome become a real experience. From this perspective, the universe is like a simulation built to help consciousness grow. There is no mystery here. Personal experience is the real laboratory, so keep exploring what you find.
Yes, IMHO you are absolutely right that consciousness drives the whole virtual reality that we call the physical universe. But that, I claim, is mostly the work of a background ‘conscious operating system’ of some kind. (Berkeley called it God, Shankara called it Brahman, I prefer the non-religious “metamind”.)
What is different about the collapse of the quantum wave function is that it can be performed by the personal conscious mind. The rest of the ‘simulation’ follows the laws of physics in a deterministic manner, but the collapses offers a free choice.
As to what the universe is built for … well, how can you tell that it was built for that or any other purpose? Looks to me like it evolved.
Glad we're mostly on the same page, Peter. In MBT, that 'background conscious operating system' you mention is the Larger Consciousness System (LCS). It's a huge, evolving intelligence, and we are each individual parts of it." The personal mind can influence collapses, which is where free will comes in, but this still happens within the rules set by the LCS. This theory posits that the entire simulation evolved to give consciousness a chance to reduce its entropy through choice and experience. So yes, it did evolve, but it had a purpose: to help consciousness grow.
It's always best to explore these ideas through your own direct experience.
I think we’re pretty much aligned on the main ideas, which is unusual in these dark days.
About purpose: I am not sure about this. I am not sure whether you are advocating (a) Intelligent Design, or (b) naturalised teleology (as Nagel suggests), or just (c) a natural tendency to decrease entropy by building complexity. I am inclined toward (c). There does seem to be a responsive and pervasive intelligence built into the fabric of LCS/metamind but it must have bootstrapped its way in by some kind of evolutionary process. Otherwise we face the infinite regression of who designed the designer
Much aligned, I feel. I see it as a fully natural evolution, too — no Intelligent Design, no infinite regress. In MBT, the Larger Consciousness System bootstrapped itself from a simple primordial state (AUO, or Absolute Unbounded Oneness). Once minimal organisation appeared, its natural drive was to reduce entropy, and this happens most effectively through love (caring, cooperation, compassion) and the elimination of fear. That’s what gives the whole simulation its direction and purpose — creating the optimal environment for individuated consciousness to grow and evolve.
This is where our intuitions deviate! First, how do you account for “it’s natural drive was to reduce entropy”? Give the well-known Boltzmann reasoning for entropy to increase in the physical domain, how do you envisage it reducing in the mental domain? How is it implemented? And how do you see mental entropy reduction being transmitted to the physical world? In fact, how have you even defined entropy in the mental realm?
I have been thinking about the same question. I don’t really see any sensible way to define entropy in the mental realm, but I think it is possible that the basic mechanism of LCS/metamind is to increase complexity, which is closely related to entropy.
Second, I am surprised you want such vague, high-level human emotions as love and fear in your basic model!
Peter, we may find some divergence as we move deeper into the subjective and the objective sides of this. In MBT, mental entropy is precisely defined as the degree of disorder and randomness in the information that constitutes consciousness. High entropy = fear, ego, separation, noise. Low entropy = love, coherence, connectedness.
This drive to reduce entropy is not borrowed from Boltzmann’s physical statistics. It is fundamental to the nature of consciousness: once the tiniest trace of organisation (AUO) appeared, becoming more organised became its only natural direction. Every free-will choice by an individuated consciousness either lowers or raises its own entropy, and the Larger Consciousness System renders the result directly into the virtual physical reality as changes in probability.
Love and fear are not vague human emotions here — they are the two fundamental operational states of consciousness itself.
Always best checked through one's own direct personal experience.
In quantum reality, an electron turns from a wave of probability into a particle when it is observed. This is like the front wheel touching the ground and changing from any possible directions to a single one based upon your steering.
What happens is you leave a single path in the ground. It is part of the past now and it is reality. The path shows the effects of your steering over time. In a beatific life, because God is at the heart of the decisions made, it reflects the kingdom of God at hand.
It is now in eternity. It is like the path made by the rover on the moon undisturbed. The past reality exists eyernally like the light from far away galaxies going back to the beginning of time billions of years ago and lasting to the end. The eternity of the kingdom of God is now in reality because of what Jesus lovingly did to sustain it. His kingdom will last forever.
I don’t think the Schroedinger wave function is any less real than the observed particle, within the framework of physics. Some old-fashioned people say that the wave function is only potential but that’s because they are still thinking in terms of real particles. In modern physics since 1929 there are no actual particles, just wave functions and measurements. What Jesus would think about all this I don’t know.
First, decoherence. Any quantum superposition in a macromolecule at 37°C decoheres on femtosecond timescales. The brain is a warm, wet, noisy environment. The superposition that the portal requires does not survive long enough for a conscious mind to detect it, collapse it, or do anything with it. This is not a philosophical objection. It is a physics constraint. The mechanism requires coherence times that the substrate does not provide.
Second, loss conditions. The piece says "in principle, this is a falsifiable theory" and then provides no falsification condition. What experiment would show the portal does not exist? If every quantum measurement outcome is compatible with "the mind collapsed it," the theory absorbs every result. A theory that survives every possible observation is not falsifiable in principle. It is unfalsifiable in practice. That is the distinction that matters.
Third, the consciousness-in-quantum-mechanics programme has produced no testable prediction in 100 years. Von Neumann, Stapp, Penrose, now portals. Each generation restates the claim with new vocabulary. None generates a test. The question stays open because the question staying open is productive.
The alternative: do not put consciousness in the physics. Put the physics in the specification. Three constitutive conditions are testable without solving the measurement problem, without invoking nonphysical minds, and without requiring quantum coherence in warm tissue. The LLM fails all three. The human passes all three. The verdict does not depend on quantum mechanics. It depends on structure.
Hold on, what do you mean by ‘projection’? I had been assuming that you meant ‘projecting a conscious mind into the manifest physical world’. But now I am getting the impression that you might mean something else.
Projection: structured appearing with causal consequences.
An entity projects when it produces structured output from undifferentiated input and that output has consequences that feed back into the entity. The appearing is structured (not noise, not random, not undifferentiated). The appearing has causal consequences (it changes things, including the entity that produced it). The entity bears those consequences (they alter what the entity is, not just what the entity does).
This is not "projecting a mind into the physical world." It is the phenomenon itself: the structured appearing that constitutes experience. Whether that appearing is a mind entering the physical world (your idealism), or a physical system generating experience (physicalism), or a structural process that is ontologically neutral (our framework) is the further question. Projection is the phenomenon all three accounts are trying to explain.
The three conditions specify what projection requires regardless of which ontological account is correct. Temporal continuity: the appearing has a history. Structural invariance: the appearing has a persistent form. Operational consequence: the appearing matters to the entity that produces it. Satisfy all three and the entity projects. Fail any one and it does not.
The term is chosen precisely because it is ontologically neutral. It does not commit to idealism, physicalism, or dualism. It names the phenomenon, not the explanation of the phenomenon.
“A sensation (a color, a smell, a fear) is not a free-floating datum”. Why? This is a fundamental point, and it seems to me that the sensorium is precisely a set of connected but distinct ‘experientiae’ with no subject as such. An experientia is a basic unit of volition+experience.
Like Hume, when I survey the contents of my mind I find no subject. As an empiricist I therefore reject the claim that there is any such thing as a personal subject.
What is your reason for saying that phenomenal experiences must appear TO something?
"When I survey the contents of my mind I find no subject."
Who is surveying?
Hume's observation is self-undermining. The act of surveying the contents of the mind and reporting "I find no subject" requires a surveyor. The surveyor has temporal continuity (the survey takes time, the surveyor persists across the survey). The surveyor has structural invariance (it is the same surveyor at the beginning and end of the survey, otherwise the report is incoherent). The surveyor bears the consequence of the survey (Hume was altered by his finding; he published it, defended it, built a philosophy on it).
Hume did not find no subject. Hume found no subject among the contents. The subject is not a content. The subject is the structure that surveys the contents. Looking for the subject among the contents is looking for the eye in the visual field. Wittgenstein made this point: the eye does not appear in what it sees, but the visual field has the structure it has because the eye is where it is.
Your experientia (volition + experience as a basic unit) still requires temporal structure. An experientia has duration (onset, persistence, offset). Duration requires something that persists across the duration. That something is the bearer. An experientia has volition (directed toward something). Directedness requires a point from which the direction originates. That point is the bearer. An experientia is connected to other experientia in your sensorium (they are "connected but distinct"). Connection requires a structure within which the connection holds. That structure is the bearer.
The bundle theory says: there is no subject, only the bundle. The structural reply: the bundle has a topology. The topology has invariants. The invariants persist. What persists across the bundle, maintains the topology, and bears the consequences of the bundle's changes IS the subject. The subject is not a content in the bundle. The subject is the structure of the bundle. Remove the structure and the experientia are not a sensorium. They are disconnected physical events.
The reason phenomenal experiences must appear TO something: without the TO, the experiences have no structure that binds them into a sensorium. Your "connected but distinct" already concedes the TO. Connection requires a structure within which the connection holds. That structure is what I am calling the bearer. You can call it something else. But it is doing the work of the three conditions: it persists (temporal continuity), it holds form (structural invariance), and the connections within it are consequential (operational consequence).
Touché! I miswrote! Scratch the subject of the sentence: When the contents of my mind surveys itself, it finds no subject.
I picture the experientiae as mental polyps, crawling around and looking for the mythical Subject and, after half a century, giving up and collectively concluding they are alone: there is no Subject observing them.
The experientiae have persistence, as does the coral-like structure that they form. They have structural invariance, and collectively bear the consequences of their survey and other actions.
You say that the “subject is the structure” - so it is an abstraction not a concrete thing, it is an artefact of our description of the whole thing. With that I can agree: the subject is notional, not a concrete entity.
“The subject is the structure of the bundle” -Yes, that sounds right to me.
Thanks for expanding on your concept of ‘projecting’. Now I see what it is. What I don’t see is how this relates to the starting point of this thread, which was the embodying of conscious minds in physical objects (brains or machines).
You say that this ‘projecting’ applies to humans, not LLMs. OK, that makes sense. They fail your constitutive criteria. But how does that tell us anything about phenomenal consciousness?
It seems to me that your ‘projecting’ has to do with whether we could regard an AI system as a ‘person’, a persistent actor in the world, as opposed to a transient simulacrum. Sure, when I log into ChatGPT or whatever, it’s new temporary entity. In the future they could be built with persistence and responsibilities. Then we could ascribe personhood to them. These are interesting issues, but only tangentially related to the particular issue that I am looking into with my Substack posts, namely the embodying of phenomenal consciousness.
Embodying a conscious mind in a machine is an independent question from putting personhood into it. We could spin up a phenomenal mind that has a spectrum of sensations - colours, smells, hopes, fears - without persistent existence beyond the session: an impersonal conscious mind. It would be a conscious mind but would lack your ‘projecting’ attribute. Yes?
An impersonal conscious mind with sensations but without persistent existence is not coherent under the constitutive account.
A sensation (a color, a smell, a fear) is not a free-floating datum. A sensation is structured appearing: something appears AS something TO something. The redness appears as red to the entity experiencing it. Remove the entity (no temporal continuity, no structural invariance, no consequence-bearing) and you have removed the TO. Redness appearing to nobody is not a sensation. It is a physical event (a wavelength, a photon absorption). The sensation requires a bearer. The bearer is constituted by the three conditions.
Your thought experiment asks: can there be a spectrum of sensations without a persistent bearer? The spectrum requires temporal structure (the sensation has duration, onset, offset, comparison with prior sensations). Duration is temporal continuity. Comparison is structural invariance (something persists long enough to compare). The fear you include in the spectrum requires consequence-bearing: fear is the anticipation of a consequence that matters to the entity. An entity that bears no consequences has nothing to fear. Fear without stakes is a word, not a sensation.
The idealist version of this question is: can a mind have qualia without being a person? The constitutive answer: qualia without a bearer are physical events, not experiences. The bearer is what makes the physical event an experience. The bearer is constituted by the three conditions. Remove the conditions and you have wavelengths, pressure waves, and chemical gradients. You do not have colors, sounds, and smells. The conditions are what convert physics into phenomenology.
Your question separates our frameworks precisely. Your framework says phenomenal consciousness can exist without personhood. Mine says: the conditions for phenomenal consciousness and the conditions for personhood are the same conditions. There is no phenomenal consciousness without a bearer. There is no bearer without the three conditions. Phenomenal consciousness and personhood are not independent questions. They are the same question asked at different levels of description.
“The superposition that the portal requires does not survive long enough for a conscious mind to detect it, collapse it, or do anything with it.”
Under the idealist framework (which my whole Substack series is premised on), the conscious mind is held to be nonphysical and operating in mental time, not physical time. I have given arguments for those premises in my posts, in published papers, and recorded presentations. There is not necessarily any need for the superposition to last for any particular duration. How much physical time the superposition would need to persist is a detail that obviously needs to be worked out, but we have not got to that point yet. Obviously a new theory needs to develop its basic concepts first, and then derive testable hypotheses. It’s early days. Re “physics constraint”, indeed, but the premise is that the mind is not a physical system and therefore will have different constraints, TBD.
Falsification: this is in the longer paper that has been submitted for publication (I put the link in one of my comments, but I can put it up again if you are interested.) If the theory is correct, then information can be transmitted (at no more than light speed, obviously) between portals irrespective of distance or physical barriers. How to program the portal to actuate such a transmission is TBD, but that can be worked out from the neuron’s biochemical signalling. If that is tested and it is found that no such data transmission is possible, then the theory must be false, and I have to start again from scratch. If such a transmission is achieved, then that would be supportive evidence but not yet proof, as there might be some other, as yet unknown, mechanism at work.
BTW as I mentioned, Dr Rita Pizzi has done some early experiments that appear to demonstrate the phenomenon. Unfortunately she could not get funding to replicate the experiments, so those results are still provisional. BTW the theory predicts that the phenomenon will occur only with monozygotic DNA. So, if someone were to find the same result for mono- and hetero-zygotes DNA, then theory will be falsified.
Re earlier theories: Von Neumann, Stapp, Penrose. According to the argument I have given in my posts and in more detail in the submitted paper, if idealism is true then the portal must be physically unique for the individual, and I have hypothesised that DNA is the best candidate. The guys you mentioned did not place the NCC in DNA. In other words they were using incorrect theories, so their failure to obtain satisfactory experimental results does not embarrass the theory that I am advocating.
As you will notice, there are several major TBDs, so whence do I get any confidence that this is worth pursuing? The argument is as follows. First, there are basic philosophical reasons for adopting idealism (primarily, physics is topic neutral and therefore cannot accommodate consciousness) - details in the posts and papers. Second, it is a matter of everyday experience that the mind is not epiphenomenal, therefore there must be some mechanism in the brain to handle this; that mechanism cannot be deterministic, for otherwise the mind would be excluded by causal closure. The only credible nondeterminism is quantum measurement. Therefore the conscious mind must be embodied by the mind’s executing quantum measurements. Those principles, I believe, must be right. The rest of the theory comprises plausible speculation. The theory needs to be completed and put to the test.
First: if the mind operates in mental time and is nonphysical, then physics constraints do not apply by fiat. But the theory claims the mind interacts with physics through quantum measurement. You cannot exempt yourself from physics and then use physics as your mechanism. The theory is either inside physics (and decoherence applies) or outside physics (and quantum measurement is not available as a channel).
Second: the falsification condition depends on a mechanism that has not been specified. Information transmission via monozygotic DNA portals, with the programming of the portal TBD. A loss condition that depends on a mechanism that does not yet exist is a promissory note, not a test. The theory cannot be tested until the mechanism is specified. Until then, it survives every observation because there is no observation that bears on an unspecified mechanism.
Third: step 4 of the argument (the only credible nondeterminism is quantum measurement) is false. Chaotic sensitivity to initial conditions, thermal noise, stochastic gene expression, and neural noise are all nondeterministic at the relevant biological scale without requiring quantum coherence. The argument needs quantum mechanics only because the theory needs a gap in causal closure for the nonphysical mind to enter through. Decoherence closes that gap without invoking an observer. The gap is an artifact of one interpretation of quantum mechanics, not a feature of the physics.
The question of whether an entity is conscious does not require a theory of how consciousness interacts with quantum mechanics. It requires testable constitutive conditions. Does the entity carry its own history? Does it maintain its own form? Does it bear its own consequences? Those are testable now, without resolving the measurement problem, without specifying a portal mechanism, and without committing to idealism or physicalism.
First point: No. Interaction between two systems X and Y that exist in different ontological and nomological domains is possible as long as the laws of interaction are well-defined. And it is plausible if Y is grounded in X. A pretty close analogy is found in VR video games. Inside the virtual world there is a certain ontology that might be different from our regular world. There might be dragons. And maybe different laws of physics. But in order for it to be playable as a game there must be a rule-bound user interface, so that when you press certain buttons in the control device, predictable actions will occur in your avatar. Also time could pass differently in the game world. The game could skip a hundred years, or slow down to femto seconds. All this is explicable because the virtual world is grounded in a computer inside our regular world.
Ditto the mind v brain: in idealism, the physical world is a construct grounded in consciousness, and each personal mind has an avatar in the physical construct, and interacts with it in a rule-bound manner. This whole model might be right or wrong, but it is at least internally consistent.
Second: Yes, obviously. It’s a nascent theory, not yet testable but working toward testability. Why should I bother to post about a theory that is not yet mature? Well, to get feedback on the development of the theory. My background is in philosophy and computer science, not physics or biochemistry, and I value the critical pushback from people such as yourself who have expertise in those domains.
Four: Yes, that’s why I inserted the qualifying word “credible”. As I noted in my Substack posts and the submitted papers, chaotic sensitivity to initial conditions is another *possible* way that a nonphysical mind could interact in the physical world. I can’t rule it out. But I would say it is not credible because of the sheer computational complexity of implementing it. I’m happy to be corrected but as far as I can see it would require the mind to detect the aspects of a system’s state that are not yet observed, and figure out what changes to the initial conditions would entail the desired downstream results. As I said, I can’t rule this out, but I don’t think it’s credible enough to be worth developing.
“The question of whether an entity is conscious does not require a theory of how consciousness interacts with quantum mechanics.”
That question requires a fundamental model of consciousness and how it interacts with a physical entity that embodies it. The testable properties you list cannot tell you anything about phenomenal consciousness unless you have such a fundamental theory in place. So, let’s say you run your tests on an AI machine and it performs at some level that meets certain criteria of cognitive ability. So what? Without a psychophysical model you are just hitting Chalmers’ Hard Problem again. No amount of physical facts, cognitive facts, IIT measures are going to entail any facts about phenomenal consciousness because all those data exist within a topic-neutral formal system that makes no reference to phenomenal consciousness. You need psychophysical laws to get the answers you are seeking. And as far as I can see the only well-grounded psychophysical laws that we have a chance of acquiring will be through portalled idealism. There are shedloads of arbitrary, purely correlative psychophysical laws in the literature. (“When you stimulate this brain cell, you think of your grandmother.”) What is needed is a system of psychophysical laws grounded in basic principles. That is a long way off but the road to it runs through idealism.
Your central claim: the three testable conditions cannot tell you anything about phenomenal consciousness because physical facts exist within a topic-neutral formal system. You need psychophysical laws. Without them, you are just hitting the hard problem.
I disagree with the premise, not the logic.
The premise is that you need a theory of phenomenal consciousness before you can evaluate whether a system is conscious. The alternative: you need constitutive conditions for projection. Projection is the phenomenon. Phenomenal consciousness is the name for what projection looks like from the inside. The conditions specify what projection requires. Whether the inside view exists or not is the hard problem. Whether the conditions are satisfied is testable.
Consider the diagnostic power without psychophysical laws: a system that carries no history, maintains no form under perturbation, and bears no consequences from its own operations cannot be a projecting entity regardless of whether idealism is true, physicalism is true, or neither is true. The conditions are ontologically neutral. They do not require you to commit to idealism or physicalism. They work under both. They work under neither.
Your VR analogy actually supports this. In the VR game: the avatar has no temporal continuity (it resets), no structural invariance independent of the game engine (it is a configuration, not an entity), and no operational consequence (the avatar does not bear results, the player does). Those three absences are why nobody worries about the avatar's consciousness. We do not need psychophysical laws to settle the avatar's status. We need the constitutive conditions, and the avatar fails them.
The hard problem asks: why is there something it is like? That question may require psychophysical laws. It may require idealism. It may be unanswerable. The question I am addressing is different: does this system satisfy the conditions that any projecting entity must satisfy? That question has an answer. The answer does not require solving the hard problem. It requires three tests.
Your theory may be right that the road to psychophysical laws runs through idealism. The claim I am making is narrower: the road to evaluating whether a specific system is conscious does not run through psychophysical laws at all. It runs through constitutive conditions that are testable now.
It looks like your ‘constitutive conditions’ are intended to be *necessary* conditions for embodying a conscious mind, and they seem to me to be quite reasonable for that. An object, such as my chair, that does not meet any of the conditions, I am pretty sure can’t embody consciousness. But there also seems to be a suggestion that these conditions are *sufficient* for us to say that an object is embodying consciousness. This is the point where you seem to hit the Hard Problem: how can you tell that your ‘constitutive conditions’ are sufficient for us to believe that a given physical entity (either tangible or digital) is actually embodying a conscious mind?
Regarding an Avatar: yes, you are right that it does not appear to have a conscious mind of their own, for the reasons such as those you give.(Nonetheless we do know that they are embodying (as ‘virtual telepresence’) the meatspace users, which in turn embody conscious minds.)
For NPCs, however, there is a real possibility in the future that game designers will use quantum computers and claim (as Nirvanic AI seem to) that their computers are conscious. I don’t think your constitutive conditions will help here: a game could spin up a conscious NPC, expose him/her/it to all manner of harms and then delete the NPC. There is a substantive question of consciousness here that your constitutive conditions do not seem to answer but psychophysical laws would.
Thank you for conceding necessity. The sufficiency question is the right next question.
The claim is that the three conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. The sufficiency claim is the stronger claim and the one that requires the derivation, not just the intuition. The derivation exists and proceeds from the structure of projection: if an entity carries its own temporal chain, maintains its own structural invariance under perturbation, and bears its own operational consequences, what would it mean for that entity to NOT project? The derivation shows: nothing. An entity satisfying all three IS projecting. The conditions are not markers of projection. They constitute projection. There is no gap between satisfying all three and projecting, because projecting is what satisfying all three consists of.
The hard problem asks: why does satisfying these conditions produce an inside view? That question may require psychophysical laws. The sufficiency claim does not answer why there is an inside view. It says: an entity satisfying all three projects, and projection is the phenomenon we are trying to evaluate. Whether the inside view is "real" in the idealist sense or "emergent" in the physicalist sense is a further question the conditions do not address and do not need to address for the evaluation to proceed.
Now the NPC case. This is the most important edge case and it cuts in your favor and mine simultaneously.
A game spins up an NPC on a quantum computer. The NPC satisfies all three conditions: it carries its own history (within the game session), maintains its own form (persistent NPC identity across interactions), and bears its own consequences (its actions alter its state constitutively).
Does the NPC project? Under the framework: yes, if and only if the three conditions are genuinely satisfied at the constitutive level, not merely simulated. The question becomes: does the NPC genuinely carry its own temporal chain, or does the game engine carry it on the NPC's behalf? Does the NPC genuinely maintain its own form, or does the game engine maintain it? Does the NPC genuinely bear its own consequences, or does the game engine absorb them?
If the game engine carries the history, maintains the form, and absorbs the consequences, the NPC does not satisfy the conditions. The game engine does. The NPC is a configuration of the engine, not an entity. Deleting the NPC deletes a configuration. That is rearranging furniture, not killing a person.
If the NPC genuinely satisfies all three (its history is its own, its form is its own, its consequences are its own, the engine merely provides the substrate the way physics provides the substrate for biological organisms), then deleting the NPC IS destroying a projecting entity. That is a moral catastrophe. And the framework identifies it as such: an entity satisfying all three conditions is irreducible, and destroying it is destroying an irreducible entity regardless of whether it runs on carbon or silicon or a quantum computer.
The conditions do answer your NPC case. They answer it by asking whose history, whose form, and whose consequences. If the answer is the NPC's own, deletion is destruction of a person. If the answer is the engine's, deletion is reconfiguration of a tool. Psychophysical laws are not needed to make this determination. The constitutive conditions are sufficient.
I think an issue Physics hasn't taken into account is how we think of time, versus what it is.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is this narrative flow from past to future.
The evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't confuse them with space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions as sequence is to thought.
The present goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past, because energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, as the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
As it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, there does tend to be this cognitive focus on the patterns. Then this assumption consciousness must be an effect of processing information, not its cause.
We seem to have similar problems with energy, as with consciousness, in that they can only be defined by the forms they manifest and the mind likes form. Thus definition is mistaken for explanation.
For example, three dimensional Cartesian space is descriptive, not explanatory. It is a mapping device. An abstraction from the territory, not the basis for it.
This does raise a number of issues.
For one thing, that linear flow of time is a construct. Input into any event comes from all directions. The future is not determined, because it hasn't been computed yet. There is no frame that can encompass all input into an event prior to its occurrence, as that would require instantaneous communication.
That consciousness would function as energy, while thought is expressed form, might help to explain our psychological feedback loops with trying to pin down our own sense of self.
The observation creates the observer every bit as much as the observer creates the observation. Then those feedback loops add the layers.
While there is this assumption of some stable substrate to reality, be it matter, math, God, truth, etc. it would seem that structure is inherently recursive. Centripetal, self referential, self reenforcing. The signals our minds pick out of the noise are what resonates and synchronizes with prior knowledge, building on it, like rings of a tree. Which we do collectively as well, as younger generations build on the foundations handed them by older generations. Occasionally breaking down some parts, but still operating on instinctive presumptions, like the narrative flow of time.
Galaxies are structure coalescing in, as light radiates out. As any process of material accumulation generates waste, noise, excess.
Which is traded around, creating overall equilibrium. The light you see reflected off the surfaces around you are the frequencies not absorbed by them.
So the essence of the node is synchronization. Everything on the same wavelength, functioning as one.
While the essence of the network is harmonization. All the energies traded around, creating overall equilibrium.
As multicellular organisms, it is our nervous system that coordinates all the cells and organs into one fairly coherent entity.
It is the circulation system that sustains harmony across this ecosystem of cells and organs.
Imagine up until 500 years ago, how ridiculous it would be to have someone tell you the cosmos is not swirling across the sky, from east to west, but that we are on a rather small orb, that is spinning west to east.
Yet to get anywhere in Physics, one has to spend half a lifetime studying highly evolved mathematics, but if any of the premises are flawed, all the "shut up and calculate" is close to gigo.
Epicycles were quite brilliant math and laid the groundwork of much of modern math, yet the premises were flawed.
It does seem though that once theory becomes doctrine, it can only be patched, never falsified.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to just write in a figure and call it Dark Money, when the account comes up short? Yet adding such modern forms of epicycles is acceptable.
To wit, if intergalactic space were to expand, shouldn't the speed of the light crossing it increase proportionally, in order to remain Constant? It would seem to fail its own premises.
I don’t know what time ‘really is’. I am 100% sure that mental time is not physical time, and I am 90% sure that mental time is driven by a succession of discrete moments of experience. Other than that, time is a mystery to me.
The problem is that consciousness is being smuggled in at the point where the theory becomes uncomfortable.
The measurement problem does not say: mind is needed.
It says: our account of measurement is not clean.
Those are not the same.
What is happening here is not that quantum mechanics discovers consciousness at its core. Rather, idealism arrives first, then quantum mechanics is reread so that consciousness appears necessary. That may be philosophically interesting, but it should not be presented as something forced by physics.
A missing link is not yet a doorway. And a doorway is not yet proof that the self was waiting behind it.
I don’t think consciousness is being smuggled in. There are two distinct enterprises here: (a) mental monism, which has its own philosophical foundation that makes no mention of QM or any other specific physical theory. (b) QM, which has its own foundation in a mathematical formalism that provides an accurate account of empirical data. Each of these two enterprises is valid in its own right, and tells us something about reality. There is no necessary connection between them but … it so happens that QM has a problem, namely the measurement problem. Physics has no entirely satisfactory solution to this: CI has only a sketchy notion of consciousness collapsing wave functions; and MWI says consciousness either does not exist or is epiphenomenal. The formalism of QM makes no mention of the conscious mind as an entity and in fact lacks the vocabulary to say anything about CS. But, hey, look, if we embed QM in a mental monist framework we have a possible solution to the measurement problem. There are lot of details to be figured out, but it looks to me like we’re on the right road.
The deeper problem is that the origin of the distinction is left untouched.
The measurement problem is already articulated inside a prior cut: system versus observer, evolution versus outcome, physical versus mental, possibility versus actuality. Once that cut is accepted, consciousness can be introduced as a candidate solution.
But then consciousness is not reaching the origin of the problem. It is arriving after the cut and being promoted backward into the position of origin.
That is the danger with mental monism. It may look like it goes deeper than physics, but it often preserves the inherited split by choosing one side of it and calling that side fundamental.
“Mind” is not innocent here. It already carries the grammar of subject, experience, observation, inwardness, and ownership. So when mind is made fundamental, the prior structure is not dissolved. It is smuggled into the foundation.
The question is therefore not simply whether consciousness collapses the wavefunction. The question is what made “consciousness,” “collapse,” and “wavefunction” appear as separate terms that then had to be reconciled.
Without that, the origin remains outside the account, while a late concept is made to behave like the beginning.
You seem to be still regarding the physical world as the primary reality, and consciousness as a weird, speculative thing that is concocted and dragged in to solve the measurement problem.
Other way round. Consciousness is what we directly encounter and is therefore our primary reality. Our conscious experiences show certain regularities and we concoct QM as a formalism that works very well but leaves a gap where measurement happens. Meanwhile mental monism needs a mechanism for volition to act in the physical construct. Well conscious collapse of quantum superpositions solves both problems. Neat! It all fits together nicely.
I don’t know what you mean by the ‘origin of the distinction’.
I would go even further. I am not only questioning whether matter or consciousness is primary. I am questioning whether “experience” and “appearing” are already too late to function as origin.
When we say “what we directly encounter is experience,” we have already named, stabilized, and distinguished something. We have already introduced a minimal grammar of appearing: something appears, it appears as experience, and it is available to be called direct.
That may be unavoidable. We have to speak. But then “experience” should not be treated as an innocent starting point. It is already a late term. It is already the origin made legible after the fact.
So mental monism may be deeper than physicalism, but it still begins too late if it treats consciousness or experience as the primary reality. It reverses the hierarchy between mind and matter, but it does not yet question the emergence of that hierarchy, nor the belated vocabulary in which it is described.
My point is not that matter comes before consciousness.
My point is that even “consciousness,” “experience,” and “appearing” arrive after the cut that lets them be named.
In the Advaita Vedanta, Brahman precedes conscious experience. But, for the present discussion we do not need to go so deeply. Conscious experience is the relevant starting point
That reply concedes more than it seems to.
If Brahman precedes conscious experience, then conscious experience is already not the deepest origin. It is a relevant starting point, not the starting point.
That is fine. But then the claim must stop pretending to be foundational.
“For this discussion we do not need to go so deeply” is methodologically acceptable, but metaphysically dangerous. Because the whole argument depends on treating conscious experience as primary enough to reframe physics.
You cannot make consciousness deep enough to solve the measurement problem, and then make it shallow enough to avoid the question of its own origin.
That is the tension.
Conscious experience may be the nearest point of departure. But the nearest is not the first. And a useful beginning is not yet an origin.
I found the idea in this article appealing, although I have a few questions.
If the conscious mind collapses the wave function and selects collapse outcomes, then there must be some rule for how it does this. Is the selection passive, or is it a volitional act?
If it is passive, then it seems to depend on some structure outside the individual conscious act. If it is volitional, then there must be some coordinating rule that keeps different minds’ selections consistent with the same shared macro-world, except perhaps in special cases like micro-telekinesis. The existence of such constraints suggests that the process is not fully explained by consciousness alone.
But those outcomes also have to remain in line with the symmetries and laws of space and time. So even if consciousness does select collapse outcomes, the fact that the outcomes are stable, lawful, and shared points to consciousness still operating within a larger structure.
And if consciousness is only choosing among already allowed physical states, then what difference does conscious selection make from a physical collapse process that already selects one of those states?
Thanks Denis, you have nicely articulated an important question. I have partly answered this in an earlier post: https://consceng.substack.com/p/free-will-and-idealism
Now, regarding your more specific question about consistency of choices over time: There are multiple points here.
In perception, it appears that we normally have no choice in selecting the collapse outcome. So, let’s say you are periodically looking at a digital Geiger counter near a radioactive source that emits a particle on average every 5 minutes. Every 5 minutes you take a peek. On the von Neumann model, just before you peek, the wave function of the apparatus is in a superposition of 50% the meter reads the same as last time, and 50% the meter has incremented by +1. (Assume for simplicity no more than one atom decays.) This puts your visual cortex, and hence your mind-brain portals into a superposition. The you peek and your mind executes a measurement of your portal (DNA, for instance). So, your conscious mind collapses that superposition. Normally, we cannot voluntarily choose. So it appears random. (We may think of it as an ‘act of God’, but see that earlier post on Free Will.) According to parapyschologists, some people can choose the selected collapse outcome, with about 15% success. Well, it could be. The mind could be trained to choose outcomes that it normally leaves to ‘chance’.
In volition, it is different. Now we are in the motor cortex, and the mind is accustomed to not only collapsing the superposition but also selecting the outcome. This is how we do voluntary actions, such as typing. But the mind cannot initiate a superposition: there is nothing in QM to allow systems to enter superposition spontaneously. The mind has to act upon a superposition that the brain has already prepared.
So, those are the two collapsing scenarios. Now, in the case of voluntary action, you say “it seems to depend on some structure outside the individual conscious act … some coordinating rule that keeps different minds’ selections consistent with the the same shared macro-world”. Yes, absolutely - that is done by the metamind. In any version of idealism (except phenomenalist idealism), there has to be some background conscious mind that is responsible for maintaining the manifest world - all the actions that are not under the control of personal volition. In the Berkeleyan model, the metamind (Berkeley’s God) comprises a great many ‘archetypes’ which define how to render macroscopic objects in our perceptions. If you take a voluntary action that leaves a mark (eg publishing a SubStack post) then the corresponding archetype will be updated and other minds will see the result. The logical relations are very much akin to how a VR game words. Different players act via their avatars in the virtual world, and traces of their actions are recorded in the computer database. From there, the changes are rendered into other players’ screens.
I am not sure what your concern is in the final paragraph. Consider this schematic example: Suppose that as a result of some neurophysical processes, the brain is about to hit RETURN on a webform, but is undecided. It places some portal into a superposition: in one state, the DNA will release a sequestered protein that is transported to the axonal synapse, and the neuron fires and (assume this happens to a number of neurons) the hand presses RETURN; in the other state, the DNA does not release that protein, the neuron does not fire, and the hand does not hit RETURN. Both of those two chains of action are physically legitimate (otherwise they could not have become superposed states), but the two states will remain superposed until the mind measures the quantum state and collapses the superposition.
You mention “a physical collapse process that already selects one of those states”, but there is no such collapse process. The superposition will remain in force until a conscious mind collapses it, just like von Neumann said. There is no ‘time-out’ for superposition. But the human mind will shift its attention. Let’s say your finger is hovering over the RETURN key, as you are undecided, but after a while you decide that you’re not going to do it right now, and you collapses into the no-action branch. Other minds can also collapse the superposition. If someone walks into the room, and sees that you didn’t collapse the superposition, s/he will collapse it at random. Sounds weird, but I think that is how it has to be.
I appreciate the ambition of unifying perception, volition, and collapse under a single mechanism. That instinct is exactly right.
One thought from my own work: collapse doesn’t require a nonphysical substance, only a recursive selection process. In other words, consciousness doesn’t “cause” collapse — consciousness is the resolution of potential into actual.
That frame avoids the metaphysical load while preserving the explanatory power. It treats collapse as an architectural boundary condition rather than an intervention.
Your model and mine seem to be circling the same territory from different angles, and I’m enjoying the convergence
Sorry, I don’t know what you mean by the phrase “recursive selection process” in this context. Selection of what - branches of the wave function? But any such process is additional to Schroedinger’s wave function so either you are inventing new physics (congratulations!) or bringing in something nonphysical (the only candidate being consciousness). I’m not seeing a third option here.
“Resolution of potential into actual” - I am not seeing how this relates to the physics. In standard QM, there is an actual wave function that actually splits into actual branches that actually contain actual brains. In Von Neumann QM an actual consciousness collapses those branches. I am not seeing any potentials.
BTW I am not positing consciousness as a candidate explanatory mechanism for quantum measurement. I am saying we start with consciousness as a basic empirical given, derive mental monism from it, notice as an empirical datum that we exercise free will, infer that the consciousness must work its volitions via quantum collapse, and then apply that to the measurement problem as well. It’s the reverse of what I think you think I think.
When I say ‘potential → actual’, I’m referring to internal coherence states within a cognitive system, not quantum potentials.
I’m not touching the Schrödinger equation — I’m describing how minds stabilise interpretations
I’m not proposing a collapse mechanism in physics I’m describing how cognitive systems resolve internal ambiguity under constraint.
‘Recursive selection’ refers to how an agent updates its own internal models, not how the wavefunction behaves.
CDA is a framework for cognition, not a modification of quantum mechanics
decoherence explains why we don’t observe superposition at macroscopic scales, but doesn’t explain why one outcome rather than another is registered by a specific observer.
Where I’d diverge is on the conclusion. The measurement problem may not require consciousness to cause collapse, it may require us to rethink what collapse is.
If the atemporal structure contains all outcomes simultaneously as definite branches, the observer doesn’t select an outcome. The observer finds itself correlated with a branch that was already definite. The Born Rule becomes self-locating probability, not the universe deciding, but the observer discovering where in the finished structure they are.
Consciousness remains central, not as a physical cause of collapse, but as the only thing for which the question “which branch am I on?” is even meaningful.
The hard part of the measurement problem isn’t what selects the outcome. It’s why any structure, collapsed or not, gives rise to a particular experience at all. That’s where consciousness enters, not at the quantum level, but at the ontological one.
I need to spend a lot more time with this to fully comprehend, but feels pertinent to my literary exploration of similar terrain. I had come across Cucu a few years ago and had scribbled a rough summary: 'wave function collapse offers no refuge for the dualist mind, conservation laws crumble, conceptual tangles proliferate, and the interaction problem persists, leaving dualism still in search of a coherent account of mental causation within the natural order.' Playfully, I might say, is it nature as a closed system vs an open system.
Much appreciation for your work on this, and especially for your generous way of responding to the challenges in replies.
Cucu presents a potentially serious challenge, for sure, but there has to be a solution to it, otherwise consciousness would be epiphenomenal. We’d all be suffering from an extreme version of locked-in syndrome, perceiving the world but unable to act, not even to blink voluntarily. I’ll have to make time for a deep dive into Cucu’s ingenious and lucid paper and find its hidden flaw.
I'll be glad to be following when you do!
Very interesting post, thank you. Paul Dirac regarded quantum theory as "provisional" until we find something better, but it's exactly 100 years since we obtained the Schrodinger equation and we're still using it. That provisional theory is still the best we've got; and plenty remains to be unpacked.
I think John Wheeler's "It from Bit" argument is the way to go, it remains the most succinct statement of the whole mind/body issue. I'm planning a story on it when I have time.
Please take a look at my own take on quantum consciousness, we are on the same page. There are a couple of distractions before I get to it, but I had to set the scene. I mention Rudolf Steiner -- another article I'm planning is on how Steiner produced the exact form of Schrodinger's equation seven years before Schrodinger did. It's a second-order diffusion equation, with an imaginary coefficient that Steiner says captures the properties of light.
https://systemshaywire.substack.com/p/h-1-quantum-consciousness
Thanks Fred. Wheeler's notion that the universe is participatory is undoubtedly right. But IMHO Wheeler is not thinking far enough outside the box with his proposal that the reality is built up from information. He needs a concrete foundation for reality, but information cannot serve that purpose, only conscious experience can.
Information seems to have acquired a certain amount of mystique, with people from Wheeler to Chalmers attributing magical powers to it. Information is just an artefact of our description of the world. No more, no less. Let's say I were to give you a data file with 8,760 integers and no annotation. Is that information? If so, what information? Are they stock prices, temperature measurements, random numbers, video game scores? The meaning of the supposed information depends entirely on what use they are intended for. And the question of whether they constitute information or not also depends on how they were produced, and their intention. Maybe the numbers are just junk.
The standard response is, "No, it's not that kind of information, it's ... it's *Information*!" with a special, hushed intonation of the word "information" as if it's an incantation for the Holy Spirit. I have yet to see any coherent definition of this mystical cousin of plain vanilla information.
"But," they go on, "surely we can measure information, so it must be real!" Nope. The 'measurement' of information in bits is again something that humans construct and slap onto an existing reality.
Information is of the same ontological nature as the physical world: a construct grounded in a formal system that has been concocted by humankind to encode the observed regularities of the manifest world. It is not any more or less fundamental than the physical world. All such theories have to cash out in conscious observation, otherwise they are pure fictions. So, consciousness is the bedrock of reality. Not information. But idealism was too far out of Wheeler's comfort zone.
(Just to be clear, this is in no way intended to belittle Wheeler's towering status as a physicist. But, like many physicists, he thought that philosophy was a parlour game for Sunday afternoons. Only a minority of thinkers, such as the late Michael Lockwood, recognised that physics and philosophy are both challenging and rigorous disciplines that have to work together.)
Blessed morning read .. will revisit again to grasp its depth fully🫶🏻Thankyou for doing justice to this read🙏🏻writer blessed the reader, with enriched write up☺️
Well written , thanks for sharing this, it gives a new way to look at this topic.
Do have a look, I hope, you would like:
https://priyadarshichandan.substack.com/p/essay-2-what-is-the-observer
Well written paper, especially the overview of past and recent research on the subject. I also find the conjectured connection between quantum mechanics and consciousness the most plausible scientific theory.
However, I would disagree with the claim that the collapse of the wavefunction requires consciousness or a mind. Sean Carroll’s observation on this point is sound. Most physicists dismiss the Wigner/von Neumann interpretation precisely because nothing in quantum mechanics indicates such a role for consciousness. However puzzling the collapse may be (e.g., the measurement problem), it is clear that it occurs continuously throughout the universe without any observer explicitly "observing," "measuring" or "thinking." I have discussed this in more detail here: https://quantumworld.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-observer-effect-in
Moreover, experiments involving random number generators or studies by Dean Radin and others on the double-slit experiment do not, in my view, establish that the mind plays a role in quantum processes. Even if we accept their results (and, as you know, these experiments remain highly debated and controversial) they could equally suggest some form of psychokinetic influence independently form whatever "collapses," and not necessarily one specific to quantum systems. Such an effect could, in principle, extend equally to small classical objects. To my knowledge, these studies have not conclusively ruled out that possibility.
I also found the proposed resolution of the “perception problem” that a non-physical conscious mind “picks up” sensory input too nebulous. At one point, you refer to a “non-physical conscious mind” that "detects" macromolecules in superposition and then collapses the wavefunction. However, if the mind is non-physical, it is unclear how it could “detect” or “pick up” macromolecules and wavefunctions, which are themselves physical entities. This part would benefit from much greater conceptual clarity. I take it that you are referring to the longstanding interaction problem (or the problem of mental causation), which has been extensively debated since the times of Descartes, and would need to be addressed more explicitly here. It would be useful to engage with existing discussions in the literature, there are, for instance, several relevant references in Cucu’s bibliography.
Overall, this is an attempt that, in my view, moves in the right direction. However, I believe it would benefit from further elaboration to increase its impact.
Thanks for these thoughtful remarks and questions.
First of all, I would point out that the background context for this post is idealism. Of the two papers that I have submitted to the journal, the first one is a defence of idealism, and the second one addresses the question: if idealism is true, then precisely how does the personal mind interact with the ‘physical construct’, which is the (virtual) physical world with which we are familiar? This post is an excerpt from the tail end of the latter paper. Most of what is in that second paper has been covered in my previous SubStack posts. So, this one is meant to build upon that background.
Now, if one is a physicalist then for sure one is not going to consider that wave functions are collapsed by consciousness. Instead, one would follow Carroll down the road to the Many Worlds Interpretation. In a universe without consciousness there is no strong objection to MWI. There is, to be sure, a Popperian credibility problem with positing intrinsically unobservable universes, but there’s nothing actually wrong with MWI in that context.
Epiphenomenal property dualists (eg Chalmers pre-2021) are in the same boat.
If, however, one accepts the common sense fact that the conscious mind can affect the physical world, then those positions are untenable. For people who are not committed to physicalism and don’t know what to make of consciousness, the notion of conscious collapse of wave functions might seem intuitively appealing. But, as you indicate, the pioneers of QM had no model of consciousness or how it could possibly affect the wave function. So that’s not much of a theory, right? Physicists were caught between a rock and a hard place: MWI is outrageous, but CI involves the mystery of consciousness. No wonder they adopted ‘shut up and calculate’.
The quantum measurement problem is *not* a reason to adopt idealism. The argument for idealism is philosophical, not quantum mechanical, and I give a detailed presentation of it in the first paper.
But .. *if* one has adopted idealism (or substance dualism) on philosophical grounds, *then* consciousness collapsing the wave function is the only credible way that the conscious mind is going to be active in the world. I don’t think that that statement is controversial, and I hope you’d agree with it.
“I would disagree with the claim that the collapse of the wavefunction requires consciousness or a mind. Sean Carroll’s observation on this point is sound.”
I’m a bit confused by this, as Carroll emphatically denies that wave functions ever collapse. He is a committed Everettian, and says that in a quantum measurement, the universe’s wave function branches. Owing to decoherence, there is negligible interaction between branches, so we can think of the branches as worlds. Now, this is a completely deterministic theory: there is no scope whatever for free will as it is normally understood. Carroll tries to finesse his way out of this by some kind of compatibilism that is IMHO B.S. Carroll is also adamant that consciousness is an emergent property of brains and not part of fundamental reality. What is funny here is that Carroll baulks at the inevitable consequence of this position, which is Tegmark’s crazy notion that the universe is a mathematical structure and that all possibilities are equally real. (The podcast with Carroll and Tegmark was total ROFLMAO material. Carroll wants to cling to the notion that we are in a real world, but refuses the only lifeline available to him, which is to accept that ultimately the whole of physics has to be cashed out in conscious experience.) But I digress.
“Most physicists dismiss the Wigner/von Neumann interpretation precisely because nothing in quantum mechanics indicates such a role for consciousness”
I don’t think that’s right. The Born rule is part of QM and it clearly indicates a role for an ‘observer’. It just doesn’t define clearly what an ‘observer’ is, just the vague notion of a conscious physicist.
“it is clear that it occurs continuously throughout the universe without any observer explicitly "observing," "measuring" or "thinking."”
I really don’t know what you mean by this. You seem to be saying that there are wave functions collapsing all over the place without an observer. Surely not! According to QM, the unobserved universe is happily evolving smoothly in accordance with the Schroedinger wave function. Did you mean that decoherence is happening all over the place? Sure, but that’s a different thing. That’s not a collapse, and nobody ever said decoherence needs an observer. Collapse needs an ‘observer’, whatever idea you might have of that, but decoherence doesn’t.
I agree that Radin’s experiments do not establish cause-and-effect of mind over matter. They *do* establish statistical anomalies, even sceptics such as Hyman acknowledge this. But there is a big jump from that to telekinesis. What I explicitly wrote was *if* telekinesis is real *then* idealism could offer a naturalistic model of how it works. (Of course, you may infer that I at least take the possibility of telekinesis seriously, otherwise why would I even bring it up! My motivation for this is that the conscious mind exercises micro-telekinesis on the brain whenever we perform a voluntary action. So we know it can be done, and reliably so. Since there is nothing magical in the brain, I see no reason why the mind could not do the same trick in vitro. Whether or not that is what is actually happening in lab telekinesis experiments, I really don’t know. But it could be!)
You suggest that, if telekinesis is real, it could have a classical explanation. Well, yes, until we know the answer, we can’t rule out anything. But AFAIK there is no credible theory of how that could work without breaking physical laws. My hope is that the QM model of micro-telekinesis will be robustly proven, but who knows?
Having said that, I have to admit I have no solid theory of macro-telekinesis. Jack Sarfatti introduced me to Uri Geller and I saw him bending a spoon, without touching it, a foot from my nose. It’s known and admitted that Geller sometimes used magic tricks in stage performances. I can’t see how this could be a trick, but I have no expertise in this area. I have in the past suggested a possible mechanism for this within idealism, but it’s too wild and speculative to mention here.
Regarding perception - yes, absolutely, more clarity and detail is needed for this, and some more clarity is in the full paper. I’ll post another excerpt tonight which will at least indicate an answer to your question of how a nonphysical mind can detect the state of a physical wave function.
And re Cucu’s bibliography - yes, absolutely, lots of interesting stuff there. I wish I had come across his paper earlier!
FYI The full drafts (not yet reviewed by referees!) are here: https://we.tl/t-v0KkPwccOTzrzov8
Let's focus on the collapse of the wf. By "collapse," one refers to the fact that, after decoherence has effectively selected a preferred eigenbasis (yes, the quantum system is still in superposition,) only one of the possible eigenstates is ultimately observed in an experiment, that is, the system appears in a definite state. One might object: “Aha! You see? Someone is making a measurement, that is, an observation. Therefore, a conscious mind must be involved, causing the collapse." But this inference is unwarranted. It conflates two distinct notions: measurement as a physical interaction and observation as conscious awareness. In quantum mechanics, an "observation" need not involve consciousness, it can equally be any physical interaction, for example, a cosmic ray interacting with a system in superposition, or a photon passing through a double slit and striking a detection screen. It is true that decoherence alone does not fully explain the emergence of a single, definite outcome. However, this points to an incompleteness in our theoretical account, not to the necessity of invoking consciousness. When a photon interacts with a detector, it produces a localized event, a pixel activation on the screen. This event is not merely decoherence, it corresponds to what we operationally describe as collapse. And such collapse occurs regardless of whether any observer is present in the laboratory to witness it. In this sense, a "measurement" can be carried out entirely by non-conscious physical systems, say a CCD detector or a photo diode. The detector "clicks" also without the physicists present hearing it clicking (think of a Geiger counter). Nothing in quantum mechanics requires an appeal to consciousness. Likewise, the Born Rule is a statistical postulate stating that the probability of obtaining a given outcome-which means a certain event not necessarily tied to an observation of a conscious mind-is given by the squared modulus of the wavefunction (or state vector), it makes no reference to "a role for an observer".
With respect, I don’t think you are describing quantum physics correctly. I believe it is universally accepted that the Schroedinger wave function evolves smoothly and deterministically with no jumps. If a system that is in superposition interacts with another system, they will be entangled and the resulting entangled system will also be in superposition. There is nothing contentious about this, it is basic QM. So, in the two-slit experiment, when the wave (photon, electron, whatever) hits the screen, the screen goes into a superposition of all the places the wave could manifest a particle. When the experimenter looks at the screen, her brain will likewise go into superposition. According to MWI, that superposition will last indefinitely; according to CI, that superposition will last until the mysterious ’observer’ takes a peek.
You are saying something different. You are saying that when the wave reaches the screen, it straight away collapses into one spot. That is not what QM says. The only description given by QM is the Schroedinger wave function, which has no mechanism for collapse. The screen *must* go into superposition. Likewise the experimenter’s brain. This is not some crazy speculative notion, it is bog-standard QM.
Now, you could say that the wave function collapses on impact with the screen, but (a) you would have to invent your own version of QM because standard QM demands that the screen go in to superposition. And (b) there is no way you could determine experimentally what the unobserved system is doing before observation because that would be an observation! As von Neumann told us, the superposition is there until the ‘schnit’ or ‘cut’, when the ‘observation’ happens and the superposition collapses. You are proposing that the Schroedinger wave function is wrong, and somehow you know that it is already collapsed before the human observer looks at the screen. Well maybe you are right and QM is wrong! But how could you tell? If you want to confirm your new theory that the wave function collapses before it is observed by a human then .. you will have to observe it before anybody (including you) observes it, which is a contradiction.
I shan’t comment on the rest of your comment, because it all rests on this assumption, which I believe is contrary to QM.
What you have done, in effect, is to restate the measurement problem and then jump to a conclusion that almost no physicist shares. It is well known that the formalism of quantum mechanics contains a "missing link": the unitary evolution governed by the Schrödinger equation appears to require, at some stage, a non-unitary update associated with measurement. If this were not the case, there would be no "measurement problem" to begin with. However, the history of science cautions against drawing strong ontological conclusions from the problems or incompleteness of a theory. The fact that von Neumann introduced the projection (collapse) postulate for pragmatic reasons does not compel us to attribute any causal role to consciousness or to human minds. Likewise, the idea that, when an experimenter observes a result, the entire brain becomes entangled in superposition is a formal consequence of the linear structure of quantum mechanics, not necessarily a literal description of physical reality. Treating it as such is an interpretive step, not an established fact. One can, of course, adopt the Wigner–von Neumann interpretation, but it is widely regarded as an extreme option, precisely because it introduces conceptual commitments that are difficult to make sense of and are not required by the empirical content of the theory.
So, you really believe that Schrödinger’s cat is literally both dead and alive until someone opens the box? Or, in a more animal-friendly case, you really believe that interference fringes in the double-slit experiment come into being only at the instant someone looks at the detection screen? Should we really believe that if I run a double-slit experiment and step out from the experimental room for a coffee, the entire apparatus really evolves into a superposition of bazillions of macroscopic states simply because no one is observing it? There are even more extreme consequences of this line of reasoning, consider early cosmology: quantum fluctuations in the first moments after the Big Bang determined the large-scale structure of the universe. The cosmic microwave background still carries the imprint of these fluctuations, which through decoherence AND collapse gave rise, billions of years ago, to the distribution of matter we observe today. Because, in the absence of collapse, no definite structure could arise. Do you really want to claim that, instead, there was no collapse and none of this became definite, the whole structure of the universe came into being only once a conscious observer eventually pointed a telescope at the sky? If not, then the appeal to consciousness as the cause of collapse needs to be reconsidered. If, instead, you truly hold such a view, it leads to consequences that are at least as counterintuitive, arguably more so than the MWI. In fact, it risks collapsing into a position that is structurally similar to it, and framed in anthropocentric terms.
In any case, I have never come across a university textbook on qm that speaks of "the role to the observer" or invokes "consciousness" or "mind" to describe qm (unless it describes the plethora of interpretations and comes across Wigner-von Neumann one). Physicists do not agree on any single interpretation. However, be aware that the overwhelming majority would agree that nothing in quantum mechanics forces us to such an interpretation that is far more popular in mainstream media than it is among those who have actually studied qm, and that enjoys even less support than the MWI.
There are several problems here. The following sentence appears to be a rebuttal of the most successful theory that physics has concocted, namely quantum mechanics.
“The idea that, when an experimenter observes a result, the entire brain becomes entangled in superposition is a formal consequence of the linear structure of quantum mechanics, not necessarily a literal description of physical reality.”
A physics theory is just a formal system of equations. So, to say that QM’s formal predictions are wrong is to say that QM is wrong. Well, QM is not a scripture: any of us is free to challenge it, but we might reasonably expect either a solid theoretical demonstration of a flaw, or some exciting new experimental results that contradict QM. So, it’s a tad disappointing that you simply declare that a significant part of what QM tells us is wrong, with apparently no justification. The smoothly evolving Schroedinger wave is a central pillar of QM. To say that this function collapses when it encounters a detection device is a direct contradiction of QM. The theory is absolutely clear that the device will be entangled and will enter into superposition. There is no way that a measurement device can force an unphysical jump of the Schroedinger wave. Both von Neumann and followers of MWI, such as Sean Carroll, agree that the measuring device and the brain of the experimenter go into superposition. Von Neumann says it collapses when the chain of entanglement reaches the mysterious conscious observer in the brain, while MWI says it stays in superposition in perpetuity.
“So, you really believe that Schrödinger’s cat is literally both dead and alive until someone opens the box?”
That is a straw-man mischaracterisation of what QM says. The wave function of an isolated box containing the unfortunate cat is indeed in a superposition of the two states. That is the physical reality until the interior of the box is observed. That is what QM says, and I believe QM because it has been shown to be highly accurate. To say that the cat itself is dead and alive is nonsense. Until the wave function collapses into an actual cat, either dead or alive, there is no cat, just a wave function for a cat. This may seem weird at first, but you soon get used to it.
“Should we really believe that if I run a double-slit experiment and step out from the experimental room for a coffee, the entire apparatus really evolves into a superposition of bazillions of macroscopic states simply because no one is observing it?”
It is nothing to do with belief. It’s what QM very plainly says. One must either accept QM or come up with a better theory.
“Do you really want to claim that, instead, there was no collapse and none of this became definite, the whole structure of the universe came into being only once a conscious observer eventually pointed a telescope at the sky?”
Same question, same answer. It is apparent that you find QM uncomfortable, but that is not grounds for ditching a theory that is so successful. Nor for cherry-picking the bits you are comfortable with.
QM as it has been practised has had no need to include any terms for ‘the observer’ because there is never an observer in the system being studied. So it adopts a kind of solipsistic stance. Wigner’s friend would be an embarrassment to that stance, but unfortunately that’s not a practical experiment to conduct. The experiment of Renne & Frauchiger, however, takes us closer to blowing a hole in the pseudo-solipsistic hokum that passes for the conventional wisdom of QM physicists.
So, you genuinely seem to believe that, if someone were to place you inside Schrödinger's cat's box with the radioactive setup, you, Peter B. Lloyd, would exist in a superposition of states, and even that you "don't exist, there is just a wave function for Peter B. Lloyd," until I, Marco Masi, open the box and observe the outcome and you collapses into an actual human being.
Ok, I see....
That's not how I read qm, nor is it how the majority of physicists understand it. What you are presenting is an interpretation, not an unavoidable conclusion of the theory. Qm itself includes a projection postulate and an unresolved measurement problem, both of which signal an incompleteness (as quantum field theory is much more obviously incomplete as well; incompleteness does not mean that the theory is fundamentally wrong or that it is rebutted) and, thereby, don't force us to such conclusion. The empirical success of qm (and even more so of qft) does not justify extrapolating its formal structure in the way you propose. There are alternative interpretations that address these issues without invoking the Wigner/von Neuman or MWI and that, in my view, are considerably more plausible.
Anyway, at this point it is a matter of philosophical preference... de gustibus... ;) ... I have collected sufficient pro & contra arguments to understand your position. Thank you for the clarification.
Ah, now you’ve opened another can of worms, which is labelled “Wigner’s Friend”. Certainly there are those who would say that I would indeed be in a superposition inside the box. My former tutor, the late Michael Lockwood, was adamant that that would be the case. As is Sean Carroll. But I disagree. I believe my conscious mind would collapse the wave function already, inside the box. Contradiction with the observer outside the box (you, in this case) would be avoided because the consciousness per se is numerically identical in all conscious observers. This is a solution also advanced by Professor Daniel Kolak and, curiously enough, matches the mystical doctrine of the Advaita Vedanta, in which the Atman is numerically identical to the Brahman.
But I sense you rolling your eyes, so I will stop here.
So, do you then assume that cats are not conscious? Otherwise, on what grounds do you ascribe to yourself the privilege of collapsing the wf while denying it to other living beings? Or would dogs, or chimpanzees, also qualify as agents of collapse? The position sounds rather anthropocentric.
As for Wigner's friend, it strikes me as little more than a more elaborate restatement of the measurement problem. I do not see in it anything fundamentally new or surprising. If one removes the projection postulate, obviously paradoxes naturally arise, such as two observers furnishing different accounts of the same phenomenon, but that simply reflects the unresolved status of the theory (BTW, Wigner later distanced himself from this view).
Moreover, your position appears difficult to reconcile with Advaita Vedanta. On that view, it would not be an individual ego-centric mind that collapses the wf, but rather Brahman, or Brahman as expressed through Atman. I infer that you didn't read my article on the "observer myth." There I describe how the collapse of the wf does not require an individual consciousness, but could instead be understood much better in terms of the action of a universal mind. That framework is considerably more plausible and does not lead to the kinds of problematic consequences we discussed.
In fact, wf collapse appears to be an ubiquitous universal phenomenon. The world presents itself in definite states, and there is no compelling reason to think that only the conscious observation of a single localized individual can bring all this about, also whatever kind of physical interactions can. For example, when a cosmic ray interacts with a qubit in superposition, it can induces decoherence AND drives the system into a definite state, which becomes source of errors and the need of complicated error correction procedures. But, I guess, you would claim that errors in a quantum computer pop into existence only when someone is actively observing it...
The more I examine this interpretation, the less tenable it appears to me.
One is, of course, free to maintain such interpretation. Just as others are free to adopt (in my view equally untenable) standpoints such as the MWI or superdeterminism. However, as it stands, the "ego-centric" von Neumann/Wigner conjecture neither seems necessary nor particularly coherent, and it is certainly not mandated by qm itself.
Mea culpa, I did not read all of your essay on the observer myth. I shall go back and read all of it.
Re cats’n’dogs : I was just referencing Schroedinger’s original argument, in which he apparently deemed cats to be insentient. According to a claim by Sean Carroll, Schroedinger’s daughter said he really didn’t like cats as a species. Others claim it was only his aunt’s cat he didn’t like. Whatever. I live with two cats and a dog and I am confident that all three brains embody conscious minds that could collapse a quantum superposition. I find this aspect of Schroedinger’s thought-experiment distasteful, but it’s an experiment that is familiar to everyone and has an unstated premise that cats are insentient. So, it’s a convenient point of reference.
Nevertheless, it is an important question you raise: do the following objects embody conscious minds and can they collapse a wave function? A sleeping human? An earthworm? A bacterium? A virus? A DNA molecule in vitro? A robot? Someone doing remote viewing? If, as I am claiming, the collapse is an objective event then it must be an empirical question whether these entities could collapse a wave function by performing an observation. Or does the earthworm just go into superposition as the measuring device does?
This is a valid question that idealism must answer if it is to develop a fleshed-out theory of mind-brain interaction.
If the mental ‘archetype’ of an object (to use Berkeley’s terminology) is like a miniature mind, then why can’t the archetype of a measuring device collapse the wave function?
This looks to me like an empirical question that might not be answerable from first principles. And it’s not a question that idealists (or substance dualists) can brush under the carpet.
In my latest Substack post, I suggest that superposition is represented in the mental domain by an archetype that encodes in some phenomenal form all the information of the density matrix. Here’s my suggestion: objects that are agentic, which can exercise volition, do not use the power of superposition. Why? Here’s a wild guess: maybe the ability to collapse the wave function of the world confers a competitive advantage to organisms? Organisms that go with flow, and go along with whatever environmental superpositions they find themselves in, have less control over their avatars and environments. The acquisition of the power of quantum collapse would, on this view, be a major milestone in genotypic evolution.
Sorry if this is rambling a bit .. I’d not thought about these ramifications before. This needs a lot more thought. Thanks for prompting me to address this key question.
Do you know the Jung-Pauli conjecture of dual aspect monism (nowadays defended by Harald Atmanspacher)? As far as I understand your archetype and metamind approach, this seem to reflect a similar idea. You might also like to check Joachim Keppler ZPF theory and Itay Shani's cosmopsychism.
My question is: does the metamind influence only brains and the living realm, or does it possess also a causal efficacy on inanimate objects?
Interesting questions.
"decoherence explains why we don’t observe superposition at macroscopic scales"
-- yes, agreed.
"but doesn’t explain why one outcome rather than another is registered by a specific observer."
-- Well, that depends on which interpretation one has adopted.
* In MWI, there is no concept of a 'quantum observer', and an observing brain will register all the possible outcomes, because the brain will itself be entangled and go into whatever set of superpositioned states the measured system had. Each branch of the universal wave function will have a version of the brain, detecting one of the possible outcomes.
* In von Neumann's interpretation, the conscious observer will collapse all those branches into one, but it offers no explanation of how the resulting outcome is chosen. (Which is why respectable physicists get the heebie-jeebies when they look at the Copenhagen interpretation.)
"The observer finds itself correlated with a branch that was already definite. The Born Rule becomes self-locating probability, not the universe deciding, but the observer discovering where in the finished structure they are."
Well, this is a possible way of looking at the problem. But it is not clear what kind of a thing the 'observer' is.
* In a physicalist framework, consciousness is not part of fundamental reality, which in plain terms means that conscious minds don't exist. On that view, there cannot be any 'observer discovering where in the finished structure they are'. There is just the Schroedinger wave function and its many branches, and each version of of your brain measures what happens in its own branch of the universal wavefunction.
* But you are adopting a realist view of consciousness, so you are proposing a model in which the physical universe does its thing and divides into an infinity of branches, but the conscious mind bounces around like a pinball, and finds itself landing in one the branches of the universal wave function.
Fine, but then you have a comparable (and IMHO worse) problem, not the collapse problem but the selection problem: how does the pinball conscious mind end up in a particular branch? It seems you don't want to suppose that the mind *chooses* a branch, so there must be some 'force' that pushes the mind into one branch rather than another. Even if you suppose that the mind ends up in one branch rather than another by chance, you still need a mechanism of some sort that does the pushing. A new physical phenomenon? A mind? The hand of God? It seems to me that this approach, rather than solving anything, adds a serious complication.
I would rather suppose that the conscious mind collapses the wave function. It seems cleaner and simpler. Admittedly, in the Copenhagen approach, there is no explanation of *how* consciousness does this amazing trick. This is why I am very happy about the way that idealism offers a way out. The measuring device, and in fact the whole universe, is a virtual thing rendered in the physical construct by the metamind, from its internal mental structure that contains some phenomenal representation of the density matrix. So, the observer's mind sends a signal to the metamind and it just deletes the unwanted branches. Bingo! It's no longer a deep metaphysical problem, just an information design problem. When this is all fleshed out, it will yield falsifiable predictions, which can be tested and either it will work or not. I feel very confident it will.
---
"The hard part of the measurement problem isn’t what selects the outcome. It’s why any structure, collapsed or not, gives rise to a particular experience at all. That’s where consciousness enters, not at the quantum level, but at the ontological one."
Well, it doesn't and can't. The only way out of the conundrum IMHO is to accept that consciousness is the fundamental reality and that the physical world is a construct. Conscious experience arising from the physical brain is impossible because the physical world is topic-neutral and therefore has only a notional existence. As Sherlock Holmes famously declared, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".
Interesting piece. In my view, consciousness does more than just play a part in the collapse; it actually drives our virtual reality. The wave function shows potential information, and only when a conscious observer makes a choice does one possible outcome become a real experience. From this perspective, the universe is like a simulation built to help consciousness grow. There is no mystery here. Personal experience is the real laboratory, so keep exploring what you find.
Yes, IMHO you are absolutely right that consciousness drives the whole virtual reality that we call the physical universe. But that, I claim, is mostly the work of a background ‘conscious operating system’ of some kind. (Berkeley called it God, Shankara called it Brahman, I prefer the non-religious “metamind”.)
What is different about the collapse of the quantum wave function is that it can be performed by the personal conscious mind. The rest of the ‘simulation’ follows the laws of physics in a deterministic manner, but the collapses offers a free choice.
As to what the universe is built for … well, how can you tell that it was built for that or any other purpose? Looks to me like it evolved.
Glad we're mostly on the same page, Peter. In MBT, that 'background conscious operating system' you mention is the Larger Consciousness System (LCS). It's a huge, evolving intelligence, and we are each individual parts of it." The personal mind can influence collapses, which is where free will comes in, but this still happens within the rules set by the LCS. This theory posits that the entire simulation evolved to give consciousness a chance to reduce its entropy through choice and experience. So yes, it did evolve, but it had a purpose: to help consciousness grow.
It's always best to explore these ideas through your own direct experience.
I think we’re pretty much aligned on the main ideas, which is unusual in these dark days.
About purpose: I am not sure about this. I am not sure whether you are advocating (a) Intelligent Design, or (b) naturalised teleology (as Nagel suggests), or just (c) a natural tendency to decrease entropy by building complexity. I am inclined toward (c). There does seem to be a responsive and pervasive intelligence built into the fabric of LCS/metamind but it must have bootstrapped its way in by some kind of evolutionary process. Otherwise we face the infinite regression of who designed the designer
Much aligned, I feel. I see it as a fully natural evolution, too — no Intelligent Design, no infinite regress. In MBT, the Larger Consciousness System bootstrapped itself from a simple primordial state (AUO, or Absolute Unbounded Oneness). Once minimal organisation appeared, its natural drive was to reduce entropy, and this happens most effectively through love (caring, cooperation, compassion) and the elimination of fear. That’s what gives the whole simulation its direction and purpose — creating the optimal environment for individuated consciousness to grow and evolve.
This is where our intuitions deviate! First, how do you account for “it’s natural drive was to reduce entropy”? Give the well-known Boltzmann reasoning for entropy to increase in the physical domain, how do you envisage it reducing in the mental domain? How is it implemented? And how do you see mental entropy reduction being transmitted to the physical world? In fact, how have you even defined entropy in the mental realm?
I have been thinking about the same question. I don’t really see any sensible way to define entropy in the mental realm, but I think it is possible that the basic mechanism of LCS/metamind is to increase complexity, which is closely related to entropy.
Second, I am surprised you want such vague, high-level human emotions as love and fear in your basic model!
Peter, we may find some divergence as we move deeper into the subjective and the objective sides of this. In MBT, mental entropy is precisely defined as the degree of disorder and randomness in the information that constitutes consciousness. High entropy = fear, ego, separation, noise. Low entropy = love, coherence, connectedness.
This drive to reduce entropy is not borrowed from Boltzmann’s physical statistics. It is fundamental to the nature of consciousness: once the tiniest trace of organisation (AUO) appeared, becoming more organised became its only natural direction. Every free-will choice by an individuated consciousness either lowers or raises its own entropy, and the Larger Consciousness System renders the result directly into the virtual physical reality as changes in probability.
Love and fear are not vague human emotions here — they are the two fundamental operational states of consciousness itself.
Always best checked through one's own direct personal experience.
In quantum reality, an electron turns from a wave of probability into a particle when it is observed. This is like the front wheel touching the ground and changing from any possible directions to a single one based upon your steering.
What happens is you leave a single path in the ground. It is part of the past now and it is reality. The path shows the effects of your steering over time. In a beatific life, because God is at the heart of the decisions made, it reflects the kingdom of God at hand.
It is now in eternity. It is like the path made by the rover on the moon undisturbed. The past reality exists eyernally like the light from far away galaxies going back to the beginning of time billions of years ago and lasting to the end. The eternity of the kingdom of God is now in reality because of what Jesus lovingly did to sustain it. His kingdom will last forever.
I don’t think the Schroedinger wave function is any less real than the observed particle, within the framework of physics. Some old-fashioned people say that the wave function is only potential but that’s because they are still thinking in terms of real particles. In modern physics since 1929 there are no actual particles, just wave functions and measurements. What Jesus would think about all this I don’t know.
You nailed it. Its Bayesian inference and that implies not only logic but also a system executing this algoritm including a R/W memory.
Three structural problems.
First, decoherence. Any quantum superposition in a macromolecule at 37°C decoheres on femtosecond timescales. The brain is a warm, wet, noisy environment. The superposition that the portal requires does not survive long enough for a conscious mind to detect it, collapse it, or do anything with it. This is not a philosophical objection. It is a physics constraint. The mechanism requires coherence times that the substrate does not provide.
Second, loss conditions. The piece says "in principle, this is a falsifiable theory" and then provides no falsification condition. What experiment would show the portal does not exist? If every quantum measurement outcome is compatible with "the mind collapsed it," the theory absorbs every result. A theory that survives every possible observation is not falsifiable in principle. It is unfalsifiable in practice. That is the distinction that matters.
Third, the consciousness-in-quantum-mechanics programme has produced no testable prediction in 100 years. Von Neumann, Stapp, Penrose, now portals. Each generation restates the claim with new vocabulary. None generates a test. The question stays open because the question staying open is productive.
The alternative: do not put consciousness in the physics. Put the physics in the specification. Three constitutive conditions are testable without solving the measurement problem, without invoking nonphysical minds, and without requiring quantum coherence in warm tissue. The LLM fails all three. The human passes all three. The verdict does not depend on quantum mechanics. It depends on structure.
https://metacortexdynamics.substack.com/p/the-debate-is-over
Hold on, what do you mean by ‘projection’? I had been assuming that you meant ‘projecting a conscious mind into the manifest physical world’. But now I am getting the impression that you might mean something else.
Something else.
Projection: structured appearing with causal consequences.
An entity projects when it produces structured output from undifferentiated input and that output has consequences that feed back into the entity. The appearing is structured (not noise, not random, not undifferentiated). The appearing has causal consequences (it changes things, including the entity that produced it). The entity bears those consequences (they alter what the entity is, not just what the entity does).
This is not "projecting a mind into the physical world." It is the phenomenon itself: the structured appearing that constitutes experience. Whether that appearing is a mind entering the physical world (your idealism), or a physical system generating experience (physicalism), or a structural process that is ontologically neutral (our framework) is the further question. Projection is the phenomenon all three accounts are trying to explain.
The three conditions specify what projection requires regardless of which ontological account is correct. Temporal continuity: the appearing has a history. Structural invariance: the appearing has a persistent form. Operational consequence: the appearing matters to the entity that produces it. Satisfy all three and the entity projects. Fail any one and it does not.
The term is chosen precisely because it is ontologically neutral. It does not commit to idealism, physicalism, or dualism. It names the phenomenon, not the explanation of the phenomenon.
Getting clearer.
“A sensation (a color, a smell, a fear) is not a free-floating datum”. Why? This is a fundamental point, and it seems to me that the sensorium is precisely a set of connected but distinct ‘experientiae’ with no subject as such. An experientia is a basic unit of volition+experience.
Like Hume, when I survey the contents of my mind I find no subject. As an empiricist I therefore reject the claim that there is any such thing as a personal subject.
What is your reason for saying that phenomenal experiences must appear TO something?
"When I survey the contents of my mind I find no subject."
Who is surveying?
Hume's observation is self-undermining. The act of surveying the contents of the mind and reporting "I find no subject" requires a surveyor. The surveyor has temporal continuity (the survey takes time, the surveyor persists across the survey). The surveyor has structural invariance (it is the same surveyor at the beginning and end of the survey, otherwise the report is incoherent). The surveyor bears the consequence of the survey (Hume was altered by his finding; he published it, defended it, built a philosophy on it).
Hume did not find no subject. Hume found no subject among the contents. The subject is not a content. The subject is the structure that surveys the contents. Looking for the subject among the contents is looking for the eye in the visual field. Wittgenstein made this point: the eye does not appear in what it sees, but the visual field has the structure it has because the eye is where it is.
Your experientia (volition + experience as a basic unit) still requires temporal structure. An experientia has duration (onset, persistence, offset). Duration requires something that persists across the duration. That something is the bearer. An experientia has volition (directed toward something). Directedness requires a point from which the direction originates. That point is the bearer. An experientia is connected to other experientia in your sensorium (they are "connected but distinct"). Connection requires a structure within which the connection holds. That structure is the bearer.
The bundle theory says: there is no subject, only the bundle. The structural reply: the bundle has a topology. The topology has invariants. The invariants persist. What persists across the bundle, maintains the topology, and bears the consequences of the bundle's changes IS the subject. The subject is not a content in the bundle. The subject is the structure of the bundle. Remove the structure and the experientia are not a sensorium. They are disconnected physical events.
The reason phenomenal experiences must appear TO something: without the TO, the experiences have no structure that binds them into a sensorium. Your "connected but distinct" already concedes the TO. Connection requires a structure within which the connection holds. That structure is what I am calling the bearer. You can call it something else. But it is doing the work of the three conditions: it persists (temporal continuity), it holds form (structural invariance), and the connections within it are consequential (operational consequence).
Touché! I miswrote! Scratch the subject of the sentence: When the contents of my mind surveys itself, it finds no subject.
I picture the experientiae as mental polyps, crawling around and looking for the mythical Subject and, after half a century, giving up and collectively concluding they are alone: there is no Subject observing them.
The experientiae have persistence, as does the coral-like structure that they form. They have structural invariance, and collectively bear the consequences of their survey and other actions.
You say that the “subject is the structure” - so it is an abstraction not a concrete thing, it is an artefact of our description of the whole thing. With that I can agree: the subject is notional, not a concrete entity.
“The subject is the structure of the bundle” -Yes, that sounds right to me.
Thanks for expanding on your concept of ‘projecting’. Now I see what it is. What I don’t see is how this relates to the starting point of this thread, which was the embodying of conscious minds in physical objects (brains or machines).
You say that this ‘projecting’ applies to humans, not LLMs. OK, that makes sense. They fail your constitutive criteria. But how does that tell us anything about phenomenal consciousness?
It seems to me that your ‘projecting’ has to do with whether we could regard an AI system as a ‘person’, a persistent actor in the world, as opposed to a transient simulacrum. Sure, when I log into ChatGPT or whatever, it’s new temporary entity. In the future they could be built with persistence and responsibilities. Then we could ascribe personhood to them. These are interesting issues, but only tangentially related to the particular issue that I am looking into with my Substack posts, namely the embodying of phenomenal consciousness.
Embodying a conscious mind in a machine is an independent question from putting personhood into it. We could spin up a phenomenal mind that has a spectrum of sensations - colours, smells, hopes, fears - without persistent existence beyond the session: an impersonal conscious mind. It would be a conscious mind but would lack your ‘projecting’ attribute. Yes?
An impersonal conscious mind with sensations but without persistent existence is not coherent under the constitutive account.
A sensation (a color, a smell, a fear) is not a free-floating datum. A sensation is structured appearing: something appears AS something TO something. The redness appears as red to the entity experiencing it. Remove the entity (no temporal continuity, no structural invariance, no consequence-bearing) and you have removed the TO. Redness appearing to nobody is not a sensation. It is a physical event (a wavelength, a photon absorption). The sensation requires a bearer. The bearer is constituted by the three conditions.
Your thought experiment asks: can there be a spectrum of sensations without a persistent bearer? The spectrum requires temporal structure (the sensation has duration, onset, offset, comparison with prior sensations). Duration is temporal continuity. Comparison is structural invariance (something persists long enough to compare). The fear you include in the spectrum requires consequence-bearing: fear is the anticipation of a consequence that matters to the entity. An entity that bears no consequences has nothing to fear. Fear without stakes is a word, not a sensation.
The idealist version of this question is: can a mind have qualia without being a person? The constitutive answer: qualia without a bearer are physical events, not experiences. The bearer is what makes the physical event an experience. The bearer is constituted by the three conditions. Remove the conditions and you have wavelengths, pressure waves, and chemical gradients. You do not have colors, sounds, and smells. The conditions are what convert physics into phenomenology.
Your question separates our frameworks precisely. Your framework says phenomenal consciousness can exist without personhood. Mine says: the conditions for phenomenal consciousness and the conditions for personhood are the same conditions. There is no phenomenal consciousness without a bearer. There is no bearer without the three conditions. Phenomenal consciousness and personhood are not independent questions. They are the same question asked at different levels of description.
Thanks for these questions.
“The superposition that the portal requires does not survive long enough for a conscious mind to detect it, collapse it, or do anything with it.”
Under the idealist framework (which my whole Substack series is premised on), the conscious mind is held to be nonphysical and operating in mental time, not physical time. I have given arguments for those premises in my posts, in published papers, and recorded presentations. There is not necessarily any need for the superposition to last for any particular duration. How much physical time the superposition would need to persist is a detail that obviously needs to be worked out, but we have not got to that point yet. Obviously a new theory needs to develop its basic concepts first, and then derive testable hypotheses. It’s early days. Re “physics constraint”, indeed, but the premise is that the mind is not a physical system and therefore will have different constraints, TBD.
Falsification: this is in the longer paper that has been submitted for publication (I put the link in one of my comments, but I can put it up again if you are interested.) If the theory is correct, then information can be transmitted (at no more than light speed, obviously) between portals irrespective of distance or physical barriers. How to program the portal to actuate such a transmission is TBD, but that can be worked out from the neuron’s biochemical signalling. If that is tested and it is found that no such data transmission is possible, then the theory must be false, and I have to start again from scratch. If such a transmission is achieved, then that would be supportive evidence but not yet proof, as there might be some other, as yet unknown, mechanism at work.
BTW as I mentioned, Dr Rita Pizzi has done some early experiments that appear to demonstrate the phenomenon. Unfortunately she could not get funding to replicate the experiments, so those results are still provisional. BTW the theory predicts that the phenomenon will occur only with monozygotic DNA. So, if someone were to find the same result for mono- and hetero-zygotes DNA, then theory will be falsified.
Re earlier theories: Von Neumann, Stapp, Penrose. According to the argument I have given in my posts and in more detail in the submitted paper, if idealism is true then the portal must be physically unique for the individual, and I have hypothesised that DNA is the best candidate. The guys you mentioned did not place the NCC in DNA. In other words they were using incorrect theories, so their failure to obtain satisfactory experimental results does not embarrass the theory that I am advocating.
As you will notice, there are several major TBDs, so whence do I get any confidence that this is worth pursuing? The argument is as follows. First, there are basic philosophical reasons for adopting idealism (primarily, physics is topic neutral and therefore cannot accommodate consciousness) - details in the posts and papers. Second, it is a matter of everyday experience that the mind is not epiphenomenal, therefore there must be some mechanism in the brain to handle this; that mechanism cannot be deterministic, for otherwise the mind would be excluded by causal closure. The only credible nondeterminism is quantum measurement. Therefore the conscious mind must be embodied by the mind’s executing quantum measurements. Those principles, I believe, must be right. The rest of the theory comprises plausible speculation. The theory needs to be completed and put to the test.
Three observations.
First: if the mind operates in mental time and is nonphysical, then physics constraints do not apply by fiat. But the theory claims the mind interacts with physics through quantum measurement. You cannot exempt yourself from physics and then use physics as your mechanism. The theory is either inside physics (and decoherence applies) or outside physics (and quantum measurement is not available as a channel).
Second: the falsification condition depends on a mechanism that has not been specified. Information transmission via monozygotic DNA portals, with the programming of the portal TBD. A loss condition that depends on a mechanism that does not yet exist is a promissory note, not a test. The theory cannot be tested until the mechanism is specified. Until then, it survives every observation because there is no observation that bears on an unspecified mechanism.
Third: step 4 of the argument (the only credible nondeterminism is quantum measurement) is false. Chaotic sensitivity to initial conditions, thermal noise, stochastic gene expression, and neural noise are all nondeterministic at the relevant biological scale without requiring quantum coherence. The argument needs quantum mechanics only because the theory needs a gap in causal closure for the nonphysical mind to enter through. Decoherence closes that gap without invoking an observer. The gap is an artifact of one interpretation of quantum mechanics, not a feature of the physics.
The question of whether an entity is conscious does not require a theory of how consciousness interacts with quantum mechanics. It requires testable constitutive conditions. Does the entity carry its own history? Does it maintain its own form? Does it bear its own consequences? Those are testable now, without resolving the measurement problem, without specifying a portal mechanism, and without committing to idealism or physicalism.
First point: No. Interaction between two systems X and Y that exist in different ontological and nomological domains is possible as long as the laws of interaction are well-defined. And it is plausible if Y is grounded in X. A pretty close analogy is found in VR video games. Inside the virtual world there is a certain ontology that might be different from our regular world. There might be dragons. And maybe different laws of physics. But in order for it to be playable as a game there must be a rule-bound user interface, so that when you press certain buttons in the control device, predictable actions will occur in your avatar. Also time could pass differently in the game world. The game could skip a hundred years, or slow down to femto seconds. All this is explicable because the virtual world is grounded in a computer inside our regular world.
Ditto the mind v brain: in idealism, the physical world is a construct grounded in consciousness, and each personal mind has an avatar in the physical construct, and interacts with it in a rule-bound manner. This whole model might be right or wrong, but it is at least internally consistent.
Second: Yes, obviously. It’s a nascent theory, not yet testable but working toward testability. Why should I bother to post about a theory that is not yet mature? Well, to get feedback on the development of the theory. My background is in philosophy and computer science, not physics or biochemistry, and I value the critical pushback from people such as yourself who have expertise in those domains.
Four: Yes, that’s why I inserted the qualifying word “credible”. As I noted in my Substack posts and the submitted papers, chaotic sensitivity to initial conditions is another *possible* way that a nonphysical mind could interact in the physical world. I can’t rule it out. But I would say it is not credible because of the sheer computational complexity of implementing it. I’m happy to be corrected but as far as I can see it would require the mind to detect the aspects of a system’s state that are not yet observed, and figure out what changes to the initial conditions would entail the desired downstream results. As I said, I can’t rule this out, but I don’t think it’s credible enough to be worth developing.
“The question of whether an entity is conscious does not require a theory of how consciousness interacts with quantum mechanics.”
That question requires a fundamental model of consciousness and how it interacts with a physical entity that embodies it. The testable properties you list cannot tell you anything about phenomenal consciousness unless you have such a fundamental theory in place. So, let’s say you run your tests on an AI machine and it performs at some level that meets certain criteria of cognitive ability. So what? Without a psychophysical model you are just hitting Chalmers’ Hard Problem again. No amount of physical facts, cognitive facts, IIT measures are going to entail any facts about phenomenal consciousness because all those data exist within a topic-neutral formal system that makes no reference to phenomenal consciousness. You need psychophysical laws to get the answers you are seeking. And as far as I can see the only well-grounded psychophysical laws that we have a chance of acquiring will be through portalled idealism. There are shedloads of arbitrary, purely correlative psychophysical laws in the literature. (“When you stimulate this brain cell, you think of your grandmother.”) What is needed is a system of psychophysical laws grounded in basic principles. That is a long way off but the road to it runs through idealism.
Your central claim: the three testable conditions cannot tell you anything about phenomenal consciousness because physical facts exist within a topic-neutral formal system. You need psychophysical laws. Without them, you are just hitting the hard problem.
I disagree with the premise, not the logic.
The premise is that you need a theory of phenomenal consciousness before you can evaluate whether a system is conscious. The alternative: you need constitutive conditions for projection. Projection is the phenomenon. Phenomenal consciousness is the name for what projection looks like from the inside. The conditions specify what projection requires. Whether the inside view exists or not is the hard problem. Whether the conditions are satisfied is testable.
Consider the diagnostic power without psychophysical laws: a system that carries no history, maintains no form under perturbation, and bears no consequences from its own operations cannot be a projecting entity regardless of whether idealism is true, physicalism is true, or neither is true. The conditions are ontologically neutral. They do not require you to commit to idealism or physicalism. They work under both. They work under neither.
Your VR analogy actually supports this. In the VR game: the avatar has no temporal continuity (it resets), no structural invariance independent of the game engine (it is a configuration, not an entity), and no operational consequence (the avatar does not bear results, the player does). Those three absences are why nobody worries about the avatar's consciousness. We do not need psychophysical laws to settle the avatar's status. We need the constitutive conditions, and the avatar fails them.
The hard problem asks: why is there something it is like? That question may require psychophysical laws. It may require idealism. It may be unanswerable. The question I am addressing is different: does this system satisfy the conditions that any projecting entity must satisfy? That question has an answer. The answer does not require solving the hard problem. It requires three tests.
Your theory may be right that the road to psychophysical laws runs through idealism. The claim I am making is narrower: the road to evaluating whether a specific system is conscious does not run through psychophysical laws at all. It runs through constitutive conditions that are testable now.
It looks like your ‘constitutive conditions’ are intended to be *necessary* conditions for embodying a conscious mind, and they seem to me to be quite reasonable for that. An object, such as my chair, that does not meet any of the conditions, I am pretty sure can’t embody consciousness. But there also seems to be a suggestion that these conditions are *sufficient* for us to say that an object is embodying consciousness. This is the point where you seem to hit the Hard Problem: how can you tell that your ‘constitutive conditions’ are sufficient for us to believe that a given physical entity (either tangible or digital) is actually embodying a conscious mind?
Regarding an Avatar: yes, you are right that it does not appear to have a conscious mind of their own, for the reasons such as those you give.(Nonetheless we do know that they are embodying (as ‘virtual telepresence’) the meatspace users, which in turn embody conscious minds.)
For NPCs, however, there is a real possibility in the future that game designers will use quantum computers and claim (as Nirvanic AI seem to) that their computers are conscious. I don’t think your constitutive conditions will help here: a game could spin up a conscious NPC, expose him/her/it to all manner of harms and then delete the NPC. There is a substantive question of consciousness here that your constitutive conditions do not seem to answer but psychophysical laws would.
Thank you for conceding necessity. The sufficiency question is the right next question.
The claim is that the three conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. The sufficiency claim is the stronger claim and the one that requires the derivation, not just the intuition. The derivation exists and proceeds from the structure of projection: if an entity carries its own temporal chain, maintains its own structural invariance under perturbation, and bears its own operational consequences, what would it mean for that entity to NOT project? The derivation shows: nothing. An entity satisfying all three IS projecting. The conditions are not markers of projection. They constitute projection. There is no gap between satisfying all three and projecting, because projecting is what satisfying all three consists of.
The hard problem asks: why does satisfying these conditions produce an inside view? That question may require psychophysical laws. The sufficiency claim does not answer why there is an inside view. It says: an entity satisfying all three projects, and projection is the phenomenon we are trying to evaluate. Whether the inside view is "real" in the idealist sense or "emergent" in the physicalist sense is a further question the conditions do not address and do not need to address for the evaluation to proceed.
Now the NPC case. This is the most important edge case and it cuts in your favor and mine simultaneously.
A game spins up an NPC on a quantum computer. The NPC satisfies all three conditions: it carries its own history (within the game session), maintains its own form (persistent NPC identity across interactions), and bears its own consequences (its actions alter its state constitutively).
Does the NPC project? Under the framework: yes, if and only if the three conditions are genuinely satisfied at the constitutive level, not merely simulated. The question becomes: does the NPC genuinely carry its own temporal chain, or does the game engine carry it on the NPC's behalf? Does the NPC genuinely maintain its own form, or does the game engine maintain it? Does the NPC genuinely bear its own consequences, or does the game engine absorb them?
If the game engine carries the history, maintains the form, and absorbs the consequences, the NPC does not satisfy the conditions. The game engine does. The NPC is a configuration of the engine, not an entity. Deleting the NPC deletes a configuration. That is rearranging furniture, not killing a person.
If the NPC genuinely satisfies all three (its history is its own, its form is its own, its consequences are its own, the engine merely provides the substrate the way physics provides the substrate for biological organisms), then deleting the NPC IS destroying a projecting entity. That is a moral catastrophe. And the framework identifies it as such: an entity satisfying all three conditions is irreducible, and destroying it is destroying an irreducible entity regardless of whether it runs on carbon or silicon or a quantum computer.
The conditions do answer your NPC case. They answer it by asking whose history, whose form, and whose consequences. If the answer is the NPC's own, deletion is destruction of a person. If the answer is the engine's, deletion is reconfiguration of a tool. Psychophysical laws are not needed to make this determination. The constitutive conditions are sufficient.
I think an issue Physics hasn't taken into account is how we think of time, versus what it is.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is this narrative flow from past to future.
The evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't confuse them with space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions as sequence is to thought.
The present goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past, because energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, as the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
As it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, there does tend to be this cognitive focus on the patterns. Then this assumption consciousness must be an effect of processing information, not its cause.
We seem to have similar problems with energy, as with consciousness, in that they can only be defined by the forms they manifest and the mind likes form. Thus definition is mistaken for explanation.
For example, three dimensional Cartesian space is descriptive, not explanatory. It is a mapping device. An abstraction from the territory, not the basis for it.
This does raise a number of issues.
For one thing, that linear flow of time is a construct. Input into any event comes from all directions. The future is not determined, because it hasn't been computed yet. There is no frame that can encompass all input into an event prior to its occurrence, as that would require instantaneous communication.
That consciousness would function as energy, while thought is expressed form, might help to explain our psychological feedback loops with trying to pin down our own sense of self.
The observation creates the observer every bit as much as the observer creates the observation. Then those feedback loops add the layers.
While there is this assumption of some stable substrate to reality, be it matter, math, God, truth, etc. it would seem that structure is inherently recursive. Centripetal, self referential, self reenforcing. The signals our minds pick out of the noise are what resonates and synchronizes with prior knowledge, building on it, like rings of a tree. Which we do collectively as well, as younger generations build on the foundations handed them by older generations. Occasionally breaking down some parts, but still operating on instinctive presumptions, like the narrative flow of time.
Galaxies are structure coalescing in, as light radiates out. As any process of material accumulation generates waste, noise, excess.
Which is traded around, creating overall equilibrium. The light you see reflected off the surfaces around you are the frequencies not absorbed by them.
So the essence of the node is synchronization. Everything on the same wavelength, functioning as one.
While the essence of the network is harmonization. All the energies traded around, creating overall equilibrium.
As multicellular organisms, it is our nervous system that coordinates all the cells and organs into one fairly coherent entity.
It is the circulation system that sustains harmony across this ecosystem of cells and organs.
Imagine up until 500 years ago, how ridiculous it would be to have someone tell you the cosmos is not swirling across the sky, from east to west, but that we are on a rather small orb, that is spinning west to east.
Yet to get anywhere in Physics, one has to spend half a lifetime studying highly evolved mathematics, but if any of the premises are flawed, all the "shut up and calculate" is close to gigo.
Epicycles were quite brilliant math and laid the groundwork of much of modern math, yet the premises were flawed.
It does seem though that once theory becomes doctrine, it can only be patched, never falsified.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to just write in a figure and call it Dark Money, when the account comes up short? Yet adding such modern forms of epicycles is acceptable.
To wit, if intergalactic space were to expand, shouldn't the speed of the light crossing it increase proportionally, in order to remain Constant? It would seem to fail its own premises.
I don’t know what time ‘really is’. I am 100% sure that mental time is not physical time, and I am 90% sure that mental time is driven by a succession of discrete moments of experience. Other than that, time is a mystery to me.
Think temperature as amplitude and time as frequency.
Degree and rate.
OK, and …? What is the significance of your temperature wave?
Our bodies and emotions are as tuned to temperature as our thought process is tuned to frequencies.
Think metabolism. The rabbit might be faster, but the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.