The Human Conditon

Yin: We are the stuff that dreams are made of. Puffs of air buffeted by the wind, fading into night.

Yang: We orbit along the event horizon of the black hole for some time, getting a little closer to crossing it each second. We eventually do cross it and it’s always there. And sometimes we can’t help but stare.

Himself the Age Transfigured (#2)

We have come to be the movement,
The moment of the cosmos.
Each particle that exists,
Changes and touches all others.
And we are the awareness.

To each change, we give name.
We track each touch,
We push all levers,
Or learn them just the same.
We are the lever,
The hand that encompasses.

Each molecule flowing over and around
Every other molecule
Is perceived by us,
Measured by us,
Called into being by us.

Ours is the time in which
The Universe came into it own.
We ride the surf and,
At the same time,
Dive the waters.

That which we cannot do,
We can imagine doing.
Ours is the power and the glory,
To be true.

GMG 

The Brain As Quantum Computer

Recently I had the opportunity to watch southern African White-necked crows while they were watching me. I was taking afternoon tea (and eating rusks) on the patio overlooking a beautiful valley in the hills near Mbabane. Crows are smart and these are among the smartest. One sat on the roof of the next house staring at me convinced that at some point, I would grow careless and give him or her a chance to steal something, perhaps something to eat. As I was ever-vigilant, eventually they flew off over the valley, soaring and dipping in very real time. As I watched, I thought about the complex calculations that a bird must make moment-to-moment to move so quickly through three-dimensional space. They must keep track of where they are, where to go, how to get there. Knowing each requires entire subsets of information – such as (for where to go), where they saw food or last saw food or might find food while watching for anything that might require evasive action. These calculations must be solved each fraction of a second. I then thought this must be true for any animal with a brain (or nervous system). Neural systems allow the organism to move through, and react to, the environment rather than obey simple tropisms or merely be buffeted about by the external environment. The more complicated the neural system – reaching a peak of networks of networks to the 4th or 5th power (or beyond) running in our human brains – the more complex the information that can be stored and manipulated. A classical view of the human brain would start with the 500 trillion synapses of the adult brain’s hundred billion neurons. Now that is a lot of synapses. But think about how much information is stored there in language, knowledge, experience, memories and everything else that makes each individual unique and utterly complex.

I’ve speculated in this space about quantum consciousness, the production of mind from brain through “collapsing the wave functions apprehended from the perceptual flow. While watching the crows, I realized that the brain must function as a quantum computer and not as a classical system. The notion that quantum processes mix with (or form) consciousness is called “orchestrated objective reduction.” It rests on the possibility that the microtubules in nerve cells are small enough to contain quantum states. The brain accounts for just two percent of the human body’s mass but utilizes around 20% of its energy. It basically is like having a 20 watt bulb in our head shining all the time. This energy could be powering the creation and persistence of entangled states inside the microtubules of every cell. In this way, the neural organization of the brain would be the maintenance of a complex, constantly refreshed, while constantly changing, global entangled state. The collapse of the highest level of this entangled state-of-states coincides with consciousness. Inside our heads, this quantum computer has storage and calculating power well beyond what would be true if our brains functioned simply along classical physics lines. It may produce what we experience as consciousness. Or, collapse may come through the decisions that we – the “ghost” in the machine, acting as the internal observer – make in each moment as the crow flies.

Consciousness: An Alternative View

Been suggesting in this space that consciousness may be a primary characteristic of the universe and that there is, in effect, a “ghost in the machine” that observes the universe by collapsing the wave function of quantum reality. The supposition has been that our individual consciousness is but part of a cosmic consciousness that in some sense caused the universe. But there may be another way to look at things.

Stephen Hawkin has suggested that the entire universe might be described as a wave function. That is, one single equation – if we could calculate it – might define the entire universe across time. The math is beyond me but the notion might be seen as raising the question of how the wave function is broken by the conscious observer. One possibility is that a conscious observer is necessary. But at least for some billions of years, there was no conscious observer as we might understand that without resorting to some role for an original cosmic observer. Yet the universe evolved. From the Big Bang through the the differentiation of the primordial energies and matter to the emergence of galaxies and stars. Now without any conscious observers, how could the wave function of the universe have collapsed? To put this into classic terms, if a tree fell in the forest without anyone there to hear it, would it make a sound? For millions of years on earth, life arose and also evolved without any of us to witness it. Yet obviously, things happened and did so according to the laws of science. We live on continents that moved into the place we find them long before we arrived on the scene. Dinosaurs left fossils in the ground that we could later observe. Did none of this exist before we were around to see the results?

Our common sense must tell us that the universe and the world we live in did not depend on our observation to exist. The straight forward answer might be that the individual particles and organizations of energy and matter continually collapsed the wave function through their lawful interactions. Hydrogen crashing into oxygen makes water. Perhaps, then, wave functions collapsed through a kind of “virtual observation.” As wave functions broke down engendering new wave functions, this virtual observer rode the crest as a flame may arise from combustion. In effect, collapse creates the observer. In our case, the brain, with its almost infinite complexity, creates such a convincing virtual observer that our “I” experiences it as real. Consciousness – and our individual sense of self – would then be a kind of illusion riding the continually collapsing wave function arising from the biological mechanism of our brain and its moment-to-moment apprehension of the quantum reality at the base of everything.

This would not seem to me to explain why there is anything and why the universe is lawful. Nor does it fully answer the question of what might be said to have exisited without anyone to see it.  Perhaps all systems of matter and even the earliest forms of life have a kind of striving which is a form of consciousness.  Or a “virtual observer” might simply be the way the universe knows itself and therefore as real as anything else.

Still ruminating....

Quantum Consciousness

In 1929, Niels Bohr, in what he admitted was perhaps a rush of enthusiasm for the new science, speculated that perhaps the quantum understanding of physical reality might also apply to an understanding of the mind and consciousness. Maybe as analogy but perhaps, he suspected, as something more. In effect, Bohr suggested that any effort to apply thought to perception – of the subject apprehending the object – collapsed a continuous wave function. When we use language to describe something – whether it be internal or external – we were extracting some possibilities out of a number of ways to do so, indeed from a continuously variable flow. Recent investigations (as reported in Science News) into apparently illogical thought – decisions or judgements that flout the basic mathematical logic of if A=X and B=X, then A=B – suggest the possibility that quantum logic in which something can be both particle and wave at the same time may apply. The situations examined violated the “sure thing” rule.

One well-known example involved asking students whether they would buy a ticket for a Hawaii vacation in three different situations: They had passed a big test, they had failed the test, or they didn’t yet know whether they had passed or failed. More than half said they would buy the ticket if they had passed. Even more said they would buy the ticket if they failed. But 30 percent said they wouldn’t buy a ticket until they found out whether they had passed or failed.

It seems odd that people would decide to buy right away if they knew the outcome of the test, no matter what it was, but hesitated when the outcome was unknown. Such behavior violated a statistical maxim known as the “sure thing principle.” Basically, it says that if you prefer X if A is true, and you prefer X if A isn’t true, then you should prefer X whether A is true or not. So it shouldn’t matter whether you know if A is true. That seems logical, but it’s not always how people behave.

The researchers found that context is important and that quantum logic may better explain such behavior. We make decisions within a framework that allows possibilities that are logically the same to interfere with each other as quantum waves might. Uncertainty seems to leave us both particle and wave.

This is deep. But the essential bit seems to be that the conscious observer necessary to turn quantum reality into the classical reality we live in – by observing and thereby collapsing the wave function – also may operate in the same quantum/relativistic manner. If the brain is organically based and operates as a classical system, perhaps the mind – brain/nervous system plus consciousness – acts as a quantum system in which perceived reality is constructed through collapsing the wave functions apprehended from the perceptual flow. (Some of us “collapse” more readily than others: judgers vs perceivers?) Now, whether consciousness itself is a quantum-derived property of the physical brain – perhaps arising at the nano-level – or a “ghost in the machine” would remain a question. But the first possibility – that consciousness arises within and from a physical system that demands consciousness to operate – would seem to violate Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

Moments in Time and Consciousness

Attended the symphony today.  Instrumental music does not hold my attention as well as a play -- especially Shakespeare -- would.  I enjoyed the program but without words (lyrics), it didn't pin down my thoughts.  So they just wandered.

I wondered about exactly why I could not focus on the assembly of notes as I would on an assembly of words.  That made me think about just how these notes add up to music anyway.  The basic length of time in a conscious moment must be long enough for a series of notes to be assembled in the mind into a bit of music.  If we only perceived note by note -- or word by word for that matter -- we'd never make sense of anything.  The basic unit of conscious perception apparently is 2-3 seconds. Our now is this long.  Short term memory -- what is held in consciousness readily available as context for each moment -- is some 10-15 seconds.  We can perceive a much denser reality in each moment than simply one "thing."  Events can enter our consciousness that linger only some 40 milliseconds.  Indeed, each note is made up from a number of vibrations in the air and a symphony has lots of instruments making each note.  So each conscious moment is a highly sampled chunk of passing time.  The point is, however, not this but the apparent fact that our consciousness grasps this moment in its entirety.  It spans the stream of quantized time.  (The smallest unit of time is the Planck time, 5.39x10 to the -44th seconds.)  Consciousness seems to exist outside the flow of time.  We do not observe, think, exist in time but somehow alongside it.  The "ghost" in our machine provides a stage large enough for an assembly of actors to play their parts so that we can experience each moment of the world.

Quantum Being

Reading in La Roy Ladurie's excellent study of the people of Montaillou, came across his observation on the musings of these 14th century peasants on freedom of will, do we have it or not? Began thinking of this question in light of my musings on the speed of consciousness. I had suggested that the speed of light is actually a measure of time, the time it takes us to leap from one moment of existence to the next. Light itself has no speed since at its "speed" as we measure it, time does not exist. Light relative to itself is everywhere it will be at the same moment. The universe it illuminates is therefore that which exists across all time at once, the universe as an eternal whole. Our consciousness – embedded in matter and not traveling as light – experiences time and sees light crawl along at so much slower than infinite speed.

Could freedom of will exist if a timeless universe also exists? If everything that has happened, is happening and will happen “already” exists in the same instant of creation in the Big Bang, what could be new? Are we conscious beings just crawling along lines that already exist, just following what is already fated to happen?

Being is an interesting word. It can be both verb and noun. I can be something, I can be being sad or happy. I can have a state of being, we can talk of human and supreme beings or even alien beings. Being is simply the condition of existing, of having existence. But does a rock have being? It does exist but would we say that a rock is being anything. Even just being a rock? Being implies something more, it suggests a subjective agent, someone who is being. Only something that is being could also be conscious. Consciousness is the awareness of a being. The speed of time is the pace of a beings movement through moments.

Back to freedom of will. We certainly feel, at least some times, that we have it. Life can be so complicated with so many random seeming events and difficult choices to make that it is hard to believe that it has all already been written. Sure, sometimes it seems we have no choice but to have done what we have done but in reality at each moment, we can decide among almost anything. How to square this with a relativistic universe in which the true speed of light is instantaneous and in which everything has already happened?

What if being is quantum, both particle and wave? Each of us are particles. We move through a material universe with time. We are attached to particular assemblages of matter we call bodies. We observe and act within the time-bound material world and with our wonderfully complex brains our consciousness blossoms into self-awareness and thought. Being also exists as a wave. We would not necessarily be able to understand that, as such being – accompanied by an experience of everything at once – is not easy to grasp. But such being – being beyond time – would not become aware of the particles of being before (or after) they acted because before and after would not exist. In other words, there is no text for us to follow, no “fate” which limits or determines our actions, because what we do can be known only as we do it. If the eternal, timeless universe is one conscious thought of being, it is nothing but what we particular beings immersed in time have made of it. We collapse the wave function.

Just a thought.