Synchronicity and Quantum Cosmology

 Chris King

18-12-22

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Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung "to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection." In contemporary research, synchronicity experiences refer to one's subjective experience that coincidences between events in one's mind and the outside world may be causally unrelated to each other yet have some other unknown connection.

 

This does not mean the events have to be synchronous – occurring at the same time – and in fact many can be associated with having an experience which anticipates a subsequent happening in real life, as in premonition and precognition or deja vu. This is critical to the role of subjective consciousness in anticipating threats to survival.

 

Many of the critiques of the notion of significant coincidence revolve around the idea that the observing subject  is incorrectly classifying a perceived coincidence as significant when without synchronicity being a real effect, some events will always appear to have an uncanny relationship by chance and the observer is selecting these and incorrectly attributing significance when no such significance exists because they are simply occurring as often as the laws of probability indicate. This is associated with Bayes’ theorem on conditional probabilities because the observer is failing to factor the conditional probabilities that a coincidence will occur for random events having a perceived relationship to one another, and they are attributing significance post-hoc after the two events have been experienced.

 

It is often difficult to assess these probabilities in real life, because the probabilities are difficult to quantify, but sometimes the correspondence is glaring enough if one of the events is extremely unlikely and the other experience or observation was recorded before the unlikely event occurred.

 

A Singular Synchronicity

 

On 19-7-2001, a month before 9-11, referred to at the time before the fact as a synchronicity, I published the lyrics of a song I had composed – The Song of the Biosphere – video. A key line invoked jihad: 'When it comes tothe final struggle, jihad of the biosphere, there's only one true rogue nation - the great American shaitan’, because George H W Bush had refused to sign the 1992 Rio Convention on Biodiversity. (As of 2016, the convention has 196 parties. All UN member states – with the exception of the United States – have ratified the treaty. TheUS still only has observer status as I write this in 2022, 30 years later!). The lyrics continue with a lament for the dark canyons of lower Manhattan among thefallen towers: 'walking in the twilight, down in the valley of shadows', and then the plane: 'We'll fly so high well pass right to the other side and never fall in flames again’.

 

Just under two months later, at one in the morning on a continuous BBC news broadcast, I watched in horror, Jihad coming true, as firstly one and then two planes crashed through the twin towers of the World Trade Center in flames and the towers fell, turning the streets of lower Manhattan into a literal vale of the shadow of death.

 

 Fig 22: A: Extracts from the lyrics posting of 20th July 2001 (http://dhushara.com/nino/19julyjihad.jpg). B: Passenger plane collides with one of the twin towers. C: Rudi Giuliani Mayor of New York the number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear (http://youtu.be/xhBYWDy4m9M). For the complete song video containing the 9-11 documentary footage, see: (http://youtu.be/g-giqTW4_YQ).

 

The lyrics contain an uncanny ‘prophetic’ reverse echo of the event a month before it occurred.

 

(1) We have the jihad against the U.S. over the Rio biodiversity convention, but now it has really become Islamic fundamentalism on 9-11:

 

when it comes to the final struggle - jihad of the biosphere

there's only one true rogue nation - the great American shaitan

big brother, you are Uncle Sam

 

(2) We have the planes flying clean through the towers in flames:

 

can we touch the sky?

can we fly so high we'll pass right to the other side

and never fall in flames? will we ever be the same again?

 

(3) The shining goal in the beginning and end of life - reminiscent of a martyr seeking the face of God.

 

we'll become the living soul, the primal source, the shining goal

the beginning and the end of life,

 

(4) An echo of the streets of New York amid the smoke and haze of fallen masonry amid a deadly massacre:

 

walking in the twilight, down in the valley of shadows

when will you comprehend - the damage you have wrought in your indiscretion?

can we undo - the death trance you have set in motion?

 

(5) The amazing, outstanding, caring efforts of those on the ground, to begin the process of recovery:

 

will you discover -  the fabric of love that ignites us?

can we embrace the ocean of life that unites us?

all our lives long this journey has been our destination

if we get this one wrong will there be any chance for restoration

 

(6) An echo of Rudy Giuliani’s statement as Mayor: The “casualties will be more than any of us can bear”:

 

the happiness and the pain … can we bear it all again?

 

I apologise to all Americans for comparing your country to the Shaitan, but  saving biodiversity is saving ourselves. Refusing to sign the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity is counter to the entire planetary future, so it was/is satanic, just as Donald Trump’s pulling out of the Paris accord was satanic. These are not the acts of a responsible superpower.

 

So what are we supposed to make of this? It’s just a coincidence isn’t it? There is more to this tale caught up in the quantum entanglement of past, present and future.  It’s a completely non-replicable non-IID event. Is it a coincidence?  What’s the probability of that? My father used to marvel at coincidence, repeatedly astounded.

 

How come, a month or more before 9-11 did I get it into my head to write these lines? Yes it's the same life-protecting motive that brought the SEC into existence. But no one remotely conceived this was going to happen. The lyrics are an allegory not conceived to be literal future fact, just poetry, but they are nevertheless written from an apocalyptic viewpoint. But they are also a stream of consciousness account of everybody and everything that happened. The minds of the martyrs thinking they'll fly so high they'll pass right to the other side and  it's also the consciousness of the people who went in to deal with the destruction in the smoke and dust of Manhattan's dark corridors and the spirit of those who came to light their candles for life and the uncanny "can we bear it all again?" whose words Giuliani echoed on TV.

 

What does this all mean about consciousness?

 

This example is much easier to analyse on its probabilities because 9-11 is a unique unparalleled event occurring only once so far in history. Thus any recorded prior reference to events that occurred on 9-11 direct or indirect can be assessed directly in terms of the probability that they are related.

 

In the above account we have six synchronicities: If we say each has a 1 in 10 chance of appearing randomly, then all appearing together in one situation gives 1 in 106 i.e. a one in million chance of happening randomly. You could counter that I had intended to declare jihad for biodiversity, but then (2) to (6) become even more uncanny because they apply in completely different ways to the two contexts. A search of songs predicting 9-11 returns no more convincing results, making this song spookily  significant by comparison.

 

So where does this take us?

 

When I was living on a canal boat we built in England as a student, I read J W Dunne’s (1934) “An Experiment with Time”. According to Dunne, our wakeful attention prevents us from seeing beyond the present moment, whilst when dreaming that attention fades and we gain the ability to recall more of our timeline. This allows fragments of our future to appear in pre-cognitive dreams, mixed in with fragments or memories of our past. Other consequences include the phenomenon known as deja vu and life after death.

 

Shortly after this I had a double nightmare that I was being hideously stung by a spider, repeated in the second dream because I had failed to brush it off when it had removed its fangs. I continued to sleep in after Hallie, my young wife, got up to feed our first child, a newborn baby girl, opening the bedroom window in the process. I woke long enough to tell her “I had a terrible double nightmare” and then fell asleep again. About an hour later, I was stung wide awake by a wasp that had flown in after she opened the window, going through all the same feverish motions under the intense pain I had experienced in the dream, blowing it off to find it was a large wasp.

 

This is also clearly highly unlikely. I have never had such a double nightmare of being stung before or since. The dream also has specific intimations of a bee sting because the sting is then left in the wound unlike a spider bite. The fact it proved to be a wasp doesn’t alter the fact that I blew it off rather than swatting it.

 

I have had many such dreams during my life most, often anticipating things that unexpectedly happen early the next day. What it has taught me is that the universe is an entangled handshaking, in which past, present and future are intertwined, and that the role of conscious existence is partly to anticipate future threats and challenges through direct perception of the space-time continuum.

 

Notice also that writing a song and its lyrics comes from the realm of pure imagination, which unbinds the filters on reality just as dreaming does. I start with a chordal riff that has an ambience and then the lyrics take shape around it coming literally out of nowhere.

 

Both these events clearly have the critical common component of anticipation of a future nascent event, so we need to consider the existential role of conscious anticipation in organismic survival.

 

Real World Existential Threats and Survival

 

Real world survival problems in the open environment don’t necessarily have a causally-closed or even a computationally tractable solution, due to exponential runaway like the travelling salesman problem, thus requiring sensitive dependence on the butterfly effect and intuitive choices. Which route should the antelope take to reach the water hole when it comes to the fork in the trail? The shady path where a tiger might lurk, or the savannah where there could be a lion in the long grass? All the agents are conscious sentient beings using innovation and stealth and so  computations depending on reasoned memory are unreliable because the adversaries can also adapt their strategies and tactics to frustrate the calculations. The subtlest sensory hints of crisis amid split-second timing is also pivotal. There is thus no tractable solution. Integrated anticipatory intuition, combined with a historical knowledge of the terrain, appears to be the critical survival advantage of sentient consciousness in the prisoners’ dilemma of survival, just as sexuality is, in the Red Queen race (Ridley 1996) between hosts and parasites. This coherent anticipation possessed by subjective consciousness appears to be the evolutionary basis for the emergence and persistence of subjective consciousness as a quantum-derived form of anticipation of adventitious risks to survival, not cognitive processes of verbal discourse.

 

Fig 29: Which route should the antelope take to reach the water hole when it comes to the fork in the trail? The shady path where a tiger might lurk, or the savannah where there could be a lion in the long grass? Real world survival problems require intuitive multi-option decisions, creativity and and often split-second timing requiring anticipatory consciousness. Thus modelling the existence of subjective consciousness or otherwise based only on causal concepts and verbal reasoning processes gives a false evolutionary and cosmological view. Here is where the difference between a conscious organism and an AI robot attempting to functionally emulate it is laid bare in tooth and claw.

 

Michael Graziano’s (2016, 2017, Webb & Graziano 2015), attention schema theory, or AST, self-described as a mechanistic account of subjective awareness which emerged in parallel with my own work (King 2014), gives an account of the evolutionary developments of the animal brain, taking account of the adaptive processes essential for survival to arrive at the kind of brains and conscious awareness we experience: 

 

“We propose that the top–down control of attention is improved when the brain has access to a simplified model of attention itself. The brain therefore constructs a schematic model of the process of attention, the ‘attention schema,’ in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the ‘body schema.’ The content of this internal model leads a brain to conclude that it has a subjective experience – a non-physical, subjective awareness and assigns a high degree of certainty to that extraordinary claim”.

 

However, this presents the idea that subjective consciousness and volitional will are a self-fulfilling evolutionary delusion so that the author believes AST as a purely mechanistic principle could in principle be extended to a machine without the presence of subjective consciousness: “Such a machine would “believe” it is conscious and act like it is conscious, in the same sense that the human machine believes and acts”. 

 

However it remains unclear that a digital computer, or AI process can achieve this with given architectures.  Ricci et al. (2021) note in concluding remarks towards one of the most fundamental and elementary tasks, abstract same-different discrimination:  The aforementioned attention and memory network models are stepping stones towards the flexible relational reasoning that so epitomizes biological intelligence. However, current work falls short of the — in our view, correct — standards for biological intelligence set by experimentalists like Delius (1994) or theorists like Fodor (1988).

 

Yet AST is a type of filter theory – a mechanistic version of Aldous Huxley’s ideas about consciousness, so it invokes a principle of neural organisation that is consistent with and complementary to subjective consciousness: “Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence.”

 

The overall idea of a purely physical internal model of reality representing its own attention process, thus enabling it to observe itself, is an astute necessary condition for the sort of subjective consciousness we find in the spread of metazoa, but it is in no way sufficient to solve the hard problem or address any more than the one easy problem it addresses, about recursive attention. However its description, of fundamental changes in overall brain architecture summarised in Graziano (2016) highlights the actual evolutionary forces shaping the development of the conscious mind lie in the paranoia of survival the jungle as noted in fig 29, rather than the verbal contortions of philosophical discourse:

 

 “If the wind rustles the grass and you misinterpret it as a lion, no harm done.
But if you fail to detect an actual lion, you’re taken out of the gene pool” (Michael Graziano 2016).

 

However Graziano (2020), in claiming why AST “has to be right”, commits to de-subjectifying  consciousness in favour of an AI analysis of recursive attention systems. In relation to the reality of consciousness in his words, the claim that: “I have a subjective, conscious experience. It’s real; it’s the feeling that goes along with my brain’s processing of at least some things. I say I have it and I think I have it because, simply, I do have it. Let us accept its existence and stop quibbling about illusions”, he attempts a structural finesse based on recursive attention:

 

Suppose the brain has a real consciousness. Logically, the reason why we intuit and think and say we have consciousness is not because we actually have it, but must be because of something else; it is because the brain contains information that describes us having it. Moreover, given the limitations on the brain’s ability to model anything in perfect detail, one must accept that the consciousness we intuit and think and say we have is going to be different from the consciousness that we actually have. . … I will make the strong claim here that this statement – the consciousness we think we have is different from, simpler than, and more schematic than, the consciousness we actually have – is necessarily correct. Any rational, scientific approach must accept that conclusion. The bane of consciousness theorizing is the naïve, mistaken conflation of what we actually have with what we think we have. The attention schema theory systematically unpacks the difference between what we actually have and what we think we have. In AST, we really do have a base reality to consciousness: we have attention – the ability to focus on external stimuli and on internal constructs, and by focusing, process information in depth and enable a coordinated reaction. We have an ability to grasp something with the power of our biological processor. Attention is physically real. It’s a real process in the brain, made out of the interactions of billions of neurons. The brain not only uses attention, but also constructs information about attention – a model of attention. The central hypothesis of AST is that, by the time that information about attention reaches the output end of the pathway … , we’re claim-ing to have a semi-magical essence inside of us – conscious awareness. The brain describes attention as a semi-magical essence because the mechanistic details of attention have been stripped out of the description.

 

These are simply opinions of a hidden underlying information structure, confusing conscious experience itself with the recursive attention structures that any realistic description has to entail to bring physical brain processing into any kind of concordance with environmental reality. His inability to distinguish organismic consciousness from AI is evidenced in Graziano (2017)  where he sets out AST as a basis for biologically realisable artificial intelligence systems.

 

The actual answer to this apparent paradox that leaves our confidence in our conscious volition in tatters, is that the two processes, neural net attention schemes and subjective consciousness have both been selected by evolution to ensure survival of the organism from existential threats and they have done so as complementary processes. Organismic brains evolved from the excitable sentience of single-celled eucaryotes and their social signalling molecules that became our neurotransmitters a billion yers after these same single-celled eucaryotes had to solve just these problems of growth and survival in the open environment. Brains are thus built as an intimately coupled society of eucaryote excitable cells communicating by both electrochemical and biochemical means via neurotransmitters, in such a way that the network process is an evolutionary elaboration of the underlying cellular process, both of which have been conserved by natural selection because both contribute to organismic survival by anticipating existential threats.

 

This is the only possible conclusion, because the presence of attention schemae does not require the manifestation of subjective consciousness to the conscious participant unless that too plays an integral role in survival of the organism.  Indeed an artificial neural net with recursive schemes would do just that and have no consciousness implied, as it would be superfluous to energy demands unless it had selective advantage.

 

So is there a possible explanation in the groundswell of quantum cosmology?

 

Synchronicity, Anticipation  and Quantum Cosmology

 

The transactional interpretation presents a  unique view of cosmology,  involving an implicit space-time anticipation in which a real exchange, e.g. a photon emitted by a light bulb and absorbed on a photographic plate or elsewhere, or a Bell type entanglement experiment with two detectors, is split into an offer wave from the emitter and retro-causal confirmation waves from the prospective absorbers that, after the transaction is completed, interfere to form the real photon confined between the emission and absorption vertices. We also  experience these retro-causal effects in weak quantum measurement, and delayed choice experiments.

 

To get a full picture of this process, we need to consider the electromagnetic field as a whole, in which these same absorbers are also receiving offer waves form other emitters, so we get a network of  virtual emitter-absorber pairs.

 

There is a fundamental symmetry between creation and annihilation, but there is a sting in the measurement tail. When we do an interference experiment, with real positive energy photons, we know each photon came from the small region within the light source, but the locations of the potential absorbers affected by the wave function are spread across the world at large. The photon could be absorbed anywhere on the photographic plate, or before it, if it hits dust in the apparatus, or after if it goes right through the plate and out of the apparatus altogether, just as radioactive particles escape the exponential potential barrier of the nucleus. The problem concerning wave function collapse is which absorber?

 

In all these cases once a potential absorber becomes real, all the other potential absorbers have zero probability of absorption, so the change occurs instantaneously across space-time to other prospective absorbers, relative to the successful one. This is the root problem of quantum measurement. Special relativistic quantum field theory is time symmetric, so solving wave function collapse is thus most closely realised in the transactional interpretation, where the real wave function is neither the emitter's spreading linear retarded wave, nor any of the prospective absorbers’ linear advanced waves, but the results of a phase transition, in which all these hypothetical offer and confirmation waves resolve into one or more real wave functions linking creation and annihilation vertices. It is the nature of this phase transition and its non-linearity which holds the keys to life the universe and everything and potentially the nature of time itself.

 

Fig 24b: (1) In the transactional interpretation, an emitter has crossed phase offer waves going forwards (retarded) and backwards (advanced) in time. (2) The transaction is completed by an absorber responding with a confirmation wave which reinforces in the space-time interval between emitter P and absorber Q but interferes destructively outside PQ, leading to the wave of the real exchanged particle. (3) A reflecting origin at he  origin of the universe could explain why real positive energy particles follow the retarded arrow of time.  (4) Transactions provide an explanation for quantum entanglement’s spooky action because the earlier measurement at detector A1 sends a confirmation wave back to the split pair and the retarded other component now carries the new information on the retarded offer wave to A2. (5) The same space-time spanning wave functions are implicit to the wave propagators of all quantum field theories under the Feynman description. (6) A transaction modelled by a phase transition from a virtual plasma to a real interactive solid spanning space-time. I call this process transcausal, because the transaction happens transversely to space-time with both the initial and final states spanning the same space-time region.

 

The full picture of a transaction process is a population of real, or potential emitters in excited states and potential ground state absorbers, with their offer and confirmation wave functions extending throughout space time, as in the Feynman representation. As the transaction proceeds, this network undergoes a phase transition from a “virtual plasma” state to a “real solid”, in which the excited emitters are all paired with actual absorbers in the emitters’ future at later points in space-time. This phase transition occurs across space-time, covering both space-like and time-like intervals. It has many properties of a phase transition from plasma to solid, with a difference – the strongest interactions don’t win, except with a probability determined by the relative power of the emitter’s wave amplitudes at the prospective absorption event. This guarantees the transaction conforms to the emitter’s probability distribution and the absorber's one as well.   If a prospective absorber has already interacted with another emitter, it will not appear in the transaction network at this space-time point, so ceases to be part of the collective transaction. Once this is the case, all other prospective absorbers of a given emitter scattered throughout space-time, both in the absorber’s past and future, immediately have zero probability of absorption from any of the emitters and no causal conflict, or time loop arises.

 

Here is the problem. The transition is laterally across the whole of space-time, not along the arrow of time in either direction, so cannot exist within space-time and really needs a dual time parameter. This is why my 1989 paper was entitled “dual-time super-causality”.

 

Now this doesn’t mean a transaction is just a random process. Rather, it is a kind of super-selection theory, in which the probability of absorption at an absorber conforms to the wave probability but the decision making process is spread between all the prospective absorbers distributed across space-time, not just an emitter-based random wave power normalised probability. The process is implicitly retro-causal in the same way weak quantum measurement and Wheeler’s delayed choice experiments are.

 

The fact that in the cat paradox experiment, we see only a live or dead cat and not a superposition doesn’t mean however, that conscious observers witness only a classical world view. There are plenty of real phenomena in which we do observe quantum superpositions, including quantum erasure and quantum recoherence, where entangled particles can be distinguished collapsing the entanglement, and then re-entangled. A laser consists of excited atoms above the ground state which can be triggered to coherently emit photons indistinguishably entangled in a superposition of in-phase states stimulated by a standing wave in the laser caught between pairs of reflecting mirrors, so we see the bright laser light and know it is a massive superimposed set of entangled photons.

 

In all forms of quantum entanglement experiment, when the state of one of the pair is detected, the informational outcome is “transmitted” instantaneously to the other detector so that the other particle’s state is definitively complementary, although the detectors can be separated by space-like as well as time-like intervals, although this transmission cannot be used to relay classical information. This again is explained by the transactional interpretation, because the confirmation wave of the first detector of the pair is transmitted retro-causally back to the source event where the splitting occurred and then causally out to the second detector where it now has obligately complementary spin or polarisation when detection occurs.

 

What the transactional interpretation does provide is a real collapse process in which the universe is neither stranded in an Everett probability multiverse, nor in a fully collapsed classical state, but can be anywhere in between, depending on which agents are dong the measuring in a given theory. Nor is collapse necessarily random and thus meaningless, but is a space-time spanning non-linear phase transition, involving bidirectional hand-shaking between past and future. The absorbers are all in an emitter’s future so there is a musical chairs dance happening in the future. And those candidates may also be absorbers of other emitters and so on, so one can’t determine the ultimate boundary conditions of this problem. Somehow the “collapse”, which we admit violates retarded causality, results in one future choice. This means that there is no prohibition on this being resolved by the future affecting the outcome because the actual choice has no relation to classical causality.

 

The only requirement is that individual observations are asymptotic to the Born probability interpretation modulated by the wave function power  *, but this could arise from a variety of complex trans-deterministic quasi-random processes, where multiple entanglements generate effective statistical noise, while having a basis in an explicit  hidden variable theory. The reason for the Born asymptote could thus be simply that the non-linear phase transition of the transaction, like the cosmic wave function of the universe, potentially involves everything there is – the ultimate pseudo-random optimisation process concealing a predictive hidden variable theory.

 

It is also one in which subjective conscious volition and meaning can become manifest in cosmic evolution, in which the universe is in a state of dynamic ramification and collapse of quantum superpositions. The key point here is that subjective conscious volition needs to have an anticipatory property in its own right, independent of brain mechanisms like attention processes, or it will be neutral to natural selection, even if we do have free will, and would not have been selected for, all the way from founding eucaryotes to Homo sapiens. The transactional interpretation, by involving future absorbers in the collapse process, provides just such an anticipatory feature.

 

It is one thing to have free will and it’s another to use free will for survival on the basis of (conscious) prediction, or anticipation. Our conscious brains are striving to be predictive to the extent that we are subject to flash-lag perceptual illusions where perceptual processes attempt, sometimes incorrectly, to predict the path of rapidly moving objects (Eagleman & Sejnowski 2000), so the question is pivotal. Anticipating future threats and opportunities is key to how we evolved as conscious organisms, and this is pivotal over short immediate time scales, like the snake’s or tiger’s strike which we survive. Anticipating reality in the present is precisely what subjective consciousness is here to do.

 

The hardest problem of consciousness is thus that, to be conserved by natural selection, subjective consciousness (a) has to be volitional i.e. affect the world physically to result in natural selection and (b) it has to be predictive as well. Free-will without predictivity is neutral to evolution, just like random behaviour, and it will not be selected for. If we are dealing with classical reality, we could claim this is merely a computational requirement, but why then do we have subjective experience at all? Why not just recursive predictive attention processes with no subjectivity?

 

Here is where the correspondence between sensitive dynamic instability at tipping points and quantum uncertainty comes into the picture. We know biology and particularly brain function is a dynamically unstable process, with sensitive instabilities that are fractal down to the quantum level of ion channels, enzyme molecules whose active sites are enhanced by quantum tunnelling and the quantum parallelism of molecular folding and interactive dynamics. We also know that the brain dynamics operating close to the edge of chaos is convergent to dynamic crisis during critical decision-making uncertainties that do not have an obvious computational, cognitive, or reasoned disposition. We also know at these points that the very processes of sensitivity on existing conditions and other proesses, such as stochastic resonance, can allow effects at the micro level approaching quanta to affect the outcome of global brain states.

 

And those with any rational insight can see that, for both theoretical and experimental reasons, classical causal closure of brain dynamics is an unachievable quest. Notwithstanding Libet’s attempt, there is no technological way to experimentally achieve verification that the brain is causally closed and it flies in the face of the fractal molecular nature of biological processes at the quantum level.

 

Nevertheless we can understand that subjective conscious volition cannot enter into causal conflict with brain processes which have already established an effective computational outcome, as we do when we reach a prevailing reasoned conclusion, so free will is effectively restricted to situations where the environmental circumstances are uncertain, or not effectively computable, or perceived consciously to be anything but certain.

 

This in turn means that the key role of free will is not applying it to rationally or emotionally foregone conclusions but to environmental and strategic uncertainties, especially involving other conscious agents whose outcomes become part of quantum uncertainty itself.

 

The natural conclusion is that conscious free will has been conserved by evolution because it provides an evolutionary advantage at anticipating root uncertainties in the quantum universe and only these. This seems almost repugnantly counter-intuitive, because we tend to associate quantum uncertainty and the vagaries of fate with randomness, but this is no more scientifically established than causal closure of brain function. All the major events of history that are not foregone conclusions, result from conscious free will applied to uncertainty, such as Nelson turning his bind eye to the telescope, in the eventually successful Battle of Copenhagen.

 

So the question remains that when we turn to the role of subjective consciousness volition in quantum uncertainty, this comes down to not just opening the box of Schrödinger’s cat, but to anticipating uncertain events more often than random chance would predict in real life situations.

 

That is where the transactional approach comes into its own, because, while the future at the time of casting the emission die is an indeterminate set of potential absorbers, the retro-causal information contained in the transaction is implicitly revealing which future absorbers are actually able to absorb the real emitted quantum and hence information about the real state of the future universe, not just its probabilities at emission. Therefore the transaction is carrying additional implicit “encoded” information about the actual future state of the universe and what its possibilities are that can be critical for survival in natural selection.

 

Although, like the “transmission” of a detection to the other detector in an entanglement experiment cannot be used to transfer classical information, the same will apply to quantum transactions, but this doesn’t mean they are random or have no anticipatory value, but just that they cannot be used for classical causal deduction.

 

Because the “holistic” nature of conscious awareness is an extension of the global unstable excitatory dynamics of individual eucaryote cells to brain dynamics, a key aspect of subjective consciousness may be that it becomes sensitive to the wave properties of quantum transactions with the natural environment in the process of cellular quantum sentience, involving sensitivity to quantum modes, including photons, phonons and molecular orbital effects constituting cellular vision, audition and olfaction. Expanded into brain dynamics, this then becomes integral to the binding of consciousness into a coherent whole.

 

But how that can result in anticipating complete conscious imprints of future events even in fragmentary glimpses is an insightful challenge to the physics underlying conscious mental experiences. It can only be understood by subliminal brain states retrocausally involved in a transactional brain dynamic lasting over the entire time interval between the two perceived synchronicities, implying very long lived quasi-particle excitations in brain dynamics, or in retrocausal encryption of future memories.

 

References: See Symbiotic Existential Cosmology
.