Consciousness, Cosmology and the
Meaning of Life
Chris King © 13-12-16 PDF
Contents:
Free-will, Determinism and Accountability
Quantum Reality and the Conscious Observer
A
Perfect Storm at the Edge of Chaos
Origin Myths and Apocalyptic Allegories
Coming to Terms with the Cosmological Universe
Molecular Complexity and the Origins of Life
Evolution, Diversification and the Metabolic Genome
Eukaryotes Transform the Game of Life
Ancient Evolutionary Foundations of Consciousness
Single Celled Societies to Sappy Nervous Systems
Consciousness and Real Time Anticipation
Fathoming the Inner Dimensions of Consciousness
Conscious
beings are launched by their very existence on a quest to discover the essential
meaning in life that makes sense of the entire process. ItÕs the one thing we
all want to know - the central core truth of reality - before we escape the
mortal coil and pass on.
There are many depictions of the existential dilemma, echoing through philosophy, novels, art music and theatre. Existentialism itself is an attempt to form a philosophy centered on this dilemma, emphasizing the existence of the individual person, as a free and responsible agent, determining their own development, through acts of the will. Jean Paul Sartre claimed that a central proposition of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the most important consideration for individuals is that they are individuals - independently acting and responsible, conscious beings (existence) - rather than what labels, roles, or other preconceived categories the individuals fit (essence). Thus, human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life.
Many
religious people believe in an ordered cosmos ruled by God, with the single
purpose of testing human moral obedience in a cosmological trial ending in a
day of judgment. All the great
monotheistic religions preach that we must obey GodÕs commands if we seek
eternal life in heaven and that those who fall into sin will be tormented forever
in the fires of hell. Nor do we
have the right to even assess whether these claims are true or false, for such religion
also demands that we believe, regardless of the evidence or lack of it, either
as the foundation of affirmative religious faith, or oppressively as in Islam, under
pain of death for apostasy. Centrally
this is a moral cosmology in which conscious experience is predominant in fantastic
visions of paradise and hell taking precedence over the veridical reality of
nature and the real world around us.
Doctrines
claiming the literal truth of every word in the Bible and Quran lead to an
inability to accept the evidence of the natural and physical world. Rejecting
the clear evidence that the universe, the Earth and life itself are billions of
years old, many cling to the notion that the universe was made literally in six
days, as in the sabbatical creation, so is no older than the 4000 years ago,
when the events of Genesis are assumed to have occurred. Those Christians whose
scientific experience leads them to have to acknowledge the evidence of the
universeÕs actual age, unable to escape the convictions of their religious beliefs,
attempt to paste the literal Ôrevealed truthÕ of the scripture into the scientific
view, so that the same literal Old Testament deity has instead made the vast
ancient physical universe, we have discovered much later in the scientific age,
but then claim has much more recently, manifested again to ÔgiveÕ human kind
the knowledge of good and evil and Ôliving soulsÕ, so that we still have to live
out the morally imperative eschatology regardless.
Others
of a more honest predisposition may conclude there is no preferential rhyme or
reason to existence in the physical world and that life is, just as we see it,
a round of tooth and claw, as generation upon generation struggles in the
survival of the fittest, amid the endless attrition of entropy and mutational change,
most ominously and succinctly expressed by Bertrand Russell:
Such in outline, but even more
purposeless, more devoid of meaning is the world which science presents for our
belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a
home. That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they
were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and
his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no
fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an
individual life beyond the grave, that all the labours of the ages, all the
devotion, all the inspirations, all the noon-day brightness of human genius,
are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the
whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris
of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet
so nearly certain, that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand. Only
within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of
unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. ...
Brief and powerless is man's life, on him and all his race the slow, sure doom
falls pitiless and dark.
This
can lead to the expedient conclusion that we may as well eat, drink and be
merry and take what advantages we can out of this material life, even to the
point of exploitation of others too witless or too powerless to resist, before our
time passes and we ebb away, leading to obdurate claims that religion provides
the only antidote to a corrupt degenerate scientific vision, but this is not
necessarily the case. One can develop an ethical view that science and the
discovery of nature can provide us with an moral sensibility, because we can
better know those things which we need to value most highly, such as the
preservation of biological and genetic diversity, which has taken a good part
of the universeÕs own lifetime to evolve, so that these resources will not
become lost and life can continue to flourish for the future generations.
Ironically, this is something that religious believers are generally no better
at than expedient individuals, because belief in a creator God leads to notions
of the inferiority of nature and the acceptance of ultimate destruction of the
Ôlate planet EarthÕ in GodÕs Ôday of resurrectionÕ.
In
the post-Newtonian age of reductionism and artificial intelligence, some materialistic
thinkers reach the conclusion that consciousness and free-will are illusions
and that we are no more and no less than our functioning brain – in
effect biochemical automata. Sam Harris for example, while defending a moral
view of the value of nature, tries to claim free-will
is an illusion:
You feel like you are a thinker
of thoughts - the author of intentions - you feel like you are a subject and
commensurate with that feeling is the sense that you are in a position to do
what it is you do, to decide to lift my left or right hand and deliberate
between the two and I can have reasons for one or the other and I'm in the
driver's seat - I really am - and that's where everyone is starting. The
problem with that is that objectively we know that everything you are
consciously aware of - all your thoughts and your intentions and your impulses
and your intentions to resist those impulses - whatever's coming up for you -
but we know that's all preceded by events in your nervous system of which
you're not aware and which you didn't create and the state of your brain in
this moment in every sense is the product of variables that you are not
responsible for - you didn't pick your parents, you didn't pick your genes, you
didn't pick the environment in which your genome was going to be expressed, you
didn't pick the way your interaction with other people and the world sculpted
the microstructure of your brain so as to give you the brain you have - you
didn't pick the number of receptors you have of every type at each synapse, you
didn't pick all the charges that are currently in place in your brain at this
moment - you haven't created your neuronal physiology and yet your neuronal
physiology is going to give rise to every next thought and intention that shows
up for you.
Francis
Crick co-discoverer of DNA puts it even more pungently:
"You," your joys and
your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity
and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of
nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack
of neurons - although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have
already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.
The
trouble with these viewpoints is that the veneer of precise causality
surrounding the circumstances leading to our assumed deterministic brain process
only acts this way in a classical Newtonian universe, in which each cause induces
precise effects. But in the quantum universe in which we actually exist, these
classical conclusions no longer have validity.
I
want to convince you that both of the notions of a morally imperative religious
cosmos and a physically deterministic brain with no free will are tragic
fallacies and that the actual situation is both far more exciting, provocative
and challenging than either of these degenerate philosophies, but that we need
urgently to address our meaning and purpose to avoid these travesties of cosmological
reality fatally compromising the EarthÕs natural fecundity and robustness and
doom the vital prospects of the generations to come.
Of
course, on both sides, there are also mitigating visions. The Eastern tradition
includes Vedantic and Buddhist, notions in which consciousness is central to
the vision quest of discovering the cosmic inner self, a path of self-discovery
rather than imposed belief, which teaches that egotistical selfishness is
simply a form of ignorance, that causes us endless suffering. These traditions
include Tantric and Taoist ideas of the complementarity of consciousness and
matter, as Shakti is to Shiva and yin is to yang, but they also suffer from
inconsistencies, in which the universe is portrayed as a moral testing ground
for sentient beings in a round of reincarnation of sentient beings, possibly in
animal form, inconsistent with ecosystemic evolution filling all niches
including predators and parasites and with the sanctity of individual species
as unique and sometimes vulnerable or threatened organisms of incalculable value
in their own right.
As
noted, there are also Ôenlightened humanistsÕ, who expound the essential
goodness of natural being and of the diversity of life as the cradle and
support of human existence in a world in which caring and empathy provide the
connection that makes life a meaningful process, which can be made tolerable
for all, if we can collectively mitigate, through compassion and informed
insight, the ongoing tragedy of the commons perpetrated by people too ignorant,
or selfish, to realize the essential coexistence that unites us all.
However
ultimately we come back to the crux of the problem. Is life just a meaningless
rash of complexity – a planetary surface growth in a physical universe,
which cares not a dot for biological or conscious survival, and in which black
holes and disintegrating galaxies hold the ultimate fate of all. Or does life
have some integral role in the whole cosmological process, as religions insist
in all too imperative terms? But in fact a role so different from traditional
ideas, that it takes the full sum of our current knowledge, from consciousness
research and neuroscience through particle physics to cosmology to even begin
to get a hint of an answer which can turn our understanding of the world inside
out and with it our senses of time and direction and what ultimate meaning of
conscious life might portend.
From
birth to death, the sum total of all our experiences - all our dreams , our visions and all our observations of the
physical world, and all our notions about it, come exclusively through our
subjective conscious experiences. By comparison, our knowledge of the physical
world comes only indirectly through our conscious experience, by cross-checking our observations with those of others, to
establish such fundamental conclusions as that we are biological organisms that
will become unconscious if knocked on the head or die if we cut an artery and
bleed out. In turn we become aware of the consciousness of others even more
indirectly through their behavior and vivacious personae, which we closely
identify with our own conscious existence, while rare instances of deeper
conscious connections, such as close relatives or twins noticing when a loved
one passes away or has a serious accident, remain anecdotal and ephemeral.
Effectively
the world is divided between two complementary realms, the subjective realm of
conscious experience and the objective realm of physical existence which we
access indirectly through the former, although we recognize physical existence,
and with it our biological bodies and brains, to be essential to the existence
of our conscious mental states.
Subjective
consciousness poses the deepest dilemma for the scientific description of
reality. Although neuroscience has produced many new exciting techniques for
visualizing brain function, from EEG and MEG to PET and fMRI scans, which show
a deep parallel relationship between mental states and specific modalities of
brain processes, these go no way in themselves to solving the so-called Ôhard
problemÕ of consciousness research – how these purely objective
physiological processes give rise to the subjective affects of our conscious
experiences. Philosopher Jerry Fodor famously complained:
Nobody has the slightest idea how
anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like
to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious.
Little
wonder then that people, since the dawn of history, have coined origin myths
ornamenting their experience of the physical world with fantastic stories of
spirits, deities and imaginary realms like heaven and hell, the dreamtime,
underworld and afterlife, which, in the minds of believers, remain as real as
the physical realm they consciously experience in waking life.
This
means inevitably that addressing the question of the meaning of life has to
plumb the role subjective conscious experience plays in the cosmological
theatre and in the evolution of the physical universe. This brings us
immediately to the question of free will.
Free-will, Determinism and Accountability
Complementing
subjective consciousness is the notion of intentional will or free-will as it is sometimes, for better or worse, called.
With the exception of a few catatonic individuals and extreme skeptics, all of
us found our sense of our personal autonomy on our belief in our ability to
make conscious decisions over our fate. Actions as simple and seemingly
inevitable as getting out of bed and making a cup of coffee to start the day
are all accompanied by a sense of conscious choice on which we depend and
invest in in all our actions in life, predictable and unpredictable. This
situation becomes particularly acute when we have to make life-changing
decisions sometimes unsure of the outcomes. To deny free-will
is at face value a lunacy equivalent to insisting on a catatonic or automatic
reality, over which we have no conscious control.
Traditional
religions hand free-will to us as a poisoned chalice.
We must be allotted free-will, or we wouldnÕt have the
ability to fall into temptation and become guilty of sin. On the other hand we
are given this freedom only to have it denied, by God judging us for every
transgression, so we have to obey the bondage of the moral imperative, or be
damned. Worse still, we are deemed to be mortally corrupted by original sin
– stemming right from the Garden of Eden, where the woman Eve was tempted
by the serpent and persuaded the man Adam to eat the fruit of the knowledge of
good and evil thinking it to make one wise.
In
virtually all societies, the rule of law is founded on the principle that we know
right from wrong and are accountable for our actions, in a tacit concession to
the idea that we likewise have the free-will to err.
Of course, we know from experiments running back to PavlovÕs dogs that applying
rewards or punishments by pain or fear can act as behavioral inducements or deterrents,
without assuming free-will, and indeed deterrent
punishments, from incarceration through torture to death, are designed both to
punish the guilty party and to warn others of the consequences of doing
likewise. Culpability for our criminal intentions and their consequential
actions is conceded only if genetic, or circumstantial evidence, can be
provided, or by virtue of us not being of sound mind, to mitigate our deeds.
Yet
classical notions of the physical universe stemming from Newton and Laplace
have led scientific reasoning towards a notion that, not only our actions, but the entire universe is causally deterministic. Laplace in ÒA Philosophical Essay on ProbabilitiesÓ
famously
declared the universe to be a causal determinism:
We may regard the present state
of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An
intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in
motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this
intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would
embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the
universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be
uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
The
notion of the deterministic classical universe has inevitably led to the idea that
free-will is an illusion and that all our actions are
determined by our brain function. Consciousness came to be described as a mere
epi-phenomenon, a kind of illusory internal model of reality made by the brain
to focus awareness on the issues at hand, having no capacity to
causally influence our physical actions or behavior, which were all a direct consequence
of the firing of neurons in the brain. The growth of computer technology and
artificial intelligence has added to this view of human decision-making as
simply a computational process.
This
approach has ramified into notions that subconscious processing in the brain
may precede conscious awareness of an intention to act, leading to
controversies over whether conscious will can play any part in oneÕs intention
to move even a little finger. In
1983 Benjamin Libet and co-workers asked volunteers wearing electrodes to flex
a finger or wrist. When they did, the movements were preceded by a dip in the
signals being recorded, which they called the 'readiness potential' -
interpreted as the brain preparing for movement, which came a few tenths of a
second before the volunteers said they had decided to move. Libet concluded
that unconscious neural processes determine our actions before we are ever
aware of making a decision. Using
contemporary brain scanning technology, researchers have since been able to
predict with 60% accuracy whether subjects would press a button with their left
or right hand up to 10 seconds before the subject became aware of having made
that choice. This doesn't negate conscious willing because these prefrontal and
parietal patterns of activation merely indicate a process is in play, which may
become consciously invoked at the time of the decision, and clearly many
subjects (40% of trials) were in fact making a contrary decision.
The
assumption that Libet's RP is a subconscious decision has been undermined by
subsequent studies. In one, subjects waited for an audio tone before deciding
whether to tap a key. If Libet's interpretation were correct, the RP should be
greater after the tone when a person chose to tap the key. The supposed RP was
the same whether or not they elected to tap, implying the RP is simply a sign
that the brain is paying attention and does not indicate that a decision has
been made. Another study explains the RP as simply an indication that brain
processes, which could lead to a decision, have crossed a certain threshold. Previous studies had shown that, when we
have to make a decision based on sensory input, assemblies of neurons start
accumulating evidence in favor of the various possible outcomes leading towards
a decision when the evidence favoring one outcome becomes strong enough to
cross a threshold. The team repeated Libet's experiment, but this time if,
while waiting to act spontaneously, the volunteers heard a click they had to
act immediately. The researchers predicted and found that the fastest response
to the click would be seen in those in whom the accumulation of neural noise
had neared the threshold - something that would show up in their EEG as a
readiness potential. concluding that what looks like a
pre-conscious decision process may not in fact reflect a decision at all.
Other
experiments suggest that in the very moments that we experience a choice, our
minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice - that
was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived -
was a choice that we had made all along. In 1999, Wegner and Wheatley claimed:
The experience of intentionally willing
an action is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our
thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no causal
role in producing that behavior.
Some
aspects of our conscious experience of the world do make it possible for the
brain to sometimes construct a present that has never actually occurred, for
example, in the flash-lag illusion, incorrectly perceiving that a flash which
actually happens exactly when a rotating arrow crosses a marker, occurs after
the arrow has crossed. Due to our gatherer-hunter origins, the brain is primed
for very rapid visual recognition of moving targets and it does this party by
constructive prediction of the future state of a moving object. This can lead
to situations where visual illusions can establish that the brain is constructing
an image of the future that is incorrect. Some variants of these illusions can
also show that sometimes the brain synthesizes a logic
of the sequence of events after the fact and interpolates it backwards. This
seems paradoxical, but other tests have confirmed that what is perceived to
have occurred at a certain time can be influenced by what happens later. This
again does not show that the brain is unable to anticipate reality, because it
applies specifically to very short time interval spatial reconstructions by the
brain, which would normally be more accurate by retrospective interpolation,
aiding survival, and thus being selected for.
Regardless
of cultural and religious history, belief in free-will
appears to be a normal biological condition. In 1998, the International Social
Survey Programme asked 40,000 people from 34 countries: "Do we make our
own fate?" More than 70 per cent answered in the affirmative. In
experiments where volunteers read statements reinforcing or undermining belief
in free will, the first group behaved no differently from volunteers who had
not been primed to think of free will at all, indicating we naturally act as
though we possess it. Moreover those with a greater belief in their own free
will were generally rated as performing better than those with weaker beliefs,
suggesting belief in free will is effective in our actions. And ironically people
don't just believe they have free will, they also believe they have more of it
than others.
We
will thus reject the notion that free-will is an illusion and that consciousness
plays no role in decision-making and present a radically different perspective,
based on quantum reality.
Quantum
Reality and the Conscious Observer
Two
founding discoveries of physics since the nineteenth century have transformed
our notion of the classical universe. Special relativity has shown us that
space and time and energy and momentum are coupled in such a way as to both
define the speed of light as the upper limit for causal propagation, and bringing
with it the notion of both retarded and advanced solutions to the fundamental
equations of motion – with retarded solutions travelling in the usual
direction to later times and advanced solutions being time-reversed.
At
the same time, quantum physics has shown us that it is impossible to
deterministically specify the state of any fundamental wave-particle, such as
an electron, or photon, because energy is equivalent to frequency and momentum
equivalent to wavelength, and we canÕt determine the frequency of a wave at an
instant because we need a certain amount of time over several wave beats to
make a measurement of a given accuracy, since we have no finer measure than the
quantum itself. Effectively the universe has thrown in a cubic centimeter of
chance into the equations – a volume of momentum times
distance, or energy times time, within which arbitrarily wild fluctuations can and
do occur.
Each
quantum manifests discretely as a particle and continuously as a wave. While we can be relatively certain about
average behaviors of many wave-particles, for example the photons of light
making the interference rainbows we see on a CD or DVD, we canÕt know where any
individual photon will end up. The
CD rainbow is an example of a many-slit interference experiment, generated by
reflections between the slits forming the data tracks. In the usual experiment,
a photon is discretely released as a particle from an excited atom in a light
source making a discrete orbital transition to the ground state. It travels as
a wave through space, passing through two slits in a barrier as a wave, and
traveling on to a photographic plate where it is absorbed discretely by an atom
on the plate. Over time, the pattern of these absorptions shows up as bands of
dark and light confirming the wave nature of the light emerging from the two
slits, and that the photon passed through both the slits at once to make the
interference bands. But we have no idea where each individual particle will be
absorbed, because all we know from quantum mechanics is that the probability of
them being in any particular place varies with the intensity of the wave
– the amplitude squared. So a single photon could end up almost anywhere.
Quantum
mechanics predicts an overlapping set of probabilities superimposing all the
possible states. However when a conscious observer makes a measurement, the
superposition of all the possible states in the wave appears to collapse into
one unpredictable outcome – the particle is absorbed by a single atom
somewhere the amplitude is non-zero in the wave function spreading across
space-time. It is as if each photon itself has a form of free will, as long as
they conform on average to the wave function intensity. This problem was made
famous in Erwin SchršdingerÕs cat paradox experiment. A cat is subjected to
Russian roulette in a closed box driven by a radioactive source with a
probability of a half of going off during the experiment, killing the cat. Quantum
physics says the cat is both alive and dead with equal probabilities, but when
we open the box we find it is either alive or dead and history has been made.
John
von Neumann the mathematical physicist who also invented the computer CPU suggested
that quantum observation is the action of a conscious mind and that everything
in the universe that is subject to the laws of quantum physics creates one vast
quantum superposition. But the conscious mind is different, being able to
select out one of the quantum possibilities on offer, making it real to that
mind. Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, said in 1931, "I regard
consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from
consciousness." Werner Heisenberg also maintained that wave function
collapse - the destruction of quantum superposition - occurs when the result of
a measurement is registered in the mind of an observer.
Uncertainty
is not just a hypothetical idea about measurement either. The vacuum is teeming
with virtual particles of every possible type appearing out of nowhere and
disappearing again within the cubic centimeter of chance uncertainty dictates.
These virtual particles are also responsible for the forces of nature, such as
electromagnetism, which is due to the exchange of virtual photons between
charged particles such as electrons. When we apply energy to electromagnetic
circuits, for example in a radio antenna, the photons generated making the
music on our airwaves are literally virtual photons that have been drawn out of
thin air by the oscillating electromagnetic fields picking up virtual photons
and making them real by giving them positive energy. Quantum electrodynamics,
devised by Richard Feynman, has proved to be the most accurate theory of
physics ever, predicting the magnetic moment of the electron due to emitting and
re-absorbing virtual photons, agreeing with the experimental result to an
accuracy of one part in 1010.
Couched in terms of special relativity, all such quantum field theories
likewise admit both retarded and advanced solutions.
This
picture of quantum uncertainty has been further deepened by the notion of
quantum entanglement. This is the
spooky Ôaction at a distanceÕ that Einstein decried: ÒI donÕt believe that God
is playing dice with the universeÓ. But later this spooky connection became an
experimental reality. If we generate two particles in the same wave function,
it turns out that sampling one immediately tells us about the complementary one,
without limits on their exchanging information at the speed of light. For
example an excited atom of calcium needs to radiate two photons together
because the excited and ground states are both spin zero, but a photon carries
a spin of one, so emitting two complementary ones will cancel the spins out. The atom thus radiates two photons in
opposite directions with complementary polarization. Measure the polarization
of one along a given axis and you know the other instantaneously in a way that
is not bounded by the limits of speed of light communication between the two
detectors, since the effect persists even when we change the detectorÕs
orientations over time intervals too short for light speed communication to
occur between them. Entanglement
and related phenomena such as quantum discord show that uncertainty also plays
a significant role in the way physical and biological processes occur.
Quantum
discord is an extension of entanglement to more general forms of coherence, in which partial correlations induced through
interaction with mixed state particles can still be used to induce quantum
correlated effects. Quantum discord is a promising candidate for a complete
description of all quantum correlations. Coherent interactions can harness
discord to complete a task that is otherwise impossible. This advantage can be
directly observed, even in the absence of entanglement. Quantum discord does
not require isolation from decoherence caused by entangled particles getting
knocked out of synch by a third party quantum, and can even derive additional
quantum information from interaction with mixed states which would annihilate
entangled states. Quantum discord is thus a viable model for processes ongoing
at biological temperatures, which could disrupt full entanglement.
Uncertainty
and entanglement also raise deep questions about the nature of causality in
time. A photon can be absorbed anywhere inside its spreading wave function , but this spreads both in space and time. When
light is passing through a semi-transparent medium, it could be absorbed sooner
of later, but somehow the universe never makes a mistake resulting in two
absorptions, even when a particle is absorbed long after the wave front has
passed other locations.
Quantum
reality thus has a form of hand-shaking between past
and future, which we can see more clearly in the Wheeler delayed choice
experiment. Supposing we look out
at a very distant galaxy whose light was emitted shortly after the universe
began, which is gravitationally lensed by a nearer one so, we can see two split
images, as in the double slit experiment because the light has followed two
paths around both sides of the intervening galaxy. If we bring these two
together in a detector, we will get an interference pattern confirming the
photon went around both sides of the intervening galaxy on its way here, but if
instead we put separate photon detectors pointing at each image, we will find
it went only around one side of the galaxy. In this case the interference
fringes disappear just as they do in the double slit apparatus if we try to
detect which slit the photon went through, but here we are making the choice
long after the photon traversed the universe. It is thus clear that, within the
wave function, there is a hand-shaking between past
and future, in which future absorbing states act as boundary conditions on the
collapse of the wave-function to the particle, as definitively as the past
emitting state(s). This is also true of entangled states and means that the
physics inside entanglement in a fundamental sense anticipates future absorbing
states.
This
doesnÕt mean that entanglement or uncertainty can be used to deterministically
predict the future, because entanglement canÕt be used to send a causal message
faster than the speed of light. It is just the correlation between internal
sates that is instantaneous and has to be to avoid particles appearing out of
nowhere more than uncertainty allows.
A
central error made by people criticizing free-will is that the quantum universe
is divided between deterministic laws, including both Newtonian mechanics and
the Hamiltonian wave functions of quantum mechanics, the only exception being
the probability laws of quantum mechanics giving rise to particle ensembles,
thermodynamics and kinetic processes. These are, in turn, claimed to be as
unyielding to free-will as determinism, because we are
merely replacing stipulated actions by law with random unspecified actions.
Since the universe is governed by unyielding determinism and unrelenting
randomness, the notion of free-will is meaningless,
even in the quantum universe. This then enables the argument to descend to a
reductionism, in which particulate molecules interact kinetically, reducing the
brain to a complex probabilistic automaton.
Carlo
Rovelli, a gravitational theorist, makes exactly these mistakes claiming that:
Free will has nothing to do with
quantum mechanics. We are deeply unpredictable beings, like most macroscopic
systems. There is no incompatibility between free will and microscopic
determinism. ... The issue has no bearing on questions of a moral or legal
nature. Our idea of being free is correct, but it is just a way to say that we
are ignorant on why we make choices. The first is that the indeterminism of
quantum mechanics is governed by a rigorous probabilistic dynamics. The
equations of quantum mechanics do not determine what will happen, but determine
strictly the probability of what will happen. In other words, they certify that
the violation of determinism is strictly random. This goes in exactly the
opposite direction from human freedom to choose. If an element of randomness is
sufficient to account for free will, there is no need to search it into quantum
uncertainty, because in a complex open system such as a human being there are
already many sources of uncertainty, entirely independent of quantum mechanics.
The microscopic atomic dynamic inside of a man is influenced by countless
random events: just consider the fact that it occurs at room temperature, where
the thermal motion of the molecules is completely random. The same balance
between rigidity and chance plays an important role in our brain, which
functions, in spite of the illuminating similarities with good software, because
of the ubiquity of statistics in his working. ... Our brain is a machine, but
it is a machine that works in a manner where statistical elements play a
continuous and persistent role, next to deterministic functions.
The
problem with this approach is that we can exert the strictness of the
probability interpretation only when a process is repeated in a systematically
consistent way, as in an interference experiment to form a statistical particle
distribution. If we allow only one event to occur in a given context, such as
letting one photon through the apparatus, we simply don't know where it will
end up. But all human decision-making is of this second type - that is it is
not repeated - history is made and a new situation results. Evolution through mutation
shares this precisely at the quantum level, which never fully converges to the
probability interpretation since many mutations are adventitious and then
become fixed by selection. The brain shows rich avenues for quantum
fluctuations of this kind to become amplified into global activation of new
states and then fixed by synaptic changes involved in long-term potentiation
have been found to lead to epigenetic changes.
Peter
Tse has an interesting answer:
If the brain sets up criteria for
future firing, and if spike timing is made random by the amplification of
quantum-level events in the synapse, it is down to chance how these criteria
are met. The inputs that meet criteria cannot be predicted - the outcome
depends on which spikes coincidentally arrive first. É The missing piece is
that neurons can rewire each other. Spikes don't just trigger subsequent spikes
in other neurons. Within milliseconds, they can temporarily change the degree
to which synapses -- the nerve structures that pass signals to other neurons --
trigger future spikes ... rapid bursts of spikes trigger the opening of
specialised synaptic receptors, altering the responsiveness of neurons to
subsequent spikes. É With synaptic reweighting, mental events don't change
their present physical basis. They change the neuronal basis of possible future
events. But this alone is not enough for free will. The brain of a zombie who
lacked consciousness could use this mechanism too, but we would not say it had
free will. To have free will requires that our self - that which we feel
directs our attention around our conscious experience - has some say in the
matter of what we do or think. If consciousness plays no part in the synaptic
reweighting process, there is hardly a free will worth having. Fortunately, the
neural activity associated with consciousness does play a necessary role.
He
illustrates this with the brain deliberating an outcome in a novel situation,
which has features that have not occurred previously, leading to a new response
as a result of the unstable brain dynamics, which then becomes a process in the
real world realizing the outcome. We could in principle then make verifiable
tests that consciously willed actions do indeed result in historically
verifiable outcomes, closing the circle.
When
we involve quantum entanglement and its generalized forms such as discord, the
stakes become more interesting because we have no model of how the universe
actually correlates such processes. Hidden variable theories have been
proposed. David BohmÕs pilot wave theory, for example, models quantum processes
in terms of particles having a real location modified by a quantum potential
which acts at a distance in such a way as to generate the same outcomes as those
predicted by quantum mechanics.
Strong
measurements that disturb the quantum state cannot be used to investigate an
ongoing wave function because they will cause wave function collapse. For
example, testing whether a particle has passed through one slit of a two slit
apparatus destroys the coherent interference fringes, but weak quantum
measurement which only marginally perturbs the wave function, e.g. by a small
change in polarization, can be used to build up a statistical profile of how a
particle traverses its wave function.
Weak quantum measurement can be performed in a double slit apparatus generating single photons using a laser stimulated quantum dot and split fiber optics and it shows us what the trajectories look like inside the wave function. The overlapping wave function is elliptically polarized in the xy-plane transverse to the z-direction of travel. A calcite crystal is used to make a small shift in the phase of one component, while the other retains the information, subsequently leading to absorption of the photon on a charged coupled device. By combining the information from the two transverse components at varying lens settings, it becomes possible to make a statistical portrait of the evolving particle trajectories within the wave function. Pivotally, the weak quantum measurement is made in a way, which is confirmed only in the future of the ensemble when the post-selection absorption takes place.
When we examine the result, the internal trajectories look consistent with the Bohmian interpretation. Thus, rather than a universe with temporal determinism, with causes strictly preceding effects, interrupted by purely random uncertainty variables, we may be actually living in a universe with a hidden variable interaction with hand-shaking boundary conditions imposed symmetrically by both past and future states..
Weak measurement also suggests
that, in some sense, the future is determining the present, but in a way we can
discover conclusively only by many repeats. Focus on any single instance and
you are left with an effect with no apparent cause, which one has to put it
down to a random experimental error. This has led some physicists to suggest
that free-will exists only in the freedom to choose
not to make the post-selection(s) revealing the future's pull on the present.
Yakir Aharonov, the co-discoverer of weak quantum measurement sees this
occurring through an advanced wave travelling backwards in time from the future
absorbing states to the time of weak measurement. What God gains by 'playing
dice with the universe', in Einstein's words, in the quantum fuzziness of
uncertainty, is just what is needed, so that the future can exert an effect on
the present, without ever being caught in the act of doing it in any particular
instance, neatly explaining why no subjective account of prescience can do so
either. Post-selection can also induce forms of entanglement in particles
even if they have no previous quantum connection coupling their wave functions.
The link with Bohm's pilot wave
theory became reinforced when a critical experiment demonstrated the existence
of so-called "surreal Bohmian trajectories" which could violate the
predictions of quantum theory. The experiment first prepares a pair of highly
entangled photons with complementary polarization and then passes one into a
double slit apparatus in which the photon to be measured is directed to one or
other slit depending on its entangled twin's polarization. The measured photons
are then passed through an apparatus to do weak quantum measurement of their
trajectories as an ensemble and then detect the eventual position
destructively. However when weak measurement is used to
detect the trajectory close to the slit. it
confirms that the photon has gone through the correct slit according to its
assumed polarization as subsequently measured by sampling its entangled twin.
However, as the position of weak measurement moves towards the photographic
plate the predictions fall to an even superposition of the two polarizations.
Since the weak quantum measurement is a physical realization of the ensemble
trajectories going to this particular point on the plate, the surreal
trajectories are real but the prediction made of the spin by the entangled twin
has become changed. This implies in turn that changes have occurred between
entering the slits and hitting the plate of a non-local nature, implying the
there is substance to the Bohmian reality.
Quantum
uncertainty in brain processes could thus provide a loophole both for free will
and for conscious anticipation, if decision-making corresponds to unstable
processes where quantum uncertainty means we canÕt predict the outcome of the
brain state. This brings us to the question of the role chaos may play in
generating unpredictability.
A Perfect
Storm at the Edge of Chaos
A
third discovery in physics much closer to home paradoxically took much longer to become recognized. The classical
paradigm of the rule of order meant that physicists thought all real phenomena
would have to be structurally stable and not disintegrate under arbitrarily
small perturbation, until Lorenz studying turbulent weather in the 1960s came
up with a system of equations which demonstrated the Ôbutterfly catastropheÕ
– that for some ÔchaoticÕ systems, arbitrarily small perturbations can
grow exponentially, so that the disturbance of a butterflyÕs wings in Hawaii
can later grow into a tropical cyclone hitting Mexico. Chaos also has two other
key properties – it thoroughly mixes dynamical space topologically and it
is permeated with a dense set of repelling orbits, while ordered systems
converge toward a stable set of attracting orbits.
Earlier
Werner Heisenberg had prophetically commented: "When I meet God, I'm going
to ask him two questions, 'Why relativity?' and 'Why turbulence?' I really
believe he will have an answer to the first" - implying the second, i.e.
chaos is the very nemesis.
Suddenly
people realized that chaotic instability underlay a whole raft of phenomena,
from fluctuations in the populations of rabbits through to the forms of
snowflake-like fractal sets in dynamical systems. Evolution and climax
ecologies both operate at the so-called Ôedge of chaosÕ. Complex biological
systems are particularly prone to dynamics which include transitions in or out
of chaotic phases, and these include the very phenomena in the brain we
associate with conscious decision-making, where all the competing factors relating
to an uncertain decision we are about to make, lead to an unstable tipping
point.
Chaos
is essential to such processes, because it provides a form of ÔannealingÕ.
Ordered dynamical systems tend to be totalitarian, getting stuck by drawing
every state into one of their stable attractors, making it very difficult to
avoid a Ôfait accompliÕ. Chaos enhances a systemÕs dynamical unpredictability,
so it can end up almost anywhere, avoiding it getting stuck and enabling it to
form or enter a new attractor as we make a transition from chaos to order.
Quantum
systems engaged in chaotic dynamical processes can also enter paradoxical
states of entanglement. Many closed quantum systems display repression of
classical chaos. For example a confined wave function under chaotic energisation,
such as the quantum stadium, displays scarring of the wave function, causing
the probability to cluster around the repelling periodic orbits. However this
is not true for open or interactive systems. An indication of how the
transition from classical to quantum chaos might lead to complex forms of
quantum entanglement can be gleaned from an ingenious experiment forming a
quantum analogue of the kicked top using an ultra-cold cesium atom kicked by
both a laser pulse and a magnetic field. In the experiment the lack of a dip in
linear entropies in the chaotic regime indicates entanglement with nuclear spin,
showing quantum chaos can lead to new forms of quantum entanglement.
Studies
of brain waves in the electroencephalogram show that these are broad-spectrum
excitations associated with chaotic processes, rather than the narrow peaks we
associate with ordered resonances. Work by Walter Freeman in the 1990s showed
that processes such as sensory recognition and learning can be explained by
dynamical evolution of chaotic strange attractors through transitions in and out
of chaos, in which a high-energy chaotic phase frees up the dynamic to explore
the phase space of possibilities, while a lower-energy transition back towards
order seals a perception or decision into place. Attractor based dynamics can
also explain how learning occurs if a new situation arises by forming a new
attractor by bifurcation out of chaos.
Moreover
the brain consists of a fractal-like system of interconnected neuronal
assemblies, where in cases where there are potential tipping points,
instability in a single neuron can lead to cascades of instability in larger
neural assemblies, leading ultimately to a change in the whole brain state, as
has again been demonstrated by experiment. Between the global, cellular and molecular
levels are a fractal cascade of central nervous
processes, which, in combination, make it possible for a quantum fluctuation to
become amplified into a change of global brain state. The neuron is itself a
fractal with multiply branching dendrites and axonal terminals, which are
essential to provide the many-to-many synaptic connections between neurons,
which make adaptation and the representation of reality possible. In all
tissues, biological organization is achieved through non-linear interactions
which begin at the molecular level and have secondary perturbations upward in a
series of fractal scale transformations through complex molecules such as
enzymes, supra-molecular complexes such as ion channels and the membrane,
organelles such as synaptic junctions, to neurons and then to neuronal
complexes such as cortical mini-columns and finally to global brain processes.
Because
neurons tend to tune to their threshold with a sigmoidal activation function,
which has maximum limiting slope at threshold, they are capable of becoming
critically poised at their activation threshold. It is thus possible in principle for a
single ion channel, potentially triggered by only one or two neurotransmitter
molecules, if suitably situated on the receptor neuron, e.g. at the cell body,
where an action potential begins, to act as the trigger for activation.
The
lessons of the butterfly effect and evidence for transitions from chaos in
perceptual recognition suggest that if a brain state is critically poised, the
system may become sensitive to instability at the neuronal, synaptic,
ion-channel, or quantum level. A
variety of lines of evidence have demonstrated that fluctuations of activity in
single cells can lead to a change of brain state when the global brain state is
critically poised for example under
stochastic resonance, in which the
presence of chaotic excitation or noise, somewhat paradoxically, leads to the
capacity of ion channels to sensitively excite hippocampal cells and in turn to
cause a change in global brain state. Specific neuronal circuitry also
facilitates such processes. Chandelier cell activation can result in poly-synaptic activation of pyramidal neurons that drive
active output to other cortical regions and to the peripheral nervous system,
in such a way that single action potentials are sufficient to recruit neuronal
assemblies that are proposed to participate in cognitive processes.
Confirmation
of edge of chaos processing has come with several recent experimental studies.
Consciously perceived stimuli appear as islands of relative stability in a
chaotic sea of unconscious processing. High density
EEG experiments confirm that the brain, is self-regulated at the boundary
between stable and unstable regimes, a form of self-organized criticality, allowing
it to maintain high susceptibility and sensitivity to stimuli. During loss of
consciousness due to anesthetics, the number of resonance modes at the edge of
instability decreases, independently of the type of anesthetic and specific
features of brain activity, but drifts back toward the boundary during recovery
of consciousness. These findings imply that dynamics at the edge of instability
are essential for maintaining consciousness.
However,
there is another aspect of brain activity that is also critical for our
understanding, which comes very close to the idea of quantum measurement. A
central way the brain distinguishes signal from noise is whether excitations
are Òin synchÕ with one another – i.e. they rise and fall in time with
one another coherently. Circuits which do this tend to
be reinforced and couple together to make a larger scale dynamical system. This
attribute is termed Ôphase coherenceÕ because the phases of the two waves
– i.e. the angle between rise and fall, flow together.
Karl
Pribram coined the term Ôholographic brainÕ for this dependence on phase-front
processing, because it is similar to the way a holographic photograph stores
3-D wave information on a photographic plate using coherent laser light, where
all the photons are caught Ôin synchÕ in the same wave function.
One
can thus picture brain processes as arising locally and those which achieve
phase coherence coupling together and competing with others out of synch, with global
attention processes scanning for dominant coherences that subsequently rise to
conscious attention. This process is a very close analogy to quantum
measurement where wave beats are a direct discrete measure of phase coherence.
Of
course there are many people who will then object that the firing of even
individual neurons happens on a far grosser scale than individual quanta at the
molecular level and the uncertainty can play no significant role in conscious
decision-making. This is again incorrect, because neurons can self-tune to
their activation threshold with sigmoidal acute activation triggers so that
changes at an individual neurotransmitter receptor or even a single ion channel
at a critically poised neuron can result in activation, leading in turn to an
escalating cascade of activated neural assemblies.
Moreover
many sensory processes are known to be sensitive down to the one quantum level.
Recently experiments have verified, for example, that it is possible for the
human eye in the limit of sensitivity, to detect a single photon. Membranes of cochlear cells oscillate by
only about one H atom radius at the threshold of hearing, well below the scale
of individual thermodynamic fluctuations and vastly below the bilayer membrane
thickness. Moth pheromones are similarly effective at concentrations consistent
with one molecule being active, as are the olfactory sensitivities of some
mammals.
Furthermore,
although long distance transmission of signals is driven by the discrete pulse-modulated
action potentials of pyramidal neurons, many neurons at the organizing centre
of neural assemblies have graded potentials with continuous variation, so the organizing
process cannot be reduced to a digital process like that of a silicon-based digital
computer.
The
nature of wave-front processing raises a question
about whether brain excitations might be more than an analogy with quantum
processes and actually be in some sense inflated quantum excitations. In such a
situation, coherence between excitations would be equivalent to quantum
entanglement and raise intriguing questions about the causality of brain
processes. We would move beyond merely citing quantum uncertainty as a loophole
in determinism and enter unknown territory about the space-time properties of
entangled brain processes.
Biology
has been discovered to contain a challenging diversity of quantum phenomena. Enzymes
commonly use quantum tunneling as a means to traverse the activation barrier. When
a photosynthetic active centre absorbs a photon in a plant, the wave function
of the excitation is able to perform a quantum computation by superposition, which
enables the excitation to travel down the most efficient route through the
molecular web to reach the chemical reaction site. Quantum entanglement is
believed to be behind the way some birds navigate in the magnetic field. Light
excites two electrons on a molecule and shunts one of them onto a second
molecule. Their spins are linked through quantum entanglement. Before they
relax into a decoherent state, the Earth's magnetic field can alter the
relative alignment of the electrons' spins, which in turn alters the chemical
properties of the molecules involved. Quantum coherence imaging is an
established technique in tissue imaging, demonstrating quantum entanglement in
biological tissues at the molecular level. Interesting candidates for
entanglement in the brain could occur as a result of spin are Calcium phosphate
Posner's clusters, which have an estimated the coherence time of over a minute.
If
the brain is able to generate entangled excitations the lifetime of these
excitations could create a potentially anticipatory loophole on a similar time
scale to the conscious moment of hundreds of milliseconds which might provide
exactly the anticipatory advantage that resulted in the evolution of consciousness
nervous systems to avoid potentially lethal predator attacks.
To
put this in a molecular context and to see the whole picture, we now need to
throw the covers off the cosmological universe and where life fits into the
picture.
Origin Myths
and Apocalyptic Allegories
LetÕs
turn back for a minute to traditional ideas of how the universe began. Cultures
since the dawn of history have devised creation myths to explain how we find
ourselves in the world. The San
Bushmen, one of our most ancient founding cultures that go back 150,000 years
to the mitochondrial Eve, tell a story of a creator deity making in turn a
second god of misfortune and chaos and female partners for them both, who in his earthly existence was a supernatural trickster
capable of assuming any form, who changed people into animals and brought the
dead back to life. He created the earth with holes in it where water could
collect and water and rain, the sky, the sun, moon, stars and wind, and all the
plants and animals and gave them names. Then he put life into humans and gave
to them all their weapons and implements and the knowledge of how to exist in
the wild. And he ordained that when
they died they should become spirits, who would live in the sky with him and
serve him. The Bushmen do not worship their deities
in fear or supplication, in the way the major social religions do, but rather
see them as quizzical elements far off in their own domain, who manifest
indirectly through natural phenomena and the vagaries of fate.
Although
charmingly evocative, the sabbatical creation sequence of Genesis one defies
the natural order in a way that makes no cosmological or biological sense. The
universe is a logos - enunciated verbally - ÔLet there
be light and there was lightÕ. Light, immediately adopting the forms of day and
night, is created before the Sun, Moon and stars. The photosynthetic plants are
also impossibly created before the Sun. The firmament of the heavens is
"raqiya" a beaten hemispherical bowl, dividing waters above and
below, in which the stars are fixed as adornments and the Sun and Moon are mere
lamps to light the day and night. Earth is a flat domain created by bunching
the waters under heaven to one place. The fishes and whales and the birds are
created a day before the land animals and long after the plants. The Sabbatical
deity is ÔElohim – God in the
plural - with implications of being a deity partnership in consort, culminating
in humans being made female and male in their likeness. This is echoed in the
proverbs where Wisdom portrayed as a female who says ÒI was with him from
everlasting before the Earth was.Ó To try to use this charming allegory to deny
the evolution of natural life in the name of religious belief is a frank disgrace
of bibliolatry the written word version of idolatry.
The
Eden tale stands in stark contrast. A lone and lonely God sets up a tender trap
in paradise with the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The woman Eve, conceived out of AdamÕs rib, is tricked into eating the fruit of
knowledge, leading to woman being cursed as the ÔdevilÕs gatewayÕ to suffer the
pains of childbirth and be ruled over by her husband, giving patriarchy free
reign, and both woman and man doomed to mortality to live struggling with the
thorns and thistles, exiled from the Garden by a flaming sword.
With
the development of urban culture, deities became totems for city-states and empires
vying for dominance. The nature of God underwent a change, to become a moral
deity cursing the people for infidelity or selfishness to enhance the internal
cohesion of the state. The rise of patriarchal dominance at the same time
resulted in God becoming connected with the control of female reproduction.
Recent genetic evidence comparing Y-chromosome and mitochondrial evolution has
shown that, with the advent of the agricultural era, the reproductive sex ratio
went from about a fairly natural ratio of 2 women to each reproducing man
since all women can get pregnant but only some men have partners, to 17 to 1,
due to powerful landlords in agrarian societies controlling female reproductive
choice for themselves in harems and sexual slavery.
Yahweh
became the abstract totem deity of the bride Israel, in the same way that other
deities, from old El of Canaan, to Marduk of Babylon were totem deities. As successive societies rose and fell, so
the cosmology evolved by cross-fertilization. Originally in Hebrew religion
there was no place for heaven, or hell, just Sheol, a primitive underworld of
the dead. It was only with the
influence of Zoroaster that the idea of apocalyptic renovation in a future day of judgment arose and became incorporated into the
thought of exilic Jews in Babylon, who were then allowed to return to Israel by
Cyrus the Mede, Ôanointed by GodÕ as a Jewish messiah.
In
modern Judeo-Christian thought, we end up with a syncretic false perspective,
in which the universe has become a cosmic moral passion play in which we are
condemned to torture or given eternal life in a sexless heaven with angelic
wings which makes no physical sense in the rarified upper atmosphere or outer
space and which has no meaningful future creative or enlightening purpose,
frozen forever in eternal time.
As
we have learned from sociobiology, morality is not an imposed fundamental of
the cosmological design, but a natural evolutionary feature of animal and human
societies, in which intra-social strife is repressed to enhance inter-social
domination. In the Judeo-Christian cosmology we are left with a vestigial
creation myth in Genesis 1, inflated by the believing mind into claims that the
Earth is only 4000 years old, and that, without any shred of corroborating
evidence, or even a plausible description in the scripture of how this might
have come about, that the wooly-haired God has created the universe and all
life within it by breathing on it, or naming it in the same way the San Bushmen
imagined it was done.
The
Quranic account, while couched in Arabic poetry, is even more insubstantial,
revolving around a simplified Eden story, leading to fantastic tales of a
sexual heaven where female houris are made anew as virgins every day for the
pleasure of men, and the day of judgment is accompanied by eclipses and the
Moon being torn in two, the one commonplace and the other a cataclysm
impossible except in the birth of the solar system.
When
we turn to the teachings of the Upanishads and Buddhism, we find a more subtle
cosmology that has become centered around the
conscious quest for enlightenment. The entire perspective is that of the
sentient conscious mind seeking the cosmic self within. We have Vishnu the
sustainer dreaming the universe in the form of Brahman manifesting the
phenomena of existence, as a lotus out of VishnuÕs navel. In other accounts we
have Shiva as the conscious avatar in sexual embrace with Shakti-Kali as
material and temporal reality and in their retreat from cosmic union, thus manifesting
all the phenomena of temporal existence, astutely portraying the existential
condition as an intimate sexual union of subjective mind and material body
whose truth has become lost in the myriad reflections of sentient beings
engaging the material world. The intrinsic value in these accounts lies in
their being recognized as allegories, just as the sabbatical creation is a beautiful
allegory, but a fraudulent danger to our survival when fraudulently claimed to
be an actual cosmology.
The
Buddhist account is a story of releasing sentient beings from the grasping bondage
and torments of the ego, in a philosophy of undivided phenomena, all of which
are undivided because they are integrated states of mind, leaving the objective
physical world as part of Maya, the domain of illusion. The end result is a
cosmology of conscious cycles of incarnation in which only the sentient being
exists and has validity and all the diversity of nature, from simple organisms
to humanity, are caught in a moral cosmology which is in fundamental conflict
with nature, because it fails to recognize the difference between an endangered
bird, and a feral rodent which eats it, as both are simply sentient beings. It
is another moral cosmos, in which the wheel of life,
containing realms, from hell, through hungry ghosts to titans, are
archetypal reflections of differing states of mind. It is thus again not a valid
cosmology, but a psychological theory of mind, claiming to address the
existential dilemma, without offering a realizable description of nature or the
physical world.
None
of these accounts contain a remotely plausible or verifiable cosmology of the
universe, nor do they make any meaningful explanation of the origin or purpose
of conscious life in the cosmological process. The struggle to understand the natural
universe as it is, was not achieved easily. People
like Galileo, who challenged the Earth-centric view, were threatened with
excommunication, and attempts have been mounted ever since to insist,
regardless of the lack of evidence, that God created the universe either by
command or by artifice in the manner we create artifacts and machines, and to
deny the natural emergence and evolution of life.
Coming to Terms
with the Cosmological Universe
The
universe has proved to be vastly older, huger, more populous, varied and far
more deeply confounding than any of the ideas of traditional belief systems. Natural reality is inscrutable and existentially
challenging and although we have a fairly clear idea of the general picture,
the exact description of life, the universe and everything isnÕt completely
signed and sealed. However this is a much more healthy
situation than a religious cosmology that resists the evidence and seeks a
dominant regime of order through preconceived beliefs. ItÕs a sign of
our growing maturity to accept uncertainty in the cosmic description.
In
our own galaxy alone there are a hundred billion stars, a good proportion of
which are now known to have planetary systems. But there are also a hundred
billion galaxies, stretching out to the limits of the observable horizon where
we are effectively seeing back to the cosmic origin, because their light has
taken over ten billion years to reach us. We also know the universe had an ÔexplosiveÕ
origin around this time, around 13 billion years ago, because there is a
universal cosmic background radiation at around four degrees absolute, which corresponds
to the hot blast, later cooled almost to zero by the expansion of the universe,
just at the point that the hot opaque charged plasma condensed into neutral
atoms, allowing the universe to become transparent and the photons to escape.
But
the Ôbig bangÕ was no ordinary explosion. It seems to have occurred from a
state of high symmetry immediately followed by a phase of exponential expansion
in around 10-12 seconds, which goes by the name of cosmic inflation.
Like many other aspects of the universe, life and consciousness, inflation is
still in the process of confirmation, but it ties together with some other
issues about how the forces of nature linking matter and radiation that govern
everything from how stars and galaxies form to molecular life and evolution
came about. Nor is the Ôbig bangÕ a
candidate for GodÕs creation of the universe, because according to relativity,
space and time would come together as the lines of longitude do at the south
pole, so we donÕt necessarily have any meaning of time ÔoutsideÕ or time ÔbeforeÕ
the origin, although in some models, inflation is like a fractal, leaving
behind universes like ours, and in others the big bang may have resulted from a
bounce out of a big crunch. The ideas here are as wild and varied as the
uncertainties.
Nevertheless
there are four well-known forces governing the evolution of the universe,
electromagnetism making light, electromagnetic phenomena and driving molecular
chemistry; the weak force governing the radioactivity that exchanges neutrons
and protons; the strong (colour) force governing the high energy attractions
that hold the nucleus together, causing nuclear fission and the fusion driving stars, and gravity. These are now very different, but
they appear to converge at very high energies and the idea is that, just after
the big bang, they were a single super-force and that inflation occurred
because the universe had a universal anti-gravity caused by the fact that,
although very hot, the universe was a little below the unification temperature,
causing a negative mass-energy. Almost as soon as it began and made the
universe huge, the symmetrical state froze out like a ferromagnet, where the
polarized magnetic state is lower energy than the symmetrical state, giving us
the twisted form of the forces we see today where the weak force is chiral, the
strong force goes in three colours of quark and there is an excess of matter
over anti-matter, with atoms and molecules having exclusively positively charge
nuclei and negative charged orbital electrons. Inflation also explains why the
total kinetic energy of the universe flying apart is almost exactly equal to
its gravitational potential energy, leaving us unsure whether it will expand
forever or collapse back again.
Each
of the quantum forces is mediated by radiation particles called bosons, for
example the photons that are exchanged between charged particles such as the
electron, which along with the positively charged proton and neutron constitute
molecular matter. These matter-forming particles are called fermions and can
only group in pairs, causing matter to become incompressible, while bosons can
clone any number together, as in a laser.
But
this isnÕt the whole story, because there are two dark clouds hanging over
cosmology. The first is dark matter. When we look at a galaxy, there simply
isnÕt enough mass in the stars and black holes formed by large stars which have
gobbled up other matter, exploded and collapsed under their massive gravity to
hold a spinning galaxy together. Nearly all the mass must be hidden in some other
massive form of Ôdark matterÕ. At
the same time, careful measurements show the universe is not just expanding,
but the expansion is accelerating, so there is another entity Ôdark energyÕ
causing the acceleration. No one yet has a clear answer to what either of these
actually are, although there are many competing
theories.
Also
we donÕt have a unified Ôtheory of everythingÕ that can fully unite gravity
with the other three forces of nature. There are several candidates extending
the standard model which unifies the other three, but none of the ideas such as
super-symmetry between bosons and fermions, or its extension to superstrings,
where particles become loop vibrations, has achieved confirmation so far in
experiments such as the LHC.
Molecular
Complexity and the Origins of Life
Nevertheless,
the four forces of nature induce an interactive hierarchy in the quantum forms that
matter and radiation can assume. After the cosmic background separated, the
universe consisted mostly of atoms of hydrogen with a little helium, until the
first galaxies formed by gravitational collapse and the first stars began to
shine. From then on, the stars became furnaces burning hydrogen under the
strong nuclear force ultimately generating the heavy elements by nuclear fusion,
until they explode in a supernova. These elements are then swept up into the
gas clouds forming smaller long-lived stars like the sun, which then have
planets containing a spectrum of the lighter and heavier elements we find on Earth.
The
forces of nature are also prone to chaotic interaction due to their non-linear
force fields, that generate extreme variety in
planetary and molecular environments. Anyone who looks at images of the solar
system planets and their major satellites can see how varied and different they
have become. The same is the case for molecular systems. The molecules of life
centre on H, C, N and O with an emphasis on the most strongly covalent elements
in the first row as backbone building components that are also cosmologically
abundant as light elements. These
also form the strongest multiple bonds such as -C≡C-, -C≡N, >C=O, which
can be found in molecular gas and dust clouds such as in the Orion nebula where
new stars and solar systems are being formed.
However
these strong multiple bonds are unstable, because their π orbitals are
at higher energy than a single σ bond, so they polymerize to form a
variety of heterocyclic CNO molecules, which turn out to be precursors of life,
such as nucleic acid bases, amino acids and many other prebiotic molecules. Complex
molecular precursors to life have thus been found both in interstellar gas
clouds, and in carbonaceous meteorites that are associated with the primordial
material on the outer edges of the solar system, which would have rained down
on the early Earth in abundance, providing much of the carbon and nitrogen in
the EarthÕs crust and supplying the Earth with a rich brew of organics.
This
puts complex molecules at the top of the cosmogenesis hierarchy, because they
are the cumulative interactive result of all the forces of nature acting in
order of their energy interactions. You cannot find greater complexity in black
holes, or the centre of stars, because the energies are too catastrophic to
allow all the forces of nature to generate full complexity. Molecular
complexity on the planetary surface thus becomes the Sigma of paradise on the
cosmic equator - life in the universe is as significant in cosmological terms
as the alpha of the cosmic origin or the omega of its final end. The
interaction of the bio-elements is a thus cosmological process based on each of
the chemical elements generated by nucleo-synthesis contributing unique
properties, due to the non-linear nature of charge interactions, which in
combination with one another under the quantum orbital periodicities, provide
the boundary conditions for a structurally unstable complex quantum system to
emerge.
Strong
covalent bonds of the principal bio-elements H C, N and O, which as we noted
have the strongest covalent bonds among the elements, provide the central
backbones of complex organic molecules.
This interacts with a graduated increase of electronegativity in C, N
and O producing a distribution from non-polar C-H to the highly polar O-H found
in the diverse quantum properties of H2O, bifurcating the reaction
medium into non-polar (oily) and polar (aqueous) phases, becoming the source of
micelle, stacked double helix and membranous structures ubiquitous in living
systems. The heterocyclic double and single bonded rings of the first generation
molecules such as the nucleic acid bases provide unique electronic properties
including photon absorption from delocalized electronic orbitals. Second row
elements induce complexifying perturbations. Unique properties of P as
dehydrating condensing agent in the form of -PO43- driving key molecular
polymerizations and energy processes and the milder covalent S-S to S-H bonding
of S provide key additional quantum properties. These are again complemented by
the strongly ionic properties of Na+, K+, Ca++
and Mg++ along with Cl-, in interaction with the diverse
polar, H-bonding, and ionic properties of H2O. Finally the
transition elements add unique catalytic properties, due to their higher
orbital transitions. One can thus confirm that the interaction of the bio-elements
is a culmination of the cosmological process that generated the forces of
nature in their polarized chiral condition as a central interaction of the
chemical elements expressing their graduated periodic and non-linear quantum
properties in a cosmologically
optimal form.
Furthermore, the fractal process of complexity doesnÕt stop at individual bonds. Weaker H-bonds, polar and non-polar interactions, and van der Waal forces act cooperatively to make molecules into fractal structures where catalytic energetics are a function of cooperative weak bonding, leading to molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids with complex tertiary structures based on polymer chains, helices and modifying side groups resulting in active sites with high catalytic power. In a fundamental sense, once life begins, the ultimate culmination interactively of the cosmological forces of nature is excitable tissue, an integrated dynamical quantum fractal, where complex molecules aggregate into molecular complexes, and these into cellular organelles, cells, tissues, organs and organisms, with the ultimate interactive culmination being the conscious brain.
Then
there is the naked lunch of negentropic free-energy, bathing the whole process.
Solar systems, by their genesis, set up a situation of negative entropy, where
there is a free input of energy in stellar radiation bathing the planetary
surface. This leads to all manner of secondary effects in terms of storms,
lightning, and ionizing radiation, all of which can induce molecular
polymerization. In addition, the chemical and geological forces are far from
equilibrium, with the early Earth having massive tectonic and volcanic
activity. Ultimately this becomes the source of all photosynthetic energy
driving life on Earth.
But
the situation is even more auspicious for the emergence of life. There are
unique chemical reactions that can induce a chemical Garden of Eden scenario
out of the cosmological milieu. One of these is the reaction of alkalinizing
olivine with acidic sea water in a higher carbon dioxide atmosphere than we
have today. Olivine is a cosmologically abundant iron-aluminum silicate mineral,
which is ubiquitous in the galaxy and abundant on rocky planets and meteorites.
Olivine vents are still fizzing at the Lost City in the mid Atlantic and off
the coasts of Spain and Iceland, but they would have been vastly more abundant on
the early Earth. The Lost City field itself has undergone continuous activity
for some 30,000 years - a hundred times longer than hydrothermal vents. It
undergoes a chemical reaction with sea water, generating hydrogen and methane to
form columns of carbonate full of fizzy columns, which can both concentrate
organics exponentially and generate key non-equilibrium reactions supporting
central oxidation-reduction pathways driving living processes.
Biogenesis
is a second bridging point, where the religious try to assert that God must
have intervened to set the process in motion, but this is a misconception. The
key polymers, including, both the nucleic acid RNA, which can both replicate
itself and also act as an enzyme-like catalyst, and the polypeptides leading to
proteins, are direct products of the molecular energisations found in
interstellar gas clouds, also found in carbonaceous meteorites and as products in
prebiotic experiments. Adenine, one of the four nucleic acid bases, is simply
(HCN)5. Several new counter-intuitive routes have been discovered
which help bridge the gap all the way from simple precursors to the nucleotide
units making up RNA, utilizing phosphate as a dehydrating binding agent in the
first polymerizations, as it is in cellular energetics today. Moreover living
polymers need to be thermodynamically unstable, or polymerization would run
itself to death and life would have ended before it began in a dob of gunk, so
a long period of a rich non-equilibrium environment is exactly the conditions
which can bridge the gap to replicating living systems.
The
geological evidence suggests that living systems emerged around 3.8 billion
years ago, almost as soon as the temperatures fell enough for liquid oceans to
form, only a few hundred million years after the formation of the solar system
around 4.1 billion years back, although this time manifestly dwarfs the few
days at most of origin of life experiments on Earth today.
Evolution,
Diversification and the Metabolic Genome
Life
depends critically on molecular replication provided by the double helix of
nucleic acids and the complementary base pairs adenine-uracil and guanine-
cytosine, which form a hydrogen-bonded zipper of stacked heterocyclic CN
molecules - purines and pyrimidines. All molecular process are also doomed to
ÔrandomÕ entropy-increasing effects, as are all thermodynamic processes. Thus
replicating life, no matter how precisely it strives to perfectly replicate,
inevitably suffers mutational change, either by errors in replication, or by
chemical damage to the constituent molecules. In the event such changes result
in new advantageous features, selective advantage will result in their
preservation, otherwise they will weaken the genome and tend to be eliminated.
This
means that evolution is absolutely inevitable in all living organisms
cosmologically. It isnÕt a theory, but a molecular fact and reality of the
physical universe, which cannot legitimately be sidelined, marginalized or
claimed to be unproven by religious arguments about creation. It is confirmed,
both by the geological record and the now sequenced genetic trees of diverse
living organisms, including humanity, where we have learned that we have not
only descended from apes but interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. It has
been observed in real life in a host of natural and experimental situations and
is happening to us as we speak.
Once
life became established, it fanned out into two broad categories, those living
closer to mineral conditions became the archaea, and those interacting more
closely with other organic systems became the bacteria. The archaea are now
found living in extreme habitats such as hot pools, high-salt habitats and as
the methanogens living in swamps and some animal intestines. The bacteria fanned
out into a host of habitats, both becoming photo-synthesizers, such as the
blue-green algae that rule todayÕs ocean photo-fixation of energy and
heterotrophic bacteria that invade, break down and utilize all manner of
biological nutrients, including pathogenic and symbiotic forms as well as a
wide variety of other habitats.
This
divergence into all available ecological niches is universal to evolving living
systems. Climax ecosystems require
plants, and animals to fertilize them and control rampant competition, and
evolution generates, along with the animals, carnivores and herbivores,
parasites, predators and prey filling complementary niches. A climax predator
such as a lion, despite living of killing the stragglers, is necessary to the
survival of its prey, or the gazelles become liable to acute boom and bust,
only to die en masse from starvation through eating out the grasslands. There
is thus no moral cosmology that says the lion should lie down with the lamb.
Morality is not universal to cosmology but an evolutionary property of human
and animal societies, as we have noted.
The
divergence between the archaea and bacteria is very ancient because the
ribosomes, the RNA-based protein translating factories of living systems, are
structurally distinct, placing their divergence close to the evolution of the
genetic code and protein translation, and the fact that they donÕt share key
DNA enzymes or fundamental cell wall components suggests they diverged both
before RNA genomes had converted to DNA and before life had fully escaped its
chemical Garden of Eden to become free-living cells.
Nevertheless
shortly after its initial appearance, around 3.5 billion years ago, there was
an explosion of genetic diversity, probably due to a high degree of horizontal
transfer of genes between organisms, resulting in most of the key metabolic
pathways we find today. There was then a long epoch of single-celled life on
Earth, with the largest fossils being stromatolite colonies of bacteria, which
still exist on the shorelines of parts of Australia, until around a billion
years ago, another event, almost as significant as the origin of life, took
place.
Eukaryotes
Transform the Game of Life
Somewhere
between 1.4 and 1 billon years ago, a new life form emerged out of an energy
symbiosis between a species of archaea and a respiring proteobacterium. The
archaeote appears to hav engulfed the bacterial species, but rather than
digesting it, became energized because the respiring bacterium was providing
about seven times as efficient a form of energy transduction than the archeote
metabolism.
There
is no clear trace of the immediate precursors of this event, or exactly how
several of the rapid-fire changes occurred, but we can identify the archaea
closest in genetic evolutionary terms with the closest set of genes and we know
that it was probably a respiring γ-proteobacterum that became
engulfed. Neither are there any fossils of the immediate successors of this
event still in existence because the ensuing life forms were so successful that
they have wiped all immediate precursors and successors off the face of the
Earth.
These
new life forms are the eucaryotes, the first fully nucleated cells, which are
an endosymbiosis between powerful respiring bacteria, and archaea that still
retained much of the more ancient RNA-based information processing. These cells,
utilizing the combination of high-energy respiration and versatile genetic
processing developed the nuclear envelope, the ability to manipulate many
chromosomes using centrioles and microtubule spindles in cell division, a complex
internal digestive system, the endoplasmic reticulum, the new forms of motile
flagella we see in human sperms to this day and all the other organelles of the
modern eukaryote cell, from protists such as amoeba through to multicellular
plants animals and fungi.
The
critical thing is that all eukaryote cells have endosymbiont mitochondria
genetically related to proteobacteria, which perform the energy-rich functions
of respiration and electron transport in the eukaryote cell. Even very
primitive eucaryotes such as giardia have been found to have vestigial
mitochondria which have atrophied due to their anaerobic habitat, placing the
endosymbiosis event right at the origin. Among the eucaryotes there are several
major families, broadly divided into the unikonts (one flagellum), including
amoebae, animals and fungi; and dikonts, including plants and the other
unicellular groups. Plants and animals separated close to the root, so
characteristics common to both plants and animals are probably also primal.
Careful
analysis shows that the majority of reactive enzymatic genes in the eukaryote
nuclear genome probably derived originally from the mitochondria, while the
information processing nuclear genes originated from the archaeal genome.
Gradually, with migration of mitochondrial genes to the nucleus, only a bare
minimum of essential mitochondrial genes remain on the mitochondrial
chromosome. In turn the RNA processing function of the archaeote provided a
richer repertoire for gene regulation than the ultra-compact fast tightly-linked
operon-based gene regulation of bacteria, and the modular functional architecture
of non-coding spacers called introns which separate the functional exon regions
of active coded enzymes provided for a more flexible framework for gene
evolution involving modular components of genes, facilitated by the RNA
processing which enables differential gene expression from the same messenger.
A
species very close to the root of the eukaryote radiation is Naegleria gruberii, a free-living ocean
organism belonging to the excavata, which include some of the most primitive
eucaryotes such as Giardia and Trichomonads. Nevertheless it is capable
of both oxidative respiration and anaerobic metabolism and can switch between
amoeboid and ciliated modes of behavior, regenerating complete centrioles and
flagellae as needed. Its genome sequence includes ÔmuscularÕ actin, microtubule
cytoskeletons, mitotic and meiotic machinery, suggesting cryptic sex, and a
rich repertoire of signaling molecules, which become pivotal to brain
function in higher animals, including G-protein linked receptors, histidine
kinases and second messengers including cAMP. One Naegleria strain investigated is a composite of two distinct
haplotypes, indicating sexual hybridization. Although sexual mating has not
been observed, the heterozygosity found in the Naegleria genome is typical of a
sexual organism, with perhaps infrequent matings.
We
thus see that founding eukaryote lines already had essentially all the organelle
and functional components necessary for multi-celled animals to evolve,
including receptors and signaling molecules necessary for nervous system
function, the capacity for sexual reproduction and the full suite of genes
involved in cellular architecture and motile activity.
Sexual
recombination transforms the evolutionary process in two intertwined ways.
Firstly sexual recombination aligns genes resulting in natural selection being
able to respond to single gene changes, rather than the major chunks of the
genome coupled together in bacterial replication. Secondly crossing over means
homologous genes from the two parents are crossed over to provide novel
genomes, which nevertheless contain a full viable gene complement.
This
provides endless variety in the offspring, which enables them to resist
catastrophic attacks from parasite organisms, as well as enabling a form of
ÔMullerÕs ratchetÕ preventing the gradual accumulation of mutations in a large
genome to lethal levels. Resistance to parasites and diseases provides an
immediate survival advantage to sexual organisms in the first generation,
helping to explain how sexuality could become established before any
evolutionary advantages accrued over time. Because all the offspring are
genetically diverse, even if some contain deleterious or lethal mutations, some
others will not and become the survivors who have eluded the mutational change.
Sexuality also allows extremely rapid uptake of a new advantageous mutation,
through selective sweeps, which confer a significant advantage to the
reproductive power of offspring containing the new characteristic.
Contrary to the idea that sexuality and sexual recombination are late adaptions of advanced eucaryotes, investigation of meiosis-related genes produces evolutionary trees showing the occurrence of these genes across the eucaryotes from Giardia to Homo sapiens, implying sexuality is a founding characteristic of all extant eucaryotes. Forms of both unikont amoebozoa and dikont rhizaria and excavates show trends consistent with founding sexuality, later lost in some branches. Both amoebozoa and rhizaria show confirmed evidence for sexuality, such as meiosis, showing it is a likely founding characteristic.
The
early origin of sexuality is attested to by research into the extended family
tree of amoebae, which shows that sexuality is likely to have arisen in their
common ancestor and been subsequently lost in asexual protist species. Unequivocal evidence for sex in the primitive excavate Giardia
implies sexuality arose in the last common ancestor of all eucaryotes, very
early in evolution, suggesting it may have been a founding characteristic of
the archaeote partner in the endosymbiosis, from which most of the information
processing genes are derived.
The Ancient
Evolutionary Foundations of Consciousness
Excitable
membranes are universal to eucaryote cells, as is the need to sense
electrochemical and nutrient changes in their milieu. Edge of chaos dynamics is
a natural consequence of excitability, providing arbitrary sensitivity to
disturbances caused by predators and prey in the active environment. It is a
function critical for survival in both single-celled and multicellular
organisms. It is thus easy to see how chaotic excitability became a sensitive
sense organ in single celled eucaryotes constituting a form of cellular
ÔconsciousnessÕ in such species.
It
should also be noted that the biological sense modes of vision, hearing, smell,
touch and electrical sensitivity are really the available fundamental physical
quantum modes, which the electrical sensitivity of the excitable cell can help
bring into play. Vision for example is membrane excitability primed by photon
absorption, and the photoreceptor molecule in human vision is rhodopsin. The
extremely ancient origin of the rhodopsin family of heptahelical receptors can
be seen from the ultra-primitive photosynthesis in archaeote Halobacteria,
which lack any form of electron transport, relying only on the direct coupling
between photo-stimulated H+ pumping and chemiosmotic ATP formation
universal to life, based on bacteriorhodopsin, which shares genetic sequence
homology with vertebrate rhodopsins, uses a form of retinal as in human vision,
and has the same heptahelical membrane-spanning structure as G-protein-linked
receptors for neurotransmitters such as serotonin, suggesting these receptors,
also found in Naegleria, first arose
in archaea.
Likewise
the neurotransmitters that give us the sappy biochemical brain have an ancient
origin in single celled-eucaryotes as signaling molecules. The elementary neurotransmitter
types, many of which are fundamental amino acids (glutamate, glycine, GABA) or
amines derived from amino acids (serotonin, catecholamines nor-epinephrine and dopamine,
histamine, and choline) have primordial relationships with the membrane, as soluble
molecules with complementary charge relationships to the hydrophilic ends of
the phospholipids, which later became encoded in protein receptors. The
serotonin 5-HT1a receptor for example is estimated to have evolved up to a
billion years ago, concomitant with the eucaryote emergence. Receptor proteins,
second signaling pathways and key neurotransmitters including norepinephrine,
epinephrine, and serotonin occur widely in single-celled protists. Species of Entamoeba secrete serotonin and the
neuropeptides neurotensin and substance P, a neuropeptide associated with
inflammatory processes and pain in humans, and release and respond to
catecholamine compounds during differentiation. The metabotropic
(protein-activating) glutamate and GABA receptors likewise go back to the
social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum,
along with the cAMP signaling pivotal in aggregation of some 100,000 partially
differentiated cells on impending starvation to form an asexual fruiting body,
although it is also capable of sexual reproduction.
This
leads to a picture where the essential physiological components of conscious
brain activity and sensory awareness arose in single-celled eucaryotes,
both in intra and intercellular communication, and in the chaotic excitability
of single cells in sensing and responding to their environment. These
include ion channel based excitability and action potentials,
neurotransmitter modulated activity based on specific receptor proteins,
membrane-nucleus signaling and precursors of synaptic communication. We can
thus see that the neurodynamic processes underpinning subjective consciousness
are evolutionarily ancient and originate in single-celled protista long before
the emergence of multi-celled animals and nervous systems.
Single Celled
Societies to Sappy Nervous Systems
With
the emergence of multi-celled organisms, the evolutionary features that enabled
sensory excitability and social signaling became adapted to internal signaling
within the organism as well as sensory receptors for the active environment.
The adaptions driving this change arose in the era of single celled eucaryotes from
sophisticated cells with active social signaling acting with a relative degree
of autonomy to form active colonies.
A
key idea about the evolution of consciousness is thus that it first evolved in
single celled eucaryotes as a combination sensory and anticipatory excitation,
occurring at the edge of chaos, which the cell maintained energetically to keep
a sensory model of its electrical and sensory environment to detect food but
above all to guard against sudden attack by predators. As this is the most
pressing filter on survival of the organism and its species, anticipatory
modeling of the active environment via chaotic excitation continued to be
pivotal as social single celled species became colonies and then organisms,
with the central nervous system becoming the key organ of anticipatory modeling
by chaotic excitation, utilizing both direct membrane excitation, and the modes
of molecular social signaling in the form of modulating neurotransmitters.
The
coelenterate hydra illustrates a point on the transition from autonomous colony
to organism. It has one of the first nervous systems, which is essentially a
neural subnet pervading the tissues with no imposed central organization. The
organism is still essentially a colony and if the hydra is turned inside out
the individual cells of the endoderm and ectoderm can migrate and reorganize
themselves to reform the active organism. Nevertheless, the behavior of the
hydra is highly sophisticated. It can detect and kill prey surrounding it with
stinging tentacles and drawing resisting prey into its stomach and it also has
up to twelve different forms of locomotion, involving central coordination,
including snail-like sliding on its base, rising to the surface on air bubbles
and attaching to the surface tension, and even somersaulting onto its tentacles
and rolling over to adhere again at its base. This helps make it clear that the
sophistication of its behavior is very much a function of the neural plasticity
of its individual neurons and the extent of behavioral programming in its
genome. Serotonin signaling in ectodermal neurons is also known to cause
metamorphosis in coelenterates.
The
diversification of neurotransmitter receptors into the forms we find in humans
today also occurred early in the metazoan radiation, with the serotonin 5HT1
and 5HT2 receptor families diverging before the diversification of molluscs,
arthropods and vertebrates. All metazoan central nervous systems are also
sappy, with pivotal roles for diverse neurotransmitters modulating activity
through metabotropic receptors such as a vast G-protein linked family that
includes all the major neurotransmitters including both amines and polypeptides
and diverse sensory receptors for chemical sense including smell, as well as
vision. Arthropods for example have a very similar repertoire of
neurotransmitters including serotonin and dopamine in evolutionarily similar
roles to vertebrates with octopamine and tyramine being used in place of
nor-epinephrine. Psychedelics and stimulants are known to have behavioral
effects in arthropods distinct from but related to those in vertebrates.
Looking
at the roles of serotonin, dopamine and other neurotransmitters from oxytocin
to endorphins in humans and their functions in mood and motivation, combined
with their predilection for ÔabuseÕ as recreational and psychotherapeutic drugs
demonstrates that humans, although having an electrically excitable nervous
system, depend on the same sappy signaling molecules to maintain their overall
emotional tone and sense of motivation, direction and their survival that
social signaling has achieved for single celled social species, such as Dictyostellium, in ensuring their
survival.
The
profound affects that psychoactive molecules can have on consciousness,
especially the psychedelic serotonin agonists, shows there is a deep connection
between this sappy biochemical aspect of brain function and major changes of
coordinated activation associated with changes of consciousness that may be a
key to understanding how consciousness actually arises. This association is
also confirmed by the changes in brain function associated with wakefulness and
sleep cycles where the onset of sleep and dreaming REM states is likewise
associated with changes in modalities of excitation via serotonin,
nor-epinephrine and dopamine secreting neurons in basal brain centres such as
the substantia nigra, and locus coeruleus.
Consciousness
and Real Time Anticipation
Running
counter to the reduction of consciousness to a combination of deterministic
laws and random perturbations, are approaches in which consciousness is seen as
fundamental to the existential condition, and even complementary to physical
phenomena and processes. The nature of this complementarity has been
highlighted by the "Hard Problem" in consciousness research, -
"explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences, contrasted
with the "easy problems" of explaining our ability to discriminate, integrate
information, report mental states, focus attention, etc. Easy problems are easy
because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism in
the brain that can perform the function. For example identifying conscious
states accompanying attentive processes with higher frequency EEG signals in
the gamma range. The dilemma of the hard problem implies that no purely
objective mechanism can suffice to explain subjective consciousness as a
phenomenon in its own right.
This
leads ultimately to a cosmology in which consciousness and the physical
universe are complementary. Existential reality thus presents as a
complementarity paradox. While we acknowledge our subjective consciousness is
somehow a product of our biological brain, which is in turn a fragile product
of physical forces on a cosmological scale, all our experiences of reality,
including our perceptions of the physical world, as well as dreams memories and
reflections, come exclusively and totally from our subjective consciousness.
This suggests that existential cosmology is a complementarity between
subjective consciousness and the physical universe, in which both are
fundamental.
In
the veridical way existential reality is generated, subjective experience is
primary. In the consensual overlap of our subjective experiences we gain a
common experience of the physical world, which we then interpret as containing
biological brains, which may also be able to have subjective experiences.
However, attempted construction of reality from the physical universe and its
brains remains incomplete, because there is no explanation of how the brains
can also have subjective conscious experiences.
Subjective
consciousness involves coordinated whole-brain activity as opposed to local
activations, which reach only the subconscious level. Attempts to find the functional locus of
subjective consciousness in brain regions have arrived at the conclusion that
active conscious experiences are not generated in a specific cortical region
but are a product of integrated coherent activity of global cortical dynamics. This implies that the so-called Cartesian
theatre of consciousness is a product of the entire active cortex and that the
particular form of phase coherent, edge-of-chaos processing adopted by the
mammalian brain is responsible for the manifestation of subjective
experience. This allows for a
theory of consciousness in which preconscious processing e.g. of sensory
information can occur in specific brain areas, which then reaches the conscious
level only when these enter into coherent global neuronal activity, integrating
the processing.
To
discover what advantage subjective consciousness has over purely computational
processing, we need to examine the survival situations that are pivotal to
organisms in the open environment and the sorts of computational dilemmas
involved in decision-making processes on which survival depends.
Many
open environment problems of survival are computationally intractable and would
leave a digital antelope stranded at the crossroads until pounced upon by a
predator, because they involve a number of factors, whose computation increases
super-exponentially. Open environment problems are intractable both because
they fall into this broad class and also because they are prone to irresolvable
instabilities, which defy a stable probabilistic outcome. Suppose a gazelle is
trying to get to the waterhole along various paths. On a probability basis it
is bound to choose the path, which, from its past experience, it perceives to
be the least likely to have a predator, i.e. the safest. But the predator is
likewise going to make a probabilistic calculation to choose the path that the
prey is most likely to be on given these factors i.e. the same one. Ultimately
this is an unstable problem that has no consistent computational solution.
There
is a deeper issue in these types of situation. Probabilistic calculations, both
in the real world and in quantum mechanics, require the context to be repeated
to build up a statistical distribution.
But real life problems are plagued by the fact that the context is
endlessly being changed by the decision-making processes of the active players
in the survival game. Finally, in many real life situations, there is not one
optimal outcome but a whole series of possible choices, any or all of which
could lead either to death, or survival and reproduction.
Key
to the role of consciousness is that survival is often a matter of split-second
reaction to foreboding, just in advance of a strike. The critical point is that
consciousness is providing something completely different from a computational
algorithm, it is a form of real time anticipation of threats and survival that
is sensitively dependent on environmental perturbation and attuned to be anticipatory
in real time just sufficiently to jump out of the way and bolt for it and
survive. Thus the key role of consciousness is to keep watch on the unfolding
living environment, to be paranoid to hair-trigger sensitivity for any
impending hint of a movement, or the signs, or sound of a pouncing predator -
an integrated form of space-time anticipation.
It
is this question, above all which consciousness evolved to resolve because the
survival of the organism depends on it. This goes a good way to explaining why
humans, despite having some 1011 neurons and 1015
synapses can manage only a digit span of around seven. We are superb at
split-second integrated reactions but most of us are relatively lousy at
numbers by comparison even with a pocket calculator, let alone a personal
computer.
This
immediacy is the basis of an innovative theory of consciousness. The Attention
Schema theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to the
environmental informational overload problem: Too much information constantly
flows in to be fully processed, so nervous systems evolved increasingly
sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few selected signals at the
expense of others. Consciousness is the ultimate result of this evolutionary
sequence. The cortex gains its abstraction by constructing a constantly updated
perspective that describes what covert attention is doing moment-by-moment and
what its consequences are. This first evolved as a model of one's own covert
attention, but once in place, it adapted to model the attentional states of
others, to allow for social prediction. Not only could the brain attribute
consciousness to itself, it began to attribute consciousness to others.
We
understand other people by projecting ourselves onto them. But we also
understand ourselves by considering the way others might see us. Thus the
networks in the brain that allow us to attribute consciousness to others
overlap extensively with the networks that construct our own sense of
consciousness. And this process can become hyper-tuned defensively. It's better
to be safe than sorry. 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 are taken
out of the gene pool. So paranoia is the name of the game and a key to the
conscious condition. This doesnÕt solve the hard problem, but it does suggest a
path into the centre of the cyclone. The question remains as to how the brain
can anticipate reality in a universe full of chaos and uncertainty.
Fathoming the Inner Dimensions of Consciousness
In discovering the foundations of existence,
understanding the inner dimensions of conscious experience forms a critical
complement to the discovery of the natural universe. There is an urgent need in
the cosmological discovery process for a full exploration of the diversity and
depths of the conscious condition, a process that, in the scientific era, is
lagging far behind understanding of the objective world, yet is completely
central to the existential condition.
Subjective experience comes in a spectrum of
conscious states that extend far beyond our everyday experiences of the world
around us and the immediate processes of memory and reflection about our past
and future waking existence. They include meditative and contemplative states,
common to both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, utilizing complex
forms of visualization, one-pointedness and emptying the mind of the internal
dialogue that manifests in the default circuit activation of the brain as we
rehearse situations we may face in real life, also encompassing forms of
sensory deprivation and trance states induced by shamanic practices of diverse
cultures. These mental states show distinct patterns of coherent activation
when explored using EEG and MEG. There is also a spectrum of conscious states
associated with sleep, from daydreaming reverie, through deep sleep to the
paradoxical states of REM (rapid eye movement) dreaming sleep, and lucid
dreaming, to OBE (Ôout of bodyÕ) experiences sometimes associated with
semi-consciousness states or sleep paralysis. Going further, they include
hallucinatory, psychotic and delirious experiences and the NDEs (near death
experiences) of people in major physical existential survival crises, from
heart attacks, to traffic accidents.
Finally, they include psychedelic experiences,
both using synthetic drugs like LSD and natural psychedelic species, ranging
from sacred mushrooms to peyote and ayahuasca, all of which have been used for
millennia as ceremonial sacraments by traditional cultures to understand the
inner nature of existence. Alongside dreaming states, these induce some of the
most profound changes in consciousness known including kaleidoscopic visions,
eo death and extra-corporeal experiences. One should also include the
dissociative experiences associated with consciousness-altering agents such as
ketamine, salvia and ibogaine. Cannabis has likewise been used as a sacred consciousness-altering
herb, from the Ganga of the Shiva Sadhus to the Rastafarians of Jamaica.
The journey of inner conscious exploration that has
always been integral to the Eastern meditative tradition, is also central to
shamanic traditions of diverse ethnic cultures who have preserved a spiritual
relationship with natural forces as integral to their cosmology of existence.
Meditative and contemplative traditions tend to stress ordered states of mind,
requiring mental control and thoughts and actions defined by the religious
doctrines and beliefs of the tradition.
This tends to restrict the domain of inquiry to those conscious states that
reinforce the tenets of the tradition, rather than the free pursuit of knowledge
and wisdom. There is thus a need to foster a full investigation of the inner
and outer limits of conscious experience, in the same free spirit of inquiry
that is the hallmark of scientific discovery and is the central principle
guiding the vision quest.
Psychedelic and dissociative agents provide
unique opportunities for exploration of deep states of consciousness that are
confounding to our every day notions of the conscious condition and introduce
completely new insights as to what consciousness is. They may provide the best
clues we have to the ultimate question of what the actual relationship is
between brain activity and conscious experience in the Òhard problemÓ.
The psychedelics have been subjected to a completely
counter-productive cultural, legal, and criminal repression by Western governments,
that has deep parallels to the witch-hunts and inquisition of the middle ages,
in which alternative beliefs and practices were seen as an existential threat
to Christianity. There is an immense contradiction, that in the scientific age,
Western governments, despite knowing that psychedelic agents have been used
traditionally for millennia as visionary sacraments, acted to taboo them out of
a similar fear they posed an existential threat that could precipitate a
breakdown in the fabric of our dependence on domestic consumer society, and so classified
them as schedule one prohibited substances under pain of extreme criminal
penalties for possession or supply.
I have pursued experience of the Eastern
meditative traditions at their roots as well as experience of psychedelic
shamanism at its sources, from the peyote ceremonies of the Native American
Church, through the use of sacred mushroom species to partaking in ayahuasca ceremonies
in the villages of Amazonian Peru. In my view the psychedelic path has significant
advantages over traditional meditative traditions, because it is an inner
journey of discovery, which is free of doctrinal assumptions and is the most
direct route to a mind-expanding investigation of the foundations of
consciousness available. Its effects on consciousness are both profound and
provocative to the core quest to discover the inner nature of subjective
experience in understanding the meaning of existence.
They also have a potentially unique relationship
with our sappy neurotransmitter-saturated brain that appears to be modulating
the very brain processes through which subjective consciousness is generated.
Psychedelics are super-agonists of serotonin 5HT2a receptors, which appear to cause
a confirmation shift which may activate associated metabotropic glutamate mGluR2
receptors, initiating a cascade of modulations to brain activity in which
internal brain processes, including fractal excitations evoked by the
substances, allow aspects of unconscious or sub-conscious processing to reach
the conscious level.
Studies of dreaming states are also highly
provocative to the discovery quest of subjective consciousness. The role of REM
dreaming sleep still remains enigmatic. Although it has been associated with
forms of memory consolidation and reprogramming, the amounts of REM and deep
sleep in diverse mammals species remain enigmatic and highly varied. Dreams
evoke existential situations, which challenge our ideas of how the existential
universe is composed. Like deep psychedelic experiences, they include
paradoxical states ,which it can be difficult or impossible to rationalize
afterwards.
Some people also report prescient dreams which
appear to become realized afterwards, leading to the possibility that the dream
state may be a key to understating how conscious anticipation relates to time
and space. They are also part of the continuum, in the dreamtime, of a
collective, or empathic, consciousness between widely separated individuals who
may be closely related or intimate partners.
The key to exploring the subjective condition
more deeply may be that rather than seeking verification from others, we can
each discover for ourselves in the first person the deeper nature of our
conscious existence and only then come together to compare notes and establish
a cultural consensus of what these states contain and imply. These are all
questions which take us to the boundary of where verification and proof become
contradictory to the subjective nature of the realm being explored, just as we
have seen with the escalating forms of indeterminacy in the quantum universe,
leading to the potential roots of both enigmas.
So where does this journey take us in terms of how conscious experience links back to changes in the world around us that make the changes in history we associate with meaning and purpose? What is the actual relationship between consciousness observing and subjectively acting on the physical world and changes in the world itself?
We have noted that the interactive cosmological process set off by the symmetry-breaking of the forces of nature culminates in molecular matter where all the forces gain expression in order of their interaction strengths, and that this process doesn't stop at individual bonds, because weaker H-bonds, polar and non-polar interactions, and van der Waal forces act cooperatively to make molecules into fractal structures leading to molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids with complex tertiary structures, cellular organelles, cells, tissues, organs and organisms, with the ultimate interactive culmination being the conscious brain. The ultimate seat of consciousness in the universe thus lies in the biota and nowhere else. The buck thus stops with us. There is no other place, from the gravitational core of black holes through the nuclear furnaces of stars to the cold outer reaches of galactic dust clouds that interactive complexity reaches its ultimate culmination. Thus we can be relatively certain that consciousness lies pivotally in the biota of the universe and that any pretensions to a conscious divinity in the heavens are a delusion just as a heaven in the clouds populated by winged angels are fantasies. Without being in any way anthropocentric, we can thus realize that the conscious brain is the ultimate interactive expression of the forces of nature which broke symmetry in the big-bang – paradise on the cosmic equator becomes our conscious condition and our living responsibility to fulfill in protecting the living diversity of the planet, in the closing circle of the biosphere, for the conscious generations to unfold into the living future.
So we finally trace our journey back to discovering how intentional will may be able to alter the course of physical history, giving us the means to apply our conscious awareness to change the world and to sustain and replenish it for life to follow.
Two
experimental studies supporting the observer having a critical role in collapse
of the wave function include the delayed-choice quantum eraser. The quantum
eraser is an arrangement of entangled particles where we can separate them in
such a way as to make a quantum measurement, but can then subsequently re-unite
them in such a way that the collapsed measurement is erased. In the delayed
choice quantum eraser, this process occurs by an observer after the quants have
traversed the apparatus.
The
experiment uses a careful arrangement of detectors generating a particle pair
which are simultaneously entangled with another pair whose paths are only
detected later which then pass through a detector which cannot distinguish
their paths, leading to a superposition. However the later detection of their
entangled siblings in a manner which can also be subsequently erased shows that
it is the observers later knowledge of the pair, not whether there was a
detector at one of the slits that determines collapse.
A
second experiment involves delayed-choice entanglement swapping. Here,
entanglement can be produced after the entangled particles have been measured
and may no longer exist. A third observer by making a choice of detector
determines which arrangement two other observers experience of an entangled
pair, shows decisively that a change induced by a third-party observer can
alter the (earlier) observation of an entangled pair.
Thus
a critical role of subjective consciousness may be that it is a way the
universe can solve the super-abundance of quantum superposition probability multiverses
where the cat is both alive and dead, to bring about a natural universe in
which some things do happen and other things don't. Hence the title Ôunfolding
the universeÕ through consciousness collapsing the wave function because
history is unfolded by consciousness collapsing the multiverse.
One
of the most central experiences of our lives is that there is a line of actual
history, in which each of us is embedded and in which we are able to change the
world in ways that we consciously intend. However insignificant our lives, we are
participating in bringing the world into actual being historically. This means
that the passage of the generations is able, through making decisions about our
lives and the circumstances around us, as well as ensuring our own survival is at
the same time discovering ourselves more deeply as conscious beings, in reaching
towards a state where the universe comes to consciously understand itself ever
more deeply and completely.
The
notion of the brain using entanglement provides a paradigm for resolving many
of the contradictory situations that arise when classical causality is applied
to anticipatory processes. A premonition being either a cause of a future event
or caused by it leads to contradiction, which is resolved in the space-time hand-shaking
of the entanglement shrouded in quantum uncertainty.
The
process goes something like this: Memory systems are used to form a model of
the quantum collapsed history already experienced, which is sequentially stored
in the hippocampus and then semantically re-encoded into the cortical feature
envelope, so that it can be interrogated from any contingent perspective in
future. The conscious cerebral cortex contains a dynamical system of entangled
states, which together envelop a space-time region extending a limited distance
into both the past and future - the quantum-delocalized present. The cortical
envelope thus maintains a state of context-modulated sensitively-dependent
dynamic excitation which generates our conscious sense of the present moment by
encoding the immediate past and future together in a wave function type of
representation entangled within discord in the globally coherent dynamic.
The
quantum present would extend over the lifetime of the coherent excitations,
incorporating quantum-encrypted information about the immediate past and future
of the organism into the current state of subjective experience. The quantum
present provides the loophole in classical causality that permits intentional
will to be free enough to perturb unstable and hence formally unpredictable brain
states and hence physical states in the world, through our behavior. The
experiencing subject perceives they are making an autonomous decision. An
external observer will simply see a brain process sensitively dependent on
quantum uncertainty bifurcating into a defined but unpredictable outcome.
It
may also be possible for the brain to encode entangled states in more permanent
forms. Highly active brain states have been shown in fMRI studies to elicit
changes in cerebral activation lasting over 24 hours. Long-term potentiation
and memory processes are in principle permanent and may involve epigenetic
changes.
The
notion of the conscious mind acting on the body to induce actions and complex
behavior has been described by founding brain researchers, from David Eccles to
Roger Sperry, as an 'act of psychokinesis.' Eccles followed Karl Popper's
triune notion of a three-aspect cosmos in which mental experiences and decisions,
physical systems composed of quantum and molecular structures, and abstract
knowledge, form three interacting components. Initially Sperry agreed with
Popper and Eccles, like them, rejecting materialism and reductionism about the
mind and brain. In 1966 he began referring to himself as a
"mentalist."
Sperry's
idea of emergent downward causal control gave the subjective experience of
consciousness (regarded as an emergent property of brain activity) a causal
role in the control of brain function. While this was still a causal
deterministic model and did not involve quantum uncertainty, it did centrally
involve mind as experienced by the observer acting on matter in the form of
physical brain dynamics. Investigating split brains, Sperry found what he considered
science-based examples of ideas, not just chemical events, running the show.
From this he developed the idea that the conscious mind and the physical brain
were really part of "a single unified system extending from sub-nuclear
forces at the bottom up through ideas at the top. Mind and consciousness are
put in the driver's seat, as it were: ÒThey give the orders, and they push and
haul around the physiology and the physical and chemical processes as much as
or more than the latter processes direct them.Ó
What
this meant to Sperry was that free will, and responsibility, were no illusion.
"It is possible to see today, an objective, explanatory model of brain
function that neither contradicts nor degrades but rather affirms age-old
humanist values, ideals, and meaning in human endeavor" - the notion that
we are autonomous conscious beings capable of exerting a mental control over
our own and other people's fates. We can see that quantum uncertainty and
chaotic sensitive dependence do provide a loophole for mental decisions to
induce physical outcomes in the form of a bifurcation of an unstable brain
state, which from the subjective point of view, is perceived to be the
conscious experiencer coming to a decision under salient circumstances and
choosing a course of action, which is then played out in brain function, and
ultimately physical behavior.
A
theory which is in effect a description of how the entanglement within the
cosmic wave function might contribute to a fundamental form of free-will has been
proposed by Scott Aaronson, who advocates the unpredictability description of
free-will and uses it to develop a description of the universe explaining how
the early universe may have given rise to unpredictable degrees of freedom
which could open another quantum basis for free-will:
I advocate replacing the question
of whether humans have free will, by the question of how accurately their
choices can be predicted, in principle, by external agents compatible with the
laws of physics.
He
cites a form of unpredictability, which is more fundamental than mere
statistical uncertainty, which he calls "Knightian freedom" after the
economist Frank Knight, who wrote about uncertainty that can't be quantified
with probabilities. The presence of such "freebits" with
quantum-mechanical degrees of freedom preventing their cloning makes predicting
certain future events - possibly including some human decisions - physically
impossible, even probabilistically and even with arbitrarily advanced future
technology. Our ignorance about the freebits would ultimately need to be
traceable back to ignorance about the microstate of the early universe. Thus
it's possible that humans will never become as predictable as digital
computers, because of chaotic amplification of unknowable microscopic events.
Another
cosmological description by Martin Green involves a hidden "Bare
World" which he sees as the ultimate reality. The Bare World precedes all
ordinary notions of the "Real World" that people perceive and study
in physics. The Real World emerges from Bare World as a description dressed up
in Newtonian, Einsteinian or quantum clothing. Observers, matter, and time, all
come into existence within Real World. None of these exist within pre-physical Bare
World. It is the "foundation for all that might ever be perceived in the
universe". Since it contains much more information than Real World can
ever accumulate, the laws of Real World do not constrain Bare World from
introducing surprises. Human free will is therefore not constrained by the laws
of physics - which simulate, and thus represent, aspects of emergent reality
and apply only to Real World, not Bare World. Free will is a manifestation of
the ability of conscious observers to influence the order in which previously
unknown information about Bare World is consistently incorporated into their
reality.
We
actively participate in our perceived reality. We control our bodies and the
world we inhabit sufficiently to collectively investigate, formulate, record,
and debate fundamental ideas regarding the world. We refine our models by
acting on the world and sensing its response. And so the future is not strictly
determined by the past. Humans can shape it. Within bounds - consistent with
our limited present knowledge, a prohibition on revising history, and severely
limited scope and capacity - we are able to consciously influence our future.
Contrasting
with the perception that we can act independently on the world is the obvious
requirement for mutual consistency of the perceptions of all observers. Such
consistency can be understood only if consciousness is actually a single,
global phenomenon.
But
just how far does the notion of mental causation go? If we can exert
psychokinetic control over our arm movements to give the thumbs up to personal
autonomy, or just to wave out to a friend, are there potentially other
manifestations of this mental-physical interaction?
The
lessons of entanglement as a possible central process in anticipating threats
to survival extends readily to other such effects, but at the same time places
potential limitations on their action. The key lesson of pair-splitting
experiments is that, while entangled states are correlated, we can't use them
to send locally-Einsteinian causal information between the entangled
components. Thus we might well find ourselves having an ad-hoc evolutionary
survival advantage through our conscious experience, while never being able to
prove this in a set of causally verifiable experiments.
By
the same token any other effects of mental causation on material phenomena
would not be causally controllable because, although changes to the
entanglement arising from a mental decision might ramify throughout the cosmic
wave function, a change in one component, i.e. one's mental state, cannot
necessarily be used to causally induce some other physical manifestation,
because of the barrier to causal determinacy in the entanglement.
This
could mean that our mental decisions might potentially have other effects, both
on other peopleÕs mental experiences, and on diverse physical states in the
universe across space-time, but not necessarily in a way we can determine or
demonstrate conclusively. Thus notions of mental action, from telepathy and
prescience to poltergeists and other 'super-natural' phenomena, would remain
unverifiable anecdotal occurrences, which could not be replicated
scientifically to produce an experimental verification of a causal effect.
This
however does not mean that we should conclude that all such phenomena are ephemeral
or non-existent and that such non-ordinary phenomena are just wishful
fantasies. The evolutionary emergence of conscious sentience in organismic
brains itself suggests that seemingly materialistic interactions among genetic
and other molecules in simple living systems have somehow given rise to an
emergent phenomenon having existential status even more immediate than the
material phenomena from which it emerged, since we access the material world
only through our conscious sensory experience.
I
have had during my lifetime several riveting experiences of prescience, which
generated my interest in the question of space, time and consciousness. In the
1920s, J W Dunne wrote a book ÒAn Experiment with TimeÓ outlining a double
blind experiment where he found subjects dream records tallied as closely with
future as with past events. Shortly after reading the book, I had a double
nightmare that I was being stung and told my wife about it when she got up to
feed our infant daughter. About an hour later I was stung wide awake by a wasp
that flew in the window she had opened after getting up.
A
month before the Twin Towers were bought down in the 9-11 catastrophe, I
composed a song, which contained words uncannily prophetic of the events ÒCan
we fly so high weÕll pass right to the other side and never fall in flames
againÓ É Then I watched live in prescient horror as one of the two planes
struck the tower and passed right through, coming out in a burst of flames on
the other side. The lyrics include a lament for the dark canyons of lower
Manhattan 'walking in the twilight,
down in the valley of shadows É when
will you comprehend the damage you have wrought in your indiscretion, can we
undo the death trance you have set in motion?Õ The last line closed with 'Can
we bear it all again?' It thus presciently echoed the Mayor of New York Rudi GiulianiÕs
words on TV 'This will be more than any of us can bearÓ.
Critics
of such influences cite Bayes theorem on conditional probabilities, claiming
people who see such effects are selectively picking the times when something
appears prescient while ignoring the many other situations where nothing
happens, which effectively reduce the probabilities to chance. My own
experience contradicts this claim. Both the two examples above were verified in
real time by reporting the dream and by publishing the lyrics and the latter is
too climacteric an event to reduce to Bayes formula in anyoneÕs mind.
Nevertheless I donÕt ÔbelieveÕ in prescience either, I just live in the
unfolding reality and watch carefully, using whatever subtleties I can summon to
further my own survival and understanding of the world.
Biogenesis
likewise remains an enigma whose processes, from simple high-energy molecules
such as HCN, through RNA and proteins, to the first organisms depends on
emergent properties hidden in the non-linear interactions among the four forces
of nature that occur at the quantum level. The same goes for many of the emergent
properties in the evolutionary epoch. Evolution, while we conceive it as a
molecular process of conservation and mutation of genes, is also threaded
through the life and reproductive investments of participant organisms and in
the context of higher animals in all the (conscious) decisions they make to the
extent that what appears to be simply an adventitious molecular dance
improbable in the extreme, a little like a monkey playing Beethoven's Moonlight
Sonata, is an emergent manifestation of a universe coming to know itself ever
more deeply in a redemption of the mechanistic fallacy that we are merely a meaningless
collocation of atoms.
Likewise the evolution of emotional experience and expression in mammals has given rise to a new paradigm in sociobiology leading to human culture, which broadens the narrow genetic bases of genetic selfishness, moderated by kin and reciprocal altruism into a complex social interplay of nuanced extremes from love to hate, happiness to despair, intimate trust to jealousy and paranoia, contempt, anger, disgust, fear, excitement, intimacy, compassion, forgiveness and all the social interactions they provide, giving not just humans but mammals generally a more oceanic form of social participation. Despite the seven deadly sins and our reluctance to be ruled by our worldly desires, and our susceptibility to sometimes coercive moral eschatologies, it is precisely these emotional nuances that have made the world a place in which love and caring form a basis of resolution of our belonging in an often perilous world of tooth and claw, and it is the higher virtues of these emotions which people define as the guiding light of spiritual illumination.
Central in this resolution of our sense of meaning and purpose is preserving the diversity of life and the robustness of the biosphere, so that that the future generations of life and humanity can prosper and further expand the vistas of conscious experience. We have already reached a level of awareness where we can grasp the cosmological dilemma, but this is not the end of the road and we need above all to be compassionate to the life which follows our own demise and for the genetic diversity which has taken a third of the universe's own lifetime to manifest.
It may be that the very conscious decisions we make as individuals, not only
through our survival and reproduction, nor just the examples they set for
others and the knowledge they provide us all in the cultural epoch, but also
through the unseen effects of the entanglement, extending far and wide through
space-time, may be a key part of the way the universe as a whole comes to
unfold its capacity for knowing. This may both aid the flowering of life in the
universe over time and a deeper meaning in space-time that stands, even when
the Earth, the human race and our future forebears, become extinguished in the
nemesis of the solar system as the sun transforms into a red giant, or on a
cosmological scale, as the universe itself enters the eventual big crunch, or
heat death.
In
this sense, what is achieved may ultimately be achieved eternally in space-time
by having occurred at some phase in the life of the universe, rather than life
gaining meaning only because it will lead to further exponentiating outcomes in
future. In a fundamental sense, space-time is both eternal in the relativistic
reality and temporal in the quantum events that unfold. Consciousness appears
to be able to capture both these aspects and in its cosmological manifestation
may be as eternal as the quantum universe is temporal.