Deus ex Machina and the Conscious Cosmos
Chris King © 20-2-14 Genotype 1.0.4
For full scientific discussion see: Space, Time and Consciousness
The concept of Ògod in
the machineÓ evokes all the paradoxes of nature and existence, from religious creationism to mechanistic atheism. We shall use this evocative notion to escape from the contradictions of current world views and to discover the roots of our transformative consciousness.
Tragic Roots of a Great
Notion
The
term Òdeus ex machinaÓ has an intriguing and paradoxical history, not from God
transcending the flawed mechanism ascribed to nature, but the creative process
of poetry and theatre. The Latin term goes back to the Greek ἀ¹ὸ
μηχανῆς θεός (ap˜
mēkhanḗs the—s), meaning "god from the machine". It harks
back to Dionysian theatre, where the deities were literally portrayed in
theatre using machines, such as mobile cranes, to enable the supernatural
figures to ascend from the depths, or fly into the heavens on stage.
More generally deus ex machina is conceived of as a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object - a ÔsupernaturalÕ intervention - intended to move the story forward when the writer has "painted themself into a corner" and sees no other way out.
Euripides' Medea, performed in
2009 in Syracuse, Italy (Wikipedia).
Opinions
about this device run right across the spectrum. More than half of Euripides'
tragedies employ a deus ex machina in their resolution. In Medea, a dragon-drawn
chariot sent by the sun god, is used to convey his granddaughter Medea, who has
just committed murder and infanticide, away from her husband Jason to the
safety of Athens.
However
Aristotle criticized the device in ÒPoeticsÓ, where he argued that the
resolution of a plot must arise internally, from previous action of the play:
"For we grant that the gods can see everything. There should be nothing
improbable in the incidents; otherwise, it should be outside the tragedy".
However, he praised Euripides for generally ending his plays with bad fortune, consistent
with tragedy, and suggested "astonishment" should be sought:
"since it is probable that improbable things will happenÓ.
The
Greeks could think this way because, although they saw their deities as
omniscient, they were polytheists who felt free to enact the lives of their
gods and goddesses creatively in tragedy and comedy. They could thus appreciate
the boundaries of legitimate use of the device, unlike monotheists who adopt
more inflexible positions.
Horace
in his Ars Poetica, vv. 191-92, instructs poets that they should never resort
to a "god from the machine" to resolve their plots "unless a
difficulty worthy a god's unravelling should happen."
This
criticism is particularly cogent in regard to creationism, where to accede to a
mythological six day sabbatical account in Genesis, God is forced to come to
the rescue of fundamentalist religious belief, when all the scientific
evidence, from the geochemical record, through fossils to genetic sequences
attests to evolutionary diversification.
Intelligent Design: God
Forced to Rescue His Tragically Flawed Machine.
The
sabbatical creation is an utterly beautiful mythological creation account. Just
like the seven layers of heaven and hell of the ancients from Sumeria to
Babylon, the creation takes place in seven days – the week, which
quarters the 28 day cycle of human menses, slightly shorter than the 29.53 day
lunar cycle, just as our circadian cycle tends to be a little longer than the
earth day, but again close enough to form a resonance.
This
creation, leading ultimately to woman and man in the likeness of the dyadic
ÔElohim, follows an order which makes sense only in a flat Earth cosmos where
the Sun, Moon and stars are merely secondary fixtures on a great firmament or
ÔdomeÕ like the lid on a dinner tray.
Consequently the creation is all out of natural and cosmological order. It begins with Earth tohu va vohu - 'without form or void' - until the spirit of ÔElohim
moves on the face of the waters. By the end of the first day we have light
separated from darkness. On day two ÔElohim put a firmament in place to divide
the waters and call it heaven. The third day the land and waters are divided
and the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and
the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself. At this point we have light
and darkness, heaven, and all the plants which are even fruiting, but no Sun,
Moon or stars. It doesnÕt take denial of evolution to see from the most basic
energetics that this cosmic machine is never going to fly! Only on the fourth
day do the ÔElohim belatedly realize to put the Sun Moon and stars in the heavens. Where the first light came from before is anyoneÕs guess – the
big bang possibly?
On
the fifth day ÔElohim paradoxically make the fishes, whales and birds of the
air who fly up into the firmament above. Then on the sixth day in a last flurry
all the creatures of the land appear - the beast of the earth after his kind,
and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth. In
one last afterthought, the ÔElohim make humanity male and female Õin our image
after our likenessÕ to have dominion over the lot. Finally, to consecrate a
holiday for spiritual observance, the ÔElohim rested on the Sabbath. One would
have thought that, given the invocation in the Ten Commandments against
idolatry, that taking sacred texts so literally would also be seen to be a
corruption of the essential spiritual meaning, but no such luck.
When
Copernicus and Galileo discovered that the flat Earth-centric cosmology was a
fallacy the church issued ex-communications. Not satisfied with finding the
universe has rejected the flat-earth creation, latter day Christians have
rallied to paint themselves into a corner over adamantly rejecting both
cosmology and biological evolution, despite the evidence from fossils and the
geological record, the immense age, size and complexity of the universe, and
finally the overwhelming flood of genetic data since the turn of the
millennium, confirming in minute detail, the evolutionary process, from the
first life forms to migrating human cultures. This is a frank violation of
HoraceÕs maxim not to invoke the god in the machine unless unravelling the
deity is necessary.
The intelligent-design approach flies directly in the face of all integrity. By comparison with the menial evidence of Copernicus and Galileo we are currently faced with a tsunami of genetic evidence consistent in every detail with the evolution of life. For example all the protein-linked receptors in our body, from those for neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and dopamine, through rhodopsin permitting vision, to the many diverse receptors for smell do not conform to an independent design attuned only to their designated function, but display an evolutionary tree showing they all evolved from a much more ancient precursor. When we take one family of these, the serotonin receptors and compare them with those of other animals we find it originated before the fundamental branchings of molluscs, arthropods and vertebrates, in the first single celled eucaryotes.
Of course the stumbling block in the creationist model of the universe is the flawed notion of creation itself. As the myth goes, ÔElohim created each of the creatures de novo as is by commanding the earth to bring them forth and set them to carry out their fixed allotted tasks. In the Eden version Yahweh breathes life in Adam and builds Eve from one of his ribs. This picture sets all the life forms up as created - ÔmadeÕ by
manufacture at the beginning of time by a single act of God. They are
assembled, but do not themselves have the capacity to transform into new forms,
or to adapt to new roles. God made them then and because God made them, like
clockwork toys, they have no creative powers of their own, or that would be
assuming some of GodÕs powers to themselves. This despite the fact that life is sexually reproductive, even under the command to 'be fruitful and multiply', and thus clearly has procreative capacity to generate new unique life forms, which every one of us is an example of. Consequently under no circumstances can an evolutionary process be admitted or accepted by religious creationists, or intelligent design proponents, even though the evidence is incontrovertible.
Memling: The Day of Judgment
At
every point, attempts are made to select evidence in a non-scientific way to
cobble together a resolution to this story to prove God is needed to
intelligently design the universe because it canÕt pull itself up by its
bootstraps. The one area where science hasnÕt quite completed the picture - how life first began - is seized upon as a critical weakness, but even in this area, the evidence, from interstellar gas clouds, through organics on comets, to the decoding of key reaction pathways, and the core biochemical record in living organisms continues to point to natural biogenesis occurring almost as soon as Earth was habitable.
What is so contradictory about the intelligent design fallacy is that it consists of a tragic cycle. Because literalists believe God created the universe and life in six days at the beginning of time, even though it is a charming, but entirely mythological and hence metaphorical account, they are forced to believe life cannot evolve, so we end up with a machine that is doomed to eventually break down with no hope of improvement or adaption. Because they have invented a broke machine, they then have to complete the tragic cycle by insisting God designed the whole thing to be this way, attempting to incorporate snippets of evidence that appear to suit these arguments, however unscientific these may be. Because we believe God created a flawed universe without the creative potential, we are forced into a deus ex machina fallacy, recreating God
as a cosmic designer to solve the tattered mess of life spawned in the sabbatical
creation.
But
the problems donÕt just stop there. There are also the diabolical problems of the endless war between good and evil and the schizophrenic divide between a heaven devoid of any creative potential except by grace of God, and eternal damnation in the fires of hell, awaiting us as divisive futures when we die and pass into the imagined realm of pure consciousness that we are taught to believe carries on eternally when our mortal bodies pass away. This means that the entire ÔmachinaÕ of the universe as we know it is just a dress rehearsal for an eternal transfixation - that all of nature, and with it the universe at large, is just a husk to be discarded in a morally retributive cosmos whose only law of nature is obedience to the creator deity.
Mechanistic Atheism: A Mindless
Machine with no Redemption in Sight
It
is with the scientific revolution that we have come to view the entire universe
as a mechanism.
Rene
Descartes, the "father of modern philosophy, and also the founder of Cartesian
geometry, is renowned for his statement "Cogito ergo sum" – I
think, therefore I am (Discourse on the Method part 4). Descartes proposed that
the body works like a machine, while the mind (or soul), on the other hand, was
described as nonmaterial and as not following the laws of nature. This form of
dualism proposed that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also
influence the otherwise rational mind, as when people act out of passion.
However the critical flaw in DescartesÕ description has turned out to be the
link between mind and body, which he envisaged took place in the pineal gland
which we now know functions in circadian rhythms.
Although Isaac Newton was a devout religious believer who attempted to predict the date of the apocalypse, his great achievements are in discovering gravity, defining the laws of motion and co-inventing calculus. In his Principia, Newton came to describe a universe following mechanical laws defining the relationship between causes and their effects. Newton and Laplace after him came to describe the universe as
a gigantic mechanism in terms of differential equations and initial
conditions.
In
1814, Laplace published what is usually known as the first articulation of
causal or scientific determinism: ÒWe 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 eyesÓ (Pierre Simon Laplace, A
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities). With the advent of Clerk MaxwellÕs
equations for electromagnetism and light, this description seemed to be almost
complete.
Along with the growth of the scientific model, we came to understand that the phenomena of biology and hence the affairs of human life as defined in terms of our brain and bodily functions are just complex instances of chemical reactions, which ultimately become defined in the physical properties of atoms and molecules and their shared radiation through electromagnetic and other force fields. We enter the era of reductionism, where ultimately everything reduces to the laws of physics.
Humanity trapped in the existential
nightmare: Deus ex Machina by Ekud (http://ekud.deviantart.com/art/DEUS-EX-MACHINA-100870568)
This
leads to an existential nightmare, as expressed so succinctly by Bertrand
Russel: ÒThat Man is the product of causes which 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 inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are
destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the
whole temple of ManÕs achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the dŽbris
of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are
yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of
unyielding despair, can the soulÕs habitation henceforth be safely builtÓ (Bertrand
Russell, Free Man's Worship).
Everything
might have remained caught in this nightmare except for two "dark
clouds" noted in the 1900 warning by Lord Kelvin - the Michelson-Morley
experiment, which led to the discovery of relativity and black body radiation
which led to quantum theory. Thus the deterministic Newtonian universe opened
up to new forms of uncertainty at the quantum level, although some aspects of
the theory, such as quantum electrodynamics remain one of the most
quantitatively accurate theories of physics ever devised. Quantum theory has
opened up the philosophical arena surrounding both determinism and the part
played by the mind of the conscious observer in reality. Quantum uncertainty involves the causality-violating process of reduction of the wave function, which founding researchers have attributed to the intervention of the conscious mind on the probability superpositions of quantum mechanics.
However, running against this quasi-mystical trend in physics have been two great developments in scientific discovery, which have profoundly strengthened the notion of causality and determinism in the everyday universe around us. Both of these stem partly from a reaction to the Second World War, with physicists developing the fields of biology and computer science.
The first gave rise to molecular biology and molecular genetics, which began with the discovery of the structure of DNA and has led all the way to the explosion of genetic science in initiatives such as the human genome project. Over half a century this has laid bare the physical mechanisms underpinning all biological processes and the computational and informational processes enabling biological organisms to reproduce and develop true to their genetic code, despite mutational change.
Artificial intelligence closes
in on the conscious brain: four internet views
The second is the revolution in digital computing and digital communications that has brought about the explosion of computing power, from super computers to laptops and cell phones, and spawned the internet, along with robotics, and artificial intelligence. Not only has this transformed human society into an interconnected global village, but it has brought upon us a cybernetic form of thinking - that causality is simply a matter of instruction sets following strict rules prescribing how 0s and 1s are encoded into new forms of information.
The
confluence of these two highly deterministic sciences has led to a new kind of
collective ÔcyborgÕ mythology, that conscious experiences are really just brain
function, that human beings are really just molecular machines and the brain is
just a biological computer, admittedly a very different sort of computer from
the serial digital computers having a central architecture basically identical
to that originally conceived of by John von Neumann, perhaps working using
parallel processing and brain waves rather than purely digital 0s and 1s, but
nevertheless just a computer for all that, and that the only difference between
a conscious being and a personal computer is one of scale and complexity
– although our laptop may not be currently conscious, given the right
artificial intelligence and enough processors and memory space, computers will,
like us become conscious beings.
.
Although subjective experiences are all that we have to access the physical world with, the privacy and non-replicability of subjective experience has led to a situation in which objective science has successfully built a description of reality covering diverse aspects of the physical world, from solid-state semi-conductors to biological tissues, and even to brain function based on classical deterministic notions of functional mechanisms. By comparison, the role of mind has slipped by degrees into a neglected orphan status, in which many scientists regard it as merely an epiphenomenon, perhaps the shadow of a kind of internal model of reality generated by the functional brain, but unable to have any affect on physical functions, reducing free will, and our sense of personal conscious autonomy to the status of a necessary delusion we all depend on to keep functioning and live out our reproductive, social and professional lives.
It
is a world view which is not really justified by the science, but rather by
popular impressions of it in the media and in science fiction productions, in
which humans and computers become ever more closely equivalent. We and all of
human conscious experience becomes just one big data set on the information
super-highway. Free-will is dead long live the CPU!
Could any form of (intelligently) designed computational system replicate, or emulate, biological brains and consciousness? One might presume that any interactive system that can develop genetically could also be designed from the top down but this isn't necessarily the case. We don't yet have any idea of what the physical principles are underpinning subjective consciousness. Philosopher Jerry Fodor famously complained that: "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". Until we do we can't make significant progress on what sort of synthetic physical system might also support it.
The brain is a fractally generated developmental system where the genetic code results in organization from the molecule up and in turn cell type specific interactions involving cell migration to develop resonant neurocircuits which ramify as the brain develops. It's not a set of modules put together top down according to an overall design. The code is generative but not prescriptive - it doesn't specify the final arrangement but only the recursive process to generate a chaotically resonant complex system through very complex molecular feedbacks in the way genes are orchestrated through non-linear couplings in nucleic acid structure. There is no viable way to replicate this developmental complexification in the solid state semiconductor physics.of the digital computer. If the conscious brain falls into class that requires bottom up developmental ramification for the system to form, we are back to a synthetic brain using genetic technology - utilizing the genetic processes underlying the biological brain structures we already have naturally and gene technology plagiarized from existing biological systems.
The vision of human as a computational automaton becomes another kind of existential nightmare and another breakdown of the deus ex machina, this time by a complete failure to engage the process necessary to redeem the mechanical nightmare from its own pitiless future. By losing the mind to the cyborg mechanical monster, we have created a demiurge universe null and void of both consciousness and any autonomous will, doomed to its own extinction as entropy wipes away all distinction and the "statues made of matchsticks crumble into one another", as Bob Dylan lamented.
Of course this universe is not quite as defunct as the morally retributive cosmos of the monotheistic tradition's intelligent design. It does leave room for the mechanism to evolve by random mutation and natural selection, even if all the ensuing life forms are really just molecular automata of one sort of another.
But
there is no rhyme or reason to any of it. The best we can say of it is that,
although we have no conscious will of any kind, evolution has selected us to
feel that we do, so that the mechanics of the life process continues unimpeded
by existential ennui and a complete loss of faith in our joie de vivre, let
alone our discredited Žlan vitale.
Effectively the machine is a dysfunctional shadow of what it needs to be to support volitional subjective conscious existence, but by refusing to invoke the deus ex machina when it is genuinely required, at least as consciousness ex machina, and claiming that we can act as intelligent designers of a computational machine eclipsing our own awareness, we remain stranded as mechanical canaries in a cage constructed by our own predilection for mechanically verifiable certainties - in denial of the manifold entangled uncertainties of the quantum universe.
In effect this is a second manifestation of the design delusion. Creationists think the conscious universe must be an intelligent design of God. Deterministic materialists think conscious brains could be intelligently designed by humans. Same delusion - same misconception - external design as a generative metaphor based on mechanistic human manufacture. Concrete thinking in the entangled universe.
.
How do we find our way out of this predicament? It's all a question of revitalizing the 'ghost in the machine'. And it is also centrally a question of getting the physics right. This model of reality is based almost entirely on a classical notion of physics, one which was superseded with the discoveries of relativity and quantum theory.
The Mind Escapes its Mechanistic Bondage in the Quantum Universe
Brian and mind are complementary but categorically different manifestations of an existential cosmological reality.
.
At the same time as this highly deterministic myth about reality became common currency, the status of the mind and of conscious experience as a foundation of reality had became almost completely eroded.
If
we turn back the clock again to the middle of last century, Gilbert RyleÕs ÒThe
Concept of MindÓ argues that "mind" is "a philosophical illusion hailing chiefly from Descartes and sustained by logical errors and 'category mistakes'. According to the official doctrine É every human being
has both a body and a mind ... each person has direct and unchangeable
cognisance. In consciousness, self-consciousness and introspection, he is
directly and authentically apprised of the present states of operation of the
mind. É I shall often speak of it É as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.' It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category mistake". According to Ryle, mental processes are merely intelligent acts and in this sense he is part of the flow of psychological behaviourism, which was dominantly influential at the time, but he criticized both Cartesian dualism and behaviourism alike as too rigid and mechanistic to provide us with an adequate understanding of the concept of mind.
The
idea of the category error has veracity because mental experiences are categorically
different from physical phenomena. Conscious experiences are entirely
subjective while physical processes are objective and verifiable by others.
This doesnÕt necessarily mean that subjective experiences are unreal, but that
they cannot be understood or classified using the same analytical techniques as
we do with physical phenomena.
Towards
the end of the twentieth century a growing need to understand higher brain
functions and the role of conscious decision-making has led to the emergence of
the so-called science of consciousness research. While at the easy end this
simply constitutes modelling higher brain function and the integrated
neurophysiological processes supporting conscious attention and cognition, at
the opposing ÔdeepÕ end we come to the Òhard problem in consciousness researchÓ
enunciated by David Chalmers – the fact that no purely objective
functional description invoking integrated brain states can be equivalent to,
or explain of its own accord, the nature of conscious experience, because
subjective consciousness and objective brain function are so utterly different
qualitatively, turning RyleÕs category error into a categorical complementarity
of attributes, as different as the wave and particle aspects of quantum
reality.
Subjective consciousness poses the ultimate dilemma for the scientific
description of reality. We still have no idea of how the brain generates it, or
even how, or why, such an objectively elusive phenomenon can come about from
the physiology of brain dynamics. The problem is fundamental because, from
birth to death, the sum total of all our observations of the physical world,
and all our notions about it, come exclusively through our subjective conscious
experience. Although neuroscience has produced new techniques for visualizing
brain function, from EEG and MEG to PET and fMRI scans, which show a parallel
relationship between mental states and brain processing, these go no way in
themselves to resolving how these objective physiological processes give rise
to the subjective effects of conscious experience.
The
advent of quantum theory has fundamentally altered our idea of a deterministic
universe where defining the conditions at an earlier point in time determines
the conditions at successively later points in time, as a dynamical system
progresses. In this sense the notion of temporal causality – that causes
at an earlier time define subsequent effects at later times also becomes
fundamentally changed.
Quanta have both a wave and a particle nature. They are emitted and absorbed discretely as particles but travel through space and time as a wave. For example in a two-slit interference experiment photons are each released as a particle from an excited atom, and then travel as waves through the apparatus, which we can see because each one travels through both slits and they then strike the photographic plate in a pattern which reflects the superimposed wave amplitudes. However each single photon arrives in a different place, which cannot be predicted, in what is called reduction of the wave function. It is only when many have passed that we can see the wave pattern from the probability distribution of the particles. Causal determinism is thus violated for each quantum.
Quantum uncertainty is a fundamental feature of the dynamical process, preventing us knowing both the energy and the time of an event simultaneously. The more precisely we need to define the energy results in the time being spread over an increasingly large interval and vice versa according to the relation
This arises because energy is equivalent to frequency
and to determine the frequency within a given accuracy requires counting how many wave fronts have passed over a period of time using beats as shown in B in the image above.
But
quantum reality has many more tricks up its sleeve. If two particles of
complementary spins, or polarizations, occur in a single wave function, they
become entangled in such a way that finding out the identity of one cause the
other to immediately have the complementary identity, no matter how far away it
is, and to do so in a way which cannot occur by information travelling between
the two particles at below light speed.
Moreover
the boundary conditions defining an exchanged quantum appear to involve both
the past emitters and the future absorbers, in a transactional handshaking in
which the future also has an effect on the past. This handshaking relationship
can be seen in the transactional interpretation E above, in which the exchanged
particle is an overlap of an offer wave from the emitter and a confirmation
wave from the absorber travelling backwards in time. This effect can also be
seen in the Wheeler delayed choice experiment D above, where switching between
individual detectors and an interference film after the photons have passed the
gravitationally lensing galaxy, determines whether they went around one or both
sides.
It is also possible to extract information from a quantum by making a small deformation in its wave function during its path flight without absorbing and thus destroying it, which will nevertheless change the way it is eventually absorbed later, in a way we can learn about its original state from. This doesnÕt give us enough information to know what happened to each quantum
at the time but can be used to build up a statistical profile when all the
information is put together after the quanta are eventually absorbed.
Critically the pattern of eventual absorptions leaves a strong mark on the
earlier weak measurement statistics. This shows up another feature of
uncertainty. What God gains by Ôplaying dice with the universeÕ, in EinsteinÕs
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: ÒThe future can only affect the
present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistakeÓ, Yakir
Aharonov the discoverer of weak quantum measurement declares.
An indication of how quantum chaos might lead to
complex forms of quantum entanglement can be gleaned from an ingenious
experiment forming a quantum analogue of a kicked top illustrated above in F. In
the chaotic dynamic (right) the orbital and nuclear spins have become entangled
as a result of the chaotic perturbations of the quantum topÕs motion. This
shows that, rather than the suppression of classical chaos seen in closed
quantum systems, reverberating chaotic quantum systems can introduce new
entanglements.
Now
letÕs turn back to the brain and conscious mental states. We now know that the
aspects of conscious experience are represented over the entire cortex in a
many-to-many ÔholographicÕ representation, in which each aspect of an
experience such as a given personÕs face, or a facial expression is stored in a
given area. This means that conscious mental states correspond to integrated
excitations of brain areas working in a coherent manner together, while local
processing that is Ôout of synchÕ with the global brain state remain
subconscious processing, which may later become conscious.
This
means that there is no single area of the brain responsible for consciousness
although a variety of brain studies point to certain areas being pivotal for
central aspects of conscious processing, as illustrated in B below, such as the
ÔselfÕ network, also called the default network because it is activated when we
are in idle moments anticipating situations we may shortly be having to deal
with. The default network connects frontal and other regions also involved in
working memory and cognition. Areas that appear to be pivotal for integrative
consciousness, which cause significant problems if damaged, also show a similar
arrangement. Other frontal and related areas are involved in a salience network
that uses very fast neurons apparently to keep up an ongoing representation of
the dynamic present. These ideas are reinforced by brain scans on anaesthetics,
which show that loss of consciousness is accompanied by brain areas going out
of synch with one another. They also explain why consciousness tends to unitary
and attention to centre broadly on one train of ideas at a time.
A: Evidence for dynamical chaos and phase
wave-front ÔholographicÕ processing. (a) FreemanÕs model of olfactory
recognition involves a transition from high-energy chaos to enter a new or
existing strange attractor basin as the energy is lowered, represented (b) in
distinct global patterns of olfactory bulb activation. Extended spatial
distribution of cortical activation accompanying recognition of an odour. (c) Strange
attractors in the EEG. (d) Fourier transforms of an EEG, showing broad-spectrum
excitation and correlation dimensions, both consistent with chaotic dynamics.
(e) Correlation dimensions of brain states. (f) Increased phase coherence when
a musical note becomes anticipated (Basar et al. 1989) (g) Wavelet transform,
showing time evolution of amplitudes with a peak accompanying recognition of an
anomalous note is consistent with phase-front processing. Spectral product
(right) illustrates coherence across several EEG channels.
Brain
excitations also show the characteristics of dynamical chaos, see A above. They
have broad spectrum frequencies rather than resonances, their orbits behave
like strange attractors and many states have been found to have a fractal
dimension indicative of dynamical chaos. Chaos might seem to be a noisy
interference in what might be thought of as an ordered deductive process, but
it provides two essential dynamical properties. Firstly it makes a system arbitrarily
sensitive to its bounding conditions in the butterfly effect – a
disturbance as small as the eddy from a butterflyÕs wing can become the source
of a tropical cyclone. Secondly it prevents the dynamic getting stuck in the
rut of an ordered attractor by shaking the system up a little like a fly
buzzing around the room exploring the space fully. Transitions at the edge of
chaos thus form an ideal meeting point where new structures can form out of the
instabilities and then be incorporated if they have adaptive value.
But
this may introduce another feature. If a brain state is critically poised
because there is no obvious best outcome to a computational assessment, it may
in turn become sensitive to the instabilities of a single neuron, a single ion
channel and ultimately quantum uncertainty itself. Neurons are often tuned to
their sigmoidal thresholds putting the system into a state of critical
instability. Certain neural processes, and other dynamical features such as
Ôstochastic resonanceÕ can amplify such small oscillations from single ion
channels to cells and in turn into global brain states.
The
critical role of consciousness is to enable an organism to be able to evade
imminent threats to its survival. However problems of survival in the open environment
are notoriously intractable by classical computation because of
super-exponential runaway in the number of computations required. Given serial
computation alone, a digital gazelle would become stranded at the crossroads,
gobbled by a real predator while it was protractedly ticking over trying to
solve the problem of what to do. Hence the massively parallel processing in our
brains and the brains of our sibling species, which enables living organisms to
make a decision in real time through a transition from the edge of chaos if
there is no predisposing factor driving the decision.
Given
the fact that the central role of the brain is to anticipate imminent futures
and this intractability problem, we are led to a situation in which the brain
may use an extra-computational avenue of anticipation to complement
computational assessments with the sort of integrated intuition, hunch,
paranoia and split-second reactions we know active consciousness is capable of.
But
there is another feature of brain processing which we have already touched on –
coherent wave excitations – that are essential to distinguish attended
signals from the groundswell of incoherent noise and peripheral processing,
which is both central to the conscious state and necessary to identify salient
features from the flood of sensory and higher-level processing information
passing through the doors of perception..
Karl Pribram in the notion of the holographic brain, has drawn attention to the similarity between phase coherence processing of brain waves in the gamma frequency range believed to be responsible for cognitive processes and the wave amplitude basis of quantum uncertainty in reduction of the wave packet and quantum measurements based on the uncertainty relation
, where the relation is determined by the number of phase fronts to be counted.
In effect brain
wave states may act like quantum excitations and the brain as a special type of
ÔholographicÕ quantum computer whose role is to anticipate reality. It is
likely that this form of consciousness first arose in chaotically excitable
single cells sensing and anticipating the environment around them through
sensitive dependence, because all the components we associate with the
conscious brain, from ion channels to neurotransmitters and their receptors
evolved long before multi-celled animals.
Biology is full of
phenomena at the quantum level, which are essential to biological function.
Enzymes invoke quantum tunneling to enable transitions through their
substratesÕ activation energy. Protein folding is a manifestation of quantum
computation intractable by classical computing. When a photosynthetic active
centre absorbs a photon, the wave function of the excitation is able to perform
a quantum computation, which enables the excitation to travel down the most
efficient route 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 one 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 is an established
technique in tissue imaging, demonstrating quantum entanglement in biological
tissues at the molecular level.
Weak quantum
measurement provides a way that the brain might use its brain waves and phase
coherence to evoke entangled states that carry quantum encrypted information
about immediate future states of experience as well as immediately past states,
in an expanded envelope - the Ôquantum presentÕ - which we witness as
subjective experience.
Effectively the
brain is a massively parallel ensemble of wave excitations reverberating with
one another, through couplings of varying strength in which excitations are
emitted, modulated and absorbed. The entire system could be a reverberating
system of massively parallel weak quantum measurement of its ongoing state,
giving the conscious brain state a capacity to anticipate immediate future
threats through prescience, paranoia and foreboding. Notice that the nature of
uncertainty noted by Aharonov above might prevent us ever proving that such
anticipation occurs in any given instance.
This form of weak
quantum measurement would require significant differences from traditional weak
quantum measurement experiments, which are designed to produce a classically
confirmed result from an eventual statistical distribution in the future,
whereas in the brain coherent states would correspond to ongoing entangled
excitations themselves extended between past and future through quantum
hand-shaking. This would open the quantum loophole in the deterministic
nightmare which would admit both subjective consciousness as a sensitive
anticipator of immediate futures and free-will as the converse action of
conscious volition on brain states through the uncertainty of the physical
brain dynamic. Discovering a molecular-biological basis for such an effect
would pose an ultimate challenge to experimental neuroscience.
By liberating the
conscious mind and volitional will from the shackles of the mechanistic
nightmare we are at the same time evoking a deus ex machina in the form of the
way our own subjective consciousness is capable of transforming the world and
unfolding history to bring about social and psychic change.
The central enigma
of quantum reality is the causality-violating reduction of the wave packet. We
see this in SchršdingerÕs cat paradox (A in the second to last image) a cat set
to be killed by a radioactive scintillation breaking a cyanide flask. In
quantum reality the cat is both alive and dead with differing probabilities,
but in our subjective experience, when we open the box the cat is either alive,
or dead, with certainty.
However, not only
is SchršdingerÕs cat both alive and dead, but in quantum reality Napoleon has
both won and lost the battle of Waterloo. Many of these strategic outcomes,
indeed all accidents of history, depend on uncertainties that go, in principle,
right down to the quantum level.
The whole notion
of a single line of history unfolding seems to be something only our conscious
awareness is able to determine. Several of the founding quantum physicists,
from John von Neumann to Werner Heisenberg adhered to this view. In physicist
Henry StappÕs words: ÒBefore human consciousness appeared, there existed
a multiverse of potential universes. The emergence of a conscious mind in one
of these potential universes, ours, gives it a special status: realityÓ.
This implies that we
are playing a pivotal and in its essence a cosmological role through our
subjective consciousness in bringing about a cognizant universe aware of its
own existence and imbued with a sense of purpose expressed in and through our
free-will and sense of compassion for the unfolding nature of conscious
existence amid the mortal toil of biological sexuality.
This appears to be the ultimate answer to the Òdeus ex
machinaÓ paradox - invoking not God in the machine, but consciousness in the cosmos. In discovering this change of perspective lies our redemption through taking full responsibility for our actions participating in a deepening understanding of this extraordinary universe, in which we as sentient beings are the conscious progenitors of its becoming.