Complexity, Physics, and the Emergence of Consciousness

The two major philosophical positions on the hard problem of consciousness are materialism and dualism. Dualists view mental and physical realms as distinct aspects of reality, while materialists assert that mental states are produced by brains in ways based on physical laws.

Materialism is supported by studies of brain imaging, injuries, and disease, which provide correlations of mind with brain structure and function. The main challenge to materialism is the explanatory gap, or the huge difficulty that materialistic theories have in explaining how physical properties can give rise to conscious experiences.

In response to this challenge, materialists rely heavily on the idea of emergence; materialism says that mind emerges from brain.

Multi-scale levels of life

Source: Paul Nunez

In science and philosophy, “emergence” refers to novel holistic properties that arise in complex systems, created by interactions at smaller scales. Various levels of life emerge from multiple lower levels, as indicated by up-arrows in the figure. Let a lot of cells interact in the right environment, and as a result, organ systems and ultimately human beings emerge. Emergence is also common at larger scales—wars and economic depressions emerge from human interactions.

At each level of complexity, entirely new properties appear. These emergent properties can then act down on the lower levels so that life, for example, is a multi-scale process. By this, we mean that life depends critically on both top-down and bottom-up interactions across spatial scales. A human can produce many top-down influences on the lower levels (down-arrows) like when he eats a pizza, runs a race, or hops in bed with his partner. Such two-way interactions (circular causality) suggest that psychology is not just applied biology, biology is not just applied chemistry, and chemistry is not just applied physics. In summary, life is encoded at multiple scales.

Many question how such emergent wholes can become so different from just the sum of their parts. Protein and DNA molecules underlie all known life; they are believed to form according to the laws of quantum mechanics. There are perhaps 10 million or so known molecules; one of each kind could easily fit into the corner of a single cell. In contrast, the number of possible molecules obeying the laws of quantum mechanics is greater than the number of grains of sand that could be squeezed into the known universe (even if we only count molecules with fewer than 100 atoms).

Why, then, did life’s DNA and protein molecules develop rather than other molecules that we don’t see? The answer is largely unknown; however, we do know that DNA and protein molecules developed under the influence of certain environmental conditions (curved arrows). Once life developed at the cellular level, higher life forms are explained, at least in part, by Darwinian evolution, which relies strongly on environmental conditions that operate over multiple scales, including quantum effects responsible for mutations. But the question of how life got started in the first place (biogenesis) remains largely unanswered.

The hard problem of consciousness appears to be far more challenging than other kinds of emergence, including the emergence of non-conscious life. While emergent properties are typically unpredictable, once such properties are discovered, we can usually create plausible narratives that explain how such properties could have emerged from underlying processes consistent with physical laws. As one reader of an earlier post expressed, “It is the absence of such a story for conscious experience that makes the hard problem hard” (Complexity is not the hard problem, “unemergeability” is, posted comments by Frank 11/13/2017).

To address this insightful question, we may focus more on environmental influences represented by the curved arrows. Such influences are believed to obey physical laws—relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics are all laws about information transfer. Relativity limits speed, quantum mechanics limits quantity, and the second law of thermodynamics limits quality.

Here we focus our attention on quantum mechanics, the physical theory governing the behaviors of very small systems—electrons, protons, atoms, and so forth. Quantum systems are governed by an information field called the quantum wavefunction. Quantum mechanics has been verified in numerous experiments and provides the basis for much of our modern technology. Physicists have discovered a deep fundamental information barrier, a hidden reality whose existence is now widely accepted, but whose actual nature remains an ongoing controversy.

This hidden reality has been associated with a number of labels—uncertainty principle, wavefunction collapse, many worlds, implicate order, coherent histories, and more. Although the true nature of this hidden reality is currently unknown (and perhaps unknowable), there seems to be little doubt of its influence—not only on our environment but on the very existence of the universe.

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In particular, quantum mechanics involves strange ideas about the nature of information that are entirely at odds with our “common sense” experiences. One such feature is nonlocality in which influences can occur instantaneously across vast distances, in contrast to ordinary information transfer that is limited to the speed of light.

This discussion again raises the question as to whether we have grossly undervalued the environmental influences depicted by curved arrows in the figure; perhaps they play a more central role in consciousness than most assume, involving some sort of “ultra-information” field. In this case, “emergence” might indicate the emergence of a functioning “brain antenna” to interact with the putative ultra-information field.

As background to this idea, note that physics has identified several fields that have no known underlying structure, including electromagnetic fields and quantum wavefunctions. The electromagnetic field carries both information and energy; the wavefunction carries only information. We know of the existence of these fields only through their influence on matching “antennas.” Electrons, for example, have fundamental properties like charge and spin, which serve as sensors or antennas of electromagnetic fields.

I am not suggesting that these fields have anything to do with consciousness. But, for all we know, our universe may contain other undiscovered fields, and some may fall into the ultra-information category (a more recent field discovery is dark energy). Over the past century or so, most scientists have regarded mass and energy as nature's primary actors on the universal stage with information allowed only a secondary role. However, some modern scientists advocate a radically different view, one that elevates information to the fundamental entity underlying all of physical reality, implying the conceptual hierarchy: information → laws of physics → matter.

I am not advocating for this idea, only contending that it does not seem to violate physical laws as we now understand them. Were such ultra-information field to be discovered, today’s apparent distinction between materialism and dualism would be called into question.