Quantum Consciousness?

One of the very big problems we find regarding consciousness is that of the appearance of the ego and the fact that it has some sort of life-experience (as phenomenologists would say). This has been the holy grail of neurobiology for many years now, and we still has no adequate theory to address it.

Some scientists take an exotic path to solve this problem, like in the case of Stuart Hameroff when he tries to address this issue using quantum mechanics. Here is his explanation (an hour and 9 minutes interview):

I am no neurobiologist, so I will not criticize Hameroff on that basis, but I can do so on a philosophical basis. For instance, I noticed that he is positing the physical existence of a platonic realm where we have access to rational aspects of consciousness in the universe. In fact, according to the theory suggested by David Bohm, in order to avoid the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, we have to recognize existence of hidden variables and non-local interconnectedness. Hameroff also used Roger Penrose’s proposal that when superpositions happen there is a split in reality, but these splits are unstable, so they end up collapsing. Hameroff and Penrose suggest that this platonic dominion is the realm of non-local interconnectedness at the Planck scale, where we find logical and mathematical truths, ethical norms and values, and the aspiration for a deeper meaning. And particularly in the microtubules in the brain at the quantum level, there is superposition being carried out all the time which actually connects to this platonic realm due quantum behavior (including the travel of quantum information backwards in time).

As philosopher, a realist (particularly a platonist), I am particularly concerned about this, because it starts from the premise that platonic abstract truths and relations are physical, hence reducing relations-of-ideas (as Hume would call them) to matters-of-fact. Philosophically speaking, this would still not explain why are logical and mathematical truths true in every possible world, while physical laws can apply to this world, but not necessarily to any other world.

It also has the problem of what can actually be the base to determine that such physical logico-mathematical laws or ethical values are indeed correct, the only way is to posit a non-physical and non-causal abstract reality, which would lead us back to square one. Since the physical platonic realm is based on the non-causal platonic realm, then how is the physical one legitimized or unconditionally valid in any way?

Second, many have suggested epistemological models to achieve the level of abstraction that would enable us to recognize abstract concepts or objects. Guillermo Rosado Haddock, my former thesis director and now friend, has proposed Edmund Husserl’s epistemology of mathematics (see Rosado, 2000), which is essentially platonist but whose epistemology can be naturalizable in principle. A similar proposal has been made by Jerrold Katz with his realistic epistemology, which can be naturalizable (Katz, 1998, pp. 45-51). I think that the Husserlian mathematical epistemology, in my judgment, is more satisfactory and complete, and the way it was formulated by him can show that it can be naturalized, neurobiologists could, in principle, discover the natural mechanisms of the brain that would let us perceive abstract structures and relations based on objects being shown to us. Much of Husserl’s view of "elementary experience" have been confirmed again and again in the realm of psychology and neurobiology. A "physical platonic" realm, or a platonic space embedded in the universe is not needed for this.

The same thing happens with the discovery of elementary ethics and values, which in reality can be explained through the diverse conflicts developed within human groups, which leads to the setting of several basic moral rules to be followed, the recognition of another person as a person, another rational being (here is a phenomenological aspect), and then universalizing it to all rational beings. And as we see in different stages of society throughout history, group morals limited ethical behavior to the group, and then this requirement was expanded to include larger groups, until we are able to empathize with humanity as a whole. We are going to talk about this in a later article, but the origin of our grasp of ethical values seems to be evolutionary. The same can be said about meaning values which serve as one basis of all religious beliefs and spiritual paths.

Finally, from the perspective of philosophy of science, perhaps the most serious flaw in Hameroff’s proposal is that it is non-testable. There is absolutely no way at all to show experimentally that there is a consciousness embedded in the universe, much less a physical platonic realm of truths and values. Unless there is a way to create an experiment that would confirm his theory, it will remain a metaphysical proposal (in the Popperian sense of the word "metaphysical").

At a personal level, I feel that quantum physics has become a sort of quick answer to certain mysteries of the universe. The reasoning is: if quantum phenomena look as weird as X, then in some way X and quanta are related. The quantum world is strange indeed, but the problem with always looking for answers in quantum physics is that in the end it does not explain anything. It just restates in the form of an extensive chain of equations that both X and quanta are weird. The same criticism goes to the holonomic view of the brain.

Memory Power: Sometimes You Have It All Over the Brain, Sometimes You Don’t

Sure enough, some of the holonomic view of the brain is valid, but not completely. Karl Pribram was busy trying to understand how the human brain works, specifically the faculty of memory. Is memory located in some part of the brain? As it turns out his experiments showed that memory is dispersed all through the brain like a hologram. When you use a holographic film and you shine a LASER beam through it, it will show you on the screen a three dimensional object. The funny thing about the film is that you can tear it up to pieces and still you have a complete image in each one of them. If you take one piece and shine the LASER beam through it, it still shows the three dimensional object. The whole information of the image is in each part of that film. Pribram figured it would be more or less like that, we could lose any part of the brain, and still the whole of memory would be retained. The brain, in fact, can store up to ten trillion bytes of memory, and the holonomic model seems to help us understand that.

However, the holonomic model does not explain everything in the brain, because, as we have seen before, our brain is a set of organs, producing higher level modules which interact with each other in order for them to work in coordination. The same thing happens with memory in a way. Have you seen this movie?

Awwww! Romantic comedy! Who didn’t like that movie? Drew Barrymore is this girl who has the peculiar thing: ever since an accident she had, she is only able to remember briefly all recent events, until the very next day when she wakes up and forgets completely the day before, or all of the days after the accident. The character played by Adam Sandler has to make a videotape to update her to the present every single day. Hollywood fantasy … right? Weeeelllll … maybe not too much! Yes, Goldfield Syndrome, what she was going through, does not exist at all. But, remember "ten seconds Tom"? That was hilarious! … Except something very similar (yet not the same) does happen. Meet Clive Wearing!

Born in 1938, he was a musical conductor and musicologist with an entire career ahead of him, until a virus basically affected a part of his brain. Ever since then, his only lapse of immediate memory is about 30 seconds. He does not remember anything about his life. He only has short-term memory. The reason is that although memory is spread all through the brain, immediate memory is not. Short-term memory is located in the hippocampus within the limbic system, the evolutionary inheritance from the earliest forms of mammals. Long-term memory is all over the brain. Wearing’s brain is not able to transform short-term into long-term, so he forgets everything in a short period of time. The virus severely damaged his hippocampus.

But still, Wearing’s case is illuminating regarding one specific thing. He never forgot how to speak. The reason is that apparently the memory that requires him to speak is essentially different from that which stores events of his life. It is possible that the memory of language and speech are located in the temporal lobes, where we find the Wernicke’s area, a key location for human speech and language. Oh, and he can still play the piano! His procedural memory is also unharmed, and it works extremely well (and in the case of his piano-playing, it works beautifully).

Even though we sometimes feel that memory works like a tape recorder or a super-hard drive that "records" everything we do, in reality that is not the way that our brain works. In reality it all works out because of the connections of events in our brain, and the way neurons arrange themselves in order for us to connect different events. In cases like Wearing’s, those who are Hippocampus amnesiacs not only are unable to remember anything, but also live in fragmented and disconnected moments. They do not have enough sense of continuity to project a possible scenario for the future.

Also we must keep in mind that recalling is not exactly rewinding our memory to a certain moment and playing whole events in our mind once again. What we do when we remember is to literally reconstruct an event from bits and pieces that we actually store in our brain. This is the reason why, for most of us, when we recall something it is more vague than what we are presently living an event on the flesh.

This is also the reason why we have false memories. Michael Gazzaniga, renowned neurologist and member of the Law and Neuroscience Project, often complains about how fragile are the memories of rape victims. There are many documented cases where the victims swear to recognize their rapists, but after making a DNA analysis or looking at other conclusive evidence, the alleged rapists turn out to be innocent. Yet, the whole legal system is made up on the basis that memory is more reliable than it really is.

People who try to recall lost experiences through hypnosis may not intentionally try to distort their experiences they are trying to recall, but their brain can do it. The same happens with people who use L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics to engage in auditing, most of the "recalled" experiences may not be genuine memories, but constructed memories during the whole auditing process, and this could lead to worsen memory rather than enhance it.

What Makes Consciousness Possible?

Memory is not merely our ability to recall, but it is an integral part of what our consciousness is. If we have an self at all, it is in great part because our experience of time is linear: there is a past, present, and future. If there is no memory at all, there cannot be any consciousness. Wearing’s case teaches us that at the very least there must be a minimum of short-term memory for a consciousness to be possible and a self to appear as the component of conscious mental acts that remains ideally the same despite flow of time.

Memory, short-term and long-term, are not the only components that make consciousness possible. What else is needed at a neurobiological level for it to exist? First, as we have said, there are different parts or organs of our brain that interact with each other, and functionally speaking produce modules, which themselves interact with each other too. So, we are at the problem of emergence, we are asking: which modular interactions or layers of mental processes are necessary for consciousness to emerge?

António Damásio is a neurobiologist whom, in my opinion, has proposed one of the best theories on the origin of consciousness. We should think consciousness as a multilayered building, much like the step-pyramids in Egypt, or like a Babylonian zyggurat, or like a Mayan pyramid. From the base upwards, the order is the following:

• Proto-Self: According to Damásio, all animals have this basic trait, and it can be described as a sort of preconscious biological precedent to consciousness. He defines it this way: "The proto-self is a coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its dimensions" (Damásio, 1999, p. 154). This does not take place in one part of the brain, but in multiple levels and multiple places, from the brain stem to the cerebral cortex (Damásio, 1999, p. 154). We are not aware of this proto-self, and the vast majority of animals have this proto-self, but without any consciousness at all. This suggests that the proto-self came up in an early evolutionary stage of our ancestors.
• Core-Consciousness: "Core consciousness occurs when the brain’s representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal account of how the organism’s own state is affected by the organism’s processing of an object, and when this process enhances the image of the causative object, thus placing it saliently in a spacial and temporal context" (Damásio, 1993, p. 169). What does this mean? It means that when we think, we use to think in images. Contrary to the dogmas that many people still cling to, we do not think in language, our primary form of thought is nonverbal imaging. As a result of processing images, we pay attention to an object (any object) that our mind considers somehow relevant. Core consciousness include two sorts of selves: Transient Core Self which lets us be aware of our existence and the effects of the world on us because of sensory experience; the Autobiographical Self which operates thanks to a certain memory capacity that we all have in order to create a "fleeting feeling of knowing" which is created anew in short periods of time.
• Extended Consciousness: This part of our consciousness depends on the capacity of memory, especially long-term memory "for facts". Acts of knowing "objects" consists in attending objects according in our personal past. These objects understood within a temporal framework makes us able to substantiate our identity and our personhood (Damasio, 1999, p. 196). Extended consciousness is precisely the result of the ability to retain in our mind numerous sets of experiences, and being able to recall them at will, and to have a sense of obtaining knowledge by experiences (counting past experiences). This part of consciousness is one that primates have developed in general, and that humans have developed better than any primate. There is a reason for that, humanity is endowed with language and intelligence, which help us enhance extended consciousness.

A long time ago Edmund Husserl pointed out the importance of memory in phenomenology, without it there would not be consciousness nor any possible knowledge of anything in this world. Today neurobiologists basically state the same thing on naturalist foundations.

The Problem of the Self

Yet, as Damásio already knows, this does not explain everything about consciousness. For example, the phenomenon that philosophers have called "qualia" is one that represents one of the biggest challenges of both neurobiology and cognitive science. Qualia refers to our ability to experience sensations. All Damásio does in his theory is to explain how the self comes to be, but he never explains how we experience the world around us. Not only does my mind can perceive colors, sounds, etc., but also there is a self which actually senses them and is pleased by them.

Daniel Dennet has been one of those philosophers who tries to show that the problem of qualia is a pseudo-problem. In his essay "Quining Qualia", he practically denies its existence at all. Other cognitive scientists and psychologists are not as easily persuaded by Dennett’s arguments. They are very clever, but qualia is a real phenomenon, and contrary to what Dennett believes, Descartes was right in pointing out that "thought" (understood in the Cartesian sense) is the only fact that cannot be doubted. Whether the self is a substance that thinks is another very different story, though. Husserl, who many consider the last Cartesian, recognized the existence of the ideality (non-causal abstract content), and also did recognize Cartesian thinking (cogito) as the only matter-of-fact that we can be certain of. He also argues that because of the essence of the cogito, this matter-of-fact requires a thinking subject (a self) and an object (cogitatum). So the act of intending an object (intentionality), requires a self that intends.

What Husserl argues from the point of view of intentionality, Ramachandran argues from the point of view of qualia. For him, qualia evolved thanks to the fact that there are layers of neural processes of encoding sensory representations which are processed in the higher executive structure of the brain. Remember that our frontal lobes make up the Executive Brain (or as Michael Dowd would call it "The Higher Porpoise"). Ramahandran suggests that during this process we reach a metarepresentation from what were originally sensory representations, and that these metarapresentations create a more economical description of what we are sensing, and they "have" qualia so-to-speak. From the point of view of natural selection, qualia highlights what is important from the whole set of sensory representations and what is not. The most advanced process for metarepresentation is unique in humans, or at least different from other primates related to us: the case of the chimp, their metarepresentations are not as sophisticated as ours.

However, qualia comes with a price. What is qualia? They are experience. If they are, then that means that something or someone is experiencing it, since there cannot be experiences "lose floating in the air" so to speak. As qualia evolved, so did the self evolve. The self is the mind’s correlate to the development of qualia: the self has experiences.

Now, what is the self? Ramachandran does not define it, but he suggests five essential characteristics of what we mean by "self":

1. Continuity or the sense of an unbroken flow in our experiences, with the rudimentary feeling of past, present and future.
2. The experience of being one sole "self" despite all the disparity of experiences, beliefs, memory, thoughts and so on.
3. There is a sense that the self is joined together with the body.
4. The sense of agency, that the self is somehow "driving" or "managing" the body.
5. In the very specific case of human, the self is also self-aware … it is aware of itself.

This does not mean that the self is a substance inhabiting the body, but the result of these brain processes.

Is the Self an Illusion?

Give me a nickle each neuroscientist who has got to the conclusion that the "self" is an illusion. Daniel Dennett, to Steven Pinker, to António Damásio, and beyond have stated that the self is a mere illusion, it is a make-believe made by the brain as a result of processes that the self is not aware of. Even Francisco Ayala, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch use Buddhist reasonings to deny the existence of the self, as if it dissolved in the midst of the argument.

I am no neuroscientist, but I beg to differ as a philosopher. I’m not going to defend the Cartesian statement that the self is a "thinking substance", since it is not a substance at all. However, I will argue that the self has an ideal reality, that is, an abstract unity that remains the same despite the flow of experiences. The fact that it comes to be from brain processes does not mean that it is less real. If it were pure fiction, it would be practically impossible to even talk about our selves at all, or how it comes to be, or how our brain and our mind relate to it.

I think that one philosopher can help us understand this is Karl Popper, who held a semi-platonist view of a non-causal abstract reality. He basically uses the Fregean distinction of three realms (or "worlds" as he calls them): the first realm (world 1) would be the world of physical objects, the second realm (world 2) being the world of psychological representations and subjective experiences, and the third realm (world 3) an abstract cultural realm that is filled with objective creations of world 2, including propositions, problems, numbers, information, theories, and so on.

For Popper, the self is a world 3 entity, it is something that is abstract, but real. Yet, in his philosophy, usually world 3 is created culturally by "selves", yet selves cannot create themselves. His view is that selves are language creations, that we acquire language, and then we start being selves. However, this cannot be the case, since, as we have seen, there can be core-selves without having developed language.

Also in his argument he confuses "self" with "self-awareness", he says that animals don’t have "selves" because they are not self-aware. However, as Fernandes (1985) has pointed out, you cannot be self-aware without having a self to be aware of.

It seems to me that the solution to the problem is that when we look at the processes in the brain, these processes go constantly from lower-level processes to higher more abstract processes. Remember, the mind is nothing more than a product of the brain, a network of modules that carry out all sorts of functions. Each module, even when it is processed by different parts of the brain, create abstractions. As we shall see in later articles, the brain is a conceptual, conjectural and theory making machine. So, the self is a form of an objective abstraction created by lower-level mental processes. This is its reality. It might well be that the self is a world 3 abstract and non-substantial being that can be generated by processes that happen in the brain (world 1), but mediated by different levels of mental abstract processes.

Those who deny the existence of selves or state that they are illusions usually do so on grounds of either physicalism or naturalism. Yet, even on a moderate physicalist view, like Quine’s for instance, it is consistent to think this way: abstract reality can come up of matter but cannot exist without matter. What a physicalist will never accept is the existence of abstract reality divorced from the physical universe, that would be platonism.

Denying selves carries also several dangers, one of which denies the self’s agency. Yes, there can be cases where a person thinks it is making a well thought decision when in fact is something at a deeper mental level. This is the case of anosognosia, a person’s mental refusal to recognize his or her problem, it is not a voluntary self-delusion, but instead something that happens at a deeper level in the mind. This also happens when, for example, a man approaches a woman supposedly to ask what time it is (and he may well believe he is actually doing this for this specific reason), but in reality it is because he is attracted to her, and his R-Complex is pushing him to mate in some way.

However, we are moral animals. With the exception of people whose brain are seriously affected in some way, in general we all make decisions that we know are good or bad, and we can control our bodies to a certain extent despite all the web of complex impulses our mind is pushing us to do. The R-Complex may be pushing me to mate with a woman, but that does not justify rape or sexual harassment. In fact, I can act against that instinct because I know it would be wrong to do so. It is not exactly that we as selves are not in control of anything! Our selves are just not in control of subconscious and unconscious processes.

And last, but not least, the denial of selves is also the denial of the inherent dignity of every human being as a rational being. Yes, the self is the result of processes in the brain, but it is not reducible to these processes. As Michael Dowd would say, this is a case where the whole is more than the sum of its parts … and I would add "and also the sum of its mental processes". Each self in each person can be viewed as a rational being, capable of making moral choices, not only with self-awareness, but also with an inherent sense of dignity: making a dignifying act or being degraded.

To deny the existence of the self just because there is a whole set of complex biological processes behind is a very big non-sequitur.

References

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. US: Penguin Books.

Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness. San Diego, US: Hancourt.

Dennett, D. (2002). Quining qualia. In D. J. Chalmers (ed.) Philosophy of mind: classical and contemporary readings. (pp. 226-246). NY: Oxford University Press.

Dowd, M. (2007). Thank God for evolution: how the marriage of science and religion will transform your lie and our world. US: Plume.

Fernandes, S. L. de C. (1985). Foundations of objective knowledge: the relations of Popper’s Theory of Knowledge to that of Kant. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

Gazzaniga, M. S. (2006). The ethical brain: the science of our moral dilemmas. US: Harper Perennial.

Greene, A. J. (2010, July/August). Making connections: the essence of memory is linking one thought to another. Scientific American Mind. 22-29.

Hubbard, L. R. (1950). Dianetics: the modern science of mental health. CA: Bridge Publications.

Huston, T. & Pitney, J. (2010, Spring/Summer). Finding spirit in the fabric of space & time: an exploration of quantum consciousness with Stuart Hameroff, MD. EnlightenNext: the Magazine for Evolutionaries, 46 (Spring/Summer), 44-57.

Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Pinker, S. (2007, January 19). The brain: the mystery of consciousness. Time. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html

Popper, K. (1994). Knowledge and the body-mind problem: in defence of interaction. London: Routledge.

Ramachandran, V. S. (2004). A brief tour of human consciousness. NY: Pi Press.

Ramachandran, V. S. & Blakeslee, S. (1998). Phantoms in the brain: probing the mysteries of the human mind. NY: Harper Perennial.

Rosado Haddock, G. E. (2000). Husserl’s epistemology of mathematics and the foundation of platonism in mathematics. In C. O. Hill & G. E. Rosado Haddock (eds.) Husserl or Frege? Meaning, objectivity and mathematics. (pp. 221-239). US: Open Court.

Talbot, M. (1991). The holographic universe. US: Harper Perennial.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. MA: The MIT Press.

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