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My mind keeps coming back to the "Big Wow" Hypothesis put forward by Paola Zizzi. It follows from the "orchestrated objective reduction" quantum consciousness hypothesis put forward by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Stated technically, the abstract of this idea is as follows:

...[D]uring inflation [the period just after the Big Bang when the spacetime continuum expanded rapidly], the universe can be described as a superposed state of quantum registers. The self-reduction of the superposed quantum state is consistent with the Penrose's Objective Reduction (OR) model. The quantum gravity threshold is reached at the end of inflation, and corresponds to a superposed state of 10^9 quantum registers. This is also the number of superposed tubulins-qubits in our brain, which undergo the Penrose-Hameroff's Orchestrated Objective Reduction, (Orch OR), leading to a conscious event. Then, an analogy naturally arises between the very early quantum computing universe, and our mind.

Paraphrased, it is proposed that (a) proto-consciousness is a natural quality of existence, (b) conscious awareness arises from self-orchestrating quantum events in the brain, and (c) the universe, during the period of inflation shortly after the Big Bang, experienced a moment of conscious awareness that is analogous to the conscious awareness that we as human beings experience.

There is a certain "neatness" in this. If there is any truth to this at all, what are the theological, cosmological, and anthropological (using the term in its theological sense) implications?

Addendum. It is suggested that the law of entropy may not necessarily apply on microcosmic scales. Evidence of this sort would seem to bolster the idea that conscious awareness and perhaps even volition have their roots in quantum-level an-entropy. Stuart Hameroff has proposed a testable hypothesis he has called "quantum vitalism" that suggests that life is a special kind of quantum superconduction. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Schwartz and Harry Stapp have proposed the concept of "mental force" to explain a way volition (or free will) may be reconciled with materialism.

crossposting to

religiousdebate.

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Thanks for all 4 really great links!

I came to your journal because of the link you posted on

real_philosophy, and I was floored by this post, because at least part of it basically is exactly the topic that has been driving me for the last couple of weeks. (I friended you to make sure I don't miss anything good!)

nanikore had described to me the Taoist description of a void as, instead of nothingness, as "there is no ripple." This sounded to me like a pretty good definition of maximum entropy. I really like the idea of the inverse relationship between entropy and existence. (Also, I find that Genesis 1:2 seems to give the same definition of "pre-existence," just in case you were interested.)

What's your understanding of consciousness being a "threshold value" of complexity? What relationship does that have to entropy, if any? I'm inclined to think as complexity goes upward toward this threshold value, entropy goes down, but now I may be confusing myself with a poor analogy rather than a useful metaphysics.

There is a certain 'neatness' in this.

I like that statement--lately I've been focusing on aesthetics as a possible foundation for my personal philosophy. Not art per se, but just the nature of beauty and subjective experience itself. "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." (Genesis 1:31)

Your user info page tells me you may be of like mind. Nice to meet you.

"there is no ripple."

Yes, that does sound like a good description of maximum entropy. I'm sort of an armchair Taoist, in that my conception of God or divine presence is similar to the Taoist description of the Way as "that which never acts yet leaves nothing undone." To much to say on that within the space of a short comment.

I'm going to make a follow up post to this sometime today or tomorrow outlining a few religious parallels I find really fascinating in this idea.

TBH I haven't thought much about consciousness with regards to entropy. Something to ruminate, certainly. I'll have a thought or two on that eventually.

Regarding aesthetics -- I think there is much to commend the idea of appealing to elegance when looking for answers to the "big picture." Even though the things around us can be extremely complex, it seems to me that what we see are overlapping ripples of different sizes and in different "media," interacting and overlapping in ways bounded at the core by a few simple principles. The physicist's quest for a summary of a Theory of Everything that can fit on a tee-shirt is not, IMO, a quixotic quest.

The physicist's quest for a summary of a Theory of Everything that can fit on a tee-shirt is not, IMO, a quixotic quest.

I was thinking of using Ockham's razor as one of the supreme ethical statements in a philosophy based on aesthetics. While futile, the tee-shirt goal is a good target. The goal of course is impossible (especially given recent developments in modern physics), but it does at least force the physicist to try to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, as opposed to using complex mathematics as a vaccine against participation of 99% of the population.

I see the "vaccine" method used in other disciplines, such as words with "accepted" rigorous definitions that are rarely stated in philosophy to frustrate those who haven't subjected themselves to 4-8 years of disciplined study in the philosophy of mind and language. Another example is the "young-earth-creationist" who uses the vaccine to exclude anyone who wishes to use their brain from religious discussions.

There's alot of problems with this whole area right now. Not the least of which is that it's purely speculative: nearly every premise in the proposed theory is an assumption. This isn't to say nothing will come of it; interdisciplinary consciousness research is exciting and promising.

One of the main problems with Orch OR models is that they're so withdrawn from psychological and neurological findings on the topic. For instance, consciousness isn't evenly distributed throughout the brain, and we can, at least in some cases, demonstrate with considerable confidence where consciousness is compared to where it is not. It would be promising if microtubule composition could be correlated with these conscious zones, but I've never heard of such a thing proposed. This alone is fairly damning.

Regarding the panpsychist theory, a serious conceptional problem with this approach is that it completely ignores features which many researchers believe to be primary to consciousness - such as intentionality and self.

Generally, in both cases we have theories that can, at best, offer a speculative description of how consciousness arises. However, the standard reductive neuroscience approaches can do this as well. The difficult issues in consciousness (the ones where the standard reductive approaches fall short, impelling us to look for alternatives) are not how it can be generated, but how it becomes associated with precisely those features these theories ignore (eg. intentionality and self).

Yes, it certainly is speculative; I try to have fun with exploring these possible themes while not getting too attached to any ideas, should the ideas prove to be false.

Actually the finding that there isn't a single "center of first-person qualitative experience" or what Daniel Dennett calls a "Cartesian theater" seems to me to lend itself in support of quantum consciousness. Dennett spent his entire very long book Consciousness Explained attempting to lay out an alternative explanation. He had many excellent points but I got the sense that even he did not seem to be 100% satisfied with having laid the "Cartesian theater" to rest.

It also seems to me that he could not address the fundamental problem with trying to disprove the idea of a Carteian theater -- why it seems such an intuitive and attractive explanation for qualitative experience.

The idea of consciousness as quantum superposition of registers is attractive because it does not depend on finding a "qualia center" in the brain. As for other aspects of what we call consciousness, I am aware for example that there is a volition center in the prefrontal cortex, that the "stream of verbal consciousness" that many of us experience is caused by firing in the linguistic portions of the brain, and so on. The emerging idea of thoughts evolving in the brain using a Darwinistic "pandemonium" process also has a lot to commend it.

But at the core, from everything I've read neuroscience is far from explaining what causes qualitative experience (the stuff philosophers refer to as "qualia") or demonstrating why it is a delusion.

In the meantime, I see it as an interesting and healthy diversion to speculate on the metaphysical aspects of an idea that has a certain kind of elegance to me -- even if it is highly speculative.

Yeah, Dennett doesn't have me convinced either, although he's still a fruitful read.

There are definitely qualia centers in the brain, in the sense of areas which generate a sort of "screenplay" of experience. The difficulty seems to be in how they become unitary; how the become invested with self, intention, or whatever special features you believe consciousness is necessarily invested in; and why they're around in the first place (ie. why we weren't zombies).

Neurosci and psychology are still far from decent explanations, but I tend to bias research in their favor. Firstly, there's simply been more people working harder and longer in neurosci and psychology on consciousness and related issues. In neurosci and psychology we don't need "the answer" immediately, but can conduct alot of important research right now relating to isolated features of consciousness; in this way progressing gradually towards an answer, rather than relying on metatheory (the former being more amicable to a scientific approach anyway). Secondly, I give them a sort of primacy rather than equivalency with alternative approaches: I demand that physics findings on consciousness accord with psychological findings, and favor the latter when there is a dispute (simply because psych is a more immediate measure of consciousness than physics is).

The neurosci research I alluded to is basically as follows: we can follow, for instance the visual pathways in the brain, and determine at any given "level" which neurons are correlated with conscious experience and which are not. Any proposed mechanism for consciousnes (eg. some function of microtubules, quantum or otherwise) should be expected to correlate to this "map" of consciousness in the brain - that is, we should expect to find whatever feature that generates consciousness in the consciousness-generating neurons and not in the not-consciousness-generating neurons. Otherwise, there's no link between the proposed mechanism and the actual generation of consciousness.

As far as physics-inspired approaches to consciousness goes, although I find Orch OR fascinating, I'm much more favorable to the models put forth by David Bohm. Admittedly, this pegs me as a bit of a flake. But I got over that long ago.

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