The Denial of Consciousness as a Causative Factor is Getting Absurd.
In 2014 Cosmologist Max Tegmark wrote a paper positing that consciousness is a state of matter. The concept is presented as a long-overdue attempt to include consciousness in the study of physics. However, throughout the paper there are subtle denigrations of consciousness. Consciousness is posited to be “an accidental by-product of error correction”. Elsewhere, the conception of subjective consciousness is relegated to either a dualistic soul or a non-entity that doesn’t influence so much as a particle.
This presented a frightening fidelity to only what was widely known at the time reminiscent of Richard Dawkins's thinking in The Selfish Gene. In the book he took Darwinian natural selection by ruthless competition as a rigid law, relegating altruism to be a by-product of evolution. This is startlingly bleak and short-sighted for a book written in the 1970s, decades before the study of epigenetics came into being.
In Dawkins's book, this can be directly tied to the reductions that game theory inspires and Tegmark, likewise, is making his case predominantly with mathematics, which is only as good as its assumptions. The problem is that the results of game theory or the results of mathematics are taken so seriously, as if reductionism somehow generates more rational conclusions. The issue is that to make inferences about reality from reductionist models is to assume nothing potentially relevant is unknown.
The universe as we understand it is “fine-tuned”, meaning that there are many constants that, if they were slightly different, would make our existence impossible. The proportion of matter to anti-matter is just right for complex structures, the nuclear forces are perfectly balanced for the existence of stars. The fact that fine-tuning exists is why the multiverse became a supported idea. Fine-Tuning is only acceptable to many physicists if it was arrived at randomly.
This can be obviously tied to the disgust with religious thinking and the conception of a universe centered around us. It’s completely understandable to disavow religion and its dogmatism. However, it’s come to the point now where placing consciousness to be so much as consequential is seen as something heretical. As science has moved away from empiricism and embraced abstract theory, it’s become less scientific and more dogmatic.
In the wake of the indeterminacy of quantum physics, increasingly absurd explanations have been put forth as experiments deliver more and more impressive results. Quantum effects have been observed at a macroscopic visible scale. The light from ancient quasars has been used to confirm quantum entanglement, which also suggests retrocausality, in that the light confirming the effect has been traveling longer than the earth has existed. The response to these increasingly wondrous experiments is an increasing fidelity to determinism and a ridiculously increasing multiplicity of universes.
At no point does it seem to be suggested that we take experimental observations at face value. Maybe foundational ideas that we thought were right, are not. It wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe there are no other universes and there is no infinity. Maybe we do have free will, maybe what we are seeing doesn’t need to be explained away. It’s increasingly suspected that space/time is not fundamental, maybe we need to rethink the ideas that stem from believing it is.
The most well-known theory of quantum activity involved in consciousness is a proposal by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff called Orch OR, or Orchestrated objective reduction. Penrose has made the case that consciousness is not computable, that it’s not the result of deterministic processes. Together with Hameroff, the theory was developed that quantum processing occurs in cell microtubules, vital structures involved in structure and transport that are particularly abundant in neurons. Many current models have consciousness resulting from synaptic transmission, whereas Orch OR places it inside the neuron.
The theory was presented in the 1990s and criticized under the assumptions that science had at the time, many of which are no longer believed, such as the idea that quantum effects cannot occur in warm wet environments. The theory goes a long way to answer questions like how a paramecium, a single-celled organism some call a “swimming neuron”, can have social behavior, memory, and navigate complex environments. In contrast to placing consciousness as an irrelevant side effect of random chance, or as something magical beyond the scope of science altogether, Orch OR makes consciousness an “intrinsic feature of the action of the universe” while keeping it firmly within the realm of falsifiable science.