The Physics of Consciousness
from the Meaning-of-Life dept.
| The Physics of Consciousness | |
| author | Evan Harris Walker |
| pages | 368 |
| publisher | Perseus Books |
| rating | 8/10 |
| reviewer | Jon Katz |
| ISBN | 0-7382-0234-7 |
| summary | A look at the quantum mind and the meaning of life |
Here's some questions to mull in front of the screen: Why are we here? Where have the Gods all gone?
Harvard entomologist James Wilson wrote in the late l970's that no species, including the human one, has any real purpose beyond the imperatives created by its particular genetic history.
Individual species, he wrote, may have tremendous potential for material and mental progress, but at the core they lack any direction beyond that in which their genetic and molecular architecture steer them.
Wilson believes the human mind is constructed in a way that locks it onto this pre-ordained track and forces it to make choices on a purely biological basis.
His notion is part of one of the oldest feuds in philosophy, science and the humanities - is there really free will, or are conscience and consciousness merely byproducts of electricity, impulses, genes and molecules?
The essence of Wilson's argument is that the brain exists because it promises the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly. The human mind, then, is a device for survival and reproduction, with reason just one of the techniques used to achieve that goal. All other functions of human consciousness - creativity, anger, exploration, adventure - exist either in support of this goal, or are inconsequential.
Despite all the advances in biological science and genetics, physical reality remains mysterious - even to physicists - because of what Wilson called the "extreme improbability" that it was constructed to be understood by the human mind.
"We can reverse that insight," wrote Wilson, "to note with still greater force that the intellect was not constructed to understand atoms or even to understand itself but to promote the survival of humans, and the genes of humans."
The reflective person thus knows that his life is in some incomprehensible manner guided through biological ontogeny, a more or less fixed order of life stages. With all the drive, wit, love, pride, anger, hope and anxiety that characterize the species, he will in the end be certain of only one thing: helping to perpetuate the cycle that created him. Almost everything else is up in the air, one theory as good as another.
This is heavy stuff, increasingly brought into focus by technological and scientific revolutions - artificial intelligence, nano-technology, genetic research - that might tell us whether Wilson is on-target.
If he's right, the dilemma is enormous: we have no particular place to go as a species. We lack a common or universal goal beyond our pre-determined biological nature.
In the next century, it's possible that humankind can conquer technology, stabilize politics, solve the ongoing crises in energy, poverty and materials, avert nuclear and other war, and begin to control reproduction. That would bring the world a stable eco-system for the first time.
But what then?
If this dilemma holds any interest for you, try reading "The Physics of Consciousness, The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life," by Evan Harris Walker, physicist and director of the Walker Cancer Institute.
For more than a thousand years, writes Walker in this complex and haunting book, philosophers, scientists and theologians have battled furiously to explain the phenomenon of human consciousness, believed to be unique among the world's species.
What is it? Where does it come from? What is its purpose?
The answer, says Walker, is in quantum and Newtonian physics. Using "Bell's Theorem" - the notion that one particle can instantly influence the behavior of another, Walker unveils his notions of the intricacies of electron tunneling in the brain.
He also undertakes a mystical, profoundly geeky meditation on spirituality, consciousness and quantum physics, three disciplines not traditionally linked to one another.
"We want to ask, is there a God? Does my life have meaning and purpose? Science, we are told, says that even to ask about God is beyond its scope." But this, Walker argues, is not true. Either there is no such thing as God, or science - which embodies our ability to reason - must be able to frame the question and provide us with the answers.
Walker takes us on an amazing journey into what he calls the "engines of the mind," from membranes of nerve cells which maintain electric fields, to the synapse, the junction between neurons, the site of what he calls "quantum choice" a major intersection of human consciousness.
Quantum physics and mechanics create a mechanical picture of consciousness, Walker says, "consciousness arising out of the very observer-dependent processes that go on in the brain as they do in the laboratories of physicists, in the hearts of atoms, and in the cores of stars." With an observer in the brain, this consciousness selects the things that happen in the external world.
Out of this arises a picture of what the fabric of reality is.
Walker's highly personal search for the meaning of life began half a century ago when the woman he loved died of leukemia. He set out find out what human beings really are and what, if anything, remains when the tissues of the brain and body have ceased their functions. Surprisingly, he looked to physics, not religion or spirituality for some answers, and ended up wedding science to original notions of God.
"A universe that has only matter cannot have consciousness and cannot have will," he concludes. "The picture painted to explain the material world, orderly but without God, has failed to work." Einstein, writes Walker, could see "the print of God's hand" on creation exteding to the edges of the cosmos, but he failed to see us there, he failed to see the implications of mind for physics, and he failed to see anything but the shadow of God." Walker sees all those things.
Warning: This isn't an easy book to read. It's dense, painful and centered heavily around Zen meditations and physics as the key to life, meaning and consciousness. But Walker asks a few of the biggest questions that there are, and shows us how in the right hands and sensibilities, quantum physics can relate very powerfully to much more than science.
Purchase this book at fatbrain.
Nothing new (Score:3)
Then I studied physics. The strongest evidence Iknow for God is the nature of the physical universe. It's not rational evidence: it's emotional, because what is important about the order is not it's existence, but its beauty and (most of all) elegance. I found (and find) the cycles of increasingly useful approximations (Aristotle to Newton, Newton to Einstein, Einstein to Quantum) awesome to behold. And cannot conceive how they could be in the abscense of a creating will.
Ultimately, the existence of will is simpler than physics. As such, if there is one thing uncreated, it seems to me that it must be a will, not the myriad laws of physics, in all their elegant complexit.
So, through this rather tortuous and illogical path, I came to believe in a personal God. How I came to believe that Jesus personified him is another story. The point is that my religion does not stand in opposition to my knowledge of physics (I majored in Physics as an undergrad), but is supported by it. I think the whole "reason vs. religion" debate is nothing but a straw man, just waiting for wide-spread good sense to knock it down.
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Physicists should stick to physics (Score:4)
I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone, especially a scientist(!), would try to look for a quantum explanation of consciousness unless, like Penrose, that was their initial goal - that they *wanted* to reject the more prosaic explanations.
Nature and evolution work on many different emergent levels. Quantum physics gives rise to chemistry which in turn begats physics and biology. Cellular biology begats neurology, which in turn should be the basis for any higher level abstractions of brain architecture such as the cortical minicolumns.
The rational place to look for explanations of consciousness is at the level of higher level brain architecture. Much can be learned about brain architecture from studying those with various types of brain damage, and phenomena such as "blind sight" indicate that consciousness is indeed a function that can be disrupted by architectural damage.
Personally I would assert that consciousness is simply put an inward looking sense - one which monitors some (but not all) of the brains own functioning, as opposed to external senses wich monitor externally derived stimulii. The experience of consciousness is explicable in the same way as other sensory "quales" - it's got to feel like *something*, and there's nothing more mysterious about the way it does feel to be conscious than the way green appears as a color.
Free will is really unrelated to consciousness, although easily confused with it. The real question is whether we can control nature, not whether we can consciously do so. The simple answer to this is "no", although that really depends on what you identify as "I". With "I" correctly identified as the center of narrative experience (i.e. the fabricated entity to which our internal narrative attributes our actions), then "I" is in control, but it's really just our neural circuitry executing according to the inescapable laws of physics (conventional physics at that, not another parallel quantum realm). We perceive ourselves to have free will simply because the entity we attribute it to ("I"/ourselves) is our internal causal *explanation* for our actions.
Free will works like this: Our neural circuitry, part born out of genetics, part out of experience, generates some motor action (perhaps as a result of some external stimulii, perhaps as a result of some internal one), and we see both the resultant action and the internal precursor signals (via consciousness feedback), and though associativity attribute the action to the precursor signals and hence the high level construct "I". We therefore percieve/believe that "I" *decided* to take the action, when in fact really the action was taken by our neural circuitry, and the causal association is a high level phenomenon that has arisen though evolution due to the benefit of being able to predict things by both subconsiously and consciously modelling causal relationships.
Given the myth of free will we could *try* to abdicate all responsibility and just do whatever we want, but the illusion is too strong to be overcome by intellectual beliefs, and almost all people will sensibly continue to live their lives according to the feeling that they're actively making decisions.
Re:Similar paths, different end points (Score:3)
The old problem with the emotional aspect of a statement being lost when it is rendered in text.
I don't feel superior. Nor was I trying to be arrogant. I can see how it could be read that way.
The point I was trying to make is that I do feel the awe, the immensity, the glory if you will of the universe. This is my spiritual side. But I am comfortable knowing that there is more out there than I can know; that I don't have all the answers. But I think that I would be unture to myself if I tried to rap things up by postulating a god to provide these answers.
Note that when I say 'I' above I mean it. This is a personal thing. In my original post I just wanted to show that even though we had similar experiences, we came to rather different conclusions. You are more than welcome to your beliefs. (I only have problems when others try to force their beliefs on me, but that's another story.)
But I do feel pity that others can't join me at the edge of that abyss. I think that it is the most intellectually invigorating place in the universe. I do think people 'dumb it down' when they use god as an explanition. And I want people to experience the awe that I do.
If this is arrogance then so be it. If this puts me at one end of the spectrum then I'm glad to be there.
Steve M