Is consciousness grounded in matter or the other way around?
We will ask physics about physicalism, zombies, and consciousness. This video is an as-simple-as-I-could explanation of this article https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23108/. We will use a bit of physics and math, but I'll introduce these smoothly, to make the trip easy and interesting. You can verify each step of the proof, and if you can find an error, please let me know. Many of the implications of this result remain open to be discussed later.
Abstract of the article
If the mind of a sentient being would be reducible to its structure, any system with identical structure should be equally sentient. Based on the structural symmetries of Physics, I prove that this thesis has two unexpected consequences:
1) There would be an inflation of minds, living in apparently different worlds. 2) The content of these minds would be independent of the properties of the external world. That is, these minds would be unable to know anything about the world.
Since this contradicts empirical observations, structure alone is insufficient for sentient experience.
This excludes the purely physicalistic approaches to physics and consciousness. For physics to be as we know it, all physical properties have to be grounded in something sentiential.
Imagine a man and a woman, seeing and liking each other at a party or club or so. They start talking, the mutual attraction is obvious, but they want to be casual for two minutes. So they exchange informal formalities about doesn't matter what. Then he asks her: "so, what do you do?", and she replies "I'm a poet". What if the guy would say something like "I hate poetry!", or even declare proudly "I never knew how to use letters to write words and stuff, and I don't care!". Or imagine she's a musician, and he says "I hate music!". There are two things we can say about that kind of guy. First, he is very rude, he never ever deserves a second chance with that girl or any other human being for that matter. He should be isolated, kept outside society. Second, or maybe this should be first, how on earth can he be proud for being illiterate!
You probably guessed that this story is true. OK, In my case it was about math instead of poetry, and the genders are reversed. This happened to me or to anyone in the same situation quite often. There is no political correctness when it comes about math, maybe because one tends to believe that if you like math, you have no feelings, and such a remark wouldn't hurt you. And I actually was never offended when a girl said such outrageous things like that she hates math. Because whenever a girl told me she hates math, I knew she calls math something that really is boring and ugly, and not what I actually call math. Because math as I know it is poetry, is music, and is a wonderful goddess.
The story continues, years later. You talk about physics, with people interested in physics, or even with physicists. And you say something about this being just a mathematical consequence of that, or that certain phenomenon can be better understood if we consider it as certain mathematical object. It happens sometimes that your interlocutor becomes impatient and says that this is only math, and you were discussing physics, that math has no power there, and so on. Or that math is at best just a tool, and it actually obscures the real picture, or even that it limits our power of understanding.
People got the wrong picture that math is about numbers, or letters that stand for unknown numbers, or being extremely precise and calculating a huge number of decimals, or being very rigid and limited. In fact, math is just the study of relations. You will be surprised, but this is actually the mathematical definition of math. Numbers come into math only incidentally, as they come into music, when you indicate the duration or the tempo. Math is just a qualitative description of relations, and by relations we can understand a wide rainbow of things. I will detail this another time.
Imagine you wake up and you don't remember where you are, or who you are, like you were just born. You are surrounded by noise, which hurts your ears and your brain, meaningless random violent noise. You run desperately, trying to avoid it, but it is everywhere. And you finally find a spot where everything becomes suddenly wonderful: the noise becomes music, a celestial, beautiful music, and everything starts making sense. You are in a wonderful Cathedral, and you are tempted to call what you are listening "music of the spheres". The same music played earlier, but you were in the wrong place, where the acoustics was bad, or the sounds reached your ear in the wrong order, because of the relative positions of the instruments. Or maybe your ears were not yet tuned to the music. The point is that what seemed to be ugly noise, suddenly became so wonderful.
So, when someone says "I hate math!", all I hear is "I am in the Cathedral you call wonderful, but in the wrong place, where the celestial music becomes ugly violent noise!".
If you are interested in physics, you entered the Cathedral. But if you hate math, you will not last here, and maybe it is better to get out immediately! And if you are still interested in physics, come inside slowly, carefully choosing your steps, to avoid being assaulted by the music of the spheres, to allow it gently to enter in your mind, and to open your eyes. Choose carefully what you read, what lectures you watch, and ask questions. Don't be shy, any question you will ask is the right question for your current position, and for your next step.
There are some places in the Cathedral where the music is really beautiful. If you meet people there, to share the music, to dance, you will feel wonderful. If not, you will feel lonely. So you will want to share that place, you will want to invite your friends to join you.
The reason I love physics, is that I want to find these places. The reason I read blogs and papers, is that I want them to help me find such places. The reason I write papers, and I blog about this, is that I would like to share my places with others. I attend conferences (four so far this year) because they are like concerts, where you get the chance to listen some wonderful music, and to play your own.
But these are just words. I would like to write more posts in which I show the unreasonable beauty of math in physics, with concrete examples. Judging by the statistics, I have a few readers; judging by the number of comments, I don't really touch many of them. I know sometimes I am too serious, or too brief when I should explain more, especially when mathematical subtleties are involved. I am not very good at explaining abstract things to non-specialists, but I want to learn. I would like to write better, to be more useful, so, I would like to encourage comments and suggestions. Ask me to clarify, to explain, to detail, to simplify. Tell me what you would like to understand.
To start, I would like to write about vectors. They are so fundamentals in all areas of physics and mathematics, so I think it's a good idea to start with them. You may think they are too simple, and that you know all about them from high school, but you don't know the whole story. Later, when I will say something about quantum mechanics and relativity, they will be necessary (after all, according to quantum mechanics, the state of the universe is a vector). On the other hand, if you will understand them well, you will be around half of the way to understand some modern physics.
I just watched an episode of the Colbert Report, where the mathematician Edward Frenkel was invited in April this year. It was about Frenkel's new book and about his movie. He discusses at some point precisely the fact that it is so acceptable to hate math, as opposed to hating music or painting. Here is what he says for The Wall Street Journal:
It's like teaching an art class where they only tell you how to paint a
fence but they never show you Picasso. People say 'I'm bad at math,'
but what they're really saying is 'I was bad at painting the fence.'
a type of human behavior that deviates from that which is understood to be orthodox or normal.
Now consider the human mind. We evolved so that we find food, make children, avoid predators etc. All these are just means that serve to our survival in a universe that is trying to kill us. Or, even better, they serve to the selfish gene, to its replication.
So, the human mind shouldn't care about things that don't serve this purpose. What evolutionary purpose can be in doing math and physics? Indulging yourself in such activities doesn't serve the purpose of your survival and replication. One may say that, at least for some, science is their job, they earn money, and they survive. But researchers know better that jobs in the industry are safer and better paid, and with better success rate. And better success at ladies (although artists are doing even better). But anyway, sciences and arts are recent, so they can't be the product of mutation and selection. So, science and arts are perversions of the original purpose of the brain.
While they are not the product of evolution, they may be a byproduct. In order to survive, our ancestors had to identify patterns around them, use these patterns to make predictions. To anticipate when a wild animal will attack them, to recognize comestible fruits, to identify a sexual partner with good potential, all these require pattern recognition and the ability to make predictions. And this is why we became intelligent. So, even if we are using our intelligence to other purposes like sciences, this is a byproduct of evolution.
Nature has a way to reward you when you do something good for your genes. This is why we like to eat and to have sex. This is why we feel proud and happy when our children accomplish tasks or acquire new skills. But the blind gene doesn't know the future, so she can't reward us for actually doing something good for her. Instead, she rewards us for guessing patterns. We feel happy when we guess a pattern, and especially when a long anticipated prediction is confirmed. We identify patterns in sounds and drawings too, so this is why we like music and other arts. Even literature, builds on our predictions and anticipation. During anticipation, the brain produces the drugs that will make us happy. Building anticipation and suspense is the craft of accumulating this happiness in the consumer of one's art.
We are surprised when we make predictions which we consider safe, and turn out to be wrong. Sometimes, the anticipation accumulates the feel-good drug, and the surprise makes it explode. So this is how we laugh. Jokes are just clever ways to manipulate us into making predictions that turn out to be wrong in an unexpected and usually harmless way.
OK, so evolution explains all these as perversions of our mind, as byproducts. However, we know that science helped us to survive better. As a result of science and of its progeny, technology, we live longer, in better conditions, we find and produce food easier, we can take care better of our children and it also helps the children of our children.
So, science really helps the replication of the selfish gene.
I can't help but asking, did the selfish gene have a secret plan all this time?
I realized that an apparently well-understood word, "explanation", may lead to controversies in discussions about the foundations of physics. The foundations are already controversial enough, but this adds even more to the confusion. It gives you a double featured feeling: on the one hand, of being misunderstood, and on the other hand, that you don't understand where the interlocutor is going on.
What is an "explanation"? Probably the most usual meaning is that explanation is to reduce the unknown to the known, the unfamiliar to the familiar. When this happens, we get the sense of understanding.
Even since childhood, we had so many questions, and the grown ups explained them - reduced the unfamiliar to more familiar notions. In school, the teachers continued to provide us explanations, and we appreciated most the teachers who managed to make the unclear things more intuitive for us. When reading about the foundations of physics, we usually start with popular physics books. The most recommended such books are those providing the feeling of understanding, appealing to our intuition. When we try to read something more advanced, even if it is recommended by our favorite pop-sci books, we find ourselves in a totally different situation. Instead of finding the deeper explanations we are looking for, we find ourselves thrown in the turbulent torrents of the abstract mathematics, drifting without an apparent purpose. And what is most annoying, these textbooks and articles full of equations actually claim to explain things!
Why is this happening? I think that they are guided by another meaning of the term "explanation": "to give an explanation to a phenomenon is to deduce the existence of that phenomenon from hypotheses considered more fundamental. For example, when from the principles of General Relativity was deduced the correct value from the perihelion precession of Mercury, it was considered that GR explained this precession. On the other hand, the deflection of light by the Sun was considered a prediction. After the full experimental confirmation, it became an explanation. I consider that "prediction" is just a temporary status of a scientific explanation, and that the fact that many explanations are first predictions is a historical accident.
There seem to be a similarity between principles/phenomena and axioms/theorems. This similarity suggests the reason why mathematics plays such an important role in the explanation of phenomena. To deduce more from less, complicated from simple, diverse from universal, this means to use logic and mathematics. And there is no limit of the difficulty of the needed mathematics, even if the principles are not that difficult.
This notion of explanation, I understand now, it is not shared by all of us. The reason is simple: because "explanation" usually means to reduce the unfamiliar to familiar. When somebody claimed to explain a phenomenon, we expect him to show how this strange phenomenon can be described in more familiar, concrete terms. Instead, we find that he or she starts describing it in more abstract terms. How come that such more and more abstract terms are shamelessly named "more basic principles", "more elementary principles" and so on? Isn't this a lie?
Maybe the explanation by "reducing to concrete things" has pedagogical reasons, and the explanation by "reducing to universal principles" is in fact foundational research. But does this means that the gap between pedagogical and scientific explanation should grow as it does nowadays? Wouldn't be much, much better to have a mechanistic explanation? After all, Maxwell sought for such an explanation of the electromagnetic waves, even though he had the equations! The ether theorists of the XIXth century tried to reduce electromagnetism to vibrations in a medium. This tradition still continues, and we encounter on a daily basis renowned scientists trying to explain things which other renowned scientists consider to be already explained: electromagnetism, wave-particle duality, gravity, entropy, the Unruh effect, spacetime, time, black holes and so on.
Probably it would be better to have a mechanistic explanation of everything. This would definitely help the public outreach of physics, and will help physics to advance faster. This may have a huge impact on technology, and on our lives. But who can bet that God, when created the world, bothered about our need to reduce the things to what we know? Why would the universe care about our limited understanding, when decided what principles to follow? Who are we, why would we be so important? I think that, although it would be desirable to find concrete, familiar universal principles behind this complex and diverse world, we have no guarantee that this will ever happen. "You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."
The definition of "explanation" as a reduction to universal principles has its own advantages, given that we do not take these principles as ultimate truths, but just as hypotheses. One of these advantages is that it allows us to equally appreciate theories which seem to contradict each other. We can appreciate its explanatory power in the sense stated above: as its efficient encapsulation of a wide variety of phenomena in fewer, simpler, and more general principles. This doesn't mean that we should consider these principles as being "true". It is not about being "true", just about encapsulating as much phenomena as possible in as few principles as possible, even if these principles are more abstract. If we insist to become fans of one theory or another as the ultimate "truth", we may reduce our capacity to grasp other explanations. This would not be a problem, if we could prove our theories beyond any doubt, but the truth is that we cannot, no matter how convincing they may look to us.
The purpose of this short post is to provide a very brief presentation of Quantum Theory.
Short:
In quantum theory, particles are waves of various shapes. You cannot directly observe the waves, only some of their properties. Each property is well defined only for some of the possible shapes. There is no shape for which the properties "position" and "momentum" are simultaneously well defined (Heisenberg's principle). When you observe a property, you find the wave in a shape corresponding to that property (like magic!), without regard of its previous shape. Entanglement: n particles are a single wave in a space with n x 3 dimensions, they don't have individual shapes.
Details:
In classical physics, particles are points moving on well-defined trajectories. This picture turned out to be an approximation: a particle is in fact a wave (although there is no waving medium for this wave). We know it is a wave, because it interferes, it can be diffracted, its allowed states in an atom are those corresponding to an integral number of wavelengths, and it is governed by a wave equation. As a wave, it has no definite trajectory, and insisting in discussing in terms of position and momentum as for point particles leads to problems.
But you can't observe the wave directly, only classical properties, like position or momentum. Each property you observe is well defined only for a particular set of possible shapes of the wave. When you observe its position, the wave appears to be concentrated at a point, but it has an undefined momentum. Conversely, the possible shapes that have well defined momentum have no well defined position – they are spread in all the space. Similar things happen when you want to observe any other classical property.
The first strangest thing about quanta is that when you look at them, they take precisely one of those shapes corresponding to the property you observe, without regard of their previously known shape. If further you try to observe another property, which is not well defined for the previously observed shape, you will find the new kind of shape, allowed by the new property. Knowing its shape before an observation, you can not predict which of the allowed shapes you obtain, but only the probability for each allowed shape.
The second strangest thing is the entanglement. When dealing with more particles, say n, they are not described by individual waves, but by a single wave on a space obtained by multiplying the usual three-dimensional space with itself n times. This means that after two particles interact, they have no individual shape, but a common shape on this space with 6 dimensions. We can still observe one of the particles, and obtain a particular 3-dimensional shape for it, but if we try to observe both particles, the shape of one is dependent on the shape of the other. The strangest part is that their shapes are correlated even if the particles are separated by very large distances.
