to understand it, we must look beneath it and there is nothing beneath it.īut how do we know that? We don’t, actually. Such an answer raises further questions: If “the conscious mind is nothing more than the brain,” then we won’t understand it. They argue that “although we know that the conscious mind is nothing more than the brain, it is simply beyond the conceptual apparatus of human beings to understand how this can be the case.” ( Britannica) Marcelo Gleiser, “ Can quantum mechanics explain consciousness?” at Big Think (November 24, 2021)īy the Mysterians, he means philosophers like Thomas Nagel (what is it like to be a bat?), Colin McGinn (“we are not equipped to understand the workings of conciousness, despite its objective naturalness”) and David Chalmers (the Hard Problem of Consciousness). This unknowability may well be what will rescue what is left of our humanity from the unstoppable mechanization and objectification of modern existence.
The nature of consciousness could be one of those “unknowables” that many people will find very hard to live with.
Whatever the resolution may be, we still do not know how to avoid the arguments from the Mysterians. Then he closes with an interesting admission: Gleiser suggests that there co-operation between quantum and classical physics, depending on the level, may be part of the explanation. That said, we can be fairly certain that classical physics doesn’t account for consciousness either. Sharp criticism of these hypotheses, he notes, includes the concern that the brain is too “busy and warm” ( Max Tegmark) for anything but classical physics. He also hat tips Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which likewise incorporates “quantum vibrations in microtubules.” Quantum entanglement between electrons in the neurons might mean that contact can be maintained over considerable distances because two entagled particle will act together even when separated. They see the protein tubulin, which forms the microtubules that make up the skeleton of neurons as a enabling the entangled quantum states the force a choice.
Physicist (and Nobelist) Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff offer a model of consciousness from quantum mechanics: Gleiser poses it as a question, “Could thoughts exist in some sort of quantum superposition in an unconscious level only to become conscious when there is a specific selection - akin to a measurement of the electron’s position?” (explained in detail here). But where does that leave us? Vertebrates of widely varying degrees of intelligence or self-awareness have brain stems. For example, in a recent discussion, neuropsychologist Mark Solms and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor agreed that, while neuroscientists tend to see the prefrontal cortex of the human brain as the seat of consciousness, clinical experience points to portions of the brain stem. Marcelo Gleiser, “ Can quantum mechanics explain consciousness?” at Big Think (November 24, 2021)
The hard part is understanding how active neurons conspire to create the sense of who we are - that is, translating bioelectrical activity and blood flow into self-awareness.
In a nutshell, the issue here is that tagging neuronal activity is the easy part of the task. It’s the same with the brain and the mind: