Quantum cognition, when old gods learn to talk like scientists
I found an article today, on Stanford’s prestigious philosophical encyclopedia, the rightfully named “Plato”. The article goes over the old materialist / dualistic debate, but approach it from the side-door of quantum physics. Quantum physics!
No area of science is safe from bullshit, and I must say, this may be the best-written piece of bullshit I have ever read.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/
The whole article is heavy under biased premises of how consciousness has been defined in the field of philosophy and in early psychological work. They brush over the premise very fast, the main problem is centered around how to reconcile the idea of free will with a deterministic universe. This notion has always fascinated me, “free will” is a catch 22, because if it is truly free it cannot sit at all in the material world. In the idea of a free will is necessarily the idea of a monadic entity bound to no rule but its own and able to bend our material reality. Hence the debate is already closed before it has started.
Under the pen of the author(s), they cunningly transform the problem to ask if a phenomenon at a quantum level could be displaced by a certain object/force that could introduce truly nondeterministic reactions. But again, this question is misleading because it implies also an otherworldly truly independent element to direct this force in the first place. And even if they could prove the existence of such a force, this phenomenon would be very far removed from our own macroscopic consciousness, but yet they would happily make the leap.
“Philosophers latched onto the idea of QM in consciousness bc they thought the randomness aspect left room for free will. Of course, it doesn’t, any more than hooking up an ax over your head that will only drop if a certain atom decay means that you can now choose the time of your death.”
— A guy called Omalleit
They call the materialistic (hopefully still the proven, only provable, and accepted view of the world) a “strong reductionist approach”. Under cover of giving “scientific” account of how the brain works, the author(s) write three ridiculously short paragraphs on the “Neurophysiological Levels of Description”, and is sure to cite one or two neuroscientists only to call their approach reductionist. The author preaches to his choir, and reading the whole article, I felt uneasy because of the author’s dishonest use of the scientific method of reasoning. He does not take into account modern neuroscientific or computational views of how the brain works and since the premises are speculative, the whole article is hard to read and not informative in itself, except to realize how many scientists have been desperately trying to reconcile their dualistic beliefs and science (I was shocked at how many Physicists worked on the subject).
The case of consciousness
The position of the author on consciousness in its relation to free will is not very clear and I was not able to understand if the author judged that one must be sentient to have free will. It probably does for the author, so does it mean that free will is only accessible to humans?
If not I wonder which animal nervous systems have access to such quantic wonders? The worm? The ant? The squid? The dog? The chimp? Or just us?
Strange that we so very rapidly fall into old religious beliefs. Doing the devil’s advocate, for free will to exist you would not really need consciousness to be otherworldly. Free will could be this last beautiful spark of magical self that uses information contained in the material consciousness to decide, beyond this world, of what has to happen in the now not-so-deterministic physical world. But authors won’t have that, consciousness is not material, and they have arguments against such “strong reductionist” view. *sigh*
“The most discussed counterarguments against the validity of such strong reductionist approaches are qualia arguments, which emphasize the impossibility for materialist accounts to properly incorporate the quality of the subjective experience of a mental state, the “what it is like” (Nagel 1974) to be in that state”
If that is the most discussed counter-argument the authors probably could have stopped there, it is not a counter argument at all. The apparent immediateness and reflexive nature of consciousness are in no way proof of its immaterial nature. Consciousness is a seemingly unitary process, a monade, an indivisible phenomenon, but it is not. It is partial, biased, composed of continuous unconscious preprocessing steps, of attentional, memory retrieval, reflective post-processing that can be measured, deconstructed, and tempered with through experimentation. Their argument is that a qualia, a subjective experience, appears to be more than the sum of its material functional parts. But all scientific pieces of evidence on consciousness would actually favor the opposite, a conscious experience and the information it holds is less than the sum of its parts.
Taking a simple psychophysical GO task, let’s say click on a button every time you see a dog in a series of images appearing on the screen at a fast pace. While performing the task sometimes a dog would appear and not produce a conscious recognition nor a motor response, but recording the brain using Electroencephalography (EEG recording electric signals in the brain), you would usually be able on those trials to detect error signals. That signal appears for rare events of interest — here the dog. Although this error information is present at a subconscious level and implicated already a good amount of preprocessing steps (proportional to the delay between stimulus and error signal), it did not reach full consciousness to produce the motor response. On the other hand, a machine trained to recognize such EEG errors signals on both correct and omission trials would be able to detect the dog, when the human did not, using the signal of the human’s brain. This is proof that a conscious experience, a qualia, is less than the sum of its part, it is using a final filtered hyper-relevant representation of your inner and environmental reality.
But some might say: “Yeah! But that is only information processing, like your eye detecting light, it does not prove consciousness is indivisible, or a sum of parts. It could just be that information is somehow “communicated” to consciousness at a later stage.”
Very well, if consciousness is defined as an independent element that somehow communicates with the brain through an unknown channel, first we agree that consciousness is partial and use only a fraction of the information treated in the brain. But more importantly, we agree that it uses only information treated in the brain. Hence it is not free of the material world, and if the decision process is somehow “free” from classical physical rules, it still has to work with partial and imperfect data.
But again, this is not even the claim of the author for whom consciousness receives information from other channels, and who likes to remind us of this weird and strange phenomenon of Synchronicity. Assuredly, nothing but quantum physics could explain this… I should have become a magician instead of a scientist, my life would have been easier (with probably more likes on my posts…).
So let’s tackle the monadic indivisible view of consciousness which is even more easily derailed. First, someone must have the intellectual honesty to define what is consciousness, what is its boundaries, its functions, its accesses and interfaces, which is something the author do not do. And if they stick to a philosophical definition of consciousness, the question remains unsolvable because to my knowledge consciousness has not been philosophically described in a functional way.
But whatever your own definition, consciousness is at least in part the ability to perceive objects in relation to itself. An example of such a mechanism being incomplete is when you are faced with a negligent patient after a right Sylvian stroke. For him, the left side of the world and of any object in it would be forgotten. Although his visual system works fine, he will tend to forget you when you stand on his left, asking to copy a drawing he will forget the entire left part, he will eat only the right part of his plate, and usually feel that the left part of his body belongs to a stranger. But his memory will be intact, you would have explained to him what he is suffering from, that he will tend to forget the left side, that his left hand is not one of a stranger. But he will tend to naturally forget, or not process this information, hence the name “negligence”. Although he would know his disease, be able to explain it in your terms, he will still make the same mistakes, and often would not really feel like anything is really wrong with him (anosognosia) — when asked he might tell you something is wrong, but not that. A function is lost, but the brain even forgets it had ever access to this function, it forgets it had a left side, that there is a left side in the room. This is not an isolated syndrome, focal neurological deficits are often associated with some degree of neglect for the lost functions. As if the ability to imagine, model, project, and the ability to be conscious of the loss function would somehow arise from the function itself. Wernicke’s Aphasia, for example, produces a syndrome in which patients do not realize they are saying or hearing nonsense, what could be their qualia then?
Patients suffering from Pure alexia can write but not read… they can move their hands, hold a pen, and write correctly words they are unable to read.
A related weird syndrome is the Gerstmann syndrome in which impairment in written language production is associated with difficulty discriminating between one’s own fingers, difficulty distinguishing left from right, and difficulty performing calculations. You might say: “but that is not consciousness, this appears before consciousness”. But what is consciousness then? When does it appear? What are the necessary characteristics that consciousness must have?
If you believe your consciousness is more that the sum of its part, and monadic, just take an LSD trip and you will see what your brain has in store for you, what it filters out, what it can enhance or produce by itself — but also the changes in perception of self, and time, and space: is it not different above and beyond any information processing? Is it not what you would define as a true alteration of your qualia ?
But maybe then you will say LSD molecules are in resonance with the central string of the universe, it is the gateway to the Quantic perception!
In reality (not fantasy) the brain has nothing to do with qualias, it works at the opposite of what a monad or a qualia is supposed to represent. The brain uses distributed computations, distributed representations across a large array of units (neurons). Multiple neurons will encode one concept, and each neuron will be participating in various concepts. Multiple brain regions will be recruited for a function, and each brain region will be participating in several functions. Conscious experience arises from these distributed networks interactions. Make the mental experiment of killing one neuron one by one (leave the pons and medulla alone so that you do not die too fast). As your brain progressively disappears, you will not see the qualia disappear abruptly, but you will see at first part of the experience, part of the function of what constitute the notion of self, slightly disfunction. Then, those functions would progressively disappear at their own unpredictable pace, with strong interdependence and complex interactions between functions.
The myth of the observer
If there is consciousness, and free will, there must be an observer, right? From the outside, he will observe the material world to choose his next action. Or is there a little bit of brain that observes all the rest at once and that we should call, consciousness?
“As a consequence, it is inessential whether a detector or the human brain is ultimately referred to as the “observer””
From a dualistic view arise false premises. The brain is not an observer, you are not observing the state of your brain, or collapsing any function. You are your brain, living in an illusion created by the interaction of systems inside your brain. It is all well packaged with your sense of self, which is also an illusion, a function that can be altered, for example, in patients suffering from depersonalization, or derealization.
If the brain was a projector able to display the movie of your life on a screen, the concept of self you call “me” has less to do with a guy sitting in front of the screen shouting orders, than with the screen itself. Filling its entire surface with the information the brain sends it. Your judgment about the dog and the choice you will make to press the button can be predicted even before you are conscious of it, by looking at signals in your brain. This feeling of conscious choice is nothing but a movie your brain is generating, to give ‘you’ a sense of self and continuity.
Patient suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome offer a fascinating example of our brain continuous quest for meaning and continuity, even when it is not able to find it. For the Korsakoff patients, who due to severe Vit B1 (thiamine) deficiency suffer diffuse frontal metabolic dysfunction and often irreversible bilateral lesions in the hippocampo-mamillo-thalamic pathway, would become amnesic and incapable of forming new memories. Lost in a forever-present state, those patients would present ‘confabulations’, false memories, explaining why they are where they are, and who other people are in respect to them. They would tell that the doctor in the room is a close childhood friend of his and that they have been fishing together yesterday. Filling the gaps is a central function of the brain, and by extension, continuity is maintained whatever the cost.
Another amazing body of research was produced through the study of split-brain patients in the 60’s. Split-brain patients are those patients who had the main bundle of fibers (corpus callosum) between the two brain hemispheres surgically severed to treat resistant epilepsy. In those patients, both hemispheres would act on their own accord, but only the left brain would verbalize the reason of its action, and infer the reason of the other hemisphere action. This short (but sweet) article goes over the phenomenon:
Some patients are born without any connection between the two hemispheres (anterior and posterior commissures, as well as corpus callosum), such as Kim Peek, a savant, who was the inspiration for the movie Rain Man. It is certain that the processes going on in Kim Peek’s brain were very different than those in surgical split-brain patients. From what we know of brain plasticity, vastly different outcomes are seen between congenital (or very early) defects and the same defects seen in older children or adults. Kim Peek often got into fits of anger at what it seems to be an imaginary friend, speaking out loud what would seem out of context and nonsensical. I have no proof of this but I am certain his two hemispheres, his two ‘consciousness’ learned to communicate through other indirect sensory channels (visual, vocalization, touch, motor).
It is understandable that people would want to reconcile dualistic view with the cold reality of modern neuroscience, but if it is the truth that you are seeking, and until proven otherwise, there is no need of anything but distributed computation to explain everything about cognition.
But I guess everybody needs to believe in something, at least the authors are not endorsing creationism, and seem open to debate.
