Genesis of EdenCONTENTS
CONSUMMATING COSMOLOGY: THE EMERGENCE OF SENTIENT CONSCIOUSNESS
The deepest question which can be posed about cosmology is what is the relationship between the existential observer and the universe at large? What is the relation between conscious subjectivity and the objective physical world? This is a question which has plagued philosophers and scientists from Bishop Berkeley through Descartes to modern researchers from Francis Crick, who believes consciousness to be a product specific brain oscillations and their neural mechanisms to David Chalmers who sees the 'hard problem in consciousness research' as a fundamental philosophical chasm which can only be crossed through a greater description of reality.
Understanding of the dynamics of the central nervous system has multiplied and we now have some idea of the ways in which the brain forms models of the world. The brain uses massive parallel organization, a sappy electrochemical brain, as dependent on chemical neurotransmitters and long term potentiation as it is on rapid electrochemical changes. The brain is also a dynamical organ in which variations are continuous, resonant and potentially chaotic, rather than a simple all-or-nothing digital computer.
Much of the organization of the cerebral cortex of mammals is a spatially distributed system of columns penetrating several layers of cortical neurons to form a massively parallel system of dynamical structures from the sensory areas of the fingers through the visual areas to the language centres. As a picture of the dynamics of the cortex has emerged from PET scans and magnetic resonance imaging, we have discovered something of the paradoxical nature of cortical organization. We can now highlight the different regions involved in specific language tasks and discover that visual processing is performed in many distinct regions in parallel, so that colour is processed separately from movement. Complementing scan studies are studies of the brain waves themselves, all of which indicate the brain is a dynamical organ reaching states of coherent organization through dynamical transitions in and out of chaos.
However. despite these advances, a chasm still remains between the brain states under a researchers probe and the subjective experiences of reality we depend on for our awareness of the physical world. And this comes on top of a fundamental complementarity upon which we depend for our existence. Although we navigate our lives and perform our science on the assumption of the existence of the physical world, we access physical reality only through our subjective sensory experiences. Without the subjective aspect it remains unclear that we could establish that the physical universe exists.
The problem of consciousness is compounded by the question of free will. What is the purpose of subjective consciousness if it is only the brain states and not the subjective aspect which is effecting our future physical states? Put in reverse, if subjective consciousness has any evolutionary advantage then it can do so only by interrupting in some way the physical determinism of brain processes. This is the problem of free will - intent. Everyone who sets foot out the door invests in the principal of personal autonomy, that we have a personal subjective control over our physical circumstances. Yet this implies mind affecting matter, something which mechanistic science tries to deny.
This question led several of the early researchers of quantum physics to propose that the brain may be in some way utilizing the uncertainty of individual quanta that violates causality at the foundation of physics to give rise to a quantum uncertain brain state. Eddington, for example noted that the uncertainty of position of a synaptic vesicle was large enough to be comparable with the width of the membrane, making synaptic release potentially subject to quantum uncertainty.
Since then the non-local space-spanning manifestations of quantum uncertainty have become apparent and given rise to the concept of quantum non-locality. A key example of this is the situation of the EPR experiment when a single quantum event releases two particles in the same wave function. The particles spins or polarizations then become correlated in a way which involves mutual exchange across space-like intervals in a manner which local information limited by the speed of light cannot traverse. This is consistent with a universe whose underlying quantum dynamics are correlated in a way which is consistent with all the events being related parts of a whole which sources from the cosmic wave function itself, allowing for all manner of subtle interactive possibilities.
The space-time properties of quantum phenomena also have a peculiar hand-shaking potentiality in which future can affect past as well as past affect future. Below is illustrated the Wheeler delayed choice experiment in which the route taken by a photon around a gravitational lens can be determined after it has already passed by rearranging the detection apparatus at the end of its path, reinforcing the notion of future-past hand-shaking. The concept is also fully consistent with quantum field theory formulations as exemplified by Feynman diagrams, which themselves can be time reversed, resulting for example in inter-conversion between positrons and electrons.
A specific theory which resolves all these paradoxes is the transactional interpretation. In this view each emitter of a quantum sends out an offer wave and each potential absorber sends out a confirmation wave. The decision-making process that results in collapse of the wave function of many possibilities to the actual unique real quantum event results in an interference between one emitter and one absorber interfering to form the real particle travelling between. In the transactional interpretation, the absorber, such as my eye looking at a distant star is as essential to the transaction as the star which long ago emitted the light.
In this view of quantum mechanics there is then a sense in which any quantum emitter is implicitly aware of the future existence of the absorber by the very act of entering the transaction. This then leads to a very intriguing possibility - that evolution has used the laws of quantum non-locality to enable a form of temporal anticipation which might be of pivotal survival value and hence strongly selected as a trait.
Although the first conceptions of the intervention of quantum uncertainty were relatively simple and conventional researchers rejected the idea of an ephemeral quantum fluctuation citing the law of mass action as inexorable even at the level of the synapse, a variety of developments from chaos theory to quantum computing have brought the whole question back into the centre of the scientific arena of discovery.
Firstly the hopes of artificial intelligence to impose a narrow minimalist idea of digital processing as a model for cognition have failed to mature, despite successes in certain areas such as chess strategy. The key problems of computation in the open environment are classically intractable because the number of computations required grows super-exponentially with each added contingency. The artificial intelligent deer would thus die, stuck trying to make a decision which path to take to avoid the tiger. Secondly a host of reasons have emerged why a real biological system handling open environment problems may need to invoke stochastic 'randomness' or frank chaos to free up its dynamics to explore the 'phase space' of possibilities open to it, without becoming locked in a local energy valley which keeps it from a global solution.
Walter Freeman's (Skarda and Freeman 1987) model of chaos in sensory perception gives a good feeling for how chaos can play a key role in sensory recognition. If we consider a rabbit sniffing air which may also contain a specific smell. The experimental data fits a model in which the olfactory cortex undergoes high energy chaotic excitation in time to form a spatially correlated 'holographic' wave across the cortex, as the rabbit sniffs, causing the state of the cortex to travel widely through its phase space of possibilities without becoming stuck in any mode. As the sniff ends, the energy parameter reduces carrying the dynamic down towards basins in the potential energy landscape. If the smell is recognized the dynamic ends in an existing basin, but if it is new, a bifurcation occurs to form a new basin (a new symbol is created) constituting the learning process, as illustrated below. The same logic can be applied to cognition and problems solving in which the unresolved aspects of the problem undergo chaotic evolution until a bifurcation from chaos to order arrives at the 'optimal' solution.
A second fundamental reason for any dynamical nervous system to enter chaos is that chaotic systems are arbitrarily sensitive on their initial or external conditions. A chaotic state is thus capable of being acutely responsive to its environment over time, while any stable process heads inexorably towards its stable states or periodicities, entrapped by its very stability.
Several indicators of the use of chaos in the electroencephalogram come for measurements of the fractal dimension of a variety of brain states from pathology through sleep to restful wakefulness. Recordings from single neurons, and indeed form other cells such as the insulin-releasing cells of the pancreas indicate their capacity for chaotic excitation. The organizers of neural systems are also frequently non-pulse coded 'silent' cells capable of such continuous non-linear dynamics. Despite the classical result of quasi-linearity of the axonal discharge rate with depolarization, virtually all aspects of synaptic transmission and excitation have non-linear characteristics capable of chaos and bifurcation. The electroencephalogram itself although nominally described as having brain rhythms such as alpha, beta, gamma and theta actually consists of broad band frequencies, rather than resonances or harmonics, consistent with a ground swell of chaotic excitation.
Into this picture of global and cellular chaos comes a second complementary aspect, the fractal nature of neuronal architecture and brain processes and their capacity for self-organized criticality at a microscopic level. The many to many connectivity of the brain, the tuning of responsiveness to a sigmoidal threshold, and the fractal architecture of individual neurones combine with the sensitive dependence of chaotic dynamics and self-organized criticality of global dynamics to provide a rich conduit for instabilities at the level of the synaptic vesicle or ion channel to become amplified into a global change. The above description of chaotic transitions in perception and cognition leads naturally to critical states in a situation of choice between conflicting outcomes and this is exactly where the global dynamic would become critically poised and thus sensitive to microscopic or even quantum instabilities.
This fractal process runs all the way from the global brain state to molecular quantum chaos. From the synaptic vesicle we converge to the ion channel which in the case of the K+ voltage channel is determined to have a fractal kinetics, and further to the structure and dynamics of proteins and their conformational dynamics, both of which operate on non-linear fractal protocols. The brain is thus an organ which is capable of supersensitivity to the instabilities of the quantum milieu.
The purpose may be as follows: Early on in the evolution of the first excitable cells, a solution was arrived at to the problem of quantum perception. The sense modes we experience are not biological as such but the qualitative modes of quantum interaction with the physical universe. They thus have plausible cosmological status. Vision deals with interaction between orbitals and photons, hearing with the harmonic excitations of molecules and potentially with membrane solitons as well. Smell is the avenue of orbital-orbital interaction, as is taste. Touch is a hybrid sense involving a mixture of these.
Now the hypothesis is this. Chaotic excitation was a primal phenomenon which occurred in the first cells, even as the metabolic pathways were becoming established. Chaotic excitation leads to a multi-quantum-mode sense organ responding to external perturbations of the environment by sensitive dependence. This sense organ then found that through the exchange of transactional hand-shaking with its own emission and absorption states, leading to a form of anticipation of its own immediate future through the inner correspondences of quantum non-locality. This anticipation then proved to have significant selective advantage for the organism and thus became fixed in evolution as the sentient conscious brain, complementing computational capacity with transactional anticipation through the chaotically fractal central nervous system.
What is interesting here is that the 'binding problem' - how sensory experiences being processed in parallel in different parts of the cortex are bound together to give the conscious expression we associate with our integrated perception of the world - has not direct solution in terms of being hard-wired to some collection point - the ultimate seat of consciousness. Every indication is that consciousness is distributed and bound together by non-linear resonances in the brain which is exactly what we would expect in a situation self-resonances were being used as part of a transactionally super-causal solution to the perception-cognition dilemma. Below are illustrated two such models, one explaining the electroencephalogram as a whole in terms of phased excitation-inhibition feedback and the other linking two frequencies of brain wave in a resonant binding.
A point of clarification about survival is needed here. The key aspects of survival involve contingencies which cannot be computationally solved. For example the critical decisions for survival of a gazelle are which path to take today of two possibly indistinguishable routes to the water hole. Logic may suggest one is safer but the tiger could be on either path and hunch in the face of the shadow of paranoia is perhaps the best survival strategy.
Subjective consciousness then enters into the picture as the inner complement of the quantum non-local hand-shaking process which violates the temporal causality of initial states determining future states, which we associate with the Newtonian universe and temporal determinism. Since the quantum transaction appears to be cosmologically general to all quantum interaction, its manifestation in resolving the fundamental questions of quantum interaction with the physical world adopts a wholly cosmological dimension in which the sentient conscious brain becomes a central avenue for the expression of quantum non-locality in space time. This is the consummation of cosmology, not in the alpha of the big-bang, nor in the omega of finality but in the sigma of its interactive complexity.
Since the brain has at the same time been evolving towards a type of universality expressed in flexible algorithms for multi-sense processing and modelling, which experiencers of synaesthesia can witness are capable of coexisting in one multi-sense perception mode, a huge cosmological question is now raised. Is evolution simply adventitious accident, or is it part of the way the quantum universe explores its own phase space of possibilities in finally converging towards a universal solution to the expression of the quantum non-local substratum in the physical universe.
There is an ultimate quantum cosmological reason for this. In a real universe we have the dilemma of the many-universes problem. How does reduction of the wave packet result in one history or another occurring, This is the famous Schrödinger cat paradox. In the real world if we wire a cat to a geiger counter on lethal consequence, when we open the box, the cat is either alive or dead, not in a superposition of possible states.
But the theory of virtual and real particles demonstrates that real and virtual particles are indistinguishable. If we oscillate the electromagnetic field we elicit a radio broadcast, virtual photons in the electromagnetic field have become real ones telling us the news. The transactional interpretation explains this problem as follows - the many probability multiverses solve their problem of super-abundance by hand-shaking across space-time to reduce the packet of all possible emitter absorber connections to one 'happy marriage' as illustrated in fig 31(f). The universe, thus becomes experientially historical. Napoleon does not win the Battle of Waterloo, despite the quantum uncertainty of Nelson's blind eye. The same goes for all the hopeful monsters of evolution.
Quantum non-locality thus appears to have a method through space-time hand-shaking of determining which one of the multi-verses hovering in the virtual continuum will actually manifest. The role of consciousness as a cosmological process appears to be to mediate effectively between the shadow world of the cosmic subjective, represented in physics as quantum non-locality, with the uniqueness of historicity which is itself, despite the manifold weaving of mutation and natural selection, very much a unique happening which never fully converges to the statistical interpretation of the cosmic wave function, because each change leads to another, despite the cosmic epochs elapsing since the big-bang.
This leads to a deep question shared by all the spiritual paths from the dawning of shamanism, through Vedanta to the Tao and even in the Judeo-Christian paths belief in the prophetic tradition and obsession with unseen influences. If historicity is in some way interactive with the existential condition, what are the consequences for science, society and cosmology itself? The Tao states that the cosmic creative force works through three avenues, chance, life and consciousness.
Our description of reality here suggests that the physical universe has a complement - the self or cosmic 'mind'. Such a view both of the cosmological role of evolution to sentience and the brain as an interface between the cosmic subjective and the physical universe puts us right back into the centre of the cosmic cyclone in a way which Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Leonardo and Albert Einstein would have all appreciated. Consciousness is then not just a globally-modulated functional monitor of attention subject helplessly to the physical states of the brain, but a complementary aspect to physical reality.
Although subjective consciousness, by necessity, reflects the constructive model of reality the brain adopts in its sensory processing and associative areas, this does not fully explain the subjective aspect of conscious experience. Conscious experience underlies and is a necessary foundation for our entire access to the physical world. Without the consensuality of our collective subjective conscious experience, it remains doubtful whether the physical world would have an actual existence. It is only through stabilities of subjective conscious experience that we come to infer the objective physical world model of science as an indirect consequence. For this reason, subjective consciousness may be too fundamental a property to be explained, except in terms of fundamental physical principles, as a dual manifestation of quantum non-locality, which directly manifests the principle of choice in free-will in generating history.