Quantum Reality
Nick Herbert
IS CONSCIOUSNESS A TYPE OF
QUANTUM KNOWLEDGE?
Science's biggest mystery is
the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or
imperfect theories of human awareness, we simply have no such
theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has
something to do with the head, rather than the foot. That's not much
but it appears to be more than the ancient Egyptians knew; the
Egyptians threw away the brain before beginning their elaborate
embalming procedures, judging it to be a mere accessory.
Is it possible that consciousness is
some sort of quantum effect? Is human awareness a privileged access
to the "inside" of the quantum world, an open door to some
brain quon's realm of possibility? Can we know firsthand what it is
like to dwell in the quantum world just by sitting still and looking
inside our heads? Human mental experience seems to be of two
kinds--an experience of facts, memories, emotions, body states-a
thoroughly classical kind of knowing which we might call "computer
consciousness," which takes place against a peculiar background
of "raw awareness"-that uncanny yet familiar feeling we
relinquish when we go to sleep and awaken into every morning. Some
have called thus second kid of experience "consciousness without
an object." I call it “ordinary awareness" and believe
that it is one human quality that distinguishes us from computers--at
least computers as they are presently constituted.
If ordinary awareness is a direct
connection to quantum reality, then just as our external knowledge of
quantum entitles may be characterized by the term "quantum
ignorance, “ so we might call this immediate internal experience of
the world's real nature "quantum knowledge." One of the
greatest scientific achievements imaginable would be the discovery of
an explicit relationship between the waveform alphabets of quantum
theory and certain human states of consciousness. Bell's theorem
shows that although the world's phenomena seem strictly local, the
reality beneath this phenomenal surface must be superluminal. The
world's deep reality is maintained by an invisible quantum connection
whose ubiquitous influence is unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate.
Unconfirmed rumors of telepathy and other alleged powers of mind
aside, our basic computer consciousness appears to be as local as any
other classical phenomenon. However, if ordinary awareness is a
private manifestation of deep quantum reality, Bell's theorem
requires our quantum knowledge to be non-local, instantly linked to
everything it has previously touched. Since this type of awareness
consists of consciousness without content, it is difficult to see
what use we could make of such non-local
connections. On the other hand, perhaps
these connections are not there for us to "use."
Religions assure us that we are all
brothers and sisters, children of the same deity, biologists say that
we are entwined with all life-forms on this planet: our fortunes rise
or fall with theirs. Now, physicists have discovered that the very
atoms of our bodies are woven out of a common superluminal fabric.
Not merely in physics are humans out of touch with reality, we ignore
these connections at our peril. Albert Einstein, a seeker after
reality all his life, had this to say concerning the illusion of
separate- ness: "A human being ls part of the whole, called by
us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences
himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the
rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion
is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires
and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to
free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its
beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving
for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a
foundation for inner security."
What - when you really think about it - is consciousness? I had long understood that this is the mega-question of both science and philosophy but I had not appreciated either the tautology of epicycles that neuroscience had projected onto relations between the brain and the mind or the full boggle of philosophy's forays in search of subjective being. Our own awareness is the thing in the universe most difficult to understand or vindicate. As one chemist friend emailed me upon learning that I was writing this book "I personally have no idea what the mind is. I know what a brain is but I have no idea how the two are related." This is a plaint of the sort that I have heard so often that I tend now to hear its undercurrent too: "Can you believe that the relationship got so weird we can't fit mind into the universe anymore or for that matter, even find it?"
Most working scientists share this perplexity yet they cannot entertain the notion that consciousness might have a source beyond entropy and its workarounds. It is a lynchpin of modernity that we cannot be intrinsically and independently conscious. Of course even the folks who propose that we cannot cannot. The only way they can adduce or uphold their own mindedness is by overdetermining or misplacing concreteness in one form or another and then assigning it a basis in their own brain. Failing (of course) to uncover such a basis they concoct one. Physicists and biologists will no more admit the contraversions in their theories than say Tea Party Americans will risk conceding that Barack Obama was born in the USA. For scientists to tolerate any exogenous source of consciousness would be to forfeit their eminent domain and vested legitimacy - the basis of their declaration of power. Consciousness must finally be either illusional or imaginary - a spinoff of thermodynamics and neural stacking. It cannot aspire to any higher status. If it ever gets a foothold outside entropy their goose is cooked.
I mean to kamikaze rather than skulk into this snafu avoiding resorts of quantum mechanical metaphors that relocate science and spirituality at layers of the same general paradox. What I seek instead is an actual convergence of scientific and psychic attunements - very very different birds that stick out hard beaks and sharp claws in trying to bash the other into nonexistence. I force them into coexistence and frame their meanings in terms of each others. I can't think of anyone else eager enough to operate at this frequency yet I believe that it is precisely where we have to go. Mind cannot be shriven onto its tissues. There are no two ways about it. Either human experience is an emergent evolutionary state of the brain and nothing more creating just a mirage of consciousness or it is a transpersonal event that has always existed in the universe, a form of structured information that does not have to be physically embodied and can transmute from one state to another.
We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel the vital principle. It pervades the sciences from top to bottom transforming every branch of knowledge. Information theory began as a badge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing. What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatik and informatika. Now even biology has become an information science a subject of messages instructions and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule the most advanced message processor at the cellular level-an alphabet and a code 6 billion bits to form a human being. "What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire not warm breath not a spark of life declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. "It is information, words, instructions.... If you want to understand life don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology." The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network transmitting and receiving coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.
"The information circle becomes the unit of life" says Werner Loewenstein after thirty years spent studying intercellular communication. He reminds us that information means something deeper now: "It connotes a cosmic principle of organization and order and it provides an exact measure of that." The gene has its cultural analog too: the meme. In cultural evolution a meme is a replicator and propagator, an idea, a fashion, a chain letter or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day a meme IS a virus.
Economics is recognizing itself as an information science now that money itself is completing a developmental arc from matter to bits stored in computer memory and magnetic strips world finance coursing through the global nervous system. Even when money seemed to be material treasure heavy in pockets and ships holds and bank vaults it always was information. Coins and notes shekels and cowries were all just short lived technologies for tokenizing information about who owns what. And atoms? Matter has its own coinage and the hardest science of all physics seemed to have reached maturity. But physics too finds itself sideswiped by a new intellectual model. In the years after World War II the heyday of the physicists the great news of science appeared to be the splitting of the atom and the control of nuclear energy. Theorists focused their prestige and resources on the search for fundamental particles and the laws governing their interaction the construction of giant accelerators and the discovery of quarks and gluons. From this exalted enterprise the business of communications research could not have appeared further removed. At Bell labs Claude Shannon was not thinking about physics. Particle physicists did not need bits.
And then all at once they did. Increasingly the physicists and the information theorists are one and the same. The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract-a binary digit a flipflop a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial yet as scientists finally come to understand information they wonder whether it may be primary, more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence. Bridging the physics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries John Archibald Wheeler the last surviving collaborator of both Einstein and Bohr put this manifesto in oracular monosyllables: "It from Bit." Information gives rise to "every it-every particle every field of force even the space-time continuum itself." This is another way of fathoming the paradox of the observer: that the outcome of an experiment is affected or even determined when it is observed. Not only is the observer observing she is asking questions and making statements that must ultimately be expressed in discrete bits. "What we call reality" Wheeler wrote coyly "arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions." He added: "All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe." The whole universe is thus seen as a computer - a cosmic information-processing machine.
A key to the enigma is a type of relationship that had no place in classical physics: the phenomenon known as entanglement. When particles or quantum systems are entangled their properties remain correlated across vast distances and vast times. Lightyears apart they share something that is physical yet not only physical. Spooky paradoxes arise unresolvable until one understands how entanglement encodes information measured in bits or their drolly named quantum counterpart quoits. When photons and electrons and other particles interact what are they really doing? Exchanging bits transmitting quantum states processing information. The laws of physics are the algorithms. Every burning star every silent nebula every particle leaving its ghostly trace in a cloud chamber is an information processor. The universe computes its own destiny.
How much does it compute? How fast? How big is its total information capacity, its memory space? What is the link between energy and information, what is the energy cost of flipping a bit? These are hard questions but they are not as mystical or metaphorical as they sound. Physicists and quantum information theorists, a new breed, struggle with them together. They do the math and produce tentative answers. ("The bit count of the cosmos, however it is figured, is ten raised to a very large power" according to Wheeler. According to Seth Lloyd: "No more than 10**120 ops on 10**90 bits.") They look anew at the mysteries of thermodynamic entropy and at those notorious information swallowers black holes. "Tomorrow" Wheeler declares "we will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.
Consciousness
Dark Pool of Light – Richard Grossinger
The Neuroscience, Evolution, and Ontology of Consciousness
Introduction
What - when you really think about it - is consciousness? I had long understood that this is the mega-question of both science and philosophy but I had not appreciated either the tautology of epicycles that neuroscience had projected onto relations between the brain and the mind or the full boggle of philosophy's forays in search of subjective being. Our own awareness is the thing in the universe most difficult to understand or vindicate. As one chemist friend emailed me upon learning that I was writing this book "I personally have no idea what the mind is. I know what a brain is but I have no idea how the two are related." This is a plaint of the sort that I have heard so often that I tend now to hear its undercurrent too: "Can you believe that the relationship got so weird we can't fit mind into the universe anymore or for that matter, even find it?"
Most working scientists share this perplexity yet they cannot entertain the notion that consciousness might have a source beyond entropy and its workarounds. It is a lynchpin of modernity that we cannot be intrinsically and independently conscious. Of course even the folks who propose that we cannot cannot. The only way they can adduce or uphold their own mindedness is by overdetermining or misplacing concreteness in one form or another and then assigning it a basis in their own brain. Failing (of course) to uncover such a basis they concoct one. Physicists and biologists will no more admit the contraversions in their theories than say Tea Party Americans will risk conceding that Barack Obama was born in the USA. For scientists to tolerate any exogenous source of consciousness would be to forfeit their eminent domain and vested legitimacy - the basis of their declaration of power. Consciousness must finally be either illusional or imaginary - a spinoff of thermodynamics and neural stacking. It cannot aspire to any higher status. If it ever gets a foothold outside entropy their goose is cooked.
I mean to kamikaze rather than skulk into this snafu avoiding resorts of quantum mechanical metaphors that relocate science and spirituality at layers of the same general paradox. What I seek instead is an actual convergence of scientific and psychic attunements - very very different birds that stick out hard beaks and sharp claws in trying to bash the other into nonexistence. I force them into coexistence and frame their meanings in terms of each others. I can't think of anyone else eager enough to operate at this frequency yet I believe that it is precisely where we have to go. Mind cannot be shriven onto its tissues. There are no two ways about it. Either human experience is an emergent evolutionary state of the brain and nothing more creating just a mirage of consciousness or it is a transpersonal event that has always existed in the universe, a form of structured information that does not have to be physically embodied and can transmute from one state to another.
The Information
James Gleick
Prologue
We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel the vital principle. It pervades the sciences from top to bottom transforming every branch of knowledge. Information theory began as a badge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing. What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatik and informatika. Now even biology has become an information science a subject of messages instructions and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule the most advanced message processor at the cellular level-an alphabet and a code 6 billion bits to form a human being. "What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire not warm breath not a spark of life declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. "It is information, words, instructions.... If you want to understand life don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology." The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network transmitting and receiving coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.
"The information circle becomes the unit of life" says Werner Loewenstein after thirty years spent studying intercellular communication. He reminds us that information means something deeper now: "It connotes a cosmic principle of organization and order and it provides an exact measure of that." The gene has its cultural analog too: the meme. In cultural evolution a meme is a replicator and propagator, an idea, a fashion, a chain letter or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day a meme IS a virus.
Economics is recognizing itself as an information science now that money itself is completing a developmental arc from matter to bits stored in computer memory and magnetic strips world finance coursing through the global nervous system. Even when money seemed to be material treasure heavy in pockets and ships holds and bank vaults it always was information. Coins and notes shekels and cowries were all just short lived technologies for tokenizing information about who owns what. And atoms? Matter has its own coinage and the hardest science of all physics seemed to have reached maturity. But physics too finds itself sideswiped by a new intellectual model. In the years after World War II the heyday of the physicists the great news of science appeared to be the splitting of the atom and the control of nuclear energy. Theorists focused their prestige and resources on the search for fundamental particles and the laws governing their interaction the construction of giant accelerators and the discovery of quarks and gluons. From this exalted enterprise the business of communications research could not have appeared further removed. At Bell labs Claude Shannon was not thinking about physics. Particle physicists did not need bits.
And then all at once they did. Increasingly the physicists and the information theorists are one and the same. The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract-a binary digit a flipflop a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial yet as scientists finally come to understand information they wonder whether it may be primary, more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence. Bridging the physics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries John Archibald Wheeler the last surviving collaborator of both Einstein and Bohr put this manifesto in oracular monosyllables: "It from Bit." Information gives rise to "every it-every particle every field of force even the space-time continuum itself." This is another way of fathoming the paradox of the observer: that the outcome of an experiment is affected or even determined when it is observed. Not only is the observer observing she is asking questions and making statements that must ultimately be expressed in discrete bits. "What we call reality" Wheeler wrote coyly "arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions." He added: "All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe." The whole universe is thus seen as a computer - a cosmic information-processing machine.
A key to the enigma is a type of relationship that had no place in classical physics: the phenomenon known as entanglement. When particles or quantum systems are entangled their properties remain correlated across vast distances and vast times. Lightyears apart they share something that is physical yet not only physical. Spooky paradoxes arise unresolvable until one understands how entanglement encodes information measured in bits or their drolly named quantum counterpart quoits. When photons and electrons and other particles interact what are they really doing? Exchanging bits transmitting quantum states processing information. The laws of physics are the algorithms. Every burning star every silent nebula every particle leaving its ghostly trace in a cloud chamber is an information processor. The universe computes its own destiny.
How much does it compute? How fast? How big is its total information capacity, its memory space? What is the link between energy and information, what is the energy cost of flipping a bit? These are hard questions but they are not as mystical or metaphorical as they sound. Physicists and quantum information theorists, a new breed, struggle with them together. They do the math and produce tentative answers. ("The bit count of the cosmos, however it is figured, is ten raised to a very large power" according to Wheeler. According to Seth Lloyd: "No more than 10**120 ops on 10**90 bits.") They look anew at the mysteries of thermodynamic entropy and at those notorious information swallowers black holes. "Tomorrow" Wheeler declares "we will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.
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