IS THE UNIVERSE CONSCIOUS?
PERHAPS THE LAWS OF PHYSICS ARE NOT ENOUGH TO EXPLAIN REALITY
Consciousness has long proven to be a mystery. We know we are conscious because we experience and feel things. Yet scientists and great thinkers are unable to explain exactly what consciousness is. “Consciousness – or conscious experience – is obviously a part of reality,” affirms mathematician and theoretical physicist Johannes Kleiner. “We’re all having it. It’s very likely that many animals have it too. But without understanding how it relates to known physics, our understanding of the universe is incomplete.”
It’s a bold statement. But there is a pervading thought that consciousness is not confined to humans, or even animals. Though many scientists say you remove a brain and lose consciousness, Buddhists believe consciousness is not dependent on the physical body – that it comprises four layers and continues always like a stream of water.
But even putting religion to one side, there is panpsychism, a philosophical point of view that claims consciousness is inherent in even the tiniest pieces of matter. That sounds like a trippy theory, and yet it’s one which appears to be gathering pace.
What’s more, panpsychism isn’t an idea being peddled by people in tinfoil hats. It is being pursued by top scientific and philosophical minds, among them Dr Philip Goff, associate professor of philosophy at Durham University.
“According to panpsychism the fundamental building blocks of reality have conscious experience,” Goff says. “Perhaps the fundamental building blocks are fundamental particles, such as electrons and quarks. But many theoretical physicists think that the fundamental entities are universe-wide fields, and particles are merely local excitations in those fields. If you combine that view with panpsychism, then these fields are the complex experience of the universe itself.”
Kleiner is among those looking to pin down whether inanimate matter could be conscious. In doing so, he’s studying whether the universe as a whole could be conscious too. For many all of this may seem like a giant leap forward. Neuroscience still needs to figure out how our brains operate and how consciousness works, let alone extend that to the universe as a whole. But for an ultimate scientific account of reality, Kleiner says we need to include consciousness alongside gravity, electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. And how our brains work is fundamental to such work.
“Many models of consciousness have been proposed, and most tie consciousness to the brain in some way,” says Kleiner. “But since the brain is actually a very complicated system – some say the most complicated known to humankind – you can only go so far in describing it in plain words.
“Eventually you need maths to describe how neurons are wired together, how they exchange
Leading scientists have long pondered how matter gives rise to our subjective experience of reality, believing consciousness could even permeate the cosmos
signals and how they process these signals. Mathematical models of consciousness allow us to be more precise in proposing how consciousness attaches to brains.”
According to Kleiner, such models can act as a jumping point. “A mathematical theory can be applied to many different systems, not just brains,” he says, adding that the models are looking not at the various brain areas scientists have named in the past, but at the interactions between the various components.
“If you develop a mathematical model of consciousness based on data from brains, you can apply the model to other systems, for example computers or thermostats, to see what it says about the conscious experience of these systems.” His task is to take models from neuroscience that have been formulated in words and translate them into mathematical terms. “This will make them more precise and more general,” he attests. But his work is only the latest in a long line of pursuits.
There have been some large steps forward in the drive to explore whether the universe is conscious. Renowned Oxford physicist Sir Roger Penrose, for instance, was among the first to propose that we go beyond neuroscience when looking at consciousness, saying we should strongly consider the role of quantum mechanics.
In 1989 he published The Emperor’s New
Mind, arguing that human consciousness is nona-lgorithmic and a product of quantum effects. Along with anaesthesiologist and psychologist Stuart Hameroff, Penrose developed a hypothesis, called orchestrated objective reduction (Orch
OR), which claims consciousness is likely due to quantum vibrations in microtubules deep within brain neurons. So what does this have to do with the universe being conscious? A paper they wrote in 2014 states that “Orch OR suggests there is a connection between the brain’s biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe”.
Crucially, they also wrote: “We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe.” For them consciousness results from discrete physical events. “Such events have always existed in the universe as non-cognitive, protoconscious events, these acting as part of precise physical laws not yet fully understood,” the paper said of this possibility.
It’s difficult to prove. In 1995, philosopher David Chalmers coined the phrase ‘the hard problem of consciousness’, fully realising the tricky nature of answering how and why neurophysiological
activities produce the experience of consciousness. Kleiner is also having a good stab at it. His work is being inspired by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr Giulio Tononi, distinguished chair in consciousness studies at the University of Wisconsin. Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT) is one of a small class of very promising models of consciousness. “IIT is very different because it’s a very mathematical theory, and this very fact – that it is formulated in precise mathematical terms – is very important and endows the theory with a guiding role for the development of the field,” Kleiner says.
Working with Sean Tull, a mathematician at the University of Oxford, Kleiner is basing his work on IIT’s core idea that consciousness can be explained in physical terms. Tononi collaborated with
Gerald Edelman at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, and the pair wrote A Universe
of Consciousness in 2000, which suggested consciousness will emerge when information moves between subsystems of an overall system.
It says consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality: that it exists and that it is structured, specific, unified and definite. What is important, however, is how complex the system is. To be conscious an entity has to be single and integrated, and it needs to possess a property called ‘phi’, which is dependent on the interdependence of the subsystems. In other words, you could have a bunch of coins on your desk, and on top of each sits a bunch of neurons. If information which travels along those pathways is crucial for those coins, then you’ve got a high phi, and therefore consciousness.
If those coins could operate perfectly well as subsystems without information flowing to and from other coins, then there is no phi, and there is no consciousness. The greater the interdependency between subsystems, the more conscious something will be, and so it’s about whether a system is more than the sum of its parts, as Christof Koch, the Lois and Victor Troendle professor of cognitive behavioural biology at the California Institute of Technology, wrote in
Scientific American in 2009.
“Integrated information is an abstract quantity which you can calculate if you have a good, detailed description of the system,” Kleiner says. The result is a number, denoted by phi, so if you have an apple you can ask how much integrated information is in there, just as you can ask how much energy is in there. You can talk about how much integrated information is in a computer, just like you can talk about entropy.”
The system doesn’t have to be biological. It doesn’t have to relate to humans or other living creatures. “IIT says that a system is conscious if – and only if – it has integrated information,” Kleiner says. “If you’re an apple, which has no integrated information, phi is zero and you’re not conscious. If you’re a thermostat, which has some integrated information, albeit only a little bit, you are a little bit conscious.”
In many respects IIT backs panpsychism, because even a proton can possess phi, according to the theory. And just as an apple, thermostat and computer can possess it, so can all manner of other things across the universe. “When it comes to experimental evidence, there are several independent studies which point at a correlation between integrated information and consciousness,” Kleiner affirms.
So do subsystems have conscious experience? No. Is any system conscious? No. We’ve already seen that an absence of phi in a system means there is no consciousness. “The theory consists of a very complicated algorithm that, when applied to a detailed mathematical description of a physical system, provides information about whether the system is conscious or not, and what it is conscious of,” continues Kleiner.
“The mathematics are such that if something is conscious according to the theory, then the components which make up that system can’t have conscious experiences on their own. Only the whole has conscious experience, not the parts. Applied to your brain, it means that some of your
cortex might be conscious, but the particles that make up the cortex are not themselves conscious.”
What does that mean for the universe? “If there’s an isolated pair of particles floating around somewhere in space, they will have some rudimentary form of consciousness if they interact in the correct way,” Kleiner explains. According to IIT, the universe is indeed full of consciousness. It’s all over the place, and many things which we didn’t think were conscious do have some conscious experience. But does it have any implications for the physical part of the universe? According to the maths of the theory, no. A physical system will operate independent of whether it has a conscious experience or not. Kleiner gives a computer as an example, saying that IIT’s maths shows it may have consciousness, but that won’t change the way in which it operates.
“This is at odds with the metaphysical underpinning of the theory, which is strongly idealist in nature,” he says. “It puts consciousness first and the physical second. We might see some change in the mathematics at some point to take this underpinning more properly into account.”
This is what his and Tull’s study seeks to resolve. Emergentist theories of consciousness tend to claim physics is all there is. “They would reject the idea that consciousness is separate from or more primary than the physical, and they would say consciousness is nothing but a specific physical phenomenon which emerges from the interaction of the fundamental physical quantities in certain conditions,” Kleiner says.
His and Tull’s mathematical version of IIT, on the other hand, is intended to be what could be called a fundamental theory of consciousness. “It tries to weave consciousness into the fundamental fabric of reality, albeit in a very specific way,” Kleiner tells us. If it’s shown that the universe is conscious, what then? What are the consequences?
“There might be moral implications. We tend to treat systems which have conscious experiences different from systems which don’t,” Kleiner answers. “Most of us don’t, for example, attach emotion to our laptops: if they break down, we don’t worry about the laptop for its own sake. But if our pet is hurt, we worry about the pet for its own sake. There are implications here for artificial intelligence (AI). If there was proof AI systems were conscious, we might have to adapt some of our behaviour and possibly also some of our laws.”
Even so, scepticism still remains.
Goff says we shouldn’t be surprised that our current scientific approach struggles to capture the qualities of experience because our current scientific approach was designed to exclude them. He tells us that science has worked with a purely quantitative description of the
physical world ever since the