IMO there are potentially several quite coherent arguments against the existence of consciousness (“C”) at the level of existence (= orders of magnitude) described by Quantum Mechanics. Any such coherent arguments are arguments against the conjecture of panpsychism. I think it is important to uncover and set out such arguments in plain English so that other ordinary people like me can concentrate our minds on explanations, theories, and conjectures, which are in line with modern scientific findings concerning psychology and neuroscience (ie, what Granny Weatherwax called _headology_, what I like to think of as good quality headology anyway).
NB, this is a work in progress so will be edited as I go along. Any constructive comments and criticisms will be gratefully received.
Three approaches I can think of are:
- through looking at what quantum mechanics is actually about
- in general terms of course rather than the hideously complex mathematics it requires as a scientific tool,
- through looking at what information is in reality, and
- through what might be called mereology which is a technical name for the study of parts and wholes.
1. What quantum mechanics is actually about – in general terms
Quantum mechanics (QM) is the mathematical system which describes the behaviours of the smallest measurable items and amounts of the ultimate constituents of our world. QM uses mathematical structures called fields to describe the fundamental forces of nature and treats what otherwise we call particles as being localised vibrations, rotations, and point-like concentrations of these various fields. We don’t need to go into details here and I am not competent to make pronouncements about that kind of mathematics anyway. There are some important points to consider though:
a/ QM is extremely successful at describing how (electrically) charged particles will move within certain carefully presecibed situations and this has allowed the creation of all the portable digital electronic devices which are now used everywhere in the modern world,
b/ QM successfully describes attributes and behaviours of the ultimately smallest constituents of our universe (that it is possible to detect and measure so far anyway) and these are different from the things of the world that exist at the scale of size that we normally deal with and that we have evolved to sense, to use and to think about.
- For example it is never possible to know both exactly where a fundamental particle is and its speed and direction of motion (its momentum.)
- The more exact our knowledge of either its location or its momentum is, then the less exact is our knowledge of the other attribute.
- Another example is that a pair of quantum particles can become “entangled” which means they have interacted such that certain of their quantum attributes are interconnected, even though the two particles may become separated to quite enormous distances. It has been demonstrated conclusively that testing of one of the quantum attributes, called ‘spin’, of one of the pair of particles affects the other particle such that if the one tested is found to be “spin up” then the other one will be “spin down”, or vice versa.
- The “weird” aspect of this is that, until a test is done the state (of that attribute) cannot be known for either particle and no signal passes between them. In fact the correlated fixing of their respective states is to all intents and purposes, instantaneous.
- Technically speaking ‘instantaneous’ in this context means that a signal would have to travel between them faster than the speed of light, “c”, but c has been shown to be the fastest possible speed for a causal effect in our universe. Albert Einstein, whose theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity have been experimentally verified and which depend on c being the fastest possible speed in the universe, referred to this inexplicable synchrony as “Spooky action at a distance”.
- NB: something to note is that the two particles of each pair involved in such an entanglement experiment must not interact with any other particles in the period between their initial entanglement and the test event.
The facts of these QM attributes and behaviours have provoked a variety of interpretations concerning what are, or are not, necessary implications of these facts, ie there is a question about the extent to which human consciousness is necessary for QM experimental results to actually occur. (Most of us consider that the existence of our universe for 13.8 billion years before humans came on the scene is a reason to be sceptical about that.) QM however is a statistical prediction system. As mentioned earlier, it is impossible to say exactly both where a particle is and what it is doing, so exactly predicting what individual particles will do is, by definition, impossible. Thus the success of QM, which has allowed the creation of some of the world’s biggest experimental devices, the particle accelerators, lies in its ability to specify the probabilities of quantum events occurring.
IMO there are some interesting implications of this statistical determinacy. For one thing it makes it extremely unlikely that the biochemical processes which make up living entities rely on anything approaching the exactitude needed for controlling the paths of particles moving at speeds close to c. The atoms and molecules in the cells of our bodies are vibrating and bouncing together due to ambient thermal energy of 37 degrees centigrade, so their relative motions approximate to some proportion of the speed of sound in water. Is it not reasonable to assume that this jiggling around, which is the basis of what is called Brownian motion, ensures that any kind of quantum entanglement which occurs lasts only as long as it takes for a atom, ion, or molecule to bounce from one neighbour to another?
There is much uninformed speculation and conjecturing that gets written down and posted on social media and in books also which conflates human consciousness with features of the world described by QM. In fact though, the only real similarity they have is that they are both considered “mysterious”.
2. Information
There are many ways of defining information, some simple, some complex; here I want to keep things simple and to the point. So let us say that information in its most general sense is something or other which, as well as being just itself, is about something else, ie something other than itself. Another way to say this is that something can be informative when its appearance indicates something about something else which we would not have known otherwise.
The simplest way that has been expressed is “information is that which reduces uncertainty”. That is a mighty fine, minimulist, definition but what needs to be added is that it is always within a context. So the uncertainty of someone or some creature – or some information processing device – about something which may concern them/it is reduced by the appearance of something or the change of something in their surroundings. Another important point is that whatever the informative thing or event is, it has to be somewhere and made out of something or has to be a change occurring in something which really exists. I hold the belief that anything which really exists must be somewhere now. Some people find that idea hard to accept but I called it reality. I choose to summarise this viewpoint as: information is that part or aspect of the structure of something which can be about something other than itself.
There are of course a whole bunch of subtleties which can arise to confuse us but IMO the main one is that some ‘things’ can seem to exist, but then seem to disappear but then may seem to come back into existence. I believe something like this definitely happens inside human, and other, brains. This is easily accounted for though if we take the brain in question to be part of the context and realise that, due to neuronal plasticity and epigenetic changes, the brain has been changed in such a way as to be able to recreate the particular distinctive activity whenever a relevant stimulus/signal is received from the environment or through other activity within the particular brain itself (AKA memory!).
So the crux of the argument from the point of view of information per se, is that quantum particles, be they electrons, photons, protons, or whole atoms or molecules, are simply what they are. Generally speaking they are not about anything other than themselves. It is true that many molecules within living cells are very complex and can have very distinct ways of interacting with other molecules within the cell or outside the cell’s membrane but these activities are to do with the the building and maintenance of the cell and its biochemical interactions with others. Furthermore these interactions are powered, as much as anything, by the random thermal jostling of water and other small molecules which are moving at the speed of sound characteristic of such liquids. For salty water at 37 deg Celsius the speed is somewhere near 1,500 m/s or between four and five times the speed of sound in air.
The reason for mentioning the high velocity of water molecules inside the cells of our bodies is because there are those who surmise (I don’t think the word theorise is appropriate) that quantum mechanical effects inside what are called microtubules within our brain’s neurons may be the basis of long distance connections between cells. Microtubules actually form the internal ‘skeleton’ of the cell, holding the various organelles within the cell in place and allowing the cell to maintain its shape and/or move. They also form a scaffolding which allow motor molecules to drag large proteins and vesicles along the surface of the microtubule from place to place within the cell. Whilst microtubules are helical structures which do form a tube shape with interior lumen, there is no reason to suppose that this internal space is sufficiently isolated from the rest of the cytosol to maintain some sort of quantum isolation unit that is spookily entangled with similar units in other cells! I think it is much more reasonable to accept that the local equivalent of constant Brownian motion restricts quantum entanglement of the particles involved to their nearest neighbours.
3. Mereology – the study of parts and wholes
The “panpsychism” concept, suffers from a mereological mistake. If mereological is not the right work my apologies; it is still a mistake.
Reason: if atoms and molecules or whatever all have their own wee bit of “C”, what is that C about?
Answer: the teeny weeny bit of C – is about being that atom or molecule. This strongly provokes the question of: Why should a whole bunch of separate little C’s become a C which is about something which is not those separate particles but is about, not just the amalgamated assemblage of particles, but about the world that the assemblage of particles is within?
IMO that question stands until someone can provide a coherent explanation and reasonable description of the main mechanism/process purported to underlie panpsyche. This is never provided however. Panpsychism is always put forward by persons asserting their own disbelief that scientific method has any chance of explaining subjectivity, ie: why it can be like something to be an embodiment of self-awareness.
Mereology is a term used by academic philosophers who use it for academic purposes. Sometimes this involves an attack on the idea of emergent properties, ie the apparent fact that in many situations a collection of smaller things when associated together act collectively in a way that could not be reliably predicted from the properties of the individual constituents. Indeed I have seen the term ‘mereological mistake’ applied to descriptions of the way neurons act together to create representations of things external to the brain. I hope my argument above shows how that cuts much more strongly against vitalistic concepts like panpsychism.
IMO for lay people it is more helpful to speak in terms of the nature of information, as above already, which enables us to describe things in terms of dynamic logical structures and their functional potential.
Optimistic realism 