A bit of mind-blowing to explain the ‘hard problem of consciousness’

Human consciousness is one of the great mysteries of science. Being aware of ourselves, asking ourselves existential questions that make our hair stand on end, having desires that go beyond those emanating from the most primary instincts, projecting ourselves into the future to achieve them... It seems that the merely material is exceeded or transmuted. David Chalmers, an Australian analytical philosopher, defined all this as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. To understand it, let’s see what would be the easy part, such as the functioning of a neuronal cell. Like an ant, a neuron performs the basic processes of subsistence, turning processes on and off. However, when hundreds of thousands of ants come together, a perfectly structured and hierarchical underground mega-city is created, or in our case when more than a hundred billion neurons communicate with each other, a thinking being appears to wonder things and enjoy an experience. It may sound scary, but it has been the matter of the universe that has come to ask questions about itself.

Is it possible that there is something else? How do seemingly immaterial experiences arise from the brain? Thoughts, for example, cannot be touched, they are intangible, but they emerge from the brain, which can be touched and measured.

I will not go into philosophical issues or faith, since it is apparently ‘easy’ to answer (it’s the spirit, don’t be fooled!), but I will say that in science there is another closely related mystery that is quite close: how energy can create matter? We know that matter and energy are the same. In Einstein’s famous equation (E=mc²), the energy (E) corresponding to a piece of matter depends directly on the mass (m) of that matter, in direct relation to the square of the speed of light (c). Indeed, matter, mass, can be converted into energy, and we can observe it from facts as familiar as burning coal and obtaining thermal energy. Or, being more precise in the disintegration of matter that occurs during nuclear fusion and fission reactions. In theory, the reverse process is also possible, although just as small amounts of matter can be used to release huge amounts of energy (think in nuclear weapons), it takes huge amounts of energy to be able to produce tiny amounts of matter. So far, it has only been shown experimentally when a photon (a high-energy particle of which light is made) passes through an atomic nucleus, producing a particle of matter (electron) and an antimatter particle (positron). However, there was a moment in history when there was a practically infinite amount of concentrated energy... Yes, at the origin of the universe, energy gave rise to what we know today as stars, planets, and to us as the universe expanded and cooled.

Perhaps, the consciousness, like the energy, was always there. In order to find solutions to this hard problem, radical ideas are needed that can explain this mystery, even if they seem like a contradiction. Here are some examples:

To that consciousness permeates the entire universe and is a fundamental feature of reality is known as pampsychism (pam = ‘everything’; psyche = ‘soul’ or ‘mind’). Its defenders make it clear, however, that it does not mean that everything is conscious, but rather that the building blocks of matter, quarks, and electrons, have incredibly simple as well as complex forms of experience. That does not mean that a stone is conscious, but that the tiny elementary particles it is made of have some kind of very rudimentary experience. The human brain, I understand, from its neurons, would enjoy better luck. And this is somewhat better explained in another somewhat more refined variant called ‘Integrated Information Theory’, which predicts that, in effect, consciousness can occur in any system, whether biological or not, as long as it has a correct form of internal structure.

Further twisting the concept of pampsychism are three researchers from Quantum Gravity Research in Los Angeles (paper here). In it, the authors abandon the belief that the universe exists by itself, rejecting the materialist postulates that see reality as something external (for example the Moon is there, even if you don’t see it), and to which we can only access through the senses or experience. Instead, they embrace Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s hypothesis of considering the universe as the product of a simulation created by post-humans to learn more about their ancestors. Just as if we were SIMS in its 100,000 version that we developed consciousness.

The resurgence of these currents may be due in part to the latest studies in quantum mechanics, where the space-time that we observe is considered as, literally, a hologram. In principle, nothing prevents explaining that what happens within a universe with specific laws can be fully explained from what happens within another universe with one dimension less and with different laws. This curious connection is assimilated to a photograph that can be projected in 3D. Thus, we would have a universe, ours, that would emerge from a simpler one. And that is what has been shown, not that the universe is a holography, but that theoretically by modifying parameters of the universe-photography, our 3D-universe could be perfectly explained. In other words, we could be 2D particles projected in 3D, although there is no evidence at the moment.

In any case, regarding pampsychism and its variants, with more and more followers, it remains open how these small particles with miniscule consciousnesses form a more complex consciousness, and how conscious experience emerges. Or in the case of the simulation, if we are SIMS with consciousness, nothing would prevent us from creating video games of other SIMS following the physical laws of that world, and they once pass a time do the same, etc. In that case, which character would you be? The initial? The simulated? In other words, we will never know if we live in a simulation, since all the reality that we believe to be safe could be simulable.

I guess reality doesn’t give a fuck about us. Reality existed before we were born and it will exist after we are gone. The portion of reality that is accessible to us is very small and we must enjoy it by doing what makes a human being best, knowing and loving. Regarding consciousness, we know that the brain produces it and that it is real, that it may be a biological process, but we don’t know how.

Beyond the previous mind-blowings, much further, we have the hypothesis of Bowman’s brain. There is a non-zero possibility that now all the air molecules in the room where you are will end up in a corner, and you will die. Although it is extremely unlikely, it is not impossible, since the movement of the molecules is unpredictable (remember the uncertainty principle) and, by a huuuuge chance, they will all point in one direction at a given moment. And I repeat, it is not impossible given infinite time, in which all possibilities can happen. This simple idea has been extrapolated to more complex things: from water molecules that crystallized by chance to form an ice cube to... the origin of the universe. According to the statistical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, in that primordial soup of particles, after an abysmal time, they would link together in such a way that they gave rise to everything we know today. In fact, maybe your life started five seconds ago, and the particles had been arranged in such a way in your brain that you believe you have a past. Years later, the astronomer Arthur S. Eddington, mocking such nonsense, said: ‘of course, and if instead of a Universe being formed out of nothing, the Earth, each human brain with its past..., wouldn’t a brain that floats through space be formed?’ In other words, what you are reading is the product of a brain that perceives itself as you, but is actually floating through space. This kind of speculation likes because, theoretically, there would be nothing to prevent it if you let the particles do their thing in infinite time. And you, what do you think?