Physicist claims to have solved the mystery of consciousness

Scientists have developed a new conceptual and mathematical framework for understanding consciousness from a relativistic point of view.

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According to the theory, all we need to solve the difficult problem of consciousness is to change our assumptions about it. When we realize that consciousness is a relative physical phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally disappears.

How does 3 pounds of brain tissue create thoughts, feelings, mental images and a detailed inner world?

The brain’s ability to create consciousness has baffled people for thousands of years. The secret of consciousness lies in the fact that each of us has a subjectivity, with the ability to feel, feel and think. Unlike being under anesthesia or in a deep, dreamless sleep, while we are awake we do not “live in the dark” – we experience the world and ourselves. However, it remains a mystery how the brain creates conscious experience and which area of ​​the brain is responsible.

According with the doctor. Nir Lahav, a physicist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, “this is a big mystery because it appears that our conscious experience cannot originate from the brain and, in fact, cannot originate from any physical process.” Strange as it may seem, conscious experience in our brain cannot be found or reduced to neural activity.

Dr. Zakaria Nehme, a philosopher at the University of Memphis, says: “Think of it this way, when I feel happy, my brain will create a distinct pattern of complex neural activity. This neural pattern will be completely associated with my conscious feeling. of happiness, but it’s not my real feeling. It’s just a neural pattern that represents My happiness. That’s why a scientist who looks into my mind and sees this pattern must ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, but just a representation of it.” For this reason, we cannot reduce the conscious experience of what we feel, feel, and think to any brain activity. We can only find correlations to these experiences.

After more than 100 years of neuroscience, we have very strong evidence that the brain is responsible for shaping our conscious abilities. So how can these conscious experiences exist nowhere in the brain (or in the body) and cannot be reduced to any complex neural activity?

This puzzle is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult problem that only philosophers discussed it until two decades ago. Even today, although we have made tremendous progress in our understanding of the neuroscientific basis of consciousness, there is still a satisfactory theory that explains what consciousness is and how to solve this difficult problem.

in the magazine Frontiers of PsychologyDr. Lahaf and Dr. Nehme recently published a new physical theory that claims to solve the difficult problem of consciousness in a purely physical way. According to researchers, when we change our assumption about consciousness and assume that it is a relative phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally disappears. In the article, the authors develop a conceptual and mathematical framework for understanding consciousness from a relativistic point of view. According with the doctor. Lahav, lead author of the paper, “Consciousness should be investigated using the same mathematical tools that physicists use in other known relativistic phenomena.”

To understand how relativity solves the difficult problem, consider a different relativistic phenomenon, constant velocity. First, let’s choose two monitors, Alice and Bob. Bob is on a train at constant speed and Alice is watching him from the platform. There is no absolute physical answer to the question “What is Bob’s speed?” The answer depends on the observer’s frame of reference. From Bob’s frame of reference, he will measure that he is stationary and that Alice, along with the rest of the world, is moving backwards. But by Alice’s frame of reference, Bob is the one who moves and she is stationary. They have opposite measurements, but both are correct, just from different benchmarks.

We find the same situation in the state of consciousness because consciousness, according to the theory, is a relative phenomenon. Now Alice and Bob are in different cognitive frames. Bob will measure whether he has conscious experience, but Alice has only brain activity with no sign of actual conscious experience. On the other hand, Alice will measure whether she has consciousness and Bob has only nervous activity without any evidence of her conscious experience.

As in the case of speed, although there are opposite measures, both are correct, but from different cognitive references. As a result, due to the relative point of view, there is no problem with measuring different properties from different frames of reference. The fact that we cannot find actual conscious experience when measuring brain activity is because we are measuring from the wrong cognitive frame of reference.

According to the new theory, the brain does not create our conscious experience, at least not through calculation. The reason we have conscious experience is because of the physical measurement process. In short, different physical measurements in different frames show different physical properties in those frames, even though these frames measure the same phenomenon.

For example, suppose Bob is measuring Alice’s brain in the lab while she is happy. Although they observe different characteristics, they actually measure the same phenomenon from different points of view. As the types of measures differ, different types of characteristics have appeared in cognitive frames of reference.

In order for Bob to observe brain activity in the lab, he needs to use measurements from his sensory organs, such as his eyes. This type of sensory measurement shows the substrate that causes brain activity – neurons. Thus, in her cognitive structure, Alice has only neural activity representing her consciousness, but no sign of her actual conscious experience per se.

However, for Alice to measure her neural activity as happiness, she uses different types of measurements. She doesn’t use sensory organs, she measures her neural representations directly through the interaction between a part of her brain and other parts. It measures your neural representations according to their relationships to other neural representations.

This is a completely different measurement than what our sensory system does, and as a result, this kind of direct measurement shows a different kind of physical characteristic. We call this property conscious experience. As a result, from her cognitive frame of reference, Alice measures her neural activity as a conscious experience.

Using the mathematical tools that describe relativistic phenomena in physics, the theory shows that if the dynamics of Bob’s neural activity could be altered to be like the dynamics of Alice’s neural activity, both would be in the same cognitive frame of reference and would have exactly the same same conscious experience as the other.

Now Dr. Lahaf and Dr. Nehme want to continue examining the minimum number of precise measurements any cognitive system needs to create consciousness. The implications of such a theory are enormous. It can be applied to determine which animal was the first animal in the evolutionary process to have consciousness, which patients with consciousness disorders are conscious, when a fetus or child begins to become conscious, and which artificial intelligence systems are already low today. (if any) degree of consciousness.

Reference: “A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness” by Nir Lahav and Zakaria A. Grace, May 12, 2022, available here. Frontiers of Psychology.
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.704270

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