Everything has consciousness, a scientific theory

 Mystery of Consciousness : Everything has consciousness, a scientific theory gaining momentum

In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this elusive phenomenon. Yet, despite critical development in our understanding of the functional side of consciousness, we still lack a fundamental theory regarding its phenomenal aspect. Consciousness is usually treated as a human problem, tied to brains and behaviour. Yet for centuries some thinkers have quietly asked whether experience might reach far beyond our skulls, right down to the building blocks of matter. The radical possibility, panpsychism, holds that every bit of the universe possesses a flicker of experience, however faint. Interest in the idea has surged again as researchers wrestle with the “hard problem of consciousness,” the stubborn mystery of how physical stuff gives rise to subjective feeling. If neurons alone cannot fully explain awareness, might awareness already be lurking everywhere, waiting to be arranged into minds like ours?

Consciousness can not simply be reduced to neural activity alone, researchers say. A novel study reports the dynamics of consciousness may be understood by a newly developed conceptual and mathematical framework. How do 1.4 kg of brain tissue create thoughts, feelings, mental images and an inner world? The ability of the brain to create consciousness has baffled some for millennia. The mystery of consciousness lies in the fact that each of us has subjectivity, something that is like to sense, feel and think. In contrast to being under anaesthesia or in a dreamless deep sleep, while we’re awake we don’t “live in the dark”, we experience the world and ourselves. But how the brain creates the conscious experience and what area of the brain is responsible for this remains a mystery. The question is older than science itself. Thales of Miletus, puzzling over magnets in the 6th century BC, claimed they must carry a soul because they move iron. A generation later, Anaxagoras said that “everything contains a portion of mind,” foreshadowing today’s talk of micro-experiences combining into richer ones. Greek Stoics spoke of the universe as a living creature animated by “logos,” the rational breath binding all things. This principle was thought to permeate all matter, giving rise to the interconnectedness of all things. Plotinus kept the thread alive in late antiquity, arguing that the cosmos emanates from a single living “One.” His influence resurfaced in the Renaissance when Giordano Bruno pictured an infinite universe teeming with worlds, each ensouled. Such views clashed with the mechanistic models which soon powered modern science, but they never disappeared.

As strange as it sounds, the conscious experience in our brain, cannot be found or reduced to some neural activity. “Think about it this way,” says Dr. Zakaria Neemeh, a philosopher from the University of Memphis, “when I feel happiness, my brain will create a distinctive pattern of complex neural activity. This neural pattern will perfectly correlate with my conscious feeling of happiness, but it is not my actual feeling. It is just a neural pattern that represents my happiness. That’s why a scientist looking at my brain and seeing this pattern should ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it.” As a result, we can’t reduce the conscious experience of what we sense, feel and think to any brain activity. We can just find correlations to these experiences. During the Enlightenment, René Descartes sliced mind from matter, pushing consciousness into an immaterial corner. Even so, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz answered with “monads,” indivisible units which mirror the entire universe through their own tiny perception. By the late 19th century, William James, Gustav Fechner, and Alfred North Whitehead were again arguing that feeling might be woven into nature’s fabric instead of perched on top of it. Their intuition found fresh urgency once Charles Darwin showed that life, and by extension minds, evolve. If consciousness blooms gradually, perhaps it never strictly begins; perhaps it intensifies as matter organizes itself.

After more than 100 years of neuroscience we have very good evidence that the brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities.  So how could it be that these conscious experiences can’t be found anywhere in the brain (or in the body) and can’t be reduced to any neural complex activity? This mystery is known as the hard problem of consciousness. It is such a difficult problem that until a couple of decades ago only philosophers discussed it and even today, although we have made huge progress in our understanding of the neuro scientific basis of consciousness, still there is no adequate theory that explains what consciousness is and how to solve this hard problem. Modern neuroscience attacks the mystery head-on. Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin put forward Integrated Information Theory (IIT) in 2004, claiming that a system’s consciousness equals the amount of integrated information it generates, a value symbolized by “Φ.” High Φ signals a richer, more unified experience; low Φ signals a dim one. Crucially, IIT treats consciousness as “intrinsic and independent of external observers,” meaning it could arise in any structure, animal brains, artificial networks or, in principle, a block of silicon, if the informational web is tight enough.

Dr. Lahav and Dr. Neemeh gave a new physical theory in the journal Frontiers in Psychology which claims to solve the hard problem of consciousness in a purely physical way. According to them, when we change our assumption about consciousness and assume that it is a relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves. the researchers developed a conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view. According to Dr. Lahav, “consciousness should be investigated with the same mathematical tools that physicists use for other known relativistic phenomena.” Researchers are now testing IIT’s predictions with brain-stimulation experiments and computer models. Some early results suggest that loss of consciousness, as in deep anaesthesia, coincides with a sharp drop in measurable integration. The data are tentative, but they push the theory beyond armchair speculation. IIT also tries to map the quality of experience: different shapes of integrated information should correspond to different qualia, the raw feelings of colour, taste, or pain. This ambition draws praise for its clarity and criticism for its boldness. Sceptic's note the difficulty of calculating Φ in real systems and ask whether the math truly captures subjective life. Yet the framework has already inspired machine-consciousness tests, raising practical as well as philosophical stakes. If IIT holds up, panpsychism gains a scientific foothold, because the theory does not limit consciousness to biology. Wherever the right informational architecture appears, experience could spark.

To understand how relativity dissolves the hard problem, think about a different relativistic phenomenon, constant velocity. Let’s choose two observers, Alice and Bob, where Bob is on a train that moves with constant velocity and Alice watches him from the platform. there is no absolute physical answer to the question what the velocity of Bob is. The answer is dependent on the frame of reference of the observer. From Bob’s frame of reference, he will measure that he is stationary and Alice, with the rest of the world, is moving backwards. But from Alice’s frame Bob is the one that’s moving and she is stationary. Although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, just from different frames of reference. Because, according to the theory, consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, we find the same situation in the case of consciousness. Now Alice and Bob are in different cognitive frames of reference. Bob will measure that he has conscious experience, but Alice just has brain activity with no sign of the actual conscious experience, while Alice will measure that she is the one that has consciousness and Bob has just neural activity with no clue of its conscious experience. Just like in the case of velocity, although they have opposite measurements, both of them are correct, but from different cognitive frames of reference. As a result, because of the relativistic point of view, there is no problem with the fact that we measure different properties from different frames of reference. The fact that we cannot find the actual conscious experience while measuring brain activity is because we’re measuring from the wrong cognitive frame of reference. A more controversial route links mind to quantum mechanics. Physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff propose the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory, which places quantum computations inside neuronal microtubules. When enough microtubules entangle, they say, an “objective reduction” occurs, collapsing superposed states and producing a moment of awareness shaped by “quantum gravity.”

According to the theory, the brain doesn’t create our conscious experience, at least not through computations. The reason that we have conscious experience is because of the process of physical measurement. In a nutshell, different physical measurements in different frames of reference manifest different physical properties in these frames of reference although these frames measure the same phenomenon. For example, suppose that Bob measures Alice’s brain in the lab while she’s feeling happiness. Although they observe different properties, they actually measure the same phenomenon from different points of view. Because of their different kinds of measurements, different kinds of properties have been manifested in their cognitive frames of reference. For Bob to observe brain activity in the lab, he needs to use measurements of his sensory organs like his eyes. This kind of sensory measurement manifests the substrate which causes brain activity, the neurons. Many biophysicists argue that brains are too warm and noisy for prolonged quantum coherence and that microtubules are unlikely qubit hosts. Supporters counter with new work on room-temperature quantum effects in photosynthesis, suggesting nature might pull off similar tricks elsewhere. So far, definitive evidence for Orch-OR is missing, but the debate keeps the link between physics and consciousness on the table.

Brain is responsible for the creation of our conscious abilities. Consequently, in his cognitive frame Alice has only neural activity that represents her consciousness, but no sign of her actual conscious experience itself. But, for Alice to measure her own neural activity as happiness, she uses different kind of measurements. She doesn’t use sensory organs, she measures her neural representations directly by interaction between one part of her brain with other parts. She measures her neural representations according to their relations 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 manifests a different kind of physical property. We call this property conscious experience. As a result, from her cognitive frame of reference, Alice measures her neural activity as conscious experience. Panpsychism alarms some thinkers who worry that ascribing feeling to atoms cheapens the concept of consciousness. The main technical hurdle is the “combination problem”: even if electrons feel a whisper, how do countless whispers merge into the loud voice of human thought? No consensus mechanism exists. Still, the position refuses to die because it offers a clean way around dualism. If experience is not tacked onto matter but rides with it from the start, the gap between mind and world may shrink. Philosophers compare the shift to realizing that heat is molecular motion rather than an extra substance called caloric. Whether the analogy holds is an open question, yet it shows why the stakes are high.

The implications of such a theory are huge. It can be applied to determine which animal was the first animal in the evolutionary process to have consciousness, when a fetus or baby begins to be conscious, which patients with consciousness disorders are conscious, and which AI systems already today have a low degree (if any) of consciousness. Future progress will rely on sharper experiments and clearer concepts. Neuroscientists are refining Φ-based metrics, while physicists hunt quantum signatures in biology. Philosophers, for their part, are re-examining ancient ideas with modern logic, asking whether panpsychism is a genuine explanation or a verbal sleight of hand. Wherever the search leads, it forces us to face an unsettling possibility: consciousness might be less a rare jewel than a basic note in the cosmic score. If so, the challenge is not to grant minds to stones but to understand how nature composes simple tones into the symphony we call waking life. There is an “explanatory gap” between our scientific knowledge of functional consciousness and its “subjective,” phenomenal aspects, referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness. The phenomenal aspect of consciousness has thus far proved recalcitrant to direct scientific investigation. We develop a conceptual and a mathematical argument for a relativistic theory of consciousness in which a system either has or doesn’t have phenomenal consciousness with respect to others.