An Experiment For Consciousness? Scientists And Philosophers Across Three Countries Debate It

Last year, scientists inferentially detected the existence of 2D visual mental representations that fundamentally change vision science. “The question becomes, what are they exactly? Are they patterns of neurons firing? Are they some kind of phenomenon not necessarily reducible to any kind of physical substrate?” Asks Jessica M. Wilson, philosopher and author of the book Metaphysical Emergence. 

Coming up, scientists and philosophers spanning three countries weigh in on an experiment to discover the material nature of consciousness and the content of our experiences. 

Let’s start with a definition: Consciousness is awareness. It’s the qualitative experience of that awareness — what it’s like to be something. 

The philosophers

Wilson, like many of her peers, doesn’t see anything controversial about the idea that mental representations might be actual things that exist in space and time and populate conscious experience. Sensory information and neurons firing seem to be involved in the vibrant, dynamic mind show projected onto our every living, waking, dreaming moment. 

But there’s little consensus about how activity at the level of our neurons turns into conscious experience. This is the Hard Problem of Consciousness. How does microscopic activity in your brain turn into the large, rich experience of sitting on the edge of a craggy outcropping on the Atlantic shoreline and sipping a steaming cup of toasted, earthy buttery Columbian coffee, while watching a kaleidoscopic halo over the rising sun as a cool, crisp brackish breeze whisks your cheeks? While the Easy Problem is how the brain works, the Hard Problem is how brain workings turn into experience. 

What does it mean to say consciousness emerges?

Theories about the fundamental nature of consciousness fall roughly into two camps: The first camp, called Identity Theory, thinks conscious experiences are identical to neural events. Mark Balaguer, philosopher, identity theorist, and author of the book Free Will, thinks conscious events are identical to neural events the same way Clark Kent is identical to Superman. It may seem to Lois like they’re not identical. For instance, Lois doesn’t think Clark can fly. When Lois looks at him, “he doesn't seem to be a flyer,” says Balaguer. “But my view is that he actually is a flyer." For Balaguer, if you don’t think they’re identical, you’re committed to a “spooky dualist view” — meaning you believe consciousness is something like a soul. 

The second camp views conscious experience as something that isn’t identical to neural events. This is because experience has qualia, i.e. “what it feels like,” whereas neural events don’t have this property. For the second camp, consciousness emerges from complex systems like brain activity, and it can emerge in two ways. “Weak Emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level,” says Wilson, describing a theory where a conscious event emerges as a new thing that can be reduced to the sum of its parts. Strong Emergence is the theory that consciousness emerges as something entirely different than the sum of its parts. 

An experiment for Strong Emergence

Most theories of strong emergence are dualistic. Dualism is the view that there’s a natural, physical world that can be explained by science versus a spiritual world that can’t. For dualists, conscious experience exists in the realm of the spiritual world. But the theory that consciousness emerges as something entirely new doesn’t necessarily require a break from natural laws. Science evolves by trying to fit new observations into an already established framework. If new observations can't be explained by the prevailing scientific theory, a hypothesis is proposed and tested. Depending on the results, the old scientific theory is amended or a new one is created.

An example of this in action is the First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation), which states that energy can’t be created or destroyed. It’s always conserved. But when physicists observed something that looked like it was breaking this law, they proposed a new particle called the ‘neutrino’ and a new force called the ‘weak force’ or ‘weak interaction.’ This was a fundamental, irreducible new force. The hypothesis was demonstrated experimentally and a new fundamental interaction was incorporated into our explanation of the natural world. 

Wilson considers it scientifically respectable to say that consciousness might be a new, fundamental interaction that emerges at a certain level of system complexity, which would be Strong Emergence. However, Wilson cautions that the theory has yet to be substantiated. 

Taking the weak nuclear interaction as a model, Wilson thinks the hypothesis of strongly emergent consciousness might be something we can test for, at least in principle. The first step would be to come up with a hypothesis based on the known fundamental physical interactions, predicting the overall energy of a complex system, like an octopus brain. The next step would be to test for any apparent violations in the conservation of energy of this system. If there were, this might point to strong emergence, just as the apparent violation of conservation of energy led to the discovery of a new interaction.

The scientists respond — specifically, a physicist, an anesthesiologist, a cognitive neuroscientist and a developmental and synthetic biologist

“It’s pseudoscience,” says Eric Carlson, associate professor of physics at Wake Forest University about Wilson’s proposition to test for Strong Emergence. “We know very well that consciousness is the action of the brain, which operates on electrochemical principles.” Carlson says testing to see if consciousness is a new interaction legitimizes junk science. “There were spiritualists who tried to demonstrate the existence of souls through physical manifestations. And some people thought it had to do with electromagnetic radiation or something. And we still have ghost hunters walking around measuring electromagnetic fields." For Carlson, Strong Emergence is a vintage, debunked investigation into the existence of a soul, repackaged as “consciousness theory.” 

Carlson admits he’s not caught up on the growing body of evidence that organisms without neurons (like plants and slime molds) are capable of memory, thinking, problem-solving and learning — or that it’s getting harder for researchers to explain away these behaviors as purely nonconscious and mechanical. Consciousness in brainless organisms undermines the claim that consciousness is an action of the brain. While the brain is undoubtedly involved in human and animal consciousness, if beings without brains can be conscious, then what consciousness is must have another explanation.

“I don't know how you test for [Strong Emergence]. I don't think consciousness is in essence, an emergent property, which means that it emerges at a higher level of complexity,” says Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist and professor at University of Arizona. “Actually, I think it's a basic fundamental property of the universe. Every time there's a collapse, there's a little blip of experience.” 

Hameroff is the co-author of a theory of consciousness with Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Sir Roger Penrose. Their theory is Orchestrated Objective Reduction or the Orch OR Theory of Consciousness — the theory that consciousness arises from quantum wave function collapses inside microtubules. It’s a polarizing theory and one of the few theories of consciousness that has the potential to be tested and either proved out or falsified. 

What’s a quantum wave function collapse? “Einstein demonstrated with his theory of general relativity that large objects cause big curvatures in spacetime,” says Hameroff. “Penrose applied this on a microscale saying tiny particles cause tiny curvatures in spacetime. A single particle in quantum superposition of two locations would have opposing curvatures, a separation in the structure of spacetime. These separations are unstable, and self-collapse, causing consciousness. That is the origin of qualia and phenomenal experience.”

According to Orch OR, quantum collapses that give over to proto-conscious moments are happening everywhere in the universe. This is not consciousness. These moments of proto-consciousness are the building blocks for consciousness. The blocks get assembled in an orchestrated way inside microtubules. Microtubules are fractal structures inside cells. They can be found in plants, unicellular organisms, and inside neurons. They help cells keep their shape and internal order. Although smaller than a neuron, microtubules may be large enough to host proto-conscious events (quantum collapses) of a particular scale or quantity necessary to give rise to conscious experience.

“I think the basic problem is the brain is not strictly a computer. It's more like an orchestra. It's a multi-scale hierarchy that goes downward, inside neurons, to the microtubules and then to the quantum level,” says Hameroff, who likens proto-consciousness to the atonal notes when musicians in an orchestra tune their instruments. Once the performance begins, the notes harmonize. If proto-conscious events are like individual notes, and microtubules the orchestra, then consciousness is the symphony. Until quantum collapses become organized by microtubules into conscious experience, Hameroff thinks these random, disconnected proto-conscious moments occur everywhere. “They’re the origins of life. Or they prompted the origins of life. They're driving evolution.”

Tests for quantum collapse due to spacetime separation are currently underway in multiple labs, like The Bouwmeester Lab (run by Dirk Bouwmeester’s team) at University of California, Santa Barbara and Ivette Fuentes’s research group at University of Southampton. Results from these experiments might resolve the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, a big problem for physics and a big part of the Orch OR theory. However, these experiments are not designed to show that quantum collapse produces proto-consciousness.

Orch OR also needs to show that cognition depends on microtubule activity, which Anirban Bandyopadhyay, a senior scientist at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan was able to demonstrate. Bandyopadhyay’s research also shows the presence of quantum effects in microtubules. But the microtubule activity linked to cognition has yet to be shown to be quantum.

Another critical test in proving Orch OR is the actual manipulation of consciousness, turning consciousness on and off through anesthesia. 

“General anesthesia basically affects consciousness and very little else in the body,” says Hameroff, who points out that the brain is still active under anesthesia even though you are not conscious. Anesthesia seems to target consciousness. And anesthetic gases work by a quantum interaction. “We have shown quantum effects in microtubules and are attempting to prove their relevance to consciousness by testing for sensitivity to anesthetics proportional to anesthetic potency,” says Hameroff. “We should know within a year.”

Why does science need to solve the problem of consciousness?

“Figuring out how we go from a neural event to a psychological experience, that's absolutely fundamental,” says Jacob Bellmund, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany. While Bellmund’s research doesn’t focus on what consciousness is, he looks at the neural substrates that produce mental representations. Specifically, Bellmund works in the area of memory and cognitive representations of space and time. 

His previous research looked at grid and place cells inside the brain that function as our internal GPS, navigating us through the world. Bellmund and a team of researchers from around the world discovered that these cells produce a trajectory through cognitive space, a coordinate system for our thoughts where we collect and piece together properties of a concept. “Our train of thought can be considered a path through the spaces of our thoughts, along different mental dimensions.” His findings served as the basis for the hypothesis that knowledge is organized spatially in the mind. “I'm currently working on temporal memories,” says Bellmund. “How we remember when things happened, how we build this representation.” 

As with all cognitive neuroscientists straddling neuroscience and psychology, Bellmund has to resort to abstract terms like cognitive spaces and mental dimensions to describe experiences. When it comes to the relationship between neural activity and cognition, “I think it's important to understand how this arises.” Bellmund doesn’t think it’s accurate to say that neural events are identical to cognitive events, though he doesn’t know how to design an experiment to settle this question.

"You can't just have opinions on this,” says Michael Levin, a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University conducting intelligence studies on slime molds. “You have to do experiments.” Levin insists scientists need to propose various definitions of consciousness, examine which definition gives a better understanding of a conscious system, and then do experiments to predict and control conscious systems. Levin thinks consciousness arises on a continuum, with a sort of higher degree of fidelity the more complex the system. “If evolution is true, then these cognitive capacities appear somewhere, and if you think it's binary, you can't just say it, you have to propose an empirical explanation of what is different and where the jump happens.” 

Levin also sees an inherent problem in trying to use an objective discipline like the scientific method to make sense of subjective experience. “You can communicate predictions of stories about brains and about cognition and about computation,” he says. “Let's say you have a perfect, correct theory of consciousness. Okay. What format are your predictions in?” 

For every other scientific theory, there’s an objective third-person story about what’s going on. For cognitive neuroscience, it’s third-person observations and descriptions of neuronal and human behavior. 

Levin’s not sure how to objectively observe and communicate findings about consciousness. “How could you possibly know if you have a correct theory of consciousness if you can't even tell me what shape the answers are going to be in, what language are they going to be in? I don't think there is a third-person story to be told about consciousness.”

Why does humanity need to solve the problem of consciousness?

Technically, we don’t. We can continue to live with the ironic fact about our existence: That there’s nothing we know better, more directly and more intimately than our consciousness. And there’s virtually nothing in the universe that remains a bigger mystery. Meanwhile, the need to bridge that gap and understand consciousness might be a clue to solving it. But that’s another (upcoming) story.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2021/11/04/an-experiment-for-consciousness-scientists-and-philosophers-across-three-countries-debate-it/?sh=3494804f1484