The difficulty of imparting consciousness to a machine should be obvious to anyone who has attended a birth, when a new being with consciousness enters the world. How does it arise? Hindus believe that consciousness or sentience enters the fetus in the third
month of pregnancy. In reality, when we are scientifically honest, we must admit we have no idea how awareness can
ever
arise—not in an individual, not collectively, and certainly not from molecules and electromagnetism. Indeed, does consciousness arise at all? It’s widely repeated that each cell in our body is part of a continuous string of cells that started dividing billions of years ago—a single unbroken chain of life. But what about consciousness? This more than anything else must be unbroken. Although most people like to imagine a universe existing without it, we have seen that this makes no sense if one gives the matter sufficient thought. How does consciousness ever begin? How could that possibly occur? And is that question any less enigmatic than trying to figure how it might arise at a later date? Is
consciousness
synonymous with
everything
?
The deep thinkers of the past and present are right: it is the biggest mystery, next to which all else pales.
Lest the reader think this to be idle talk or philosophy, remember that observer-dependent arguments have been raging at high-level ordinary physics circles for three-quarters of a century. Debates about the role and importance of observers in the physical universe are nothing new. Recall, for example, Austrian quantum expert Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, which attempted to show how preposterous were the prevailing alleged consequences of mating mind with matter in quantum experiments.
Imagine a closed box, he said, in which we have a bit of radioactive material that might or might not release a particle. Both possibilities exist and, according to Copenhagen, these potential outcomes do not become real until they are observed. Only then does what later was called the wave-function collapse, and the particle manifests itself . . . or not. Well, fair enough so far. But now place a Geiger counter in the box that can detect the particle’s appearance (if that possibility is the one that materializes). If the Geiger counter feels the particle, it triggers the release of a falling, swiveling hammer that breaks the glass in a vial of cyanide gas.
A cat also constrained in the box would then be killed. Now, according to Copenhagen, the quantum radioactive release of the
particle, the detector, the falling hammer, and the cat all have now been unified into a single quantum system. But only when someone opens the box is an observation made, which forces the entire sequence of events to go from a possibility to a reality.
But what could this mean? asked Schrödinger. Are we to believe, if we find a dead, rotting cat, that the animal had been suspended in an anything’s-possible state until a moment ago when the box was opened? That it only
appears
as if it’s been dead for days? That the cat really was both dead and alive, as Copenhagen would insist, until someone opened the box and therefore established the entire sequence of
past
events?
Yes. Exactly. (Unless the cat’s consciousness counts as an observation, so that the initial wave-function collapses then and there, and needn’t wait for a human to open the box days later.) Anyway, all this is still believed by a great many physicists even today. Similarly, we can look at a universe that seems to have been started with a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, and yet that is only what we see now, what
seems
to have been an actual history. Quantum theory maintains that we can say only one thing for sure: the universe
looks like
it’s been there for many billions of years. According to quantum mechanics, there are major, irrevocable limits on the certainty of our knowledge.
But if there were no observers, the cosmos wouldn’t merely look like nothing, which is stating the obvious. No, more than that, it wouldn’t exist in any way. Physicist Andrei Linde of Stanford University says, “The universe and the observer exist as a pair. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of the universe that ignores consciousness. I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers.”
Eminent Princeton physicist John Wheeler has for years been insisting that when observing light from a distant quasar that’s bent around a foreground galaxy so that it had the possibility of appearing on either side of that city of suns, we have effectively set up a quantum observation but on an enormously large scale. It means, he insists, that the measurements made on an incoming bit of light now
determine the indeterminate path it took billions of years ago. The past is created in the present. This of course recalls the actual quantum experiments outlined in our earlier chapters, where an observation right now determines the path its twin took in the past.
In 2002,
Discover
magazine sent Tim Folger to the coast of Maine to speak to John Wheeler firsthand. His opinions about the anthropic theory and such still carried a lot of weight in the community. He had been saying such provocative things that the magazine decided to title the article “Does the Universe Exist if We’re Not Looking?” based on the direction he’d been going in the tenth decade of his life. He told Folger that he was sure the universe was filled with “huge clouds of uncertainty” that have not yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. In all these places, he believes, the cosmos is “a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet the past.”
Because your head may now be spinning, let’s take a break and go back to my friend Barbara, sitting comfortably in her living room with her glass of water, certain of its existence and her own. Her house is as it has always been, with its artwork on the wall, the cast-iron stove, the old oak table. She putters between rooms. Nine decades of choices—dishes, bed sheets, art, machines and tools in the workshop, her career—define her life.
Every morning, she opens her front door to bring in the
Boston Globe
or to work in her garden. She opens her back porch door to a lawn dotted with whirly-gigs, squeaking as they go round and round in the breeze. She thinks the world churns along whether she happens to open the door or not.
It does not affect her in the least that the kitchen disappears when she’s in the bathroom. That the garden and whirly-gigs evaporate when she’s sleeping. That the shop and all its tools don’t exist while she is at the grocery store.
When Barbara turns from one room to the next, when her animal senses no longer perceive the kitchen—the sounds of a dishwasher, the ticking clock, the groaning pipes, the smell of a chicken roasting—the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into
the primal energy-nothingness or waves of probability. The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way around. Or, perhaps more graspably, there dwells an eternal correlativity of nature and consciousness.
For each life, or if one prefers, the one life, there is a universe that involves “spheres of reality.” Shape and form are generated inside one’s head using all the sensory data collected through ears, eyes, nose, mouth, and skin. Our planet is composed of billions of spheres of reality, an internal/external confluence, a mélange whose scope is breathtaking.
But can this really be? You wake each morning and your dresser is still across the room from your comfortable spot in the bed. You put on your same pair of jeans and favorite shirt and shuffle to the kitchen in slippers to make coffee. How can anyone in his right mind possibly suggest that the great world out there is constructed in our heads? This takes some additional analogies.
To grasp a universe of still arrows and disappearing moons more fully, let’s turn to modern electronics and our animal-sense-perception tools. You know from experience that something in the black box of a DVD player turns an inanimate disc into a movie. The electronics in your DVD player convert and animate the information on the disc into a two-dimensional show. Likewise, your brain animates the universe. You can imagine the brain as being like the electronics in your DVD player.
Explained another way, in the language of biology, the brain turns electrochemical impulses from our five senses into an order, a sequence, into a face, into this page, into a room, into an environment—into a unified three-dimensional whole. It transforms a stream of sensory input into something so real that few people ever ask how it happens. Our minds are so good at creating a three-dimensional universe that we rarely question whether the universe is anything other than we imagine it. Our brains sort, order, and interpret the sensations that we receive. Photons of light, for example, which arrive from the Sun carrying the electromagnetic force, by themselves look like nothing. They are bits of energy. As
uncounted trillions bounce off the objects around us, and some are reflected our way, various combinations of wavelengths enter our eye from each and every object. Here, they deliver the force to trillions of atoms arranged into an exquisite design of several million cone-shaped cells that rapidly fire in permutations too vast for any computer to calculate. Then, in the brain, the world appears. Light, which as we saw in chapter 3 has no color by itself, is now a magical potpourri of shapes and hues. Further parallel processing snaking through neural networks at one-third of the speed of sound makes sense of it all—a necessary step because those who were blind for decades but whose sight was restored gaze confusedly and unsurely at the world, unable to see what we see or to process the newfound input usefully.
Sights, tactile experiences, odors—all these sensations are experienced inside the mind alone. None are “out there” except by the convention of language. Everything we observe is the direct interaction of energy and mind. Anything that we do not observe directly exists only as potential—or more mathematically speaking—as a haze of probability. “Nothing,” said Wheeler, “exists until it is observed.”
You can also think of your mind operating like the circuitry of an electronic calculating device. Say you bought a brand-new calculator and have just taken it out of the package. When you punch in 4 × 4, the number 16 pops up on the little display screen, even though these numbers have never been multiplied before on that particular device. The calculator follows a set of rules, like your mind. 16 will always pop up on a functioning calculator when given the input of 4 × 4, or 10 + 6, or 25 - 9. When you step outside, it’s like a new set of numbers has been punched that determines what will be on “display”—whether the Moon will be here or there, blocked by a cloud, crescent, or full.
The i’s and the t’s of physical reality are not dotted and crossed until you actually look up into the sky. The Moon has a definite existence only after it has been pulled out of the realm of mathematical probability and into the observer’s web of consciousness. In any
event, the space between its atoms is so huge, it is as correct to call the Moon empty space as to call it an object. There’s truly nothing solid about it at all, it’s just more brain-stuff.
Perhaps you may find yourself trying to catch a quick glimpse of this haze of probability before it bursts into form, like a kid sneaking a peek at the cover of
Playboy
. The inclination is to dart your eyes or turn your head with lightning speed to catch a forbidden glance. But you can’t see something that doesn’t yet exist, so the game is futile.
Perhaps some readers will dismiss this as nonsense, arguing that there’s no way the brain has the machinery actually to create physical reality. But remember that dreams and schizophrenia (consider the movie
A Beautiful Mind
) prove the capacity of the mind to construct a spatio-temporal reality as real as the one you are experiencing now. As a medical doctor, I can attest to the fact that the visions and sounds schizophrenic patients “see” and “hear” are just as real to them as this page or the chair on which you now sit.
It is here, at last, where we approach the imagined border of ourselves, the wooded boundary where, in the words of the old fairy tale, the fox and the hare say goodnight to each other. At sleep, we all know, consciousness is diminished, and so too, the continuity in the connection of times and places, the end to both space and time. Where, then, do we find ourselves? On rungs that can be intercalated anywhere, “like those,” as Emerson put it “that Hermes won with dice of the moon, that Osiris might be born.” It is true that consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the Earth, we know only the crust. Below the level of conscious thought, we can conceive unconscious neural states. But these mental faculties, in themselves, apart from their relation to our consciousness, cannot be said to exist in space and time, any more than does a rock or a tree.
And as for its limits, its boundaries so to speak, do they exist in any imaginable way? Or is it even simpler than we can imagine? “There is,” wrote Thoreau, “always the possibility . . . of being all.”
How can this be true? How is it managed, as in our actual experiments with electrons, that a single particle can be at two places at
once? See the loon in the pond, the single mullein or dandelion in the field, the Moon, or the North Star? How deceptive is the space that separates them and makes them solitary? Are they not the subjects of the same reality that interested Bell, whose experiment answered once and for all whether what happens locally is affected by nonlocal events?
The situation is not unlike the one in which Alice found herself in the Pool of Tears. We are sure we are not connected to the fish in the pond, for they have scales and fins and we don’t have any. Yet, “non-separability,” theorist Bernard d’Espagnat has said, “is now one of the most certain general concepts in physics.” This is not to say that our minds, like the particles in Bell’s experiment, are linked in any way that can violate the laws of causality. We may imagine two detectors situated on opposite sides of the universe, with photons from some central source flying off to each of them. If an experimenter changed the polarization of one beam, he might instantaneously influence events 10 billion light-years away. But no information can possibly be transmitted from point A to point B or from one experimenter to another through this process. It unfolds strictly on its own.