8. Consciousness: A Way for the Cosmos to Know Itself
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“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan, American astronomer, in the TV series "Cosmos"
“The universe contains infinitely more beauty than humans can ever appreciate. While you enjoy the spectacle of one sunset, trillions of sunsets are simultaneously occurring across the universe, painting alien skies with color frequencies you couldn't even perceive.”
― Francois Chollet, AI Scientist at Google, in a Tweet
We all have this feeling that there is some sort of a "presence" inside of us. It is looking out from the inside and is having the experiences we are having.
For example, when you say, "I'm feeling cold". Who or what is this "I" that is feeling cold?
You could say that it is your body that is feeling cold. But where is this feeling of coldness being experienced? Is it your mind?
But then, when you say "I am feeling happy" or "I am thinking about ice cream", who is this "I" that is feeling happy or thinking about ice cream?
You could say it is your mind.
But again, if you are saying "my body" or "my mind", who is this "inner me" that is not your body or your mind but seems to think it owns them both?
This is a question that has bothered everyone from little children to wise old people for a long time.
And we have given this “inner me” a name, “Consciousness”.
Consciousness is the feeling we have that there is something inside of us that is experiencing the things we experience. And through the sum total of those experiences, it is the thing that knows "what it is like" to be you.
Over the millennia, the word has taken on a few slightly different meanings.
To start with, there is the meaning we started with, the experience of "the inner me" that knows "what it is like to be you". This is often called as "subjective or phenomenal experience".
But colloquially, consciousness can also refer to the cat's version in the meme up there i.e. being awake (vs sleeping). It can also refer to being aware of what's going on (vs being unconscious), or having a certain amount of activity in certain brain regions (vs being dead) and so on. We have also developed the concept of "universal consciousness" that gives rise to, or maybe, is, all of existence.
Then there are other words like "spirit" or "soul" or "essence" and so on that also get associated with the concept of consciousness.
Having the same word mean all these things makes any debates about consciousness highly problematic. Often it turns out that when people are having fierce debates, they are really talking about different senses of the word.
And since we are trying to take a principled approach to all such important concepts in this book, we need to be clear about what exactly we mean when we use the word Consciousness.
For the purposes of this book, there seem to be at least 3 meanings of the word that could be interesting for us to look at.
Let us take a quick look at them next.
This meaning of consciousness refers to the “inner me” or "what it is like to be you" mentioned at the beginning of the chapter.
Consciousness in this sense is self-evident to all of us but we cannot prove its existence to anyone but ourselves because it is purely subjective.
In fact, the only reason why I believe that you are conscious is because I know I am conscious, and I am a human being, and you look like a human being, so I extrapolate from there and accept that you are probably conscious too!
Needless to say, this makes it really hard to study this phenomenon scientifically because science is based on objectively verifiable phenomena. It has generally stayed away from dealing with highly subjective phenomena such as this. (Though I believe it is time for science to find ways of dealing with them, as I have already explained in the chapter on Methodology.)
But since we are trying to build the whole stack of concepts starting from the absolute fundamentals, we have a deeper problem here. It is known as the "hard" problem of consciousness.
The "hard" reference comes from Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers, who characterizes it as follows:
"The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject."
― David Chalmers, Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Essentially, the deeper question here is, "How does consciousness, as in phenomenal experience, emerge from purely physical matter?"
After having thought about this for centuries, we still do not have a good answer to this question. While various people have proposed a few hypotheses, we are far from proving any of them.
But what we can say for sure is that this phenomenon is self-evident, easy to understand and widely corroborated. Every human being you can talk to will attest to the fact that they are definitely conscious. One does not need to be an expert on consciousness or a meditator or anything like that.
And since the PBR methodology allows us to include subjective phenomena that are simple to understand and widely corroborated, we can include this sense of consciousness in the MSE Framework, at least at the axiom level. (And, as you have seen earlier, we have indeed included it in the MSE Framework diagram.)
Consciousness in this sense refers to the structures and processes inside our nervous system that appear to be related to consciousness.
We usually associate various cognitive functions with consciousness, such as perception, attention, memory, and introspection. These, among others, are the "neural correlates" of consciousness.
Of course, more and more evidence is piling up that our bodies don't use just neurons to "think". We also "think" in deeper, subconscious ways all over our bodies.
So I think it is more accurate to say "biological correlates" rather than just neural.
Irrespective of whether you agree with this characterization, consciousness in this sense is considered to be "easy", (at least as compared to the "hard" version,) because we assume we can study these biological correlates objectively, and thus gain scientific insight into them.
And while we haven't completely solved this problem, we have made tremendous progress in doing so, using various scientific techniques.
This is the idea that the entire universe is a single unified entity and, just like we have a consciousness, it also has, or in fact is, a consciousness.
Another idea that usually gets added to this is that the consciousness we feel inside ourselves is really just this universal consciousness expressing itself through us, though we aren't always aware of this.
This concept is known as Brahman in the Vedic tradition or Tao in the Chinese tradition or sometimes just as the Universal Generative Principle in secular terminology.
Unfortunately, here again, we have no evidence that such a thing exists. We have no way to verify that the universe is conscious in any way that we can understand or explain. We also have no evidence to claim any relationship it has with the individual consciousness we experience. The whole thing is an enigma.
But one part of this idea that we can agree with is that we all seem to have a natural tendency to want to expand and enrich our consciousness.
This is widely corroborated by many people when they say things like "I need to belong to something larger than myself" or "I feel that I am a part of something much larger than myself."
We also agree that simply watching a sunset or looking at a smiling child (or indeed, a cat) or listening to music or reading a book are all consciousness-enriching or expanding experiences.
And it's not even just that. We can think of everything we do as, in some way, expanding or enriching our consciousness because each experience we have is unique in some, no matter how minor, way, and it adds to the whole.
And since this subjective feeling is simple and is widely corroborated, we will include it in our framework.
In fact, we will actually use this concept further below to state where we think the desire for meaning, purpose and hope comes from. So this idea turns out to be rather critical for the MSE Framework.
So here is a quick picture showing our model of consciousness. For the purposes of the MSE Framework, we will use the term "consciousness" in all these senses. The context should make it clear which sense we are talking about.
A significant roadblock to scientifically studying consciousness in the "hard" sense is that it is subjective, whereas science likes to deal only with objective evidence. The most powerful tool of science, the Scientific Method, requires objective evidence.
On the other hand, the phenomenon of consciousness is self-evident. You don’t really need any proof of the fact that you are conscious and are having an experience of seeing these words in front of your eyes right now.
But there is no way to prove this fact to someone else. All they can do is infer it based on the sharing of various characteristics, as mentioned earlier.
Normally, when science comes across evidence that isn’t objective, it simply dismisses it (or at least in need of further study so that it can be converted into something objective).
But in the case of consciousness, that would make no sense since, in spite of it being subjective, its existence seems self-evident already!
There are various proposals to show how consciousness might be emerging out of physical neural activity. I am myself receptive to the idea and have my own hypothesis which I have included further down in this chapter.
But unfortunately, all such proposals, including mine, are far from being proven at this point.
The way I have chosen to resolve this problem for the MSE Framework is to treat consciousness, in the "subjective or phenomenal experience" sense, as an axiom. An axiom is nothing but something fundamental that seems self-evident, is widely accepted and can’t be explained in any other way, so this should be perfectly reasonable.
But just in case you have some hesitation over accepting it as an axiom, let me provide a strong supporting argument.
The truth is, what we call “physical reality” is also something fundamental and self-evident that we all take for granted. Everyone agrees that it exists, but one can argue that, ultimately, it is also just a subjective experience.
All we can say confidently is that we are receiving some signals from something "out there", but we really have no idea what their origin is. Because all we have are these signals. Whatever we construe as physical reality is simply what our brains infer from those signals. And the fact that other people agree with those inferences gives us a lot more confidence that they truly exist "out there". But no one can say anything about the source of those signals.
In fact, if you really think about it, we don’t even have a good definition of what the word “physical” means. This is because there is no deeper reference frame that we can point to in order to define it. It is simply something we all intuitively agree upon without any further basis.
Any definition, such as “we can see it” or “touch it” either quickly becomes circular or somehow ends up involving consciousness.
We can talk about solid objects and elementary particles and forces and even quantum fields and so on, but those are just characteristics of physical reality. They do not tell us what we mean by the word “physical”.
This is no different from what we said about consciousness earlier. We all agree it exists but there appears to be no deeper frame of reference to base it on.
So, it makes sense to treat both physical reality as well as consciousness on the same footing - as axioms!
A major benefit of this approach is that it allows us to completely bypass all the philosophical debates between people who believe in one of them as being fundamental and the other one being just a figment of our imagination.
Let us dig a little deeper into these debates and highlight an important benefit of how our methodology helps us move past them.
A lot of scientists have the temptation to treat physical reality as privileged and consciousness as something that needs to be explained using physical reality as the basis.
That is why, by “Hard Problem”, people always tend to mean the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” i.e. the problem of defining how consciousness arises out of physical reality.
On the other hand, some philosophers argue that one could take consciousness as fundamental and physical reality as something imaginary that emerges out of it. In fact, this is pretty much the stance taken by Vedic philosophy.
Interestingly, if you take this argument to be true, then consciousness becomes easy but explaining how physical reality emerges from it becomes a “Hard" problem, i.e., we end up with the "Hard Problem of Physical Reality”!
Many scientists and philosophers alike get stuck on one or the other of these problems because they believe that unless we can resolve this, we cannot have a complete understanding of reality.
But we do not need to go there. Our focus is on solving a real-world problem, that of defining meaning, purpose and hope. Due to our adoption of Present-Bounded Rationality as our methodology, we are fine with not having complete knowledge of everything. We can use what we know and see if we can create a useful model and a solution to our problem based on it, which we can always improve later on as we learn more.
So, we'll go ahead with treating both consciousness and physical reality as axioms, and both have an equal footing in our model. (As you can see, this is already reflected in the MSE Framework diagram included earlier in the book.)
As we have already stated, we have no good theory for how consciousness originates. But what we do know for sure is that it does originate, and we can feel its presence right here and now.
Moreover, many other mammals (apes, dogs, elephants, whales etc.), birds (crows, parrots etc.) and sea creatures (octopuses etc.) exhibit at least some aspects of consciousness that are quite similar to ours.
For example, many of them seem to have a sense of self, enjoy a certain amount of play, display empathy towards each other, show evidence of thinking through problems, communicate with each other, show evidence of experiencing pleasure and pain, and so on.
Even some complex organized groups of Living Entities such as communities or countries or economies can also be seen to exhibit certain aspects of consciousness. These again take the form of exhibiting a distinct identity with unique characteristics, drives, fears and other types of emotions, the desire for survival and expansion, and so on. One could say that their consciousness is just an agglomeration of the individual consciousnesses of the Living Entities that inhabit them, but they also demonstrate some emergent properties that aren't present in the individuals.
There is even speculation that AI could develop consciousness down the road.
There are scientific theories, like the Integrated Information Theory that try to generalize the notion of consciousness to all systems that have a complex organization, irrespective of their substrate, biological or otherwise. (There is a Deep Dive into this theory below.)
The point I am trying to make is that, irrespective of our inability to identify the exact process of its emergence, we can say that consciousness in various forms has indeed emerged in the universe, and continues to emerge in various contexts and ways.
You have probably guessed what I am going to say next: Yes, we can absolutely think of the tendency to give rise to consciousness as another universal tendency, emerging on top of a variety of types of self-emergent complexity.
So, let us add it to our list.
The universe appears to have a natural tendency to create Living Entities of various types that display consciousness to various degrees.
But that's not all. Consciousness is more special than all the other tendencies we have identified.
What's really interesting is that Consciousness itself demonstrates all of the other universal tendencies that we have identified, namely Coherence, Complexity, Continuity, Curiosity, Creativity, Evolution and even Diversity. (As a fun exercise, you may want to spend a little bit of time thinking of examples of Consciousness exhibiting each of the other tendencies.)
Let us keep this idea in mind for now, we will use it further down in the chapter.
But first, we need to look at the most important reason we have included Consciousness in the MSE Framework. Consciousness has a larger role to play in the framework besides being one of the tendencies, or even an "uber" tendency as described above.
Most of us have probably experienced states of "heightened awareness" or "intense consciousness" at some point in our lives.
They could be a result of experiencing (or creating) great music, great art, great movies, great books, being in or making love, hanging out with friends, or maybe just eating ice cream.
Many people would even say that such experiences are really meaningful to them.
This realization gives us a clue for where we think our desire for meaning in life may be coming from, not to mention where the experience of meaningfulness occurs.
We have seen that our physical desires, such as those for nutrition, comfort, safety etc. arise in our physical body as a result of it performing Active Inference in order to minimize surprises and thus continue to survive.
But while these desires arise from our physiology (which emerges from Physical Reality in our framework diagram), some other desires, such as those for meaning, purpose and hope in one’s life, appear to be arising out of our consciousness.
One reason for saying that these desires arise out of consciousness is that the sense of meaning, purpose and hope have no counterpart in physical reality. It requires a serious stretch of imagination to say that atoms and molecules, or even complex chemicals have any sense of meaning, purpose or hope. And since we have no theory that shows us how consciousness may be arising from physical reality, we can not jump to that conclusion either.
As we have already said, the desire to "belong to something larger than oneself" is simple and widely corroborated. We have already seen earlier that this desire could be seen as an expression of the natural tendency for our individual consciousness to expand, to include not just other people, but eventually all of reality.
Moreover, we have also observed that the experience of expanding or enriching our consciousness is widely considered to be meaningful by those experiencing it.
In other words, we can say that our consciousness naturally acts as if it is trying to expand and enrich itself, and we experience this phenomenon as a desire for meaning and purpose.
Moreover, our consciousness expects to keep trying to expand and enrich itself in the future and we can say that we experience this as our desire for hope. In other words, hope is nothing but an expectation we have that our lives will continue to be meaningful in the future.
As a result, we can state that the desires for meaning, purpose and hope all appear to be side-effects of the natural tendency of our individual consciousness to expand and enrich itself.
Let us represent this idea with a simple diagram:
While that should be sufficient for our needs, I am going to postulate a highly plausible hypothesis about desires in general and using that as another factor in favor of this argument.
I am claiming that desires, whether they arise from our physiology or consciousness, are a result of Living Entities performing Active Inference.
Let us take a deeper look to see how we can arrive at this conclusion.
We know that the process of Active Inference involves Living Entities building a generative model of their environment. This model is generative in the sense that it generates counterfactual scenarios. The Living Entity then seeks evidence for those scenarios in its environment.
Well, we can say that desires are nothing but these counterfactual scenarios that emerge in these generative models, that we are compelled to realize in our real lives as a result of us constantly performing Active Inference.
In other words, it is the process of Active Inference that is at the root of the desire to realize these counterfactual scenarios. It inspires Living Entities to go out and seek evidence for their existence, which is the same as trying to fulfill them.
So, it seems quite reasonable to say that Active Inference is the root of all desire.
Now, note that Active Inference is a general principle that applies equally well to all Living Entities. It does not matter whether the entity is biological (such as a living organism), social (such as a community or organization), virtual (such as consciousness) or possibly even artificial (as in AI). One can say the process is “substrate-independent”.
Thus, not only does our physical body tend to perform Active Inference, but even our consciousness may be doing it. We could even postulate that consciousness is a "virtual" life form that complex lifeforms give birth to. (We will explore this particular idea further down.)
This virtual life form also needs to continue to survive, and hence has to perform Active Inference.
For example, our physical brains do have the ability to sense our environment, build a model of the environment and perform actions on the environment. Similarly, our consciousness can also be seen to sense its environment, build a model of it, and act on it. It does this via the thinking / feeling parts of our brains.
We can also say that some of our desires are physical, such as hunger or physical comfort, and some arise out of consciousness, such as meaning, purpose and hope.
But note that the generative models created by these two processes are different. One is physical and the other is virtual or abstract (though it possibly uses physical infrastructure).
Let me explain what I mean.
We say that Newton developed abstract models of the law of gravity or laws of motion. But the models he created were meant for our consciousness, not for our physical body.
The reason why I am saying this is because our physical body already had its own, physical model of gravity and laws of motion. It built this model a long time ago, when we were small and kept picking things up and dropping them or throwing things around!
Yes, when we picked things up and let go of them. only to see them fall down, we intuited over time that things always seem to fall down unless supported by something solid i.e. we essentially "discovered" gravity ourselves.
Similarly, when we learned to throw and catch balls or whatever, we were slowly putting together a model of the laws of motion without being consciously aware of it.
These models were "physical" or subconscious in the sense that they got embedded somewhere in our neurons and even our muscle memories without us being explicitly aware of them. We didn't know any calculus or even any math then, but we could still throw things around and catch them reliably, i.e., deal with physical reality effectively, as a result of these models.
It was much later, when we actually did learn math and calculus that we were able to build abstract or mathematical models of gravity and laws of motion.
Why did we have to build these abstract models when we already knew these concepts intuitively?
We did that for the benefit of our consciousness! While our bodies had learned Newton's laws intuitively long before, our consciousness hadn't and (at least for some of us) was starving for that knowledge!
This is because the physical models we built were subconscious or embodied, so they were not directly available to our consciousness. Consciousness needs abstract models. It needs something abstract like math and calculus and find a way to represent reality in those terms and then figure out how to process it in mathematical terms.
And of course, once our consciousness had learned these abstract models, it could analyze them and build even more complex counterfactual scenarios using them, and that then motivated it to realize those more complex scenarios in reality. That's how we ended up with cars and planes and rockets.
When our teachers taught us math and calculus and Newton's laws, and we said "Oh, I finally get it", what we really meant was "My consciousness finally got it". Our physical body had already known it from the time we were little children. We wouldn't have been able to walk or run or jump or play ball without that knowledge!
So we actually learn Newton's laws twice in our lives - once, as infants, on our own (so, actually, we could call them our own laws!) and then again in school. The first one may be called intuitive or embodied, and the second one, abstract or mathematical.
Isn't that interesting? Makes you wonder about which other things we learn in school were intuitively known to us long before. (This isn't just an interesting thought. It is interesting to go through this exercise. You will be amazed at what you will discover!)
To summarize, let me state the main hypothesis a little more formally.
Desires arise in Living Entities as a result of them performing Active Inference. They are the counterfactual scenarios generated by their internal generative model. The process of Active Inference results in the Living Entities going out and seeking evidence for the existence of those counterfactual scenarios. When such evidence is found (or constructed), that is essentially the same as those desires being satisfied.
Physical desires such as hunger and thirst arise out of the physical process of Active Inference. Similarly, conscious desires, such as those for meaning, purpose and hope in life, arise out of our consciousness performing the same process of Active Inference.
Also note that this hypothesis lends additional support to the idea we had stated earlier, that the desire for meaning, purpose and hope arises in consciousness via the Active Inference process.
This idea actually turns out to be a rich vein capable of generating many insights about consciousness. Allow me to propose another intriguing hypothesis that emerges from it.
As we have already seen, Living Entities perform Active Inference in order to continue to exist or survive.
In the case of conscious Living Entities such as ourselves, not only does our physical body constantly try to continue to survive, but our consciousness also does the same. (In fact, we can and do commonly think of our consciousness as a "little person" inside our heads, essentially implying that it is an abstract life form of its own, and it doesn't want to die.)
Does that mean that consciousness may itself be a Living Entity? Could it be a “virtual” life form that complex Living Entities give birth to and continue to support, nurture and enrich during their own lifetimes just like they do with their biological offspring?
It is known that newborns do not exhibit many aspects of consciousness. Then, as they grow, they develop more and more attributes of consciousness until they mature into the adult version of consciousness that we are all familiar with. And even as adults, our consciousness continues to mature, or expand and enrich, as we have said earlier.
While our consciousness is going through this process of evolution, it keeps perceiving its environment, which includes our own physical environment as well as the virtual environment of our thoughts, feelings, emotions and perceptions.
Throughout this process, consciousness also tries to build its own internal model of its environment.
This is what we would typically call our conscious understanding of our reality, which is different from our physical or subconscious understanding of it. The conscious understanding is in the form of formulas and diagrams, while the physical understanding is in the form of muscle memory or physical skills or even our physical form.
Moreover, consciousness also tries to generate its own counterfactual scenarios based on its model, which get translated into instructions for our physical body to carry out. This is how, for example, we dream of ourselves sitting on a tropical island, and after a period of planning, budgeting and traveling, find ourselves over there.
Note that all of this is separate from the physical perception, internal model building and actions that our bodies perform. Our bodies perceive and react to a lot of things in our environment without even getting our consciousness involved.
These are things like breathing, digesting food, fighting pathogens, circulating nutrients and disposing of waste products, walking and so on. Our bodies do that in order to satisfy their own desires for survival, comfort and so on. They perform these actions without conscious involvement because they use their own internal model which is pretty much hidden from our consciousness.
The Active Inference that our consciousness performs is on top of what our bodies are doing. Some of our physical perceptions do reach our consciousness (like you noticing a notification popping up on your screen), get processed in our consciousness (such as you consciously deciding to look at the notification that just popped up), and then converted into physical actions (such as you clicking on the notification).
Of course, as you may have noticed, all of these conscious activities are tightly integrated with our physical bodies. But we can also see that they are separate from the activities that our bodies perform subconsciously, though the separation isn't always very clear to us.
What I am ultimately trying to suggest is that it is possible to think of consciousness as its own life form that lives inside our bodies, that we essentially give birth to, nurture and support throughout our lives. And just like our children, we hope that this life form will expand and enrich itself.
While I have no evidence to support this besides my own introspection, I am hoping that this idea will appeal to other people and, over time, get corroborated by a wide range of people. If it does, it can be incorporated into the MSE Framework as a first-class concept.
As I mentioned, this idea is a rich vein and we will look at another idea that emerges out of it in the next chapter.
Ok, after that bit of diversion, let us get back on track to consciousness and desires.
Suffices to say that, unlike many other scientific frameworks that try to avoid talking about consciousness, the MSE Framework treats it as a critical part of its foundation, not only as one of of the most important universal tendencies, but also as the source of our desires for meaning, purpose and hope, and more.
Satisfying these desires helps us improve our mental and even physical well-being, which is ultimately why we consider it so critical.
With that, we have now built all the scaffolding we need to finally get to where we have been trying to get to, Meaning. We will do that in the next chapter.
The "Easy" Problem of Consciousness refers to the question of how and why certain physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences or the phenomenal experience of consciousness. This distinguishes it from the "Hard" problem, which deals with the deeper philosophical conundrums of that phenomenal experience itself.
While the Easy Problem is still an area of active research and debate, there are several leading theories and approaches that attempt to explain it. Here are a few prominent ones:
Higher-Order Theories (HOT): Higher-order theories propose that consciousness arises from the brain's ability to generate higher order representations or thoughts about one's own mental states. According to these theories, conscious experiences occur when the brain represents or reflects on its own internal states. They are called higher order to distinguish them from subconscious or unconscious mental processes.
Representationalist Theories: Representationalist theories propose that consciousness is closely tied to the brain's capacity to model the world, similar to the idea of the internal model in the Free Energy Principle. These theories suggest that conscious experiences involve mental representations that are rich, detailed, and actively updated by sensory inputs and cognitive processes. Consciousness is seen as a form of inner representation of the external environment as well as the internal states of the living organism itself.
Attentional Theories: Attentional theories emphasize the role of attention in generating conscious experiences. They propose that conscious awareness arises when attention is focused on specific sensory inputs or one's internal mental contents rather than the entirety of the sensory experience. According to these theories, attention acts as a spotlight, selecting and amplifying certain information, thereby making it available to conscious processing.
Global Workspace Theory (GWT): While GWT primarily addresses the Hard Problem of Consciousness, it also provides insights into the Easy Problem. GWT suggests that consciousness arises from the global exchange and broadcasting of information in the brain. According to this theory, information becomes conscious when it is made available to multiple cognitive processes and enters a "global workspace" that allows for flexible, widespread access.
It is worth noting that the Easy Problem of Consciousness remains a complex and multifaceted issue, and no single theory has yet provided a satisfactory and comprehensive explanation.
Nevertheless, the problem is considered to be "Easy" because it appears to be easier than the Hard problem, about which we are far more uncertain.
The Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is a theory proposed by neuroscientist and professor Giulio Tononi that attempts to explain and characterize the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
According to this theory, a conscious experience is characterized by a high degree of integrated information, meaning that the conscious system must be able to generate a large number of highly differentiated and irreducible states that cannot be decomposed into simpler components.
The theory also proposes that consciousness exists on a spectrum, with different levels of consciousness corresponding to different degrees of integrated information.
For example, a simple system like a thermostat may have very low levels of integrated information and therefore be considered unconscious, while a complex system like the human brain has a high degree of integrated information and can support rich, complex conscious experiences.
This theory is still very controversial, and a satisfactory and comprehensive theory for the Hard Problem remains an ongoing challenge.
Based on what we know so far about physical reality, at the most fundamental level, the universe consists of quantum fields.
A quantum field is basically a probability distribution i.e. a wave function that has a value everywhere in space. This value corresponds to the probability of an elementary particle existing there. These fields evolve over time, leading to the changes we see in the universe.
But then, we don’t perceive anything like that when we observe reality. What we see are concrete things happening, not evolving probabilities.
In order to explain this paradox, physicists came up with the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which proposed the idea of “wave function collapse”.
The idea here is that the universe behaves as a quantum wave function when observations aren’t being made. But as soon as an observation is made, the wave function “collapses”, i.e., we don’t perceive probability distributions, we perceive definite outcomes.
An equation known as the Schrödinger Equation has been extremely successful at allowing scientists to calculate the results of the wave function collapse, so we have strong evidence of this theory.
At the same time, the idea that "an observation" causes the collapse has caused a lot of controversies because it introduces the idea of an “observer”. Many people have speculated that this observer is nothing but the mysterious (Hard version of) consciousness.
Physicists have generally shied away from venturing too far in this direction, but the idea is still quite popular. For now, physicists are content with simply doing the calculations, leaving the idea of the observer to speculators.
Still, Stephen Wolfram has proposed an intriguing possibility, mentioned below.
Stephen Wolfram has come up with some intriguing ideas about the "observer" in quantum theory. It is a deep topic, but I will try to summarize it here quickly. His argument goes as follows.
We ourselves are embedded in the universe, which means we also ultimately consist of quantum fields.
Unfortunately, this means that we can never be sure of anything being anywhere at any point of time.
This raises the question: How can an observer such as ourselves, who is embedded in such a quantum universe “make sense” of anything?
Wolfram has a hypothesis about what might be going on, based on his own framework of Physics. (See the Deep Dive on it.)
According to him, the only way for an entity such as ourselves which is embedded in the quantum field of the universe to make sense of anything is to make the field “collapse” into concrete physical particles.
This “collapse” is exactly what the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics demands. And it is corroborated by the fact that whenever we make an observation, we always see concrete things happening, though we can also infer the existence of the quantum fields.
Of course, this is still a hypothesis and is actively being worked on.
