Is consciousness fundamental to the universe?

Question

In January 2023, Entropy published a paper entitled "Fusions of Consciousness" by Hoffman, Prakash and Prentner. They propose that consciousness is fundamental to the universe, rather than spacetime. They show that fusions of consciousness and fusions of qualia occur. This builds on the work of Strawson, Chalmers, and Goff. Are spacetime and materialism doomed?

Answer 1

Oh boy.

I skimmed the paper, kind of expecting to hate it, but I was pleasantly surprised. The Markov chain stuff is completely over my head, which is annoying as I find qualia a particularly interesting field of study, but this got far too technical for me.

But, I think I can offer at least some kind of answer for your two actual questions: "Is consciousness fundamental to the universe?" and "Is spacetime/materialism doomed?"

I'll disclaim all this by saying, I'm Catholic and a big fan of the scholastic tradition, and my answer is going to be in this vein. If you're looking for an answer that doesn't reference God, you'll probably have to look elsewhere. But I hope you'll read and find something interesting.

Let's start with the second question, just to be awkward.

Is Spacetime/Materialism doomed?

For a start, I hate the phrasing here. It's very dramatic and non-technical. There's two meanings we can have here.

Ok, which meanings?

• First, the literal; is spacetime, the "real" thing we experience as dimensions and time, going to stop existing?
• Second, the theoretical; are spacetime and materialism going to cease having currency in the philosophical dialogue of our day? Will they be disproven?

Let's start with the first meaning.

Well, disclaimer, I'm a Catholic, and my view here is an obvious yes, whichever way I slice it. Entropy seems to be unstoppable, so from a purely materialistic view, it seems likely that spacetime, if it doesn't outright collapse, will reach a state of essentially zero practical meaning.

From a wider theological stance, of course I'd have to say the endtimes is a thing. Next.

What about the theoretical sense?

Ok, this is more interesting, but more difficult. Again, I'm inclined to say "yes" here, but we're straying out of philosophy and into hard science and physics.

Quantum physics gives us some clues. Spooky action at a distance throws out basically everything we used to believe about spacetime. Here's a fun thought for you to chew on.

In our typical observations of space and forces, we see very clear chains of causality. Thing 1 touches Thing 2 and stuff happens. Even if those things are just waves, like in the case of radio waves or radiation, there has to be this direct interaction element where two things interact within roughly the same space.

Quantum entanglement blows that out of the water, with entangled particles able to affect one another at vast distances; the spatially contiguous nature of physics is violated.

If we see time as just another dimension, things get really weird. Just as we see spatially contiguous motion, we also see temporally contiguous motion. Plants grow smoothly, from one instant to the next changing. We don't get Minecraft crops that do nothing for several months and then suddenly pop into ripe bloom.

So the headscratcher is this; if spacially discontiguous action is possible, and time is just another dimension of spacetime, is temporally discontiguous action possible? Can one thing from several years ago suddenly have action on something today, or in the future, or in its past?

It's perhaps a nudging clue. Of course, again, to return to my own theological views, I would simply state that the ground state of being beneath spacetime is, of course, God.

Ok, what about consciousness? Is it fundamental to the universe?

Oh boy. This is such a fun question and it's puzzled us in some form or another for thousands of years.

A thought always comes up with this question; if consciousness isn't fundamental to reality, what's the point of reality? Do non-cogitant entities, such as rocks, waves and stars have any meaning, purpose or function if they are not observed?

The prospect is somewhat frightening. The possibility that all of reality could have just been a dustbowl.

Our ability to perceive reality seems to have, if not a fundamental role, at the very minimum a purpose-giving role.

This connects very deeply to the heart of why I'm a Catholic. For a start, if we presuppose that reality was created for us, the previous statement makes a lot more sense. Of course our consciousness gives reality a purpose, because the purpose of reality is, in part, to be perceived by us.

The second connection is this; if our reality is a creation that stems from the mind of God, then consciousness is truly fundamental to reality.

The existence of God would align very well with the paper you've cited. If spacetime itself is not the fundament, the ground state of being, something else must be. If consciousness seems to have some of the fundament nature, then it would not be wrong to speculate that a consciousness is in fact, the fundament.

Answer 2

The paper quotes several particle physicists saying "spacetime is doomed" or words to that effect. What they mean is that there probably is some kind of substructure to the spacetime continuum, much like continuum matter turned out to have a discrete substructure. The authors write

If spacetime is not fundamental, neither are its particles [...]. Nor are macroscopic objects, such as neurons and brains, made of particles.

Indeed, just as we aren't made of continuum matter (since there is no such thing), so we probably aren't made of particles, fundamentally. But if we actually find a substructure to spacetime, the spacetime/field/particle description will still be as accurate as it ever was—and it is very accurate, so much so that we've found no deviation at all from its predictions in decades of increasingly precise experiments. To fit consciousness into the so-far-undetectably small gaps in that picture would probably be difficult. Of course these authors don't even try to do that, and instead throw everything out for a framework that they made up.

I only skimmed the mathematical part, but it looks like a lot of nothing. They suppose that the world has a state and the state at a time tick depends on the state at the previous time tick in some (perhaps probabilistic) way, which is as generic as it sounds. The fancy technical name for this is a Markov chain. It's true that in the case of a finite number of states n, the possible transition functions can be seen as living in a n(n−1)-dimensional space (the number of off-diagonal entries in the transition matrix) on a polytope with nⁿ vertices (the number of functions from a set of size n to itself). They mention that in the abstract, in what I have to assume is an attempt to make their proposal sound more substantive than it is. It's not original to their paper and it says nothing about what state transitions actually occur, or why.

They don't "show that fusions of consciousness and fusions of qualia occur", they just posit it and then formalize it mathematically, again in a generic way (Cartesian product) that makes no predictions.

They talk about amplituhedrons which are a real thing in particle physics, and have a combinatorial character, but just because these authors' work also has a combinatorial character doesn't mean they're related. As far as I know, amplituhedrons are a way of doing calculations in continuum field theories, and don't represent a proposed substructure for spacetime as these authors claim.

Answer 3

The argument of Hoffman and his colleagues centers on what Hoffman calls the Fitness Beats Truth Theorem, purported to be a mathematical theorem (game-theoretic if I recall) which states roughly

that during the course of the evolution of species, organisms whose perceptual apparatus are tuned for fitness for reproduction always win out against organisms that are tuned to perceive reality accurately.

From this Hoffman develops his Interface Theory of Perception in which every organism sports a species-specific perceptual interface modelled on the metaphor of icons on a computer desktop.

The metaphor Hoffman articulates is that the modern computer desktop interface has evolved to maximize fitness of use. For example, our experience of creating a word processing document is as follows : We click on the WP icon to open the program ; we type our document ; we save our document ; success. But our experience is not the reality - a reality that consists of some sort of electronic dialect distributing voltages across silicone chips, etc., and all while time slicing various other unrelated computational demanded by the operating system.

So Hoffman's idealism, just like Kant and others, denies that the external world is spatial. We experience the world spatially simply because that is how our minds work. Hoffman states his argument that consciousness is fundamental in the section titled Conscious Agents in the paper referred to in the OP.

Unsurprisingly, Hoffman's ideas are not without their critics. See, for example, Bagwell's Debunking interface theory: why Hoffman’s skepticism (really) is self-defeating.