What makes us human? Hard problem of consciousness”

“Hard problem of consciousness” – I am the new fuzzy sizzler in the town; I might baffle you.“

“What makes us human; why not just a philosophical zombie- a conceptual talk. “

When one hears this statement, one wonders what so hard about this common and familiar concept of consciousness but let me assure you; it’s a great myth-buster!!!!

“What makes us human; why not just a philosophical zombie- a conceptual talk. “

Feed for the day; Can we download consciousness?

              As a young psychology enthusiast, I have always been keen on looking for what’s brewing new in psychology. One such baffling topic that caught my attention lately is the very intriguing discourse around the concept of consciousness, which is also giving sleepless nights to young researcher’s as well as scientists coming from various fields like neuroscience, quantum mechanics, biology, and physics is- The hard problem of consciousness”.

                  The existing narrative around consciousness had become really static in terms of the explanatory power of the researches and theories around this fuzzy concept. Still, this dominant narrative has been challenged by a radical researcher like David Chalmer’s who coined the term “Hard problem of consciousness’, Sir Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff, and the forgotten pioneer in this domain Thomas Nagel, who published a revolutionary paper in the year 1974 titled, ‘what is it like to be a bat?’’

        Consciousness has been defined as an individual’s awareness of his thoughts, feelings, sensation, and environment. Moreover, this awareness is unique and subjective to us. This definition points to the two important keywords that we mostly interchangeably co-relate with consciousness: awareness and the very term subjective. These two terms indeed give consciousness a great twist and create the pathway of difference between meta – problem and the hard problem of consciousness.

The meta-problem is associated with the objective mechanism of cognitive systems associated with brain structure and functions, which may sound like this;

How does the brain integrate information from different places and use this information to control behavior?

 How does it Discriminate sensory stimuli from the background and react to them appropriately?

How can subjects verbalize their internal state?

              The hard problem of consciousness assumes the basic premise, which starts with the question of why and how does an objective living system like the human brain produce a first-person subjective experience “qualia “that is unique to humans or rather why are our behavior, actions, and responses accompanied by subjective inner life or awareness at all. Can’t we do without it? The implication of this line of thought patterns give rise to the following intriguing arguments:

Mind /matter

We as mere reactionary deterministic agents or naively existential responsive conscious agents a) what is the purpose of this unique awareness?

1. b) is then the free will really real or an illusion that we should not be bothered about?
2. c) Does consciousness emerge from a complex living physical system -that is, life precedes consciousness, or could it be another way around which is a view that consciousness precedes life?

Optimistic reductionism

AI singularity theory Neuronal computational capacity – 10/16 per brain

a] is consciousness equivalent to neural co-relates that depend on the strength of association between neural networks. Should we see the brain as the complex computational information processing structure with neurons acting as a unit /bit that wires and fires? Rather can consciousness be defined as the by-product of brain function and its association with certain conscious experiences?

1. b) can consciousness be inter-changeably used with intelligence?

Panpsychism

1. a) is consciousness fundamental to reality like space and time, or is reality fundamental?
2. b) IS consciousness all-pervasive and shared collectively such that it also governs the subatomic particles like electrons and protons. (Veganism is a new conscious paradigm)

Quantum vitalism -can life and consciousness originate from the pi resonance,  quantum coherence, and quantum entanglement present in our biomolecules? - can neurons and brains operate at the quantum level

Epiphenomenalism and dualism- can we Play safe and take a dualist approach that the objective aspect of reality and subjective aspect of reality are two different closed systems that cannot interact? Therefore both systems should have separate laws governing them; our consciousness is something outside the material world.  

Dead and alive at the same time -Schrodinger‘s cat – A thought experiment

A superposition – An observer’s paradox – consciousness causes collapse of the wave function  

Deals with dual nature of wave and particle such that one particle can be at the two places simultaneously. He did this by imagining a cat in a box together with a radioactive source. Alongside the cat would be a radiation detector. The radioactive source would be selected to have a quantum mechanical probability of 50% to decay per hour. After one hour, it would be equally likely that the cat would be alive or dead. According to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, exactly one hour after this macabre experiment began, the box would contain a cat that is neither alive nor dead but rather in a mixture of these two states. In the language of quantum mechanics, the cat's wave function is a superposition of the 'dead' and 'alive' wave functions. 

The binding agent that integrates all these varied disciplines is the pandora box of microtubules, and its uncanny similarity with anesthesia is the-.

 Orch OR Theory of consciousness – developed by Dr.Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose, Anirban Bandyopadhyay

 (Collapse of the wave function is consciousness)

Which stands for orchestrated objective reduction, proposes that consciousness originates inside the microtubules due to the continuous shifting cycle of quantum coherence and decoherence produce by the microtubules pie resonance clouds in their non-polar benzene rings as they act as quantum tunnels that are suitable for creating a quantum superposition which is internally unstable and self-collapse therefore responsible for creating events of consciousness as they reach a particular threshold computed by the formula t=h/EG were h is Planck’s constant. Hence some aspect of consciousness is nonlocalized, both wave and particle-like, which resonates with gamma synchronicity.  

Upcoming researchers also demonstrate that anesthesia actually acts on microtubules and disrupts their coherence. Also, the root cause of Alzheimer’s disease is the dismantling of tao in microtubules, due to which their memory interferes.

 Considering brain as quantum and the way forward; How do these concepts affect the discipline of psychology;

A derivative hypothesis;

If microtubules are essential to consciousness, stimulating their brains at resonating megahertz frequency should alter mental states.

The answer lies in the application part of these debates and rather the futuristic tonality of the potential possibility of how it can change the way we study and deal with the brain in neuropsychiatry. More profoundly, the chronic cognitive disorder with a low rate of prognosis like Alzheimer’s.

But can the hard problem of consciousness be answered?

Useful links that can re-kindle curiosity  

https://www.researchgate.net/journal/NeuroQuantology-1303-5150

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/15710645

https://doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2020.1839037

https://youtu.be/ZKoowV2i--U

https://youtu.be/84xNHw66JAg