Chalmer’s last option is neutral monism, that something more primal than matter or mind is the cause of both, as suggested by Russell in 1921:

“The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor.” (Russell, 2005)

Russell didn’t specify a common ancestor for mind and matter, but if quantum reality creates the observer as well as physical events, quantum realism is a neutral monism as Russell proposed.

Consider the premise that every physical event must have an observer. Virtual worlds exist by being observed so if our physical reality is virtual, it should be the same. Quantum theory confirms that physical events require observation, as spreading quantum waves only collapse to a physical event when observed. It follows that an observer is needed for physical events to occur.

We also know that our universe began at a moment in time so without observation, it would have stayed in a quantum superposition. The initial physical events had to be observed to occur. If our universe began as a light plasma that physically collided into basic matter (Chapter 3), the only entities that could observe were photons. The simplest conclusion that lets observation cause the initial physical events is that photons observed.

It isn’t claimed that photons observe as we do, but that they observe quantum scale events of 10^-35 meters and 10^-43 seconds. Such events are incredibly short and brief to us, as they occur more times per second than there have been seconds in our universe. That photons observe seems preposterous but the alternative, that only we observe the universe, is equally so.

To observe so little so briefly seems hardly worth it to us, but smallism, that facts about big things come from facts about small things (Coleman, 2006), can apply to observation too. If the observer experience began small, like everything else, then macro-consciousness can derive from micro-consciousness (Chalmers, 1996) (p305). It is possible that photons observe, so who are we to say that they don’t when we claim that we do? By Conway’s free will theorem, either everything is conscious or nothing is (Koch, 2014), so it is simpler to say that observation always existed than to explain how it began with no precedent.

If observation existed from the start, then photons observe on their scale, but not as we do. To avoid confusion, let us call quantum-scale observations proto-consciousness, as Penrose proposed in 1944 (Penrose, 1994), and more recently:

“… the elements of proto-consciousness would be intimately tied in with the most primitive Planck level ingredients of space-time geometry, these presumed ‘ingredients’ being taken to be at the absurdly tiny level of 10^-35m and 10^-43s, a distance and time some 20 orders of magnitude smaller than those of normal particle-physics scales and their most rapid processes.” (Penrose & Hameroff, 2017) p21.

That consciousness began small answers another question, that if everything is a player in our virtual universe, isn’t it boring for some? If one asked for players in a virtual universe like ours, who wants to be a rock on mars, that just sits there for a million years? But a rock is an aggregate of molecules, so it observes on a molecular scale, not a rock scale. On this scale, something new happens every nanosecond, so it isn’t boring at all.

This isn’t panpsychism, that matter is conscious, because in quantum realism, matter doesn’t exist except as a view. Panpsychism assumes that matter exists to have a consciousness property, but if matter itself doesn’t exist, it can’t have that property. This is possible because previous chapters derived matter properties, like mass, charge, and spin, from quantum reality.

Quantum realism changes the question from how dead matter became able to observe to how proto-observations became human observations. It replaces the explanatory gap between matter and consciousness with an evolutionary gap, between what atoms observe and what we do. The conclusion, developed later, is that the ability to observe had to exist from the beginning to cause physical events. Hence, instead of asking how matter acquired consciousness, we now ask how matter observations evolved, which raises the question of how brains evolved?

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Another cognitive theory of consciousness attributes the mind to complexity, by claiming that brains become conscious in the same way that ants form colonies, because:

“… ant colonies are no different from brains in many respects.” (Hofstadter & Dennett, 1981), p181.

The brain is then just a colony of nerves that communicate electrically instead of chemically, as ants do. By this logic, the chemical trails ants lay down are the colony’s “language” just as neuron wiring causes our language. Dumb neurons then create consciousness as dumb ants create a colony, so it remains as neurons come and go, just as a colony remains as ants come and go. Crick’s “pack of neurons” theory is now that we are nothing but a colony of nerves.

The evidence that ant colonies are conscious is weak, as if an ant colony is a being that can communicate, why haven’t we learned its language by now, as we did that of the bees? It doesn’t help to suggest the same logic applies to countries like Russia or America:

“… let us think a bit right now about whether it makes sense to think of ‘being’ a country. Does a country have thoughts or beliefs?” (Hofstadter & Dennett, 1981) p192

To say that consciousness is private so countries might be conscious is just a smoke-screen, as no evidence at all suggests that countries are beings. Scientists don’t ask others to disprove their speculations but go where the evidence leads. To argue that what appears as a unity might be a being is an appeal to naivety. If that were true, tornadoes might be conscious beings, but they aren’t, and neither are ant colonies or countries. When we connect physical parts into a bicycle, it becomes an entity to us but not to itself.

After presenting paradoxical Gestalt patterns and speculating that ant colonies are conscious, the underwhelming conclusion of this theory is that:

“Mind is a pattern perceived by a mind.” (Hofstadter & Dennett, 1981) p200.

It isn’t hard to see that this statement is circular, because a mind is assumed to perceive a pattern that is then equated to the mind that perceived it. This theory, that mind is a creation of mind, is just another miracle thrown up to maintain physical realism.

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If matter can’t explain consciousness, it is unclear why its information derivative should do better, but integrated information theory argues that “consciousness is integrated information” (Tononi, 2008), generalizing an earlier theory that brain senses like vision, hearing, and smell store data in a global workspace (Baars, 1988).

Nerves from the eye go to the back of the brain, from the ears to its sides, and smell to its center, so how do sizzling sausages whose smell, sight, and sound are analyzed in distant brain areas appear as one object? The global workspace answer is that sense data is analyzed then put into a common area that higher functions like memory and language can act upon because:

“… the information has entered into a specific storage area that makes it available to the rest of the brain.” (Dehaene, 2014), p163.

Integrated information theory equates this unification to consciousness, but clinical studies deny that a specific brain data-center causes consciousness (Block, 1995), as does information theory. To exchange information, sender and receiver must agree on what physical signals mean. If they don’t, the result is gibberish, like a foreign language, so the auditory area of the brain can no more read visual data than I can read Chinese. Unless a global workspace had a sight, sound, and smell translator that the brain doesn’t seem to have, brain functions couldn’t use it.

The same logic applies to apps on a computer. For example, Windows Notepad reads text data and Paint reads picture data, but loading text into Paint, or a picture into Notepad, gives nonsense, so even if both put their data into a common area, neither could read what the other posted. Programs like Word that read text and pictures need a lot of code to do that, so they become very big, and still can’t read zip files for example. In general, for one application to read all data denies the benefits of specialization, and brain functions are specialized not centralized. One can’t plug the optic nerve into the auditory cortex and expect information to flow like water. 

Nonetheless, workspace theory goes on to suggest that neural systems chat like little people:

“… neural systems do not merely report to their superiors; they also chat among themselves.” (Dehaene, 2014), p176.

The brain then uses neuron sociology (Nunez, 2016) p18 as the Internet uses crowd control:

“… it is helpful to think metaphorically of a theater of mind. In the conscious spotlight on stage – the global workspace – an actor speaks, and his words and gestures are distributed to many unconscious audience members, sitting in the darkened hall. Different listeners understand the performance in different ways. But as the audience claps or boos in response, the actor can change his words, or walk off to yield to the next performer.” (Baars & Laureys, 2004), p672.

The analogy is seductive but that neural areas chat like little people over nerve phone lines, or clap and boo each other as we do online, contradicts information theory. Electrical signals going down a wire don’t exchange information unless designed to do so. For example, the Internet needs data, network, transport, and application protocols to work, namely ethernet, internet protocol (IP),  transmission control program (TCP), and hypertext transfer (http) respectively. The Internet’s TCP/IP/Http protocols took decades to develop from the original Arpanet, and it was done by a central group the brain doesn’t have. And if the Internet integrates data, shouldn’t it also be conscious? Information integration theorists expect it be so soon (Koch, 2014), despite no evidence.

Theories of brain consciousness must respect information science, but information integration theory doesn’t, and what doesn’t work for computer networks won’t work for brains either. The cartoonish concept that neural areas chat like little people, by a common language the brain doesn’t have, merging claps or boos they can’t make, on a central stage that doesn’t exist, is a fantasy. If integrated information caused consciousness, the Internet would have had it long ago, but it hasn’t.

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In 1637, Descartes concluded that mind is real because a thinker can doubt what he sees but not that he sees, so our sensory experiences could be a dream but the experience of them is real. The physicalism of science (Figure 6.1) then required a mind reality to consciously experience it (Figure 6.2). In this Dualism-A, mind and matter exist in different realms that interact, to provide both the machine of science and the immaterial observer of religion.

This view held for centuries until in 1814, Laplace argued that physical causes alone sufficed:

“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.” Laplace, in (Truscott & Emory, 1951), p4.

In this causal determinism, science not only doesn’t need religion, but is better off without it, because the physical world is causally closed. It is a causal chain with no gaps, like a tube of balls where pushing one end makes a ball pop out the other end, with no mind needed to make it happen. If physical events follow a predetermined path, there is no room for mental causes.

Dualism couldn’t counter this because it can’t explain how mind affects matter (1.2.2), and logic confirms that causal closure means that if the mind has a physical cause, it must also be physical and so not mind, and if not, it has no physical effect (Kim, 1999). Physicalism doesn’t let the mind affect the body as we think, so Dualism-B, that mind exists but does nothing, is essentially physicalism.

Supporters of mental causation then sought to demonstrate it by paranormal events like telekinesis (mentally moving objects), or extra-sensory perception (seeing what is physically unseeable), but these results haven’t replicated reliably (Kelly at al., 2007).

Then just as physicalism was destroying the foundations of dualism, quantum theory destroyed its foundations, by stating that no physical event is 100% certain. For example, in the Stern-Gerlach experiment, silver atoms fired into a magnetic field move up or down based on a perfectly random spin that is set when they enter the field. We can’t pre-sort the atoms into those that will go up or down as they are initially identical, and according to quantum theory, the spin that decides their movement is defined when they enter the field, not before. In a causally closed universe, the physical past causes the physical future, but in our universe it doesn’t, and physicalism can’t explain this.

Physicalism then can’t explain the experiential fact of consciousness or the physical facts, and dualism can’t explain how an immaterial observer can exist alongside a material world, but this didn’t stop its supporters from proposing causes that derive from matter.

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If consciousness is a scientific fact, science should be able to discover what causes it. The scientific approach to a fact is to explain it, not to ignore or dismiss it, so the question raised is:

“Why does conscious experience exist?” (Chalmers, 1996), (p5).

A major review of theories on consciousness divides them exhaustively into the following categories labelled A-F (Chalmers, 2003):

A.  Materialism-A. Consciousness doesn’t exist, except as imagined by the physical brain (Dennett, 1991). Physical causes explain everything but the physical brain just invents an observer, so the hard problem doesn’t exist.

B.  Materialism-B. Consciousness does exist, but is identical to certain physical brain states for all practical purposes (Block & Stalnaker, 1999). Again if physical causes explain everything, consciousness must equate to a brain state, so the hard problem is solved.

C.  Materialism-C. Consciousness does exist, but is in theory a physical brain effect (Nagel, 1974) (Edelman, 2003). That physical causes explain everything then just means they will one day explain consciousness, so the hard problem will be solved eventually.

Materialism then concludes that either consciousness doesn’t exist (A), or if it does, it is just a physical brain state (B), or some other physical cause that the future will find (C). Others however suggest various non-physical causes, including:

D. Dualism-D. Consciousness exists by itself in a non-physical realm, where it affects matter which in turn also affects it (Stapp, 1993). Consciousness is then independent of matter, but interacts with it, so the hard problem is solved.

E.  Dualism-E. Consciousness is a brain by-product that helps us survive but doesn’t affect matter (Zizzi, 2003). Consciousness is then an epiphenomenon, like a train whistle that exists but doesn’t affect the physical train, so the hard problem is solved.

F.   Neutral Monism-F. Both consciousness and matter derive from a primal cause that is neither, as a common ancestor causes both (Russell, 2005). Consciousness and matter then both exist but are generated, and neither causes the other, so the hard problem is solved.

In these theories, consciousness exists as matter does in another realm (D), or it exists there but unlike matter affects nothing (E), or something else entirely causes both it and matter (F).

The proposed causes of consciousness then divide into those that attribute it to physical states and those that imply a non-physical cause. How science assesses these theories is now reviewed, starting with physical causes.