Sep 11, 2022 11:28 PM
The Math of Consciousness: Q&A with Kobi Kremnitzer
https://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/263
EXCERPT: . . . Tell us more about your interest in consciousness—it’s not a field of study you’d immediately associate with a pure mathematician.
It is one of the biggest open problems in science. Understanding consciousness would help us to understand who we are and what we are.
About ten years ago, I learned about integrated information theory, which describes consciousness as the result of information traveling between different parts of a system. The more interconnected the parts, the more conscious the system. It’s a wonderful, really revolutionary theory. I’m not sure if it’s the right theory or not, or if it covers all aspects of consciousness, but what amazed me as a mathematician is that there’s a precise mathematical theory, with precise definitions of what consciousness is and what experience is.
And you’ve been specifically working on how this might apply to the measurement problem in quantum theory?
Yes. A quantum system can be described by a wavefunction that encodes all possible states the system can be in. When you measure a quantum system the wavefunction collapses. At least that’s the standard approach to quantum physics, but what causes it to collapse?
There’s an idea that somehow consciousness causes the collapse of the wavefunction, but, at least as far as I could see, it was never rigorously understood what this really could mean, partly because there was just no definition of what consciousness is. So we used the mathematics behind integrated information theory to build a model describing how consciousness could collapse the wavefunction.
Is this theory testable?
I think it’s really important to emphasize that with any scientific theory, it’s not just enough to say what something is, but you really also have to say what it does. If you don’t, it’s not a scientific theory because you can never test it. This is currently a big problem with many models of consciousness.
On the one hand, integrated information theory was revolutionary in the sense that it gave a rigorous mathematical model of what consciousness is, but there’s a missing step: how does it interact with the rest of physics, biology and chemistry? We want our theory to be testable and scientifically falsifiable.
So we’re looking at how integrated information might interact with the quantum world. It may act as a guide that encourages the wavefunction to collapse. There are predictions that this interaction with the wavefunction can emit extra heat not predicted by current physics. There are physicists trying to do very refined measurements of quantum systems to see if this theory is correct... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/263
EXCERPT: . . . Tell us more about your interest in consciousness—it’s not a field of study you’d immediately associate with a pure mathematician.
It is one of the biggest open problems in science. Understanding consciousness would help us to understand who we are and what we are.
About ten years ago, I learned about integrated information theory, which describes consciousness as the result of information traveling between different parts of a system. The more interconnected the parts, the more conscious the system. It’s a wonderful, really revolutionary theory. I’m not sure if it’s the right theory or not, or if it covers all aspects of consciousness, but what amazed me as a mathematician is that there’s a precise mathematical theory, with precise definitions of what consciousness is and what experience is.
And you’ve been specifically working on how this might apply to the measurement problem in quantum theory?
Yes. A quantum system can be described by a wavefunction that encodes all possible states the system can be in. When you measure a quantum system the wavefunction collapses. At least that’s the standard approach to quantum physics, but what causes it to collapse?
There’s an idea that somehow consciousness causes the collapse of the wavefunction, but, at least as far as I could see, it was never rigorously understood what this really could mean, partly because there was just no definition of what consciousness is. So we used the mathematics behind integrated information theory to build a model describing how consciousness could collapse the wavefunction.
Is this theory testable?
I think it’s really important to emphasize that with any scientific theory, it’s not just enough to say what something is, but you really also have to say what it does. If you don’t, it’s not a scientific theory because you can never test it. This is currently a big problem with many models of consciousness.
On the one hand, integrated information theory was revolutionary in the sense that it gave a rigorous mathematical model of what consciousness is, but there’s a missing step: how does it interact with the rest of physics, biology and chemistry? We want our theory to be testable and scientifically falsifiable.
So we’re looking at how integrated information might interact with the quantum world. It may act as a guide that encourages the wavefunction to collapse. There are predictions that this interaction with the wavefunction can emit extra heat not predicted by current physics. There are physicists trying to do very refined measurements of quantum systems to see if this theory is correct... (MORE - missing details)