This exclusive eBook explores the fascinating intersection of quantum mechanics, consciousness, and the very nature and origin of reality
Beginning with the question of how consciousness arises from simple life forms and progressing through the intricacies of information processing in biological systems, we examine how our brains interpret sensory data to construct our perceived reality.
We consider the implications of this subjective reality for our understanding of the universe, the potential for artificial consciousness, and the fundamental relationship between information, entropy, and time. Drawing on insights from quantum physics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, this discussion probes the limits of our knowledge and challenges our assumptions about the world around us.
‘Quantum bits and consciousness’
Q1. You mention that early life forms like single-celled organisms exhibited basic consciousness through chemical signals. Could you elaborate on how you define the threshold between chemical signal transfer and the emergence of true consciousness?
I guess that with ‘true consciousness’, you mean self-awareness, the way we humans experience and interpret consciousness or awareness.
Though I will never be able to know how you experience the world, your world, or whether your reality is the same as my reality, the latest insights in quantum information theory indicate that until two people interact, they don’t share the same reality. A common reality is created only when people communicate, share and exchange information. Information can be shared, stored and exchanged in many ways;
- By electrons in our information processing devices.
- By photons in fibre optic cables.
- By chemical signals in our brain and body, neurotransmitters and hormones.
- By peptides in prokaryotes, small proteins consisting out of only 6 amino acids, quorum sensing.
- By nerve wise, action potentials and ion channels, a flow of positively charged sodium and potassium ions and a Na-K-ATPase pump.
- By a bioelectrical code, saving, sharing and transferring information between eukaryotic cells in complex organisms.
As for consciousness or even true consciousness, my definition of it is the notion or awareness of the environment, with whatever means it takes, to keep biological systems and life alive. There is a gradation in the capacity of biological information processing and its interpretation, where interpretation is only possible in biological systems with a complex neural organisation. Though latest research in socio-bacteriology and socio-virology shows new remarkable insights.
Bacteria and viruses communicate through peptides and quorum sensing, as mentioned earlier. They are aware of their environment and the presence of both good and bad entities. They even exhibit different personalities.
There are the brave ones, willing to take risks, as well as followers, and those preferring to remain out of the spotlight. They are capable of creating strategies to achieve their goals and cooperating in a manner whose basic complexity can be compared to our own. Even the very simple unicellular organisms from 3.8 billion years ago had already developed ingenious techniques to keep themselves alive and to cooperate. Organisms live and die by the amount of information they acquire about their environment. However, our (true) consciousness requires an extremely complex neural organisation and a constant influx of sensory and environmental information (cell phones ). Each time new information reaches our brain, it rewards us with the release of dopamine, the feel-good and addiction messenger. This raises the question of whether ‘true’ consciousness is indeed an added value.
Q2. Interpretation of sensory data is noted as a critical step towards intelligence and self-awareness. How do you view this process biologically, and do you think it is unique to humans, or could it exist in other species to varying degrees?
Life is, encoding and transmitting information between generations.
The unique property of life is its ability to store and process information in an organized manner. The more information a biological system can process, the higher its degree of complexity.
For intelligence and self-awareness to emerge, you require a complex neural system capable of attributing meaning to the information it receives. This involves producing an interpretation of said information. Man-made information processing systems can recognise patterns from vast amounts of data. Until now, only extremely complex neural systems have been capable of interpreting the signals they receive, giving them meaning, and creating an internal world and a sense of self.
Mirror recognition is often used to determine self-awareness in different animals. Species for whom smell is more important than sight or seeing in their interaction with the environment have developed a form of self-awareness through their nose and sense of smell.
As humans, we will never understand the internal experiences of another person, let alone those of an animal. However, we observe complex behaviors in many species, suggesting a level of intelligence. For example, the intricate dances of bees, a form of communication, demonstrate sophisticated planning and coordination. These behaviors, among others, can be considered a form of intelligence.
Q3. Do you believe artificial systems (e.g. AI or synthetic biology) could replicate this inherent link of consciousness to life, or is it exclusive to organic, biochemical systems?
Artificial systems can recognise patterns very quickly in vast amounts of information. However, these systems must be provided with all that information. They lack the ability to search for information on their own. Furthermore, unlike humans, these systems have no understanding of what they are doing or why, as they only carry out a single, simple task.
Extremely trained systems, with information supplied by mankind, can beat the best chess or Go player. But that’s it! Even a toddler has the ability to deduce new knowledge from previous experiences.
Side note: A newborn baby has approximately 2,500 synapses created for every brain neuron, forming connections with other brain neurons. A toddler forms about 15,000; their brain must shape to all the incoming new information. An adult and elderly person have around 7,500, pruning less important network connections to be more economical.
A toddler walks, plays, talks, hears, smells, touches, tastes, and looks around, interpreting all this information while learning from it. Hardly reachable for machines. Let alone being creative, thinking outside the box, or creating an internal world. But hybrid humans – humans with a brain-computer interface – will be the next stage.
Although the slightest interaction in the brain yields tremendous consequences, a whole personality or conscious state can be changed by external interference in brain processes.
Quantum bits and neural interpretation of information
Q4. How would you address the philosophical implications that our perception of colour, sound, taste, and touch are brain-generated interpretations of information, such as the nature of objective versus subjective reality?
Cosmology has evolved from an anthropic multiverse perspective in the 1980s and 1990s to a quantum understanding of the cosmos today. In a quantum cosmological universe, we, the observers, turn on the light.
Observership plays a central role: we create the universe just as much as the universe creates us. To survive, all living creatures on Earth had to pay close attention to their surroundings. Life managed to create its own reality. Primitive eyes developed around 550 million years ago, and in the most pessimistic estimates, it took evolution only 400,000 years to create this masterpiece.
Electromagnetic radiation could be observed and interpreted into visibility and colours. Fish developed a receptor for the bitter taste 450 million years ago, enabling them to distinguish between edible and harmful. After millions of years of evolution, human brains can imagine their own environment, helping them interact with it and survive.
An objective reality doesn’t exist. Reality is elusive.
Q5. Could you elaborate on how different species might interpret environmental information for survival (e.g. electromagnetic radiation) differently due to their unique evolutionary paths?
As previously mentioned, I will never be able to know your internal world, nor the world of your experiences. It is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for other species to comprehend. What we do know is that when a beneficial and useful mutation occurs, all subsequent lifeforms inherit it. The simplest yeast cell employs the exact same mechanism for autophagy and the same genes as the much more complex and organised cells of higher organisms, including human beings.
When lobsters shed their shells, they become extremely vulnerable and display anxious behaviour. However, when they receive the anxiolytic Xanax during moulting, they lose nearly all their anxiety. Thus, the primary mechanism of fear seems to be similar in crustaceans and humans, with both responding to the same drug.
The basic interpretation of the environment is evolutionarily driven and universal. Throughout nature, conspicuous colours are interpreted as ‘keep away, danger,’ while camouflage colours signal edibility. Yet, we have no clue whether an identical basic interpretation creates the same perception of the world.
Q6. Do you believe the role of structures like the thalamus, prefrontal cortex, and corpus callosum in generating self-awareness could be modelled in artificial neural networks to create a form of artificial consciousness?
The human brain is of immense complexity, a complexity from which consciousness and self-awareness emerge. One cubic millimetre of the brain contains 2 petabytes of information, while the whole brain holds approximately 200 exabytes. Neurons can fire at a frenetic rate of 15 pulses per second.
The brain can execute about 1015 logical operations per second. It comprises numerous zones with distinct functions and connections, yet they manage to collaborate effortlessly. The brain functions as an extremely complex ecosystem, akin to a rainforest that is incredibly difficult to replicate.
Unlike artificial neural networks, our brains possess biological measuring instruments and senses, connecting them to the outside world and providing them with information. Furthermore, they are capable of self-aware interpretation of all the information they receive, demonstrating intelligence: imagining the world, attempting to predict how it functions, along with problem-solving capabilities.
Intelligence, along with the development of mathematics, has enabled humans to achieve extrasensory perception through advanced measuring and detecting devices, providing a method to gather information beyond the traditional senses.
Modelling artificial neural networks with the same basic complexity as the brain, tools for independent information gathering, an information interpretation capacity, and artificial consciousness… you can fill in the outcome for yourself.
Q7. Could this suggest limitations in our ability to ever fully understand the universe, given our perception is inherently filtered by the brain?
Descartes already feared it in the 17th century ‘My senses deceive me’.
Until the end of the 19th century, the world seemed entirely graspable; with some thorough calculations, we would know exactly how everything functioned. That was until the first glimpses of a previously completely hidden world became apparent: the realm of the infinitesimal. The macroscopic world, as it had been felt and experienced until that point, was discovered to consist of micro-components. Remarkably, these micro-components appeared to obey entirely unfamiliar laws. None of the familiar principles of physics and its established laws seemed to apply. The laws of quantum physics at the smallest scale were entirely counterintuitive.
It quickly became apparent that these laws gave a much more accurate description of ‘reality’ than classical physics. The world of the very smallest could only be penetrated by building on existing knowledge and information: through mathematics, another product of endless information gathering and evolution, ‘a product of human thought’, as Albert Einstein put it. And through measuring instruments capable of ‘extrasensory perception’.
This world turned out to be completely astonishing and bewildering. Reality, as revealed by experiments and increasingly sophisticated measuring equipment, was completely different from the familiar world of experience we know through our senses.
Traditionally, our understanding of the world has been filtered through our limited human senses. However, advancements in technology have allowed us to observe wavelengths previously beyond our perception, providing a more direct view of reality, unhindered by the subjective interpretations of the human brain.
Early cosmological theories, such as anthropic multiverse cosmology, adopted a bottom-up approach, attempting to understand the universe from an external, “God’s eye view” perspective. In contrast, Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog, in their final work, championed a “top-down” approach, emphasizing the importance of starting from our own perspective here on Earth and tracing our origins back through time. There is no goal or meaning behind life’s evolution and natural selection, as there is no goal or meaning behind the evolution of natural laws, space and time after the Big Bang. They argued that the universe lacks an inherent goal or meaning, just as there is no inherent purpose behind the evolution of natural laws, space, and time following the Big Bang. Our very existence, they suggest, may be the universe’s way of contemplating itself.
The ultimate goal of human understanding, according to this perspective, lies in expanding the scope of human knowledge beyond the limitations of our senses, ultimately unravelling our origins and finding meaning within that understanding – a meaning that encompasses not only ourselves but also the universe and the information it continuously emits.
Quantum mechanics rules
Q8. You cite Anton Zeilinger’s view that reality and information are indistinguishable in quantum mechanics. How do you reconcile this with the classical notion of objective reality, and what implications does this have for fields like neuroscience or artificial intelligence?
The basic principle of quantum mechanics is observership.
John Wheeler states, “No microscopic property is a property until it is an observed property. This is a participatory universe. The past history of the universe has no more validity than that assigned by the measurements we make – now!” He was the first to highlight information with the phrase, “it from bit.” The quantum mechanical wave function represents information, instead of being a physical object. The zeros and ones, the binary information in the cloud, hold no intrinsic meaning; they require hardware and software for meaningful translation.
So the qubits, the quantum information that builds up the universe, do not signify anything concrete but are translated by biochemical projection and neural interpretation into apparent reality. Our observership creates reality. An objective reality doesn’t exist. Anton Zeilinger observes, ‘When quantum mechanics was formulated some centuries ago, it discarded two cherished assumptions.
The first was realism. According to classical physics, the world exists independently of observers and observations. However, quantum theory strongly implies that reality does not exist, or at least cannot be meaningfully described, before it is observed. The second issue is non-locality, which Albert Einstein famously termed ‘a spooky action at a distance’, is equally unequivocally proven.’
Reality, the physical world as we perceive it, is a neural interpretation of perceived information, akin to virtual reality, where a complete 3D world arises in a simulation and objects seem to possess real existence. Yet, the reality behind it – electrical circuits and software – bears no resemblance to the reality it creates. The brain holds a mask in front of reality, behind which the true world, the world of information and quanta, lies concealed. And as artificial intelligence is fed by ‘human information’, it must follow the same line of reasoning.
Ralf Landauer demonstrated that for information storage and transfer, physical systems are always necessary; ‘information doesn’t float for free in the ether’. He calculated the energy content of an information bit to be 3 x 10-21 J. Lucas Celéri discovered a huge difference in the energy content of a qubit, averaging at 2.8 x 10-21 J. A rough calculation, E=mc2, gives a mass of approximately 3,1 x 10-34 kg. Some scientists are beginning to consider information as the 5th state of matter.<
Q9. Could you expand on how microtubules and other cellular mechanisms contribute to the entropy balance: life maintains low entropy while the universe trends towards higher entropy?
Rudolf Clausius formalised the second law of thermodynamics and introduced the concept of entropy as a measure of a system’s disorder. According to this second law, the entropy of an isolated physical system can never decrease. This law is regarded as the physical law with the greatest impact outside the realm of physics itself.
The universe began in a state of low entropy, creating a bustling place where life like ours could emerge. It strives for an ever-increasing entropy until it reaches equilibrium: a state of maximum entropy with the lowest energy and the most disorder. All fundamental processes will cease then, signifying the end of the universe. Thus, living systems as we know them must maintain their entropy at a low level, as maximum entropy, or equilibrium, signifies the end – death. The reduction of entropy is a fundamental characteristic of life.
Living organisms extract energy from their environment, and through their metabolism, they manage to persist as islands of low entropy. Consequently, all biochemical processes and cellular mechanisms must operate at an extremely low energy level with maximal efficiency, minimising energy waste and dissipation. Microtubules act as super-efficient steam engines at the nanoscale.
The brain has only 1/50th the mass of the body yet consumes 20% of its energy. This represents only the energy use of a 20-watt light bulb, meaning the brain is approximately 6 million times more energy efficient than a regular computer. All this requires extreme and precise communication between information streams and exchanges within the systems of the cellular machines. Life is about ‘creating order out of chaos’.
Life needs order, not disorder. Everything has to fit perfectly together. The ways in which life as we know it can arise are extremely small, showing a state of lowest entropy. All life and species, including humans, originated from that single Luca, the last universal common ancestor, some 3.95 billion years ago. In microbiology, we are only at the very beginning of understanding the full mechanisms of life on a microscopic scale and its entropy.
Q10. Do you believe the concept of ‘infotropy’, where the brain seeks information to develop, could be extended to the evolution of artificial intelligence systems, enabling them to autonomously ‘search for information’ to grow?
First, let me explain what I mean by ‘infotropy’. There seems to be a close connection between information and entropy.
Ludwig Boltzmann refined the concept of entropy in 1877, characterising it as the total number of distinct microscopic states in which the particles composing a parcel of matter can exist without altering the parcel’s external appearance. Building on this, Claude Shannon introduced the concept of entropy as a measure of information content in 1948: the Shannon entropy. The number of states calculated from the Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information required to achieve any specified arrangement of particles.
Research on black holes indicates that the higher the entropy, the more information can be stored in the microscopic details of a system. The universe urges for the most probable outcomes, leading to an ever-increasing entropy. In computer terms, sequences of roughly equal amounts of zeros and ones are the most probable, thus possessing higher entropy and containing the most information. Information and entropy appear to be two sides of the same coin, which could be termed ‘infotropy’. While the brain continually seeks and gathers information for its development and maintenance, artificial intelligence systems lack a connection with their environment and cannot independently search for information on their own. They depend on the information we provide. However, it may be possible for AI systems in the future to be designed in a way that allows them to autonomously seek out information and develop. Nevertheless, this implies that they possess neither consciousness nor true intelligence.
Q11. DNA is described as containing 2 terabytes of information, forming the basis for life’s complexity. How might advances in quantum computing or biochemistry help us better understand or manipulate this information system?
It’s not only DNA that contains the information for life’s complexity.
Our computers utilise only two signs, 0 and 1, to describe the entire universe. DNA and RNA employ four signs, nucleobases, for their information processing and storage: A, G, C, and T for DNA, and A, G, C, and U for RNA. The proteins they construct use twenty signs, or amino acids, for their information processing, storage, and their three-dimensional structure, which is essential for their biological interactions and activities, demonstrating how deeply connected life and information are.
An average human body contains approximately 7 octillion (a 7 followed by 27 zeros) atoms, and they all ‘know’ exactly what to do and how to interact. Hidden webs of information guide the atoms and molecules in their biochemical reactions while adhering to the peculiar laws of quantum physics: every chemical and biochemical reaction relies on the interplay of electrons.
The most powerful supercomputers today are not capable of simulating at least a fraction of this complexity. To get a glimpse of this complexity, we will need the extreme computation capabilities of quantum computing systems. In the meantime, there is an opportunity to boost the search and development of new molecules with biological activity for curing diseases.
Q12. Do you believe our understanding of quantum mechanics could eventually reveal whether consciousness itself operate like a simulation, and how might this change our perspective on free will and individuality?
Consciousness, for sure, doesn’t operate like a simulation.
We don’t live in a virtual reality but in a virtuality of the real. Consciousness is the appearance of a world through biological processes. It emerges out of the complexity of the brain and our interaction with the environment. The information enclosed in the quantum reality guides it all, including life.
Every brain has its own subjective reality, which we can call individuality in some sense. Free will, too, is nothing more than a philosophical illusion. Everything we do and the way we behave are a consequence of previous happenings and experiences in our personal past, our genetics, and our surroundings. The brain constantly tries to predict what is going to happen next in order to be prepared and makes decisions based on prior experiences.
