MT03.
Copyright © 1994 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
Unpublished.
A Sketch for
A PHYSICAL YET SPIRITUAL BASIS FOR CONSCIOUSNESS:
FROM THE NEUROSCIENCE OF ROGER PENROSE
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF ROGER PENROSE AND GOD’S INTERACTION WITH THE WORLD
Kevin Sharpe
ABSTRACT. The Common Creation Story proposes a physical basis for the origin and development of the universe, including life and consciousness. It shuns the dualism where another realm, the spiritual, inserts the Divine’s scheme into a physical universe. It also upholds the importance of meaning.
The Story hits a bump when consciousness enters. Can science adequately explain consciousness? For the Story, it must have a physical origin. Further, the Story wouldn’t sell it out to physical and mechanical reductionism.
One surviving explanation for the origin and significance of consciousness comes from Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind. He thinks of it as physical, the activity of tubulins in the brain’s neurons. On the other hand, this occurs at the level where quantum physics applies. And such events, he says, involve non-computable mathematics, blocking the reduction of consciousness to mechanical phenomena.
This promising candidate for the Story invites spiritual reaction. For instance, how do the Divine and consciousness or the universe relate? Penrose’s scheme suggests consciousness mightn’t be the domain of the Divine. Should we, secondly, speak of the Divine as having consciousness? And in another direction, the non-computable mathematics suggests a wholism and mystery on which to base a system of spiritual ideas.
IDEAS:
* Look at all my stuff on the subject and see if any others relate to this, i.e., other neuroscience theories.
* RI One on Penrose; consciousness; mind/brain.
Make the paper read like it comes from Penrose, ie., not making it my ideas apart from at the end.
* Uniqueness of humans: only we know about things, about neuroscience, etc.
* Maybe The Ape that Spoke would have the difference between subjective (mental) and objective language.
* Is self-transcendence the same as self-awareness?
Does d’Aquili’s work feature here?
I. Introduce Penrose, his recent work, and his critics. Personal based on his appearance (two overheads; when did he get time to do this; knew his stuff well; very personal; upcoming knighthood).
II. Two matters that interest me wo theology:
A. Time responses for conscious events, coming into consciousnes or free will reactions.
I look out the window and see a tree swaying in the wind. Change this image so it’s much more arresting and original. Maybe the softball of some neighboring kids and Erica hits the ball so hard-home run-at least into my house. If you’re like me, you think I see the tree swaying at the same moment that it does. Perhaps a tiny fraction of a second later, the time it takes for light from the tree to enter my eye. But I’m off by a much larger amount. It takes about half a second for a person to become conscious of a stimulus entering her or his brain. Everything I’m aware of happened at least half a second before I become aware of it. Mary read an account of the movement of the hand being later than something or other. Also enter stuff from Penrose’s writings. Conscious events aren’t instantaneous, simultaneous with the events of which they make us aware. There’s a very consistent time lapse between the event and our awareness of it.
But that’s not all. Suppose as I look at the tree out the window I notice a softball heading my way ferociously fast. No, ducking could be an instinctive and not a free will reaction. Need a better example. I need to do something. But the average person takes about one second to make hat decision. A conscious, free will decision takes about one second. And that’s one second on top of the half second it takes to be aware of what’s coming at me by way of sensory input. Will I be too late to duck, or not? My son will find out soon enough.
Penrose on why these time elapses. Electrical currents flowing down the tublins. I’ll need to describe the brain structure that he uses.
B. Noncomputable math involved. Consciousness tied to tublins that depend on qm. In this comes the noncomputable math.Nonreducibility.
Penrose associates consciousness with non-computable mathematics and so with nonreducibility.
1. Consciousness associated with tublins.One can continue with this as tublins appear even in the very simplest of amebas, i.e., even they have a rudimentary consciousness. This relates to the work by someone on pain and consciousness. Even the simplest of life forms experience pain and this must be associated with consciousness for it to have any significance. Feelings can’t inform or motivate if there’s no consciousness for them to be expressed in. Also reminds me that humans are said to be self-conscious rather than merely conscious, though I can’t quite see the difference, or at least the dramatic difference.
2. Tublins associated with q activity.
3. Q activity associated with a type of math that is non-computable. [Measurement problem?]
4. What non-computable math means.
5. Non-computable math associated with non-reducibility to mechanistic explanations.
6. Conclusion: consciousness not reducible to mechanistic explanations.
I need more details from Penrose to fill these steps out.
III. Theological implications of these:
A. End of nonphysical/ethereal nature of consciousness.
1. Physical association and explanation of consciousness. Tied to the microtubules and their tublins.
There are above two associations given by Penrose of consciousness with the physical world. One is experimental and the other conjectural. The experimental is the time delay for incoming sensory data to reach consciousness and the time it takes to make a consciousness decision, even if it be split second, as fast as possible. Consciousness takes time.
The second is the association of consciousness with the activity of the tublins. This is what Penrose suggests is the location of consciousness. What we experience as consciousness is the [outcome of the?] activity of the tublins.
2. What is received status (ethereal) of consciousness? What is its significance wo the God-world relation? [Look up consciousness in theological and philosophical word book, to put in some of its hiStory.]
I suspect that tradition says consciousness is something special, a gift from God. Consciousness, pure consciousness untainted with physical matter, is often associated with God. Think of Bohm. Matter is a product of consciousness in some traditions. Think of my 2nd reader learner Elyse Curtis.
This brings me to a criticism of spiritual defensiveness. What I call double speak. It is a big dividing line. The difference is between consciounsess and the objects having consciousnes (this type of division will come up again here). Many spiritual cases say this needs another outline title the true significance of an experience lies elsewhere than in the physical. e.g., of near death experiences, d’Aquili on religious experience. The experience of a [softball] chair doesn’t mean to say the chair exists only in the mind but does in reality. But does the experience of consciousness mean consciousness exists somewhere else? No. Why not? Answer this! Done below.
Parts of consciousness are also thought of as special gifts from God. Conscience, for example. Twangs when you eat that chocolate cream puff. Twangs when you tell a lie (late because the traffic held me up; rather, because I didn’t leave enough time, wanted to watch the end of the show).
3. To have a nonphysical (i.e., ethereal) explanation of consciousness have to say it is associated with the physical. But then, why would it have this time delay? Really stretching a spiritual/ethereal explanation now too thin. Last ditch to defend it.
Back into the Voltaire gag: have no need of that hypothesis. Back teetering on Occam’s razor: no need to multiply explanatory characters with spiritual beings when the physical is sufficient. That happens when you agree that, yes, the activity of or the end of the activity of the tublins may well be the sensation of consciousness. But, unlike the softball, the sensation needn’t be concommitant with something going on elsewhere, something that in some way causes the physical consciousness sensation. Reason: it follows its own coherence, is self-consistent. Unlike the baseball sensation, [this is the whole philosophical debate over realism vs idealism, which I don’t want to get into] which others can observe. I’m not an idealist or a subjectivist. That’s my philosophical stand. Further, if it were in response to/an expression of some external Consciousness, and the time delay were the time it took to react or absorb this (like the time delay for the softball to reach consciousness) – this is an important point that needs bringing out earlier as part of this case. You would expect some physical connection, like the visual connection/optical nerve for the softball. We’re back into the causal joint problem. Have a physical phenomenon which is assumed comes from some super-natural thing called Consciousness, but no energy change, etc. Is miraculous, etc. And all those problems.
4. Consider self-consciousness. This is the hallmark of humanity especially. What is it? Is it that different from consciousness or just more of the same? Some say it is the experience not the physical manifestation.
As consciousness comes to be seen as perhaps physical, and especially as it comes to be seen to be held by many animals, more and more emphasis is placed on self-consciousness, self-awareness, as the unique hallmark of humans, the way in which we differ from other animals. See the stuff on pain and consciousness. See what Penrose says about it. An example. Why is self-consiousness important for spiritual thinking, as a defensive strategy? It is seen as something nonreducible to the physical or cultural. Peacocke and Bowker. Some place where the human being can rise above the forces on them and be truly moral and creative. [I don’t think this is a place of refuge; but I do think humans can be truly moral and creative. This transcendence comes elsewhere, in the nonreducibility of consciousness itself.]
What is self-consciousness? I have a hunch that it is really just being conscious of being conscious. An elaboration of consciousness and not an extra faculty. An extension of what animals have. Nothing all that special. Just like our opposable thumb isn’t quite evidenced in any other animal, their thumbs haven’t moved around quite as much as ours have, so our brains and our conscious faculty have moved further than has that of any other creature in the direction of consciousness. It doesn’t mark a complete break with the physical or cultural where the individual human can be unique [NB: I used to say the cultural was the unique aspect, but now I see with the meme theory it’s just the same as the biology aspect. The important thing for my detractors is the individual rising bit.]
There’s something more about self-consciousness, though. It has to do with the experience rather than the physical manifestation. Here lies the rub in the mind/body tradition. Could review that briefly here. My position, and I think the usual one, is that there’s nothing extra going on here. The experience is the activity of the brain. It’s another word for the physical activity. It’s within another language system, not unrelated, though. Otherwise, I think we are multiplying entities needlessly. And I don’t think we need be defensive or fear this position (also of Penrose?) but rather see the nonreducibility, the mystery, involved in it. Let’s explore it theologically and see what comes.
John McCrone: The Ape that Spoke: language and the evolution of the human mind. The great book about the evolution of consciousness and the development from that of self-awareness/self-consciousness as a use of consciousness and memory in conjunction with the development of language. They are learned as children, and are cultural.
Assumes: The human mind must have evolved; self-consciousness must have a biological basis. Goes through the origins of language, the evolution of habits of thought, and the “mapping” of the world in the brain which creates awareness. The human mind is only a few degrees different from an animal’s. Self-consciousness, memory, and higher emotions are all simple language-driven abilities that we pick up as children.
Self-consciousness is that extra step beyond consciousness of being aware of what is taking place inside our own heads.
5. Seems related to sociobiology and the end of the “extra”/unique theological area.
Maybe no need to bring in the sociobiology debate here explicitly, although I may refer to authors whose arguments come out of that arena too. As above, there’s no need for spiritual thinkers to fear this physicalism because it isn’t reduction and entails oodles of mystery. This is a key point of Penrose. Let’s do away with the extra or the unique things that spiritual thinkers want to preserve because they set up defenses and make theology ever open to defeat. Let’s explore the physical because even it contains what we really want.
6. Conclusion? What is theological status of consciousness now? Is physical. What is relation of God to the physical? I.e., no direct nonphysical relationship now to consciousness. Need for God’s actions to be natural, worldly. End with this question-the next on wholism will attempt an answer.
Already said this.
B. Wholism. [Using consciousness as an example of the wholistic consequences of non-computable math. The consequences are much broader too.]
Do I really mean wholism or is mystery or nonreducibility sufficient? See 1. below.
I may not want or need the wholism part of this. I could mention it as an aside, but not make it so central. Perhaps. Maybe I really only need the mystery.
1. How does the non-computability => wholism?
Consciousness is [a direct result of] the quantum level activity in the tublins. This activity as measured or as experienced, i.e., as a collective since our experience is not of the electrons etc., but of the baseball as perceived, [thinking of the measurement problem in qm] is governed by non-computable math. In principle non-computable. That is, it can’t be reduced to classical, determined processes computed in the manner of there being solutions to equations. But is this wholism? What whole is influencing its parts? What top-down non-reducible causation is going on? The whole that is the experience as opposed to the q events that constitute it? Yes. And here perhaps is where Peacocke and Bowker might come in so I’ll have to be careful not to sell out to them. The whole is the experience which is the “collapsing” of the q states in the tublins. This paper has become my own ideas and really a major contribution. Does it then stand as a popular level article? Better for a journal? This is a major hypothesis.
2. Mystery. Preserved by the non-computability or irreducibility of the math etc. A natural theology doesn’t remove the mystery.
The chief spiritual point about the wholism and the non-computable math is the mystery, the nonreducibility to mechanical clocks that comes in. What is mystery? Use what I’ve used with Bohm, the unending depths of nature. Humans can never grasp it or control it. It will always lie beyond us. However much we know it an unimaginable amount will lie beyond us.
So a natural theology that assumes the physical nature of such things as consciousness and self-awareness doesn’t do away with mystery and make these things under the control of humans.
3. Relate to Peacocke (a biochemist) and Sperry’s theology based on neuroscience. Not brain-as-a-whole, but is a wholism. Even Peacocke’s top-down questioned because Sperry’s model is.
The biochemist and theologian Arthur Peacocke has used the idea of wholism to help him understand the interaction between God and the world, in particular between God and people. He uses the wholism of the Nobel Prize winner Roger Sperry as an inspiration. Sperry thinks of the mind as the whole of the brain, its neurons, etc. The collection of neurons form a whole which acts differently in some ways than would the neurons. This whole Sperry calls the mind. There are obvious similarities with Penrose’s approach and the way I have expanded it. I’ll need to look at Sperry’s in more detail and compare it with penrose’s in detail. The whole that is the quantum level activity in the tublins as measured or collapsed I need to explain these physics terms above is the experience of consciousness or the mind. This may not be the brain-as-a-whole, but rather just parts of it acting as a whole. But the images are similar. Further, Sperry or just Peacocke? He thinks of the whole that is the brain-as-a-whole takes on a life of its own and affects the activities of the neurons. The whole affects the parts.
I’m not sure whether I can extend Penrose’s ideas to say the whole that is the conscious mind can affect its constituents that are the quantum activity in the tublins. Of course it does. Thinking takes on a life of its own, more than just the noting of stimuli that impinge on it from outside. On the one hand, this thinking (or decision making as in free will decisions) is the activity in the tublins, on the other there is a guiding of the tublins’ activities, of which tublins are to act, etc. I don’t know how far I’m out in left field here.
Now to Peacocke. He suggests that God acts on the world-as-a-whole that then acts on its parts, including on us humans. The relationship between the world-as-a-whole and the parts is similar, in his model, to that between the brain-as-a-whole acting on the parts of the brain and the body.
This gets me away form the central theme of this paper, namely how the brain works, what consciousness is, the non-computability/mystery/wholism involved, and how this allows a naturalistic theology that is not defensive of some extraordinary transcendence going on. YES, JUST WORK ON THIS AND LEAVE OUT THE GOD-WORLD RELATIONSHIP BIT. THAT MEANS REVISING THE PREVIOUS PARAGRAPHS AND THE OUTLINE. OK. HOLD IT! MAYBE DON’T DO AWAY WITH ALL OF THIS---SEE WHAT i DO BELOW WITH PEACOCKE.
4. What is left for arena for God’s actions? My model. What happens to it? Still left with the wholism and downward actions, but not TOP-down. No, God can still be the whole (waaw) acting downward.
In a revised form, this section becomes: what is the relationship between God and the conscious mind? Or similar.
The wholism of neuronal activity. Yet physical. Theology usually protective of a transcendence here, because it fears reducing everything to mechanisms. [Peacocke and Sperry used as another way of talking about the brain’s wholism.] I say it needn’t be, go natural. Nothing to be afraid of. Wholism protects it. The naturalism contains a transcendence. But then: what is God’s relationship to this activity if not a special connection to that transcendence? I turn to an image like Peacocke’s. God relates to the conscious mind as God relates to all other parts of the natural world, in a downwardly causal way from the world-as-a-whole. But there’s a hitch to this for Peacocke’s model. He assumes God transcends waaw in an absolute way. Here we come back to the models of God-consciousness relationship, the Consciousness-consciousness relationship and the problems of the causal joint, etc. Detail them. It’s the same problem. So I say: just as I said the mind is natural and not specially connected to some spiritual Consciousness transcending consciousness, so the waaw is natural and not specially connected to some spiritual God transcending waaw. I suggest for exploration, the idea that the world-as-a-whole is indeed God.
IV. Conclusion. Need to accept a naturalism in theology. End of dualism. Where God acts is the physical, even if the physical be wholistic and nonreducible and nonmechanical.
Use Penrose only as an example-what I want to say is that nonlocality is involved in consciousness and is physical and mysterious. Time delay in reaching consciousness => consciousness physical.
OUTLINE
IIntroduce Penrose, his recent work, and his critics.ty Personal based on his appearance (two overheads; when didty he get time to do this; knew his stuff well; very personal; upcoming knighthood). IITwo matters that interest me wo theology: ATime responses for conscious events, coming into consciousnes or free will reactions.
BNoncomputable math involved. Consciousness tied to tublins that depend on qm. In this comes the noncomputable math. Nonreducibility.
1Consciousness associated with tublins.
2Tublins associated with q activity.
3Q activity associated with a type of math that is non-computable. [Measurement problem?]
4What non-computable math means.
5Non-computable math associated with non-reducibility to mechanistic explanations.
6Conclusion: consciousness not reducible to mechanistic explanations.
IIITheological implications of these: AEnd of nonphysical/ethereal nature of consciousness.
1Physical association and explanation of consciousness. Tied to the microtubules and their tublins.
2What is received status (ethereal) of consciousness? What is its significance wo the God-world relation? [Look up consciousness in theological and philosophical word book, to put in some of its history.]
3To have a nonphysical (i.e., ethereal) explanation of consciousness have to say it is associated with the physical. But then, why would it have this time delay? Really stretching a spiritual/ethereal explanation now too thin. Last ditch to defend it.
4Consider self-consciousness. This is the hallmark of humanity especially. What is it? Is it that different from consciousness or just more of the same? Some say it is the experience not the physical manifestation.
5Seems related to sb and the end of the “extra”/unique theological area.
6Conclusion? What is theological status of consciousness now? Is physical. What is relation of God to the physical? I.e., no direct nonphysical relationship now to consciousness. Need for God’s actions to be natural, worldly. End with this question-the next on wholism will attempt an answer.
BWholism. [Using consciousness as an example of the wholistic consequences of non-computable math. The consequences are much broader too.]
1How does the non-computability => wholism?
2Mystery. Preserved by the non-computability or irreducibility of the math etc. A natural theology doesn’t remove the mystery.
3Relate to Peacocke (a biochemist) and Sperry’s theology based on neuroscience. Not brain-as-a-whole, but is a wholism. Even Peacocke’s top-down questioned because Sperry’s model is.
4What is left for arena for God’s actions? My model. What happens to it? Still left with the wholism and downward actions, but not TOP-down. No, God can still be the whole (waaw) acting downward.
IVConclusion. Need to accept a naturalism in theology. Endo of dualism. Where God acts is the physical, even if theo physical be wholistic and nonreducible and nonmechanical.