I’m a theoretical physicist who’s published on topics in the philosophy of mind. I’m quite open to unorthodox approaches, indeed I’m the author of a few, and I’m generally of the opinion that we need something out of the mainstream to make progress on consciousness.
That paper is hot garbage. Not only do I not understand how it ever passed peer review—in what I would’ve thought to be an at least semi-decent physics journal—I don’t even understand how it passed by the editor’s desk without taking an immediate detour into the bin. There’s nothing there beyond vague generalities in the shape of grandiose declarations. Nothing is ever properly defined, what math there is is used as some sort of analogy or metaphor at best, and the references for specific details are to entire books. This isn’t bad because it’s a contentious or overly speculative piece, it’s bad just because it’s shoddy work.
I mean, what is that ‘thought’-operator even supposed to be, mathematically? It seems to connect a superposition with its individual terms, which means it can’t be a ordinary quantum mechanical time evolution operator. (That there’s no such evolution is exactly the much-vaunted measurement problem, or well one of them at least.) So it seems to be something like a projection operator, but then eq. (10) is just nonsense, as a repeated projection would just yield the same state again. And neither quantum fluctuations nor symmetry breaking nor ‘self-reflection and creative emergence’ can facilitate that sort of transition. Also, if space and time are supposed to ‘emerge’ from |\Phi_0\rangle, or perhaps one of the |\Phi_k\rangle, what’s it doing all of a sudden obeying an ordinary space-time dependent wave equation?
And Jesus, it just keeps getting worse. Seriously, this should not have been published, much less apparently gotten actual press in any other form than as a reverse Sokal-style hoax to expose that some journals will publish any old garbage. When I think of the hoops reviewers have made me jump through to make my arguments more rigorous (often for good reasons!) in my (by comparison rather tame) papers on consciousness, while this just gets published in this form…
Anyhow, to not just make this an entirely negative post, I do think it’s not entirely unreasonable to think about a role of consciousness in fundamental physics. The idea that individual conscious entities are just ‘fragments’ of a fundamental consciousness suffering from a kind of dissociative identity, due to Bernardo Kastrup, has at least the virtue of being entertaining. That physicalism properly construed entails a kind of panpsychism, since the merely structural of physical science needs some kind of grounding, an idea proposed by Galen Strawson, makes a lot more sense than you’d think at first. Perhaps, consciousness can even tell us something about the measurement problem, as recent attempts to create an objective collapse-type theory where the magnitude of conscious experience, as measured via integrated information, plays the role of a collapse operator (due to non other than ‘Mr. Hard Problem’ David Chalmers) allege. Or perhaps Philipp Goff is right in that there isn’t just consciousness, but full-blown agency all the way down to fundamental particles!
All of these, I think, are wrong. But at least, they rise to the level of wrongness: they present a thesis that is sufficiently well realized to test their mettle against the cold, hard facts of the world—and fall short, as almost all ideas do. I had hoped for similar for the paper discussed in this thread, but found only something it would be a stretch to call ‘not even wrong’.
