On Consciousness and Reality

Jack Dikian

November 2010

Background

Anyone who has undertaken a physics course beyond that of secondary school will have no doubt been confronted and perhaps shocked with the strange and schizophrenic nature of atoms. The comfortable Copernican view of the atom had to make room to a much weirder explanation of the atom and, by implication, the very bedrock of reality itself vis-à-vis Quantum Mechanics, Exclusion principle, Uncertainty principle, Schrödinger’s cat…

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics described as a key feature of quantum mechanics the state of every particle as a wave-function, which is a mathematical representation used to calculate the probability for it to be found in a location or a state of motion.

According to this interpretation, the act of measurement causes the calculated set of probabilities to "collapse" to the value defined by the measurement. To put this simply, the notion that an unmeasured atom is, in some sense, not real, and its attributes are created or realized through the act of measurement.

This interpretation places observers in a special position - the founders of quantum mechanics debating the role of the observer, and believing that it is the observer that produces collapse. Incidentally, this view was rejected by Einstein calling it anti-scientific. Pauli described quantum mechanics as lucid mysticism.

Hugh Everett in the 1950’s postulated the idea of the many-worlds interpretation which asserts the objective reality of the wave-function, but denies the reality of wave-function collapse, which implies that all possible alternative histories and futures are real. Here, the memories of the observer split at every measurement, leading to the subjective appearance of collapse.

Eugene Wigner made quantum physics even more subjective when in the 1960’s, in his "Remarks on the mind-body question", an assay in his collection of assays Symmetries and Reflections, claimed that a quantum measurement requires a conscious observer, without which nothing ever happens in the universe. The key idea has become known as the consciousness causes collapse interpretation.

Where are we know

Thomas J. McFarlane in an article “Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics” provides a summary of what the quantum realm has revealed to be beneath the illusion of Newton's classical universe. The points below are paraphrased;

• Atomic matter dissolves into waves of potential existence.
• Rigid determinism falls apart, giving us a world with spontaneity.
• The objective world, existing "out there" independent of observers, vanishes, leaving a world in which the observer and the observed are interdependent.
• That the manifold world of separate independent objects interacting locally within space and time is transcended, revealing a realm where all things are nonlocally united in an indivisible whole.

It is the last two points that seem to suggest that consciousness is linked at a deep level with physical reality. Many theories, including interdisciplinary approaches such as that of Saul-Paul Sirag have been developed.

I would like to concentrate on Sirag’s approach in the remaining of this piece.

Sirag's strategy is to look to mathematics for an appropriate structure to describe the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. He finds that unified field theories of the physical forces depend fundamentally on mathematical structures called reflection spaces, which are heierarchically organized in such a way that an infinite spectrum of realities is naturally suggested.

Sirag studied the works of Sir Arthur Eddington and was impressed by Eddington’s use of group theory in developing his unified field theory. Eddington's unification was based upon the 4-element group called the Klein group K4. Eddington thought of this group as describing the structure of the most elemental measurement: seeing whether or not two rigid rods are the same length.

Eddington had declared K4 to be the primary group structure of the acquisition of physical knowledge. Sirag recognized a connection between Eddington’s use of the K4 and Piaget's work on the structure of the acquisition of knowledge by children. Piaget found, by testing children in precisely contrived situations, that K4 was also the basic structure of children's acquisition of physical knowledge. Piaget's names for the four elements of K4 are identify, negation, collaterality and reciprocity.

It is generally believed by physicists working on unified field theory that space-time is hyper-dimensional, with all but four of the dimensions being invisible. Beside space-time dimensions, there are also other internal dimensions called gauge dimensions. In Sirag's view both the extra space-time dimensions and the gauge dimensions are real. This provides scope for considering ordinary reality a substructure within a hyper-dimensional reality.

Sirag's approach is that his version of unified field theory embeds both spacetime and gauge space in an algebra whose basis is a finite group. This is a symmetry group of one of the Platonic solids -- the Octahedron. Thus it is a mathematical entity contained in the reflection space hierarchy. In fact the reflection space corresponding to the Octahedron is 7-Dimensional and is also a superstring-type reflection space, so that a link with the most popular version of unified field theory is provided.

The central theme of Sirag's theory is that this 7-Dimensional reflection space is a universal consciousness, and that individual consciousnesses tap into this universal consciousness. This implies that the high level of consciousness enjoyed by humans is due to the complex network of connections to the underlying reflection space afforded by a highly evolved brain.