Consciousness as a state of matter

Abstract

We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. We explore four basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids and gases: the information, integration, independence and dynamics principles. If such principles can identify conscious entities, then they can help solve the quantum factorization problem: why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular Hilbert space factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space, say), and more generally, why do we perceive the world around us as a dynamic hierarchy of objects that are strongly integrated and relatively independent? Tensor factorization of matrices is found to play a central role, and our technical results include a theorem about Hamiltonian separability (defined using Hilbert-Schmidt superoperators) being maximized in the energy eigenbasis. Our approach generalizes Giulio Tononi's integrated information framework for neural-network-based consciousness to arbitrary quantum systems, and we find interesting links to error-correcting codes, condensed matter criticality, and the Quantum Darwinism program, as well as an interesting connection between the emergence of consciousness and the emergence of time.

Consciousness: A Molecular Perspective

“…The study of molecular mechanisms is not necessarily in competition with such theories. However, one assumption often made in this context is the assumption of "substrate-independence" (compare this also to the "robustness assumption" in [10]) which is incompatible with the assumption that changes in molecular organization are relevant to changes in phenomenology. After all, assuming substrate-independence guarantees that we could neglect any influence that "lower lying" levels might have on the phenomenon under study.…”

Indication of mental contamination in ultrametric state space of p-adic model of the subject’s behavior

“…Представляется вполне ес-тественной попытка создания формальной теории для математического описания взаимодей-ствия ментальных объектов -идей, ассоциаций, мыслей -в пространстве бессознатель-ного [10]. Для этого необходимо выбрать соответствующую систему координат и установить законы перехода системы из одного состояния в другое.…”

Many worlds in perspective

“…The main open question of this approach seems to be what defines the "frog perspective" or -in Tegmark's words -the "factorization" [15] into subject, object and environment. Obviously this perspective is a consequence of the observer's consciousness being confined to her cerebral cortex.…”

“…• More recently Tegmark applied IIT to quantum systems and found that due to the free choice of the Hilbert space basis only an insufficient maximum integrated information of 0.25 bits can be obtained [15].…”