Related papers: The Quantification Horizon Theory of Consciousness
The ``Hard Problem" of consciousness refers to a long-standing enigma about how qualia emerge from physical processes in the brain. Building on insights from the development of non-Euclidean geometry, this paper seeks to present a…
I propose that qualia are physical because they are directly observable, and revisit the contentious link between consciousness and quantum measurements from a new perspective -- one that does not rely on observers or wave function collapse…
Functional theories of consciousness, based on emergence of conscious experiences from the execution of a particular function by an insentient brain, face the hard problem of consciousness of explaining why the insentient brain should…
We approach the question "What is Consciousness?" in a new way, not as Descartes' "systematic doubt", but as how organisms find their way in their world. Finding one's way involves finding possible uses of features of the world that might…
Quantum cosmology is the quantum theory of the entire universe. Although strange at first sight, it is appropriate because (1) our world appears to be fundamentally quantum, (2) the classical description of gravity breaks down at…
Conscious experience permeates our daily lives, yet general consensus on a theory of consciousness remains elusive. In the face of such difficulty, an alternative strategy is to address a more general (meta-level) version of the problem for…
The science of consciousness has made great strides by focusing on the behavioral and neuronal correlates of experience. However, correlates are not enough if we are to understand even basic neurological fact; nor are they of much help in…
This paper presents an elementary introduction to Consistent Quantum Theory (CQT), as developed by Griffiths and others over the past 25 years. The theory is a version of orthodox(Copenhagen) quantum mechanics, based on the notion that the…
The only evidence we have for a discrete reality comes from quantum measurements; without invoking these measurements, quantum theory describes continuous entities. This seeming contradiction can be resolved via analysis that treats…
A novel representationalist theory of consciousness is presented that is grounded in neuroscience and provides a path to artificially conscious computing. Central to the theory are representational affordances of the conscious experience…
For two decades, the formalism of quantum mechanics has been successfully used to describe human decision processes, situations of heuristic reasoning, and the contextuality of concepts and their combinations. The phenomenon of 'categorical…
The mysterious phenomenon of consciousness, after having been the subject of philosophic attention for few millennia, has drawn much scientific curiosity in recent decades; and many brilliant minds of various areas of sciences are trying to…
This paper explores foundational questions about the relationship of qualia to natural selection. The primary result is a derivation of specific formal conditions under which structural systems subject to natural selection can convey…
This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly,…
The human mind is constituted by inner, subjective, private, first-person conscious experiences that cannot be measured with physical devices or observed from an external, objective, public, third-person perspective. The qualitative,…
The hard problem of consciousness is the question how subjective experience arises from brain matter. I suggest exploring the possibility that quantum physics could be part of the answer. The simultaneous unity and complexity of subjective…
We describe a midi-superspace quantization scheme for generic single horizon black holes in which only the spatial diffeomorphisms are fixed. The remaining Hamiltonian constraint yields an infinite set of decoupled eigenvalue equations: one…
Quantum theory imposes fundamental limitations to the amount of information that can be carried by any quantum system. On the one hand, Holevo bound rules out the possibility to encode more information in a quantum system than in its…
A variant of the von Neumann-Wigner Interpretation is proposed. It does not make use of the familiar language of wave functions and observers. Instead it pictures the state of the physical world as a vector in a Fock space and, therefore…
The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between…