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Several philosophical problems arising from the physics of consciousness, including identity, duplication, teleportation, simulation, self-location, and the Boltzmann Brain problem, hinge on one of the most deeply held but unnecessary…
While physicalism requires only that a conscious state depends entirely on an underlying physical state, it is often assumed that consciousness is algorithmic and that conscious states can be copied, such as by copying or digitizing the…
Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns…
The Mind-Body Problem, which constitutes the starting point for a large part of the speculations about consciousness and conscious experience, can be re-stated in an equivalent way, using the `brain duplication' argument described in this…
I start from the fundamental principles of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, without probability, and interpret them using the notion of coexistence: a quantum state can be read, not uniquely, as a coexistence of other quantum states,…
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence necessitate a re-examination of the epistemological foundations upon which we attribute consciousness. As AI systems increasingly mimic human behavior and interaction with high fidelity, the concept…
On broadly Copernican grounds, we are entitled to assume that apparently behaviorally sophisticated extraterrestrial entities ("aliens") would be conscious. Otherwise, we humans would be inexplicably, implausibly lucky to have…
It has been suggested, on the one hand, that quantum states are just states of knowledge; and, on the other, that quantum theory is merely a theory of correlations. These suggestions are confronted with problems about the nature of…
This article presents a heuristic view that shows that the inner states of consciousness experienced by every human being have a physical but imaginary hypercomplex basis. The hypercomplex description is necessary because certain processes…
It is generally agreed that decoherence theory is, if not a complete answer, at least a great step forward towards a solution of the quantum measurement problem. It is shown here however that in the cases in which a sentient being is…
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 Machine Consciousness Hypothesis states that consciousness is a substrate-free functional property of computational systems capable of second-order perception. I propose a research program to investigate this idea in silico by studying…
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard…
This paper presents a hypothesis that consciousness is a natural result of neurons that become connected recursively, and work synchronously between short and long term memories. Such neurons demonstrate qubit-like properties, each…
An interdisciplinary physical theory of emergent consciousness has previously been proposed, stemming from quantum computation-like behavior between 10^9 or more entangled molecular qubit states (microtubulin). This model relies on the…
Could there be quantum superpositions of conscious states, as suggested by the Wigner's friend thought experiment? Mathematical theories of consciousness, notably Integrated Information Theory (IIT), make this question more precise by…
The author has proposed five rules that permit conscious observers to be included in quantum mechanics. In the present paper, these rules are applied to the observation of a non-local pair of correlated particles. Rule (4) again prevents an…
It is claimed elsewhere that the conscious states of humans must have evolved together with their biological states, and that an ongoing interaction between the two must have occurred to insure that they mirror one another in any species. A…
This paper elaborates on four previously proposed rules of engagement between conscious states and physiological states. A new rule is proposed that applies to a continuous model of conscious brain states that cannot precisely resolve…
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…