In [this wonderful paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07884), Sean Carroll argues that for all practical purposes, we now know fundamental physical laws governing everyday life. The argument broadly goes like this: the standard model has been well-established at energy scales that are several orders of magnitude higher than what happens on Earth, Sun or in the human body. At LHC, we've reconfirmed standard model at energies upto $10^11$ eV (electron volts) while chemistry in the human body operates at ~$10$ eV scale and in the Sun, fusion happens at $10^8$ eV scale. It's possible that many new physical phenomena is waiting to be discovered but that potentially requires much higher energies that what's available in everyday macroscopic world. Similarly, we're yet to fully understand things like dark matter or dark energy but they don't effect everyday world as well. Dark matter interacts so weakly that multiple experiments so far haven't been able to detect it, and dark energy is only valid at scales much larger than galaxies. Essentially, [[Demystifying gauge theories and standard model|the standard model]] is _so successful_ that we can close the lid on finding new forces or particles that are relevant at energy scales at which our macroscopic world operates. **We can try introducing new phenomena but it's extremely hard to do so without breaking internal symmetries of the standard model or conservation of energy or momentum**. Successful physical theories like the standard model is so rigid that we can't tweak them easily without breaking something else in them (and we can't break something else because all the successful predictions that we've done depend on those things). So, it seems to be me that **we have no hope of discovering something as fundamental as the electromagnetic field that's also relevant for our everyday life.** ### Implications on consciousness The hard problem of consciousness is to find an explanatory chain for consciousness. That is, the question is: how do we situate consciousness in the physical world? There are many approaches to this, but I'll discuss three related approaches here and how the our current closure of physics of everyday life affects them. #### 1. Consciousness as a new (quantum) field One possible physical explanation of consciousness could be that it's a currently undiscovered field (like other fields such as electrons or strong nuclear force). This explanation wouldn't work because as we saw if there was a new field, we would have detected it in particle accelerators. Energy available for physical reactions in human brain is far weaker than what's available in particle accelerators, so if there was a new undiscovered quantum field out there, we would have discovered it by now. Sean Carroll discusses the challenge physics poses to such explanations of consciousness in [this paper](http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/19311/1/Consciousness%20and%20Laws%20of%20Physics-full.pdf). #### 2. Consciousness as strongly emergent Given that the fundamental phenomena is completely understood, what about emergent phenomena? Perhaps consciousness is a property that emerges when physical phenomena is arranged in a specific way. To explore this line of thought, we have to distinguish between two notions of emergence: 1. **Strong emergence**: this happens when the high-level phenomena arises from low-level phenomena but the properties of high-level phenomena *cannot* be deduced (even in principle) from the low-level phenomena. 2. **Weak emergence**: this is our usual notion of emergence where high-level phenomena exhibits properties that are unique to it but in principle we can deduce it from low-level phenomena (say by simulating the behavior of the parts) If consciousness is weakly emergent, it's hard to imagine how unconscious physical matter can give rise to subjectively felt perception and emotions. Simply saying consciousness is emergent doesn't dissolve the difficulty of making a leap from materialism to mind. Strong emergence, on the other hand, seems impossible. We have no phenomena so far for which strong emergence has been observed. Most phenomena has been either fundamental (like electrons) or been able to get explained in terms of fundamental phenomena (like atoms or cells). So, either consciousness is fundamental or it is weakly emergent from other fundamental phenomena. Both these are challenging because: - As discussed above, consciousness cannot be fundamental new phenomena. Physics of everyday life prohibits introduction of any new phenomena - Weak emergence of consciousness doesn't bridge the explanatory gap from objectively existing matter to subjectively felt experiences. So, what's the alternative? #### 3. Panpsychist view: consciousness is how fundamental phenomena is felt from the inside As discussed in [[What non-living things are conscious]], our experienced world is rich in structure. It is mapped in 3D space, has coincident sights, sounds and smells at a particular locations and contains many other tightly bound structures (like chairs, cars, faces, etc.) Needless to say, our experienced world is complex. If panpsychism is true and fundamental entities like electrons feel something from the inside, the question becomes how do these really primitive blips of qualia give rise to the wonderful internal world that we experience. There simply aren't enough degrees of freedom in fundamental fields to implement the richness we experience. Somehow these fundamental entities have to combine to give rise to a more structured consciousness but don't know how that can happen because we don't know what such a hypothesized primitive experience of an electron feels like. The issue with panpsychism is that even if we take all the fundamental entities from the standard model and their degrees of freedom (such as spin, charge, mass, etc.), there doesn't seem to be enough room for implementing (even in principle) the richness of our experienced world. Also, panpsychism actually doesn't explain much. It's too simplistic an idea to be able to account for the richness of our experience. As Anil Seth [writes](https://psyarxiv.com/z8f5s/): > Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on why an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma. So, given the evidence from our rich experience, **it seems likely that higher-level physical systems (such as neurons or groups of neurons) are involved in implementing the richness of the world.** ### Consciousness may be what information feels from the inside We're left with the final mode of explanation which is that consciousness is simply what information flow feels like. I've explored this line of thought in [[What is a Self?]] and [[What non-living things are conscious]]. We're forced into a corner towards this explanation because the previous three explanation styles fail to account for consciousness. We can't invoke new physics to explain consciousness. We can't expect it to be emergent from matter. We can't also expect that fundamental matter itself is conscious. So, we're left to believe **since brain is a physical system that implements information processing, it must be the case that _any_ type of information processing must be creating an internal world that's completely and fully determined by such information flow**. #### Challenges to the view that information feels like something from the inside: 1. **Information is interpretation dependent**. What qualifies as information depends on how it is interpreted. For example, in the case of [polyglot programming](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/102370/add-a-language-to-a-polyglot), the _same_ computer program can produce different outputs depending on which compiler is being used on it. This is a serious challenge because the same physical system can be interpreted in an infinite different informational contexts. Does this mean that an infinite number of conscious worlds exist? One solution out of this challenge would be that even though potentially infinite interpretations exist for a bit of data (or physical/quantum system), only limited number of them get realized in actuality and those are the ones that comprise of conscious systems. 2. **Multiple systems within us do information processing yet we identify with only one (the brain).** Our immune system also does information processing and so does out gut. In fact, all levels of biological systems (right from subcellular components to cells to tissues to organs and even higher-levels such as ant-colonies) do information processing. Do all of them have their own rich inner world? If so, why do we identify with only one. This is an easier challenge to handle as it is possible that we are simply what brain's information system feels from the inside while other systems such as immune system might be felt by a different "self". (This is analogous to how we don't identify with someone else's brain but only ours) 3. **Different modalities of experience feel very different**. If all information processing feels like something, how is it determined what feels like sadness v/s color red v/s sound of the C note and so on. What is it about information that makes it feels like something specific and not like something else? 4. **Epiphenomenalism**. The view that consciousness is information processing puts it into the category of epiphenomena: existing simply as a byproduct of information processing and having no causal impact whatsoever (instead the material system implementing information flow has causal impact). The challenge with consciousness being epiphenomena is that it certainly feels useful and capable of having causal impact (when we decide to have tea, we lift the cup). <iframe class="signup-iframe" src="https://invertedpassion.com/signup-collector" title="Signup collector"></iframe>