Awret, U. (2022). Holographic duality and the physics of consciousness. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 16. doi:10.3389/fnsys.2022.685699
[Abstract]This paper introduces a novel dual-aspect theory of consciousness that is based on
the principle of holographic-duality in modern physics and explores the prospects of
making philosophically significant empirical discoveries about the physical correlates
of consciousness. The theory is motivated by an approach that identifies certain
anti-physicalist problem intuitions associated with representational content and spatial
location and attempts to provide these with a consciousness-independent explanation,
while suspending questions about the hard problem of consciousness and the more
problematic “phenomenal character”. Providing such topic neutral explanations is “hard”
enough to make a philosophical difference and yet “easy” enough to be approached
scientifically. I will argue that abstract algorithms are not enough to solve this problem
and that a more radical “computation” that is inspired by physics and that can be
realized in “strange metals” may be needed. While speculative, this approach has
the potential to both establish necessary connections between structural aspects of
conscious mental states and the physical substrate “generating” them and explain why
this representational content is “nowhere to be found”. I will end with a reconsideration
of the conceivability of zombies.
[Citing Place (1956)]
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section EMPIRICAL CHALLENGES
Subsection The Meta-Problem of Consciousness
The second point of contact between physics and consciousness derives from the consideration of the “meta-problem of consciousness” — seeking to provide topic neutral explanation to what we say and know about consciousness — a strategy used by philosophers including Hobbes, Hume Spinoza and also Kant (1781/1999); Place (1956), Armstrong (1968); Dennett (1992), Rey (1996); Carruthers (2017), and lately Kammerer (2018) and Frankish (2019). The meta-problem is situated “in between” the hard and easy problems of consciousness. This empirical problem constrains the hard problem while lending itself to mathematical modeling.