Zenith Grant Awardee
Adrian Kent
University of Cambridge
Project Title
Connecting Experiential Aspects of Intelligence and Fundamental Physics
Project Summary
You are conscious of sights, sounds, smells, taste, where your limbs are, your emotions, thoughts, and imagination. All the evidence suggests this marvelous "window" on the external world and on your interior state is generated by your brain. As your brain state changes (for example, as you develop memories, when you dream, take drugs or are ill) so does your mind state. Although familiar, this is very puzzling. Brains are just large collections of atoms. What is it about them that makes them conscious, when (we suspect) tables, rocks and stars are not? And why is consciousness apparently so useful? We seem particularly likely to be aware of important information: whether we are hungry, or being pursued by a bear, or getting on well with our fellow humans, for example. Consciousness seems important for our survival, suggesting that evolution must have developed it along with our eyes, ears and other faculties. Yet current physics seems to tell us that we would behave in the same way even if we weren't conscious of any of these things. This project will look for simple models that explain these puzzles, by finding new models of physics that can explain the evolution of consciousness.
Technical Abstract
One influential view of consciousness is that the phenomenon poses a hard and unsolved scientific problem for fundamental physics. In this view, consciousness is a fundamental natural phenomenon, which is strongly emergent from the known laws of physics. In other words, there is no reductionist explanation of consciousness available within known physics. This motivates the search for new and relatively simple laws that characterize the degree and type of consciousness associated with any given physical system. However, as James first pointed out, if such laws are purely epiphenomenal, this poses another problem: how and why have we evolved so that our consciousnesses give us the appearance of accurate high-level narrative about our physical and mental states and environment and the appearance of executive control over our actions? Any evolutionary explanation requires that consciousness must somehow influence dynamics. This motivates us to investigate the scope for toy models in which simple dynamical laws involving consciousness give an evolutionary explanation of some of its familiar and familiarly puzzling features. We propose to elaborate on existing ideas in this direction, to generate new models, and to investigate the possibility of testing these ideas empirically.
QSpace Latest
PressRelease: Shining a light on the roots of plant “intelligence”
All living organisms emit a low level of light radiation, but the origin and function of these ‘biophotons’ are not yet fully understood. An international team of physicists, funded by the Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI, has proposed a new approach for investigating this phenomenon based on statistical analyses of this emission. Their aim is to test whether biophotons can play a role in the transport of information within and between living organisms, and whether monitoring biophotons could contribute to the development of medical techniques for the early diagnosis of various diseases. Their analyses of the measurements of the faint glow emitted by lentil seeds support models for the emergence of a kind of plant ‘intelligence,’ in which the biophotonic emission carries information and may thus be used by plants as a means to communicate. The team reported this and reviewed the history of biophotons in an article in the journal Applied Sciences in June 2024.