Schoedinger’s Cat and Consciousness

You all know the story of Schoedinger’s much loved cat. It’s both dead and alive. The problem is that puss’ fate is dependent on a quantum mechanical event that remains in a suspended state known as ‘superposition’ until it is properly observed. 

In fact, the whole experimental apparatus remains in superposition until a qualified external observer is introduced. In the words of Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD, “Be empirical; look!” (Yellow Submarine). And what better way to ‘look’ than by using light, i.e. injecting photons into the apparatus, allowing them to ‘read’ the state of things inside the box?

But no joy! The photons simply become part of the experimental apparatus, the entirety of which remains in superposition. But when Uncle Henry, drunk on Christmas eggnog, accidentally knocks the lid off the box and peers inside, puss’ status is settled, once and for all.

How is Uncle Henry different from a bunch of photons? His size? His blood alcohol level? Yes, but irrelevantly so. Henry is significantly different because he’s conscious, dimly conscious but conscious, nonetheless.

A photon can enter the experimental apparatus in superposition. Uncle Henry cannot. Uncle Henry not only perceives the state-of-affairs inside the box, but he perceives himself perceiving it.

Henry has volunteered, you see, to be part of a thought experiment originally devised by Hungarian physicist, Eugene Wigner back in 1961. Henry has sacrificed his usual temperance in the interests of science. Wigner incorrectly supposed that a qualified ‘external observer’ needed a certain minimum level of intelligence to affect a ‘collapse of the wave function’. Sober, Henry might meet Widget’s criterion, but drunk? Probably not.

But Henry has not passed out…yet. When he stumbles into puss’ box, he is still conscious. It is his consciousness, not his intelligence, that collapses the wave function.

How come? Consciousness is inherently recursive, self-aware. In fact, recursion is what consciousness is. Think of a polyhedron lined with reflective mirrors. Everything reflects everything else – that’s consciousness. Most likely, it will prove to be some sort of twist in the fabric of spacetime.

What’s important is the non-linearity of awareness. Simple awareness won’t cause the system to decohere; awareness of that awareness is what does the trick. As Uncle Henry proved, consciousness and intelligence are largely unrelated.

A few decades ago, consciousness was thought to be the exclusive province of homo sapiens. Now it is widely believed that at least some other animal species are conscious as well. How about plants? Fungi? Bacteria? 

On the other hand, IBM, Google, et al. have already built machines that are far more intelligent than Henry; but as far as we know they are not yet conscious. Taken to the extreme, a supercomputer could be absorbed into Schoedinger’s coherent apparatus while a single bacterium would collapse the wave function. That’s the power of consciousness.  

This suggests the possibility of a new sort of ‘Turing Test’. To see if a life form, or machine, is conscious, we ‘merely’ need to determine how a coherent system behaves in its presence. If the system remains coherent, then the subject is not conscious, no matter how intelligent it may be; but if the wave function collapses, voila! And it doesn’t even have to know how to read or write!

Am I on to something cutting edge here? Not in the least! 2500 years ago, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras, proposed a similar model of consciousness. He called it Nous, and he understood it to be a unique aspect of reality, uniform in itself but distinct from everything material:

“Nous is unlimited and self-ruling and has been mixed with nothing, but is alone, by itself…and indeed, it maintains all discernment about everything…all Nous is alike.”

All this gives new meaning to the traditional English rhyme:

Ding Dong Bell, Pussy’s in the Well.

Who threw her in, little Tommy Thin.

Who pulled her out, little Tommy Stout.

Little Tommy Thin is the apple of his mother’s eye. He’s an all-A student, who loads up on fresh fruits and vegetables and never eats sweets; but he’s totally lacking in compassion. He goes through life unconsciously. He lacks any moral sense. Think sociopath…zombie…or robot. He’s only too willing to place Puss at risk in superposition.

And Little Tommy Stout? Well, not so much! Nothing his parents or his teachers have tried makes any difference. He won’t touch healthy food; pies and cakes are his specialty. But Tommy Stout is conscious, and so he has an innate moral sense; he’s compassionate. Instinctively, he collapses the wave function and, thank God, he pulls Pussy out alive.

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