Must the Universe Contain Consciousness? | Brian Josephson

Brian, some talk about the relationship between cosmos, cosmology, and consciousness. Most scientists would have consciousness being derivative, accidentally, of biology, which is an accident of physics and chemistry. But those who talk about consciousness as something more fundamental, maybe irreducible, have it as part of the fundamental system of reality. You introduced the concept of biology in order to understand ultimate reality in addition to understanding consciousness, or part of consciousness. I want to understand how that works, and I want to understand the importance of biology in understanding the structure of the cosmos. Right. Well, in fact, I think biology and consciousness are fundamentally linked, in a certain sense anyway, because biology implies an organism, and an organism is dealing with information in a certain way, and you might want to put consciousness into that, which I don't really, because I don't quite understand how to talk about consciousness. The reason why I want to put biology and possibly consciousness in is because it may give us an explanation of a kind that we can't get from regular physics. My starting point for this, if you like, is the idea of John Archibald Wheeler, that the observers are also participators, and what he was talking about there is quantum mechanics deals with observation in a way which is somewhat unusual, and implies some influence on reality. Okay, I mean that's certainly a legitimate position, but how do you make progress? How do you go beyond that? Particularly, how do you deal with the issue that the cosmos existed for billions of years until consciousness came along, at least that biology produced just in the last few million years, even if you talk about animal consciousness? So, Wheeler just started off the idea that observers can influence physics, and we want then to go on, we need to go on from there to saying observers or biology can do more important things than that, which Wheeler didn't. Hameroff and Penrose proposed that there were brain structures which were creating, acting in coordination and an orchestrated process of creating reality, but I think that doesn't tell us how the universe begins. There are lots of problems there, so therefore I propose that something happening beyond the universe and on a larger and possibly infinite time scale has this organization and is doing things like bringing a universe into being and setting up its laws and so on, and perhaps partly directing its evolution. So those are very big statements, which you say very calmly and very serenely, any one of which could cause nuclear wars between scientists. Well, it's a scheme that's, I think, a fairly clear scheme with various bits which fit nicely together, and I think it's a more real approach than the M-theories and so on, which are really just hypothetical anyway. Yeah, certainly that. It would be said that there are physical theories of the standard model, and being able to explain that so you can try to look for more and more fundamental things in physics, but you're introducing some radically new ideas to claim that biology, that life and consciousness is so fundamental, and yet you don't rely on traditional religious arguments. Your arguments basically have nothing to do with traditional religious arguments. I find that interesting, that your arguments come from a totally different perspective than others who may call that proto-consciousness or proto-biological creator of the universe, you know, God. Well, I think it's nice that the two can tie in together, and I've been rather impressed reading books by Keith Ward, that his picture from the theological point of view fits nicely with where physics would take you. I think he would be happy to hear that, but the question is, how is physics taking you there? How does physics get you to that place where you see biology in such a primordial role? Well, it's in a way more satisfactory from an aesthetic point of view, because conventional physics, you're putting all your bets on one particular rather complicated piece of mathematics, and people got into that mathematics just by trying to follow the same route as before, postulating symmetries and dimensions, and they like it just because it's a version of that which at least is not in disagreement with what we know, but on the other hand is assuming lots of things that we don't know, so that's just as theological in fact. But we do know things about the mind, that it can do mathematics, create music and be logical and so on, which by the way is not really satisfactorily explained by conventional science. So if we take this biological point of view, it's also cognitive, then we have these, well, we have general principles on which the mind develops, which can partly be understood in models, and they fit with how we find minds actually developing. So as a kind of well-defined basis on which to try and go further and put mind into understanding things like why the universe has particular laws. So admittedly I'm extrapolating, but it's not too far, one can sort of look along the line and see how things might develop when lots more effort has gone into developing the ideas. So how then would you sum up the importance of biology in understanding the cosmos? It's the fact that biology involves principles that we don't have in physics, and these principles might be able to unfold in quite dramatic ways, extending our understanding of the cosmos. For example what? What specific properties of biology would lend itself to that? Because they lead to minds, and minds can do things, and that's the logic. Minds work out how to solve problems, they develop just as cultures develop, and they explore a world of ideas. And from that you go from biology to consciousness, and then that enables you to feel better about the cosmos, or gives you a reason for its existence? Well it might extend our understanding in ways that are better than the way science extends our understanding.