Non-separability of Physical Systems as a Foundation of Consciousness
arXiv Preprint Archive – June 28, 2022
Source: arXiv
Summary
Physical systems with tightly coordinated interactions, like those found in brain circuits, may hold the key to understanding consciousness. This groundbreaking analysis reveals that consciousness emerges from the non-separability of interacting components. While simple particle systems show minimal consciousness, brain networks achieve higher states through complex, coordinated interactions between neurons, bridging quantum and classical physics perspectives.
Abstract
A hypothesis is presented that non-separability of degrees of freedom is the fundamental property underlying consciousness in physical systems. The amount of consciousness in a system is determined by the extent of non-separability and the number of degrees of freedom involved. Non-interacting and feedforward systems have zero consciousness, whereas most systems of interacting particles appear to have low non-separability and consciousness. By contrast, brain circuits exhibit high complexity and weak but tightly coordinated interactions, which appear to support high non-separability and therefore high amount of consciousness. The hypothesis applies to both classical and quantum cases, and we highlight the formalism employing the Wigner function (which in the classical limit becomes the Liouville density function) as a potentially fruitful framework for characterizing non-separability and, thus, the amount of consciousness in a system. The hypothesis appears to be consistent with both the Integrated Information Theory and the Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory and may help reconcile the two. It offers a natural explanation for the physical properties underlying the amount of consciousness and points to methods of estimating the amount of non-separability as promising ways of characterizing the amount of consciousness.