arXiv Preprint Archive
May 13, 2025
Rodolfo Gambini, Jorge Pullin
Consciousness arises in entangled quantum systems coupled to the brain's neural network. Within a panprotopsychist ontology—where states and events have internal phenomenal aspects—the combination problems of qualities, structures, and subjects in panpsychism are resolved by rejecting classical-physics assumptions about supervenience. Self-consciousness is the capacity to view oneself as a subject of experience. The causal openness of quantum systems gives self-conscious beings the ability to make independent choices and decisions, reflecting self-governance and autonomy. Personal identity thereby takes a new form free from problems of the simple view or reductive approaches.
arXiv Preprint Archive
February 4, 2024
Rodolfo Gambini, Jorge Pullin
A phenomenological analysis of consciousness, similar to Husserl's, reveals that phenomenal qualities shape perception and also influence how physical and mathematical sciences operate, enabling accurate descriptions of observed regularities through communicable mathematical laws. These laws describe behaviors, not intrinsic features of things. Classical mechanistic determinism leaves no room for novelty or intrinsic aspects, but quantum probabilistic determinism, with its ontology of objects, systems in states, and events, offers a different framework. An ontology of events with internal phenomenal aspects, known as panprotopsychism, better explains consciousness. Many objections to panpsychism, the combination problem, stem from classical physics assumptions about supervenience that are inappropriate at the quantum level, where exponential emergent properties arise. This analysis imposes conditions on possible quantum cognition mechanisms in the brain.