Quantum information theoretic approach to the hard problem of consciousness.
Bio Systems May 1, 2025 Danko D Georgiev 4 citations
Functional theories of consciousness, which treat it as an emergent property of brain functions, struggle with the hard problem of why an insentient brain would produce any conscious experience at all, a difficulty worsened by classical physics' determinism, which leaves emergent consciousness causally impotent. This paper presents a quantum information theoretic approach that avoids these drawbacks by reductively identifying first-person subjective conscious states with unobservable quantum state vectors in the brain. The observable brain is viewed as a third-person construct created by classical bits from environmental measurements of commuting quantum brain observables. Quantum resource theory implies that quantum features of consciousness, protected by no-go theorems, cannot be replicated by any classical device.