For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.

These possibilities might seem wholly untestable, because part of the conceit is that sufficiently advanced life will not just be unrecognizable as such, but will blend completely into the fabric of what we’ve thought of as nature. But viewed through the warped bottom of a beer glass, we can pick out a few cosmic phenomena that—at crazy as it sounds—might fit the requirements.

In that case, dark matter could contain real complexity, and perhaps it is where all technologically advanced life ends up or where most life has always been. What better way to escape the nasty vagaries of supernova and gamma-ray bursts than to adopt a form that is immune to electromagnetic radiation? Upload your world to the huge amount of real estate on the dark side and be done with it.

If you’re a civilization that has learned how to encode living systems in different substrates, all you need to do is build a normal-matter-to-dark-matter data-transfer system: a dark-matter 3D printer. Perhaps the mismatch of astronomical models and observations is evidence not just of self-interacting dark matter, but of dark matter that is being artificially manipulated.

Or to take this a step further, perhaps the behavior of normal cosmic matter that we attribute to dark matter is brought on by something else altogether: a living state that manipulates luminous matter for its own purposes. Consider that at present we have neither identified the dark-matter particles nor come up with a compelling alternative to our laws of physics that would account for the behavior of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Would an explanation in terms of life be any less plausible than a failure of established laws?

 The universe does other funky and unexpected stuff. Notably, it began to expand at an accelerated rate about 5 billion years ago. This acceleration is conventionally chalked up to dark energy. But cosmologists don’t know why the cosmic acceleration began when it did. In fact, one explanation with a modicum of traction is that the timing has to do with life—an anthropic argument. The dark energy didn’t become significant until enough time had gone by for life to take hold on Earth. For many cosmologists, that means our universe must be part of a vast multiverse where the strength of dark energy varies from place to place. We live in one of the places suitable for life like us. Elsewhere, dark energy is stronger and blows the universe apart too quickly for cosmic structures to form and life to take root.

But perhaps there is another reason for the timing coincidence: that dark energy is related to the activities of living things. After all, any very early life in the universe would have already experienced 8 billion years of evolutionary time by the time expansion began to accelerate. It’s a stretch, but maybe there’s something about life itself that affects the cosmos, or maybe those well-evolved denizens decided to tinker with the expansion.

There are even possible motivations for that action...

A species can mitigate risk by spreading, decentralizing, and seeding as much real estate as possible. In this context, hyper-advanced life is going to look for ways to get rid of physical locality and to maximize redundancy and flexibility. The quantum realm offers good options. The cosmos is already packed with electromagnetic energy. Today, at any instant, about 400 photons of cosmic microwave radiation are streaming through any cubic centimeter of free space. They collectively have less energy than ordinary particles such as protons and electrons, but vastly outnumber them. That’s a lot of potential data carriers. Furthermore, we could imagine that these photons are cleverly quantum-mechanically entangled to help with error control.

By storing its essential data in photons, life could give itself a distributed backup system...

Toward the end of Carl Sagan’s 1985 science-fiction novel Contact, the protagonist follows the suggestion of an extraterrestrial to study transcendental numbers. After computing to 1020 places, she finds a clearly artificial message embedded in the digits of this fundamental number. In other words, part of the fabric of the universe is a product of intelligence or is perhaps even life itself.

It’s a great mind-bending twist for a book. Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence.

In other words, life might not just be in the equations. It might be the equations.

This thesis explores the possibility of composite consciousness: phenomenally conscious states  belonging to a composite being in virtue of the consciousness of,and relations among,its parts.We have no trouble accepting that a composite being has physical properties entirely in virtue of the  physical properties of, and relations among, its parts.

But a long-standing intuition holds that consciousness is different: my consciousness cannot be understood as a complex of interacting component consciousnesses belonging to parts of me.

I ask why: what is it about consciousness that makes us think it so different from matter? And should we accept this apparent difference?

Because measurement is ubiquitous in science – and, in a world where science is the dominant cultural fact, also in our everyday life – it’s hard to see just how strange it is that we are able to dismount from the flow of ordinary unsolicited experience to make a space for disciplined, quality-controlled active observations. What’s more, only a small part of what is experienced during the course of any measurement counts as the measurement. My experiences of the laboratory in which the measurement is made, what I am feeling, my reasons for making the measurement, and so on, are irrelevant. Equally irrelevant are the exact appearance of the measuring tool, and all but one parameter of the object that is being measured. The overwhelming majority of the experienced properties of the ruler, for example, and of the measured object are incidental and excluded from the result. As for the result, it doesn’t matter whether it’s recorded in black or blue ink or pencil, or as a number or dot on a screen. A measurement, in short, extracts from a complex situation with at least three elements (person, measuring tool, measured object) an item of supreme simplicity: a number attached to a unit. Everything else has been stripped off. The idea of a data point, featureless and vanishingly small, takes the stripped-down nature of the measurement to a limit. Consequently, neither the number nor the unit tells us much about the object. If I say of something that it is twenty-four inches, you would not be able to attach any meaning or significance to that statement, not even whether it was long or short, unless you already knew what the object was – a caterpillar or a tree.

The use of units to express results is the most obvious marker of the special nature of measurement and its distance from ordinary experience. Inches and pounds do not exist in nature: they are imported from the further reaches of a form of discourse made possible by the shared experiences of many thousands of individuals, most of whom will be unknown to those making the measurement. This is a reminder of how far ‘results’ are from the unregulated flow of moment-to-moment experience. When we cooperate to measure something, it is not comparable to looking at something together. Indeed, each of us might have quite different experiences of the act of measurement and of what is measured, but those differences are not (or should not be) of any importance. It will be evident that whether it involves several thousands of people in the hunt for the Higg’s Boson, or two people holding a tape to measure the size of a room, measurement requires shared consciousness of a kind quite different from that seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

To get a clearer idea of the extraordinary nature of the journey from the pell-mell of experience towards measurement and thence to quantitative science, it helps to think about the most primitive units. They depend upon a curious transformation of our relationship to our own bodies, in which we see our bodies as a source of standardized units, or at least of the idea of such units. The use of forearms (for a cubit), hands (a span), thumbs (an inch), and ‘feet’, as measures of length, is an egregious instrumentalization of the flesh of which we are made. When our ancestors deployed a measure based on their forearms to quantify the length of a building in cubits, bit of their bodies were reduced to objects that were further reduced to lengths. As ‘a cubit’, my forearm loses the privileged standing it has in my own life of being an intrinsic part of me, and becomes any(one’s) forearm. And this democratization is taken further. The forearm is downgraded to an object ontologically on a par with the very objects whose lengths it is used to measure: it is a mere object among other objects. (The compliment is returned much later when a measuring tape, an item whose role is simply to be its own length, is applied to the forearm to determine its size.)

Measurement is a vital step in the process of getting ourselves out of the way en route to objective science. The result, the ‘reading’, is stripped of the qualitative aspects of sensation, and moreover, does not rely on particular accidents of experience. For these reasons it is particularly amenable to sharing with, and corroboration by, others. You do not have to have replicate my experiences in order for both of us to arrive at the conclusion that the object we have been measuring is ten feet high.

This applies with even more force when what is in question is not a single time-dependent data point but a timeless impersonal fact, such as that Manchester is 200 miles from London, the Moon is 250,000 miles from Earth, or the Sun is 4,000,000,000 years old. The data which form the staple of science and underpin its laws and principles, not to speak of the wall-to-wall technology that is based on them, are even more obviously independent of individuals and their personal history. They belong to no-one, and float freely of all bodies.

Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the falsity of the claim by the otherwise brilliant nineteenth century physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach that “there is no break in continuity between science… and modes of behaviour characteristic of the entire animal world.” On the contrary, dismounting from the flow of experience to seek out a particular experience remote from appetites is hardly the way of the beast.

Measurement, a voluntary interruption in the spontaneous flow of experience that has vastly extended our power to predict and control the material world, is a manifestation of our individual and collective unwiring from nature and a driver to further unwiring. This unwiring is the reward for the increasingly active nature of our perceptual engagement with the world, as we move from gawping to scrutinizing and thence to making quantitative observations. Measurements which do not merely happen but are made, often building on the efforts of others, are a long way from passive bedazzlement by sensory experiences.

But they are, irreducibly, theoretically self-sufficient entities, because they are inseparable from human beings with their points of view, who provide those frames of reference that are necessary for measurements.

Quantitative measurements cannot be accommodated in the world-picture of natural science which rests on them. If, as physicists would have it, the most faithful portrait of the universe really were that it was a ‘system of magnitudes’, there would be no place for the elucidation of those magnitudes. The expectation of Mach, whose philosophy inspired the young Einstein, “That the foundations of science as a whole, and of physics in particular, await their next greatest elucidations from the side of biology, and especially from the analysis of sensations” seems a forlorn hope.

So there we have it: measurement underpins a world picture that seems to support naturalism; naturalism, however, cannot support measurement. This takes us back to the fundamental fact that natural science cannot make sense of the human consciousness upon which it depends. It cannot, therefore, explain how it is possible that, while all entities are in time and have length, there have emerged creatures who tell the time and measure their length. In doing so, they express a unique human capacity to get themselves out of the way by privileging shared, quality-controlled observations over immediate experience. Most striking among the many things science cannot accommodate, is the existence of a scientific world picture.

Some of the meaning that’s lost as science progresses is recovered when we reflect on the capacity of science to further one version of the comprehensibility of the universe. Reminding ourselves of the scientific path to disenchantment may re-enchant the world.

...Some researchers hold on to the hope that, if we just continue to investigate the brain’s physical properties, we will eventually be able to explain why conscious experience exists and why it has the intrinsic qualities it does. But the problem is more intractable than that.

The issue is that physical properties are by their nature relational, dispositional properties. That is, they describe the way that something is related to other things and/or has the disposition to affect or be affected by those other things. Most notably, physical properties describe the way that something affects an outside observer of that thing. But there is something going on in conscious experience that goes beyond how that conscious experience affects people looking at it from the outside. For this reason, the “what it’s like” to be a conscious mind can’t be described in the purely relational, dispositional terms accessible to science. There’s just no way to get there from here.

This explanatory gap is what is now commonly referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness, thanks to a paper and book written by philosopher of mind David Chalmers some 20 years ago (1995, 1996). The decades since Chalmers’ statement of the problem have seen plenty of solutions proposed (Weisberg n.d.), but none of them has dealt satisfactorily with the core issue outlined above: that no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to be conscious.

There is, however, one elegant solution to the riddle of how to explain the relationship between consciousness and physical properties. Many illustrious philosophers throughout history have held to this view, and if it is rarely considered today, this is likely because it requires such a radical shift in perspective. Nevertheless, if we are ever going to understand consciousness and its relationship to the physical world, I believe this is a shift we are going to have to make.

The key to resolving the hard problem of consciousness lies in the following observation. While physical properties cannot explain consciousness, consciousness is needed to explain physical properties.

As previously noted, physical properties are purely relational/dispositional. They don’t tell us what physical things are in themselves, only how they are related to other things (and how they are disposed to be related to them in the future). However, if all we ever have is relational/dispositional properties—that is, if everything is only defined in terms of other things—then, ultimately, we have defined nothing at all.

It’s as though someone created a very elaborate spreadsheet and carefully defined how the values in every cell would be related to the values in all of the other cells. However, if no one enters a definite value for at least one of these cells, then none of the cells will have values.

In the same way, if the universe is to actually exist, its properties can’t be exclusively relational/dispositional. Something in the universe has to have some kind of quality in and of itself to give all the other relational/dispositional properties any meaning. Something has to get the ball rolling.

That something (at least in our universe) is consciousness...

One of the most remarkable ideas in this theoretical framework is that the definite properties of objects that we associate with classical physics — position and speed, say — are selected from a menu of quantum possibilities in a process loosely analogous to natural selection in evolution: The properties that survive are in some sense the “fittest.” As in natural selection, the survivors are those that make the most copies of themselves. This means that many independent observers can make measurements of a quantum system and agree on the outcome — a hallmark of classical behavior.

This idea, called quantum Darwinism (QD), explains a lot about why we experience the world the way we do rather than in the peculiar way it manifests at the scale of atoms and fundamental particles. Although aspects of the puzzle remain unresolved, QD helps heal the apparent rift between quantum and classical physics.

About a decade ago, while Riedel was working as a graduate student with Zurek, the two showed theoretically that information from some simple, idealized quantum systems is “copied prolifically into the environment,” Riedel said, “so that it’s necessary to access only a small amount of the environment to infer the value of the variables.” They calculated that a grain of dust one micrometer across, after being illuminated by the sun for just one microsecond, will have its location imprinted about 100 million times in the scattered photons.

It’s because of this redundancy that objective, classical-like properties exist at all. Ten observers can each measure the position of a dust grain and find that it’s in the same location, because each can access a distinct replica of the information. In this view, we can assign an objective “position” to the speck not because it “has” such a position (whatever that means) but because its position state can imprint many identical replicas in the environment, so that different observers can reach a consensus.

Horodecki and other theorists have also sought to embed QD in a theoretical framework that doesn’t demand any arbitrary division of the world into a system and its environment, but just considers how classical reality can emerge from interactions between various quantum systems. Paternostro says it might be challenging to find experimental methods capable of identifying the rather subtle distinctions between the predictions of these theories.

Still, researchers are trying, and the very attempt should refine our ability to probe the workings of the quantum realm. “The best argument for performing these experiments probably is that they are good exercise,” Riedel said. “Directly illustrating QD can require some very difficult measurements that will push the boundaries of existing laboratory techniques.” The only way we can find out what measurement really means, it seems, is by making better measurements.

Current physical properties cannot describe nor explain mentality, therefore reality must be more than that which such physicalism presents. I cannot describe mental states such as hunger, despair, pain, or curiosity using physical properties alone—it would be an unintelligible category mistake to describe my hunger as comprised of a certain mass, gravity, volume, charge, and shape. But can I not say that my mental states are identical to their physical correlates, and thus describe them using such physicalist terms?

There are a host of logical reservations against such an identification. One can be called the multiple realization dilemma: if hunger (H) were identical to its human physical correlates (HPC), it would either imply that only humans could feel hunger (an implausible, unprovable position)—or it would imply that hunger was identical to both human physical correlates and to, say, shark physical correlates (SPC); but this would in turn imply that the human and shark physical correlates were identical (if H = HPC, and if H = SPC, then HPC = SPC), which is absurd.[5] So it seems illogical to posit that a mental state is the same thing as its physical correlate.[6] Thus one cannot describe or explain mentality in such physicalist terms alone.

As a result, physicalists have reconceptualized the mind-matter relation as one of emergence: that the mind emerges from certain brain activity. The two main problems associated with this approach are, firstly, that the specific nature of such an emergence is unknown: there are no known “bridge-laws” (or, no “transordinal nomology”) between the physical and the mental (they are certainly not known laws of physics). That the movement of matter can manifest mentality is the magical miracle that makes materialism a sect not a science. Secondly, it is unknown how the mentality that emerges from matter could in its turn have any power upon that matter—as most emergentists would demand so to avoid epiphenomenalism (the view that mentality is a useless aftereffect of cerebral machinations).

Not only does mentality exist in humans, but also presumably in the myriad other species of this world. For mentality to evolve and to maintain itself therein, without any purpose or power, runs against our notions of evolution, of selection. For instance, have we not evolved our intelligence, our reasoning powers? Did they not aid our survival and development? Very few will deny this premise, but a physicalist will deny mental force, mental causation: the power of the mind, as it is not a known fundamental force. Thus physicalism conflicts with evolutionary theory. To try to overcome this by identifying the mind with the physical will not work because: (1) psychoneural identity theory has failed, and (2) if mental powers are actually physical powers, one thereby returns to the predicament of having to explain why mentality exists if it has no powers of its own. The final outcome is that if one accepts evolution one must deny physicalism.

If one accepts, as even Papineau suggests, that there exists what the logician Frege called “the third realm”[16] (beyond physicality and mentality) of objective truths—such as the truth of modus ponens, the properties of Pi, the Pythagorean theorem, or the Form of Beauty—truths that exist whether or not they are discovered, meaning that they are in essence neither mental nor physical (as there can be no neural correlates of non-existent mental events), then it implies that their existence has an effect upon the physical through their discovery. For example, the discovery of the golden ratio had an effect upon the bodies of its discoverers in terms of their expression of it, and subsequently upon mathematics, aesthetics, architecture, and upon me in writing this essay. Thus the existence of such universal truths implies the falsity of one of physicalism’s key tenets: the causal closure of the physical. Universals crack open the causal closure principle of physicalism, which is to say they crack open physicalism itself.

    Of course, a physicalist could deny the existence of such universals, such objective truths. But in doing so, he would destroy the underlying assumptions of his position and thus succumb to inconsistency regardless. If physicalism considers itself to be a logical position, it must maintain the underlying truths of the laws of logic, such as the law of non-contradiction, formal fallacies, and so on. But these laws are not the laws of physics, which as such can be established through empirical observation or through modelling. Thus emerges another predicament for physicalism: the dilemma of logical objectivity. On the one side, if the laws of logic are to be considered objective—that is, they are true for all—then they must exist in a non-temporal, non-physical third realm that has causal influence upon the physical, thereby annulling the causal closure principle and, in turn, physicalism. On the other side, if the laws of logic are considered to be not objective, then physicalism cannot claim to be objectively logical. Either way, physicalism falters.