Does Consciousness Create Reality?

Mandrake the Magician

DOES CONSCIOUSNESS CREATE REALITY?
THE AMY PROJECT

When David Kaiser charted the history of a small group of independent scholars exploring the foundations of quantum mechanics outside the usual channels (How the Hippies Saved Physics, 2011) he said not a word about the AMY Project which focused on a particular physics experiment that looked like it might be able to answer the important question: "Does consciousness create reality?"

Erwin Schrödinger started it all with his famous cat in a box. Unlike the classical objects of everyday life, a quantum object can exist in a superposition of states, can be,  for instance, in two places at once. Schrödinger assumed that quantum mechanics applies to everything, not just the very small, and devised a clever thought experiment in which a cat-in-a-box is both alive and dead at the same time until someone opens the box and looks. Observation destroys the superposition and the experimenter will see either a dead cat or a live cat.

Schrödinger's thought experiment which is totally impractical to carry out, is suggestive of the notion that consciousness might act on the quantum level to bring reality into existence.

Recently in 1976, a pair of physicists from Durban, South Africa, Donald Bedford and Derek Wang, proposed a practical experiment they called An Interfering Schrödinger Cat (D. Bedford and D. Wang, Il Nuovo Cimento 32B, 243 (1976))

Bedford and Wang's experiment is a simple variation on the familiar double-slit experiment, in which a beam of light goes through two slits at once and creates an interference pattern of alternating dark and light regions on a screen behind the slit.

Instead of a single pair of slits, Bedford and Wang introduce a two-component superposition of single slits that modulate the light beam. Small objects like atoms are easy to superimpose; whether large objects like metal plates with holes in them can be made to coexist in a Schrödinger Cat-like state is problematic. For this reason any macroscopic superposition whether theoretical or actual has come to be known as a "cat state". When the objects being superposed are tiny, one sometimes hears physicists describe such situations as "kitten states"

Two Experiments: 1. Double Slit and 2. Two-Slit Superposition

One way of looking at the Bedford and Wang proposal is that as long as the superposition of two slits is not looked at, the light will go through both slits and form an interference pattern. However if someone looks at the slits, the superposition will collapse into a mixture of single slits and the interference will vanish. Thus, on the face of it, this experiment looks as though it might be able to test the conjecture that observation changes reality. The Bedford and Wang experiment seems to offer the potential to demonstrate a concrete difference between the world unlooked at and the world observed.

The notion that mind creates reality has a long history, most famously exemplified by the Irishman  George Berkeley (1685 - 1753), Bishop of Cloyne in County Cork, whom his fellow countryman, William Butler Yeats, eulogized thus:

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream

That this pragmatical preposterous pig of a world

its farrow that so solid seem

Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme.

More recently, this idealist philosophy (the world is not made of things but of ideas) has been championed by the Dutchman Bernardo Kastrup, expressed in such books as The Idea of the World and Why Materialism is Baloney.

The belief that matter can exist on its own without reference to mind might be called "independent material existence." The opposite belief is then "anti-independent material existence" abbreviated AIME which we shortened to AMY. The aim of our AMY Project was to examine the exciting possibility that there might exist a physics experiment that could refute the materialist hypothesis and perhaps establish the truth of Bishop Berkeley's exhortation:

All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth

in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world

have not any substance without a mind.

The AMY Project involved about a dozen people, including myself and Saul-Paul Sirag, as well as philosopher Abner Shimony, physicists Bruce Rosenblum, Henry Stapp, John Cramer, Casey Blood, Beverly Rubik, Evan Harris Walker plus Erwin Schrödinger's last graduate student in Dublin, Ludvik Bass. At the invitation of physicist Amit Goswami, back in 1991, Nick Herbert spent two days at the University of Oregon in Eugene presenting the original B&W experiment and some of its variations.

In their original paper, Bedford and Wang argued that the superposed slits would cause no interference whether observed or not. This conclusion was independently verified by the calculations of Casey Blood at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. In retrospect one can now recognize that the two light paths and the two superposed slits are quantum-entangled (unlike the simple double-slit experiment) and it is easy to show that entangled particles do not show interference effects.

So, in the B&W experiment, there is no interference on the screen before looking. And no interference after looking. Nothing happens when someone looks at the superposed slits.

So all that excitement was for nothing. The Amy Project failed in the sense that the B&W experiment does not test the idealist hypothesis. But there do exist quantum experiments where looked at and unlooked at systems gave different results, such as those cited by Bruce Rosenblum & Fred Kuttner in their Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness. However, despite these authors' contentions, such experiments do not reveal a hidden power of mind.

Why not? Because "looked at" in physics means deploying some sort of physical instrument. Just paying attention is not enough. The action of mind in physics experiments is simply to select which machine to deploy to ask nature a particular question. Different questions require different machines. So, in my opinion, consciousness, even in quantum physics, seems to play the same indirect role in creating reality as choosing which gear to put your car in when climbing a hill.

Bedford and Wang not only proposed a theory, they actually carried out an experiment. However there is some doubt whether B&W were actually able to superpose two macroscopic slits. Recently an elegant experiment by Kim et al has succeeded in achieving exactly the B&W configuration using the resources of modern optics. All sorts of variations that Bedford and Wang never dreamed of can now be carried out on this sophisticated platform. Needless to say, none of these experiments can be used to support or refute the idealist hypothesis. All is not lost, however. There are other paths to reality besides quantum physics.

OK, we were wrong. But can you imagine how exciting it felt to believe for a while that you were working on an actual physics experiment that might prove this world is a dream?

All is Mind: Matter is an Illusion

Bernardo Kastrup, Dutch Philosopher (Veldhoven, NL)

ALL IS MIND: MATTER IS AN ILLUSION

Esse est percipi. (To be is to be perceived): A thing exists only if it is perceived.
    -- George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, Ireland

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,
That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its
farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme.
    —William Butler Yeats, Blood and the Moon

For a time I totally believed that the world is made entirely of Mind.
Then the acid wore off.
    -- Nick Herbert

There is only universal consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of universal consciousness, surrounded like islands by the ocean of its thoughts. The inanimate universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms that we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters of universal consciousness. 
    -- Bernardo Kastrup

Recently Dutch philosopher Bernardo Kastrup published a book Why Materialism is Baloney criticizing the dominant "theology" of our time, namely that everything (minds included) is made out of matter. The prime doctrine of the First Church of Materialism was first set down by Democritus of Abdera (around 500 BC):

Nothing exists but atoms and empty space: all else is opinion. 

In the following millennia, natural philosophers have immensely expanded Democritus's ontology by getting more specific concerning the nature of "atoms" (we now call them "quarks and "leptons") and the forces that govern their motion and transformation (modern jargon for these forces is "vector bosons"). The immense success of modern physics at every scale from photon to galactic cluster is a powerful argument for the Democritean ontology. The undeniable existence of conscious experience is the only fly in the Democritian ointment. To explain the entire world, does Mind have to be added as an extra ingredient to the list of what exists (mind-matter dualism = Dualism)? Or will physics someday explain Mind as a particularly complex arrangement of atoms (matter monism = Materialism)?

The usual tactic of the antiMaterialist heretic is to argue that Mind can never be explained by mere physical brain processes because consciousness is 1. intrinsically OTHER than matter and 2. can do things (classified broadly as parapsychology) that are impossible for matter to do. Edward and Emily Kelly's book Irreducible Mind is a giant encyclopedia of things supposedly difficult or impossible for matter to accomplish.

AntiMaterialist Bernardo Kastrup takes an radically different, audacious and utterly preposterous approach by 1. denying the existence of Matter entirely and 2. arguing that everything is made of mind.

Kastrup's bold position is called idealism, a philosophy associated with Bishop Berkeley (1685 - 1753) and epitomized by his phrase:

All those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived.

 Kastrup recently published an 18-page paper describing his idealistic ontology which I was tempted to dismiss out of hand on the grounds that mind-only views such as Berkeley's are utterly preposterous. But as I looked further into Kastrup's paper, I realized that he was playing by the rules, lining up his premises and assumptions and attempting to put forth a coherent and persuasive argument for his preposterous model of reality. This is a show worth watching, I thought! How is this guy going to logically demolish "all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world" and how is he going to replace every single one of them with mere thought?

BK's first postulate is that the fundamental reality is "That which experiences" (TWE). That is all there is -- and all that there ever was and will be. We might as well call TWE by the name "God", but this primal reality is immensely larger than any God we mere humans could ever conceive.

Next there exist parts of this unitary reality that have separated themselves off from TWE and are somewhat independent of Big Reality. We can designate these Reality Rebels (which include ourselves and all other conscious beings) as "twe" (lower case). We like God are also "that which experiences" but our experiences are rather small.

A part of God that has separated from the Whole.

I'm beginning to like this metaphysics. According to Kastrup, we are all "Shards of God", in the words of Fug/poet Ed Sanders. Shards like us have two modes of perception: inner and outer. We are directly aware of some of our inner thought processes and indirectly aware of the outer world through membrane-mediated external thoughts.

Because we have separated ourselves from the Mind of God, we are mercifully unaware of the Supreme Diety's massively complex thought processes but perceive God dimly and indirectly as "the physical world". In Kastrup's view the physical world appears to us Reality Rebels as "the Body of God". And we perceive our fellow "shards of God" as those parts of the physical world that behave like physical beings with consciousness.

But what does it mean to perceive "the external appearance" of God and the "external appearance" of fellow shards? If we have truly separated ourselves from divinity, why do we perceive anything "external" at all?

And here we come to the most crucial point in Kastrup's philosophy. (We must be constantly aware that this guy is performing a philosophically dangerous high-wire act without a net and try to give him lots of support.) The separated shard is in a desperate position. If he separates completely from Reality, he ends up in a boring prison of solipsism. On the other hand, if he connects fully with Reality, his little personal twe dissolves into the universal sea of Supreme TWE.

Kalstrup's solution: the shard surrounds himself with a protective membrane of Minds That Lie (MTL). The sole function of a Mind That Lies is to take one thought and turn it into another. Once surrounded by this Decepticon Shield, the shard no longer experiences Reality-as-it-is, but merely a particular Representation of Reality. Kastrup calls this necessary shard-protective membrane the "Markov Blanket". And this Blanket's the weakest link in his argument.

How the world might look, information-wise, from inside a human-size Markov Blanket

For just as Kastrup points out that the weakest link in materialism is its failure to deliver a materialist model of Mind, the weakest link in Kastrup's philosophy is his failure to produce an idealist model of matter. Kastrup's magical Markov Blanket must manifest a lot of solid marvels out of purely mental material. It must produce, for instance, the very notion of "a simple material object" -- that exists by itself whether anyone is thinking of it or not. (To be fair, quantum theory possesses a similar weak link in its inability to clearly characterize the notion of "a macroscopic measuring instrument".) 

Materialists can't explain Mind. Idealists can't explain Matter.

A landmark achievement of Kastrupian philosophy would be to demonstrate from purely mental arguments (presumably including specific Markov Blankets made of Minds That Lie) why we seem to live in a physical space consisting of three spatial and one time dimension with a Minkowski metric. 

Kastrup's imaginative philosophy is entertaining and leads one into unconventional ways of thinking about the world. But always the proof is in the pudding. A truly successful model of reality should provide us entirely novel human experiences -- marvelous new experiences that were previously inconceivable. Yes.

Gentleman and ladies, start your engines. May the best reality win.

God wakes up and realizes the whole thing was a really bad dream.

Illustration by Sligo, Ireland artist Annie West, famous for her satirical cartoons of Irish poet William Butler Yeats.