Oded Balaban

Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

A very critical critique of the Qvibe Manas channel

(“Esta es la razón por la que la ESCALOFRIANTE TEORÍA de la Conciencia Podría Cambiar TODA la Física” [This is why the CHILLING THEORY of consciousness could change ALL of physics], Qvibe Manas channel, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHe3RmOV9Ys)

The video my friend Horacio sent me in order to provoke me, which it succeeded in doing, promises that consciousness could change the whole of physics. It begins with the 21 grams that Dr. Duncan McDougall believed he had weighed in 1907 and, although it laughs at the anecdote, it never gets out of its logic. For an hour it searches for consciousness as though it were a thing with an address: first in the neurons, then in the microtubules of the cell’s skeleton, then in the collapse of the wave function, finally in the geometry of spacetime. The error is there in full, in miniature, from the first minute. It is not a weight we have not yet learned to measure; there is nothing to weigh.

McDougall weighed six tuberculosis patients at the moment of death. Exactly one of them yielded the twenty-one grams; the other five gave different figures, or none at all, and he himself conceded that six cases were too few to conclude anything. Posterity kept the one that came out right, which is the oldest method in science. He then repeated the experiment on fifteen dogs, which lost not a single gram, and from this he deduced, his logic entirely intact, that dogs have no souls. The other available conclusion never occurred to him, namely that his scale was measuring exactly what was there, which was nothing (McDougall 1907).

There is a paradox worth squeezing to the last drop. Those who invoke the soul in order to take it out of the physical world always prove it with arguments that plunge it head first back into that world. McDougall weighs it at 21 grams. The spiritualists have it knock, tilt tables, lift objects, leave its mark on a photographic plate. For all of that the soul has to have weight, to occupy a place and to push matter; it has to be a body among bodies, with mass and who knows whether with dimensions and volume. But the principle they borrow without noticing is precisely the one that leaves them with no soul: only a physical event can set another body in motion or at rest. If the soul moves the table, the soul is a physical cause, and then it is as material as the table it tilts. The argument that was meant to show that the soul is not matter works only if the soul is matter. It saws through the branch it is sitting on. What they want is a ghost that leaves fingerprints, a spirit that pays the entrance fee to the physical world, weight, force and measure, and that at the same time is not of this world. The two cannot be had at once. Either the soul is physical, and then it is not what they mean by it, but matter that is still poorly understood, bound by the same laws as everything else; or it is not physical, and then it has no weight, tilts no tables, pushes not a single neuron, and all their evidence evaporates in their hands. They want the entry stamp in the passport and, on the same page, a certificate that they never crossed the border.

The honest ancestor of this confusion is René Descartes. He saw the problem with a clarity the others lack, and fell into it all the same. He made the soul immaterial, without extension, and at once needed it to move the body, so he placed the meeting point in the pineal gland, that small gland at the center of the brain where the soul would bend the course of the animal spirits (Descartes [1649] 1989, arts. 31-32). He chose it, of all the parts of the brain, because it is the only one that does not come in a pair, and the soul, being one, could hardly be distributed over two halves. It is the only anatomical argument in history that reasons from the number of units in stock. Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia immediately put to him the question he never managed to answer: how a thing with neither extension nor mass contrives to push one that has both (Elisabeth of Bohemia [1643] 2007). To deflect the spirits by so much as a hair, the soul has to exert a force; to exert a force it has to be physical; and then it is no longer the immaterial soul, but one more body in the chain. The pineal gland is McDougall’s scale three centuries early, and the medium’s table three centuries early.

The principle that closes the door is simple, and the whole of physics rests on it: the physical world is causally closed. Every physical event has a sufficient physical cause, and nothing enters the ledger of forces from outside. An immaterial soul that moved a single neuron would have to supply a force out of nowhere, an exception to the conservation of energy that no experiment has ever caught. Either the soul pays in the currency of physics, and is therefore physical, or it does not touch the body at all. Descartes’s gland, McDougall’s scale, the spiritualist’s table and the quantum collapse in the microtubule are four names for one and the same wish: that the ghost should move the furniture without becoming furniture itself.

The mistake has a name as old as philosophy: looking for the image inside the mirror. A mirror reflects the whole room, and if you turn it around you find no room behind it, only glass and silvering. Consciousness is like that reflection. It is always consciousness of something, a relation, and not a substance stored away somewhere. To ask where it is kept, in which neuron, in which quantum of gravity, in which 21 grams, is to ask whereabouts in the back of the mirror the reflected window has been tucked. The question is badly built, and no instrument, however fine, finds what was never there to be found.

The analogy is good for dismantling the question about the address, and not for much more. It leaves untouched what really has to be explained, which is not where consciousness is kept but something far more ordinary: how it is that I raise my hand when I want to raise it.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a biochemist before he was a philosopher, posed the question in terms that leave no way out. In Body and Mind: The Psycho-Physical Problem he showed that there are really two questions here, and that the second is almost always answered without the first having been answered at all: whether two separate worlds genuinely exist between which there is a correlation, and, supposing they do, what the nature of that correlation is (Leibowitz 1982, 36). His example is not the soul leaving the body or the photon making up its mind. It is the arm. I feel that I am doing something because I want to do it; but the doing belongs to the physical world, and my willing exists nowhere except in me, in the private domain of my consciousness. I raise my hand. Nothing in physics explains that because (Leibowitz 1982, 31).

Here things become uncomfortable for me as well. Earlier I used the causal closure of the physical world to shut the door on the soul that pushes the gland, and I still hold to it. The trouble is that the principle does not discriminate. The same door I shut on the spiritualist shuts on me when I raise my hand. If every physical event has a sufficient physical cause, my willing cannot be the cause of anything, and yet the hand goes up every time I set out to raise it. Physics does not fail in the exotic case of the ghost. It fails in the most common case in the world, and it has done so from the first day.

That is what the quarrelling parties share without noticing. The spiritualist, Descartes, Penrose and the narrator of the video all accept the same presuppositions: that there are two orders of things, and that to explain is to find the mechanism that connects them. They argue about where the socket is. None of them asks whether the device has a socket at all. Physics is not built to account for the psycho-physical relation, any more than a thermometer is built to weigh things; and nobody accuses the thermometer of being in crisis.

There is also a historical clue worth following, and Leibowitz follows it in the chapter he devotes to ancient and modern thinkers (Leibowitz 1982, 31-35). The abyss was not always there. In the ancient world the body was more soul-like and the soul more bodily: the soul was the form of the living body and not a tenant lodged inside it, the pneuma was a breath, the animal spirits ran along the nerves the way a liquid runs. There was no need to connect two things, because they had not been separated in that way. It was Descartes who made the clean cut, and he made it so well that the connection became unthinkable. The problem of how soul and body touch each other is the child of the operation that separated them. First they were defined so that they could not touch, and then the search began for the point of contact.

And experience is not only seeing red. The video stays on the receptive half of the problem and walks straight past the active half, which is the worse of the two, because there we do not have a gap in an explanation but a head-on collision with the conservation of energy. Arthur Eddington left the image that shows it best, in The Nature of the Physical World. There are two tables: the one I rest my elbow on, solid and brown, and the one of physics, which is almost entirely emptiness and charges. Eddington concluded that the real one is the second. The remarkable thing is that he wrote that conclusion leaning on the first. The world from which the scientific journey set out ends up declared an illusion by the journey itself, and nobody explains how one gets back from one table to the other (Eddington 1928, 5-8).

The category mistake

The best moment in the video is David Chalmers’s hard problem: no physical description implies that there is experience (Chalmers 1995). That is true, and it is permanent. But the video reads it backwards. From the fact that physics does not contain experience it infers that experience must be a hidden physical ingredient we have not yet found, something extra in matter, waiting in the microtubule. The honest conclusion is the opposite one. Experience is not a line missing from the inventory of particles and forces; that inventory is the list of what can be measured, and whoever does the measuring does not appear on their own list. Galileo Galilei decided four centuries ago to keep only what can be weighed and counted, and to leave out color, pain and taste (Galilei [1623] 1957). The video is astonished that physics, built on purpose to exclude experience, does not have experience inside it. Nobody is surprised at failing to find the fish in the net woven precisely so that the fish would swim straight through.

It shows up better in a single color. Physics reduces red to a wavelength, seven hundred nanometers, and there is nothing red about that figure. It is a distance, the same kind of thing a carpenter measures, and nowhere in the number does the color we see appear. The reduction is a translation that leaves out precisely what one wanted to understand: it swaps the quality for its measure and passes the swap off as an explanation. And there lies the heart of the matter. As long as physics remains what it is today, the science of what can be weighed and counted, red will go on being translated into a colorless length, pain into a discharge, taste into a molecule, and the psycho-physical problem will not remain unsolved for want of data, but closed in advance by the shape of the method. Its formulas are substitutes, not explanations: an equation can predict to the millimeter when you will see red without containing a single drop of red.

That is why every theory the video presents discovers, as it goes along, the very question it came to answer. The narrator compares that chain to a matryoshka, the Russian doll with another doll inside it, sees the comparison, and goes on opening dolls, convinced that the next one holds the answer rather than one more doll. Panpsychism hands out a crumb of mind to every particle and then cannot say how the crumbs add up into a single view of the world, and this it calls the combination problem. Integrated information theory, the work of Giulio Tononi, delivers a number they call phi (Φ), which measures how much of the system cannot be reduced to its parts. To obtain it one has to compare the system with every possible way of cutting it into pieces, and those ways multiply so fast that, for a human brain, the calculation exceeds anything any computer could manage before the universe goes dark (Tononi 2008). A quantity nobody can compute has the advantage that nobody can refute it. The microtubule is worth a closer look, because the word impresses only until one translates it. Micro, from the Greek, small; tubulus, from the Latin, little tube. A small little tube. That is what it is: a hollow protein cylinder twenty-five millionths of a millimeter across, which the cell uses as scaffolding and as a railway for hauling cargo from one place to another. It is not an organ of thought, it is plumbing. Nor is it a neuronal specialty: the mushroom has microtubules, so does the lettuce, so does the cell that is making your fingernail. If consciousness lived in there, your liver would be having experiences all day long and nobody would have noticed.

The orchestrated objective reduction of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff puts a quantum-gravitational collapse inside a protein tube and declares, with no further ado and no embarrassment, affecting to understand what it is asserting, that each collapse is a moment of experience (Hameroff and Penrose 2003). The microtubule, which until then had earned its living as scaffolding, is promoted without so much as an interview. Why a fold in geometry should be a pang of feeling, rather than merely a click, nobody says. Adding one mystery to another does not produce an explanation. It produces two mysteries and a Nobel Prize.

The observer is not a subject

The engine of the whole argument is a single word used in two senses: observer. In physics, an observer is any interaction that fixes a value, a detector, a photographic plate, a speck of dust. It needs no eyes, no self, no sensation whatever; a Geiger counter observes. The video silently swaps that observer for the other one, the one who is awake and sees red, and out of the equivocation it builds a cosmos that waits for someone to ask before deciding what is real. Eugene Wigner’s collapse by consciousness (Wigner 1961), the participatory universe, the cosmos drawn as an eye looking at itself: all of it rests on taking a technical term and reading it as though the apparatus were homesick for a mind. The video itself admits that many physicists today regard that idea as unnecessary, because the classical character of the instruments is explained without ever naming consciousness. The step from measurement to a mind that looks is not a discovery but a homonym.

The video tangles up even its own cast. It gives John Wheeler’s phrases (Wheeler 1990), the participatory universe, it from bit, the letter U with an eye on its tip, and even the coining of the term black holes, to a character it calls John Wigner, fused with the Eugene Wigner of a few lines earlier. It is a small slip, but a telling one. When an argument lives off the prestige of names and the aura of the quantum, the names themselves begin to blur. In the video’s defense it should be said that John Wigner is, of all its characters, the one most faithful to its thesis, being a physicist who exists only while someone is observing him.

The one thing it gets right turns against it

The thought experiments of the reversed signal and of the gigantic book show that consciousness cannot be a file at rest. A recording of every impulse played backwards holds the same information and sees nothing; a book with the position of every particle in the brain feels no pain, however complete it may be. A score is not a concert, a recipe feeds nobody. Consciousness is a process and not a stored thing, and that is why uploading the mind to the cloud is a mirage: the copy is a new process, with a history of its own, and not the continuation of the one that went out with the body. All of this is true. And yet none of it needed quantum gravity, or microtubules, or a cosmic eye. It is conceptual reasoning, of the kind done with a pencil. The best page of the video proves that the question is conceptual, and in doing so empties its own title, because physics is not what is going to settle it. You need no particle accelerator to see that a photograph of a flame does not burn.

From fact to meaning

And then comes the ending, where the real operation shows its face. “It finally opened a pair of eyes to behold its own beauty.” “Every one of your thoughts is, literally, a dead star that has begun to remember.” This is not physics, and it is not even a hypothesis. It is a sermon. Here the trick is complete: from “we cannot explain consciousness” the video has arrived at “the cosmos wanted us, we are its self-awareness, our existence has a cosmic meaning.” No equation says that the universe wanted eyes, or that your morning coffee is a star remembering. The carbon in the cup was once in a star too, and we do not consult it on that account. Meaning, purpose, beauty and reverence are not read off a measurement; we are the ones who put them there, and the moment we pretend to draw them out of physics we are doing religion while swearing that we are doing science. There is nothing wrong with wonder. There is a great deal wrong with a wonder that dresses up as a theorem and claims the authority of the laboratory. The honest believer and the honest physicist would both refuse the trade. It is the worst of both sides, a physics that cannot give meaning pretending to give it, and a faith too ashamed to say its own name.

The title says that consciousness could change the whole of physics. It is the other way round. Consciousness is the one thing physics set out to leave outside, and it will go on leaving it outside, not out of weakness but on principle. The day someone announces that their equation has finally felt something, the answer is the one the video itself quotes from Richard Feynman and promptly forgets: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” It cannot. Nobody can, yet. That is not a crisis in physics. It is the difference between the window and the eye that looks through it.

Bibliography

Chalmers, David J. 1995. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 200-219.

Descartes, René. (1649) 1989. The Passions of the Soul. Translated by Stephen H. Voss. Indianapolis: Hackett. (Originally in French.)

Eddington, Arthur S. 1928. The Nature of the Physical World. London: Macmillan.

Elisabeth of Bohemia. (1643) 2007. Letter to Descartes, 6 May 1643. In The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, edited and translated by Lisa Shapiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Originally in French.)

Hameroff, Stuart, and Roger Penrose. 2003. “Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections.” NeuroQuantology 1 (1): 10-35.

Galilei, Galileo. (1623) 1957. “The Assayer.” In Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, translated by Stillman Drake. New York: Doubleday. (Originally in Italian.)

Leibowitz, Yeshayahu. 1982. Guf va-nefesh: ha-beaya ha-psikho-fisit [Body and Mind: The Psycho-Physical Problem]. Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence, The Broadcast University. (In Hebrew; no English translation.)

McDougall, Duncan. 1907. “Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of the Existence of Such Substance.” American Medicine 2 (4): 240-243.

Qvibe Manas. n.d. “Esta es la razón por la que la ESCALOFRIANTE TEORÍA de la Conciencia Podría Cambiar TODA la Física” [This is why the chilling theory of consciousness could change all of physics]. YouTube. In Spanish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHe3RmOV9Ys

Tononi, Giulio. 2008. “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto.” The Biological Bulletin 215 (3): 216-242.

Wheeler, John A. 1990. “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links.” In Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, edited by Wojciech H. Zurek. Redwood City: Addison-Wesley.

Wigner, Eugene P. 1961. “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question.” In The Scientist Speculates, edited by I. J. Good, 284-302. London: Heinemann.