Consciousness and Advancing Technology

A recent conference on consciousness and teleportation illustrates that some advances in technology can’t happen until we have a better understanding of the nature of consciousness.

by Amanda Seipel

The Swiss Museum of Transport hosted the 6th Biennial Swiss Conference on Science, Technics & Aesthetics this past January. The topic - Consciousness and Teleportation. The quantum teleportation of particles and atoms is now a demonstrable reality in the lab. Although the ability to teleport human-sized objects is still a long way off, the purpose of this conference was to consider one of the less-often-discussed obstacles to the teleportation of living beings – the problem of how consciousness (mind, identity, and the sense of self) might be teleported, if indeed it can survive the current approach to teleportation.

Prominent speakers at the conference included Karl Pribram, author of “Languages of the Brain”; Stuart Hameroff, proponent of a quantum-physical process of consciousness that utilizes cytoskeletal microtubules; Otto Rossler, leading researcher in endophysics; and Jack Pettigrew, professor of physiology specializing in the physics of perception. As you might guess from reading this list, most of the speakers were at the conference to address the ‘consciousness’ portion of its title - ‘Consciousness & Teleportation’. Our knowledge about the nature of consciousness is woefully incomplete. And our failures in understanding consciousness stand between us and some of the next great leaps in technology. Indeed, none of the speakers talked much about the process of teleportation(1); rather, they all focused on data and theories that will help identify the processes which give rise to consciousness. These processes would have to be mimicked or preserved in any copy, teleported or alternatively generated, of a human being who wishes to have the same fundamental experience of self and the same degree and nature of perceptual interaction with the world as his ‘original’.

It cannot be assumed that a copy of a person that is accurate at the molecular level will have the same experience of consciousness. The reason? Consciousness may be a byproduct of happenings at the subatomic level. Certainly larger-scale events and processes are involved in shaping conscious experience, but consciousness remains isolated from the world-at-large in one key way… Enter quantum physics: specifically, the measurement problem of quantum physics, which summarizes several key experiements by saying that we only ever see one state of a particle/object/system(2) that could express any of several other mutually-exclusive states(3). Quantum physics goes on to say that these particles/objects/systems exist as something else entirely (a wave-like state of potential) when they are not being observed. This suggests that consciousness is some sort of limited interface with reality, rather than an ability to perceive the true nature of things(4). And without understanding the nature of this interface, our ability to copy or transfer it accurately is questionable.

Before discussing how the interface approach to consciousness might be useful in solving the problem of teleportation, we need to discuss the second problem of the quantum physics– consciousness connection – the problem of state selection. Most researchers to date have overlooked this problem in favor of simply trying to establish that there is a connection between quantum physics and consciousness. The fact that there is a measurement problem (sometimes called the ‘observer problem’) should take care of that point for us. The far more interesting question is – Of all the possible states of a system that we could experience, how is the state that we actually experience chosen? Here again there is a default answer – the choice is random and randomness is an inherent property of the universe. Some other proposed answers to this problem include 1) the choice is the product of ‘hidden variables’ which we can never hope to understand, and 2) there exists some as-yet-undefined ‘differential’ (a gravitational differential, if you agree with Sir Roger Penrose(5)) between the state that is ultimately ‘chosen’ and the other possible states, and this differential drives the choice. The ‘differential’ approach makes more sense to me than accepting randomness as an inherent property of the universe or surrendering to ‘hidden variables’. If such a differential exists, its nature may become apparent through further study of human cognition, psychology, neuroscience, and biochemistry. After all, if we are ultimately constrained in our perceptions of reality by the limits of the interface that we call consciousness, then our best hope for understanding any differentials that may guide its processes lies within a better understanding of the elements, physical and experiential, of consciousness. But how is this connected to teleportation? In order for a teleportation to be successful, any differential, whatever its nature, must also arrive intact and unaltered by the process. Without understanding the nature of the differentials, it’s difficult to know what will happen to them during a ‘conventional’ teleportation. It’s also possible that such differentials can be manipulated as an alternative means of teleportation: a way to ‘unplug’ the consciousness interface and plug it in at a different set of coordinates.

Viewing consciousness as an interface and considering the problem of state selection can provide new perspectives on what needs to happen in order to teleport a conscious person. But consciousness is an obstacle to teleportation in an even more fundamental way. The current method for teleporting uses entanglement(6) between two systems to allow instantaneous transmission of information between the locations of both halves of the entangled system. However, selecting the appropriate measurement to ‘remove’ the object from the entangled system at its destination still requires that classical information telling which measurement to make be transmitted from the point of origin. Thus, while the entangled system ‘transfers’ information instantaneously, the current process of teleportation is still limited by the speed at which classical information travels. If the differentials involved in state selection were better understood, it might be possible to bypass the wait for classical information at the destination, select ‘correct measurement’(7), and ‘remove’ the object from its ambiguous teleported state.

To accomplish teleportation and to advance other forms of HPE-technology, it is critical that we have a better understanding of the nature of consciousness. Only then will we be able to truly break through the barriers that stand between us and the next levels of human potential. Scientists are beginning to recognize this, but interest and research into the nature of consciousness is still taboo in many of the disciplines where it should be most cultivated. Some believe that an understanding of the nature of consciousness will follow once technology has sufficiently advanced. Perhaps that is true, but the time spent pursuing what could very well be dead ends might be better spent dealing with the foremost obstacle itself – consciousness. Without understanding its nature, we can neither accurately replicate it, nor reliably extend its range and potential. A call was made to devote significant resources to the study and extension of consciousness in Gerald Feinberg’s 1969 book “The Prometheus Project”, which called for the establishment of long-range goals for humanity to pursue, and the importance of this goal has not changed. Teleportation of conscious beings is but one of the science fiction-to-science fact breakthroughs that we would be closer to achieving when the nature of consciousness is finally understood.

1. A very readable summary of the process of teleportation exists in the April 2000 issue of Scientific American.

2. The quantum behavior of particles (i.e., electrons, photons) is widely accepted. Quantum behavior has been seen at the molecular level in labs. Some would argue that it also exists at the level of real-world objects, though experimental data to support this position is more difficult to find.

3. Here is an illustration using a classical-scale object, rather than a particle… A coin that is observed as having landed on heads is not also simultaneously observed as having landed on tails.

4. Going back to our classical-scale example, we appear to be limited to observing only heads or tails when the unobserved system would exist as a superposition of both head and tails.

5. See Discover, June 2005 for a readable summary of Penrose’s ideas on gravity and quantum physics.

6. For ‘entanglement’, you can substitute ‘weird connection’. The state of one system will always correspond to the state of the other system, no matter how or which system you choose to measure first. The exact nature of entanglement is still pretty much a mystery; some researcher think entanglement lasts forever, while others seem to think entanglement could be disrupted.

7. It’s currently believed that, prior to receiving classical information about which measurement to make, one could only guess at which of the four possible measurements would be the correct measurement to ‘remove’ the teleported particle from the entanglement. A better understanding of the process of state selection may expose this as fallacy.

Dr. Seipel has a Ph.D. in Human Development and Communication Science and an M.S. in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience. She is currently working on a differential model of state selection.