Consciousness: A Direct Link with Lifes Origin?

Title: CONSCIOUSNESS: A DIRECT LINK WITH LIFE’S ORIGIN? Authors: A. N. Mitra1 and G. Mitra-Delmotte2, Ph.D. 1Emeritus, Department of Physics, Delhi University, Delhi-110007; 244 Tagore Park, Delhi-110009; e.mail: ganmitra@nde.vsnl.net.in 239 Cite de l’Ocean, Montgaillard, 97400 St.Denis, Reunion Island ; e.mail: gargijj@orange.fr Abstract: Inspired by the Penrose-Hameroff thesis, we are intuitively led to examine an intriguing correspondence of ‘induction’ (by fields), with the complex phenomenon of (metabolism-sustained) consciousness: Did sequences of associated induction patterns in field-susceptible biomatter have simpler beginnings? Keywords: mind-matter; field-driven assembly; induction; environment; solitons; coherence; magnetism. 1. Introduction Consciousness is a many-splendoured thing, whose anatomy has been under scrutiny almost since the birth of civilization. We have come a long way from the times when this term was associated with religion and spiritualism, to the present era when serious efforts are directed towards understanding it in the language of Science (Penrose 1995; Hameroff 2003). During this saga, physical science has progressed all the way from Newtonian mechanics (when Cartesian Partition ruled against such efforts) to the birth of relativity and quantum mechanics when sheer compulsions of logical self-consistency demanded that Cartesian Partition was no longer tenable and that mind and matter could no longer be divorced from each other. This was despite Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation which had effectively decreed against difficult logical questions being asked about quantum mechanics. But Einstein could not accept this dictum and produced his EPR paper (Einstein et al 1935) ostensibly designed to demolish the tenets of quantum mechanics, but serendipitously treaded on a most fertile land as a logical consequence of the new paradigm, namely quantum entanglement and non-locality. This was directly at variance with the concept of local realism, the bedrock of the Copenhagen Interpretation. Since both could not be right at the same time, it took another half a century to decide on the issue: Alan Aspect, through his famous experiment (Aspect et al 1982), gave the verdict in favour of EPR’s entanglement and non-locality and in so doing, ruled out Bohr’s local causality. In the meantime Copenhagen had got rather outdated due to the emergence of decoherence, thanks to a two-decade-old development bearing on the very foundations of quantum mechanics (following the Aspect discovery) which gave an increasingly active role to the environment (see below for its fuller ramifications). This episode offers a possible setting for bringing mind and matter on a common platform, since a direct touch with reality of these bizarre quantum concepts have willy- nilly got these two entities “mutually entangled”! One may wonder how this ‘Frankenstein’ (read science with all its tools) which is the product of the human mind in the first place, has come to challenge its own Creator, and probe its `anatomy’. This essay is an attempt to string together some scientific advances designed to reduce the complex phenomena of consciousness (Sect.2-5), and to map (Sect.6-7) the resulting scenario to simpler ingredients that may have been available in the Hadean. 2. Bohm’s Thesis: Integral Duality of Mind and Matter For historical reasons, we start with a semi-intuitive model due to David Bohm (1990) who was led, by the conflict of quantum theory (discreteness) with GTR (continuous matter), to propose the existence of an undivided wholeness present in an implicate order which applies to both matter and mind, so that it can in principle access the relationship between these two different things. In this picture, matter and mind are seen as relative projections into an explicate order from the reality of the implicate order, with apparently no connection between them. Only at the deeper, fundamental level of the universe, does there exist an unbroken wholeness in which mind (consciousness?) merges with matter-- something akin to a holographic image of the brain (Pribram 1975). Bohm also illustrates the idea of `meaning’ through the example of listening to music as a sequence of overlapping moments each with a short but finite interval of time. To produce the notes, one moment ‘induces’ the next, such that the content that was implicate in the immediate past, becomes explicate in the next interval (the immediate present). The sense of movement in music is thus the result of a sequence of overlapping transitions, thus producing consciousness from an implicate order. Consciousness is thus seen to be intimately related to the concept of `time’ –not merely a ‘duration’, in the sense of classical mechanics, but an active ingredient bearing on consciousness that reveals a world of continuous and unfolding events, a la Bergson (2001[1889]). Bohm

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