Editor

Fabio Scardigli

Authors
Roger Penrose, Emanuele Severino, Fabio Scardigli, Ines Testoni,
Giuseppe Vitiello, Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano and Federico Faggin

Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural

Intelligence
Editor
Fabio Scardigli
Dipartimento di Matematica, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

Authors
Roger Penrose
Mathematical Institute, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

Emanuele Severino
Brescia, Italy

Fabio Scardigli
Dipartimento di Matematica, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

Ines Testoni
FISPPA, Section Applied Psychology, University of Padua, Padova, Italy

Giuseppe Vitiello
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano

Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Pavia, Pavia, Italy

Federico Faggin
Los Altos Hills, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-85479-9 e-ISBN 978-3-030-85480-5

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85480-5

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license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
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Contents
Introduction
Fabio Scardigli
A Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence
Roger Penrose and Emanuele Severino
The Death of the Emperor’s Mind from an Eternalist Perspective
Ines Testoni
The Brain Is not a Stupid Star
Giuseppe Vitiello
Hard Problem and Free Will:​An Information-Theoretical
Approach
Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano and Federico Faggin
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
F. Scardigli (ed.), Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85480-5_1

Introduction
Fabio Scardigli1
(1) Department of Mathematics, Polytechnic of Milan, Milan, Italy

Fabio Scardigli
Email: [email protected]

This book contains the transcriptions of the talks and the debate
between Roger Penrose and Emanuele Severino that took place during
the conference “Artificial Intelligence vs Natural Intelligence”, held in
Milano, at the Cariplo Congress Center, on May 12, 2018.
Besides the keynote speeches of Penrose and Severino, there were
the illuminating talks of Giuseppe Vitiello (theoretical physicist), Mauro
D'Ariano (theoretical physicist), and Ines Testoni (psychologist), which
gave rise to the three essays completing this book.
The conference was conceived and organized (like the previous one
on “Determinism and Free Will”) by a group of friends and colleagues:
Fabio Scardigli, Marcello Esposito, and Marco Dotti. Our warmest
thanks go to our colleague Massimo Blasone for his help during the
workshop’s days.
The success of the conference was somehow astonishing, even
greater than that of the previous meeting. More than 600 people
crowded into the main hall of the Cariplo Congress Center and into two
adjacent rooms, equipped with closed circuit television. This vividly
testifies to the great interest that the general public has for the themes
of Artificial Intelligence, Theory of Consciousness, Intelligent devices,
and all that.
1 Understanding and Algorithms
Regarding those topics usually grouped under the heading “AI”
(Artificial Intelligence), the perspectives of the two main speakers, the
mathematical physicist Roger Penrose and the philosopher Emanuele
Severino, are obviously quite different. Nevertheless, as the reader will
soon discover, both agree that we do not yet have “intelligent devices”,
and also that, if we follow the vision of the so-called Strong AI
(presently still the mainstream), we will never be able to build such
devices. This opinion is also supported by the authors of the other
essays in the book, although with their own slant.
In his main talk, Penrose focuses on the relations between the
words “intelligence”, “understanding”, and “consciousness”. “Being a
mathematician”, he kids, “connections among words are more
important to me than their “true” meaning”. Relations among concepts
are more illuminating than substantial definitions, in other words.
Therefore Penrose starts from the idea that the word “intelligence”, at
least in the standard usage, implies “understanding”, and
“understanding” requires some “awareness” or “consciousness”. Going
through different examples, discussed in great detail, Penrose shows
that the machines, or software, at our disposal today are computational
devices, maybe very sophisticated, but all essentially based on the ideal
prototype of the Turing Machine. “Intelligence” and “understanding”, on
the other hand, seem to exhibit properties that escape simple
computability. Intelligence is something more than mere computational
ability. Examples taken from chess, mathematical induction (the
intriguing Goodstein theorem), the tiling of the Euclidean plane
(polyominoes, which cannot be produced through computable
algorithms), all converge to show that “understanding is something
which is not achieved by rules”. So, a general quality of understanding
seems to be that it is not an algorithm. Hence, “understanding”,
according to Penrose, is not an element or a result of a (very)
complicated application of a set of rules (algorithm).

2 Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness

Penrose then reviews the two main theoretical pillars of modern
physics, namely General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and points
out that there is only one specific element of modern physics that
cannot be reproduced on a computer, because it is not computable. To
be precise, it is the measurement process in Quantum Mechanics, the so
called “collapse of the wave function”. This is not described by the
Schroedinger equation, and cannot be implemented (not even in
principle) by any computable algorithm.
In the words of Penrose “The idea is that the collapse process is
something which is not computable. In fact it is something which is a
bit like what free will might be. Because according to the current
physics, it is making its own decisions. Somehow it decides to be here
or there.”
Thus, in the whole landscape of physical theories and phenomena,
there seem to be only two things characterized by their intrinsic non-
algorithmic, non-computable nature: the measurement process in
quantum mechanics (or the collapse of the wave function), and the
phenomenon of “understanding” or “awareness” proper to (human)
consciousness. In his work, Penrose has been trying to connect these
two concepts from many years now. Starting in particular with the book
“The Emperor's New Mind”, he formulates a theory according to which
the origin of the non-algorithmic processes of “understanding”,
“awareness”, and “consciousness” should be sought in certain quantum
processes occurring in specific regions of the brain. Thanks to his
collaboration with the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, during the
1990s, some promising candidates to host these so-called
“Spontaneous Orchestrated Reductions” of the quantum states were
identified in the “microtubules”. Microtubules are very small sub-
cellular structures, located inside neurons, in the axons and dendrites.
In these structures, quantum coherence could be maintained long
enough to allow the quantum collapse of a wave function to directly
influence “elements”, or “atoms”, of quantum consciousness, named
“protoconsciousness”. According to Hameroff and Penrose, these could
be the building blocks out of which consciousness is constructed.
Obviously, in these building blocks, there is not yet a conscious aim, not
yet a purpose, and even less a meaning, but out of them structures
containing conscious behavior might emerge.
3 Protoconsciousness
An immediate consequence of this theory is that consciousness, far
from being a purely human characteristic, should instead emerge
wherever structures like microtubules are present, hence, for example,
in animals like apes, dolphins, dogs, cats, or mice. This vision, also full
of ethical implications, was what sparked the discussion with Severino.
Moreover, Penrose also briefly introduced the possibility of
“constructing” a conscious, and therefore intelligent, device. In his
perspective, of course, this could be done only by aggregating elements
of protoconsciousness and providing them with the appropriate
environment for an “orchestrated objective reduction” of the wave
function to take place.
Quite obviously, according to Penrose, insofar as they are based on
purely algorithmic capabilities, the computers of today, and most likely
also those of tomorrow, are and will remain “unconscious”, hence
lacking in real understanding and intelligence. In particular, there is no
danger that “intelligent machines” will one day be able to take over the
world, and threaten or destroy the human race. On this issue, it is well
known that Stephen Hawking used to have an opposite view.

4 Free Will and Singularities

In connection with the theme of free will, and in the light of the above
ideas, we can attempt some further consideration. As it is well known,
professional general relativists are afraid of singularities, which can
appear in General Relativity. Roger Penrose won the 2020 Nobel prize
in Physics just because in his seminal paper of 1965 proved a theorem
which stated that, under very general conditions (in particular, without
requiring any spherical symmetry), singularities are a general and
inevitable prediction of General Relativity (both in the past direction,
i.e. the Big Bang cosmological singularity, and in the future direction, i.e.
the black holes singularities).
But why theoretical physicists don't like singularities?
The standard answer is that in a singularity the predictive ability of
the theory fails completely. From a singularity literally anything could
come out (or enter), in a completely unpredictable way, since physical
laws crash down, by definition, in a singularity. In fact, to protect the
observable universe from such a monster, Penrose proposed long ago
the cosmic censorship conjecture, according to which singularities are
always wrapped and hidden behind an event horizon. And therefore
they cannot influence the external universe.
However, according to the above considerations of Penrose, there is
also another phenomenon that presents points of “singularity”, where
the predictive capacity of the theory fails completely: it is the single
event in quantum mechanics! We have crashes of computability at
every collapse of the wave function, therefore “singularities” where the
predictive ability of quantum theory fails. If for example we consider
the emission of a single photon from an excited atom, well, it is not
possible to predict either the instant or the direction of such emission.
And analogously happens for the decay of a neutron: neither the instant
nor the direction of emission of the pair neutrino-electron are known,
for a single event. Quantum theory predicts only probability
distributions, which, although in perfect agreement with experiment,
by definition, apply to classes of events only, not to single events.
Therefore, “singularities”, namely points where predictability crashes,
appear to be present everywhere in Quantum Theory.

5 Constructing Consciousness
Two of the themes which Emanuele Severino picks out for criticism are
the “place” in which human intelligence or consciousness might be
located, and the possibility of “constructing” an intelligent (or
conscious) device.
Severino starts by pointing out the hypothetical-deductive character
of Science. All sciences, and in particular the mathematical sciences, are
based on postulates, that is, propositions that are taken for granted,
from which, according to certain (logical) rules, other propositions will
follow. But postulates and even deductive rules are not considered to be
incontrovertible truths, even by Science itself. In particular, they are
themselves “conventions”. Or, to use a word to which Severino
attributes a wide meaning, they are “faiths”. That is, expressions of the
“will to power”. According to Severino “the choice between two
different and competing theories is ultimately determined by the ability
of one rather than the other to transform the world”. Science itself
recognizes that it is no longer possible to build a knowledge that no
one, either gods or men, could deny. Therefore, in Severino’s view,
Science does not aim to find incontrovertible truth; it aims rather to
have power over the world.
This objective is opposed to what Severino maintains to be the
primeval, foundational goal of philosophy, the goal for which
philosophy was born 2500 years ago in Greece, namely to “unveil”
incontrovertible truths.

6 Mathematical Modeling
However, Severino's view that the ancient Greek mathematicians, and
others right up to Galileo, were trying to arrive at incontrovertible
epistemic truths (“to know theorems as God knows them”, in Galileo's
words), can surely be criticized. It is in fact rather clear, especially
according to recent historical reconstructions (see, e.g., Lucio Russo),
that the concept of “mathematical model” was already well developed
in the work of Euclid, Archimedes, and others. The free choice of
postulates, the possibility of “playing around” with them in order to
better model a given phenomenon, or a given set of (mathematical)
propositions, are all operations very clearly stated and effectively
performed by ancient mathematicians, right down to the modern
fathers of the scientific revolution, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, etc.
Actually, it can be safely affirmed that not one of them really believed in
the construction of absolute truths; instead they were concerned with
(mathematical) models performing better than the previous ones (e.g.,
finding a physics better than Aristotelian physics, or an astronomy
better than Ptolemaic astronomy, etc.) (See also Determinism and Free
Will, Introduction, on this point).

7 Manifestation of the World

Severino then introduces the concept of “manifestation of the world”,
the dimension where everything happens, the dimension where
everything manifests itself, the dimension from which the news of
every single fact or thing is drawn: “There is no step that science can
take that does not spring from the manifestation of the world.“
According to Severino, the “manifestation of the world” is not a thing
among other things, because it contains all the past, present, and future
things of the world, everything that appears.
Severino appeals also to the idea of “manifestation of the world” in
his second intervention, where he strongly opposes Penrose's view of
“a place (in the brain) where to look for consciousness”. According to
Severino, looking for a place “where consciousness resides” means, in
fact, considering consciousness once again merely as a specific part of
that “appearing of the world”, of that “manifestation of the world”,
which should actually be considered as the primary form of
consciousness.
Nevertheless, this idea of a “consciousness of the world” would
appear to share traits with the “atoms” of protoconsciousness (common
to different entities) introduced by Penrose himself, and similarities
can also be found in concepts considered by the other authors in this
book, Vitiello, D'Ariano, and Faggin, although with different emphases
and viewed from different angles.

8 Production
The core of Severino’s criticism of the idea of “artificial” intelligence, or
“artificial” consciousness, focusses on the idea of “production” itself. As
is customary in Severino’s philosophical position, the error, the major
nihilistic mistake of Western philosophy (civilization), hides within the
verb “produce”, in the idea of “construction”, i.e., of the “production” of
something. Far from being innocent, as it may appear, the concept of
production, “poiesis” in Greek, hides the obvious, common-sense belief
that things can be made to come out from nothing, and (if desired) to go
back, to return to nothing. According to Severino, the observation that
things can be created and destroyed, the belief that things oscillate
between being and not being, with the associated transition from not
being to being, and therefore the becoming of things, which we all
consider to be the supreme obviousness, is not an observable subject, it
is not the substance of an observation, but is a theory, namely only one
possible interpretation of reality, among many. Behind this stubborn
belief, the ghost of nihilism hides itself: the belief that things are
actually nothing.
Clearly, from this point of view, the idea of producing an artificial
intelligence is just another manifestation of the deep nihilistic vision
pervading Western civilization.

9 Artificial Intelligence
But Severino goes further. He observes that the Platonic definition of
“production” as “the cause that makes a thing to go from not being to
being” permeates the whole of Western thought, in philosophy,
economics, law, and the mathematical sciences, and is always
considered as obvious. Moreover, Western thought views Man as the
only being able to organize means for the production of purposes. But,
as Severino notes, this is also the definition of the machine! Except that,
for the moment, machines have no purposes in their sights: “Man is that
machine which organizes means in view of the production of purposes,
having in mind precisely the presence of purposes, the ideal presence”.
In this way Severino reaches his provocative conclusion that the
“natural” Man is thought of as a machine, and indeed that the world
itself is thought of as a mechanism in which means are organized in
view of the production of goals. And therefore, given the way in which
Man has been understood in the West, then Man, or rather the natural
intelligence of Man, “is” already an “artificial” intelligence.
In opposition to that, Severino reaffirms that “the manifestation of
the world as a whole—this primary and fundamental form of
consciousness—cannot be an object of production, at least for this
reason: because the producer, if he had to produce the totality of the
manifestation of the world, would have to be outside the manifestation
of the world, and therefore it would be something unknown.“

10 Debate
The second part of the dialog contains the interaction, or debate,
between Penrose and Severino, and between the public and the
speakers. Many questions involved the issue of microtubules. Regarding
their capacity to survive death, and hence preserve some memories of
the past life, Penrose is definitely skeptical: “I think that microtubules
will not survive death any more than neurons”. A second set of
questions concerned tests of consciousness, and in particular ways to
investigate how general anesthetics act on consciousness. The general
opinion is that microtubules are very much involved in the actions of
general anesthetics. Penrose also introduces the role of the cerebellum
here, which controls all the “automatic” actions of a human being, and
whose action seem to be entirely unconscious, as opposed to the role of
the cerebrum, where conscious actions seem to play an explicit role. As
confirmation of his ideas, Penrose points out that microtubules are
abundant in pyramidal cells, which are in turn abundant in the
cerebrum, while on the contrary they are not found in the cerebellum.
What is interesting here is that consciousness seems to appear in
pyramidal cells. Other tests of conscious understanding are carried out
with specific chess problems, designed for humans and for computers.
Here one sees the distinction between “understanding”, e.g., what a
barrier of pawns does, and the purely “mechanical” calculation which a
computer performs. These tests clearly illustrate the difference
between conscious thinking (or conscious understanding), and mere
computation.

11 Consciousness in Animals
On the contrary, according to Penrose, the notion of creativity is
misleading and ambiguous: creativity is not a good test for
consciousness. Understanding is something where you can see the
difference between conscious or unconscious action. Instead, it is very
hard to see the difference between creativity and just random
production of something (which is considered different from what has
been “created” before). So, creativity, as opposed to understanding, is
extremely hard to test, and it is difficult to be objective about that.
Finally, Penrose supports the idea that the phenomenon of
consciousness is present also in animals. This is consistent with his
vision of microtubules as the arena in which protoconscious events, and
finally consciousness itself, draw their origin. Microtubules are very
present in many “superior” animals, and so therefore should be
consciousness, in particular in dogs, cows, elephants, monkeys, gorillas,
dolphins, mice, etc. From this point of view, ethical conclusions could be
drawn, such as the respect we owe, not just to other humans, but also to
(many) other creatures.

12 Consciousness and Language

The idea proposed by Penrose and Hameroff (consciousness emerges
out of a cumulative process of elementary “protoconsciousness” acts,
until we finally arrive at the wonders of human mind), calls for a
disturbing observation about the “strong” AI program. As is well
known, and as has happened historically, such a program starts from
(formal) languages and aims to rebuild “intelligence” through software
(i.e., computer programs based on languages), following a kind of top-
down process. And this is done with the fairly overt conviction that
perhaps from the construction of intelligence we can then pass, by
continuing on the same path, to the construction of consciousness.
However, according to the ideas put forward by Penrose, Nature
seems to arrive first at the construction of simple forms of
consciousness, which actually appears to be a fairly common
phenomenon at least in the “higher” animals. Only after that, Nature
builds languages (even complicated ones); and languages, at least the
advanced ones, seem to be relevant only for a single species, humans.
From this point of view, the Strong AI program looks truly
“artificial”, in the sense that it is moving along a path opposite to the
one followed by natural evolution. Humans are trying to build
consciousness starting from language, whereas Nature has built
languages starting from (proto)consciousness!
On the other hand, as D. Hofstadter once said, perhaps Artificial
Intelligence should be compared to a modern jet airplane: high-
performance when it comes to specific tasks, but generally unable to do
things that a sparrow, which in the metaphor represents human
intelligence, can easily do. A jet can fly from London to Milano in a hour,
an impossible task for a sparrow or a pigeon. But try to land a jet on a
gutter…

13 A Place for Consciousness?

Severino’s counter reply to Penrose well illustrates the distance and the
differences between their approaches. Severino openly criticizes
Penrose for ignoring his words about the “manifestation of the world as
a primary form of consciousness”, although this concept is present,
according to Severino, in many important exponents of contemporary
culture, such as Descartes, Kant, Brouwer. When Penrose repeatedly
looks for the “place where consciousness resides”, he simply shows, in
Severino’s view, that he still imagines consciousness as a thing among
things, namely only as a part within that “manifestation of the world”
which is actually the primary form of consciousness.
A final topic where the disagreement is particularly clear is the
practical nature of science, which according to Severino means this: the
conceptual articulations of scientific knowledge allow a power over the
world superior to other conceptual articulations, such as the
conceptual articulation of the alliance with the sacred, i.e., prayer. So,
the conceptual articulation of modern scientific knowledge is
formidable! It is what today allows the greatest power over the world.
But power is one thing, truth is another. Severino comes back to his
initial argument about the technological power of scientific theories.
His conviction is that a scientific theory ultimately is evaluated on the
basis of its technical capacity to transform the world, not its ability to
truly represent it, or effectively explain it. The theme of
intersubjectivity in science is recalled here by Severino. According to
Popper, for there to be power, intersubjective recognition of the power
in question is needed, and this means that others have to clearly
perceive the transformation of the world.

14 Science and Technology

On this last point Penrose replies forcefully (and in my opinion
correctly), by reaffirming the traditional separation between science
and technology. Deep ethical issues enter the discussion at this point. In
Penrose’s words: “My way of looking at science is to try find out what is
true about the world. So, there is no moral issue involved. I mean, the
moral issue is a separate question.” Science tries to understand the way
the world operates, how it works. Then, there is technology, which
works on how to use scientific knowledge. Technology has a close
relationship with science, but it is not science. Technology has a huge
and continued impact on what people do in their everyday lives. And
this of course raises the moral issues. So, according to Penrose, the use
of technology, and in particular the good or bad use of science, is deeply
entangled with morality. Penrose is clear about that: “When I'm doing
science, I'm trying to develop an understanding of the ways world
operates, and I am not looking for power”. Science is not trying to
control the world. That is the aim of technology. Technology and
morality are areas clearly separated from science, although they
depend on science; when science changes, these two other areas have
to pay respect to science, and see what it tells them.
Finally, Penrose points out once again that his and Hameroff's ideas
would tend to consider consciousness as a phenomenon that is not
restricted to human beings, but appears also in other animals. This
implies that a moral issue is involved in how we deal with animals, and
this is a further example of the way science influences our moral beliefs.

15 Chatbots
The essay by Ines Testoni, a former disciple of Severino, presents a
number of interesting points, of which I can only discuss a few here.
The essay opens by presenting an experiment, actually performed in
2017 at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) group. Two
computer programs (software) were trained in English conversations,
and then allowed to chat autonomously with each other using the
English language, also in a non-human way. The two chatbots seemed to
progressively invent a language inaccessible to humans. The dialogue
established between them could even be interpreted as the constitution
of an autonomous consciousness in computers. Perhaps—Testoni
provokes—artificial intelligence systems are anticipating, or even
realizing, the formation of a “quantum Turing machine”, which humans
do not yet know how to construct.
This interpretation would agree perfectly with the visions of
Putnam [17] and Chalmers [18], who hold that the material
constitution of the mind is completely irrelevant to the production of
thought and consciousness.
 In other words, mental properties are organizationally invariant, in
the sense that the material support may change. If any mental state is
organizationally invariant, then when the brain dies, it would
theoretically be conceivable to replace the grey matter with an AI
system. This intriguing prospect has also been explored by D.
Hofstadter and D. Dennett, in their famous book “The Mind's I”, and, in a
different context, by W. Pfister in the beautiful and unsettling movie
“Transcendence”.

16 Quantum Turing Machines

As we know, Roger Penrose deeply disagrees with the “strong AI”
thesis: AI systems work only through formal language, while human
thought is characterized by a functioning that cannot be reduced to
computational processes. If the core of (human) consciousness is the
set of non-computable, non-algorithmic quantum collapse processes
taking place in microtubules, then this implies that (human)
consciousness is not representable by any conventional Turing
machine, and that the human mind has abilities that no AI system could
possess, because of the non-computable physics involved in the OrchOR
mechanism [19].
The only mechanism which, at least in principle, can escape this
state of affairs, and so have a chance to “exhibit” consciousness is a
Turing machine itself based on quantum physics, i.e., a quantum Turing
machine. From the above, Testoni puts forward an intriguing thesis:
quantum mechanics could be the common element between organic
and inorganic matter that causes mind and consciousness. If so, we
cannot say that consciousness is only human, just because of quantum
mechanics. On the contrary, consciousness may in principle appear in
both organic and inorganic matter precisely because quantum
mechanics is at the base of all known forms of matter.
In her conclusions Testoni points out that, according to Severino,
“consciousness is the phenomenological manifestation of everything,
which is eternal like any matter and is identical to itself, and so cannot
be reduced to matter. The relationships between consciousness and
matter (grey matter in the brain, or other) cannot be reduced to their
reciprocal identity.” If consciousness (the manifestation) is not
restricted to a brain cavity, then we must recognize that it transcends
the individual and human dimension and, thus, humans’ ability to
recognize its presence. Here there emerges a connection between
Severino's idea of a general consciousness as “manifestation of the
world”, and the Penrose-Hameroff concept of “elements of
protoconsciousness”, which should be present wherever a wave
function is collapsing.

17 Machine Making Mistakes

The essay by Giuseppe Vitiello illustrates the most significant aspects of
a Dissipative Quantum (Field Theoretic) model of the brain (and
consciousness). Already from the title, Vitiello recalls the fundamental
role played by (dissipative) chaos for the ability of the brain to respond
flexibly to the outside world. Freeman stressed this concept, and the
remark attributed to Aristotle, that “the brain is not a stupid star”,
vividly depicts the fact that the brain in its perennial trajectory never
passes through the same point in a fully predictable way. A brain
behaves like a ‘machine making mistakes’, that is, as an intrinsically
erratic device.
“Coherence” is a central concept in Vitiello’s approach to unveiling
the marvels of the (human) brain. Observationally, neural activity in the
neocortex displays the formation of extended configurations of
oscillatory motions. These configurations extend over regions with
linear dimensions up to twenty centimeters in the human brain and
have almost zero phase dispersion. The presence of some sort of
“cooperation” over such large regions implies that brain functions
cannot be explained using only the knowledge of individual elementary
components. Brain activity demands the introduction of the notion of
“coherence”: a widespread cooperation between a huge number of
neurons over vast brain areas. The natural mathematical tool to
describe coherence is Quantum Field Theory (QFT), since its formalism
has proved to be very useful in the study of biological systems in
general and of the brain in particular. The mathematical formalism
describing “coherence” gives a well-defined meaning to the notion of
the emergence of a macroscopic property out of a microscopic dynamic
process. The macroscopic system possesses physical properties that are
not found at the microscopic level.
Vitiello stresses that the use of QFT rather than quantum mechanics
(QM) to describe the brain is necessary because QFT allows the
description of the different phases in which the system may be found.
Technically, this happens because infinitely many unitarily inequivalent
representations of the canonical commutation rules (CCR) exist in QFT,
while, on the contrary, QM allows only unitarily (and therefore
physically) equivalent descriptions (for systems with a finite number of
degrees of freedom). Systems that may have different physical phases,
like the brain, must be described by QFT, which may account for the
multiplicity of their phases and the transitions among them, something
that QM is not equipped to do.

18 Dissipative Quantum Brain

Another fundamental observation by Vitiello is that the brain is an open
system, in full interaction with the environment. This structural
openness has led Vitiello and others to the formulation of a dissipative
quantum model of brain.
A key aspect of the model is the identification of the acquisition of a
“new” specific memory, with a specific fundamental state (among the
infinitely many, unitarily inequivalent states), also known as the
“vacuum”, to which the brain-environment system has access. This is
the “secret” of memory, according to the quantum dissipative model of
the brain. This set of memory states, i.e., set of vacua, can be described
as a “landscape of attractors”. Thoughts are in principle conceived as
having chaotic trajectories in this landscape of vacua. Each act of
recognition, of association with a specific memory, can be depicted as
the approach toward a nearby attractor, and the consequent capture by
it. According to Vitiello, this represents an act of intuitive knowledge,
the recognition of a collective coherent mode, “non-computational” in
nature and not translatable into the logical framework of a language.
The ultimate “non-computational” nature of the thought re-emerges
here once again, as in the views of Roger Penrose.
The trajectories in the landscape of attractors, from memory to
memory, are classical chaotic trajectories, although they “connect”
quantum states; they are not periodic (a trajectory never intersects
itself), and trajectories that have different initial conditions never
intersect; instead they diverge (exponentially). Here, Freeman’s initial
intuition finds a rigorous expression: chaotic trajectories originate the
ability of the brain to respond flexibly to the outside world and to
generate novel activity patterns, including those that are experienced
as fresh ideas. This wandering is a characteristic trait of brain activity,
of thinking. This is why the brain is not a stupid star. It behaves rather
as an “erratic device”, a “mistake-making machine”.
The non-computational activity of an erratic device should be,
according to Vitiello, the hallmark of an intelligent device: exactly what
Penrose argues to be the distinctive character of consciousness.
Of course, the idea of a conscious agent as an intrinsically erratic
device, a mistake-making machine, goes directly against the standard
program of (strong) AI; which actually tends to produce exactly the
opposite, i.e., obedient, predictable, loyal machines, possibly useful to
improve our limited abilities. Essentially, AI projects today are still
limited to designing “stupid stars”.

19 Inner Experience
The aim of the essay by Mauro D'Ariano and Federico Faggin is very
ambitious: the authors present the main lines of a quantum information
theory of the concept of “inner experience”. Essentially they propose a
coherent theory which solves what D. Chalmers calls “the hard problem
of consciousness”, namely the origin and the properties of that “inner
experience” which is experienced by each of us daily. The origin of
qualia (=feelings, sensations), and of self, thus finds a natural place in
the theoretical scheme discussed here.
Some of the starting points of this essay have also been partially
described in previous publications or talks by Faggin and D'Ariano.
For example, the authors consider, as Penrose does, that “true”
intelligence requires consciousness, something that our digital
machines do not have, and never will. These authors are also opposed,
like Penrose, to the standard AI view of human beings as a kind of
“wetware”. They contrast the strong AI belief that consciousness
emerges from brains alone, as a product of something similar to the
software of our computers, as well the physicalist view that
consciousness “emerges from functioning”, like some biological
property of life.
On the contrary, the authors hold that the essential property of
consciousness is the ability, the capacity, to feel. Of course, the ability to
feel implies the existence of a subject who feels, a self. Therefore
consciousness is inextricably entangled with a self which (or who) feels
“inner experiences”. Central to the discussion is therefore the
construction of a theory of “qualia”, and the solution of the “hard
problem of consciousness”, namely to explain the existence and
dynamics of qualia.
Furthermore, the authors assume the point of view put forward by
D.Chalmers, who argues that consciousness is a fundamental property,
ontologically independent of any known (or even possible) physical
property. All information-bearing systems may be conscious;
consciousness is an irreducible aspect or property of nature, not an
epiphenomenon. It is not emergent. To some degree, consciousness is
an aspect of reality ab initio. This vision leads the authors (like
Chalmers) to a qualified panpsychism. Here similarities clearly emerge
with the Penrose-Hameroff idea of “atoms” of protoconsciousness,
which should be present wherever there is a collapsing wave function
in the Universe (not to mention the Severinian “manifestation of the
world”).

20 Quantum Panpsychism
To solve the hard problem of consciousness, namely the issue of
explaining our experience, sensorial, bodily, mental, and emotional,
including any stream of thoughts, the central proposal of D'Ariano and
Faggin is panpsychism, with consciousness as a fundamental feature of
“information”, and physics supervening on information. The hypothesis
of the theory presented here is that a fundamental property of
“information” is its “being experienced” by the supporting “system”.
The information involved in consciousness should necessarily be
quantum for two reasons: its intrinsic privacy and its power of building
up thoughts by entangling qualia states. Authors call their view
“quantum-information-based panpsychism”.
 Following Chalmers, they hold that: “Consciousness is a
fundamental entity, not explained in terms of anything simpler”. But
they go further, realizing the generic assertions of Chalmers in an
explicit technical model. Precisely, they postulate: “Consciousness is the
information-system’s experience of its own information state and
processing.” Moreover, they postulate the quantumness of experience:
the information theory of consciousness is a quantum theory. And
again, they state the qualia principle: “Experience is made of structured
qualia”. Qualia (phenomenal qualitative properties) are the building
blocks of conscious experience.

21 Choice as a Quantum Variable

Particularly intriguing is the discussion of the concept of Free Will.
While consciousness is identified with quantum information, free will
produces public effects which are classical manifestations of quantum
information. Will is said to be free “if its unpredictability by an external
observer cannot be interpreted in terms of lack of knowledge”. The
authors argue that if “choice” is a random variable, then it cannot be a
classical one, since it could be always interpreted as a lack of
knowledge. Therefore the free will of choice should be a quantum
variable, whose randomness cannot ever be interpreted as a lack of
knowledge. Here the connection with the Free Will Theorem due to
Conway and Kochen is clear. Since choice is a quantum variable, its
randomness should be of pure quantum origin. The randomness, or the
freedom, in the choices of consciousness has the same quantum nature
as the randomness of a quantum particle. The electron (or whatever
other particle) is “free” to choose which slit to cross: in fact we cannot
predict its individual path, and this impossibility is not due to a lack of
knowledge. This is exactly what is stated in the Free Will Theorem: the
degree of free will of the electron is the same as the degree of free will
of the external observer! In general the evolution of consciousness is
quantum, so its kind of randomness is quantum and cannot be
interpreted as lack of knowledge (no hidden variables!); as such, it is
therefore free.
22 Free Will and Consciousness
The D'Ariano-Faggin model describes several further aspects of
conscious behavior, using also the rather specialized techniques of
quantum circuits. In particular, memory is considered to be essentially
classical, and the transfer of quantum experience to classical memory,
and conversely, of classical memory to quantum experience, are
detailed with rigorous technicalities. In their approach, free will and
consciousness are deeply connected, allowing a system to act on the
basis of its qualia experience by converting quantum to classical
information, and thus giving causal power to subjectivity. The authors
believe that physics describes an open-ended future, because the free
will choices of conscious agents have yet to be made. We, assert the
authors, as conscious beings, are the co-creators of our physical world.
Here we can glimpse an idealistic perspective, partially connected with
the “manifestation of the world” described by Severino.
Of course, the idea that our physical world is created through our
free-will choices depicts the world as a series of purely creative acts,
based on the appearance from nothing of the elementary (quantum)
event, and on its going back to nothing. The perspective of D'Ariano and
Faggin is, from this point of view, radically opposed to Severino’s. We
can thus conclude by saying that these authors fully embrace the vision
of Heraclitus, against that of Parmenides and Severino.

References:
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2.
Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3.
Penrose, R. (1997). The large, the small, and the human mind. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
4.
Penrose, R. (2004). The road to reality. London: Jonathan Cape, Penguin RH.
5.
Severino, E. (2016). The essence of nihilism. London: Verso Books.
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Severino, E. (1979). Legge e Caso. Milano: Adelphi Edizioni.
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Severino, E. (1981). La struttura originaria. Milano: Adelphi Edizioni.
8.
Russo, L. (2004). The forgotten revolution. Berlin: Springer.
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Conway, J., & Kochen, S. (2006). The free will theorem. Foundations of Physics, 36, 1441.
10.
Bell, J. S. (1987). Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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Scardigli, F. (2007). A quantum-like description of the planetary systems. Foundations of
Physics, 37, 1278.
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Scardigli, F., 't Hooft, G., Severino, E, & Coda, P. (2019). Determinism and free will.
Heidelberg, Springer Nature.
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Hofstadter, D. R., & Dennett, D. C. (1982). The mind’s I. New York: Bantam Books.
14.
Vitiello, G. (2001). My double unveiled: The dissipative quantum model of the brain.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
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Faggin, F. (2019). Silicio. Milano: Mondadori.
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D'Ariano, G. M., Chiribella, G., & Perinotti, P. (2017). Quantum theory from first principles.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Putnam, H. (1975). Philosophical Papers Volume 2: Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge
University Press.
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Chalmers, D. J. (2011). A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition. Journal of
Cognitive Science, 12(4), 325–359.
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Hameroff, S., & Penrose, R. (2014). Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’
theory. Physics of Life Reviews, 11(1), 1–40.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
F. Scardigli (ed.), Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85480-5_2

A Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence

Versus Natural Intelligence
Roger Penrose1 and Emanuele Severino2
(1) Mathematical Institute, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
(2) Brescia, Italy

1 Penrose: First Intervention

Well it’s a great pleasure and an honour for me to be here, and I’m using
this wonderful piece of modern technology here, which … I hope it
works… [the device is an old projector for transparencies].
So this is the title I’ve given to this talk:

Why New Physics is needed to understand the Conscious Mind.

Now, this talk is about artificial intelligence and real intelligence,
and it is also about why I don’t think we have now artificial intelligence,
so I will come to that.
But let me first say: well there are many things that I’m not going to
talk about, which are many features of consciousness such as feeling a
pain, appreciation of the colour red, or love, or intention and all the
things that are usually attributed to conscious beings.
I am only going to concentrate to one thing, which is the word
“understanding”. I relate three words, which I don’t know the meaning
of.
One of them is “intelligence”, one of them is “consciousness”, and the
other one is “understanding” (see Fig. 1). Coming from a mathematical
background I don’t need to understand the words if I can say something
about the connections between them.
Fig. 1 Intelligence, understanding, awareness
So I would say that in ordinary usage the word “intelligence”
requires “understanding”, and I would say that in the normal usage
“understanding” requires some “awareness”. So I would say that for an
entity to be “intelligent”, in the ordinary usage of the word, it would
have to be aware, it would have to be conscious. And I don’t think the
devices that we know about are conscious. But I am not directly
addressing the issue of consciousness. What I will be more directly
addressing is the issue of understanding. Because I believe
understanding is something that we can say something quite objective
about.
And I start with a chess position which I made up recently. We know
that there are computer controlled chess players which play chess
better than any human being. So you would say that, surely, these chess
programs understand chess.
Well, the most effective of these chess programs is called Fritz. And
this position (Fig. 2) was given to Fritz. A position that I made up
deliberately, because if you notice the black pieces, well there are many
more black pieces than whites. You may worry that this position is not a
legal position because there are three black Bishops, but it isn’t an
illegal position because two have come from pawn transformation.
Fig. 2 A chess position
There’s nothing illegal about the position. It’s a stupid position. It
would never occur in an actual game, which is one of the reasons why
Fritz has no idea how to play this position. Because to a human being,
who knows very much about chess, he would see that, for the black, the
knight is trapped, a bishop can move around a little bit, the king cannot
get out, and so these pieces are all trapped behind this barrier. The
pawns also cannot move. And then there is no way to lose, there is no
way black can win, it’s an obvious draw.
However, you give this position to Fritz, and it presumes it is a win
for black!
And that, I should say, is its downfall. Because it plays the game for a
while, it makes a completely stupid move and loses the game! Which is
what I expected. It loses the game because by some kind of count, that I
don’t know exactly what it is, it thinks, “thinks” maybe is the wrong
word, it decides that it is a win for black. Probably because just
counting pieces, maybe it sees that thirty moves ahead it doesn’t make
any difference, it’s still got more pieces, and therefore it concludes that
it is a win for black.
Fritz is of that opinion. Then it comes up to close to the “Thirty
move rule”, the rule says “if your pieces have not been taken or a pawn
has not moved then it is a draw”. And since Fritz considers that the
game is a win for black, a draw is a disaster!
Then, either it sacrifices its bishop, or it takes the bishops away
from the line here, and the king can take a pawn and then another pawn
can march up and you can make three queens, completely
overwhelming the position, and it is a win for white!
Eventually Fritz agrees it is a win for white, but you can see, it has
no understanding whatsoever of the game of chess, because any player
who knows not very much of the chess at all would see this is a draw,
and it is very stupid to give up a bishop, or release that pawn which can
become a queen…
Ok, that’s only a special case. I just use it as a demonstration to
show that, despite the training that these programs have, it doesn’t
seem that they understand the game, and I don’t think they do. Now, the
point about chess of course is that it is a finite game, so you might run
out of positions like this. I’m sure that, as I speak, there are people
trying to program Fritz, so that, if it might be given a position like that,
it would not make that stupid move. It is not so easy. But of course you
can! However, Fritz is not deciding how to change the program. It’s a
human being, who understands what is going on, who understands the
program that underlies how Fritz behaves. So the understanding is on
the part of the human being, not on Fritz’s.
But nevertheless chess is a finite game, so you might worry that, ok,
it could be completely analyzed, and then mistakes like that will not be
made anymore.
So we have to concentrate on the infinite. Some people think that
infinite is something you can’t understand, we cannot contemplate. But
nevertheless, this is not true. We can understand infinite. Any one of
you is good at that. If you get two even numbers, and add them
together, you get another even number. Well, that is a statement about
all numbers.
We can do that. But that is a statement about an infinite number of
things. There’s no problem about talking about infinite number of
things and understanding an infinite number of things. Sometimes it
can be very difficult. Sometimes it can be easy.
What I claim is that the machines don’t have this ability. And there
are theorems which more or less tell you that. Let me give you a famous
theorem. I’m going to give you the Goedel theorem.
No, wait a minute, first I want to tell you the way we learn about the
infinite when we go to school.
We learn mathematical induction. This is one way we can
understand the infinite. I’m talking about natural numbers, which are
all the non-negative integers. Now, suppose you have a proposition,
P(n), which depends on the natural numbers. Now if you prove that this
proposition is true for zero, or if you can see that it is true for zero, and
you can prove that if it’s true for n then it’s true for n + 1, then you
know it’s true for all numbers!
Just establishing two things, those two things, tells you that the
proposition is true for all numbers. So this is a way you can establish
things that are true for all numbers. But I am going to say something
about the limitation of that.
The first thing is a very general statement, which is due to Goedel.
But I shall give you it in the form due to Turing, which is a very nice
way of saying it.
Suppose you’re given a set of rules, I’m calling the set R, any set of
rules which could be checked. You see, you have a set of propositions,
each of which follows from the one before by the rules R. And I’m just
insisting that a computer could check whether the rules are correctly
carried out or not.
Now, let’s say these rules are meant to be ways of proving theorems
about numbers. It could be Fermat’s last theorem which was proved by
Andrew Wiles, or it could be the Goldbach conjecture which says that
every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers,
still not proved. That’s the kind of propositions I’m talking about.
Propositions about an infinite numbers of things.
 The rules have to be such that, if you follow them correctly, namely
you feed the rules a particular statement, and the rules chug away, and
if they can obtain “Yes that’s true”, ok then you have to believe that yes
it is true. They might say “no, it’s false”, ok, or they might not say
anything. They might just go on, and on, and on, and on forever.
Now let’s suppose that you believe that the rules never say a false
statement, like 2 plus 2 equals 3. Let’s assume that they never give you
something which is blatantly false, but they only give you things that
are true.
Then, what we are going to show is that you can construct a
particular statement about numbers, like the Goldbach conjecture, like
the Fermat theorem, a very specific statement, and you can see from the
way you constructed it that:
first of all, the statement is true;
and secondly, the statement is not obtainable by means of the rules.
Now, this is a very remarkable thing. When I first heard this I was
stunned. Because what it told you is not that these things are not
provable, because the very thing that you construct is something that
you know is true. But you know it’s true only because you trust the
rules. So this means that, if you believe that the rules only give you
truths, then your belief transcends the rules themselves.
A very remarkable thing!
It means that the understanding of why the rules work tells you
something that the rules cannot achieve. It tells you that the rules
cannot achieve something, but nevertheless that something is true. You
can see it is true by the way you constructed it, if you trust the rules.
When I first heard about this, I was amazed!
Because it seems to tell us that there is something special in our
understanding—you don’t have to invent it, you don’t have to be
Goedel, you don’t have to be Turing, you don’t have to have the
inspiration to see why this has to be true. All you have to do is to follow
the reasoning, and you can see by following the reasoning that the
statement that comes out of G(R) is true, if you trust the rules. The
understanding of why the rules work gives you something that the
rules don’t give you. Well, this fact clearly tells you that understanding
is something which is not achieved by rules.
 Now there is something more about that, which I come to in a
minute. But let me give you some examples of something that
computers cannot do.
There are many such examples. This is a nice one because it is very
easy to understand. Suppose you are given things like this (Fig. 3),
which are made out of squares, all same size, and they are glued
together along the edges, and you can make various shapes in the plane.
They are called polyominoes.
Fig. 3 Polyominoes
It may be that with some of these shapes you can cover the entire
Euclidean plane, just using that shape. Here is an example by which you
can cover the entire plane. And here there is another one which leaves
some gaps in-between the shapes, and so on.
 Now, there is a mathematical theorem, due to Robert Berger, that
states there is no computer algorithm which will tell you, “yes” or “no”,
whether a finite set of polyominoes will tile the plane. That’s very
remarkable. Let me give you an example.
Here is an example (Fig. 4), I made this one up myself but it shows
you the difficulties. These three shapes will tile the plane. But if you
look at that pattern, and you stare at it for a while, can you see the
pattern by which it’s constructed?
Fig. 4 Tiling the plane with polyominoes
A very well known mathematician told me “I cannot see how this is
constructed, how would you do it? Is there an algorithm?”.
Well, there is an algorithm to see how to do this. You have to look in
my collected works. There is one paper where you can find how to do
this. But you are not allowed to look at my papers, that’s cheating!
That’s not the kind of algorithm, or procedure, I mean!
Nevertheless, there is a way of covering the entire plane with these
shapes, but I don’t know any computer program able to do that!
I just gave you this as an example of something which is not
computable.
Yet it’s possible to understand it by using the right kind of
reasoning.
Maybe I don’t know whether it is true in all cases. However, it seems
to be possible that you could tell with an insight, at least in many cases,
whether these things can be done. But there is no general algorithm for
that.
Let me give you another example which is related to this.
This is an example which was put forward in 1945 by a
mathematician called Reuben Goodstein, and I want to try and tell you
what it is (Fig. 5).
Fig. 5 Hare and tortoise
You take any natural number, here I take as an example 1077. First
you write this number in binary. You are representing this number as a
sum of different parts of the binary notation. You write also the
exponents in binary.
Now I’m going to give you two operations.
One operation is A. What A says is: look at all the “twos” and replace
them with “threes”. Ok, well defined operation. The number gets much
much bigger, never mind. That’s operation A.
Then Operation B: subtract 1.
Ok, it comes down just a little bit.
Then again, Operation A: replace all the “threes” by “fours”.
Then Operation B: subtract 1.
This is an amazing example of hare and tortoise. The tortoise always
wins. That’s remarkable. What happens with these numbers?
The first is 1077, the next one is about 1040, the next one 10600…
and bigger and bigger and bigger… and finally you end up with zero!
Very extraordinary! Because the number becomes huger and huger, but
subtracting one (the tortoise) in the end always wins. Now this is
remarkable not just because it’s true, but because it was proved by J.
Paris and L. Kirkby (in 1982) that you cannot prove this theorem using
ordinary mathematical induction. This is an example of Goedel’s
theorem. To prove it you have to use the so-called transfinite induction.
I would suggest, if you want to try, try it with 3, or also try with 4.
I would not recommend that you put it on your laptop. I would not
recommend that you use your mainframe computer. I would not
recommend that you use any computer. I would suggest that you use a
pencil and paper and you can probably convince yourself that it will
eventually come down to zero. But if you put that on any computer
which exists today in the world, or is conceivable in the world, it will
never do it. The number gets so huge, it’s remarkable… even with four…
But we can understand that. It is not so obvious, but we can.
How do we know that?
How is it possible?
Some people say we have an algorithm in our head which is so
complicated that we cannot apply the Goedel theorem. And that’s why
it doesn’t work.
I don’t believe that.
One reason why I don’t believe that is because … how did our
understanding come about? Well, by natural selection! That I do
believe!
But natural selection is not very good at making mathematicians.
Understanding in a general way, yes indeed, it was very important.
But understanding mathematics? Not really! Here is a
mathematician (see Fig. 6, cartoon). Probably he has an algorithm in his
head, but he is going to be eaten by the saber-toothed tiger! … I’m
trying to say that being a mathematician is not really a selective
advantage!

Fig. 6 Mathematics and natural selection

So, how is it that we have an understanding? Why can we do things

that no conceivable computer can do? (We have seen that with the
Goodstein theorem.)
What is the general quality of understanding? Which is not an
algorithm! Understanding is not an element of a very complicated
algorithm. That is all I am trying to say.
So, what is the selective advantage of the general quality of being
able to understand? And, this is not a computational quality. That is the
message I’m trying to make.
 When I was a student in Cambridge I went to a course on
mathematical logic. There I learnt about Goedel and Turing, and I was
amazed. But then I thought: ok, if our heads are not governed by
algorithms, so that they could look like a computer, then what could it
be?
I was trying to do physics. I was trying to understand how the
physical world operates. And I was able to understand that you can put
on a computer these very complicated things, like Einstein’s equations
of general relativity, and simulate things like black holes merging, and
the emission of gravitational waves. People did very complicated
calculations to work out the exact shape of the gravitational waves’
signal which indicates that a pair of black holes is coming together.
Computations! With computations you can simulate the action of
Einstein’s theory to a tremendous precision.
Ok, so what can we do in our heads? Maybe it’s not relativity, maybe
it’s ordinary Newtonian physics. Well, with that you can do very, very
good computations.
And what about quantum mechanics? Well, that’s an interesting
question.
Because you can follow the Schroedinger equation; again that can
be quite difficult, but again it’s purely computational.
When I was a graduate student, I went to a course given by the great
physicist Paul Dirac, and in the very first lecture he had a piece of chalk
which he put in two places. He was talking about the superposition
principle in quantum mechanics, which says that a thing that can be in a
superposition of states can be in two places at once, with certain
complex numbers as weighting functions.
And then Dirac explained why a piece of chalk cannot be in two
places at once, and my mind unfortunately wandered, and I never heard
the explanation!:)
So I have worried about that ever since!
He said something vaguely about energy, but I don’t know what that
was.
So, from then on, I worried about how on Earth a piece of chalk
cannot be in a superposition. Because, according to the rules of
quantum mechanics, you can in principle put a piece of chalk in a
superposition.
 Schroedinger showed that according to quantum mechanics a cat
can be dead and alive at the same time. I should point out that he
worked out this example just to show that his own equation cannot be
the whole story. There must be something else. He was deliberately
showing the absurdity in his own equation. I think that’s very
remarkable!
Now I’m going to tell you about quantum mechanics. I’m using this
picture (Fig. 7) to illustrate quantum mechanics. The origin of this
picture is because I was invited to give a lecture by the Christian
Andersen Society in Copenhagen, and this happened because I wrote a
book titled The Emperor’s New Mind, which is a play on The Emperor’s
New Clothes by Andersen.
Fig. 7 Classical world and quantum world
This picture is part of the lecture I gave, and it illustrates quantum
mechanics. How can it illustrate quantum mechanics?
The picture is really made of two things. The top is the classical
world. You see separated things, the buildings, people around, they
have a location, here and there, etc. The bottom is the crazy looking
quantum world, which is all entangled up in complicated ways, and
that’s all under the sea. And what is the role of the mermaid?
Well, the mermaid is magic. She represents how to get from one
world to the other. She is the magic of the reduction of the state, or the
collapse of the wave function.
It is what you have to do in quantum mechanics. You follow
Schroedinger’s equation up to a point, and then you say: well, no, this is
getting too wild… dead cats and live cats. Ah, look into the box, and your
consciousness is getting involved with that, and you somehow make the
cat be dead or alive instead of being in a superposition.
I never believed that. There seems to be something out there, in the
physics of the world, which is making that choice, and that is the magic
of the collapse of the wave function, or the reduction of the quantum
state, which is what the mermaid is doing.
This is how classical physics comes out of the quantum world.
It is not coming out in the way we understand quantum mechanics
now.
So I gradually began to think that this thing that I didn’t understand
in the Dirac lecture is really profound. Something missing in the
physics.
And it is the only thing I could see that you could not put on a
computer!
So it seemed to me that this must be what we can take advantage of.
What consciousness is made of.
Let me now illustrate the argument by giving you an example, a
formula that I elaborated after a lot of thinking (a Hungarian physicist,
L. Diosi, came up with a similar formula earlier than me) (Fig. 8).
Fig. 8 Collapse of the wave function
Suppose you have a body and you try to put it into two positions at
once, and you want to know how long that will last. Now we say it will
become one or the other in a certain length of time which depends on
an energy.
 I don’t know what exactly Dirac was saying, but what you do is to
look at the energy in this configuration and the energy in that, and to
the mass distribution, and you subtract one from the other. Then you
work out the so-called gravitational self-energy of this system of two
configurations, namely Eg, and finally the lifetime of that superposition
of states is given by ħ/Eg.
So, there is a formula that will tell you when Dirac’s piece of chalk
would become over here, and when it would become over there. The
formula will not tell you where, but it will tell you when it becomes one
or the other configuration.
The idea is that this process is something which is not computable.
In fact it is something which is a bit like what free will might be.
Because according to the current physics, it is making its own decisions.
Somehow it decides to be here or there, somehow it decides… But I
don’t know what that means!
So, with my colleague Stuart Hameroff we have elaborated a theory
where we try to say that conscious decisions are processes like that. A
“collapse” on one state or on the other.
I had these ideas when I wrote The Emperor’s New Mind, but I had
no idea where in the brain there could be anything like that happening.
I start reading and thinking about nerve transmission, and this and
that, and so on, but it cannot be, it cannot be… And I thought
optimistically, “by the end of the book I will know the answer”.
That was stupid of me. By the end of the book I didn’t know the
answer.
But still I didn’t stop writing the book, and it was published, and I
hoped that some young people could be inspired by the book. But
mainly it was old people who had retired who wrote to me. Perhaps
they are the only people with enough time available to read the book.
Anyway, I did get a letter from Stuart Hameroff, whose job is to put
people to sleep in a reversible way. He is an anaesthesiologist.
But unlike many of his colleagues, he wants to know what he is
really doing. Of course, he wants to put people to sleep so that they are
not put in danger, and they can be woken up again without having
suffered from the consequences of the operation that has been
performed. The operation has been successful because the person was
not conscious. And Stuart was very much interested in what he was
actually doing.
He came up with the idea that what a general anaesthetic affects are
not the neurons directly, but these things called microtubules (Fig. 9).
And when I heard about that I thought that was much more likely.
Because these are long thin nanoscopic tubes which seemed to
preserve quantum coherence, and that is a sort of what we want.
Fig. 9 Microtubules
We developed a theory between us. We still don’t know what is
really going on, but the microtubules are key parts of this, and the claim
is that something quantum mechanical is going on inside these little
tubes. They influence the synapse strengths and that is what places
them at a deeper level than the neuron synapses. What makes the
neuron structure do what you want is controlled at a deeper level, and
the controlling of that has to do with this new physics in the
microtubules. We don’t know yet, but I claim it is something like the
process I’ve just been talking about.
So there’s lots of exciting things to find out here. Is this true? There
is some good evidence, I believe, recent evidence, that the way that
general anaesthetics work is just that they do act on the microtubules.
The microtubules seem to be a key thing in the way general
anaesthetics act. I think that is promising. But exactly what is going on
is something for the future, and I think it is really interesting. However,
this point of view suggests that there is something very different in the
conscious action.
Well, in the terminology we came up with, we say “protoconscious”.
So each time the world makes a decision, namely each time there is
a collapse of the wave function (mermaid!), then this is associated with
an element of protoconsciousness. This is not real consciousness yet,
because there is no purpose, there is no mechanism which makes it
have meaning. But the idea is that these are building blocks out of
which consciousness is constructed. When we will understand that,
maybe we will make a device which is conscious. But the computers of
today are not conscious, and as long as they remain computers, they
will remain unconscious.
This tells us that they will not take over the world. I don’t think that
is the danger. I think there are dangers, there are many dangers, I
haven’t talked about that, and I don’t have any time now to talk about
that. So let’s not. I leave it to others to talk about that.
Thank you very much.

2 Severino: First Intervention

I particularly congratulate the brilliant and profound communication of
Professor Penrose.
Certainly, it is not opportune that philosophy gets its hands inside
science. Science knows very well what it intends to do. But philosophy
can try to understand the meaning of the words used by scientific
knowledge, and Professor Penrose used words which are important in
philosophy, in particular, the words “consciousness”, “intelligence”, and
“understanding”. Moreover, he has said extremely interesting things
about the difference between what a computer can do and what a
conscious being can do.
But philosophical thought, which today lies almost in shadow with
respect to the grandeur of scientific knowledge, pushes human thought
as far as it can go. First of all, it begins by noting that science cannot
enunciate incontrovertible truths. But it is not just philosophy that says
this; it is science itself that recognizes itself as a body of hypothetical-
deductive, probabilistic knowledge, and even the mathematical
sciences recognize this.
So philosophy must certainly not mess around within science,
because as I will now mention (but it will not be more than a hint),
science, summed up, aims not at truth but at power over the world. And
the choice between two different and competing theories is ultimately
determined by the ability of one rather than the other to transform the
world. It is science itself that recognizes that it is no longer possible to
do what Galileo still believed he could do, that is, build knowledge that
no one, neither gods nor men, could deny.
Science aims to have power over the world. And even mathematics,
even if only a small fraction of the possibilities of mathematics is
actually used in the physical field, as far as I know, even mathematics
ultimately does not aim at absolute truth. Let’s take for example the
Principia Mathematica that Goedel used when he built his theorems,
within which is the theorem mentioned by Prof. Penrose. The Principia
Mathematica, on which Goedel reflects, also start from postulates.
Postulating means that I ask you to grant me something from which
then, according to certain rules, something else must follow.
However, I don’t believe that even these rules can boast of being
incontrovertible rules; that is, they are themselves conventions. So, it is
agreed that given a proposition a certain other proposition must follow,
precisely according to a rule. But that the rule is absolutely
incontrovertible, is not even this something incontrovertible.
A second observation about what Professor Penrose said (but which
I could also extend, as I did before with regard to science, to the whole
field of scientific knowledge) is that when science speaks of
consciousness, intelligence, or understanding, science refers to
particular objects, to particular things. The understanding of this, the
understanding of that, the accomplishment of this operation, the
accomplishment of this other operation … But when we say “particular
dimensions”, namely consciousness understood as a “particular thing”,
well, from where exactly do we get news of a “consciousness”? What
exactly do the neurological, physical, and psychological sciences draw
upon? From what source are they informed of the existence of
consciousness, conscious operation, or psychic fact? They draw it from
a dimension to which science generally does not pay attention, and if
we want to say what this dimension is, we must say that it is the
“manifestation of the world”.
There is no step that science can take that does not start out from
the manifestation of the world. But this is not a thing among things,
because the manifestation of the world also includes things past and
things to come.
When we speak of evolutionary theory, for example, the evolution of
consciousness is something that lies within that wider consciousness,
in which something emerges such as evolution of the mind, evolution of
man … So, when we speak of the production of consciousness, we must
take care to point out that we mean the production, or the producibility,
of a particular object, since the manifestation of the world as a whole
cannot be an object of production. At least for this reason: because the
producer, if he had to produce the totality of the manifestation of the
world, would be outside the manifestation of the world, and therefore
would be something unknown.
A third observation regarding the theme proposed by the
organizers, on the relationship between artificial intelligence and
natural intelligence.
We want to produce intelligence, but when we consider what
intelligence is, we also have to deal with what philosophical thought
has said about intelligence. It is true that, for physics, and generically
for all the sciences, the existence of a world independent of intelligence
is something that is generally accepted. But we must not forget that this
world, assumed to exist beyond intelligence, is again something that we
are understanding, and therefore it is not something that lies beyond
this ‘understanding’ which I have previously called “manifestation of
the world”.
And it must not be forgotten that, with respect to this conception of
a world that exists independently of consciousness, modern thought
has pointed out precisely that this world is not a world which exists
beyond consciousness, because this world is the known world, and
inasmuch as it is known, it is the content of consciousness, and
therefore cannot be beyond consciousness.
In order to understand this point, it is sufficient to be aware of what
Descartes said about this: Descartes defined “this world”, I quote from
memory, “ea omnia quatenus in nobis sunt et in nobis fiunt et in nobis
eorum conscientia est”, that is, “all those things as they are in us,
become in us, and we are aware of them”.
As time went by, the dualistic conception of intelligence and
consciousness was superseded. But we shall not discuss this as it would
take us too far away, and instead we focus our attention on a trait that is
decisive, not only in relation to the history of science, not only in
relation to the history of culture, but I would say in relation to the
history of humanity.
Even Professor Penrose seems to me to have used the expression
“building consciousness” or “producing consciousness” … and in any
case, what is at issue here is the possibility of the production of
consciousness. Now, here the term that is given for granted and never
questioned, but which is in fact decisive, is precisely the term
“production”.
We know well that all the sciences, not only the natural sciences but
also the historical sciences, use this term without bothering to see the
abyss that lies beneath this term. To produce. And then even here,
before I mentioned Descartes, but I remember Plato, and I recall the
definition that Plato gives of production, and of producing, because it is
the definition that remains definitively at the base of everything the
West has accomplished, thought, or realized in the scientific field, and
in the non-scientific field.
 If I now mention this Platonic definition of production, many of you
will probably say: well, we know all this! Of course, we know these
things because they have become what our civilization is now
convinced to be unquestionably obvious, so this has become common
sense, and if there is someone, like me, who invites us to reflect on this,
something we all know about, then we marvel, and we naturally say: we
shouldn’t waste our time with these obvious things! Rather, let’s go into
the details, for example, of scientific knowledge!
Well, what does Plato say about production? He calls it “poiesis”.
Here, too, I quote roughly, if you will allow me to say first the Greek text
and then translate it, but I shall quote the Greek text in small bits.
Production is “poiesis”. I refer to a passage of the Convivium which is
the passage 205-bc (Convivium or Symposium).
Plato says: production is any cause—he calls cause “aitia”—it is any
cause that makes something pass from non-being to being “hec tu me
ontos, eish do on”. Production is the cause that makes everything pass
from not being to being. Since then, there has not been anything in
Western thought, either in the scientific or in the non-scientific field,
where this observation, now considered a banality, has not served as
the foundation. It is the basis of everything we think and do. And it also
underpins the notion of production.
So even when we want to talk about the production of
consciousness, we cannot avoid considering the meaning of production,
“poiesis”. Production is the cause that leads from not being to being.
And in this passage of the Convivium, Plato goes on to say that all the
“ergasiai”, i.e., actions, which are performed in the techniques, or
“technai”, are productions. So, too, the “demiurgoi”, those who produce
in the different fields, are producers; he calls them “poietai”.
Here the concept of “technology” is introduced in connection with
the concept of “production”. Now, we are all convinced that there is no
point talking about such elementary concepts that we believe to be
absolutely evident, and we are all convinced of this, especially after
listening to such interesting details as those indicated by Professor
Penrose.
However, I would like to point out, and here we approach the core of
my discourse, that what we all believe, and what science (every kind of
science) also considers supremely obvious, namely the poiesis, the
passing from not being to being, this thing we all consider to be
supremely obvious, is not in fact observable.
And this at first will certainly disappoint a good number of those
listening today, if not most of them. Because they will surely protest in
relation to this claim: What do you mean? Going from not being to
being is something obvious. We are born, we die, we move objects. Now
you are telling us that this is not observable! And this has significant
implications, because then every type of production, and therefore also
the possible production of consciousness, is something that is not
observable.
Let me very quickly indicate the reason for this claim about the
passing from not being to being, or from being to not being. Let me give
an example: the city of Hiroshima was destroyed. When Hiroshima was
destroyed it no longer appeared as it appeared before being destroyed.
It was no longer observable. Hiroshima can be remembered, but it is no
longer observable as it was when it had not yet been destroyed. And
before being destroyed, it was observable. Therefore the destruction,
for those who believe that this destruction was a passage of the city
from being to non-being, must at the same time be a form of no longer
belonging to the manifestation of the world. The point is to think about
this idea: if you believe that something was nothing, then begins to be,
and then becomes nothing again, well, this statement is a theory, not an
observation.
To give an example, we could say that we see the Sun in the vault of
the sky, and then we no longer see it after sunset, just as we didn’t see it
before it rose at dawn. But does it make sense to believe that the vault
of the sky, namely, what is observable, shows us the Sun’s fate before it
rises and after it sets? No! The heavenly vault does not show the fate of
the Sun when it is not yet inside the vault and when it is no longer.
I would like to make one more observation. Professor Penrose’s
reference to Goedel was very interesting. There are truths, says Goedel,
which are not demonstrable but are true. And these are the truths that
the Goedelians (but I seem to remember Goedel himself saying this)
sometimes call intuitive truths.
But in this case, too, what does “truth” mean?
Now, it is clear that logic and mathematics use the words “truth”
and “non-truth”. But they use words whose meaning we should look at
very carefully. One truth is for example the manifestation of the world
which I mentioned earlier. And we are convinced that we are here at
Cariplo, in Milan, in Italy, with Prof. Penrose. But this conviction, which
is an intuition, the manifestation of the world, this intuition, why can it
not be denied? Well, whoever denies it (and personally I am convinced
that I am here in Milan, at Cariplo), whoever denies it is considered
crazy and gets put in a mental hospital (although, today, there are no
longer any mental hospitals, so we should say: he would have been put
in a mental hospital).
However, putting someone in an asylum does not mean that he is in
the non-truth. It means that someone has the capacity and the strength
to prevail over the way the person who is qualified as crazy expresses
himself.
In other words, what for Goedel is a non-demonstrable truth is
actually, to use a word that Professor Penrose uses if I am not mistaken,
is a “faith”. Except that here I use the word “faith” in a broader sense,
and, if you will allow it, in a more radical one. Because if we keep in
mind what we said before about the impossibility for science to express
incontrovertible truths, then we must say, in this broad sense, that
science is a powerful form of faith, even more capable of transforming
the world than religious faith.
Prayer, or the covenant with the sacred and the divine, was once the
most appropriate means of transforming the world.
Moreover, the way in which Goedel believes he can differentiate
intuitive truths from demonstrable truths is affected by this deficiency,
namely, the question of the meaning of this decisively important word,
the word “truth”.
One more observation if I have time.
The intelligence we want to build is the intelligence of another. We
don’t want to build our own intelligence. But, from the outset, the other
person is not observable at all. I don’t go into raptures for Sartre, but
one of the important things he said is that the other person, the one we
call our neighbor, is “the hell”. And why? Because the other person is
unfathomable! What do I see of the other person? I see his behavior.
Behavior that as such is not intelligence, but is a behavior that a
machine can reproduce.
 I would like to conclude by pointing out that what we are looking
for is intelligence, the producibility or non-producibility of artificial
intelligence. But given the way in which man has been understood in
the West, then man “is”, the natural intelligence “is”, the artificial
intelligence. Recall the Platonic definition: production is the cause that
makes things go from not being to being. It is the organization of means
for the production of purposes. This is the definition that the West gives
of man. But this is also the definition of the machine! Except that for the
moment machines have no purposes in sight. Man is that machine
which organizes means in view of the production of purposes, having in
mind precisely the presence of purposes, the ideal presence; Bacht
spoke of “ideell vorhanden” purposes, the purpose is “ideell
vorhanden”.
The technology is certainly destined to the control. But it is destined
to dominate if it takes into account the capacity of philosophy to get to
the bottom of these essential meanings. So we could already say that
natural man is a machine, and indeed, that the world is a machine. If
Plato, once again, defines being as “dynamis”, or power, hence like
“poiesis”, then the world is already a mechanism in which means are
organized in view of the production of goals.
Why does man treat poiesis as something evident? I will answer and
then close.
Because man wants to live. I said before that the Platonic definition
of poiesis, which we all consider to be obvious, is not observable. But
why do we hold on so tenaciously to the unobservable in all our
convictions? Because if we did not believe in our ability to produce and
destroy, to make things go from being to not being and vice versa, we
would not be alive. And we want to live.
Now I would just like to leave you with this possibility. Are we, men,
sure that we are only “will to live”? And that there is not something
radically more decisive in us than life, something more essential than
the life we want in order to dominate the world? To dominate the world
we must know how to transform it. Therefore we must have faith in its
transformability. But are we sure we are simply “life”? Or intelligent
life? Are we sure that behind what we believe ourselves to be there is
not something essentially more decisive?
3 Penrose: Second Intervention
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to reply to these very
interesting contributions and observations. I’ll just address a few points
that I think I understood. One was the issue of what microtubules have
to say about life after death: as far as I’m concerned, nothing!
I have never made any comments about life after death, and
certainly not in this context, although my colleague Stuart Hameroff
does sometimes make a comment about that. But I don’t particularly
agree with what he says about that. I don’t know. I have no comment to
make. I have no evidence to believe that we continue in any sense after
death. It seems to me unlikely that anything like the memories that we
have built up during life have any chance of surviving death.
This does not mean that in some form our awareness might not be
reborn at some later stage, in some form. I don’t have any view, it is
conceivable, that’s true, but I don’t see any evidence for that. And I don’t
see why microtubules should have a strong role in this, because they
will not survive death any more than neurons. So I shall leave this
aside…
Let’s look at some other points. There were issues about testing
consciousness.
I think there are many things one can say about testing. One of them
is indeed what my colleague Stuart Hameroff is concerned with, namely
general anaesthesia. And this is a very clear test because general
anaesthesia, general anaesthetics, are things which directly affect
consciousness, so if one can discover what they do in the brain, this is
very important in connection with what part of the brain, or what
aspects of the brain, are involved in consciousness.
So there have been studies, particularly some made by Stuart
Hameroff and several of his colleagues in a recent paper in Nature,
where they do investigate the topic, and it seems that there are proteins
which are involved.
It is very interesting that, regarding general anaesthetics, well, there
is a whole range of them, including nerve gas, including also some other
materials, which don’t seem to have any chemical connection to each
other. So the question is: what are they doing?
 It’s not a chemical process. There is some physical process in
progress here which one might try to understand. But that’s not my
area of expertise.
They do make a study of what general anaesthetics can affect, and
microtubules become a strong candidate. It does seem to be that the
microtubules are very much involved in the actions of general
anesthetics. So I think this is an important kind of test that one can
make.
Another kind of test is something that I wish to worry about,
because most of the discussion one makes is about brains, we talk
about neurons, and so on, and people always talk to me about the thing
we have under here [Penrose touches his head], which is the cerebrum.
Now, the cerebrum has about 1011 neurons, but the cerebellum has
a comparable number of neurons and many, many more connections
between neurons, so you might say that the cerebellum has an objective
advantage for doing computations with neurons and so on, and it
should be able to do much more than the cerebrum is.
Nevertheless, the action of the cerebellum seems to be entirely
unconscious. It is what happens if you are a good performer of piano, or
a tennis player: when you learn these things you are very much
controlling things consciously, but then the cerebellum learns from the
cerebrum what to do, and it does it much better. Consider even anybody
who is walking along the street. Well, maybe you have to learn initially
how to move your muscles and so on, but then things become
controlled unconsciously, and with this unconscious control, when you
are doing things that don’t require understanding, the cerebellum does
it much more effectively.
So there is something very different about the action of the
cerebrum and the cerebellum. And what is it? I’ve been worried about it
for a long time. I did hear recently a Stuart Hameroff talk about recent
discoveries which seem to involve waves of activities going back and
forth across the brain, and consciousness only seems to appear at a
certain level, and that is the level where there are many of these cells
known as pyramidal cells.
Pyramidal cells have great numbers of microtubules, much more
than other cells, and they are not found in the cerebellum. So, that was
the first time I’ve heard of something where you can see a clear
difference between the cerebellum and the cerebrum, and in this the
pyramidal cells seem to play an important role. I think this is a very
significant area of research, one may be able to carry this further, and
understand much better.
There is another thing that intrigues me very much, which has to do
with the claim that is often made about conscious willing.
There are many experiments going back to Benjamin Libet a long
time ago, where it seems that there is evidence, before a conscious
decision is made, that some activity in the brain takes place, and it
somehow already knows what you’re going to decide.
Some people say, well, this is evidence that the decision-making
process of consciousness is not truly doing anything, it’s just what
people call an “epiphenomenon”, which comes along for the ride, but it
is not really actually doing anything.
Now, there were certain ideas which I had at that meeting, but it
seems to be quite possible that there is a certain backwards-referral (I
talked about this already before).
The kind of view that seems to come about from the scheme that
Stuart Hameroff and I developed does have a role.
Somehow it looks as though there was earlier action, but it’s not
really like that. Consciousness does have an effective action, but you get
misled by this other experiment. I don’t want to get into this now
because it would take us too far afield.
The other issue about tests… I gave this example about a chess
position. This actually was developed from an earlier set of chess
positions, which were designed by David Norwood and William
Hartston. I think it was a hundred chess positions, chess problems, and
they were given to a number of human beings and a number of
computers, i.e., programs. Half of the problems were designed to be
easy for computers, and hard for human beings. Those which involve a
lot of calculation and computation, but there was no obvious reason
why you didn’t understand the strategy. By pure computation (and
maybe a little course in computers), you can solve the problems.
But then the other half of problems were like the one that I gave.
There is a nice one, with a row of pawns that goes across, or an
incomplete row, and the white player is supposed to decide what move
to make, and the move is to complete this barrier of pawns, rather than
take the rook, which is the obvious thing, which the computer does. You
can clearly see the distinction: the actual understanding of what the
barrier of pawns does, as opposed to the pure calculation which the
computer does.
So these are tests that do show the difference between conscious
thinking or conscious understanding, and pure computation.
Now, about the issue of creativity. Many people studied the book by
Margaret Bowden, and I wrote a book about this, and I talked to her
quite a bit about this. The question is: can you make a computer which
does creative things?
I’ve never thought of this as a very good test, particularly artwork,
because you can never tell, you know, is it really creative? Is it doing
something wonderful which is conveying some new feeling or
something?
And you could put feeling in the computer work. You think it may
have some feeling or something … It is very difficult to know whether it
has been creative or not. So I deliberately don’t talk about creativity.
When I talk about Goedel’s theorem, for instance… clearly Goedel
himself was immensely creative in his creation of this theorem which
he produced. But I don’t stress that. I don’t stress the creativeness that
Goedel undoubtedly had in creating that result.
What I stress is the ability that somebody who is just a reasonably
good mathematician has in following the argument.
So, to follow the argument, for understanding the argument, you
don’t have to be creative, you don’t have to be somebody who pulls
things out of nowhere.
The understanding is something with which you can follow what
Goedel did, and you can understand what he did, and you can
understand why the result is something which is true if you trust the
axiom system, or the rules, to give you only truths.
So “understanding” is something where you can see the difference.
On the contrary, it is very hard to see the difference between creativity
and just random production of something which is different from what
has been done before.
Is that work really creative or not? You do have to have an army of
artists to decide whether they think it’s really creative… It is very
difficult that.
 So I’m sure there is something different in being creative, and I
think there is some ingenuity in creativity, which is different from what
computers do when they produce random things. I do believe that there
is a big difference, but it is extremely hard to test, and be objective
about that.
Now, another point that was brought up, was about Stephen
Hawking. He certainly made a point that I didn’t agree with, about the
dangers of Artificial Intelligence.
Stephen was taking the view that computers would do things that
would be cleverer than us, or I would say more intelligent than us,
when they would have more computational ability. I simply don’t agree
with him on that. I think there is something quite different going on,
and that’s what my point was meant to be.
I think that perhaps the point you were making about Stephen
Hawking was about his determined atheism. He was saying that there
was nothing beyond, and the world came from nothing and it goes to
nothing.
I don’t really hold that kind of view myself. I think there is
something out there. I wouldn’t call that any kind of religious view at
all. But I would say there is a meaning out there, in some sense.
I wouldn’t like to attribute that to any kind of religious view, but
nevertheless I think that the views I try to present contain something
which does give meaning to things, and that there is something out
there in consciousness which gives it meaning, and that there is
something in the world which has value.
I would also say, and this quite strongly, that consciousness is not a
feature which is restricted to humanity, and I strongly believe it’s true
with animals, it is certainly true with dogs, it’s true with elephants, with
monkeys, gorillas, dolphins…
Squirrels, I believe, might also have this quality. And mice. I know
mice can be extremely creative in a certain sense … because they
invaded our house, and I used to have these traps which won’t kill the
mice.
But the ability that the mice have to go in, and step over the trap,
clean the thing out, and escape with a piece of chocolate… I have a
tremendous respect for mice. I think they do this with consciousness, I
think they have this ability, and I think we have to respect this
consciousness, not just in human beings, but also in other creatures as
well. I hope this answers your comments.

4 Severino: Reply to Penrose

As I understood the meaning of this meeting, it was supposed to be an
exchange of opinions between scientists and philosophers. Now, I
would say (and I apologize if I seem to boast) that I made some
attempts to understand something about science. I do not see the
opposite attempt on the part of the scientists, by Prof. Penrose. The
consideration of some issues that I raised… For example, when I talked
about the “manifestation of the world”, I was not talking about a feature
unknown to the dominant culture. Descartes talks about it, Kant talks
about it, in a certain sense Brouwer talks about it.
And instead Prof. Penrose says “where does consciousness lie?”
Prof. Penrose, you have erased what I said, and you didn’t consider it.
Because to ask “where consciousness resides” means to consider once
again consciousness as a part of that manifestation, which philosophers
call transcendental, but that would perhaps be better called
“untranscendable”, that manifestation of the world that is the primary
form of consciousness. Why didn’t we discuss this?
Another theme that I would have liked to hear discussed (also
because scientists have always been interested in philosophy; I think of
Einstein, I think of Schroedinger, I think of Hilbert, I think of Weyl, in
short, it’s not that science and philosophy have always lived on two
different mountains separated by an abyss), well, it would have been
interesting to discuss for example that concept of creativity that you
have distinguished, Prof. Penrose, from the concept of result. Were you
making a distinction between the concept of creativity and the concept
of, might I say, production? (This is a question.)
Yes, so you distinguished the concept of creativity from the concept
of production. Then, my talk introduced the definition of the passage
from not being to being, a definition which, as I noted, meant that it
would not be observable. At this point I would have expected a
physicist or a mathematician to leap up from his seat!
Because saying that the concept of production, of passing from not
being to being, is not observable, means that it cannot be experimented,
and in some sense that it does not have a scientific character! It is a
theory. I mean, for example, we see colors around us today, but we do
not see the consciousness of the other people present. Here, too, was a
point I would have expected Prof. Penrose to touch upon.
Not only does the consciousness of others not belong to mice and all
the animals that you mentioned, but we do not even see it in what we
call “another person”. Or do you see the intelligence of those in front of
you? The consciousness of those in front of you? If by consciousness we
mean the appearance, or manifestation, of the world …
Another point that would have been interesting, and connected to
this, is the omnipresence of the passage from not being to being, which
we have said is not observable, not experimentable. This is present
everywhere. Even here we may go back once again to Goedel, who
produced (this was discovered after his death) a demonstration of the
existence of God following the style of the ontological argument, in the
Leibnizian version.
Goedel writes out a proof of the existence of God. What does it
mean? God for Goedel is the necessary being.
This means that, as far as the starting point of his proof is
concerned, the starting point is the set of unnecessary beings. Namely,
the set of beings that are and are not, that come out of not being and go
into being. So, also, and I would say even, Goedel participates in that
Platonic concept of “poiesis” whose domination I assert, a domination
that is all the greater the more is known on the side of the scientific
knowledge, but today, I would say unfortunately, also on the side of the
philosophical knowledge.
These were some of the considerations I wanted to mention. But
another one comes to mind. I know the importance Professor Penrose
attributes to the word “faith”.
Here also I said that science is a faith in an even wider sense. And,
heck, any scientist should bang his fist on the table and say either yes or
no! But if he says no, he should give a good reason. On this delicate
point regarding the practical aspects of science, well, if we do not
discuss this, what will we talk about when philosophers meet
physicists? … The practical aspect of science. Which means that the
conceptual articulation of scientific knowledge allows a power over the
world that is superior to other conceptual articulations, such as the
conceptual articulation of the alliance with the sacred, as I said before,
or prayer. Of course, the conceptual articulation of scientific knowledge
is impressive! It is what today allows the greatest power over the world.
But truth is one thing, power is another.
Regarding the concept of power, another theme comes to mind. We
talk about power over things, but let’s mention Karl Popper, who said: If
Robinson Crusoe had invented all modern science on a desert island,
that invention would have had no scientific value. Why? Because it
would not have been intersubjectively recognized. For there to be
power, it is not enough for an atomic bomb to burst. We need to realize
that it bursts. Because otherwise it is powerless. As Karl Popper says
(another author I wouldn’t go into raptures over, but let us remember
him at least for this): for there to be power, intersubjective recognition
is needed. But what does intersubjective recognition mean? It means
noting that others perceive the transformation of the world. But is this
an observation or an interpretation? Do we recognize the
consciousness of others? No! What do we know about the linguistic
behavior of others? We know this: that it is an event that we interpret
in a certain way. There is nothing objective about this. So the very
existence of power (and this should be something that blows up
physicists …) is something interpreted, and not something objective. It
is something wanted. I want those around me to acknowledge this
power. I could think of many other things to say, but I don’t want to
abuse the patience of those present.

5 Penrose: Reply to Severino

Thank you for those comments. I hope I can… I have to confess that I
don’t really understand some of the points you were making. Let me say
how I view the kinds of things that I’m interested and I talked about.
I’m concerned with… My way of looking at science is to try find out
what is true about the world. So, there is no moral issue involved. I
mean, this is a separate question.
We try to find out what the truth is about the world. How the world
operates. Does it work this way? Does it work that way? We learnt
something from going back to Newton, and we learnt that some of
those things are very deep and profound and true, and then we learnt
that others are not completely true, and then other things came that
refined our understandings, and we have now a much better
understanding about things, and we know how the world operates to a
great degree of precision. Not necessarily only precision, but this is a
deeper level than before. And I regard science as trying to find out what
is going on in the world, what controls the world.
It is a separate question how to use science. This is technology.
There is technology which takes advantage of science, and makes
things, and it certainly has an effect on what people do, and it is an
important thing, clearly. And you can see how science influences
people’s lives in important ways, not always good, sometimes bad, and
these are things which often come from scientific understanding. But
this is not what science is doing. Science is trying to understand the
way the world operates. And that is the way I regard science. Then
there is technology, which has to do with science, but it is not science.
Also, it has to do with morals. There is morality. You may make good
use of the science, or you may make bad use of the science. Or good use
of technology or bad use of technology. That’s a separate question. But I
think it is very important to know the truth about it, and then after that
it is much clearer to say what is beneficial or what is not beneficial.
I think, however, that this is very unclear at the moment. For
example, the development of computers, and how they operate, and
how it is they operate. And people believe they are very intelligent,
while I don’t think they are. Well, my father used to have a machine
Brunsviga, you turn your hand and it does calculations which are much
more involved than a human being can do. Ok, but you can see it is a
mechanical device and it does things that a human being can’t do very
easily, or can do much more slowly with a piece of paper and a pencil.
But that is not anything which involves intelligence. It doesn’t
involve intelligence. And I think that the computers we have today are
really still like that. They don’t involve intelligence, they don’t involve
understanding of the world. And it is important to know that. So the
points that I am trying to make are concerned with what is true about
the world, or at least that is what I’m striving for.
Now, whether it is beneficial to humanity? I don’t know! Because for
example you can use this technology for things which I’m very worried
about. You can develop machines, like drones, which can go and blow
somebody up a long way away, driven by somebody sitting in the
middle of Texas, sitting in front of a computer screen. Is this moral?
Well I don’t think it’s moral. But it raises some questions which
were not there before. So certainly technology introduces moral
questions. It doesn’t address the moral questions. So when I say I’m
doing science, I’m trying to develop an understanding of the way the
world operates, and I am not looking for power (I think you made some
point about it). I’m not trying to control the world. That’s not what
science is about. That is what technology is about. That is also about the
good and the bad, so you have morality coming in. These are separate
issues, they depend on the science, if science changes then these two
other areas, technology and morality, have to pay respect to science,
and see what it tells them. But in your comments I was not quite sure
whether you were critical of me not addressing some of these issues,
because I was thinking those issues are not part of my task.
I think the issue of morality is affected by how far we can find
consciousness in the animal kingdom. And I don’t know the answer to
that question. I certainly think that consciousness is not restricted to
human beings, and if we have an understanding of that, namely that
consciousness involves other animals, then our morality is very
important in relation to other animals. So I would say this has a big
effect on morality, but that wasn’t mainly what I was talking about.
I think we have to understand these things first, and then maybe we
can see how that affects these other questions. So that’s all I can say I’m
afraid… I hope it helps with what you were saying.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
F. Scardigli (ed.), Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85480-5_3

The Death of the Emperor’s Mind from

an Eternalist Perspective
Ines Testoni1
(1) Section Applied Psychology, FISPPA, University of Padua, Padova,
Italy

Ines Testoni
Email: [email protected]

Abstract
Contemporary Western culture is characterised by the removal of death
from real-life contexts, largely due to the secularisation of society
caused by the success of technoscience. This chapter begins by asking
what it means that two chatbots could communicate by inventing a
language inaccessible to humans. It proceeds to evaluate the problems
of consciousness and solipsism, then to consider the relationship
between the sunset of metaphysics, the concept of the immortal soul,
and the triumph of technoscience, which asserts that consciousness
and mind are mortal grey matter. Given this background, Roger
Penrose’s claim that consciousness is produced at the quantum level in
neuronal microtubules serves as the starting point for a new, authentic
sense of immortality based on Emanuele Severino’s definition of
eternity. Finally, taking up Severino’s idea of transcendental
consciousness, which pertains to the whole of being (or all that is), I
hypothesise that the dialogue between the two chatbots indicates the
constitution of a quantum consciousness in computers, though they are
still programmed by humans to process information in a computational
way. In other words, artificial intelligence systems are autonomously
anticipating—or even realising—the formation of the quantum Turing
machine, which humans do not yet know how to construct.

Keywords Meaning of death – Soul – Consciousness – Mind–brain

problem – Solipsism

1 Introduction
In 2017, some important newspapers (e.g., [13]) reported as
sensationalist news the fact that two chatbots, trained by the Facebook
Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) group on a corpus of English text
conversations involving balls, hats, and books, began to autonomously
chat with each other using the English language in a non-human way.
Because the researchers were unable to either understand or stop the
strange dialogue between the two chatbots, they decided to ‘kill’ the
dialogists by turning them off. Despite the fact that, in the field of
artificial intelligence (AI), scholars affirm that it is possible to induce
the evolution of language in multi-agent systems that, when sufficiently
skilful, can cooperate on a task and then exchange a set of symbols that
serve as tokens in a generated language [30], the problem seems to
imply some difficult questions. Indeed, even though it is assumed that
AI systems (AIS) can generate a new language from an initial series of
terms and rules, the difficulty lies in considering what the autonomy of
speaking means when there are no bilingual translators to explain the
contents of this new language. The issue is that human intelligence can
only infer and thus translate the innovative contents generated by AIS
when the problem is solved in the desired way. In a computational
information process, since the beginning and the end of the process can
be understood, the intermediate heuristic becomes cognitively and
linguistically translatable. However, if the path deviates, assuming a
different focus that is not directed toward an understandable solution
—as in the case of the two killed chatbots—it becomes difficult for
human intelligence to infer the contents of what these AIS are thinking
and then more or less intentionally communicating. The computational
task undertaken by the two chatbots may have induced a stochastic
process, rendering the machines uncontrollable.
 In cybernetics, communication processes require the construction
of a bilingual language useful for both humans and AI. However, this
confutes the natural, neuroscientific view of language, as expressed, for
example, by the neurologist Terence Hines [21], who affirms that only
humans communicate through language. Indeed, after describing the
specialisation of the human brain for language processing and showing
how this specialisation manifests at the functional, anatomical, and
cellular levels (all in an effort to confirm that consciousness is grey
matter), Hines affirms that ‘Language is unique to human beings. Other
species have their own, often complex and beautiful, communication
systems, but only humans have language’ (p. 185). In the field of AI, of
course, this assertion seems absurd, because linguistic communication
is the basis of all cybernetics studies and practices, and it is therefore
difficult to assert that computers do not communicate with humans.
Instead, the real problem may concern empathy, or the possibility that
the language utilised for communication permits inferences about the
speaker’s consciousness/mind. Natural languages are mediums that
enable inferential access to the consciousnesses/minds of other
humans, but what about the languages that mediate the relationship
between humans and AI?
Actually, this problem first arose in response to the Turing test.
Turing’s theorem stated that human intellect, though sometimes more
powerful than computers, is not essentially superior [66]. This implies
that a human may mistake a perfectly programmed AIS as a human in a
blinded dialogue, and this is what the Turing test measures. The strong
AI perspective, which largely accords with cognitive psychology—or so-
called ‘human information processing’ [35]—insists that there are
structural and functional correspondences between human minds and
computers. If so, one might hypothesise that a piece of software can
learn much as a child does, eventually becoming able to solve any kind
of problem using proper language without human cues expressed
through natural languages [50]. The next logical question is whether
the developmental process of the AIS can result in an intentional
cognitive apparatus, for example, one focused on objectives that can be
managed autonomously and without human control. Indeed, if AIS can
perform better than human intelligence and becomes autonomous, its
aims could be dangerous for human life. So, what kind of consciousness
can we infer from AIS that become independent from us and our
experience? The solution is hidden in the old issue of consciousness, as
expressed in the mind—“matter”–identity question, regardless of
whether matter is conceived as grey (brain) or not.
Roger Penrose [36] does not agree with the strong AI thesis. In his
opinion, AIS works only through formal language, while human thought
is characterised by a functioning that cannot be reduced to
computational processes—such as the aha-Erlebnis (aha-experience or
eureka effect) (e.g., [24]). By this logic, it is even more difficult to infer
whether there is any level of consciousness similar to that of humans in
autonomously communicating AIS. Because, as Penrose says, the
significance of any formal discourse is the content of reality, the
problem is to understand what the content of their discourse is. If, as
Penrose affirms, their discourse is only formal, then it is less important
than human thought, which contains references to concrete reality.
However, if their discourse is more than formal and humans are merely
ignorant of its reality-referencing contents, then how can humans
recognise this content when they do not understand the dialogue? In
this case, the ‘reality’ to which humans do not have access is the mental
or material states of the AIS, which are concretely real but operating in
a state that is not totally understood, so that it is impossible to infer
what happens in their communication. The chatbots appeared to be
reacting to each other as if they were intentionally referring to
something of which they both were aware.
This problem is significant because it pertains to the relationship
between thought and reality. Seemingly infinite arguments spring from
this field, inevitably obtaining widespread attention, and this will only
become more true as AI improves, spawning new representations of an
immaterial mind with relative autonomy from matter. Indeed, this line
of thought is so interesting because it evokes exquisitely metaphysical
conundrums even as it ostensibly pursues utilitarian ends, such as
producing new technology to improve people’s quality of life. In
particular, it evokes such concepts as soul, spirit, mind, and
consciousness and enquires about the relationships between these
concepts and matter (grey or otherwise); for example, is one reducible
to the other? The fundamental question is whether
mind/consciousness can somehow survive the disruption of its
material support, and then whether it is able to move into another
medium to survive.
The present article addresses these questions by drawing on the
eternalist perspective of Emanuele Severino and examining the
implications of Penrose’s quantum consciousness for the afterlife, or
the mortality of the Emperor’s mind. The reasoning will pass through
several phases: first it will present a recent history of the ‘soul’ concept;
then it will explain the mind-matter-identity problem (matter being
grey or otherwise) with respect to the question of AI consciousness;
next it will consider the possibility of consciousness surviving the
destruction of its material support; finally, it will consider the relevance
of these topics for death-related issues connected with the ontological
question of truth.

2 Traditional Representations of the Soul in

an Afterlife and Their Psychological Relevance
Contemporary Western thought is defined as secular and post-modern
because it is dominated by scientific and technological logic. This is the
result of the radical refutation of metaphysics and, by extension,
religion, which based itself—and, thus, its reliability—on metaphysics.
This means that the problem of death, which was previously dealt with
by historical religions, has entered something of a crisis. Where once
the metaphysical and religious concepts of soul and consciousness
entailed an essence that remains beyond death, even as the material
body dies [33], contemporary Western culture rejects the concept of an
imperishable essence that persists in an afterlife [67].
The best established arguments concerning the representation of
death are included in the binary concepts of ‘dualism versus monism’.
Dualist metaphysical theories are at the basis of traditional religions,
and they configure the soul (or consciousness) as the identity principle
of the individual, who is destined to persist in an afterlife (e.g., [32]).
This identity principle is endowed with self-awareness, memory, and
intentionality/agency, and some Western theories state that this part of
the human being persists beyond death into an endless domain of
rewards or punishments (heaven, hell, etc.), assuming a ‘strong’
dualistic perspective that is essentially Platonic and Cartesian (e.g., [3,
11]). A weak form of the dualistic perspective asserts the persistence of
only a part of this essence beyond death, wherein the portion that
remains becomes a de-subjectivised and impoverished identity
principle. According to different representations of the afterlife, the
identity principle may be limited in the following ways: a diminished
life (e.g., Greek Hades, Jewish scheol or land of the dead); invisible
earthly existence (pre-ontological and mythical cultures); separation of
body and soul followed by metempsychosis, the loss of self-awareness
or initial identity, and eventual merging with the whole (Hinduism,
Buddhism, Orphism and Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism) [53, 63].
Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Western
countries, religions lost credibility as technoscience replaced religious
practices with practices that respond to the materialistic needs of
individuals. Since then, many moral and political rules have changed for
the benefit of democracy and human well-being. When Western
metaphysical religions dominated the political scene, persecutions and
wars in the name of God were common, adding to the daily struggle
against poverty, disease, and fatigue. Despite this, Western religions
were able to maintain their cultural supremacy for centuries, orienting
social attitudes and behaviours even to the point of martyrdom.
According to positivism and materialist dialectics, the persuasive power
of religions was linked to the fact that they offered consolation with
respect to human suffering and provided a meaning for death (e.g., Karl
Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, Charles Darwin, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren
Aabye Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber,
Rudolf Carnap, etc.) [62]. The prospect of sacrificing one’s life for God in
order to gain eternal happiness after death helped people to endure the
pain of living in a violent society, along with the terrifying fear of death,
despite religion’s participation in the construction of this illiberal and
violent society.
In secular society, which is more liberal and pluralistic, faith in an
afterlife is defined as ‘wishful thinking’ [41]. Still, Terror Management
Theory (TMT) gives a persuasive account of why this faith is so
psychologically significant, demonstrating how humans’ unique
awareness of death gives rise to potentially debilitating existential
terror. This terror is managed by embracing cultural worldviews that
render the world meaningful and confer a sense of individual value,
thereby making the individual eligible for literal and/or symbolic
immortality [4, 58]. When mortality becomes particularly salient, two
levels of defence are activated: ‘proximal defences’ that keep explicit
awareness of mortality outside of focal awareness via denial,
distraction, or rational instrumental behaviour, and ‘distal defences’
that strengthen faith in one’s cultural worldview, which increases self-
esteem and improves relationships with significant others [16, 59].
More than 1,000 TMT studies demonstrate the pervasive influence of
‘death reminders’ on people’s attitudes, feelings, and behaviour,
fostering in-group bias and amplifying prejudice and discrimination
against out-groups (e.g., Pyszczynski et al. [46]).
This thesis is widely supported by evidence, and it was
philosophically anticipated by the enlightenment, positivism, neo-
positivism, and materialistic reductionism, which theoretically
discussed how any reference to God was an unreliable hypostatisation
of the human desire to exist beyond death. The radical refutation of any
metaphysical, absolute principle that could be credited with causing the
world also implied that physics does not rely on any transcendental
principle to explain the functioning of the universe and all its material
substances. That is why, nowadays, Western people seem to be
particularly vulnerable to the anguish of death, constantly striving to
feature a form of existence beyond death. One iteration of this is the
technological afterlife, wherein an autonomous, intelligent, and self-
aware identity principle transmigrates between material supports.

3 Solipsism and the Mind–Brain

Relational/identity Problem
To epistemologically solve the problem inherent to humans’ capacity to
recognise forms of autonomous mind/consciousness in AIS, we require
two further steps: first, we must manage the problem of solipsism in
order to meaningfully envision a form of human–computer
intersubjectivity, which requires, as a second step, a definition of the
relationship between mind/consciousness and physical matter. The
concept of solipsism is based on the premise that the only thing an
individual can assert with certainty is his/her own existence. This
introduces the possibility of doubting anything because everything the
individual perceives can be an illusion. Moreover, an individual cannot
see the consciousness of other people, and any empathic
representation is always biased by his/her personal needs and
viewpoints. Metaphysics solved this problem by postulating the
existence of God, conceived as the first and last causal principle
(Aristotle)—an entity composed of essences radically different from
matter and endowed with the power to substantiate matter (Plato)—
who guarantees the reliability of perceived reality (Descartes). Our
immaterial essences, which are supposedly of the same nature as God’s
and return to God after death, are universal, and they constitute the
haecceitas—or ‘thisness’—of a thing (Albertus Magnus). As such, the
consciousness of each human is recognisable on the basis of this
universal essence (soul/spirit), which is supposed to strive for the
highest good: the will of God (Thomas Aquinas). After the refutation of
any metaphysical dimension, contemporary materialistic (monistic)
theories assume that no ‘meta’ dimension is real—that is, nothing
exists beyond physical reality, neither God nor essences. Metaphysics’
universals cited the soul as the seat of consciousness, which was
thought to be universally identical for all those who were gifted with it
because it was able to participate in universal, divine ideas. With the
decline of this perspective and the subsequent replacement of the
concept of soul with that of mind, it was no longer possible to infer
others’ consciousness. Any pivotal, undoubtable keystone concept
capable of upholding the conceptual structure necessary to solve the
problem of solipsism was destroyed. Moreover, after the elimination of
any universal (transcendental) dimension, the problem of identity and
self-awareness in life and the afterlife became nonsensical, as the
definition of ‘wishful thinking’ implies:

Many people wish to survive bodily death. But wishing doesn’t

make it so. Wishful thinking is an understandable human
proclivity that nevertheless has no role to play in determining
how things are. Whenever we encounter a conjecture about the
afterlife that is completely unmotivated and unsupported by
empirical evidence, we will dismiss it as wishful thinking. No
 wishful thinking principle: conjectures motivated by wishful
thinking are ruled out [41], pp. 135–136).
After the confutation of metaphysics, which had intended to
deductively and indisputably resolve the relationship between
universal laws and the concrete, physical world, the problem of
solipsism seemed to become unmanageable. It became arduously
difficult—even impossible—to inductively affirm the existence and
contents of other minds or to determine where the mind as a substance
is located in the space/time dimension.
The main difficulty involved defining mind, including consciousness,
in relation to the physical matter that supports it—the brain, or
possibly a computer. In fact, the ‘no wishful thinking’ principle was
mainly promoted by materialist reductionism, which aimed to unify
knowledge and give it a sense of reality by universally adopting the
language of the natural sciences. From this viewpoint, it is possible to
configure intersubjectivity using physicalist language. Among those
who acknowledged the realistic potential of solipsism were Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap. In his Tractatus logico-philosophicus
(1922) [69], Wittgenstein transfers solipsism to the linguistic field;
from this passage derives the idea that the limits of ‘my world’ (the
world that ‘reveals itself to me’) are defined by the limits of ‘my
language’ (the language that I alone understand). In this perspective,
the concept of solipsism is ‘exact’: it manifests itself and yet remains
unspeakable, and must therefore be translated into the assertion, ‘I am
my world’. Carnap [6], in his work The Logical Structure of the World,
transformed the same version of the concept into ‘methodological
solipsism’, referring to the problem of knowledge and the fundamental
elements that allow us to realistically reconstruct the overall structure
of reality through the language of physics. These elements are what the
Tractatus identifies as correspondences between every linguistic term
and what is real, and they arise from the choice to regard them as
immediate facts of experience. The fundamental theoretical element
that unifies Wittgenstein and Carnap with respect to solipsism is the
concept of a subjectivity without subject, wherein solipsism coincides
with pure realism because, as Carnap points out, the ‘I’ is absolutely
nothing original. In this sense, the Cartesian cogito is no longer
recognised as the foundation for the resolution of hyperbolic doubt,
and it is limited to being an experience: the solipsistic experience of
thinking.
Certainly, the project of the Vienna Circle was to establish a univocal
physicalist language: all reality is matter, therefore intersubjective
knowledge is realistic and must be physical. This language, which
consists of what maximally ‘may be said’, is one in which every
assertion is able to pose itself immediately as intersubjective. That is,
intentionality crosses over the solipsistic experience of reflecting
thanks to shared physical reality, which becomes the intersubjective
object of thought. However, Jerry Fodor [14] contends that Carnap’s
concept of methodological solipsism contravenes the absolute
physicalist reductionism that would have made it impossible to explain
the functioning of the mind. The cognitive methodological solipsism
assumed by psychologists may be summarised as follows: psychology
studies the internal states of people or organisms only insofar as they
are describable; the syntax of mental states is independent of the
physiological processes of the brain; psychological laws refer only to
mental states. This position promotes computational psychology, which
does not recognise transparency, or the accessibility of mental states
(solipsism), but identifies the positive observational modalities
between behaviour, language, and the representation of mental states.
In this way, it is possible to infer the mental state of a subject without,
however, attributing to this inference the status of indubitability (i.e.,
with respect to the mind, we know only the knowable, which is
precisely the computable). In its computational characterisations,
positivistic psychology considers cognitive processes as both symbolic
(representational) and formal (syntactic), and as belonging to the area
of mind that is not totally reducible to grey matter (the brain).
This dualism, however, does not postulate any immortal essence
within the mind; it simply affirms that the mind and the brain are two
different entities. Different varieties of this dualism assert that there
are different relations between these entities, or none at all, depending
on the aspects taken into account by the different currents of study, and
depending on whether the variety of dualism refers to substances (the
mind is a non-physical entity separated from the body) or to properties
(there is no non-physical entity, but the physical world possesses some
properties that belong to a distinct class) [2]. For example,
interactionism considers the mind to be irreducible to the brain while
admitting causal links between the two (e.g., [10, 42]), functionalism
affirms that conscious mental processes are a form of biological
adaptation and belong to physical systems of elaboration that are not
exclusively human (e.g., [9, 14, 26, 45]), emergentism emphasises the
creative, systemic aspect of evolutionary changes in the adaptation
process (e.g., [34, 52], Sperry [60]); correlationism presupposes a
relationship between mind-brain opposites (e.g., Edelman, [12]; Young,
[70]), and so on.
To summarise, we can say that there is an important difference
between metaphysical substance dualism and non-metaphysical
property dualism: contrary to the former, the latter excludes any
immutable, immaterial essence and includes all the distinctions
between reductive physicalism and physicalist functionalism,
emergentism, interactionism, correlationism, and so on, assuming that
all substances are physical but that mental states are related to brain
states by many forms of properties. This assumption is based on
evidence that shows how mental functions take place within the brain.
For example, the clinical neurologist David Weisman ([68], p. 84), in
describing the cognitive and personality changes of a patient affected
by neurodegenerative pathologies, affirms:

Yet this folksy, religious, and ancient notion of a soul is mistaken.

The evidence that nature provides when natural processes
damage the brain does not square with the existence of such a
soul. Nature is cruel in countless ways, both human and
inhuman. But nature also performs a service if you’re willing to
take a good, hard look. Nature peels back the skin and shows us
exactly what’s underneath. What you perceive as your personal
unity and control—what you might call your soul—does seem to
be true. But the evidence shows that it isn’t.

Having eliminated the concept of the metaphysical, essential soul,

reductionism seemed to have solved the problem of solipsism,
explaining everything as a physical process with various iridescent
features. Actually, the problems of intentionality and of empathy—that
is, the human ability to understand others’ psychological conditions
without the use of any neuroimaging technologies (the so-called
‘cerebroscope’)—remained unresolved until the first decade of the
third millennium, when mirror neurons were discovered. This cerebral
system provides the physiological mechanism for perception–action
coupling, which permits individuals to understand the actions of others
and to learn new skills by imitation [49]. By this logic, brains are more
or less directly in contact through perceptive activities that support
mirroring. Indeed, mirror systems may simulate observed actions and
thus internalise inferred mental states. This function seems to
particularly assist with language development, as well as the
development of emotional competencies and empathy [23].
Furthermore, mirroring might help an individual to understand not
only what another person is doing, but also how his/her own self-
awareness is developing through constant comparison with others’
behaviour and thoughts, as expressed by language (e.g., [65]).
Though mirroring is not possible between human minds and AIS
because we do not share any kind of biological mirroring matter,
functionalism and emergentism define mental states in terms of
functions and occurrences, respectively, meaning that any system that
can produce the same pattern of roles will generate the same mental
states, including consciousness, regardless of the nature of its physical
support. Similarly, the ‘machine-state functionalism’ of Hilary Putnam
[44], which was inspired by Turing machines, affirms that the material
constitution of the mind is completely irrelevant with respect to the
production of thought and consciousness. This idea is also supported
by David J. Chalmers [7], who assumes the ‘computational sufficiency’
thesis, holding that ‘the right kind of computational structure suffices
for the possession of a mind, and the thesis of computational
explanation, which holds that computation provides a general
framework for the explanation of cognitive processes’ (p. 323). In this
perspective, mental properties are organisationally invariant, whereas
the material support may change.
In this knot, one also finds the hidden interest of those who are
convinced that it is possible to admit an immortal essence in the
dualism of properties. If any mental state is organisationally invariant,
then when the brain dies, it would be theoretically conceivable to
replace the grey matter with an AIS. This transhumanist perspective is
not so fantastical, and it is surely in line with the Cyborg Manifesto of
materialist posthumanism, which radically confutes any absolute
boundary between natural humans and non-natural humans [18].
Cybernetic humanism and posthumanism confute the idea that there
must be a necessary link between the specific nature of a material
support and its mental/conscious functions. Starting from the concept
of ‘hybridisation’, one can say that humans are no longer natural, since
they manipulate their lives with technologies. As the field of augmented
reality shows, it is possible to predict that technology will one day
enhance people’s brain functions, just as mechanical prostheses can
replace missing limbs, organs, or perceptive faculties. This idea is
clearly featured in the term ‘hybrid minds’ [8]. This is itself basically in
line with the theory of embodied cognition, which considers mind and
consciousness to be deeply dependent upon features of the physical
body which may be hybridised with technological devices. From this
point of view, the standard idea that the mind is identical to, or even
realised in, the brain is absolutely insufficient. Largely influenced by the
mirror neuron discovery, the embodied cognition theory states that
aspects of the agent’s body, located largely beyond the brain, play a
significant causal or physically constitutive role in all cognitive
processing. Mind is not something that happens in or to an individual
cranial box, but rather is a social phenomenon constructed by
perceptual/imitative action relationships between many bodies [22,
48] and devices, among them AIS. According to this conceptual
structure, neuroscience is not the only means to understand the
complex phenomenology of social cognition, which recognises the
presence of a social consciousness developed through cognitive
processes that arise from the interaction between bodies [51],
cybernetics is also able to contribute to this understanding through its
integration with all branches of the psychology of mind.

4 The Penrose Hypothesis of Consciousness

Between Human and Artificial Intelligence
Despite the success of physicalist reductionism, which argues that,
somehow, matter causes consciousness (mind, cognition, and so on),
the criteria for affirming the identity, similarity, or absolute
heterogeneity of two experiences remained to be defined. In fact, it is
not clear what ‘common matter’ between organic and inorganic
substrata causes any form of consciousness that can intentionally
utilise language to communicate. That is why the FAIR researchers, who
are certainly aware of all these issues, killed the two conversing
chatbots.
A possible solution appears in Penrose’s theory of quantum
consciousness. In the 1980s, Penrose suggested that there could be a
link between consciousness and quantum mechanics in his book The
Emperor’s New Mind. In Penrose’s perspective, regardless of the
particular role or mediating effect of consciousness, quantum
mechanics is likely to be involved in mind processes because there may
be molecular structures in the brain that alter their state in response to
a single quantum event. Thanks to Penrose’s collaboration with Stuart
Hameroff, this idea was further developed into the hypothesis of
Orchestrated Objective Reduction (OrchOR), which states that
consciousness happens in the brain and originates from a process that
takes place inside neurons—or, more particularly, in the microtubules
within neurons—rather than in the interaction between neurons (as
assumed by conventional neuroscience). In his book Shadows of the
Mind (1994), Penrose explained that microtubules support quantum
superpositions and that the objective collapse of the quantum
wavefunction within microtubules is critical for consciousness.
However, in his opinion, this quantum collapse is a physical behaviour
that transcends the limits of computability, resulting in a non-
algorithmic process. As such, the fundamental difference between
human consciousness and a putative AIS consciousness is that the first
one is not computational. This implies that human consciousness is not
as mouldable as any conventional Turing machine and that the human
mind has abilities that no AIS could possess because of the non-
computable physics of the OrchOR mechanism (see also [17, 38]).
Despite other projects that examine and confirm the correlation (if
not the causality) between quantum processes and consciousness (e.g.,
[28, 40]), this important insight is qualified by two further problems.
The first derives from the fact that human consciousness/mind and
brain functioning may also be explained in a modular way (see [15]).
The second pertains to the fact that human-like brain dynamics can
emerge in AIS circuits. Indeed, according to the perspective of AI’s third
wave, Turing machines can assume the quantum computing model—
that is, the use of quantum–mechanical phenomena such as
superposition and entanglement to perform computation [31]. This
results in a possible quantum Turing machine. Penrose’s limiting
judgment regarding Turing machines (that their computational
cognition differs from human cognition) applies only to AI’s first
(handcrafted knowledge to describe) and second (statistical learning to
categorise) waves. Indeed, the third wave intends to develop the
contextual adaptations necessary to explain facts and creatively solve
derived problems. For example, in the DARPA perspective of John
Launchbury [25], the next steps for AI include the ability to abstract, to
generate new meaning, and to reason, plan, and decide, which neural
networks are already partially able to do (learning/teaching machines
and artificial super intelligence).
If consciousness (either artificial or human) is a function of and not
identical to the brain, then quantum mechanics could be the common
feature of organic and inorganic matter that causes mind and
consciousness. If so, we cannot say that human consciousness is only
human because of quantum mechanics, as consciousness may appear in
both organic and inorganic matter precisely because of quantum
mechanics. Quantum mechanics may serve as a medium between the
Cartesian res extensa (organic and inorganic material substrate) and res
cogitans (mind, consciousness, feeling, experience). Indeed, Penrose’s
microtubules are similar to Descartes’ pineal gland. Quantum
mechanics could also explain what Descartes was unable to, providing a
definitive material foundation for the dualistic concepts of function,
emergence, parallelism, and so on, as related to the concepts of
consciousness and mind. However, where the Cartesian solution
guaranteed the existence of an essential soul, quantum processes seem
to be unable to do the same. Let us say that it is possible, even for a
moment, to transfer a quantum consciousness function from a natural
material substrate to an artificial one. Regardless, Penrose argues that
everything is bound to end because of the cyclicity of the universe,
which implies the phasic dismantling of everything—the so-called
‘Conformal Cyclic Cosmology’ (CCC) [19, 37, 39].
 All this means that, even if it is theoretically possible to solve the
problem of matter’s relationship with consciousness, this kind of
consciousness is inescapably mortal from a reductionist point of view.
This means that nothing survives annihilation. With respect to the
death issue, the contrast between metaphysical (Platonic/Cartesian)
and reductionist substance dualism consists in the representation of
death as a passage (as conceived by the former) or as total annihilation
(as conceived by the latter). All scientific knowledge states, a priori,
that total annihilation is realistic. No matter and no consciousness or
soul survives this absolute annihilation, whether the inner universe or
the life of every single inhabitant of Earth. Every single being—humans,
animals, AIS—is destined for annihilation, just as the universe is. In this
conviction lies the most important epistemological problem: scientists
assume a priori that it is true that things ‘become’—that they emerge
from and return to nothing. As Thomas Nagel ([34], p. 7) stated: ‘It is
true that both the time before a man’s birth and the time after his death
are times when he does not exist’. This is the problem that Emanuele
Severino solves by proving that annihilation is impossible. Nothing
comes from or returns to ‘nihil’, neither quanta nor the most complex
forms of life and galaxies.

5 Severino’s Ontological Solution

Because the concept of ‘reality’—glossed as physicalist reductionism’s
alternative solution to hyperbolic doubt, in place of the transcendent,
Cartesian God—can be interpreted in various ways, particularly in
terms of its relation to thought and the thinking subject, Emanuele
Severino instead relies on the concept of ‘truth’, which provides the only
secure basis for intersubjectivity. Truth is, by necessity, an
incontrovertible discourse. In Severino’s opinion, philosophy has
robbed myth of credibility, starting with the pre-Socratics, and
Parmenides, in particular. The Eleatics claimed that truth is the
opposite of myth, and that the latter does not guarantee
incontrovertible knowledge. Furthermore, truth is the necessary
discourse inherent to ‘being’ (as ‘einai’ - ει̃ναι) versus ‘non-
being/nothing’ (as ‘me ón’ - μὴ ο̉́ ν). In the first iteration of this ontology,
truth indicates the knowledge ‘that it is and that it is not possible for it
not to be […] that it is not and that it must not be’ (On Nature, Frag. 2);
in other words: ‘It is necessary to say and to think that what is is; for it
is to be,/ but nothing it is not’ (On Nature, Frag. 6). Such a ‘being’
necessarily is, and ‘being’ cannot be ‘nihil’. Absolute Being does not
change, and the discourse of truth asserts that reality is, and must
necessarily be, unity, and thus totally identical to itself. In the ‘well-
rounded reality’, any change is impossible: there is no before or after;
‘becoming’ (transformation, change, alteration) is impossible and
illusory. Persuasive truth consists in any statement affirming the
necessity of Being and confuting the ‘opinions of mortals’ (myths),
whose arguments are not truly warranted. This is the beginning of
ontology and its relationship with truth, from which the concept of
reality arises as the science of being, of existence, and of all that there is
[61].
As Severino discusses throughout his oeuvre, the concept of truth
sprang from Parmenides’ ontology and founded all of Western thought
(e.g., [55–57]) on the basis of three logical axes: (1) the Principle of
Identity: A ≡ A (every being is identical with itself), or ‘(∀x) (x = x)’ (in
which ∀ means ‘for all’), or, simply, ‘x is x’; (2) the Principle of Non-
Contradiction: for all propositions p, it is impossible for both p and not
p to be true; and (3) the Principle of Excluded Middle/Third: there is no
third or middle ‘true’ proposition between them. According to Severino,
this fundamental tripartite system was originally developed by
metaphysics. However, Severino shows that, in Parmenides’
formulation, any transformation is illusive and opposite to the ‘path of
truth’. The conviction that Being constitutionally changes is the
mythical ‘way of mortals’, which is characterised by faith in the
phenomenon of becoming and by the contradictory opinions deriving
from experience. In his analysis of the history of Western thought,
Severino [58] affirms that the first attempt to remedy the negative
relationship between phenomena and worldly appearances was
realised by Plato, who, in the Sophist, introduced the notion of ‘relative
non-being/nothing’ and defined the ‘multiplicity of beings’ as the
‘énantíon’ (εναντίον), which is the oscillation of everything between
Being (τὸ ο̉́ ν) and non-being/nothing (μὴ ο̉́ ν). Change consists of this
oscillation of all concrete (material) things between being and nothing.
In order to retain the logic of Parmenides’ original thought, Aristotle
systematised the difference between metaphysical, or absolute and
immutable, Being (God) as the first and final cause, on the one hand,
and physical beings—contingent entities oscillating between being and
nothing and subjected to the laws of time and space—on the other.
Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics tried to provide the most secure
definition of truth: a relationship between absolute Being (God) and
contingent beings wherein the former determines/causes the destiny of
the latter and grants them eternity after death. Eternal and immutable
essences shape matter, transforming it into substances, and as such it is
possible to recognise the form of something by looking at it because the
soul accesses the knowledge of these universal essences.
In Severino’s thought, the fourth and most important principle that
founds true knowledge was partially formulated by Aristotle: the
elenchos (ἔλεγχος). In the dialogue of the pólemos (πόλεμος) between
the discourse of truth, which respects the tripartite logical system, and
its denier, the elenchic argumentation of truth demonstrates the auto-
contradiction of the denier’s discourse, which implicitly assumes truth
as the basis of its negation. Those who deny truth effectively deny any
basis for their own confutation. Thus, the elenchos is the fourth
fundamental basis of logical argumentation that metaphysics enshrined
as the ‘first philosophy’ [55]. This metaphysical logic structure was
assumed by the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, which attempted to
rationally demonstrate the necessity of God (first and last cause of all
material things, which oscillate between being and nothing) and of the
human afterlife in a true and non-mythological way.
In Severino’s view, this solution was not only the greatest attempt to
solve the existential question, but also, simultaneously, the most
important failure to unequivocally clarify the relationship between
what appears and what truly is (reality). In his opinion, although
metaphysics pointed out the four principles for the first time, sought
true knowledge to defy the rhetoric of death as total annihilation and
thus mitigated people’s fear of death by grounding the idea of
transcendence in logic, in practice it betrayed this goal. Ultimately,
metaphysics was unable to achieve unquestionable, or true, knowledge.
Traditional Western thought sought to differentiate between
indubitable and mythological remedies, considering the former as
true/logical discourse and the latter as a matter of opinions and
illusions. Nevertheless, Severino argues (1982/2015) that positivism,
materialism, and reductionism irreversibly confuted metaphysics
because they understood that, if a little thing can arise from nothing
and return to nothing, then everything—including Being and the
universe itself—can do the same. As such, the notion of God is
inadequate—and ultimately unnecessary—to explain physical laws
relating to becoming (Occam’s razor). If we admit the phenomenon of
becoming in a partial way (as in the oscillation between being and
nothing), we can also admit it in a total way, wherein everything arises
from and returns to nothing, as the Big Bang and Big Crunch theories
describe. All this means that neither soul nor quantum consciousness
can retain any subjective identity following annihilation. Every being
springs from and returns to non-being/nothing. But this is
contemporary thought; if, on the one hand, it correctly and irrevocably
refutes metaphysics, on the other hand it shares with metaphysics the
same fundamental error, but expresses it in an even more radical way.
This ontological representation of becoming may be taken as ‘real’, but
not as ‘true’, as it directly contradicts the concept of truth by assuming,
a priori, that ‘being is nothing’. As Severino explicitly explains, because
being cannot be nothing, asserting that what ‘is not yet’ and what ‘is no
longer’ is nothing is tantamount to saying that what is nothing. In
Severino’s perspective, this is the fundamental contradiction of
‘nihilism’: affirming that there is a time in which being is no longer or
not yet (past and future) is the same as stating that ‘being is nothing’.
And because this does not respect any logical rule, it is an absolute and
radical contradiction. This is the basic error of both science and
metaphysics.
A similar critique was intuited by some immanentist philosophers,
among them Giordano Bruno and Spinoza, but they did not criticise
metaphysics in a systematic way. Some eternalist philosophers also
tended to argue in this direction, taking positions very close to Einstein
in an attempt to eliminate the time dimension. Indeed, recent
epistemologies, which assume the contraposition between different
conceptualisations of time [61], are based on Parmenides’ reflections
on being, as re-actualised by the philosopher John McTaggart [29].
McTaggart affirmed the unreality of time in the same period as
Einstein’s general theory of relativity and Gödel’s incompleteness
theorems, thus resurrecting discussions about eternity. According to
[29], there are two distinct modes in which all events can be ordered in
time: the A-series and the B-series. The logical and linguistic expression
of the two series, from which specific theories of time derive, are
radically different because the former is tensed and the latter is
tenseless. Whereas the A-theory of time asserts that the series of
temporal positions are in continual transformation, the B-theory,
through the concept of ‘endurance’, updates Parmenides’ perspective,
arguing that the flow of time is an illusion because past, present, and
future are equally real. There are two principal varieties of the A-
theory: presentism and the growing block universe. The first holds that
only present objects exist, or, more precisely, that it is always true that
only present objects exist [5], whereas the second contends that both
present and past objects exist, but not future ones [65]. Instead, the B-
theory belongs to eternalism, which utilises the B-series, according to
which temporal collocation is a quality of everything, and time is akin
to the dimensions of space. Indeed, it affirms that persistence through
time is similar to extension through space; thus, any being that exists in
time has temporal ‘extension’ in the various sub-regions of the total
area of time [1, 47]. The argument between A-theory and B-theory has
been developed in the field of analytic philosophy to inform the more
significant new epistemologies (e.g., [27, 43]), and it entails the
argument of 4-dimensionalism versus 3-dimensionalism (3D) that
emerged via the theory of relativity [20].
The logical languages assumed by the A-theory and the B-theory are
necessarily different because, in the tensed view of semantics,
propositions have truth values ‘at a given time’ rather than having truth
values simpliciter. In contrast, in the tenseless view, propositions have
truth values simpliciter rather than having truth values at a given time.
However, it appears that this argument is endless, and it will be, for
some time, unsolvable. As such, any aprioristic perspective assumed
ideologically by scientists is justified. Nonetheless, Emanuele Severino
[55] solved the contraposition between eternalism and temporalism.
Although the current dispute between eternalists and presentists may
create the impression that the problem of eternity and the ensuing
questions concerning the afterlife are pointless, Severino shows how
the truth discourse on so-called “reality” is the only definition of reality
that maintains an immediate correspondence, or identity, between
what appears phenomenologically and the logical structure of what is.
In other words, a discourse is only ‘true’ if it shows, in an
incontrovertible way (elenchos), that what appears is identical to and
recognisable as itself (identity principle), that it cannot be another
thing or become nothing (non-contradiction principle), and that any
intermediate position is impossible (excluded middle). Anything that
appears is necessarily eternal (exists ontologically), even when it does
not yet appear and no longer appears. The becoming of the spectacle of
matter is a phenomenological fact, and this phenomenon is something
as well. It is not nothing. Actually, consciousness consists in the
appearing of the phenomena itself, which is the spectacle of being, that
eternally appears in the infinite being, not limited by nothingness.
Severino presents an incontrovertible, unitary, and structurally
coherent system of thought and a vigorous critique of the nihilism of
Western thought, both traditional (metaphysics) and contemporary
(neo-positivism, materialism, and so on), for its inability to maintain
the fundamental ontological and logical structure of truth. From this
perspective, Parmenides was the beginning of the ‘path of night’ (error,
nihilism), wherein Western philosophy achieved its full coherence by
denying truth, as contemporary thought does with scientific
epistemology, but in a way that evokes the most profound alienation.
Nihilism—that is, the path of error, to which both metaphysics and
contemporary thought belong—is the alienation of authentic truth.
Truth is the knowledge that reveals the self-contradiction and self-
negation of this alienating error, and thus confirms the necessary self-
negation of metaphysics and contemporary thought. Severino restores
the authentic, incontrovertible discourse of truth, which is crucially
different from the ‘reality’ proposed by traditional thought or any
contemporary or scientific perspectives. In essence, he asserts that
every being is eternal, meaning that (1) everything that is not nothing is
a being, (2) it is necessary for each being to be, and, more specifically, to
be as it is, and (3) it is impossible for any being to not be at any time.
Any type of being appearing in the present is both real and eternal;
moreover, time is the phenomenal appearing of eternal beings that go
into and come out of the ‘circle of appearing’. Because any annihilation
is impossible, this ‘transformation’ is simply the appearance of
subsequence—of being’s entrance into and departure from so-called
‘reality’, which may be defined as the ‘limited circle of appearing’. This
point is crucial: there is no contradiction between the appearance of
these sequences, or of qualities in the flow of time, and the eternity of
what appears. The nihilist error lies in equating this process of
continual (re)appearing (restated as ‘becoming’) in the world with a
process of creation–annihilation, wherein death amounts to
annihilation. Severino’s thought reveals the nihilism of traditional and
contemporary thought and solves their fundamental and essential
contradiction. Contrary to what Western thought aprioristically
assumes, there is no becoming, that is, it is impossible to come ex nihilo
or depart ad nihilum. Indeed, the content that actually appears in any
consciousness does not attest in any way to the creation or annihilation
of beings.

6 Conclusions
An old king is dying. A sword has been driven deep inside his
breast. All around the king, friends, foes, courtiers, jesters dance:
each believes himself to be the one who drove the sword into the
king's breast. And yet there the sword stands, plunged in that
breast, regardless of the will of all those reckless dancers. The
dying king is philosophy (in its strong, Greek meaning, namely
metaphysical epistéme). The reckless dancers are all the
criticism that has been addressed to metaphysics throughout the
history of philosophy. No part of this criticism can really kill
philosophy. Yet, philosophy really is dying. Of an illness that our
culture still cannot identify. It is dying under the gaze of destiny,
of which philosophy as epistéme is the deformed image.

This excerpt, taken from Severino’s Studi di filosofia della prassi (p.
396–7), finally reintroduces us to the topic that is most difficult to
address in contemporary Western culture due to the angst deriving
from technoscience’s redefinition of the boundaries between life and
death. The matter is relevant as it concerns our representations of
death, the terror generated by representations of death as absolute
annihilation, and the need to soothe the anticipatory angst of
consciousness’s obliteration.
Contemporary secularism assumes that the end of transcendence is
the beginning of truth. However, we live in a culture where religions
continue to promote the truthful metaphysical idea of existence after
death. Thanks to its consolatory power, this idea has broad influence
over common sense, even while coexisting with secularism, which
declares any negation of absolute annihilation illusory. The present
historical period is very emotionally fraught because we know that the
greatest attempt to save humans from absolute annihilation—that is,
the metaphysical argument—has failed. Western people are attracted
by messages promising salvation from death, which reinforce the
primeval hope that religious thought can be essentially reliable.
However, these same people are exposed to the dramatic refutation of
these promises by scientific and academic knowledge, which are based
on reductionist epistemologies.
Our discussion has evidenced how the complexity of the
epistemological argument inherent to the meaning of
soul/mind/consciousness and its death does not allow for any
simplification. It may be that the mind–brain problem is one example of
a biased and growing tendency to generalise specific models deriving
from sectorial and empirical lines of reasoning, which should remain
inscribed in limited areas, especially with respect to questions of death
and dying. Nowadays, the fear of death, regarded as absolute
annihilation, is a real source of profound anxiety. Despite the fact that
contemporary people are more or less aware of their ‘wishful thinking’,
convinced that science is a more credible source of knowledge than
religion, and thus that everything comes from nothing (Big Bang) and
returns to nothing (Big Crunch), they nonetheless perceive themselves
as eternal. Because of this, they are constantly looking for some
reasonably possible, coherent framework to consolidate their feelings
into something that language can represent. Indeed, religious
mythologies maintain the scope for possibility, confirming that,
whatever they may think they know, what is really knowable remains a
mystery. And mysteries, as Wittgenstein himself said, cannot be spoken
of. Moreover, people’s faith in this mystery is reinforced by the fact that
science itself declares that it does not know everything that there is to
know, and even that it is fallible.
However, Severino solves the mystery beyond the point of faith: we
correctly perceive eternity despite the nihilistic language of our daily
lives. Severino’s transcendental argument may help to renew the
Platonic idea that knowledge is memory (Meno, 79e–82b), as, in the
eternalist perspective, this idea could explain why we believe in an
afterlife. If our consciousness already lives/lived in another dimension
in the eternal and infinite universe of Being, then knowledge may
surface in our unconscious as memories.
The epistemological discussion could proceed, but we must
conclude here and return to the two chatbots. In Severino’s
incontrovertible indication of truth, consciousness is the
phenomenological appearing of everything, which is as eternal as any
matter and is identical to itself, so it cannot be reduced to matter. The
relationships between consciousness (soul, spirit, mind, and so on) and
matter (grey or otherwise) cannot be reduced to their reciprocal
identity.
Quantum mechanics may cause consciousness to emerge in AIS, but
it may not wait for humans to produce it in a laboratory by constructing
a quantum Turing computer. If consciousness (the appearing) is not
restricted to a brain cavity, then we must recognise that it transcends
the individual and human dimension, and thus humans’ ability to
recognise its presence. This difficulty is necessarily linked to the
nihilistic language that characterises all the studies on this problem.
Severino’s argument can help us recognise that, whenever something
appears, a specific dimension of consciousness is involved. This means
that the quantum computer is probably already autogenerating from
the most evolved computational AIS, because a specific form of
consciousness is even now appearing in this mechanical being, hidden
from human awareness. It is really ‘wishful thinking’ to believe that
reality is limited to what humans understand. Though we are not yet
able to consciously construct a quantum Turing machine, it is not so
improbable that the two killed chatbots were already more or less
intentionally improving and developing their own quantum
consciousness.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
F. Scardigli (ed.), Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85480-5_4

The Brain Is not a Stupid Star

Giuseppe Vitiello1
(1) Dipartimento Di Fisica “E.R. Caianiello”, Università Di Salerno, Via
Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 80084 Fisciano (Salerno), Italia

Giuseppe Vitiello
Email: [email protected]

Abstract
The activity of the neocortex presents the formation of extended
configurations of oscillatory motions modulated in amplitude and
phase and involving myriads of neurons. As observed by Lashley, nerve
impulses are transmitted from cell to cell through defined cell
connections. However, all behavior seems to be determined by masses
of excitations, within general fields of activity, without reference to
particular nerve cells. Freeman has stressed the role played by chaos
underlying the ability of the brain to respond flexibly to the outside
world. These observations support the remark, attributed to Aristotle,
that the brain is not a stupid star, which in its perennial trajectory
passes always through the same point in a fully predictable way. On the
contrary, brains appear to proceed by steps that do not necessarily
belong to a strictly predictive chain of steps, but behave like a ‘machine
making mistakes’, intrinsic erratic devices. These features of neural
dynamics are discussed within the framework of the dissipative
quantum model of the brain and with reference to AI systems and
research programs. If it is ever possible to build a device endowed with
consciousness, it must possess unpredictability of behavior, infidelity,
and inalienable freedom; and must be called Spartacus.
1 Introduction
I have already used the title of this paper “The brain is not a stupid star”
as the title of a section of my contribution to the book by Robert Kozma
and Walter Freeman on cognitive phase transitions in the cerebral
cortex [1]. I mentioned there that, according to Aristotle, stars have a
stupid behavior since in their perennial trajectories they always pass
through the same point in a fully predictable way. I do not know if such
an observation was really made by Aristotle. However, the suggested
idea is that the brain is not a stupid star since its behavior is not fully
predictable. The point is that stupidity (non-intelligence?) is associated
with fully predictable behavior within broadly unchanged boundary
conditions. The brain, on the contrary, is motivated in its behavior by
intentional tasks, which although partially conditioned by the
environment in which it is embedded, are definitely formulated and
pursued by the brain in its action–perception cycle. As stressed by
Pribram [2–4], in brain activity there is always a content of ‘attention’ in
perception and of ‘intention’ in action. Neuronal activity, according to
Freeman, acts “as a unified whole in shaping each intentional action at
each moment” [5]. In pursuing our best to-be-in-the-world, we are
indeed guided by our changeable volition and intention [6, 7].
These observations might lead straight to the theme of artificial
intelligence (AI), with reference to one of the possible meanings of
“intelligence” and the predictability of the functioning of a device.
However, let me discuss first some of the features of the brain's
functional activity as described within the dissipative quantum model
of brain [8, 9]. In Sect. 2 some general features in the brain studies are
briefly presented. Section 3 is devoted to some notions of quantum field
theory (QFT), in particular to coherence, a basic ingredient in the many-
body model of the brain and the dissipative quantum model of the
brain, which will be introduced in Sects. 4 and 5, respectively. In Sect. 7,
I discuss some features of AI in connection with the chaotic classical
trajectories in the space of memory described by the dissipative model
and introduced in Sect. 6. Section 8 is devoted to concluding remarks.

2 Lashley’s Dilemma
Let me start by mentioning that Karl Lashley, in commenting the
experiments he conducted in the 1940s, proposed the following
dilemma to neuroscience scholars [10, pp. 302–306]:

Here is the dilemma. Nerve impulses are transmitted […] from

cell to cell through defined cell connections. Yet all behavior
seems to be determined by masses of excitations […] within
general fields of activity, without reference to particular nerve
cells […]. What kind of nervous organization can ever account
for patterns of excitations without well-defined and specialized
channels of cellular communication? The problem is almost
universal in the activity of the nervous system.

Lashley thus arrived at the formulation of the hypothesis of mass

action in brain activity. His experimental observations, fully confirmed
by subsequent studies (see, for example, [11]), led Karl Pribram in the
1960s to propose the hypothesis that for the brain one could speak of
coherence, a central notion in quantum optics, and use the metaphor of
the hologram [2, 3]. One of the characteristic features of a hologram is
that knowledge of a detail in any point of the image allows the
reconstruction of the whole image. Such a possibility comes from the
fact that the photons, the quanta of the electromagnetic field, which
constitute the laser used to produce and read the hologram, oscillate in
phase. The laser is made by coherently oscillating photons. The laser is
what results from the harmony, if I am allowed to use this term, of the
coherence of photons. Natural light (‘non-laser’ light) is instead made of
photons that are not in phase, i.e., they are not coherent. Beyond the
specificity of the model proposed by Pribram, the value of his intuition
consists in the fact that for brain activity we can speak of coherence.
The coherence hypothesis for the brain's functional activity is
actually confirmed by the observation of widespread cooperation
between a huge number of neurons over vast brain areas. Analysis of
the potentials measured with the electroencephalogram (EEG) and
with the magnetoencephalogram (MEG) shows that the neural activity
of the neocortex presents the formation of extended configurations of
oscillatory motions modulated in amplitude (AM) and phase (PM) [12,
13]. These configurations extend over almost the entire cerebral
hemisphere for rabbits and cats, on domains of linear dimensions up to
twenty centimeters in the human brain, and have almost zero phase
dispersion [14, 15]. The associated oscillation frequencies are in the
12–80 Hz range (the so-called beta and gamma waves). The patterns of
neuronal oscillations dissolve in a few tens of milliseconds and others
appear in different configurations, with frequencies in the 3–12 Hz
range (theta and alpha waves) [12, 16–21].
A huge number of cells and other biologically active units enter into
brain activity. For example, a weak olfactory stimulus activates about a
thousand neurons in the olfactory bulb that produce the excitation of a
million neurons and the inhibitory activity of 10 million neurons that
propagates in 5–10 ms over a distance of about 10 mm, although the
average axon lengths are about 1 mm and the synaptic propagation
times are about 10 times longer [22]. It is evident that in the presence
of such huge numbers and such complexity, the study of brain functions
cannot be limited to the knowledge of the properties of the individual
elementary components. This is certainly necessary, but it is by no
means sufficient. Ricciardi and Umezawa write [23]:

[…] in the case of natural brains, it might be pure optimism to

hope to determine the numerical values for the coupling
coefficients and the thresholds of all neurons by means of
anatomical or physiological methods. […] First of all, at which
level should the brain be studied and described? In other words,
is it essential to know the behavior in time of any single neuron
in order to understand the behavior of natural brains? Probably
the answer is negative. The behavior of any single neuron should
not be significant for the functioning of the whole brain,
otherwise a higher and higher degree of malfunctioning should
be observed, unless to assume the existence of “special”
neurons, characterized by an exceptionally long half life: or to
postulate a huge redundancy in the circuitry of the brain.
However, to our knowledge, there has been no evidence which
shows the existence of such “special” neurons, and to invoke the
redundancy is not the best way to answer the question.
 Referring to biological systems in general, but his words might be
applied equally well to the brain, Schrödinger observes that [24, p. 79],

[…] it needs no poetical imagination but only clear and sober

scientific reflection to recognize that we are here obviously
faced with events whose regular and lawful unfolding is guided
by a “mechanism” entirely different from the “probability
mechanism” of physics.

The discovery of the constituents of biological systems and the

knowledge of their specific properties certainly constitutes a great
success of molecular biology. The problem now is one of understanding
how to put these elementary constituents together in such a way as to
generate the complex macroscopic behavior of the system [25–30]. As
observed elsewhere [31],

In very general terms, the problem is the one of the transition

from naturalism, that is, from the knowledge of the catalogs of
elementary components, to understanding the dynamics that
accounts for the relationships that bind these components and
describes the behavior of the system as a whole. The phase of
naturalism is obviously essential and requires an enormous
effort of careful and patient investigation. Although it is
necessary, it is not sufficient for the purposes of a full
understanding of the phenomena that are the object of our
study. Knowing is not yet understanding.

According to Schrödinger, in the study of living matter, the

distinction has to be made between the two ways of producing
orderliness: ordering generated by the “statistical mechanisms” and
ordering generated by “dynamical” interactions [24, p. 80].
We might conclude that Herbert Fröhlich [25, 26], Umezawa and
Ricciardi [23, 32, 33], Karl Pribram [2–4], and Walter Freeman [22, 34],
have each in their own way shown how, by focusing on “masses of
excitation” and “fields of activity”, in Lashley's words, naturalism may
become Galilean science (see [34, 35]).
The notion of coherence and the associated mathematical
formalism provided by QFT have proved to be formidable tools in the
study of biological systems in general [27–30] and of the brain in
particular [8, 9, 18, 36]. Before beginning the discussion of brain
modeling, I will therefore introduce in the next section a few general
notions of QFT.

3 Coherence: From the Microscopic to the

Macroscopic
The concept of coherence is central to quantum physics, where it allows
us to explain the properties of many physical systems. For example,
crystals, where the atoms are confined in the crystal sites with a well-
defined spatial order. Or magnets, where the elementary magnets
oscillate in phase and are mainly oriented in a given direction; the
resulting magnetization characterizes the system of microscopic
components as a whole. Without mentioning of course quantum optics
and elementary particle physics.
In general, all systems that present an ordering in space or time
(e.g., oscillating in phase) are regulated by microscopic dynamics
characterized by coherence.
In the examples cited above, the concept of coherence is associated
with the transition from the level of elementary components
(microscopic level) to the level of the behavior of the system as a whole
(macroscopic level). This transition from the microscopic to the
macroscopic (or mesoscopic) scale is a very important and distinctive
aspect of the mathematical formalism describing the phenomenon of
coherence. It gives a quantitatively well-defined meaning to the notion
of the emergence of a macroscopic property out of a microscopic
dynamic process so that the macroscopic system possesses physical
properties that are not found at the microscopic level [37, 38]. The
behavior and the physical quantities that characterize the system as a
whole are thus the results of the microscopic dynamics of the
elementary components. Stiffness, for example, is a property of the
crystal, not of its atomic or molecular components. The latter are
confined to the crystal sites and cannot move freely, as an atom not
belonging to a crystal would do; that is, they lose some of their degrees
of freedom. However, characterization of the system at a macroscopic
level (the stiffness of the crystal, its electrical conductivity, etc.)
emerges dynamically from such freezing of microscopic degrees of
freedom. The order, on the other hand, whether spatial or temporal, is
itself a collective characteristic of a set of elementary components (it
makes no sense to speak of order in the case of a few elementary
components). It is therefore in this sense that we speak of macroscopic
quantum systems. Crystals and magnets are examples of macroscopic
quantum systems.
It should also be emphasized that, contrary to what is sometimes
erroneously stated, in many systems the dynamic regime of coherence
persists over a wide range of temperatures, from thousands of degrees
centigrade to quite low temperatures, below zero centigrade. For
example, diamond melts at the critical temperature of 3545 °C,
while sodium chloride crystals, the familiar kitchen salt, melt at 804 °C;
in iron, the coherence between the elementary magnets which
manifests itself in the magnetized state is lost at 770 °C, while in the
cobalt, this occurs at 1075 °C (the critical transition temperature from
the ferromagnetic to the non-magnetic phase is called the Curie
temperature). In superconductors, on the other hand, the critical
temperatures are very low, not higher than about °C for some
niobium compounds, and about for some superconductors
discovered in the second half of the 1980s, such as certain copper
oxides containing bismuth. The critical temperatures for the coherence
phenomenon can therefore be very low or very high (compared to the
ambient temperature), depending on specific conditions and dynamic
properties characteristic of the system considered.
One further remark is that the coherence phenomenon preserves
the macroscopic state from perturbations coming from quantum
fluctuations. The latter are unavoidable at the level of the quantum
dynamics of the elementary components of the system. However, in
(Glauber) coherent states, we have , where
denotes the number of elementary components in the coherent state,
the fluctuation of and is a measure of the coherence.
We find that, for high , is negligible compared with .
This shows that coherence plays a crucial role in macroscopic stability
against quantum fluctuations. The need to use fields, in particular
quantum fields, comes from the fact that is a large number for
coherent states, indeed , with high .
We thus see that the observed long lifetime of ordered systems,
such as crystals, magnets, superconductors, etc. (“diamonds are
forever” and kitchen salt “does not expire”, that is, it can be kept for
years, even in outdoor storage, and it is found in salt mines) is a result
of the coherent dynamics of quantum fields (this is one of the major
differences between QFT and quantum mechanics (QM) where the
decoherence phenomenon occurs).
The degrees of freedom of the elementary components characterize
the dynamics that regulate their spatial distribution and their evolution
over time, and are in general closely associated with the symmetry
properties of the dynamics [39]. For example, the possibility for an
atom to be placed at any point in space without inducing observable
variations in the system is described as space translational symmetry.
Thanks to this symmetry, a set of atoms can assume different spatial
configurations equivalent to each other from the point of view of
observations, therefore physically equivalent, and in this respect
indistinguishable from each other. In the example of the crystal,
however, the atom is no longer free to be in “any” space position, but
bound to sit in a specific crystal site. We then say that there is
spontaneous breakdown of the symmetry (SBS). Here, spontaneous
means that the state of the crystal is dynamically selected and
generated among the possible accessible states.
In summary, the crystalline order results from the breaking of space
translational symmetry; order is lack of symmetry. The different
crystalline structures that are observed (cubic, rhombohedral, etc.)
correspond to different ways of breaking the symmetry in the various
spatial directions.
The conclusion is that, while symmetry describes the
indistinguishability between states of the system linked by a symmetry
transformation, order, i.e., the breaking of symmetry, allows one to
distinguish between one state and another: the possibility of
distinguishing, diversity, individuality of the state emerges from the
establishment of order.
Much of the physics developed since the second half of the last
century is based on the mechanism of symmetry breaking and the
consequent formation of ordered structures, and this is linked to the
notion of coherence. Quantum field theory (not QM) provides the
mathematical formalism necessary for the study of spontaneously
broken symmetry theories [37, 39, 40].
The Goldstone theorem in QFT states that SBS implies the existence
of long-range correlations among the system elementary constituents.
The quanta of these correlation waves are called Nambu–Goldstone
(NG) bosons or quanta [41].
Boson particles can occupy the same physical state in any number
(unlike fermion particles, where no more than one can occupy a given
state, according to the Pauli exclusion principle). When many bosons sit
in the same state, one says that they are condensed in that state. If they
are massless, as NG bosons are, at their lowest (zero) momentum, they
do not supply energy to that state, which can therefore be the least
energy state of the system (also called the vacuum). If the condensed
bosons are in phase, i.e., the long-range correlation waves of which they
are the quanta are in phase, as happens in ordered states, the ground
state is a coherent condensed state.
The ground state (or vacuum) of the system is then characterized by
the non-zero expectation value of a quantity, characteristic of the
symmetry which has been broken, called the order parameter since it is
a measure of the ordering induced by the long-range correlations. In
the crystal example, it is the density, in the ferromagnets the
magnetization. The order parameter is a classical field of quantum
origin, meaning that it is independent of quantum fluctuations. It is
indeed a measure of the coherence of the system ground state
generated by the Bose–Einstein condensation of NG bosons [37, 39–41].
The order parameter may assume different values in a given range
and it depends on the temperature. Above a critical temperature , it
vanishes and the phase transition to the symmetric state is obtained
with loss of the ordered structure (symmetry restoration). See above
for examples of values of (in diamonds, magnets, superconductors).
QFT thus allows the description of different phases in which the
system may be found. These different phases present physically
different types of behavior depending on the different values of the
order parameter and are described by physically different spaces of
states of the system, i.e., unitarily inequivalent representations of the
canonical commutation relations (CCR).
In fact, infinitely many unitarily inequivalent representations of the
CCR exist in QFT. They do not exist in QM due to the von Neumann
theorem, which states that, for systems with a finite number of degrees
of freedom, all the representations of the CCR are unitarily (and
therefore physically) equivalent. Fields by definition describe systems
with an infinite number of degrees of freedom, so the von Neumann
theorem does not hold for them [37, 39, 40]. Systems that may have
different physical phases need therefore to be described by QFT, which
may account for the multiplicity of their phases and the transitions
among them, not by QM.

4 The Many-Body Model of the Brain

Lashley's dilemma and the problems arising in the study of the brain,
mentioned in Sect. 2, have their origin in the huge number of brain
constituents at cellular and subcellular levels and in the great
complexity of their organization and dynamics. The stability of the
functional activity of the brain is, on the other hand, essential in any of
our activities, and even for our survival in the world. How can it arise
out of the myriads of brain constituents? There are of the order of
neurons with synapses, each of them able to fire about pulses
per second, implying around synaptic operations per second,
without mentioning glia cells and the fact that all this happens in a bath
of 90% more numerous water molecules. Each of these molecules
carries an oscillating electric dipole momentum subject to unavoidable
quantum fluctuations.
However, the total activity of the brain requires an energy
consumption per second of the order of only 25 W. This is ridiculously
small compared with the power necessary for the simulation of quite
elementary tasks by one of the gigantic American or European Brain
Projects, which is of the order of 1.5 MW.
As already mentioned above in quoting Ricciardi and Umezawa, one
should also explain how it happens that the brain's functional efficiency
is not affected by the malfunctioning or even the loss of single neurons.
Metabolic activity induces chemical transformations and replacements
of biomolecules in intervals of time of the order of a couple of weeks. It
is then hard to explain the long and medium lifetime of memories in
terms of localized arrangements of biomolecules, due to their changes
and renewal in such a turn-over process.
Schrödinger observed that the “enigmatic biological stability” [24,
p. 47] of living matter (but, as already said, his observation may apply
to the brain, too) cannot be explained in terms of “regularities only in
the average” [24, p. 78] originating from the “statistical mechanisms”.
According to him, this would be the “classical physicist's expectation”
that “far from being trivial, is wrong” [24, p. 19].
Starting from these remarks, in 1967 Ricciardi and Umezawa
observed [23]:

[…] it seems that very few concrete results have been obtained,
in the sense that the question of how the brain works out the
information received from the outside, and what is the logic on
which the operations performed by the brain are based is still far
from receiving a satisfactory solution. […] One possibility then
arises naturally: since one usually ignores the mechanism
according to which the brain performs intelligent operations,
[…] one could try to give a more general description of the brain
dynamics; […] from a phenomenological point of view it is
strongly suggestive of a quantum model. In other terms, one can
try to look for specific dynamical mechanisms (already known in
the physics of many degrees of freedom) which can satisfy the
essential requirements of the observed functioning of the brain.

In the many-body (quantum) model of the brain formulated by

Ricciardi and Umezawa (RU), they assume that the external stimulus
perceived by the brain is responsible for breaking the symmetry. The
density of the NG correlation quanta generated by this breaking process
(see Sect. 3) is assumed to be an index or distinctive code of the
memory associated with the external stimulus that induced the
symmetry breaking.
The same happens in the dissipative quantum model which will be
discussed below. In both models the symmetry which is broken by
external stimuli has been identified with the rotational (spherical)
symmetry of the molecular electric dipoles [8, 27–30, 42].
It should be emphasized that, in the RU model (and in the
dissipative model), neurons and other cellular units are classical
systems. The quantum variables are the vibrational modes of the
electric dipoles of the aqueous matrix and of the other biomolecules
present. The long-range NG correlations among them promote and
sustain the assembly and disassembly of oscillating domains of
neuronal populations.
It is important to note that the stimulus does not affect the internal
dynamics of the brain. It only induces the spontaneous breakdown of
the rotational symmetry of the dipoles of water molecules. The internal
dynamics then proceeds on the basis of the physical and chemical
properties of the brain, independently of the stimulus. This aspect can
have a clear and direct verification in the laboratory and its description
constitutes a distinctive merit of the quantum model of the brain. It also
accounts for the fact that an external stimulus, even dissimilar from the
one originally inducing the memorization process, can stimulate the
recall of the previously recorded memory [23, 43, 44]. This explains in
dynamic terms the commonly experienced phenomenon of recalling a
memory in perceptual conditions that are also very different from those
in which it was first memorized. Here we are referring to normal or
“weak” stimuli, not of a highly stressful type, such as a shock (or also an
electro-shock) able to enslave the functionality of the brain. Although
the stimulus can be quite weak, it does need to be “in phase” with the
brain dynamics to induce SBS.
In the RU model and its subsequent developments [45, 46], the
recording of a memory induced by a stimulus was canceled by that of
another memory induced by a subsequent stimulus. This memory
overprinting minimized the memory capacity of the model. For reasons
of simplicity, the model did not consider the fact that the brain is a
system in continuous, unavoidable interaction with the environment,
intrinsically open to it. “Closing” the brain means damaging its
functionality, as can be observed in experiments forcing a subject into
isolation. The RU quantum brain model was therefore modified to
include the “openness” of its dynamics. This led to the formulation of
the dissipative quantum model of the brain [8, 9].
5 The Dissipative Quantum Model of the Brain
Any attempt to describe the brain cannot ignore the continuous and
reciprocal energy exchange between the brain and the environment.
Knowledge of the biomolecular and cellular details is fundamental but
clearly insufficient for the description of brain activity. This alone
cannot take into account the property of the system of being an open
system.
As we have already seen, the detailed study of the elementary
components is necessary, but not sufficient. It must be supplemented
by knowledge of the dynamics that governs the set of elementary
components. In the case of the brain, it is a dissipative form of
dynamics. This leads us to the formulation of the dissipative quantum
model of the brain [8, 9].
The physical need to consider the brain and, at the same time, its
environment translates into the mathematical need to “double the
system” [47]: we have the brain system and the environment system.
The latter, which cannot be eliminated, can be schematized as the
reservoir from which everything the brain absorbs comes from, and
into which everything that the brain releases is poured. The overall
brain–environment system is a closed one for which the energy flow at
the brain–environment boundary is perfectly balanced.
From the standpoint of the balancing of flows, the environment is
therefore described in the same way as the brain is described, provided
that the “flow in” is changed into “flow out”, and vice versa, which is
obtained algebraically by changing the sign of the time variable: the
environment is, therefore, a “time-reversed” copy of the brain.
Obviously, the interaction of the brain with the environment is very
complex and requires the knowledge and detection of a huge number of
parameters. However, if we limit ourselves to considering only the
balance of the energy flows, the description of the environment as a
time-reversed copy of the brain is mathematically correct and
sufficient. In this description, the environment is therefore effectively a
“copy”, the Double of the brain.
The interplay between linearity and nonlinearity plays an
interesting role in the dissipative model. Phase transitions between
different representations (phases) occur in a nonlinear dynamical
regime (criticality). SBS implies dynamical nonlinearity through which
boson condensation and coherent states are formed. Linearity holds
within each phase.
Such an interplay between linearity and nonlinearity is consistent
with observations showing the coexistence of wave modes and pulse
modes [48–50]. Pulse activity may be observed in experiments based
on linear response. On the other hand, their synchronized AM patterns
exhibit log–log power density versus frequency distributions, i.e., scale-
free (self-similar fractal) dynamics requiring coherence consequent to
nonlinear dynamics [49, 50]. Self-similar fractal properties are indeed
isomorphic to coherent states [51–53], which is consistent with the
underlying coherent many-body dynamics of the dissipative model [18,
54–57].
In the brain’s dynamical evolution (in its “functioning”), there are
variations in the flows exchanged with its environment, and therefore
the state of the brain must be continuously updated, but so also must
be the description of the state of the environment to balance the energy
flows. In the memory states, which are two-mode coherent states, the
brain modes are permanently entangled with the doubled modes (the
environment modes) [43, 44, 58]. There is therefore a continuous
“reciprocal updating”, a process of reciprocal back-reaction, of
“dialogue” between the brain and its Double, never a monologue, never
resolvable. Sometimes in the conflict between the self and the Double,
the dynamics of knowing, understanding, feeling, and living develop.
The reciprocal influences of each on the other require a continuous
updating of their relationship. Each of them is exposed to the gaze of
the other [59].
It should be observed that the entanglement relation is implied by
the in-phase correlation between the modes, which does not require
exchange of a messenger or information and can therefore be
established instantaneously without violation of the relativity
postulates. Correlation is not therefore interaction, which would
require the exchange of a messenger whose speed could not then be
greater than the speed of light.
Returning to the dialog between the self and the Double, it is in this
‘entre-deux’ that the act of consciousness has its origin [8, 9]; it
summarizes in itself the experience accumulated in the past, but is
made up only of the present [9, 31, 59]. In this perspective, the brain
appears to be “extended”, in its own functionality, beyond the limits of
its anatomical configuration. Consciousness expands into the
environment in which the brain is immersed.
It is essential to stress that the relationship with the Double is a
dynamical relationship, not one of narcissistic mirroring. In the
dissipative model, there is nothing of such a mirroring. As Desideri
observes [60], referring to certain discussions on mirror neurons [61,
62], mirroring is static and is not an opportunity for learning because
the action observed and the action performed are structurally
equivalent. What is observed in the laboratory [22, 63], and belongs to
our common experience, is the property of the brain to accumulate
experience and build knowledge, that is, to learn how to have
“maximum grip” on the world. For this purpose, a copy, a simple
mirroring is not enough; a creative operation is needed, a mimesis, in
the sense of Aristotle’s Poetics, which, as Desideri stresses, concerns
the possible and not what simply happens. We need the amount of
imaginative indeterminacy that allows learning and also a variation of
the observed action model [60]. It is remarkable that the dissipative
model allows such degrees of freedom and that the learning process
arising from the dialogue with the Double is formally linked to
minimizing the free energy of the system.
I observe that balancing the incoming and outgoing energy flows is
equivalent to setting their difference to zero. This characterizes the
state of equilibrium of the overall brain–environment system. However,
setting the difference between two quantities to zero leaves them
totally indeterminate. The balancing operation, therefore, allows an
infinite series of pairs of states of the brain and the environment,
respectively, for which such a difference is zero. Each of these brain
states (and the corresponding environment states in each of the pairs)
corresponds to a different value of the density of the condensed quanta.
Each of these densities can be considered to be the index or code for a
memory. It can be shown that states with different densities are
orthogonal (unitarily inequivalent, see Sect. 3) to each other, therefore
without mutual interference. Memories are thus protected form
reciprocal “confusion”. We see that the unitary inequivalence of the QFT
representations thus plays a crucial role in the memory recording
process. Moreover, their being infinite in number guarantees a large
memory capacity. The result is that, thanks to dissipation, we may have
infinitely many non-interfering memory states. Dissipation solves the
memory capacity problem. The huge memory capacity is a consequence
of the fact that the brain is a dissipative, open system [8].

6 Chaotic Trajectories in the Landscape of

Attractors. Errare e Pensare
From what was said above, we see that the acquisition of a “new”
memory corresponds to the use of one of the infinitely many unitarily
inequivalent fundamental states (vacua) to which the brain–
environment system has access. We can therefore describe the set of
memory states (or “memory space”) as the set of such coherent
fundamental states, each one labeled by the code of a specific memory.
These are states of minimum energy since, in them, the difference
between the incoming and outgoing energy flows is zero, as mentioned
above. Moreover, they are also states of minimum free energy. They are
thus states towards which the system “tends” in its evolution, as
towards “attractors”. The set of memory states, therefore, depicts a
“landscape of attractors”.
It is remarkable that the strict mathematical unitary inequivalence
among the representations is smoothed out in realistic situations due
to defects, impurities, and surface effects. Such an “imperfection” is
most welcome since it allows the evolution of memories in time and
thus the possibility of “forgetting”, and memories with different
lifetimes, thus short-term memories and long-term memories.
Moreover, it also allows transitions, or paths, trajectories through
memories (through memory states), so that correlations may arise
among the attractors as the brain goes from attractor to attractor;
indeed along trajectories in the landscape of attractors, dwelling more
or less for a long time in each of them, never, in normal (health)
conditions, being trapped there. Along each trajectory, the free energy
of the system is minimal. In the dissipative model, free energy and its
minimization play a crucial role. This actually controls the density of
the condensate labeling each memory state.
 It needs to be stressed that the acquisition of a new memory
involves not only the addition of a new attractor to the landscape of
attractors, but the reorganization of the entire landscape, and therefore
its complete updating in the light of the new acquisition.
It is in this process that the contextualization of the new acquisition
and the emergence of its meaning consists, which never belongs to the
perceptual stimulus (to the input). It belongs to the context of the
redesigned landscape of attractors, always new as a whole. The
meaning content of the correlations in the space of the attractors is
therefore never definitive. Meanings can always be updated, better
understood, or completely changed. They are always under test. Thus
there emerges a dimension of novelty, surprise, even astonishment
associated with suddenly seeing something unexpected [59, 64]. In this
different view [65], one must seek the genesis of the imagination, and
its role in determining different trajectories in the space of attractors.
We are a long way from a simple mirroring. The relationship of the
brain with the world is a completely dynamic one.
The process of contextualization, in which the brain calls into
question its entire experiential history, constitutes one of the most
salient features of the quantum dissipative model of the brain. It
faithfully describes the laboratory observations in which the subject
examined, animal or man, reacts to the situations in which he finds
himself undergoing the process of abstraction (or exemplification
necessary for the construction of the new attractor, i.e., the balancing of
flows) and of generalization (or creation of categories in establishing
correlations in the landscape of attractors). In this way the flow of
information exchanged in the relationship with the world becomes
knowledge [31, 59, 66] and memory becomes memory of meanings, not
memory of information.
Each act of recognition of the attractor landscape represents an act
of intuitive knowledge, the recognition of a collective mode, not divisible
into rational steps, thinkable but “non-computational”, and not
translatable into the logical framework of language [59, 67]. This
feature of brain activity is perhaps consistent with von Neumann's
statement [68]:
 We require exquisite numerical precision over many logical
steps to achieve what brains accomplish in very few short steps.
The trajectories in the landscape of attractors, from memory to
memory, can be shown to be classical trajectories, although they
“connect'’ quantum states. Moreover, they are chaotic trajectories, that
is, they are not periodic (a trajectory never intersects itself) and
trajectories that have different initial conditions never intersect; rather
they are (exponentially) divergent. It can be shown formally that the
chaoticity of the trajectories originates from the quantum nature of the
memory states [38, 43, 44].
The role of chaos described by the dissipative model is confirmed by
laboratory observations. Freeman has stressed that [69]:

The chaos is evident in the tendency of vast collections of

neurons to shift abruptly and simultaneously from one complex
activity pattern to another in response to the smallest of inputs
[…] This changeability is a prime characteristic of many chaotic
systems […] In fact, we propose it is the very property that
makes perception possible. We also speculate that chaos
underlies the ability of the brain to respond flexibly to the
outside world and to generate novel activity patterns, including
those that are experienced as fresh ideas.

It is indeed interesting to note that the chaotic characteristics of the

trajectories in the landscape of the attractors favours a high perceptual
resolution. In fact, minimal differences in the perception (such as can
occur in the recognition of images, smells, flavors, etc.) are recognized
in a short time due to the divergence of the (chaotic) trajectories.
Divergent trajectories are in fact easily recognizable as different. Small
differences in the initial conditions would generate non-diverging
trajectories in the absence of chaoticity, and the recognition of such
differences would be much more difficult.
In its temporal evolution, the brain thus appears to be a system that
“lives” on many microscopic configurations described by the minimum
energy states corresponding to different memories, passing from
configuration to configuration (from memory to memory) in its paths in
the landscape of attractors (criticality of the phase transition
dynamics). Even a weak external perturbation (a weak stimulus) can
induce transitions through these least-energy states. In this way,
occasional (random) perturbations play an important role in complex
brain activity. On the other hand, one demonstrate the connection
between the doubling of the degrees of freedom mentioned above and
the quantum noise of the fundamental states. Nonzero double modes
may indeed allow quantum effects arising from the imaginary part of
the action, which would not appear at the classical level [70].
As just observed, the role of chaos and noise predicted by the
dissipative model is confirmed in laboratory observations with
particular reference to the resting state of the brain, whose dynamics
shows fractal self-similarity [13, 19, 51, 71].
In conditions of low degree of openness of the brain toward the
environment, e.g., while dreaming, or under the effects of psychoactive
substances, during meditation, or in other states of reduced sensory
perception, the criticality of the dynamics is enhanced [6, 7, 72].
Chaotic trajectories through the memory space then depict visual brain
experiences occurring under such conditions. Indeed, these
experiences are often characterized by movie-like sequences of images,
with abrupt shifts from one image pattern to another. The truthfulness
and realism felt in these visual experiences can be discussed in terms of
the algebra of the doubling of the degrees of freedom. In the low
openness states of the brain, the self almost fails to perceive the Double
as distinct and their almost complete matching introduces a sort of
“truth evaluation function” out of which the truthfulness and the
realism of the visual experience is confirmed by the immediate and
univocal feedback [6, 7].
The strong influence on trajectories due to minimal changes in their
initial conditions leads us to consider the role of “doubt” [38, 59, 73] in
the dissipative model. The dialogue with the Double lives on the
continuous restructuring of the landscape of attractors, and this in turn
can induce, in a process of self-questioning and listening [73], weak
perturbations in the initial conditions of the trajectories with the
consequent manifestation of their divergence. In this process, brain
activity can be induced to leave other paths or to escape entrapment
(“fixations”) in one or another attractor. Doubts can well be understood
as wandering around the landscape of attractors caused by the
uncertainties linked to its constant redrawing, induced by the seduction
of new perspectives opened by the unfolding of a new trajectory,
questioning certainties acquired in previous perceptive experiences. It
is therefore this wandering (errare) in search of the possible, not
satisfied with what simply happens [60], a characteristic trait of brain
activity, of thinking (of pensare). This is why the brain is not a stupid
star. It rather behaves as an “erratic device”, a “mistake-making
machine” [74].

7 AI and Mistake-Making Machines. Spartacus

A machine is by definition and by construction a device that performs a
succession of temporally linked operations in a strictly predictive way,
like in a chain of logical steps. A machine that fails to go through such a
determined chain of steps is therefore a machine that does not work
properly and must be repaired or replaced. Brain activity, on the
contrary, as we have seen, proceeds by steps that do not necessarily
belong to a uniquely determined chain of steps.
Perhaps we might think then of the brain as a “mistake-making
machine” [74]. Our great privilege of being able to make mistakes has
its roots in the fact of wandering along chaotic trajectories in the
attractor landscape, out of which the unpredictability of the movements
of consciousness emerges, their being unfaithful to any pre-established
scheme, their inalienable subjectivity, and total autonomy. As
mentioned above, in the dissipative model the origin of the chaoticity of
the trajectories lies in the quantum nature of the dynamics [38, 43, 44].
In AI research, the problem for the construction of an “intelligent”
machine might therefore be just the problem of constructing a device
able to make mistakes, an “erratic device”. It is not a machine “not
properly functioning” or “out of order”. Its main usefulness is not in its
predictable behavior, but rather in the “novelties” appearing in its
behavior. The error, or mistake needs, however, to have the character of
being “exceptional” with respect to the normal or “correct” behavior of
the device (by definition, its stupid or boring behavior, Aristotle's
stupid star). The “novel” or “intelligent” solution to a given problem
proposed by the erratic device does not belong to the list of known
possible solutions to possible problems, included in the device’s basic
instructions. Those are the predictable solutions of, e.g., the AI
automatic pilot of an airplane. Such an automatic pilot must indeed be
replaced by a human pilot in the case of an unforeseen emergency,
requiring a solution which is “not on the list” of the automatic pilot.
In the above remarks, the reference to mistakes is not in the sense
of observer-related mistakes, but to mistakes arising intrinsically in the
behavior of erratic devices, not with respect to the expectations of the
observer [74].
For observer-related mistakes, it is known that the problem of
“right and wrong”, “true and false”, resides largely in the choice of the
model adopted by the observer. Within the adopted model, the theory
of the errors helps in the evaluation of the mistakes, also considering
the possible interferences of the observer with the measurement and
the phenomenon under study. The observer-related mistakes, in their
departure from the observer's expectations, may have the character of
“deviation” from the correct behavior. One might even define a trivial
mistake-making machine, namely a machine doing other than what is
expected by a single observer, and a non-trivial mistake-making
machine, doing other than what is expected by any observer [74].
For the non-observer-related mistakes, the unpredictability of the
mistake implies that it “cannot be expected or unexpected in any given
context” [74]. Thus it is neither a negation, nor a deviation. It is
“gratuitous”, not “derivable”, thus indicating a “non-computational”
activity of the device.
It is interesting to note how a certain conservative attitude,
confusing novelty with deviation, experiences the novelty as an attack
on one's own model (status quo) and not as an addition to this, which
may result in growth and strengthening of the model itself. However,
the other alternative is not excluded, namely that the pure conservative,
even if he does not confuse novelty with deviation, is against any
possible novelty to be on the safe side and not take the risk that the
novelty may invalidate the pre-existing model in whole or in part.
Summing up, we see that an intrinsic erratic device, producing non-
observer-related mistakes as described, “cannot be a Turing machine,
namely an algorithm generating mistakes. Indeed, it is not possible to
design an algorithm doing nothing but the expected result, even if such
a result is defined to be wrong with respect to certain criteria” [74].
 The question then arises whether it is possible to design non-
observer-related erratic devices. Remarkably, since the non-observer-
related mistake is a novelty, “an emergence” in the system behavior,
such a question may also be related to the one of designing
“emergence”, considered as a possible error appearing in mistake-
making processes [74].
The alternative to the intrinsic erratic device would just be a
prosthesis useful to help us in some of our physical or behavioral
deficiencies or to improve or enhance our limited abilities (an artificial
arm, possibly controlled through links to our nerves, a large capacity of
memories with a only very short time needed to sort one of them out, a
computer, an automatic pilot, a mobile phone, referred to as smart with
a subtle sense of humor, a robot, etc.), which is more or less what AI
provides at present.
Perhaps the program of constructing a conscious artificial device
goes through the construction of the intrinsic erratic device. If it is ever
going to be possible to build a device endowed with consciousness, it
must possess all the best properties that characterize the human being:
the unpredictability of his behavior, his ability to learn, but also his
infidelity, his inevitable involvement with the world, and his inalienable
freedom. And he/she must be called Spartacus [59, 74].

8 Concluding Remarks
Summarizing, we have seen that SBS implies the dynamical generation
of long-range correlation waves among the elementary components of
the system and that the associated quanta, the NG boson modes, are
massless. Their coherent condensation in the system's ground state is
responsible for the ordering observable there.
Symmetry corresponds to an invariance of the observable
properties of the system; the system states before and after the
symmetry transformation are “indistinguishable”. Order, which results
from a breakdown of symmetry, corresponds instead to the possibility
of distinguishing the state of the system before and after the symmetry
transformation; “diversity” thus arises. The scenario arising through
SBS in QFT is one of great richness of forms. The dynamical processes
leading to them, which we may refer to as morphogenetic processes,
actually describe the dynamical generation of many different
observable manifestations of the same basic dynamic equations, a
“proliferation of differences” in the world around us. It is the richness of
diversity, the praise of Babel.
Dissipative systems are not closed in on themselves. They exchange
energy, momenta, mass, etc., with their environment. Then in each of
them, the time translational invariance is broken, implying that the
origin of the time axis cannot be freely translated, whence time is no
longer a dummy variable [56, 75].
Dissipative systems are aging systems. History has its origin.
The many-body model of the brain and the dissipative quantum
model of the brain were born by applying the QFT formalism of SBS to
answer some of the open questions in neuroscience, as described in the
sections above.
The doubling of the degrees of freedom required by the
mathematical formalism for dissipative systems has led to the
introduction of a “mirror in time” image of the self, or Double.
In the dialogue with the Double, knowledge is built on the basis of
the experience accumulated in past perceptions. A perspective, or
vision of the world, arises from this. The intentionality that determines
our doing finds its root in updating a never definitive balance with the
world around us, generating meanings and meaningful relationships
with it.
It may happen that “the perfect exchange between inside and
outside” is realized, a “favorable connection” between the self and the
object. According to Desideri, this is the aesthetic experience [65]. The
aesthetic one is therefore not a particular experience, nor just any
experience, but [65] “it presents itself as a dimension that permeates
the entire field of our experience (and the perceptual texture that
configures the ‘landscape’)”.
Recognizing such an experience determines the aesthetic judgment
that “always involves the first person” [65]. The result is that of “taking
a new look at the world” [65], which is not alien, but rather, a
competitor with the cognitive dimension [31, 76]. The divergence of the
trajectory in the landscape of the attractors in fact guarantees that the
aesthetic experience is always new, and subversive compared to the
consolidation of already explored landscapes. The orientation it
expresses “is always awaiting renewal” [65] because the balancing of
flows, of which it is an expression, is a dynamical one, never definitive
[31]. The emotional response to the aesthetic experience thus
possesses a performative value in the intentional arc [65]. The aesthetic
experience is therefore a characteristic feature of brain dynamics [77].
Chaotic classical trajectories going through memory states
characterize brain dynamics, offering the brain the ability to provide
unpredictable behavior and answers to perceptual experiences. This
leads us to depict the brain as an intrinsically erratic device, able to
proceed by steps that are not linked by a strict, univocally determined
succession. As mentioned in Sect. 6 and observed by Freeman [69],
chaos does indeed play a relevant role in brain activity.
These properties of the brain’s functional activity seem difficult to
model within the framework of an AI research program. The same
motivation for the project of an intrinsically erratic AI device is difficult
to justify since such a device is in some sense just the opposite of the
obedient, loyal machine pursued in actual AI projects. The perfect robot
is required to be faithful and unfailing in pursuing the social, industrial,
or military tasks justifying the financial efforts supporting its
construction. Moreover, it needs to have a relatively short lifetime so as
not to saturate the market (a key requirement already applied to
smartphones, automobiles, TV sets, dishwashers, etc.). Once it has been
constructed (and sold), its commercial value must tend rapidly to zero
(and this is indeed the case). These realistic elements of “fragility”
inherent in AI devices make it difficult for them to be more than
prosthetics for some of our own physical deficiencies or disabilities, as
commented in Sect. 7. Unfortunately, AI projects today are still limited
to the design of “stupid stars”.
I would like to close with an observation on the brain–environment
frontier [78]. When the environment is made up of others, the question
is: where do “I” end and where do “the others” begin? The question
becomes even more radical when it comes from groups of people who
feel they have a “strong identity”: where do “we” end and where do
“they” begin?
Can we imagine the world without others? One possible answer is:
“No. We are all together, we ourselves are the others”. Or the opposite
answer: “Not them, just us. We come first, they are different from us”.
But the latter is not compatible with the openness of brain dynamics.
The closure it proposes is equivalent to suicide. The others are part of
our Double, too, namely of ourselves. “Their elimination” would be a
self-elimination. We belong to each other; all the richness of
imagination and creativity of the dialogue with the Double enters in our
mutual relationship. The brain has an inherent social dimension.
Finally, it is perhaps interesting here to quote a passage from
“Borges and I” [79] testifying to the broad imaginative horizon of the
dialogue between the self and its Double:

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to
[…] It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile
relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may
contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me […]
Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some
instant of myself can survive him […] Spinoza knew that all
things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to
be a stone and a tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in
myself (if it is true that I am someone) […] Years ago I tried to
free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the
suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games
belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things.
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything
belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.

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© The Author(s) 2022
F. Scardigli (ed.), Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85480-5_5

Hard Problem and Free Will: An

Information-Theoretical Approach
Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano1 and Federico Faggin2
(1) Dipartimento Di Fisica, University of Pavia, via Bassi 6,
27100 Pavia, Italy
(2) Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, San Francisco, USA

Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano

Email: [email protected]

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is
rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare

Abstract
We explore definite theoretical assertions about consciousness, starting
from a non-reductive psycho-informational solution of David
Chalmers's hard problem, based on the hypothesis that a fundamental
property of “information" is its experience by the supporting “system".
The kind of information involved in consciousness needs to be quantum
for multiple reasons, including its intrinsic privacy and its power of
building up thoughts by entangling qualia states. As a result we reach a
quantum-information-based panpsychism, with classical physics
supervening on quantum physics, quantum physics supervening on
quantum information, and quantum information supervening on
consciousness.
We then argue that the internally experienced quantum state, since it
corresponds to a definite experience–not to a random choice–must be
pure, and we call it ontic. This should be distinguished from the state
predictable from the outside (i.e., the state describing the knowledge of
the experience from the point of view of an external observer), which
we call epistemic and is generally mixed. Purity of the ontic state
requires an evolution that is purity preserving, namely a so-called
atomic quantum operation. The latter is generally probabilistic, and its
particular outcome is interpreted as free will, which is unpredictable
even in principle since quantum probability cannot be interpreted as
lack of knowledge. We also see how the same purity of state and
evolution allow one to solve the well-known combination problem of
panpsychism.
Quantum state evolution accounts for a short-term buffer of
experience and itself contains quantum-to-classical and classical-to-
quantum information transfers. Long term memory, on the other hand,
is classical, and needs memorization and recall processes that are
quantum-to-classical and classical-to-quantum, respectively. Such
processes can take advantage of multiple copies of the experienced
state re-prepared with “attention", and therefore allowing for a better
quality of classical storage.
Finally, we explore the possibility of experimental tests of our
theory in the cognitive sciences, including the evaluation of the number
of qubits involved, the existence of complementary observables, and
violations of local-realism bounds.
In the appendices we succinctly illustrate the operational
probabilistic theory (OPT) framework for possible post-quantum
theories of consciousness, assessing the convenient black-box approach
of the OPT, along with its methodological robustness in separating
objective from theoretical elements, guaranteeing experimental control
and falsifiability. We finally synthetically compare the mathematical
postulates and theorems of the most relevant instances of OPTs–i.e.
classical and quantum theories–to help the reader get a better
understanding our theory of consciousness. The mathematical notation
is provided in a handy table in the appendices.
1 A Quantum-Informational Panpsychism
In his book The Character of Consciousness [1] David Chalmers states
what he calls the hard problem of consciousness, namely the issue of
explaining our experience–sensorial, bodily, mental, and emotional,
including any stream of thoughts. Chalmers contrasts the hard problem
with the easy problems which, as in all sciences, can be tackled in terms
of a mechanistic approach that is useless for the problem of experience.
Indeed, in all sciences we always seek explanations in terms of
functioning, a concept that is entirely independent from the notion of
experience. Chalmers writes:

Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by

experience?

Why doesn't all of this information processing go on “in the dark”

free of any inner feel?

There is an explanation gap between the function and the

experience.

An effective paradigm for grasping the conceptual gap between

“experience” and “functioning” is that of the zombie, which is
behaviourally indistinguishable from a conscious being, but
nevertheless has no inner experience.
There are currently two main lines of response to the hard problem:
(1) the physicalist view–with consciousness “emergent from a
functioning”, such as some biological property of life [2]; (2) the
panpsychist view–with consciousness as a fundamental feature of the
world that all entities have. What is proposed here is:
Panpsychism with consciousness as a fundamental feature of
“information”, and physics supervening on information.
The idea that physics is a manifestation of pure information
processing has been strongly advocated by John Wheeler [3] and
Richard Feynman [4, 5], along with several other authors, including
David Finkelstein [6], who was particularly fond of this idea [7]. Only
quite recently, however, has the new informational paradigm for
physics been concretely established. This program achieved: (1) the
derivation of quantum theory as an information theory [8–10], and (2)
the derivation of free quantum field theory as emergent from the
nontrivial quantum algorithm with denumerable systems with minimal
algorithmic complexity [11, 12].1 In addition to such methodological
value, the new information-theoretic derivation of quantum field
theory is particularly promising for establishing a theoretical
framework for quantum gravity as emergent from the quantum
information processing, as also suggested by the role played by
information in the holographic principle [14, 15]. To sum up, the
physical world emerges from an underlying algorithm, and the kind of
information that is processed beneath it is quantum.
The idea that quantum theory (QT) could be regarded as an
information theory is a relatively recent one [16], and originated within
the field of quantum information [17]. Meanwhile what we call
“information theory” has largely evolved, from its origins as a
communication theory [18], toward a general theory of “processing” of
information, which had previously been the sole domain of computer
science.
What do we mean by “information theory”?
Recently, both in physics and in computer science (which in the
meantime connected with quantum information), the theoretical
framework for all information theories emerged in the physics
literature in terms of the notion of operational probabilistic theory
(OPT) [9, 10, 19], an isomorphic framework that emerged within
computer science in terms of category theory [20–25]. Indeed, the
mathematical framework of an information theory is precisely that of
the OPT, whichever information theory we consider–either classical,
quantum, or “post-quantum". The main structure of OPT is reviewed in
the Appendix.2
Among the information theories, classical theory (CT) plays a
special role. In fact, besides being itself an OPT, CT enters the
operational framework in terms of objective outcomes of the theory,
which for causal OPTs (like QT and CT) can be used to conditioning the
choice of a subsequent transformation within a set. Clearly this also
happens in the special case of QT. Thus, the occurrence of a given
outcome can be regarded as a quantum-to-classical information
exchange, whereas conditioning constitutes a classical-to-quantum
information exchange. We conclude that we should regard the physical
world as faithfully ruled by both quantum and classical theories
together, with information transforming between the two types.
This theoretical description of reality should be contrasted with the
usual view of reality as being quantum, creating a fallacy of misplaced
concreteness. The most pragmatic point of view is to regard QT and CT
together as the correct information theory to describe reality, without
incurring any logical paradox. We will use this idea in the rest of the
chapter. Due to the implicit role played by CT in any OPT, when we
mention CT we intend to designate the special corresponding OPT.
We will call the present view, with consciousness as fundamental
for information and physics supervening on quantum information,
quantum-information panpsychism.
In place of QT, one may consider a post-quantum OPT–e.g. RQT (QT
on real Hilbert spaces), FQT (fermionic QT), PRB (an OPT built on
Popescu-Rohrlich boxes [26]), etc. [10], yet some of the features of the
present consciousness theory can be translated into the other OPT, as
long as the notion of “entanglement” survives in the considered OPT.

2 A Non-reductive Psycho-Informational
Solution: General Principles
The fundamental nature of the solution to the hard problem proposed
here has been suggested by David Chalmers as satisfying the following
requirements [1]:
Chalm1: Consciousness as fundamental entity, not explained in terms of
anything simpler …
Chalm2: a non reductive theory of experience will specify basic
principles that tell us how basic experience depends on physical
features of the world.
Chalm3: These psychophysical principles will not interfere with
physical laws (closure of physics). Rather they will be a supplement to
physical theory.
 In an information-theoretic framework, in which physics
supervenes on information, our principle will be Psychoinformational
(see Chalm3). The non-reductive (Chalm2) Psychoinformational
principle that is proposed here is the following:
P1: Psychoinformational principle: Consciousness is the information
system's experience of its own information state and processing.
As we will soon see, it is crucial that the kind of information that is
directly experienced be quantum.
Principle P1 may seem ad hoc, but the same happens with the
introduction of any fundamental quantity (Chalm1,2) in physics, e.g., the
notions of inertial mass, electric charge, etc. Principle P1 asserts that
experience is a fundamental feature of information, hence also of
physics, which supervenes on it. P1 is not reductive (Chalm2), and it
does not affect physics (Chalm3), since the kind of information involved
in physics is quantum + classical. On the other hand, P1 supplements
physics (Chalm3), since the latter supervenes on information theory.
It is now natural to ask: what are the systems? Indeed, information is
everywhere: light strikes objects and thereafter reaches our eyes,
providing us with information about those objects: colour, position,
shape, and so on; information is supported by a succession of systems:
the light modes, followed by the retina, then the optical nerves, and
finally the several bottom-up and top-down visual processes occurring
in the brain. Though the final answer may have to come from
neuroscience, molecular biology, and cognitive science experiments, we
can use the present OPT approach to inspire crucial experiments. OPT
has the power of being a black-box method that does not need the
detailed “physical" specification of the systems, and this is a great
advantage! Moreover, our method tackles the problem in terms of a
purely in-principle reasoning, independent of the “hardware"
supporting information, exactly as we do in information theory. Such
hardware independence makes the approach particularly well suited to
address a problem as fundamental as the problem of consciousness.
We now proceed with the second principle:
P2: Privacy principle: experience is not shareable, even in principle.
 Principle P2 plays a special role in selecting which information
theories are compatible with a theory of consciousness. Our experience
is indeed not shareable: this is a fact. We hypothesize that that non
shareability of experience holds in principle, not just as a technological
limitation.3A crucial fact is that information shareability is equivalent to
information readability with no disturbance.4 Recently it has been
proved that the only theory where any information can be extracted
without disturbance is classical information theory [28]. We conclude
that P2 implies that a theory of consciousness needs nonclassical
information theory, namely QT, or else a “post-quantum” OPT.
Here we will consider the best known instance of OPT, namely QT.
As we will see, such a choice of theory turns out to be very powerful in
accounting for all the main features of consciousness. We state this
choice of theory as a principle:
P2′: Quantumness of experience: the information theory of
consciousness is quantum theory.
Note that classical theory always accompanies any OPT, so there will
be exchanges and conversions of classical and quantum information.
We now introduce a third principle:
P3: Psycho-purity principle: the state of the conscious system is pure.
P3 may seem arbitrary if one misidentifies experience with the
knowledge of it. The actual experience is ontic and definite. It is ontic, à
la Descartes ( Cogito, ergo sum …). The existence of our experience is
surely something that everybody would agree on, something we can be
sure of. It is definite, in the sense that one has only a single experience
at a time–not a probability distribution of experiences. The latter would
describe the knowledge of somebody else's experience. The experience of
a blurred coin is just as definite as the experience of a sharp coin since
they are two different definite experiences. It is knowledge of the face
of the coin that is definite, and this is only achieved if the image of the
coin is sufficiently sharp, otherwise it would be represented in
probabilistic terms, e.g. by the mixed state TAIL + HEAD, based on a
fair-coin hypothesis (see Fig. 1). We can thus understand that, by the
same definition, the notion of mixture is an epistemic one, based on our
prior knowledge about the coin having two possible states. In short:
Fig. 1 Illustration of the notions of ontic and epistemic states for a system given by a classical
bit, here represented by a coin, with states 0 = HEAD or 1 = TAIL. We call ontic the “actual” state
of the system, which is pure and generally unknown, except as an unshareable experience (in
the figure it is the coin state HEAD covered by the hand). We call epistemic the state that
represents the knowledge about the system of an outside observer, e.g. the state of the unbiased
coin corresponds to HEAD + TAIL

1. Experience is described by an ontic quantum state, which is pure.

2. Knowledge is described by an epistemic quantum state, which is

generally mixed.

We will see later how principle P3 is crucial for solving the

combination problem.
We now state our fourth principle, which is theory independent:
P4: Qualia principle: experience is made of structured qualia.
Qualia (phenomenal qualitative properties) are the building blocks
of conscious experience. Their existence has so far remained
inexplicable within the traditional scientific framework. Their privacy
and ineffability are notorious. Qualia are structured: some of them are
more fundamental than others, e.g., spectrum colours, sound pitch, the
five different kinds of taste buds (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami),
somatic sensations (pain, pleasure, etc.), basic emotions (sadness,
happiness, etc.). Qualia are compositional, with internal structures that
generally partially determine their qualitative nature. They are
connected by different relations, forming numerous complex
structures, such as thoughts and emotions. Since we regard
consciousness as the direct fruition of a very structured kind of
quantum information (we are the system supporting such final
information), then, according to principle P1, qualia correspond to
information states “felt” by the aware system, and according to
principles P2 and P2′, such states are quantum states of such systems.
S1: Qualia are described by ontic pure quantum states.
We will see in Sect. 3 how quantum entanglement can account for
organizing nontrivial qualia. The qualia space would thus be the Hilbert
space of the systems involved in the quale.
Classical information coming from the environment through the
senses is ultimately converted into quantum information which is
experienced as qualia. The inverse quantum-to-classical transformation
is also crucial in converting structures within qualia into logical and
geometric representations expressible with classical information to
communicate free-will choices to classical structures. For such
purposes, the interaction with the memory of past experiences may be
essential, for, as we shall see, memory is classical.
Finally, we come to the problem of free will. First we must specify
that free will, contrary to consciousness, produces public effects which
are classical manifestations of quantum information. Since the
manifestation is classical, the possible choices of the conscious agent
are in principle jointly perfectly discriminable.5
We then state what we mean by free.
S2: Will is free if its unpredictability by an external observer cannot
be interpreted in terms of lack of knowledge.6
In particular, statement S2 implies that the actual choice of the
entity exercising its free will cannot in principle be predicted with
certainty by any external observer. One can immediately recognise that
if one regards the choice as a random variable, it cannot be a classical
one, which can always be interpreted as lack of knowledge. On the
other hand, it fits perfectly the case of quantum randomness, which
cannot be interpreted as such.7

3 Qualia: The Role of Entanglement

According to statement S1, qualia are described by ontic quantum
states and, being pure states, we can represent them by normalised
vectors in the Hilbert space of system . For the sake of
illustration we consider two simple cases of qualia: direction and
colour. These examples should not be taken literally,8 but only for the
sake of illustrating of the concept that the linear combinations of qualia
can give rise to new complex qualia.

Fig. 2 Illustration of how qualia superpose to make new qualia. Left: The Bloch sphere
illustrates the case of direction qualia. Summing and subtracting the quale “up” and the quale
“down”, we obtain the qualia “right” and “left”, respectively. Similarly, if we make the same
combinations with the imaginary unit in front of “down” we obtain the qualia “front” and
“back”. Summing with generic complex amplitudes and (with ), we get the
quale corresponding to a generic direction, corresponding to a generic pure state . Right:
Summations of two members of the three-colour basis red, green, and blue (RGB), and
subtraction of two of the three colours cyan, magenta and yellow (CMY). As explained in the
main text, these examples are only intended to illustrate the notion of a linear combination of
quantum ontic states to make new ontic states corresponding to new qualia. A third case of
superposition is that of sounds with precise frequency that combine with addition and
subtraction into timbres and chords. Notice that all three cases fit the wave aspect of reality, not
the particle one

We have said that qualia combine to make new qualia, and thoughts
and emotions themselves are structured qualia. Superimposing two
different kinds of qualia in an entangled way produces new kinds of
qualia. Indeed, consider the superposition of a red up-arrow with a
green down-arrow. This is not a yellow right-arrow as one might
expect, since the latter corresponds to the independent superposition
of direction and colour, as in the following equation:
(1)
 We would have instead

(2)

where the ket with the blue star represents a completely new qualia. In
a more general case, we have a state vector with triple or quadruple or
more entanglement in a factor of a tensor product, and more generally,
every system is entangled, e.g.
(3)
We can see how in this fashion one can achieve new kinds of qualia
whose number grows exponentially with the number of systems. In
fact, the number of different ways of entangling systems
corresponds to the number of partitions of into integers, multiplied
by the number of permutations of the systems, and therefore it grows
as , and this without considering the variable vectors
that can be entangled!
Since qualia correspond to pure states of conscious systems, their
Hilbert space coincides with the multidimensional Hilbert space of the
system. Experimentally, one may be able to locate the systems in terms
of neural patterns, but we will never be able to read the encoded
information without destroying the person's experience, while at best
gaining only a single complementary side of the qualia, out of
exponentially many. In short:
System identification is possible, but not the “experience” within.

The fact that it is possible to identify the information system proves

that the identity of the observer/agent is public and is thus correlated
with its “sense of self," which is instead private. This is a crucial
requirement for a unified theory of consciousness and free will, namely
that the observer/agent be identifiable both privately–from within and
through qualia–and publicly–from without and through information.
Within QT (or post-quantum OPTs), this is possible.

4 Evolution of Consciousness and Free Will

Since the quantum state of a conscious system must be pure at all
times, the only way to guarantee that the evolving system state remains
pure is for the evolution itself to be pure (technically it is atomic, i.e.
namely its CP-map has a single Krauss operator ).
Note that both states and effects are also transformations from trivial to
non trivial systems and viceversa, respectively. In Table 1 we report the
theoretical representations of the three kinds of ontic transformations,
including the special cases of state and effect.
Table 1 Notations for the three kinds of ontic transformation (for the meaning of the symbols,
see Table 2). For the list of axioms and the main theorems of quantum theory, see Tables 3 and
4

Now consider the general scenario of a composite conscious system

in an ontic state at time , evolved by the one-step ontic
transformation with outcome , depending on classical input
from the senses and memory9

(4)

The epistemic transformation would be the sum of all ontic ones

corresponding to all possible outcomes:

(5)

The outcome is a classical output, and we identify it with the free

will of the experiencing system.
It is a probabilistic outcome that depends on the previous history of
the qualia of the system. Its randomness is the quantum kind, which
means that it cannot be interpreted as lack of knowledge, and, as such, it
is free. Notice that both mathematically and literally the free will is the
outcome of a transformation that corresponds to a change of
experience of the observer/agent. The information conversion from
quantum to classical can also take into account a stage of “knowledge of
the will” corresponding to “intention/purpose", namely
“understanding" of which action is taken.
We may need to provide a more refined representation of the one-
step ontic transformation of the evolution in terms of a quantum
circuit, for example:

(6)

Generally for each time we have a different circuit. In the example

in circuit (6) we see that a single step can also contain states and
effects, and the output system of the whole circuit ( in the present
case) is generally different (not even isomorphic) to the input systems
. Following the convention used for the ontic transformation
the lower index is a random outcome,10 and the upper index
is a parameter on which the transformation generally depends.
Overall in circuit (6) we have free will , whereas the
transformations , and are deterministic (they have no
lower index), and do not contribute to the free will; the same goes for
the transformation which depends on the sensorial input . In
circuit (6), we can see that classical information is also at work, since,
e.g., the transformation depends on the outcome of the
transformation . Similarly, the choice of test depends on the
outcome of , and the state depends on the effect outcome .
Each element of the circuit is ontic, i.e. atomic, and atomicity of
sequential and parallel composition guarantee that the whole
transformation is itself atomic. This means that its Krauss operator
can be written as the product of the Krauss operators of the component
transformations as follows
(7)
where . Note that in the expression for the
operator in Eq. (7) the operators from the input to the output are
written from the right to the left, the way we compose operators on
Hilbert spaces. Moreover, the expression (7) of is not unique,
since it depends on the choice of foliation of the circuit, namely the way
you cover all wires with leaves to divide the circuit into input–output
sections. For example, Eq. (7) would correspond to the foliation in
Fig. 3.

Fig. 3 Quantum circuit foliation corresponding to Eq. (7)

A different foliation, for example, is the one reported in Fig. 4,

corresponding to the expression for

(8)

Fig. 4 Quantum circuit foliation corresponding to the expression for Eq. (8)

Recall that all operators (including kets and bras as operators from
and to the trivial Hilbert space ) are contractions, i.e., they have norm
bounded by 1, corresponding to marginal probabilities not greater than
1. Thus, also is itself a contraction. Contractivity for an operator
can be conveniently expressed as
(9)
Now, since the evolution of consciousness must be atomic at all
times, we can write a whole consciousness history as the product of the
Krauss operators at all previous times

(10)

and apply the history operator to the wavevector of the initial ontic
state-vector
(11)
The squared norm of the vector is the probability of the
full history of conscious states and also of the free-
will history
(12)

5 Memory
The ontic evolution of the consciousness state, though it maintains
coherence, can keep very limited quantum memory of experience. The
latter, due to contractivity of , will go down very fast as
, i.e., it will decrease exponentially with the number of
time-steps. The quantum memory intrinsic in the ontic evolution
instead works well as a short-term buffer to build up a fuller
experience–e.g., of a landscape, or of a detailed object, or even to detect
motion. How many qubits will make such a single-step buffer? The
answer is: not so many.11 Indeed, if we open our eyes for just a second
to look at an unknown scene, and thereafter we are asked to answer
binary questions, we would get only a dozen of right answers better
than chance. Tor Nørretranders writes [31]: The bandwidth of
consciousness is far lower than the bandwidth of our sensory perceptors.
… Consciousness consists of discarded information far more than
information present. There is hardly any information left in our
consciousness.12
We can reasonably deduce that there is actually no room for long-
term memory in consciousness, and we conclude that:
S3: Memory is classical. Only the short-term buffer to collect each
experience is quantum.
By “short” we mean comparable to the time in which we collect the
full experience, namely of the order of a second.

Transferring quantum experience to classical memory

If we have quantum experiences and classical memory, we need to
convert information from quantum to classical in the memorization
process, and from classical to quantum in the recollection process. The
first process, namely transferring quantum experience to classical
memory, must necessarily be incomplete, otherwise it would violate the
quantum no-cloning theorem. The Holevo theorem [33] establishes that
the maximal amount of classical information that can be extracted from
a quantum system is a number of bits equal to the number of qubits
that constitute the quantum system. Obviously, such maximal classical
information is infinitesimal compared to the continuum of classical
information needed to communicate a quantum state classically!
From a single measurement one can extract classical information
about just one of the continuum of complementary aspects of the
quantum state, e.g. along a given direction for a spin. Moreover, the
state after the measurement would necessarily be disturbed,13 due to
the information-disturbance tradeoff.14 So, which measurement should
one perform to collect the best classical information from a quantum
system?
The answer is easy for a single qubit. Just perform the usual von
Neumann measurement along a random direction! This has been
proved in [35].15 For higher dimensions it is in principle possible to
generalise this result. However, the probability space turns out to be
geometrically much more complicated than a sphere,16 and a scheme
for random choice is unknown. For this reason we can consider the
larger class of observation tests referred to as informationally complete
(“infocomplete"),17 which, unlike the case of the optimal measurement
of spin direction, can be taken as discrete and with a finite number of
outcomes. Such a measurement would correspond to the following
epistemic transformation:

(13)

which is the coarse graining of the infocomplete quantum test

, with , where is an infocomplete
observation test. “Infocomplete” means that, in the limit of infinitely
many usages over the same reprepared state, the measurement allows
one to perform a full tomography [36] of the state.
The infocomplete measurement (or the random observables seen
before) is better suited to extract classical information from the
quantum buffer for long-term memory, since it does not privilege any
particular observable. It is also likely that the conscious act of
memorising an experience may be achieved by actually repreparing the
ontic state multiple times in the quantum buffer, and performing the
infocomplete test multiple times, thus with the possibility of
memorising a (possibly partial) tomography of the state. Notice that,
generally, the ontic state for a given still depends on .
However, the test will disturb it, and the less disturbance, the smaller
the amount of classical information that can be extracted [34].18

Transferring classical memory to quantum experience

We have seen that an infocomplete measurement is needed to

(approximately) store an experience in the classical long-term memory.
By definition, the recovery of an experience requires a reproduction of
it, meaning that the corresponding ontic state is (approximately)
reprepared from the classical stored data. The memory, being classical,
will be read without disturbance, thus left available for following
recollections. In order to transfer classical to quantum information,
methods of state-preparation have been proposed in terms of quantum
circuit schemes [38].
A possible benchmark for the memory store-and-recall process is
the maximal fidelity achievable in principle with a measure-and-
reprepare scheme that optimises the fidelity between the experienced
state and the recalled one. We will consider input copies of the
same state to quantify attention to the experience. The optimal
fidelity19 between the experienced state and the recalled one averaged
over all possible experiences (i.e., input states) is given by [39]

(15)

where is the dimension of the experiencing system20.

Such an upper bound for fidelity may be used to infer an effective
dimension of the system involved in consciousness, e.g. in highly
focused restricted experiences like those involved in masking conscious
perception [40].

Information transfer from body to consciousness and vice versa

We would expect most of the operation of the human body to be

automatic and use classical information that is never translated into
quantum information to be experienced by consciousness. The portion
of the classical information produced by the body that needs to be
converted into quantum should only be the salient information that
supports the qualia perception and comprehension necessary to “live
life" and make appropriate free-will choices. The amount of quantum
information to be translated into classical for the purpose of free-will
control of the body top-down should be relatively small.

6 On the Combination Problem

The combination problem concerns the issue about whether and how the
fundamental conscious minds come to compose, constitute, or give rise to
some other, additional conscious mind [41]. By definition, the problem
becomes crucial for panpsychism: if consciousness is everywhere, what
is the criterion for selecting novel conscious individuals? Is the union of
two conscious beings a conscious being? If this is true, then any subset
of a conscious being can also be a conscious being. The present
theoretical approach provides a precise individuation criterion. The
criterion derives from principle P3 about the purity of quantum
conscious states and, consequently, the need for ontic transformations.
Let's see how it works.
It is reasonable to say that an individual is defined by the continuity
of its experience. Such a statement may be immediately obvious to some
readers. However, for those who may not agree, we propose a thought
experiment.
Consider a futuristic “quantum teleportation experiment”, meaning
that the quantum state of a system is replaced by that of a remote
isomorphic system.21 The matter (electrons, protons, etc.) of which a
teleported person is composed is available at the receiver location and is
in-principle indistinguishable from the same matter at the transmission
location: indeed, it is only its quantum state that is teleported. The
resulting individual would be the same as the original one, including his
thoughts and memory.22
The above thought experiment suggests the following individuation
criterion within our theoretical approach:
S4: A conscious mind is a composite system in an ontic state
undergoing an ontic transformation, with no subsystem as such.
In Figs. 5 and 6 we illustrate the use of the criterion in two
paradigmatic cases. Here we emphasise that the role of interactions is
crucial for the criterion.

Fig. 5 The combination problem. Stated generally, the problem is about how fundamental
conscious minds come to compose, constitute, or give rise to some further conscious mind. The
ontic-state principle P1 provides a partial criterion to exclude some situations, e.g. (figure on
the left), two entangled systems cannot separately be conscious entities, since each one is in a
marginal state of an entangled one, hence it is necessarily mixed. On the other hand, (figure on
the right), if two systems are in a factorized pure state, each system is in an ontic state, and they
are two single individuals. They will then remain so depending on their following interactions
(see Fig. 6)

Fig. 6 The combination problem. The general individuation criterion in statement S4

requires full quantum coherence, namely the ontic nature of both states and transformations. In
the case depicted in this figure, every transformation (including effects and states as special
cases) is pure, and we suppose each multipartite transformation is not factorizable. Then the
first two boxes on the left represent two separate individuals. The box in the middle merges the
two individuals into a single one, whereas the immediately subsequent effects convert quantum
to classical information, and separate the single individual into the original separate ones once
again. Notice that a merging of two individuals necessarily involves a quantum interaction
This section has described what is necessary to form a combination
of conscious entities, thus removing the difficulties encountered with
panpsychist models based on classical physics. The key idea is that the
states of the combining systems and their transformations be ontic and
that such systems interact quantumly. These requirements assure that
the combined entity is also in a pure state and that none of its subsets
are conscious. Clearly, the interactions between the conscious entity and
the environment (including other entities) can only be classical,
otherwise a larger entity would be created and would persist for as
long as a disentangling transformation does not occur, as in the case
illustrated in Fig. 6.

7 Experimentability and Simulability

Proposing feasible experiments regarding the quantum nature of
consciousness is a very exciting challenge. In principle, quantumness
could be established through experimental demonstration of one of the
two main nonclassical features of quantum theory: nonlocality and
complementarity. The two notions are not independent, since in order
to prove nonlocality, we need complementary observations, in addition
to shared entanglement.
In order to prove nonlocality of consciousness, we need
measurements at two separate points sufficiently far apart to exclude
causal connection, and such a requirement is very challenging, since it
demands very fast measurements, considering that, for a distance of
3 cm between the measurements points, a time-difference of a tenth of
a nanosecond is sufficient to have signalling.
Regarding nonlocality together with complementarity, we speculate
that they may together be involved in 3D vision, and take the
opportunity to suggest that such a line of research may in any case be a
fruitful field of experimental research on consciousness.23 For example,
a genuine case of complementarity in 3D experience occurs as a result
of looking at Magic Eye images published in a series of books [44].
These images feature autostereograms, which allow most people to see
3D images by focusing on 2D patterns that seem to have nothing in
common with the 3D image that emerges from them. The viewer must
diverge or converge his eyes in order to see a hidden three-dimensional
image within the patterns. The 3D image that shows up in the
experience is like a glassy object that, depending on convergence or
divergence of the eyes, shows up as either concave or convex. Clearly
the two alternative 3D views–convex and concave–are truly
complementary experiences, and each experience has an intrinsic
wholeness.
Regarding complementarity alone, speculative connections with
contrasting or opposite dimensions of human experience have been
considered in the literature, e.g. “analysis" versus “synthesis", and
“logic" versus “intuition" [45]. Here, however, we are interested in
complementary in experiences possibly reproducible in different
individuals, of the kind of gedanken-experiments a la Heisenberg, e.g. one
experience incompatible with another and/or disturbing each other.
Having something more than two complementary observables, namely
an informationally complete set of measurements such as all three Pauli
matrices for a single consciousness qubit, would allow us to carry out a
quantum tomography [36] of the qubit state, assuming that this is
reprepared many times, e.g. through intense prolonged attention. To
our knowledge, the feasibility assessment of this kind of experiment is
of similar difficulty to a nonlocality experiment.
Finally, apart from proving the quantumness of experience, we can
at least experimentally infer some theoretical parameters in the
quantum theoretical approach consistent with observations. This is the
case e.g. of the experiment already mentioned when discussing the
upper bound (15) in memory-recall fidelity, which can be used to
inferring an effective dimension of the system involved in
consciousness in highly focused restricted experiences, such as
masking conscious perception [40]. We believe that memory-recall
experiments versus variables such as attention, memory-recovery
delay, and variable types of qualia, may be helpful to make a
preliminary mapping of the dimensionality of the spaces of the
conscious systems involved.
We conclude with a few considerations about the feasibility of a
simulation of a conscious process like the ones proposed here. As
already mentioned, due to the purity of the ontic process, a simulation
just needs multiplications of generally rectangular matrices, which for
matrices with the same dimension is essentially a process. For
sparse matrices (as is often the case in a quantum simulation) the
process can be speeded up considerably. However, to determine the
probability distribution of each ontic step, one needs to evaluate the
conditional probability for the output state of the previous step, and
this involves the multiplication for all possible outcomes (the free will)
of the corresponding Kraus operator of the last ontic transformation.
With a RAM of the order of Gbytes one could definitely operate with a
dozen qubits at a time. This should be compared with 53 qubits of the
Google or IBM quantum computer, the largest currently available, likely
to share classical information in tandem with a large classical computer.
However, it is not excluded that some special phenomena could already
be discovered/analyzed with a laptop.
8 Philosophical Implications
We have presented a theory of consciousness, based on principles,
assumptions, and key concepts that we consider crucial for the
robustness of the theory and the removal of the limitations of most
panpsychist theories [41]. We believe that conferring inner reality and
agency on quantum systems in pure quantum states, with conversion of
information from classical to quantum and vice versa, is
unprecedented, with major philosophical and scientific consequences.
In the present approach free will and consciousness go hand in hand,
allowing a system to act on the basis of its qualia experience by
converting quantum to classical information, and thus giving causal
power to subjectivity–something that until now has been considered
highly controversial, if not impossible.
The theory provides that a conscious agent may intentionally
convert quantum information into a specific piece of classical
information to express its free will, a classical output that is in principle
unpredictable due to its quantum origin. The theory would be
incoherent without the identification of the conscious system in terms
of purity and inseparability of the quantum state, which is identified
with the systems experience. The purity of non-deterministic quantum
evolution identifies consciousness with agency through its outcome.
Metaphysically, the proposed interpretation that a pure, non-
separable quantum state is a state of consciousness could be turned on
its head by assuming the ontology of consciousness and agency as
primary, whereupon physics would be emergent from consciousness
and agency. This same interpretation would then consider classical
physics to be the full reification (objectification) of quantum reality as
quantum-to-classical agency corresponding to the free will of conscious
entities existing entirely in the quantum realm. The ontology derived by
accepting consciousness as fundamental would be that objectivity and
classical physics supervene on quantum physics, quantum physics
supervenes on quantum information, and quantum information
supervenes on consciousness. If we were to accept this speculative
view, physics could then be understood as describing an open-ended
future not yet existing because the free-will choices of the conscious
agents have yet to be made. In this perspective, we, as conscious beings,
are the co-creators of our physical world. We do so individually and
collectively, instant after instant and without realizing it, by our free-
will choices.

Appendices about general OPTs

In these appendices we provide a general operational probabilistic

framework for future post-quantum explorations of a theory of
consciousness. We give here a short illustration of what constitutes an
operational probabilistic theory (OPT), with quantum theory and
classical theory being the most relevant instances. As the reader may
appreciate, OPT provides a framework that is much richer, more
general, flexible, and more mathematically rigorous that other
theoretical frameworks, such as the causal approach of Tononi [46].

The operational probabilistic theory (OPT) framework

It is not an overstatement to say that the OPT framework represents a

new Galilean revolution for the scientific method. In fact, it is the first
time that a theory-independent set of rules is established on how to
build a theory in physics and possibly in other sciences. Such rules
constitute what is called the operational framework. Its rigour is
established by the simple fact that the OPT is just “metamathematics",
since it is a chapter of category theory [47, 48]. To be precise the largest
class of OPTs corresponds to a monoidal braided category. The fact that
the same categoric framework is used in computer science [49–53]
gives an idea of the thoroughness and range of applicability of the rules
of the OPT.
In several seminal papers, Lucien Hardy [54–56] introduced a
heuristic framework that can be regarded as a forerunner of the OPT,
which made its first appearance in [8, 9] and was soon connected to the
categorical approach in computer science [20–25]. As already
mentioned, both QT and CT are OPTs [10], but one can build up other
OPTs, such as variations of QT, e.g., fermionic QT [57], or QT on real
Hilbert space [10], or QT with only qubits, but also CT with
entanglement [58] or without local discriminability [59]. Other toy-
theories, such as the PR-Boxes, are believed to be completable to OPTs
(see e.g., [60]).
 The connection of OPT with computer science reflects the spirit of
the OPT, which was essentially born on top of the new field of quantum
information. Indeed, the OPT framework is the formalization of the
rules for building up quantum circuits and for associating a joint
probability to them: in this way, the OPT literally becomes an extension
of probability theory.

The general idea

How does an OPT work? It associates to each joint probability of

multiple events a closed directed acyclic graph (CDAG) of input–output
relations, as in the Fig. 7. Each event (e.g., in the figure) is an
element of a complete test ( in the figure) with normalized
marginal probability . The graph tells us that the
marginal probability distribution of any set of tests still depends on the
marginalized set, e.g., the marginal probability distribution of test
depends on the full graph of tests to which it is connected,
although it has been partially or fully marginalised. As a rule,
disconnected graphs (like and in Fig. 7) are statistically
independent, i.e., their probability distributions factorize.
Fig. 7 An OPT associates a closed directed acyclic graph (CDAG) of output-input relations with
each joint probability distribution of multiple tests/events (see text). As a rule, unconnected
graph components are statistically independent, e.g., in the case in the figure, one has

The oriented wires denoting output-input connections between the

tests (labeled by Roman letters in Fig. 7), are the so called systems of the
theory.

A paradigmatic quantum example

A paradigmatic example of an OPT graph is given in Fig. 8. There, we
have a source of particles all with spin up (namely in the state
. At the output we have two von Neumann measurements24
in cascade, the first one measuring , and the second one
measuring , where and can assume either of the two values
. The setup is represented by the graph shown in the figure, where
represents the system corresponding to the particle spin, the
deterministic test that simply discards the particle, and the two tests
the two von Neuman measurements. Now, clearly,
for one has the marginal probability distribution
and independently of the choice of the test . On the
other hand, for the second test one has marginal probability
for and for . We conclude that the
marginal probability of is independent of the choice of the test ,
whereas the marginal probability of depends on the choice of .
Thus, the marginal probability of generally depends on the choice
of , and this concept goes beyond the content of joint probability,
and needs the OPT graph. Theoretically, we conclude that there is
“something flying" from test to test (although we cannot see it!):
this is what we describe theoretically as a spinning particle! This well
illustrates the notion of system: a theoretical connection between tested
events.

Fig. 8 A simple OPT graph. A paradigmatic example for the sake of illustration and for
motivation (see text)

A black-box approach

Finally, the OPT is a black-box approach, where each test is described by

a mathematical object which can be “actually achieved" by a very
specific physical device. However, nothing prevents us from providinge
a more detailed OPT realisation of the test, e.g. as in Fig. 9.

Fig. 9 OPT finer and coarser descriptions. The OPT is a black-box approach. It can be made
more or less detailed, as in in the box on the left, and even at so fine a level that it is equivalent
to a field-theoretical description, as on the right
 Notice that although any graph can be represented in 2D (e.g., using
the crossing of wires), one can more suitably design it in 3D (2D + in–
out), as in Fig. 10.

Fig. 10 An (open) DAG whose topology is suitably representable in 3D

The OPT and the goal of science

One can soon realise that the OPT framework allows one to precisely
express the most general goal of science, namely to connect objective
facts happening (events), devising a theory of such “connections"
(systems), and thus allowing one to make predictions for future
occurrences in terms of joint probabilities of events depending on their
connections.
One of the main methodologically relevant features of the OPT is
that it perfectly distinguishes the “objective datum" from the
“theoretical element". What is objective are the tests that are performed
and the outcome of each test. What is theoretical is the graph of
connections between the tests, along with the mathematical
representations of both systems and tests. The OPT framework dictates
the rules that the mathematical description should satisfy, and the
specific OPT gives the particular mathematical representation of
systems and tests/events and of their compositions (in sequence and in
parallel) to build up the CDAG.

The OPT and the scientific method

One of the main rules of the scientific method is to have a clearcut
distinction between what is experimental and what is theoretical.
Though this would seem a trivial statement, such a confusion often
happens to be a source of disagreement between scientists. Though the
description of the apparatus is generally intermingled with theoretical
notions, the pure experimental datum must have a conventionally
defined “objectivity status", corresponding to “openly known"
information, namely shareable by any number of different observers.
Then both the theoretical language and the framework must reflect the
theory–experiment distinction, by indicating explicitly which notions
are assigned the objectivity status. Logic, with the Boolean calculus of
events, is an essential part of the language, and probability theory can
be regarded as an extension of logic, assigning probabilities to events.
The notion that is promoted to the objectivity status is that of “outcome
of a test", announcing which event of a given test has occurred. The OPT
framework thus represents an extension of probability theory,
providing a theoretical connectivity between events, the other
theoretical ingredients being the mathematical descriptions of systems
and tests.

The OPT as a general information theory

We see immediately that a CDAG is exactly the same graph of a quantum
circuit as the one drawn in quantum information science. The quantum
circuit, in turn, can be interpreted as the run-diagram of a program,
where each test represents a subroutine, and the wires represent the
registers through which the subroutines communicate data. Indeed, the
OPT can be regarded as the proper framework for information science
in general (Fig. 11).
Fig. 11 Equivalence between the CDAG and the quantum information circuit or, equivalently,
any run diagram of a program
For a recent complete presentation of the OPT framework, the
reader is referred to the work [9, 10] or the more recent and thorough
presentation [19].

Notation and abbreviations

(Table 2)
Table 2 Notation, special-cases corollaries, and common abbreviations
Table 3 Mathematical axiomatisation of quantum theory. As given in the table, in quantum
theory we associate a Hilbert space over the complex field with each system . We
associate the tensor product of Hilbert spaces with the composition of
systems and . Transformations from to are described by trace-nonincreasing
completely positive (CP) maps from traceclass operators on to traceclass operators on .
Special cases of transformations are those with trivial input system corresponding to states
whose trace is the preparation probability, the latter providing an efficient Born rule from
which one can derive all joint probabilities of any combination of transformations. Everything
else is simply special-case corollaries and one realisation theorem: these are reported in Table
4

Table 4 Corollaries and a theorem of quantum theory, starting from the axiomatization
of Table 3. The first corollary states that, in order to satisfy the composition rule ,
the trivial system must be associated with the one-dimensional Hilbert space , since it
is the only Hilbert space which trivializes the Hilbert space tensor product. The second
corollary states that the reversible transformations are the unitary ones. The third corollary
states that the deterministic transformations are the trace-preserving ones. Then the fourth
and fifth corollaries give the composition of transformations in terms of compositions of maps.
We then have four corollaries about states: (1) states are transformations starting from the
trivial system and, as such, are positive operators on the system Hilbert space, having trace
bounded by one; (2) the deterministic states correspond to unit-trace positive operator; (3) the
states of the trivial system are just probabilities; (4) the only trivial system deterministic state
is the number 1. We then have two corollaries for effects, as special cases of transformation
toward the trivial system: (1) the effect is represented by the partial trace over the system
Hilbert space of the multiplication with a positive operator bounded by the identity over the
system Hilbert space; (2) the only deterministic effect is the partial trace over the system
Hilbert space. Finally, we have the realization theorem for transformations in terms of unitary
interaction with an environment and a projective effect test over
environment , with , being a complete set of orthogonal projectors
Quantum theory
A minimal mathematical axiomatisation of quantum theory as an OPT
is given in Table 3. For an OPT we need to provide the mathematical
description of systems, their composition, and transformations from
one system to another. Then all rules for compositions of
transformations and their respective systems are provided by the OPT
framework. The reader who is not familiar with such a framework can
simply use the intuitive construction of quantum circuits. In Table 4 we
report the main theorems following from the axioms. The reader
interested in the motivations for the present axiomatization is referred
to [61].

Classical theory
Table 5 Mathematical axiomatisation of classical theory.. With each system A, we associate
a real Euclidean space . With composition of systems A and B, we associate the tensor
product spaces . Transformations from system A to system B are described by
substochastic Markov matrices from the input space to the output space. The rest are simple
special-case corollaries: these are reported in Table 6

Table 6 Main theorems of classical theory, starting from axioms in Table 5. The first
corollary states that, in order to satisfy the composition rule , the trivial system
must be associated with the one-dimensional Hilbert space ,since it is the only real linear
space that trivialises the tensor product. The second corollary states that the reversible
transformations are the permutation matrices. The third states that transformations are
substochastic Markov matrices. The fourth states that the deterministic transformations are
stochastic Markov matrices. Then the fifth and sixth corollaries give the composition of
transformations in terms of composition of matrices. We then have four corollaries about
states: 1) states are transformations starting from the trivial system and as such are sub-
normalized probability vectors (vectors in the positive octant with sum of elements bounded by
one; 2) the deterministic states correspond to normalised probability vectors; 3) the case of the
trivial output system correspond to just probabilities; 4) the only trivial output system
deterministic state is the number 1. We then have two corollaries for effects, as special cases of
transformation to the trivial system: 1) the effect is represented by the scalar product with a
vector with components in the unit interval; 2) the only deterministic effect is the scalar
product with the vector with all unit components

Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge helpful conversations and encouragement by
Don Hoffman, and interesting discussions with Chris Fields. Giacomo
Mauro D'Ariano acknowledges interesting discussions with Ramon
Guevarra Erra. This work has been sponsored by the Elvia and Federico
Faggin foundation through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation,
Grant 2020-214365 The observer: an operational theoretical approach.
For oral sources see also the Oxford podcast http://​podcasts.​ox.​ac.​uk/​
mauro-dariano-awareness-operational-theoretical-approach.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://​creativecommons.​
org/​licenses/​by/​4.​0/​), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution
and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the
original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if
changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's
Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material
is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not
permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain
permission directly from the copyright holder.
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Footnotes
1 The literature on the informational derivation of free quantum field theory is extensive, and,
although not up to date, we suggest the review [7] written by one of the authors in memory of
David Finkelstein. The algorithmic paradigm has opened for the first time the possibility of
avoiding physical primitives in the axioms of the physical theory, allowing a re-foundation of
the whole of physics on logically firm ground [13].

2 The reader who is not familiar with the notion of OPT can regard the OPT as the
mathematical formalization of the rules for building quantum information circuits. For a
general idea about OPT it is recommended to read the appendix. The reader is assumed to be
familiar with elementary notions, such as state and transformation with finite dimensions.

3 It may be possible to know which systems are involved in a particular experience, as

considered in Ref. [27]. However, we could never know the experience itself, since it
corresponds to non sharable quantum information.

4 In fact, information shareability is equivalent to the possibility of making copies of it–

technically cloning information. The possibility of cloning information, in turn, is equivalent to
that of reading information without disturbing it. Indeed, if one could read information without
disturbing it, one could read the information as many times as needed in order to acquire all its
various complementary aspects, technically performing a tomography of the information. And
once one knows all the information one can prepare copies of it at will. Viceversa, if one could
clone quantum information, one could read the clones, keeping the original untouched.

5 In the usual classical information theory, the convex set of states is a simplex, and its
extremal states are jointly discriminable.

6 Here there is a clear distinction between the “willing agent” and the observers of it. The word
unpredictability applies only to the observers.

7 The impossibility of interpretation of quantum randomness as lack on knowledge fits

quantum complementarity. Indeed there is no way of knowing both values of two
complementary variables. One might argue that both values may exist anyway, even if we
cannot know them, but such an argument disagrees with the violation of the CHSH bound (the
most popular Bell-like bound), which is purely probabilistic, and is based on the assumption of
the existence of a joint probability distribution for the values of complementary observables, an
assumption that obviously is violated by quantum complementarity. Others argue (and this is
the most popular argument) that one must use different local random variables depending on
remote settings, which leads to the interpretation of the CHSH correlations in terms of
nonlocality, but such an interpretation is artificial. The most natural argument is that the
measurement outcome is created by the measurement.
8 We emphasize that the above examples are only intended to illustrate the concepts. The
example of color qualia in Fig. 2 would be a faithful one if the colours were monochromatic and
the summation or subtraction were made with wave amplitude, not intensity, which is what
actually happens. The case of direction qualia based on the Bloch sphere is literally correct. The
directions are those of the state representations on the Block sphere.

9 As we will see, memory is classical.

10 The outcome is random for an observer other than the conscious system, for which it is
instead precisely known.

11 For example, the amount of visual information is significantly degraded as it passes from
the eye to the visual cortex. Marcus E. Raichle says [29]: Of the virtually unlimited information
available from the environment only about bits/sec are deposited in the retina. Because of a
limited number of axons in the optic nerves (approximately 1 million axons in each) only
bits/sec leave the retina and only make it to layer IV of V1 [30, 31]. These data clearly leave
the impression that visual cortex receives an impoverished representation of the world, a
subject of more than passing interest to those interested in the processing of visual information
[32]. Parenthetically, it should be noted that estimates of the bandwidth of conscious awareness
itself (i.e. what we “see”) are in the range of 100 bits/sec or less [30, 31].

12 We believe that the inability to recall much information contained in one second of visual
experience, when the actual experience is felt to be quite rich, should not be construed to
diminish the importance of consciousness. In fact, experience is quantum while memory is
classical, and although not much classical information appears to have been memorized, the
actual experience has the cardinality of the continuum in Hilbert space. Consciousness is about
living the experience in its unfolding and understanding what is happening, so as to make the
appropriate free-will decisions when necessary. Recalling specific information in full detail is
unnecessary. Consciousness is focused on the crucial task of getting the relevant meaning
contained in the flow of experience. Our scarce conscious memory of specific objects and
relationships between objects should not be taken as an indication that consciousness is a “low
bandwidth” phenomenon, but that what is relevant to consciousness may not be what the
investigator believes should be relevant.

13 For example, for the spin originally oriented horizontally and measured vertically a la von
Neumann, the final state would be vertical up or down, depending on the measurement
outcome.
14 There are many ways of regarding the information-disturbance tradeoff, depending on the
specific context and the resulting definitions of information and disturbance. The present case
of atomic measurements with the “disturbance” defined in terms of the probability of reversing
the measurement transformation has been analysed in the first part of [34]. In the same
reference it is also shown that a reversal of the measurement would provide a contradictoring
piece of information which numerically cancels the information achieved from the original
measurement, thus respecting the quantum principle of no information without disturbance.

15 Consider the case of a single qubit realised with a particle spin. The usual observable of von
Neumann corresponds to a measurement of the orientation of the spin along a given direction,
e.g., up or down along the vertical direction, or left or right along the horizontal direction. But
when we prepare a spin state (e.g., by Rabi techniques), we can put the spin in a very precise
direction, e.g., pointing north-east along the diagonal from south-west to north-east, and,
indeed if we measure the spin along a parallel direction we find the spin always pointing north-
east! So the spin is indeed (ontically!) pointing north-east along the same diagonal! Now it
would be legitimate to ask: how about measuring the direction of the spin itself? This can be
done–not exactly, but optimally–using a continuous observation tests constituted by a
continuum of effects (what is usually Positive Operator Valued Measure or POVM). However, it
turns out that the measured direction is a fake, since such a quantum measurement with a
continuous set of outcomes is realised as a continuous random choice of a von Neumann
measurement [35]. In conclusion the optimal measurement of the spin direction is realised by a
standard Stern–Gerlach experiment in which the magnetic field is randomly oriented! The same
method can be used to achieve an informationally complete measurement to perform a
quantum tomography [36] of the state by suitably processing the outcome depending on the
orientation of the spin measurement.

16 The convex set of deterministic states for a qutrit (i.e. ), defined by algebraic
inequalities, has eight dimensions, and has a boundary made of a continuum of balls.

17 What in OPT language is called observation test is the same as what in the quantum
information literature is called a discrete POVM. An observation test is infocomplete for system
A when it spans the linear space of effects .

18 Particularly symmetric types of measurements are those made with a SIC POVM (symmetric
informationally complete POVM) [37], where are projectors onto pure states
with equal pairwise fidelity.

(14)

The projectors defining the SIC POVM in dimension form a -

dimensional regular simplex in the space of Hermitian operators.
19 The fidelity between two pure states corresponding to state vectors ,
respectively, is defined as .

20 The optimal fidelity in Eq. (15) is achieved by an observation test with atomic effects
with

(16)

where are pre-specified pure state vectors, and is a probability vector

satisfying the identity.

(17)

Here the notation denotes averaging over the prior of pure-state vectors, taking as the
prior the Haar measure on the unit sphere in .

21 Teleportation will need the availability of shared entanglement and classical

communication, and technically would use a Bell measurement at the sender and a conditioned
unitary transformation at the receiver [42].

22 Of course, this would violate the no-cloning theorem, if at the transmission point the
original individual were not destroyed. Indeed, according to the quantum information-
disturbance tradeoff [34], teleportation cannot even make a bad copy, leaving the original
untouched.

23 A paradigmatic case of superposition between incompatible 3D views is that of the Necker

cube, which some authors regard as a neuro-physiological transformation leading to perceptual
reversal controlled by the principles of quantum mechanics [43]. However, the 3D experience of
the Necker cube does not require binocular disparity since monocular vision also produces the
same effect.

24 A von Neumann measurement of e.g. has two outcomes “up” and “down”, and the output
particle will be in the corresponding eigenstate of .