Quantum consciousness is wrong- there is a material basis informed by evolution

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

In chapter 6, Wendt presents his theory of consciousness. He defines consciousness as composed of three aspects: cognition, experience, and will.12 Cognition refers to thinking information processing, memory retrieval, and so on. Experience refers to feeling what it is like to be a certain organism. Will refers to the ability to act, choose one course or another, and change one’s surroundings to some degree. Wendt starts from the premise that materialism has failed to explain subjective experience, or what it feels like to be human. The gap between the material world and the internal world of consciousness is held to be unbridgeable. Wendt argues for a solution via panpsychism and neutral monism. Panpsychism argues that actually all matter has subjective experience, not just living beings. There is consciousness all the way down to the subatomic level, so there is no need to derive consciousness from dead matter. Neutral monism claims further that there is only one substance, which is at once material and mental, so there is no messy duality in the ontology of the world. Wendt gives these ideas a quantum gloss by identifying uncollapsed wave functions as the repository of consciousness. This helps explain why animals seem more conscious than rocks, since within rocks the wave functions collapse too rapidly to sustain much thought but animal brains have mechanisms (presumably the microtubules) that prevent rapid collapse. My chief problem with this chapter, and by extension the entire project, is that I do not actually see the difficulty in explaining consciousness from a material basis as being that great. Consciousness strikes me as clearly a property of living things. As such, it is a product of evolution. As they evolve, organisms face competitive pressure. There is tremendous advantage to be had by being able to sense changes in the environment, to distinguish day from night, rain from drought, predators from innocuous creatures, food from inorganic matter, harmful events from beneficial ones, and so on. Living things have, therefore, evolved a panoply of sensory organs that give them information on their surroundings. That’s what experience is, the reception of sensory inputs. Cognition is the processing of those sensory inputs. For instance, the ability to move is selected for, because then one can happen across food rather than just waiting for it to arrive, or making it yourself from sunlight. If you can move, it is advantageous to have a mental model of the world derived from your sensory inputs, so you know where to go. As life evolves, those models get more and more complex and realistic, until they become aware of the self and others, in social species, and eventually become scientific theories, in the case of humans. Finally, will is also an obvious product of evolution. Once you have sensory inputs and a mental map of your surroundings, and particularly if you can move, the ability to make choices will be the difference between success and failure. The animal that runs away from predators, seeks out food and mating opportunities, stops doing things that cause pain, and doesn’t eat things that smell bad will do much better than one who just sits there and takes life as it comes.