Proto-experiences & Subjective Experiences Classical & Quantum Concepts

Proto-experiences & Subjective Experiences Classical & Quantum Concepts

Ram Lakhan Pandey Vimal

Deterministic reductive monism and non-reductive substance dualism are two opposite views for consciousness, and both have serious problems. An alternative view is needed.For this, we hypothesize that strings or elementary particles (fermions and bosons) have two aspects: (i) elemental proto-experiences (PEs) as phenomenal aspect, and (ii) mass,charge, and spin as material aspect. Elemental PEs are hypothesized to be the properties of elementary particles and their interactions, which are composed of irreducible fundamental subjective experiences (SEs)/PEs that are in superimposed form in elementary particles and in their interactions. Since SEs/PEs are superimposed, elementary particles are not specific to any SE/PE; they (and all inert matter) are carriers of SEs/PEs, and hence,appear as non-experiential material entities. Furthermore, our hypothesis is that matter and associated elemental PEs co-evolved and co-developed into neural-nets and associated neural-net PEs (neural Darminism), respectively. The signals related to neural PEs interact in a neural-net and neural-net PEs emerges from random process of self-organization. The neural-net PEs are a set of SEs embedded in the neural-net by a non-computational or non-algorithmic process. The non-specificity of elementary particles is transformed intothe specificity of neural-nets by neural Darwinism. The specificity of SEs emerges when feed-forward and feedback signal interacts in the neuropil and are dependent on wakefulness(i.e., activation) attention, re-entry between neural populations, working memory, stimulus at above threshold, and neural net PE signals. This PE-SE framework integrates reductive and non-reductive views, complements the existing models, bridges the explanatory gaps,and minimizes the problem of causation.

The term “virtual reservoir” in our PE-SE framework is consistent our fundamental assumption that all types of fundamental SEs/PEs are in super-imposed form in all elementary particles. Thus, every elementary particle can be considered as a virtual reservoir  containing all types of fundamental SEs/PEs. Though apparently different, virtual reservoir  can also be considered as a sort of “Penrose Platonic world” in Orch OR framework [35], “societies of occasions of experience” or “space for the qualia of material” in Whitehead framework [5,110], “sub-quantum (SQ)space” in SQ-framework [12], “cosmic consciousness space” cosmic-consciousness-framework [82,83], and “Purusha-Vishnu” or “primordial consciousness” space in Rig Vedic-Buddhist framework [81,108]. For an observer to know something, he must build an axis composed of individual measurement cells; the set of cells he owns is the space of possibilities he can conceive, and when measurement reports are placed in that space the possibilities are down selected from the possible to the actual(Wolfgang Baer, personal communication). Some of these frameworks may differ significantly from each other and from our framework. Nevertheless, introducing virtual reservoir does not necessarily extend physics because of following reasons: (i) We assume that SEs are emerged during the interaction of feed forward and feed back neural-PE signals in neural-nets possibly by the random process of self-organization because this process has ability to create novel entities to meet the environmental demands. All possible fundamental SEs/PEs are in this virtual reservoir. (ii) It is simply another useful term for the set of many possible states in quantum-wave function framework. This set is used for collapsing the waves into observable subjective experiences during measurement, for example, the selection of a specific SE such as redness from the set of color neural-net-PEs in V4/V8 neural-net when a specific stimulus such as long wavelength light is presented.