A conscious agent increases entropy through actions that contribute to irreversibility. During its lifespan, the agent transitions from a live information state (1) to a death state (0). This superposition of states is recognized conceptually in psychology and belongs to quantum biology. The information state may be frozen or reversed using the observation-based quantum Zeno effect, which for an individual would imply self-observation. Because mind and body processes are connected recursively at several levels, reversing the information state could affect aging processes, potentially increasing lifespan through a system of self-observation.
Consciousness, often linked to free will, conflicts with the causal closure of physics, where every event has a physical cause. By analyzing nested physical systems, the paper argues that if a system had agency, observers could not exist within it. Since complex systems form nested hierarchies, this suggests consciousness cannot emerge from complexity alone. The existence of consciousness in cognitive agents implies it belongs to a non-physical dimension, making machine consciousness unattainable. These arguments are applied to reinterpret two quantum theory paradoxes relevant to quantum information theory.
Consciousness, particularly subjective awareness, is not computable and cannot be replicated by machines. The authors argue that consciousness is more than an epiphenomenon and that treating it as a separate category is consistent with both quantum mechanics and cognitive science. They distinguish between two kinds of consciousness, little-C and big-C, and use this classification to analyze current academic debates. The interaction between a system and the experimenter's measuring apparatus is examined through decoherence and the quantum Zeno effect. These ideas frame the discussion of limits to machine consciousness.