Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
April 1, 2026
Kelvin J. McQueen, Ian T. Durham, Markus P Müller
Could there be quantum superpositions of conscious states, as suggested by the Wigner's friend thought experiment? Mathematical theories of consciousness, notably integrated information theory (IIT), make this question more precise by associating physical systems with both quantitative amounts of consciousness and structural characterizations of conscious states. Motivated by a recent proposal...
arXiv Preprint Archive
September 25, 2023
Kelvin J. McQueen, Ian T. Durham, Markus P. Mueller
Could there be quantum superpositions of conscious states, as suggested by the Wigner's friend thought experiment? Mathematical theories of consciousness, notably Integrated Information Theory (IIT), make this question more precise by associating physical systems with both quantitative amounts of consciousness and structural characterizations of conscious states. Motivated by a recent proposal...
arXiv Preprint Archive
September 25, 2023
Kelvin J. McQueen, Ian T. Durham, Markus P. Mueller
Could there be a quantum superposition of consciousness, as in the Wigner's friend thought experiment? The integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness has turned this into a well-defined question. According to IIT, consciousness is a measurable physical quantity given by integrated information ($\Phi$), such that the amount of consciousness in a system corresponds to its amount of...
arXiv Preprint Archive
January 28, 2023
Kelvin J. McQueen
In [1] it is claimed that, based on radiation emission measurements described in [2], a certain "variant" of the Orch OR theory has been refuted. I agree with this claim. However, the significance of this result for Orch OR per se is unclear. After all, the refuted "variant" was never advocated by anyone, and it contradicts the views of Hameroff and Penrose (hereafter: HP) who invented Orch OR...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2023
Kelvin J. McQueen, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Under what conditions are material objects, such as particles, parts of a whole object? This is the composition question and is a longstanding open question in philosophy. Existing attempts to specify a non-trivial restriction on composition tend to be vague and face serious counterexamples. Consequently, two extreme answers have become mainstream: composition (the forming of a whole by its...
Consciousness and Cognition
2022
Amber R Hopkins, Kelvin J. McQueen
Perceptual filling-in for vision is the insertion of visual properties (e.g., color, contour, luminance, or motion) into one's visual field, when those properties have no corresponding retinal input. This paper introduces and provides preliminary empirical support for filled/non-filled pairs, pairs of images that appear identical, yet differ by amount of filling-in. It is argued that such image...
arXiv Preprint Archive
May 5, 2021
David J. Chalmers, Kelvin J. McQueen
Does consciousness collapse the quantum wave function? This idea was taken seriously by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner but is now widely dismissed. We develop the idea by combining a mathematical theory of consciousness (integrated information theory) with an account of quantum collapse dynamics (continuous spontaneous localization). Simple versions of the theory are falsified by the...