Mindless Sensationalism: A Quantum Framework for Consciousness
Don N. Page
arXiv Preprint Archive August 8, 2001 preprint
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Quant-ph |
| Key points | Proposes that conscious experiences can be linked to quantum mechanics via a measure given by the expectation value of a corresponding operator, leading to a Conditional Aesthemic Principle that our experiences are likely typical among all conscious experiences. |
Abstract
The ideas of Sensible Quantum Mechanics are expressed in lay terms for philosophers of consciousness and others. A framework is proposed and explained for the `psycho-physical-parallelism' between conscious experiences and the mathematical structures of quantum physics (e.g., a set of quantum operators obeying some algebra, and a quantum state giving the expectation value of each operator). In particular, it is proposed that each set of possible conscious experiences has a measure given by the expectation value of a corresponding operator (a positive-operator-valued measure). Then one has a generalization of the Weak Anthropic Principle named the Conditional Aesthemic Principle: given that we are conscious beings, our conscious experiences are likely to be typical experiences in the set of all conscious experiences with its measure.