Possible Superluminal Propagation inside Conscious Beings

Abstract

The fact that first-person conscious perceptions or sentient experiences have many bits of information strongly suggests that they are produced nonlocally by the effects of many atoms, say by nonlocal quantum operators. If these nonlocal operators act back on the quantum state of the atoms, they could lead to evolution in which signals propagate superluminally, violating the usual causality of local quantum field theory. Although there is not yet any direct evidence that nonlocal operators associated with psycho-physical parallelism act back on the quantum state, it is not totally implausible that this might be the case. In principle the resulting superluminal propagation might be observable by sending signals across brain regions (neural correlates of consciousness) that lead to conscious perceptions.