Consciousness and non

A fundamental problem in the study of consciousness (essentially the "hard problem" of Chalmers (1995)) is the connection of the apparently incommensurable worlds of lived experience and formal objective scientific observation; the difference, that is between "what it is like to be" a person (cf. Nagel, 1974) and what a person is as far as external physical description is concerned (where I include as "external" the examination of physiological functions that are spatially internal but observed externally). The essence of human consciousness, of what it is like to be a person, lies in the awareness of qualia (the elementary irreducible aspects of perception) and in the exercise of free will.

My elucidation of qualia and of free will involves three points (the first two of which were briefly signalled in (Clarke, 1995)).

In order to expound these points we need a way of talking about things (people, atoms, pendulums) in a uniform language, so that their distinctive properties (consciousness, quantum theory, determinism) arise from their particular physical constitutions, rather than being built in through the prior choice of a different formalism in each case. This will make it natural to identify properties present in all systems, which become awareness when that system is percipient and self-reflexive, and conscious in the sense that we identify as human subjects when free will is operative.

The method to be used stems from the approach of Merleau-Ponty and the later phenomenalists who argue that "any … attempt to establish an intrinsic connection between the [physiological and psychological] is bound to fail." (Langer, 1989, pp 28-9) I am, however, less pessimistic: I will argue that there is a way of analysing systems which is sufficiently flexible to bridge much of the gap between the physical and the psychological. I will concede that this gap may never be wholly bridged without the need for a jump from formal to experiential; but I would claim that the gap can be closed enough for the jump to be fairly secure and unproblematic.

The inspiration for the particular language and formalism used derives from quantum theory¾ though there is no suggestion here of being limited to the microscopic. The idea is to regard a system rather abstractly in terms, for instance, of the set of possible states that it may have, using a language that is applicable to atoms (when it becomes quantum mechanics) to planets and pendulums (when it becomes classical physics) to the internal life of people (when it becomes psychology). This may seem so "broad brush" and abstract as to of little practical use, but I will demonstrate (here and in a later paper) that it lends itself both to the experimental study of areas such as parapsychology that lie in the interface between the subject and the objective, and to the development of theories of qualia¾ the crux of the "hard problem."

The structure of the paper is as follows. The next section gives the philosophical background, which is provided to give more of a feel for the ideas (though the section is not formally part of my argument). The following section gives the proposed bridging language, in subsections describing the basic mathematical structure, the way in which systems amalgamate to form compound systems, truth values and the role of dynamics. Following this are sections on the two key properties of consciousness: qualia and free will; and the paper ends with pointers to other developments, including experimental areas.

To end this introduction I will indicate more closely the actual area that I have in mind when I talk of consciousness. A feature of the phenomenalist approach is that the world, in the primary sense, is what subjects are aware of (though this does not, as we shall see, imply solipsism or idealism). It would thus become trivial to identify consciousness with awareness; Merleau-Ponty regards consciousness rather as "my actual presence to myself" (ibid., p. xv), that is, the self reflective aspect. On this view simple I-less awareness is not a faculty possessed by an organism (being-the-object-of-awareness is just the nature of reality) and so the question of its evolutionary origin does not enter. On the other hand consciousness as a self-reflective process involving free will, in the sense I use it here, is a specific faculty which leads to a creative adaptation between the world and the organism, and makes a difference to what the organism does. I am not, however, primarily concerned with problem solving, pattern recognition and so on, although these fall within the range of phenomena under consideration.

I have enlarged Merleau-Ponty’s definition to include qualia, because these provide a link between the phenomenalist and materialist perspectives. On the latter the primary aspect of consciousness is the presence of qualia, in the restricted sense of the elementary, irreducible constituents of our perceptual experience, such as colours, musical timbres, tactile components such as roundness, pointedness, the basic tastes and so on (others will be added later). They are clearly identifiable and distinguishable one from another through their intrinsic natures, and not, as far as immediate experience is concerned, through any logical or structural discrimination. While we still lack any genuine understanding of what qualia are, I believe that progress can still be made in explaining their role in the organism (what qualia do) and their relation to the world as a whole. This involves in an essential way including certain aspects of free will within the area of consciousness.

The model that I am proposing will be based on physical principles that attribute awareness-like properties to a much wider range of phenomena than human consciousness as delineated above. In order to talk of human consciousness (or at least a healthily functioning consciousness) we need not only reflexivity (thinking about myself), which will be treated briefly, but in addition the presence of a 'me' as a distinguished area of subjectivity within the conscious field. This last will not be explicitly modelled here.

My aim is a ‘model’ in the sense of a formalised set of mathematical structures and interpretations, whose individual components do not necessarily correspond, one-to-one, with the physical situation, but whose overall predictions are testable. (This is the sense as used by, for instance, Fowkes and Mahoney, 1994). A model differs from a ‘theory’ in that in the latter all constituents are claimed to correspond to physical structures — though in practice, of course, these are merely extremes of a spectrum, and the distinction may become vacuous in psychology. The handling of qualia as described in the previous section is in the spirit of modelling rather than theory.

While my aim is thus scientific, not philosophical, it may help the reader’s understanding if I briefly place my approach in its philosophical context. The first and most important influence is the phenomenalism of Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Heidegger (1957). Phenomenalism takes as its starting point the totality of the field of conscious awareness of a person, an awareness conceived not as a representation of the things in themselves but as something with an existential status in its own right that arises from an interaction (or, in psychological terminology, a dialogue) between the person and other entities. Perception is described by Merleau-Ponty as a "form of communing between the body and the world" (1962, p 212). More vividly (p 214) he exemplifies this dialogue as follows:

The quasi-unity of the self and the percept, and the idea that the percept "thinks itself in me" is the core of my model. The unified person-plus-perceived-world expressed in this passage (which Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty call Being-in-the-world) is taken as the primary foundation of the universe. Its unitary character can hardly be overstressed: it is what distinguishes this approach from the traditional Cartesian one in which subject and object are separate and perception is a "commercium ... between a subject present-at-hand and an object ..." (H 132). Once one has fragmented the phenomenon in this way "there is no possibility of putting it together again from the fragments. Not only do we lack the ‘cement’: even the ‘schema’ in accordance with which the joining together is to be accomplished, has been split asunder ..." (ibid.) Or, as Langer (1989, p29) paraphrases Merleau-Ponty, "Given the complete antithesis between a being which is purely ‘in-itself’ [as object] and one which is exclusively ‘for-itself’ [as subject], any meeting point is utterly inconceivable.(cf Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p 431)

As it stands, Merleau-Ponty’s approach poses many problems in a modern context. Which entities — humans, animals, stones ... — are "carriers" of worlds in this sense? How is a common world arrived at unless it grows from an objective realm of things-in-themselves? Merleau-Ponty presents an account that is essentially restricted to human organisms (he emphasises, for example, the role of language) and the question of the nature of the world before the advent of humans is excluded from the picture (1962, p 432), making any serious connection with contemporary science almost impossible. The commonality of the world is elucidated through the way in which, "[p]rior to the process of becoming aware, the social exists obscurely and as a summons" (ibid. p 362) so that the body-subject forms, with others, a "single pre-reflexive intersubjective system" (Langer, 1989, p 100), but it remains difficult to link this with a broader scientific context. The approach of this paper aims to provide, at a formal rather than philosophical level, possible answers to these difficulties by using a generalised-logic formalism in which one can pass, back and forth, in a precisely specified manner, from a description where things are primary, to one where perceptions are primary and things are secondary. An influence on the whole approach has been the development of logic approaches to quantum theory, in which the "things" are, for example, states or wave-functions, and observations (or propositions, or projections) correspond (at a formal level) to perceptions.

A second philosophical influence has been the work of Whitehead, particularly the emphasis behind his Concept of Nature (revised ed, 1926). Here he starts with perceived worlds as momentary snapshots of simultaneity, and then constructs space and time by considering the overlaps between these perceived worlds, using a mathematically specified process of abstraction. The version given in Concept of Nature is, as it stands, untenable because it is linked in an essential way to special relativity and collapses entirely when the small modifications produced by general relativity are introduced. It is possible, however, to develop this in a more process-oriented way that does not suffer from this drawback (Clarke, 1993). Whitehead’s later views in Process and Reality (1929) enter here, while his idea that the interaction between all processes is ultimately perceptual in quality has influenced my conception that all beings undergo such interactions, even if it is only in humans and higher animals that they reach the level of complexity that warrants the use of "consciousness".

Finally, I should mention the influence of Voloshinov (1973), and in general the Bakhtinian school of Soviet philosophy, who add to the forgoing a lively appreciation of the role of society in forming the fabric of reality. This work is easily misunderstood because of its subordination to Marxist terminology (so that the whole of social psychology, for example, becomes the study of "ideology"; and Heidegger’s Zeug become "the means of production"). A further source of misunderstanding arises because the atmosphere of the period was dominated by linguistics, so that the impression is given that consciousness is coextensive with language. It is clear from a closer reading, however, that "language" means the total array of "signs", expressed or unexpressed, which coordinate our transactions with the world, and that "society" encompasses all human-human interactions, so that it could include the mother-child dyad (Leiman, 1992). Thought of in this way, Voloshinov is adding a vital interpersonal dimension to a philosophy which, at least in the early work of Heidegger, gives the impression of being excessively individualistic.

I will refer back to these influences in what follows (as well as adding others) and in the case of phenomenalism I will use for reference the ideas of Heidegger rather than Merleau-Ponty, as the former better illustrates the way the ideas are embodied in my model.

As already noted, I will be adopting a logical formalism in order to implement a form of phenomenalism. This may seem paradoxical in view of Merleau-Ponty’s explicit rejection of abstract thinking as opposed to historically and culturally embodied thinking. I would argue, however, that there is a need to build a bridge between our fundamental perceptual awareness as disclosed by the phenomenological method, and the scientific structures that have become an essential part of our understanding of the universe. This model is that bridge. By drawing on formalisms from quantum theory, I hope to establish an essentially non-classical framework of analysis, within which both modern physics and consciousness (or rather, the general elements which, in human beings, become consciousness) have a natural place. In this section I will describe in turn the "generalised logic" to be adopted; its application to interacting beings/processes; and the dynamics appropriate to this application.

One of the by-products of quantum theory has been the suggestion that the description of a physical system can be carried out in terms of its logic. There is considerable controversy (in the particular case of quantum theory) over whether the logic alone is sufficient to describe the system, or whether additional structures are required. Much depends on the precise meaning attached to the concept of "logic." Here I am focusing on the core ideas, and in calling these a logic I do not mean to imply either that they correspond precisely to the traditional philosophical concept of a logic, or that they are necessarily complete. Placing the logic first is an essential step in making a bridge to the phenomenalist programme of giving primary status to Being-in-the-world, as opposed to adopting a representational view of perception. The adoption of a form of generalised logic, rather than classical logic, is needed not only for quantum theory, but, more importantly here, for the later theory of free will and decision making, which in turn is required if consciousness is to be effective and not merely epiphenomenal.

I should stress that in using a logic-based approach I am not implying that the operation of conscious processes is, in psychological terms, of a logical (and hence linguistic) nature. Rather, this basic idea is that, at each moment, consciousness structures its world through a collection of pre-verbal concepts. Although these concepts are to be thought of in operational rather than verbal terms, their representations in the model will be called propositions. When expressed verbally, they will be concepts like ‘there is a brown tree here’ or ‘I am angry’. Though we represent them verbally in order to describe them, the concepts are prior to the verbal description. While I approach the logic in terms of human consciousness, I regard it as an abstract specification of what the world is like in relation to a particular context. Considered in this way a logic is more generally applicable than just to human mental processes: it defines any sort of physical context. The Logic associated with a particular physical/mental context (or what I shall later call a locus) is the set of propositions definable in that context together with the primitive logical relations between them. Note that I am viewing a logic as a formal language rather than as a calculus for truth-values; truth-values will be introduced as a separate function on the logic.

Technically, by a "generalised logic" I will mean as system of propositions having the structure of a lattice (not necessarily with a 1) in which are defined the (not independent) operations:

In this "&" is the usual conjunction and "v" is inclusive (either ... or ... or both). For the general background here, see, for example, Beltrametti & Cassinelli (1981), but note that their use of "logic" refers to a stronger concept of predication (see 3.4 below). The definition of a lattice is given in this paper in the Appendix, section 7.1.1.

For classical logic, it is assumed that for each proposition a there is the contradictory proposition not-a (the complement of a, in mathematical terminology), which asserts the possibility of absolutely everything that is different from a. Now, it is an essential part of the conception of free will to be developed later that any system is potentially open to an indefinite extension of its possibilities, so that as far as the interpretation is concerned, we cannot interpret the idea of "everything" that the system might do¾ though, as I indicate in the Appendix, section 7.2 , at a purely formal (uninterpreted) level it may be possible to enlarge the system until this becomes the case. In place of the complement I need only the relative complement b \ a, interpreted as "b but not a" and defined only when a ® b. Relative complements have to be consistent, in the sense that c & (b \ a) = (c & b) \ (c & a) whenever a ® b and I also require that the correspondence between a and b \ a should be a true (ortho)complement on the sub-lattice L(b) of all those as such that a ® b (see Appendix section 7.2).

Apart from the technicality of only having a relative "not" (which actually is of very little consequence), I have not yet indicated any difference from ordinary classical logic. If we were using classical logic then we would assume as an axiom the distributive law that

(in which case we speak of a distributive lattice). In our case the introduction of relative complements automatically ensures that, for any a and b with a ® b, (b \ a) v a = b. This is the orthomodular condition used in quantum mechanics, and it implies that the distributive law (D) holds in the restrictive case where two of a, b, c in (D) are complements of each other (see Appendix, section 7.3). I discuss in section 7.4 the circumstances in which this makes the whole logic into a sublattice of an orthomodular lattice, as is the case for quantum theory.

In order to understand further the difference between the generalised logic and a classical logic, we note first that it is a consequence of the axioms used here that

(See Birkhoff, 1964, p5). For convenience write the left hand side as A and the right hand side as B so that this becomes A ® B

The distributive law (D) is A = B. But if A and B are not equal, as allowed for by (D*), then there is a possibly true proposition B \ A representing their difference. For example, if a is "this ball is heavy" and b (respectively c) is "this ball is green (resp. blue)," then B \ A describes a ball that is heavy and either green or blue, but which is not heavy and green, nor heavy and blue, a situation impossible in the classical logic to which properties of weight and colour properly belong. The only situation where we could consider this would be when "heavy" and "green" belonged to such different categories of thinking that it was impossible to ascertain both at the same time. In such a case "heavy and green" would become a nonsensical impossibility, even though we might happen to know that all balls involved were either blue or green with no other possibility. We could, however, say "heavy and either blue or green" as merely be a roundabout way of saying "heavy." I shall call the incompatible categories of thinking involved here (to be defined more formally in a moment) reference frames. I want to claim that they do in fact crop up very regularly in ordinary informal thinking, and even more in the general conceptualisation that precedes thinking.

To give a more picturesque example, and to illustrate how it applies to the formal structure in use here, consider the case where

(To simplify the example I am assuming the special case where there is a full negation expressed by ‘not’ in the example, or equivalently a maximum element 1, the identically true proposition, so that

If (as might be the case, though it is not necessarily so) explanations in terms of immaterial beings of healing energy, on the one hand, and explanations in terms of biochemistry, on the other, belong to different reference frames then, as I have discussed, the conjunction of propositions a and b (or a and c) is the identically false proposition, 0 (because there are no circumstances under which both propositions could be entertained at once, and hence no circumstances under which they could both be true at once). We can then evaluate the two sides of (D*) as follows:

We can see that, while the left hand side implies (® ) the right hand side, the two are not the same, as they would have to be in classical logic.

Incompatible reference frames arise in our ordinary thinking not merely when, as here, there are plausible grounds for separating them into different logical categories, but where we have compartmentalised the different schemes and not yet made the mental jump of bringing them together into a synthesis. Much of our thought is occasion-specific, restricted to boxes waiting for a creative moment for them to be amalgamated into a bigger scheme.

A quite unambiguous application of this occurs in quantum logic. For instance, if we are talking about the direction of the spin of an electron and a = "the spin is pointing along the positive z-axis", b = "the spin is pointing along the positive x-axis" and c = "the spin is pointing along the negative x-axis" then we have precisely the situation just described.

To state this formally, a reference frame is any distributive sub-lattice of the logic. Two such frames will in general neither be completely compatible not completely incompatible; but we might expect that there will some combination of propositions from the two which fail to satisfy the distributive law. As I shall show later, introducing this idea is essential for understanding the role of qualia and of free will.

Later on (subsection 3.4) we shall consider the sorts of valuation (i.e. assignment of True and False) applicable to this sort of logic.

In the conventional quantum setting just described, a generalised logic is associated with each quantum system (with its linked observer). In quantum field theory, on the other hand, the logics are based on the algebras of observables that are associated with each region of space-time (Kay, 1985; Isham 1994). These constitute the quantum version of the networks of overlapping processes referred to in connection with Whitehead, section 1 above. Generalising and combining these two ideas, I will call any entity associated with a generalised logic a locus. Thus a locus might be a system-observer pair, or (if we are working strictly in conventional reductionist physics) a space-time region, or — the case we are really interested in for consciousness — the Being-in-the-world of a particular person. In this last case, a locus is the world of an individual person — both external and internal. The distinction between external and internal is determined by the extent of overlap with other loci: things in common between the worlds of many individuals could be regarded as external, while things exclusive to one individual (or to one and a few empathically related individuals) are regarded as internal.

The interacting aspect of loci arises from a specification of ways of combining loci to form unions and intersections just as regions of space-time combine in the formalism of local operator algebras, and events overlap in Whitehead’s system in The Concept of Nature. We need to be able at times to widen the locus, to consider a society, a planet ..., taking into account the way in which what emerges at each widening will be more than the sum of the parts. (Following Voloshinov, above, the locus of society is particularly significant.) We need to be able to narrow the locus, to the objective world that is held in common by many people, for example, or to the physical locus held in common by people and by systems of measuring instruments. In keeping with the phenomenological approach, we do not assume that there is any single fixed ultimate reality on which these separate loci are perspectives.

The place of "ultimate reality" is taken by the objective world, the world that is common to, that is, lies in the overlaps of, a large number of percipients. For us objectivity lies in the numbers of human percipients, but the stability of the objective world is consituted by the fact that a multitude of non-human, indeed non-living "percipients" (loci) also enter into its determination. The real-ness of the objective world is on this view not something that is given, but something that arises dynamically from the nature of the overlaps. I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Clarke, 2000) the way this process works, using the quantum mechanical formalism of (Isham, 1994).

Overlaps give rise to a partial ordering of logics, in the sense that where two loci overlap this is represented formally by the existence of a logic which can be injectively mapped into each of the logics of the overlapping loci, and which thus provides the correspondence between certain propositions of the two loci. (There may, of course, be situations where these ordered logics can, as a whole, be regarded as a logic (Isham, op. cit.), but we do not assume this here.)

What is, and what is not, a locus is itself dynamically determined, and speculations as to the nature of this dynamic would take us far beyond the scope of this paper. The considerations of the modern phenomenologist D Abram (1997) suggest that loci are considerably more extensive than humans. He describes how, with an expanded personal awareness, he sees how "a large boulder reposes at the edge of these bushes, dialoguing with the old tree about shadows and sunlight." (ibid. p. 203) On this view, anything that can enter a dialogue with us should itself be regarded as a locus.

On the other hand consistency with quantum mechanics strongly suggests that we need to include most macroscopic systems, even if they are non-sentient in the usual sense. In these cases, however, their participation in the human world (in which they are Zeuge in Heidegger’s sense) may in part confer their status as loci. In the case of the "worlds" of macroscopic non-sentient loci, we can only speculate as to whether it is mere size, or complexity, that qualifies them for this status. The choice is important in order to resolve the Schrödinger's cat paradox: we need to allow the cat, and probably its box as well, to play a role in determining a specific state. In the case of the cat this could be quite a sophisticated role, corresponding to some rudimentary consciousness; in the case of the box it will be a mechanistic role of the sort envisaged by authors like Penrose (1994), a role for which the term consciousness is no longer appropriate.

An important experimental case arises from the consideration that, since all perception involves (as discussed below) an entanglement of states, it is reasonable to postulate that the sustained mutual perception involved in an empathic relationship between individuals will give rise to a common locus embracing the two. In making this interpretation of empathy I diverge from Heidegger, since he regards as mistaken the idea that empathy, in the sense of "understanding ‘the psychic life of others’" (H124) could be (as here) "the first ontological bridge from one’s own subject ... to the other subject." (ibid.) The difference is partly one of terminology, in that my ‘empathy’ is not merely ‘understanding the psychic life of others’, but is much closer to Heidegger’s ‘Being-with’. But the difference is also due to the fact that I deal here with (to use his terminology) the ontical (the being-ness of particular things) rather than the ontological level (Being as such).

Many authors (eg Beltrametti & Cassinelli, 1981), when speaking of a logic, imply that the propositions are predicates that are being asserted or denied in a particular situation; that is, for these authors, a logic is a lattice of propositions together with a system of truth-values and ways of handling them. Here I just refer to the lattice as the "logic," but we still need to discuss truth values.

Classical logic proceeds from a godlike view where every proposition is either true or false; but our experience of the world is not like that, and according to quantum theory (on most interpretations) the world itself is not like that. A not unreasonable representation of things, borrowed from quantum mechanics, would be to say that to each proposition a we can assign a number S(a) ranging from 0 (definitely false) to 1 (definitely true), which we can interpret as the probability that future exploration will resolve the question in favour of the proposition. I shall call this assignment of a number the situation, S. Clearly for consistency we have to demand that

In addition, we demand that classical propositional calculus should hold for those propositions whose status is certain in the given situation: in other words, if we define the certainty set of S to be

then for propositions a, b in C(S) the values of S( a & b), S( a v b ) and (where defined) S( a \ b) are given by the usual "truth tables" (Appendix, section 7.3). This entails that C(S) is a distributive sublattice, the situational lattice at the time in question.

On the basis of the situation, we can reasonably assign a truth-values {T, F } (True and False) to propositions where the probability is 1 or 0, respectively. For the other cases, we can either assign the value F whenever it is not T, or introduce a third value of U (uncertain), or else simply withhold any assignment. The first is the usual approach of quantum logic. Since, however, the situation already contains all the information available, I shall not explore truth values further here, but instead use the situation, associated with each locus at any given time t..

The term ‘situation’ is Heidegger’s (H 299), used to describe the totality of "items constitutive for the existential phenomenon;" but he applies it only to the most far-reaching acts of free will (discussed below) whereas I am generalising it considerably. The important point is that the ‘situation’ is wider than the ‘what-is-in-fact-the-case’ of the truth function.

Consciousness is an activity, not a thing. It is an ingrained habit of thought to look for an agent corresponding to every activity, but here I am regarding the activity itself as fundamental. For the purpose of building the model, the activity will be thought of as proceeding in a normal (Newtonian) linear time. But then, as a simplification, I will represent it as taking place in discrete steps. (We could make the process continuous, and the phases concurrent, in much the same way as recent work (Sudbery, 1984) has made the process of quantum measurement continuous.)

Each step is divided into two phases. The first involves a reflexive aspect of consciousness. Consciousness observes itself, applying the logic L to the situation S so as to yield a revised situation S'. This phase is modelled on the usual quantum mechanical measuring process in its quantum logic (Gudder, 1967) or consistent-histories (Zeh, 1996) version, and is essentially non-deterministic, S determining only the probabilities for the outcome. This is not, however, dependent on quantum mechanics: the same structure could be modelled by chaotic classical mechanics subject to thermal noise. The second phase is an evolution of L, through experience, or learning, altering one's concepts, adding new conceptual frames, recognising the compatibility of frames that were previously distinct, in response to the knowledge of the situation expressed through S'. We would expect this phase also to be non-deterministic; but, more importantly, it is not merely probabilistic: as I shall recount later, the qualia of consciousness, which are present through both phases, enter here in a creative manner. It seems likely that this step could not be modelled either classically or in terms of a quantum mechanics that used a fixed system of projections for measurements.

S' is evolved partly through the influence of the preceding S — the world is actually altered and formed by reflexive observation — but also as a result of its own dynamics, including the physics of matter. The dynamics of different loci have to be interrelated in a hierarchical manner, if those loci are to remain overlapping, and in particular the dynamics of physical loci influences the dynamics of the individual worlds of beings-in-the-world. This aspect follows precisely the usual operator algebra formalism for quantum field theory: whenever loci overlap, there is by definition a sub-logic common to both, and the dynamics of the sublogic are required to be compatible with the dynamics of each of the larger logics of which it is a part, so that constraints are thereby placed on the behaviours of these larger logics.

So far I have not justified this being a model of consciousness, in that I have not incorporated the essential aspects of qualia and free will (or creative will, as I would rather call it) nor have I explained how it is participatory. (Recall that in section 1 I defined qualia as the irreducible components of experience, as being, so to speak, pure experientiality.) To do this requires further development.

To explore this further, we can first recognise that the field of our awareness at any given time is a unity, though embracing many more or less distinct components, with some sort of focus, or at least gradations in the degree of attention. Some components of this unity (colours have been mentioned already) seem irreducible, and for these the term ‘qualia’ has been introduced. The total field of experience is, however, more than a sum of qualia (in this restricted sense); and the same can be said of those components of this experience that are themselves compound. Thus the perception of a tree is not the perception of a leaf, and of a trunk, and of attachment .... and nothing more. At the very least it is the perception of these together with the result of that analytical, socially rooted process that fuses these into a particular construct with all its associated ideas (to which we may then, if we choose, attach the word ‘tree’). Cognitive research focuses on the information processing that leads from the components to the whole tree, and for such a study any extension of the concept of quale to include anything like the ‘quale of a tree’ would at best be an irrelevance, at worst be nonsense.

For clarity, therefore, I will continue to restrict ‘quale’ to the sense just specified of irreducible components, and use the term ‘experience’ for the total field of awareness that embraces, but is not constituted by, its qualia. For simplicity I will talk mainly about these two extremes of extensiveness, but it will be important to remember the intermediate level of conceptualised objects such as trees.

Within an experience we can adopt Alexander’s (1920) distinction between components that are enjoyed, in the sense of being experienced ‘from the inside’, so to speak; and those that are perceived, being experienced ‘from the outside’. While this distinction roughly corresponds to that between the self and the external world (so that anger is enjoyed — in this technical sense! — whereas red is perceived) it is important to note that the distinctions do not coincide. When we empathise with another being then there is at least the possibility of experiencing it in the mode of enjoyment, whether that being is a beloved person, an animal ritually identified with (Eliade, 1964) or a tool that is totally absorbed within ones own physical work. With particular reference to this last, Heidegger argues that enjoyment (zuhanden sein) is the primordial experience, and that a process of withdrawal relegates enjoyment to mere contemplation (vorhanden sein). Analytic studies of child development confirm this transition from total participation to a partial withdrawal of participation so as to form the world of not-self, which is perceived rather than enjoyed. But the withdrawal is only partial, and I shall argue that the characteristics of qualia derive from their origin in enjoyed experience.

Conventional Cartesian philosophy would hold that qualia are purely mental constructs, and that our perceptual world with its qualia is a distant model of reality. For the Kantian, that reality is totally unknowable. For the scientific realist, reality has the same geometrical structure as the experienced world but contains scientific entities that are associated with the qualia, though quite different from them. For example, the frequency of light in the scientific world corresponds to the quale of a colour in perception. This leaves the nature of the qualia quite unexplained, and makes it impossible to make any headway with the fundamental question of why, in Nagel's sense, there should be anything that "it is like" to experience something.

The phenomenalist view which I am proposing turns this scientific realist model on its head. On the phenomenalist view, the scientific picture is a model of our perceptual world, rather than vice versa, and the perceptual world, with its ramifications through all the different perspectives of sentient beings, is the only sort of reality we are going to get. Thus the qualia are manifestly part of the (real) world: we are as much, or more, entitled to assert that the qualia are "really out there" as we are to assert that electrons are. Velmans (1990, 1996) has demonstrated the propriety of regarding qualia as being at the place that they appear to be at (indeed, since qualia are appearances it would be improper to do anything else) but this leaves unexplained the problem of how this comes about: how is it that a quale located in an external object becomes part of "my" perception. Fortunately, the descriptive scheme I have adopted, inspired by quantum theory, provides a ready way of doing this.

Suppose I am looking at a brown tree and I want to reconcile my physical model of the process with the view that the brownness actually is a property of the tree, and is not just a by-product of mental processes that is projected onto the tree. In previous accounts (Clarke, 1995) I pointed out that, if we use the language of physical (quantum) states, then, when I am observing the tree, the state of my nervous system is "entangled" with the state of the tree.

By this I meant that the compound system admitted stable pure states which could not be expressed as a the tensor product of two separate state of the constituents - a situation which in this case arises when there is an interaction between the two (as has to be the case in an observation). The situation is similar to that obtaining in the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky phenomenon (verified by Aspect), which will be referred to later, where a joint state cannot be decomposed into two separate states.

In terms of the description developed here, we need to express this in terms of loci. Formally this is easy: we require there to be an extremal situation in which the probabilities of propositions from the two constituent sub-loci are not statistically independent. When examined more closely, however, this formal equivalence breaks down, because the loci of myself and the tree are necessarily overlapping, and it is no longer possible to identify a separate locus for myself which does not overlap that of the tree - without abolishing precisely that observation which we are trying to describe! We cannot directly translate "entanglement." What replaces this concept is simply the overlap of loci. In other words, the determination of what are loci (which is not specified here) has to be such that, when there is a quantum mechanical basis, systems that are entangled have overlapping loci.. Thus, if we were to use the language of states to talk about the tree, then because my state is entangled with the state describing the capacity of the tree to reflect light there is objectively nothing to separate out this aspect of the tree from the total locus, part of which is "me." So any experiential quality associated with my own locus must necessarily include aspects of the tree. Thus my perception of the tree, on this account, is an experiential participation in the actual brownness of an actual tree, mediated by the entanglement of states that is set up when my nervous system is interacting with the tree. This is the essence of perception: that qualia arise through an actual participation in external objects. The establishment of this participation is the process described by Merleau-Ponty in the quotation in section 2.

We must, however, go beyond this account to get a credible picture of perception. First, we need to recognise the mutuality of a dynamic interaction as expressed by Merleau-Ponty. In the generalised logic picture, this is expressed by the fact that perceived objects arise from the overlaps between the loci of perceived, perceiver, and societal context, each with their own dynamic (described below).

The perceived object is very far from being a simple read-out of a pre-existing entity. It is this complex of interactions that I refer to in talking (above) of "participation" in the external object. (Note, by the way, that we have here implemented at the level of perception the basis of Heidegger’s insistence that our understanding of a thing is not a representation of it, but a grasping of the thing itself: "To say that an assertion ‘is true’ signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself" (H 218))

The second, and more serious, reason why more needs to be said, is because of the problem of illusion. The standard philosophical example of this is the phenomenon of the after-image. An after-image seen on looking towards a white wall is purely a mental projection, and yet it is momentarily indistinguishable from a greenish blob of paint on the wall. If there is in reality no blob of paint on the wall with which I can entangle my state, how does it come about that the quale of the perception is exactly the same as if there were such an external object? Does not this example instantly demolish my theory? The example in fact leads the theory forward in a most interesting way, by requiring us to take into account a form of memory, and illuminates Heidegger’s "withdrawal" that we have noted as a mark of perception as opposed to enjoyment. We need to explain how qualia, for instance, are indeed grounded in participation in other loci, but without their being nothing but simple enjoyment of these.

A given neurological state associated with a perception may have been manifested on many previous occasions, each entangled with the state of a different locus. I propose to examine this in terms of the concept of identity. In classical physics the only things considered are objects, and any two object-instances are either identical or different. Moreover, if two object-instances are in different places at the same time, then even if the objects are indistinguishable, they have to be regarded as different. This last principle fails to hold in modern physics, where there is a sense in which things that are indistinguishable (notably fundamental particles of a given species) can be regarded as identical even though occupying different places. I would suggest that this quantum property should carry over to the neurological state of perceptions, and that the perception of a particular shade of green now could be the same perception as, that is, it is identical to, a corresponding perception a year ago. Put more carefully, it is more or less identical — we are not even bound to regard identity as a binary matter, but could allow a fuzzy concept of identity. If we take this step, then the quale of green, associated with a given neurological state, is built up, with each occurrence of the state, out of a succession of participations, thereby averaging out that common component from many different total experiential contexts. As a result this adds to the basic idea of participation what Zohar (1990) has called "quantum memory". The quale engendered by this neurological state, as perceived rather than only enjoyed, is an abstraction (a sort of highest common factor) from the experiences represented by all these earlier states of other loci. In this way (to borrow a metaphor from Sheldrake, 1987) qualia are habits of nature rather than the manifestations of fixed laws.

Qualia entering into perception are thus built up through progressive experience, certainly from early childhood and even, in the case of such basic qualia as colour, through the course of the evolution of our species, since there appears to be nothing in the idea that limits it to a single individual. The quale of green, for example, would arise from such a vast sea of green objects that it would be stabilised at a very early stage of childhood, if not as a "race memory", and no subsequent development of the quale through life would be discernible. It would appear to be a fixed datum of our experiential world. Thus (to return to the problem of illusion) a given neural stimulation, whether veridical or illusory, will tap into a long line of previous such stimuli, out of which an associated quale has been built up through participation in a succession of real external objects (and a very few non-existent or illusory ones).

Let me summarise the conclusion of what has been a progressively exploring argument. When I perceive the quale ‘green’ it is external in the sense of being perceived rather than enjoyed; but it is none the less experiential — part of my experience and not at all, say, a count of vibrations per second — and it is moreover located in an external object in whose being I appear to be participating. What is happening is that I am extending my own enjoyment of that locus whose process is my own consciousness, to an abstraction of the enjoyed processes that have shared this colour green, distilling the enjoyment of such loci as leaves, of deep sea, and the rest.

While the inclusion of qualia permit us to call what we are describing ‘consciousness’, it remains to be shown that it makes a difference to what goes on in the world. Without this, what we are saying would not be testable and so it could not be called a model; we would merely have an epiphenomenal theory of consciousness. For consciousness to do something we need a dynamic, which needs to be different from a dynamic acting through external forces. This happens through the exercise of what, I think misleadingly, is usually termed free will. To elucidate this I return to the outline of dynamics in section 3.4

I want to argue that, despite some superficial appearances to the contrary, it is in the first and last of these points that we should look for the action of will.

To understand this, I want to recall the fundamental philosophical problem that is associated with any account of free will. If we have sufficient grounds for making one particular choice then, it could be argued, our choice is determined by those grounds and is not free. On the other hand, if there are insufficient grounds for the choice then it would appear to be a purely random event and not a true choice or a rational act of will. Free will appears to be "free" only if it is not "will". There is a large literature concerned with strengthening the two horns of this dilemma and then extricating oneself from them (see McCall, 1994, for a survey). The approach I take to it is to suggest that the dilemma stems form concentrating on step (2) above to the exclusion of steps (1) and (3).

Suppose we make a rational choice, thereby fixing the value of the truth function to be true on one intention rather than another (step 2). We are (on most interpretations of "rational") conscious of reaching such a choice. But then we are tempted to say that our consciousness is the agent of the choice; and this is an illegitimate deduction. The evidence of introspection (Jaynes, 1993) is that at this stage we participate passively, not actively: we observe and report a decision process whose actual origin is non-conscious. Some (contested) evidence for this also comes from the work of Libet (1987) Consciousness does seem to be involved in the process of attention in which a certain range of propositions is assembled for the purpose of scrutiny and processing, and this act of attention and selection continues until a decision emerges. But the decision itself is not an act of consciousness. The purely logico-deductive part of decision-making (which for Descartes was the only part of consciousness that he regarded as unquestionably non-mechanical) is something that can be, and increasingly is, fully automated and so has little necessary connection with the conscious process.

So if logical argument from sufficient grounds is not the hall-mark of free will, are we left with randomness? In fact there is little evidence, either physiological or introspective, that human beings normally act as game-theory recommends by using a randomiser to resolve inadequate information. To make decisions we start off by trying a variety of (usually incompatible) rules of thumb, combined with a process of imagining possible outcomes of decisions and evaluating the nature of our emotional reactions to these outcomes. So far this is essentially the same as the construction of a chess-playing computer (except that the evaluation process is not called "emotions"). If a decision does not then emerge, we do not resort to a randomiser; rather, we alter the rules of the game. It is this that constitutes the essence of conscious human decision making. We might enlarge the domain C(S) by asking, what would my Grandmother have done in these circumstances. More creatively, we might shift C(S) within L: such a shift will entail a shift to a different distributive consistent domain, a shift of reference frame. For this a generalised logic rather than a classical logic is essential. .

Beyond shifting reference frames, most creatively of all, we might change our logic L altogether, usually by moving to a larger system in which what were previously incompatible frames become reconciled, but in which there are new possibilities for incompatible frames. This step is the most likely one to involve consciousness, rather than mere intelligence. It is the possibility of enlargement of L that motivated the inclusion of relative complements in the logic rather than absolute complements, since the latter presuppose a fixed universe of discourse and hence limits its future enlargement.

To cite an example from a previous paper (Clarke, 1995), what I call ‘choosing’ whether to eat quiche or nut roast for dinner (level 1) is in reality only my post hoc emotional reactions to a largely non-conscious decision process. A true exercise of free will (level 2) would be to enlarge the scope of possibilities, uniting what had previously been seen as incompatible, and respond by cooking a nut quiche.

I am here following the distinction of Heidegger, who regarded "will" of type 2 as strictly secondary. In such a sense "no positive new possibilities are willed, but that which is at one’s disposal becomes ‘tactically’ altered in such a way that there is a semblance of something happening." (H 195) On the other hand I diverge from him as to the possible extent of will of type 3: Heidegger’s "resolution", which is "precisely the ... determination of what is factically possible at the time" (H 298) is only possible as a result of the existential act of grasping ones own Being-oneself. Though this is indeed the main significance of type 3 will, I would see it as physically present, if not so apparently recognisable, in much more trivial cases.

The creative process of shifting reference frames or enlarging L is neither deductive nor random and appears to involve consciousness essentially; but it remains for us to understand exactly how consciousness provides a suitable dynamic for this process. I have characterised consciousness through a proposed scheme for understanding qualia, noting that similar considerations will hold for the qualitative aspects of compound percepts, stressing that it is the participation in other loci that confer on percepts their "what it is like to be ..." aspect. I now want to explore the possibility that the dynamic of free will arises from the way in which this aspect of percepts enables them to act as symbols.

In referring to the qualia as ‘symbols’, acting in the conscious domain I am diverging somewhat from some previous philosophical terminology. Within the phenomenalist tradition the role of percepts as symbols is expressed through the concept of significance. E.g. "The relational totality of this signifying we call ‘significance’ This is what makes up the structure of the world." (H 87) Here, however, I largely follow the work of S Langer (1951), in which a symbol is an artifact: an utterance, a piece of music, a work of art or whatever. She also emphasises that the formation of such relations of symbolisation is the result of a primary human drive towards symbol formation, which she regards as the characteristic attribute of the human species. This results in the construction of symbol-relations concurrently with every process of perception and starting at the earliest developmental stages. Indeed, she sees the linking together of numerous strands of percepts and affects into symbol complexes as an activity that proceeds with particular facility at these early, pre-verbal stages. On the approach I am presenting, the subjective aspects of qualia are composed from actual experiences, and so are particularly suited to symbolise those experiences. ‘Green’ contains the energetics of chlorophyll synthesis, and so naturally symbolises it. Moreover, if, as I am suggesting, the original state of the infant is one of enjoyment rather than perception, then this symbolic role will be built up from infancy in precisely the way that Langer describes. The participation of qualia and of compound percepts (as they appear to consciousness) in the actual events that exemplify them carries with it a natural structure of symbolic interconnectedness. This is rooted in the various loci that support actual events, and so in the world as it is, at an interpersonal level of reality. The process of free will (or, better, creative will) is one of extending the logic and shifting reference frames by following these well-founded symbol systems that are expressed through the subjective experiences of consciousness.

To study symbol manipulation, however, (as Langer points out) we need to look to the experts in the field: the poets and musicians. Thus the true task for the study of consciousness is to bring together the language of these artists, who can describe the operations of these symbol systems that are neither deterministic nor random, with the language of this mathematical model that shows how the enlargement of the logic fits within a universe influenced by quantum matter.

There remains, of course, a great deal to say in order both to flesh out the very bare bones given above, and also to develop the observational implications of the model. Work (supported by Fundaçao Bial) is currently under way in collaboration with Dr Peter Fennwick to test the idea that pairs of empathically related individuals manifest a common locus. This is a possible explanation of the observation by Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al. (1993) and confirmed by Fennwick et al. (1998), that, when an auditory stimulus is applied to one member of the pair, then the appropriate evoked potential can be recorded from the EEG record of the other member. As noted earlier, the model here is applied by assuming that this empathic connection establishes a locus which overlaps both loci of the two individual subjects. The dynamics of the evolutions of their partial truth functions then become interlinked (the phenomenon is formally the same as that of the Aspect experiment) in a way that explains the observed result. A protocol is being implemented to repeat this experiment under different conditions to see whether the detailed predictions of the model are borne out. Full experimental and theoretical details of this application are being published separately.

This has been a first preliminary attempt to construct a testable scheme capable of accounting for the phenomena of consciousness in their experiential aspects. The viewpoint, while still needing a great deal of elaboration, is capable of being linked into practical life and experimentation. If verified, it would provide a theoretical underpinning for the way in which creative will, as experienced and exercised by people, can shape the collective world around us as well as our own interior lives.

I am grateful to the Editor, Philip van Loocke, for valuable assistance in enabling me to clarify many of the points in this paper.

Beltrametti, Enrico G & Cassinelli, Gianni (1981) The Logic of Quantum Mechanics, Addison Wesley, Reading, Mass.

Chalmers, D J (1995) ‘Facing up to the problem of consciousness’ J. Cons. Studies 2, 200-19

Clarke, Chris J S (1993) ‘Process as a primitive physical category’, in Time and Process, ed. J T Fraser and Lewis Rowell, International Universities Press, Madison, Conn pp 53-69

Edie, M (1964) (ed) The Primacy of Perception and other Essays Northwestern University Press, Evanston. Ill

Eliade, Mercia (1964) Shamanism: archaic techniques of ecstasy trans. W R Trask, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London

Fennwick, Peter; Vigus, Norman; Sanders, Sue (1998) "The transferred potential" (to appear: preprint, Institute of Psychiatry, London)

Fowkes, Neville D; Mahoney, John J (1994) An introduction to mathematical modelling, Wiley, Chichester.

Grinberg-Zylberbaum, Jacobo; Attie, I; Delafor, M; Guevara, M; Gonzalez, M; Schettino, I; Cerezo, R; and Perez, T. (1993) "Electrophysiologia de la Communicacion Humana: Potencial Transferido" Revista Mexicana de Psichologia, 10 (2) 127-134

Gudder, Stanley (1967), `Systems of observables in axiomatic quantum mechanics', J. Math. Phys. 8 2109 - 2113

Harman, Willis (1995), `Towards an adequate epistemology for the scientific exploration of consciousness', JCS 1 140 - 148

Heidegger, M (1957) Sein und Zeit (Seventh edition) Quotations are from the English Translation by Joh Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell, 1962, and designated by "H n", where n is the seventh edition page number (used in the margin of the translation)

Isham, C (1994) ‘Quantum logic and the histories approach to quantum theory’ J. Math. Phys 35 2157-85

Jaynes, Julian (1993) The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, Penguin

Kay, Bernard S (1985) "The double-wedge algebra for quantum-fields on Schwarzschild and Minkowsky spacetimes", Comm. Math. Phys. 100 (1) 57 - 81

Langer, Monica M (1989) Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, a guide and commentary, Macmillan, Houndmills

Leiman, Mikael (1992) "The concept of sign in the work of Vygotsky, Winnicott and Bakhtin: further integration of object relations theory and activity theory", British Journal of Medical Psychology, 65, 209-221

Libet (1987) "Are the metal experiences of will and self-control significant for the performance of a voluntary act?" Behavioural and brain sciences, 10, 783-786

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962) Phenomenology of perception, trans Colin Smith, London, Routledge

Nagel, T (1974) ‘What is it like to be a bat’ Philosophical Review 83 435-450

Omnès, Roland (1999) Quantum philosophy Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ

Stapp, Henry P (1993) Mind, matter and quantum mechanics , Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg New York

Sudbery, Anthony (1984) `The observation of decay', Annals of Physics, 157 512 - 536

Velmans, Max (1990) "Consciousness, brain and the physical world", Philosophical Psychology, 3 (1) 77 - 99

Velmans, Max (1996) Chapter 9 of Velmans, M (ed) Science of consciousness: psychological, neurophysiological and clinical, Routledge, London

Voloshinov, V. N., (1973) Marxism and the philosophy of language Harvard U P, Cambridge, Mass

Zeh, H D (1996) in Giulini, D, Joos, E, Kiefer, C, Kupsch, J, Stamatescu, I-O & Zeh, H D (Eds) Decoherence and the appearance of a classical world, Springer-Verlag, Berlin and Heidelberg

It is usual to require also that there exist special elements 0 and 1 such that, for any a,

0 ® a ® 1, but only the existence of 0 will be assumed here. It is, however, always possible to add these elements to any lattice satisfying the other requirements.

Orthocomplementation is an operation on a lattice with 0 and 1 that associates with each element a the element a^ (read as "not a"), such that

Classical logic obeys the distributional law: for any three propositions a, b, c, we have

together with the other relations obtained by permuting these elements among themselves. In an arbitrary lattice (not necessarily obeying classical logic) a set of three elements with these properties is called a distributive triple. An orthocomplemented lattice is called orthomodular if, for any elements a and b, the triple (a, a^ , b) is distributive.

In this section I examine whether the operation of relative complement can be extended to be a true orthocomplement. The essential tool here is the fact (Birkhoff, 1964, p 113) that any lattice L can be embedded in the larger lattice

of all ideals in L. An ideal J is a subset of L satisfying:

The embeding of L in

is defined by the map that associates with any a Î L the principal ideal L(a) of all x Î L with x ® a.

is complete in that the operations v and & can be extended not only to finite sets but to arbitrary sets.

Suppose L is a generalised logic. The construction of the orthocomplement c^ of an element c proceeds as follows. Define

It is then easily seen (using the orthomodular property of the sublattices) that J_c is an ideal. Let

On this set define

, and

. I then conjecture that this definition is consistent and that it extends uniquely to a complement on the smallest sublattice of

containing

S(a v b)

S(a & b)

S(a \ b)

S(a)

S(b)

S(a)

S(b)

S(a)

S(b)

1 or 0

(These are not truth tables in the usual sense since in the third case the values are not uniquely defined)