What If the Ontological Basis of Consciousness are Quantum Exclusions?

One of the most ontologically revolutionary implications of the advent of quantum theory was the introduction of the category of possibilities or “potentiae” among the fundamental categories of reality. Heisenberg's original suggestion that quantum entities can be understood as a form of Aristotle's “potentiae,” where potentiae are not simply epistemic, but ontologically fundamental constituents of nature, was later recovered by several authors interested in capturing the ontologic features of reality behind the experimental success of quantum formalism. Recently, on the basis of Heisenberg's ontological framework of quantum potentia, new interpretations of quantum physics have been advanced, notably R. E. Kastner's RTI/PTI, in which quantum states do not exist in spacetime but are nonetheless real. “This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of ‘what is real’ to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility,” write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson in their paper “Taking Hesisenberg’s Potentia Seriously”.

The three authors propose two ontological categories as the foundation of reality: Res Extensa, coincident with the four-dimensional spacetime of Einstein's general relativity, and Res Potentia, mathematically described by Hilbert space in which Heisenberg's potentiae, namely pure quantum states or superpositions of possible outcomes (i.e., rays in Hilbert space), reside in and from which four-dimensional spacetime crystallizes through actualization of outcomes (i.e., quantum measurement). Just as Heisenberg identified quantum potentials as a new type of ontological state distinct from the actualized state, the hypothesis advanced in this paper is to conceive of a third type of ontological state, distinct from both the potential state and the actualized state.

While Heisenberg's potential ontological state is distinguished as a superposition of potential space-time outcomes, the third type of ontological state, the quantum exclusion state, can be defined as a state of space-time outcomes annihilation, thus as a state of annihilation of the physical properties involved in the quantum measurement process that give space-time outcomes. It is therefore a question of conceiving a third ontological category beyond Res Potentia and Res Extensa, which in this paper we will call Res Exclusia. In comparison with Res Potentia, Res Exclusia would have key advantages as ontological “place of consciousness”: in addition to less vulnerability to Chalmers' conceivability arguments (quantum exclusions seem to be the only entities/states implicated in the quantum measurement process, that are naturally supervenient but not logically supervenient on Res Extensa), Res Exclusia avoids the feature that makes quantum potentiae, understood as pure states (pure density matrix), irreconcilable with our phenomenological evidence, namely, superposition.

We can also conceive of quantum exclusions as Everettian branches that, deprived of physical quantities due to the collapse of the wave function, assume only phenomenal qualities.  Each outcome in one of these “ghostly” Everettian branches instantaneously affects what is possible to implement next in this given branch, by non-locally and globally altering the superpositions of alternative possibilities  relative to this given branch, in the same way that each actualized event in space-time instantaneously affects what is possible to actualize next in space-time, by non-locally and globally altering the superpositions of alternative possibilities for all entangled degrees of freedom relative to space-time. For each outcome in Res Extensa there are N outcomes in Res Exclusia. Put in more metaphorical terms, each event in space-time carries with it N spectra of exclusion in Res Exclusia, “vestiges” of a shared past in quantum superposition. Within this scenario of phenomenal-physical N-to-1 parallelism there seems to be no room for any kind of interconnection between the physical space-time history and the phenomenal histories that take place in the “ghostly” Everettian N-branches in Res Exclusia, while between one phenomenal history and another within Res Exclusia integration is conceivable as between parts of the same fundamental ontological category.

Unlike the many worlds/minds of the “many-worlds/minds” interpretations, the separation between the N “ghostly” branches is assumed exclusively at the stage of entering, through the process of quantum measurement, of new degrees of freedom (quantum exclusions) into Res Exclusia, while it vanishes once the new degrees of freedom are instantiated within the same ontological category. Conversely, the interconnection between spatiotemporal history and the N phenomenal histories is difficult to conceive because Res Extensa and Res Exclusia are composed of ontologically different outcomes, on the one hand spatiotemporal outomes and on the other hand phenomenal outcomes. The proposal brought forward in this paper is to conjecture the interconnection between the spatiotemporal history and the N phenomenal histories exclusively at the level of specific highly integrated macrophysical systems, such as the human brain, consistent with our phenomenological evidence of consciousness causation and free will. Spatiotemporal-phenomenal interconnection, then, as an evolutionary advantage limited to specific highly integrated systems such as the human brain, in the face of non-interacting N-to-1 parallelism instead ubiquitous in nature. But how?

One possible solution, which is highly speculative and needs further investigation, is based on the prediction of inverse and re-inverted nonlocal EPR-like affections between Res Potentia and Res Extensa/Res Exclusia.