Josie Ford
FULL disclosure: I am a hypocrite. Two weeks ago, I wrote a 91av lead article about the urgent need to find alternatives to flying. Last Friday, I boarded a plane from London to Pisa, Italy, for a scientific conference that, at first glance, would almost certainly fail the “necessary” test.In my defence, one of the themes of the conference, organised by the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), was the extent to which intelligent agents control their actions – and I did offset my emissions. What’s more, I left the convention feeling that something quite important was stirring in the Tuscan hills.
At its heart is the mystery of life: how atoms and molecules come together to make stuff that can self-sustain, make decisions, influence and exploit its environment, and be conscious. Physics can’t explain that. A few months ago, physicist Paul Davies, who presented at the conference, proposed in these pages that better, information-based physical theories might be the key to resolving the conundrum (2 February, p 28).
Maybe. But the problems go deeper. Our most basic theory of reality, quantum mechanics, is beset by the problem of conscious observation, which in some way seems itself to interrupt reality and perhaps determine its evolution – with potentially nonsensical consequences.
Advertisement
My brain overheats when confronted with these problems, and I was glad to learn at the FQXi conference that I am not the only one. But it is becoming clear that we will only make progress in fundamental physics and other fields by working out where the “I” is in reality.
Ideas are out there. On page 34 of this issue, for example, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman presents his own evolutionary theory of how our perceptions necessarily cloud our ability to see what is truly what.
Conferences such as FQXi provide an opportunity for researchers from different disciplines to compare notes. What struck me observing them was how much work there is to do even just to define concepts such as agency, free will, consciousness and intelligence, and how they interrelate. Maybe physicists can help, though one early attempt – the integrated information theory of consciousness – has come under fire for allowing some pretty strange definitions of what counts as conscious.
For the very small amount it is worth, I am sceptical we will ever develop a comprehensive and objective theory of first-person, subjective experience. The lesson from other realms of enquiry, for example Gödel’s incompleteness theorems in maths, is that logical systems blow up when trying to explain themselves.
But I am glad that people are trying. As we develop artificial intelligences and ask ourselves about their limits and dangers, the pay-offs of a better understanding of this relationship between conscious experience and the physical world could be huge.
It will take a different application of agency and intelligence to solve climate change (I will take the train next time). But figuring out how we relate to the world around us on a basic level is necessary, too.
