I Think Therefore I Am Fundamental?

As we’ve just seen, analysing almost anything, even the simplest molecules, from the first principles of particle physics is depressingly hard, which makes fundamental­ly effectively pop up everywhere.

“Consciousness-first” approaches, whether they are found in scientific, philosoph­ical or mystical arguments, all suffer from a conundrum that constitutes, for many, an immediate deal breaker. It seems clear that consciousness requires a physical brain to operate: you damage the brain, you damage the consciousness; you destroy the brain, you destroy the consciousness (at lest, from an external point of view). More­over, in the early universe, there were at least millions of years, maybe billions, when there were almost certainly no conscious beings to be found anywhere. So how can consciousness come first?

During a session on consciousness and integrated information theory held at FQXi’s 2016 conference, I asked the panel what was more fundamental: conscious­ness, or space/time/matter (Fig. 2). There were many nuanced answers, but overall, consciousness won!

Frank Johnson’s famous thought experiment, “Mary the color scientist”, is one of the best arguments for believing that qualia, the subjective properties of conscious states (for example, what it is like when we perceive the color red), cannot be reduced, even in principle, to physics or any other physical science:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor.

If Mary learns something new (which seems reasonable), then qualia, as fun­damental elements of conscious experiences, cannot fully be accounted for by any amount of information about physics, chemistry or biology, and are truly, indepen­dently fundamental.

Going back to Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, another argument for the fundamen­tality of consciousness is the obvious fact that all we really know for certain about the Universe is that “consciousness is going on”, more precisely, our own consciousness. Consciousness underlies everything we know, so it must be, in some important sense, epistemologically fundamental. But does this necessarily imply that it is also onto-

Fig. 2 Question period during a session on consciousness and integrated information theory at FQXi’s 2016 conference

logically fundamental, and that it constitutes an independent, fundamental aspect of objective reality?

If we want to clarify the question “What is fundamental?” and make sense of the divergence of opinions among scientists and philosophers, it seems important to clearly distinguish between epistemological fundamentality (the fundamentality of our scientific theories) and ontological fundamentality (the fundamentality of reality itself, irrespective of our description of it).

Since science is supposed to model reality, the two kinds of fundamentality should ideally coincide. But of course, there is no way to know for certain what the true nature of reality is: the world is what it is and does what it does, science only tries to follow the best it can. As limited observers, we only have access to a restricted domain of reality. We can certainly try to ascertain the relative fundamentality of our scientific theories, but to believe that we can say anything meaningful about onto­logical fundamentality, we must first believe that we can say something meaningful about reality-in-itself.

The problem is that the sum total of what we have codified about nature in our scientific laws underdetermines what reality-in-itself could be. As Sean Carroll puts it,

The fundamental stuff or reality might be something wholly distinct from anything any living physicist have ever imagined; in our everyday world, physics will still work according to the rules of quantum field theory. [12]

It could be that the question “What is Fundamental?” only makes sense episte­mologically [13], and that the very concept of fundamentally does not apply at the ontological level: the world is simply a coherent whole, and nothing is truly more fundamental than anything else.

On the other hand, the fact that we cannot use the tools of science to ascertain the deep nature of reality does not mean that we cannot use our logic and our intuition to make reasoned hypotheses about it!

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