Indian Journal of Experimental Biology Vol. 41, May 2003, pp. 539-543

'Virtual' photons as carriers of consciousness - A critical comment

Michael Lipkind *

Unit of Molecular Virology, Kilmon Veterinary Institute, P.O. Box 12, Beit Dagan , 50250, Israe l

Internat ional Institute of Biophysics, Neuss-Hombroich, 0-41472, Germany

"Th e mind sleeps in the mineral kingdom. breathes in the vegetable kingdolll. dreams in the animal kingdom. and awakes in man."

P. Teilhard de Chardin, 'Le phenomene hL/main' (1947)

Keywords : Carriers of consciousness, Consciousness, Insentient matter, Panpsychism, Psycho-physical gap, Virtual photons

It seems to be of interest to consider a highly extrava­gant role quite recently ascribed to the 'ordinary ' (physical) photons, namely , the role of bearers or car­ri ers of consciousness I. This is , although extreme, but ex pected consequence of recently published electro­magnetic (EM) theories of consciousness explaining the latter as manifestations of the electromagnetic field of the brain cortex2

-8

. Essentially, thi s is the 'fresh generation' of the EM theories, wh ich were preceded by previous attempts to employ the EM field principle for consciousness explanation9

-12 including

the holonomic plinciple l3 and the quantum mechanical approach 14 implicating the field concept.

According to the EM theories of consciousness, the whole incredibly complicated network of the inter­neuronal interconnections within the brain is consid­ered as a source of the respectively complicated con­tinual electromagnetic field , which is a physical ground for subjective experience. Further question concerns formul ation of elementary material constitu­ents, which are correlates of the corresponding subjective constituents. The electromagnetic manifestations of the brain cortex have been analyzed using modern techniques , e .g. electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography as well as newly estab­lished highly sophi sticated scanning (imaging) tech­niques, such as positron emission tomography and

• • .. 15-1 8 B functIOnal magnetIc resonance Imagll1g . y means of these techniques, a certain correlation between the functioning of nerve cells in cerebral cortex , on one

*For correspondence: Phone : 00972-3-968 1616 Fax: 00972-3-968 1753 E-mail: lipkind @macam.ac.il

michae ii @moag.gov .il

ing of nerve cells in cerebral cortex, on one hand, and the corresponding subjective experiences, on the other, has been demonstrated l5-19

In accordance with the EM theories, the hypotheti­cal role of the consciousness calTiers was ascribed to 'virtual' photons l, which, as opposed to the 'real' photons, are not considered as a wave packet with a certain amount of energy proportional to the fre­quency of that wave. The notion of virtual photons is used in quantum mechanics as a metaphor for the mathematical description of electric and magnetic fields. Thus, "one can simply substitute 'e lectric and magnetic field patterns ' by 'virtual photon patterns' since virtual photons are by definition the theoretical constituents of these field s" l. Virtual photons receive insufficient energy to start an independent life as real photons (i.e. as expressed by electromagnetic waves) , so that they are extremely ephemeral. Their trajecto­ries are classically described as lines of force, which never cross each other. By the Heisenberg's uncer­tainly principle, virtual photons elude the law of con­servation of mass and energy, that enabling them to exist temporarily according to the relationship: the lower their energy (wave frequency) the longer their life-time and the covered di stance2o

. The Romijn 's conclusion is that the patterns of virtual photons as the "germs of subjectivity" are generated by assembli es of dendritic trees of cortical neuronal network, and "encode for- that is to say they experience them­selves as -subjective (conscious) experience"l.

The suggested below critical analysis is to be started from the hottest point of the consciousness enigma which is the well-known 'Hard Problem ' of consciousness proclaimed2 1 and further developed22

540 INDI AN J EX P BIOl, MA Y 2003

by D. Chalmers who has exposed with clear acuity a rather simple question: how and why performance of any fo rm of neural activity can give rise to subjecti ve experience. Essenti all y, the questi on has a more gen­eral meaning: how a physical system of any degree of complex ity (including the brain as "the most compli­cated of materi al objects,,23 can be 'aware' of itself? The 'hardness' of the problem lies in fundamental impossibility to ascribe to a system characteri zed by purely phys ica l parameters the property of conscious experience. Chalmers claims that "a full theory of consc iousness must build an ex planatory bridge" be­tween neurophysiology and consciousness22. In order to achieve this, an extra ingredient in the ex planati on is needed, because "no more account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises", i.e. "the emergence of experience goes beyond what can be deri ved from the physical theory ,,22. This is perfectly illustrated by the fa mous utterance: "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous ti ssue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed hi s lamp,,24.25.

Accordingly, any comprehensive analysis of the 'puzzle of consciousness' inev itably leads to the dead end, which is th at notori ous psycho-phys ical gap con­front ing mental-physica l, or, as more recentl y uttered, mental-nonmentaI26, realms, which means "finding a place fo r the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical,,27. Impossibility to comprehend somebody's subjec ti ve experience (mani fes ted by the class ic ex ­press ion "what it is like to be ... ") and to bind it caus­ally with the objec ti vely analyzed reality led to the sy nonymization of that psycho-physical gap with the earlier proclaimed Ex planatory Gap28.

The analysis of thi s paradox can be done using both the common sense logic and the hard formali sm of pure mathematics. From the former point of view, the paradox seems to be unsolvable within the Pro­crustean Bed of the determined limits of the phys ical glossary in which there are no tools to describe the subjecti ve experience which is characteri zed by quite a diffe rent language: the notions like reason, free will , thinking, intention, volition, imagination, intuition, moral values, etc., are certainly absent in the vocabu­lary of physics and there is no Rosetta Stone to con­nect both the languages. From the point of view of the mathematical formali sm, the above "hard problem" is an example of the limitati ons to the decidability or verifiabi lity poi nted out by Gbdel's theorem29.3o.

Now, returning to the electromagnetic theory of consciousness, espec ially to the concept of the virtual photons as "carri ers of consciousness", if using the Romijn 's expression , it is impossible to escape the choice between two alternative trends (rert ium non datur! ), namely, radical emergence27.J1 or generati on problem32 as opposed to panpsychism33 or panexperi­entialism34.35 or pan-proto-psychi sm36. Putting apart all the hi storical premises, numerous varieties of re­duction and emergence36

, and recent di sc ussions on d' fc . f h d' I 37-40 I .erent van ants 0 t e ra Ica emergence ,e.g. the problem can be outlined as follows.

The radical emergence means that particul ar mate­ri al configurations and processes produce conscious experience, i.e. the mentality ultimately emerges out of the wholly insentient matter, while the panex peri ­enti ali sm means that every element of physical reality is associated with mental (protomenta]) capacity (e.g. "units-events", Griffin34.35), i.e. the mentality is 'mental' all the way down. The fonner inevitabl y leads to the Hard Problem and Explanatory Gap while the latter bears the 'combination problem.32.4\ which means merging of units of, say. 'atomic conscious­ness' into higher fo rms of consciousness up to the human consciousness per se that leads to the same emergence of quality from combinations of 'elemen­tary blocks' . A fantasy based on reality can ask an enormous lot of questions that make the whole doc­trine of panpsychism "logicall y un intelli gible,,41, so that instead of "Unsnarling the World Kn ot,,35 the panpsychism brings back the Generation Problem, leading to the same Hard Problem and Explanatory Gap with a lot of questions, i.e. again "the inconceiv­able remains inconceivable,,42.

Therefore, the EM theory considering virtual pho­tons as carriers of consciousness I inevitably meets the necessity to make the fatal choice between the radical emergence and pan psych ism, the latter seem­ing much more appropriate to the idea to ascribe con­sciousness to such 'elementary' entiti es as virtual photons. This is ex pressed by Romijn , himself, who admits that the hypothesis of virtual photons needs "new scienti fic arguments supporting panpsychi sm"l, but "scienti fic" support is hardly expectable due to the above insuperable di fficulti es41 assoc iated with the " b" bl ,,3? com illatIOn pro em -.

However, apart from the philosoph ical paradoxes, there are more actu al immediate difficul ties within the sphere of EM conception itself which are perfect ly analyzed by Susan Pockett5 who is one of the leaders of the ex peri mental research rested upon the EM-

L1PKI ND: V IRTUAL PHOTONS AS CA RRI ERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 54 1

based expl anation of consciousness. According to Pockett, the defining feature of the hypothetical 'con­scious ' electromagnetic field is not its intensity , its association with the brain structure, and the neuronal firing, as suggested by McFadden , another leader of the EM theories?·8, but the "spatial constitution" of the "conscious" e lectromag netic patterns. Such conclu­sion is based on the classic ex periments by Freeman and Baird43 which permitted to c lass ify the electro­magnetic patterns measured at the surface o f the rab­bit brain when a rabbit was experi encing a parti cul ar odour. Namely, such experi ence res ided not in the overall amplitude, frequency , or phase properti es but in the postulated "spatial feat ures of those patterns". The first difficulty indicated by Pockett is connected not only with imposs ibili ty at present to measure ac­curately enough the spati al properties of the EM fields, which are proposed to be conscious, but the impossibility to generate these properties artificially , so that the theory cannot be tested in principle. The second diffi culty re lates to the fact show ing a non­constant relationship between the brain-generated EM fields measured objectively (third person perspective), on one hand, and sensatio n as reported by a subjec t (subjective first person perspective), on the other. Thi s difficulty may be mere ly technical, but in case that such non-constant correlation is substantive, thi s would be in principle incompatibl e with the EM theo­ri es. The third difficulty is based on a fundamental question of whether the consc iousness-manifes ting EM field generated at some space within the brain has any direct effec t on (is a direct cause of) behav ior. As Pockett claims, " by the time what was o ri ginall y an intricate spat ial pattern reaches some other part of the brain , it is no longer the same patte rn", so that it is imposs ible to "see how such a smeared caricature of the original could be expected to influence behavioral output in any precise way"s. Another difficulty of the EM theory concerns the re lation of the 'sy nchro­nously firin g neurons ' invol ved in the generatio n of conscious percepts? By analyzing and ca lcul ating the relative contribution to EM field potenti a l of the co­herently firing neurons to incoherently firin g neu­rons4

, Pockett comes to conclusion that " if conscious percepts are EM patterns, I % of neurons firin g coher­ently would be likely to contribute up to 30 times more to conscious percepts than the other 99% of neu­rons"s. Such outcome invalidates the whole idea of the neuronal firing as generator of conscious experi­ence.

Thus, the above ana lysis and self-criticism made by Susan Pockett seriously undermines the potenti al ca­pacities of the EM theory of consc iousness and , con­sequently, the hypothetical role of the virtual photons as carriers of consciousness.

However, the concept of field itself has been and remains to be a highly potential notion for the analys is o f consciousness. The main attraction is due to that it is tempting to analogize still undefi ned consciousness with the well-established and comprehensively defi ned fie ld principle which is the most uni versal notion in ­vo lving the whole physical world from elementary par­ticles till cosmic level. In thi s respect, in connecti on to consciousness, the concept of field has been employed in two aspects . In the 1 st aspect, the application of the established physical field theories for consciousness

I · d k ?· 14 h'I ' h 2nd ex p anat lon was un erta en- , w I e In t e aspect , the elaborated theories were based on the noti on of the au tonomous field irreducible to the establi shed phys ical fields45

.s3

. The 1st aspect means reductioni st approach for ex pl aining consc iousness from the physicalist point of view with no need for any "extra ingred ient,,22, while accord ing to the 2nd aspect , the fie ld concept is to express the very meaning of the ex tra ingredient. The EM theories of consciousness are firml y based on the comprehensively e laborated phys ical-mathematical grounds of the field theory , but, as it was shown above, inev itably lead to the Hard Proble m and Psycho-Phys ical (Explanatory) Gap. On the other hand, the recent attempts of app li ­cation of the autonomous fie lds (i .e. irreduc ible to the physical fundamentals) to the problem of conscious­ness ("Morphic resonance" by R. Sheldrake44

-4X,

" Mental fie ld" by B. Libet49.so, and "Unified Con­

sc ious Field" by 1. SearleSI .53) res ul t in either esoteric

speC Ul at ion with little rdation to sc ientific knowl edge (Sheldrake), or purely tautological definition (Libet), or vapid metaphoric descriptio n (Searle).

Thus, the s ituation is that the field theories of con­sc iousness based on the establ ished physical fields lead to the dead-end of the Psycho-Phys ical Gap, while in the theories based on the irreducible fiel d, the latter, used as a belletri sticall y expressed metaphor or defined tautologically , losses its 'fie ld face'. Some vain considerations about the "fie ld of conscious­ness"S4, in which the word " field" has idle meaning and can be easi ly replaced by various substitu tions, like "s tream" , "state", "phenomenon" etc., are indica­tive in thi s respect. Therefore, for consciousness theo­ri zi ng, the obligatory condition for an au to nomous irreducible f ield concept is its ex pression by means of

542 IND IAN J EXP BIOL, MA Y 2003

fo rma l field postul ates, wh ich are to be si mila r to those in the es tab li shed phys ical field theo ries . The wsk is to fill such abstrJct skeleton with novel onto­log ical fl esh.

Thus, it could seem that the task to elaborate a nOI1-ta utological autonomous field theory of conscio usness based on the formal field postu lates is des ti ned for future efforts . However. exactly such fiel d theory has been elaborated r:lther long ago by Alex ander Gur­wi tsch55

-57 who was the (i;'s i to introduce the 'lo ti on or

Cield into binlogySR. This fact was ackn owledged in . 5')-61 II' contemporary levlcws- as we a ~; In mo re recent

\Yorks by the biol()gi~ts cmpioying the concept of fie ld in t hei r theoretical co nsidera ti ons(1~ -6~.45.n5-6,'.

However, the last ver~i0n of the theory related to con­sciousness was elaborated by Gurwitseil in fOr\;es­iirties ill Soviet Ru ~s ia . published ma in ly in Ru ss ian . Ll nd. hence, has escaped att ention or the Western reader. /\ cOlT1rr('hC!l~;i':c rev iew on Gurwitseh's field theory anu its ,Ippli caliolls for biulogy ane psychology was published onl y in 1987 in German6'

).711 and later in E I· 171 -71 ng IS 1 '.

In Gurwitsch's theory, a notion of the autonomous irred uci ble rield is neither tautological, nor mela­phori c, nor allegorical. being based on strictl y defined post ulat es deeply rooted in the biologicLlI reai it y and descri bed by the language or mathematical modeling. These postulates concern vectorial rcpuhve character of the field, field anisotI'Opy, concept of an el emclltary fic ld "flash", field sources, mech3ni sm of the field infl ucnce upon molecular substrate wit hin the jiving cell, fo rmation of the in tegral microfields and mac­rofie lds, and dynam ics of field ten sion in associat ioil with metabo lic level. The ficld inOu_l1ce is descn bcd at morphoiogieal, cellular, and molecular levels. The mode of action of the Gurwitschian field at molecular level is realized in vectorization of molecu lar proc­esses in liv ing systems ('working' agains t molecules' chaotic movcments). A proper consideration of these postu lates is beyond the limits of the present paper.

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