The origin of consciousness has always been a mystery for scientists and philosophers, each of whom tried to find his own logical solution to this eternal question. While some neuroscience studies have been able to reveal certain brain activity that may one day shed light on the origin of conscious thinking, a number of electrochemical changes in human brain cells still remain a mystery to researchers in the field of neuroscience.
How does nerve tissue generate thought?
Despite the fact that humanity has advanced far in its neurobiological research, we still do not know exactly how the nervous tissue is capable of generating thought. According to Izi Stoll, director of the Western Institute for Advanced Study, thought is an understudied and highly specific feature of neural networks. Due to the fact that most theories about the origin of consciousness came to us from cognitive science, none of the officially voiced hypotheses ever found an answer to what exactly gave evolution an impetus to the development of conscious thinking. For those scientists who seek to find a scientific and rational explanation of the processes occurring in the human brain, one of the solutions to this problem may be to study their relationship with the quantum world.
Can quantum physics explain the emergence of consciousness in humans?
Quantum physics is one of the most mysterious branches of theoretical physics, which studies the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles that behave like waves. The physical processes taking place in the world of quantum mechanics are as mysterious as consciousness itself. So, no one knows what exactly happens with subatomic particles that exist in two places at the same time, or with a cat, which in Schrödinger's experiment is both alive and dead at the same time. What if similar processes occur at the moment of the birth of consciousness and the ability to be aware of oneself in a person?
In Erwin Schrödinger's thought experiment, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.
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In the same way that scientists hope to explore the mysteries of consciousness using quantum physics, some researchers believe that consciousness can help answer the basic questions of quantum physics. The fact that equations from this field of science have infinite states, the possibility of combining quantum theory into a hypothesis of consciousness can help explain why people experience only one reality on themselves, and are not complicit in several states of the universe at once.
Despite the fact that traditional quantum physics tends to believe that it is consciousness that determines this or that outcome of an event, in 1989 the physicist Roger Penrose put forward a hypothesis about the so-called collapse of the wave function, which causes consciousness. In other words, according to Penrose, consciousness may not be the primary, defining element, but secondary and acquired. According to Penrose, it is the curvature of space and time that causes certain events at the quantum level, which affect the behavior of quantum particles to the structures of the human brain that are responsible for consciousness. In addition, experts were able to establish that anesthetics that lead to temporary loss of consciousness affect precisely the microtubules found by the researchers.
According to Penrose's theory, your liver can be conscious. And not only him.
Despite the fact that this theory of the origin of consciousness has received wide publicity in the scientific world, it does not have official recognition as such. One of the problems of Penrose's theory is the fact that absolutely in every cell of our body there are the aforementioned microtubules, but this does not mean that, say, liver or lung cells have consciousness.
Although, perhaps, such an outcome of events would be very original.
If Penrose's concept may seem rather unusual to you, then the idea developed by the neuroscientists Andrew and Alexander Fingelkurt may satisfy the most inquisitive minds by presenting a more “down to earth” idea. According to their concept, called the architectonics of the mind and brain, the water molecules that make up most of our brains create a so-called "cortical field" that interacts with quantum waves that can propagate through brain cells, thus producing what we are. we call consciousness.
Daria Eletskaya