Consciousness Is More Real Than Any Physical Theory | Ruth Kastner

I got into physics because I thought electromagnetism was magic. I was just enchanted by it. I was enchanted by light and the fact that back when I was a child that you could have a prism and see white light being broken up into colors. I was enchanted. So I was enchanted by physics. It's also in my family. I have a lot of family members who are physicists. When I went into physics at the graduate level at the University of Maryland and came across the EPR, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment and so on, and the non-locality, that's when I became really fascinated with these puzzles, with the paradoxes of quantum theory. It was at that point after I got my master's that I decided I really wanted to pursue that kind of examination and I learned that they were doing that in the philosophy department with Jeffrey Boob, Alan Stairs, and some people there. So that was a tough decision, but I'm really glad that I made that decision. Now, I guess a meta-question. Was that decision yours to make under your framework? Is there free will? Oh, yes. Yeah. I mean, I think, and I've argued, I have a couple of papers on this and I address it in my books. I mean, free will. We have constrained will. We're not completely free, but there are live choices. I believe there are live choices. And I've also argued that there is no sense in which physics rules that out. I mean, it's very common for physicists to issue these edicts that say physics says we do not have free will. And that's very much incorrect. Those kinds of judgments are made based on certain interpretations of the physics and certain unnecessary kinds of metaphysical presuppositions that people bring into it that they may not be aware they have. So yeah, physics definitely allows room for there to be real live choices. And in fact, I've argued that quantum theory actually suggests that that's what's happening in nature. Okay, so I assume what you're referring to is libertarian free will. Am I correct? Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily go along with all the traditions of that approach. But you know, I think there's, physics leaves room for there to be unpredetermined choices on the part of agents. Now, what counts as an agent is a huge question, you know, that physics may or may not have anything to say about. But physical theory definitely allows for, you know, I mean, even Heisenberg talked about photons making choices when deciding whether to go through a polarizer or not. So there's room in physics for that, for live choices. If the transactional formulation doesn't care or doesn't make claims about observers, and observers are tied to consciousness and consciousness is tied to free will, feel free to dispel any of those claims that I just made, then I find it difficult to see how TI can have something to say about free will in a libertarian sense, because it sounds to me like it would just be probabilistic. And if it's just probabilistic, I don't see where the choice is, if it's already given to you by the Born rule. Unless it's non-deterministic, where the probability distribution is not known. No, the probability distribution is given by the Born rule. I mean, I would never say that the transactional formulation has anything to say about free will. This is just me talking, you know. I see. But kind of, given, like, suppose I think that nature does behave this way. I happen to think it does. I mean, if somebody found something terribly wrong with this, I would, you know, I'd rethink that, I'd re-examine that. But, you know, if nature really does work, you know, in a way according to this direct action theory of fields, that in itself is a different subject from free will. All it does, all it does is say, physics won't forbid it. You know, that's the most that it can say. If this physical theory is genuinely indeterministic, then it leaves room for there to be some theory of free will. It doesn't tell you there is or isn't. It, you know, it just leaves room for it. Which is opposite from, you know, many physicists will say, physics tells you you don't have free will. And I really don't think that's a fair thing to say, right? So that's, it's delimited in that way. I mean, me just speculating, I obviously consciousness, I mean, personally in my own views, I do think that you're going to have trouble accounting for consciousness if you're materialistic. And if you assume the Cartesian dualism type thing or if you assume that physical matter is as Descartes envisioned it, which means it's dead, it's by definition non-sentient, then you've got the hard problem and you're not going to get consciousness out of that. So that's my view and I think that, you know, consciousness is something that's much more fundamental than any physical theory. Interesting. So you think what lies underneath the iceberg of the iceberg is consciousness? Or perhaps it's the ocean? Well, yeah, I really think so. I mean, just in a purely logical sense. Folks, if you're going to say that the building blocks of nature are dead and non-sentient, then forget it. You're not getting consciousness out of that end of story. So I'm, just to be logically consistent with myself, I am forced into a posture of saying that consciousness must be in there at the basis of everything. Just on a logical basis. I mean, you know, by the hard problem. There's only a hard problem if you assume that everything's dead. So, I mean, physics doesn't need to. Physics doesn't need to postulate that matter is dead. I mean, why do that? There's no reason to. It's unnecessary. It's just a metaphysical choice that's optional. In my opinion. You know, seems like it. You know, like I can say, well, there's matter that described physics deals with something we call matter. I'm not going to add to that that has to be dead. Why would I do that? That's stupid. You know, like, why do that? I mean, that's just an assumption. It's dead. Why do we have to assume physics describes dead stuff? You don't have to. There's no reason. Or non-sentient. I'm going to define matter as non-sentient. Why? Nobody put a gun to your head. You didn't have to do that. You know, you can, you know, I mean, to me, it's kind of hubristic. Just say, okay, you don't know what life is. You don't know what consciousness is. So that doesn't mean you have to forbid it from being part of your theory. Just say your theory doesn't have anything to say about it. Maybe later it will, you know, so don't for, you know, that's my position is don't foreclose possibilities if you don't have to. Would you say that rivers or rock or snow or H2O or carbon dioxide have experiential elements to them or that they're conscious? I don't know. I mean, I can't, I can't assert that. But it's, I mean, Heisenberg himself said that the photon is making a choice whether to go through the polarizer. So maybe they do. I mean, you know, again, that's, that's a question of at what level could you say something begins to be like self-conscious or begins to be deliberative in it? You know, I don't know, you know, who knows that I don't purport to have those answers. But certainly that, you know, the indigenous traditions thought so, you know, and people might say, well, they weren't scientific. Well, maybe they were, but in a different way. So, I mean, people have, have traditions that, that kind of take that for granted. And of course, most of those kinds of traditions are usually, are usually, you know, dismissed by, by the Western approach. But, you know, maybe we need to be a little more open-minded. I mean, we still have to be physically rigorous. And I started out on this exploration being very much, you know, like a Sam Harris person, type person who deprecates anyone who talks along these lines, who talks about, you know, things that, that are not strictly materialistic and involving Cartesian dead matter. So I've been there. So what changed you? That it's logically inconsistent. You can't, you can't get, I mean, that's the main thing. You can't get consciousness if you, if you preclude it from the outset on a logical basis. And you know, and also I, you know, I happen to be, I'm a philosopher and I happen to be interested in various spiritual traditions and I'm, I'm a yoga teacher. So I know something about Indian philosophy and, and I've, I've come to respect other traditions and other ways of knowing as, as having some insight and having, you know, approaches to knowledge that, that maybe are not within the kind of Western usual scientific paradigm and, and along with its, its sort of constraints. But, but I've come to respect the, you know, the, some of the wisdom of those traditions. So while I would never try to mix them, you know, I don't, I don't, I think there are different ways of knowing and I try to be scientifically rigorous and when I'm working with physics, I don't postulate stuff that I don't think I, is warranted. And I try to be logically consistent and, and try to see where the theory leads me. But, you know, when it comes to things like consciousness and life, physics needs to be a little bit more modest and, and needs to understand what's within its domain of, of accountability and what isn't, what it can explain and what maybe what it can't. And that it shouldn't, that, that scientific inquiry doesn't need to be constrained and circumscribed by optional metaphysical premises that maybe were useful as kind of training wheels. I, I think of them as kind of training wheels, you know, that sort of mechanistic approach that led to Newtonian mechanics and so on. But at some point, maybe you need to like recognize what's your, what's on your bike, what's your bike that's really going to get you places and what are training wheels that are holding you back? And I think that's where we are now with the mechanistic way of looking at things. Do you think that we're being held back from further physical inquiry? Is that what this bicycle, this, the tricycle being too slow metaphor is talking about? Or is it something like spiritual advancement that is holding us back from? Well, I mean, really in terms of physics, we're being held back, I think, from some, from progress in solving a lot of these problems by physicists not really wanting to consider this direct action picture, this transactional formulation, because it violates their training wheels because it violates this kind of mechanical forward, always forward directed space-time is the entire domain of what's physically real. Those kinds of presuppositions, it challenges those. And I think of those as the training wheels in the field of physics. And I mean, again, as our publications show, we already have presented solutions to problems that you'll see people, you know, I see papers constantly come out and say, measurement remains enigmatic in quantum theory. Nobody knows what a measurement is. And I'm like, well, I've been telling you what it is since 2012, you know, and, and Kramer did 1986. So this is that it's bouncing off that the answers are there and they're bouncing off because the conventional approach is still, I want my training wheels because the price for accepting these kinds of solutions is you got to let go of your training wheels. And you have, you have to let go of your, your demand for what you call locality, your demand for determinism and mechanical explanations. And those are the training wheels. If you let go of those, you have answers to these problems. We've got the publications, we've got the answer to reconciling the quantum level with relativistic level. It's out there. You know, and so when people say this, we've still got this problem, this unsolved problem of how to reconcile quantum theory with relativity. Well, read the, the, the physics communications paper that we've put out in 2024. While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist.