Book Review: Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI by George Musser

Consciousness is a fundamental nonlocal reality Recent progress in physics, philosophy, neurobiology, and artificial intelligence (AI) research suggests that consciousness is a fundamental nonlocal field that gives rise to information, matter/energy, emerging spacetime, and of course the laws of physics under which the emergence of life/conscious entities are possible. Consciousness is a creative force that shapes the universe and human beings in a unified field. It is an intelligent information system driving the universe. The crux of the consciousness research is how do we explain the eighty-six billion neurons of the human brain produce conscious experience. In addition, the nervous system is influenced by or influence cardiovascular, endocrine, gastrointestinal, and immune systems. The human gut bacteria produce many neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and GABA, which are critical for mood, anxiety, concentration, reward, and motivation. Thus, gut microbiome changes how our brains react or produces a conscious experience. There is also the “hard problem” of consciousness that needs to explain as how humans and other organisms have qualia or subjective experiences which encapsulate our personal perception and internal understanding of the world around us. It gets even more complicated as we are learning from AI research that some form of inner conscious experience also emerges from artificial intelligence or the silicon transistors. Indeed, Google recently published an AI-powered robot that can sense and engage with its environment, when a PaLM-E delivered a packet of potato chips to its owner, despite the packet having been hidden in a drawer midway through the experiment. PaLM-E (Pathways Language Model-E) is a groundbreaking 562-billion parameter embodied multimodal language model that seamlessly connects textual data to real-world visual and physical sensor modalities, enhancing problem-solving in computer vision and robotics. Google reports that it has common sense reasoning that compares with average human being. Common sense is one of the products of conscious experience. There is also the hard problem of matter, which is similar to the hard problem of mind. Physics becomes a purely relational description of matter which at the most fundamental level originates out of quantum vacuum, i.e., quantum particles emerge and disappear (annihilates) out of nothing. All this is explained by quantum physics and physics formulas (information). Likewise, a purely relational description of the mind omits the experiential quality of our experience, and conscious experience is reduced to information. These two hard problems are linked, and that the nature of matter is related to the nature of mind and consciousness. The details are hazy at the moment, but the takeaway message is that physics needs to reach outside itself to answer its most fundamental questions, namely conscious observers in the quantum realm. Physicist Carlo Rovelli proposes that reality consists not of things, but of relations; theories, quantum physics, and scientific reasoning indicate that there are no observer-independent absolute entities. Theories of consciousness such as integrated information theory (IIT) and predictive coding supports Rovelli’s assertions which the author discusses in Chapter 3. Additional considerations help readers where the author is going with all this. For example, most physical systems are reactive, meaning that they respond only to their immediate circumstances and affect only their immediate surroundings. Causation in these systems is straightforward; effects are proximate and proportional to causes. But intelligent beings and artificial neural networks create twisty paths between cause and effect. We're not dominos falling dumbly. The universe is not just a landscape in which one thing happens and then another; there are special little causal hubs built to collect influence from across landscape and filter it through a decision process that guides our actions. These little hubs are called human minds. The book reads flawlessly, and the author makes a good effort to describe the challenges of all the scientific disciplines involved in consciousness research, but I have read better reviews on this subject in professional journals.