The Thermodynamics of Consciousness

I woke up in the wee hours with a startling revelation due to Nick Herbert's facetious prodding.

There is no mind-matter "hard problem" even in terms of David Chalmer's criteria (Sci Am 1995 or so). It was solved implicitly by Henry Stapp's Whiteheadian approach that the world intrinsically divides into "thoughtlike" and "rocklike" things. Bohm's split into the (super) quantum potential Q and the classical matter field configurations/particle trajectories (AKA hidden variables) is the obvious way to go.

(super) Q = qubit intrinsic "mental" field.

It is objective, physical, generally in configuration space, form/context dependent, immediate - all the spooky telepathic psychokinetic stuff automatically built in except for "consciousness" - qualia.

However, Bohm and Hiley (BH) implicitly solved the "qualia" problem in their book The Undivided Universe with their comments on the "two-way relation" between Q and the hidden variables with classical trajectories.

BH point out that signal locality, no-cloning, unitarity, irreducible local quantum randomness etc. are simply from the TEST PARTICLE approximation familiar from General Relativity's geodesic postulate (or theorem from Infeld et-al) that there is no direct back-action of the hidden variable on its piloting Q.

As soon as you put in the back-action you have a new ball game - a self-organizing feedback control loop, nonlinear, non-unitary and able to prevent the approach to thermal equilibrium when there is an external pump like in a laser above threshold, e.g. Frohlich's electric dipole pumped membrane model.

Quite obviously, you don't have to be a rocket scientist, or have an IQ much over say 120, to see that the matter configurations are where the classical signals are - the sensory inputs of the nerve impulses, the chemical messengers all the stuff of modern brain science with the imaging of the living brain, the DNA-RNA, the microtubules, the SETs inside the dimers (Hameroff), ion channels, cortical columns - all of that machinery is for inputs to the phase rigid macro-quantum coherent Q* and outputs from the Q* back to the muscles in a two-way feedback control loop. The only problem is to identify the elementary excitations that condense into the single-particle state that defines the ground state order parameter - a giant quantum local field that is literally the mind field - the Seat of the Soul - us! Guiseppe Vitiello thinks he has done that. Maybe he has, maybe he hasn't. But something along those lines will work. The qualia are simply the imprints of the matter field configuration on the Q* field. What don't you get?

I can't help it if All The King's Men are blind as "they paint by the numbers" and do not see that The King is naked. Physicists & Philofawzers think they think clearly because they aren't especially in this silly "hard problem," which is a pseudo-problem that vanishes once one asks the right question and formulates a more suitable premise.

Now for the coup de grace of last night's vision from Future Higher Intelligence? ;-)

Frohlich showed us that the power input to the electric dipole membrane macro-quantum coherent is inversely proportional to the effective temperature. However, when above threshold "lasing" so to speak the effective temperature is NEGATIVE - more of the N qubits in upper energy state than lower.

Simply plug in Carnot's reversible heat engine formula

Work/Qhot = 1 - Tcold/Thot

Any positive temperature is cold compared to any negative temperature.

Therefore, Tcold ~ body temperture

The consciousness engine operates at an effective negative temperature in contact with ordinary positive temperature reservoir.

Therefore, the total maximal reversible PSYCHOKINETIC efficiency for the qubit field Q* to pilot matter & vice versa is greater than 100% i.e. no heat is dumped into the cold reservoir. Useful work is sucked from both the hot and the cold reservoir. Now in fact there will probably be some irreversibility, but the basic situation is very favorable for efficient two-way transduction of information between mind and matter.