Consciousness is a state of matter

At the beginning of the 20th century,

a group of young physicists embarked on a quest 

to explain a few strange but seemingly small anomalies 

in our understanding of the universe. 

In deriving the new theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, they ended up changing the way we comprehend the cosmos.

original research publication: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219

Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, he shows how the question of consciousness can be formulated in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory.

Tegmark’s approach is to think of consciousness as a state of matter, like a solid, a liquid or a gas. “I conjecture that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness,” he says.

The new approach to consciousness has come from outside the physics community, principally from neuroscientists such as Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

In 2008, Tononi proposed that a system demonstrating consciousness must have two specific traits. First, the system must be able to store and process large amounts of information. In other words consciousness is essentially a phenomenon of information.

And second, this information must be integrated in a unified whole so that it is impossible to divide into independent parts. That reflects the experience that each instance of consciousness is a unified whole that cannot be decomposed into separate components.

Tegmark points out that any information stored in a special network known as a Hopfield neural net automatically has this error-correcting facility.

(courtesy share:https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/why-physicists-are-saying-consciousness-is-a-state-of-matter-like-a-solid-a-liquid-or-a-gas-5e7ed624986d)