Awret’s Holographic Correspondence Theory of Consciousness

Physicist and consciousness veteran Uziel Awret appeals to the ‘holographic principle’ of quantum gravity to argue for the possibility of “an admittedly very strange, single physical mechanism that can provide novel insights to many of the problems that bedevil our theories of consciousness,” especially how mental states of the mind are in some sense identical to physical states of the brain. That’s why, he says, “we need a physics in which things that seem completely different are in some sense identical.”

From Classical Holography to AdS/CFT

Awret distinguishes his holographic theory from the more classical holographic brain theories associated with Lashley (1950) and Gabor (1971), which culminated in Pribram’s Holonomic theory (Pribram, 1991) in the early 1990s (although, he says, the concept of nonlocality was, and is, central to all holographic theories).

Awret’s theory recruits the deep connections between quantum entanglement and the constitution of space, which became apparent later with Juan Maldacena’s 1998 seminal paper (Maldacena, 1998) on the ‘Anti de Sitter/Conformal Field Theory’ (AdS/CFT) duality—which provides radically different ways of describing the same system. According to the AdS/CFT correspondence, the properties of this AdS space are determined by (entangled) degrees of freedom that ‘live’ on its boundary (loosening up the connections, Awret says, between identity and necessity)! (Levine, 2019).

Neural Correlates and Holographic Correspondence

Awret’s move is to show that the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) can be massively entangled for biological durations to serve as the CFT in ways similar to the AdS/CFT holographic correspondence and thereby can explain some of our anti-physicalist intuitions by likening the constitution of consciousness to the constitution of the AdS space dual to (or generated by) a CFT quantum computer. Here the constitution and local robustness of the AdS space is dual to the nonlocal error-correction code of the quantum computer (Almheiri et al., 2015).

Awret also argues that the problems encountered by consciousness fusion (subject addition), consciousness fission (other minds problem), and mind uploading (identity paradoxes) are similar to the problems encountered by trying to fuse space, cut it in two, or upload it.

Awret defends the possibility that this strange physical ‘mechanism’ (holographic correspondence) has anything to do with brain dynamics because it seems to yield, he says, “a host of unexpected philosophical advantages without modifying our ‘core physics’ (Carroll, 2021), from suggesting a solution to the structural mismatch problem (mismatch between the structure of a phenomenal state and the structure of its physical correlate) to circumventing the mental causation problem, and to protecting physicalism from the conceivability argument.”

Non-Spatiotemporal Existence and Strange Physics

One of the reasons that consciousness seems incompatible with physical existence is our inability to place it in space and time. It is therefore only natural, Awret says, “to scour physics for relevant cases of ontologically subtler ‘non-spatiotemporal’ existence. The two most obvious cases that can be said to transcend ordinary spatiotemporal existence are entanglement in quantum mechanics and the construction of spacetime itself from more fundamental constituents which cannot simply unfold in a preexisting space.”

Examples that Awret offers include advances in quantum gravity like the AdS/CFT correspondence and Susskind’s ER=EPR (Susskind, 2017) that relates quantum entanglement to the more classical Einstein-Rosen Bridge (a solution of Einstein’s gravitational equation that connects two black holes), and wormholes suggest that space and properly entangled qubits are in some sense identical.

Surprisingly, Awret says, quantum gravity and the holographic duality is already exploring novel phases of matter in condensed matter physics and might be relevant to a putative physics of consciousness, both because his theory may provide novel ways of understanding the spatial demarcation conditions of consciousness and because of the way it loosens up the connections between identity and necessity.

Toward a Naturalist Theory of Mind

Awret says that his holographic theory is “a naturalist theory of mind that aims to replace strange metaphysics with strange physics.” Conceiving of physical facts that are strange enough to “make a philosophical difference” Carnap (1928), and not so strange as to be nonphysical is challenging, and extraordinary theories must motivate their approach and clarify their explanandum.

One advantage of the AdS/CFT correspondence is that it provides one of the only known recipes for ‘constructing’ smooth classical spacetime from quantum information (where the harnessing of the infinities resulting from the CFT UV modes by the renormalization process is dual to the construction of the extra dimension in the AdS).

For Awret, “it is only natural to attempt to learn about the constitution of consciousness (as an exotic phase of matter) and its generation by the (quantum) brain from the constitution of AdS spaces and their generation by a large-enough, functioning quantum computer.”

What is exciting, he says, is that in 20 years or so we may be able to generate such AdS spaces in the lab by entangling less than 10,000 qubits (Maldacena et al., 2017). To Awret, the parallel projects of naturalizing the mind and of naturalizing space face similar obstacles, utilize similar structures, and may have similar explanatory powers, suggesting that consciousness of space is the space of consciousness.