King’s Symbiotic Existential Cosmology

Mathematician and psychedelicist Chris King posits ‘Symbiotic Existential Cosmology’ as a biogenic, psycho-physical cosmology of conscious life in the universe (King, 2021). Subjective consciousness and the physical universe have an irreducible, asymmetric, complementary interactive relationship, in which life is a biospherically symbiotic climax phenomenon in the mature universe. Interactivity is key to cosmology, affirming the ability of subjective consciousness to participate in causal intent and acausal anticipation through coupled, physically indeterminate phase transition states, which are seen as key to why subjective consciousness has been preserved by biological evolution over computational biology.

Symbiotic Existential Cosmology

King’s central thesis asserts quantum-critical interaction, that subjective consciousness interacts with the physical brain, affecting the physical universe, through edge-of-chaos instabilities in conscious whole brain dynamics, accompanied by wave phase-modulation—in critical phase transition between full quantum entanglement and wave function collapse, in a universe also in phase transition and in biospheric evolutionary climax. Biological molecular processes do not approach classicality, because they do not involve independent identically distributed (IID) measurement, upon which the Born interpretation is founded. Subjective consciousness displays efficacy of volition over the physical universe, without causal conflict because the critical neurodynamic is quantum indeterminate. The universe consists of positive energy particles, whose absorption occurs in the future of their emission. Special relativistic quantum theory generates both retarded and advanced (retrocausal) solutions.

In the transactional approach, an emitter sends an offer wave, which future absorbers respond to with advanced confirmation waves (Cramer, 1986; Kastner, 2012). Wave collapse then corresponds to a critical phase transition from a ‘plasma’ of multiply interacting pairs to a ‘solid’ of real particles in a process providing a basis for conscious anticipation, conferring a survival advantage on the conscious organism, independent of computational prediction, selected for by evolution (King, 1989). Symmetry-breaking of the fundamental forces results in fractal edge-of-chaos molecular quantum interactions (King, 1978), leading to the complexity pathway, from macromolecules to organisms, confirming the standard model is both necessary and sufficient for conscious life. Active consciousness arose in the quantum sentience of single-celled eukaryotes due to the eukaryote endosymbiosis, sequestering respiration in the mitochondria, leaving the cell membrane free for edge-of-chaos excitability, sensitive to environmental fluctuations. Subjective consciousness thus spans the metazoa.

Scientific Evidence

King claims a multitude of scientific research supports his theory. Transitions from chaos are central to neurodynamics, including insight experiences, notable in the high correlation dimensions of resting state activity (Skarda & Freeman 1987). Active conscious states are asymptotic to the edge-of-chaos with noted parallels to quantum measurement in EEG wave beats (Toker et al., 2022; Pribram, 1991). Qasim et al. (2021) report phase tuning of handshaking between tissue potential waves and action potentials. Self-organized criticality is neurodynamically critical (Shriki et al., 2013; Fisher, 2015; O’Byrne & Jerbi, 2022; Beggs, 2023). Neural and quantum criticality leverage the same phenomena (Bettinger, 2017). Shine et al. (2018) demonstrate criticality in network integration and phase synchrony. Gallego and Dakić (2021) show that quantum theory is preserved in the macroscopic limit if correlations are not IID distributed. Chan et al. (2019), Li et al. (2018), and Skinner et al. (2019) demonstrate quantum entanglement in constellations of particles. Web or no web is akin to liquid and solid in the structure of information.

Irreducible Topological Transitions

Quantum wave-particle complementarity is an irreducible interactive topological relationship between continuous and discrete processes. Consciousness-universe complementarity—between the subdivisible quantum universe and the holistic stream of subjective consciousness—also has topological irreducibility. Kim (2001) characterizes consciousness and mental causation as a double topological world knot, after Schopenhauer’s ‘inexplicable’ Weltknoten—how the willing ‘I’ can be both the generator of the world of appearances it experiences and a particular being within that world, implying that primal subjectivity is foundational to cosmology.

These are bridged by two evolutionary topological transitions: the living cell, which forms a topological transformation of membrane electrochemistry, and the eukaryote endosymbiosis, in which respiratory electron transport became sequestered in the mitochondria, freeing the cell membrane for edge-of-chaos informational quantum sentience.

King concludes that primal subjectivity is manifest at the quantum level, with the wave function complementing “awareness” and wave collapse complementing “decision-making,” followed by encapsulated systems: quantum-sensitive butterfly effect systems, biogenic far-from-equilibrium systems, prokaryote life, and consciousness in eukaryotes.