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Volume 12: Number 4: Article 1

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The Timing of Conscious Experience: A Causality-Violating, Two-Valued, Transactional Interpretation of Subjective Antedating and Spatial-Temporal Projection¹

F. A. Wolf , Have Brains / Will Travel, San Francisco, CA

Quantum systems in the time interval between two events, so-called two-time observables (TTO), are known to behave in a manner quite different from expectations based on initial value quantum mechanics. According to the transactional interpretation (TI) of quantum physics, wave functions can be pictured as offer and echo waves - the offer wave passing from an initial event, i, to a future event, a, and the echo wave, the complex conjugate of the offer wave, passing from a back in time toward i. TTO and the TI have been used to explain certain quantum physical temporal anomalies, such as non-locality, contrafactuality, and future-to-present causation as explicitly shown in Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, an experiment wherein the history of the objects under scrutiny are not determined until the final observation. Experimental evidence involving neurological functioning and subjective awareness indicates the presence of the same anomalies. Here I propose a model based on TTO and the TI wherein two neural events are ultimately responsible for backwards-through-time wave function collapse in the intervening space-time interval. After providing a simple argument showing how quantum physics applies to neurological functioning and a simple demonstration of how the TI and TTO explain the delayed choice paradox, I propose that such pairs of causality-violating events must occur in the brain in order that a single experience in consciousness take place in the observer. Using this proposition I offer a quantum physical resolution - similar to that of the delayed choice experiment - of the "delay-and-antedating" hypothesis/paradox put forward by Libet et al. (1979) to explain certain temporal anomalies associated with a delay time, D, required for passive perception experienced by experimental subjects including the blocking of sensory awareness normally experienced at time t by a cortical signal at later time t + fD (0 < f = 1) and the reversal in time of the sensory awareness of the events corresponding to cortical and peripheral stimuli. The model may be a first step towards the development of a quantum physical theory of subjective awareness and suggests that biological systems evolve and continue to function in accordance with TTO and consequently a causality-violating, two-valued, TI of quantum mechanics. The model successfully predicts and explains Libet's temporal anomalies and makes a new prediction about the timings of passive bodily sensory experiences and imagined or phantom sensory experiences. The predictions of the model are compared with experimental data indicating agreement.

¹Supported in part by a grant from The Internet Science Education Project.

Keywords: consciousness, quantum physics, time-reversal, non-locality, contrafactuality, neurology, biology, phantom limb phenomena, Parkinson's disease, asynchronous jitter

FULL TEXT:

The Timing of Conscious Experience: A Causality-Violating, Two-Valued, Transactional Interpretation of Subjective Antedating and Spatial-Temporal Projection

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