Mindless Sensationalism: A Quantum Framework for Consciousness

Abstract

The ideas of Sensible Quantum Mechanics are expressed in lay terms for philosophers of consciousness and others. A framework is proposed and explained for the `psycho-physical-parallelism' between conscious experiences and the mathematical structures of quantum physics (e.g., a set of quantum operators obeying some algebra, and a quantum state giving the expectation value of each operator). In particular, it is proposed that each set of possible conscious experiences has a measure given by the expectation value of a corresponding operator (a positive-operator-valued measure). Then one has a generalization of the Weak Anthropic Principle named the Conditional Aesthemic Principle: given that we are conscious beings, our conscious experiences are likely to be typical experiences in the set of all conscious experiences with its measure.