Is the phenomenom of “subjective consciousness” or “qualia” formally captured by any state-of-the-art Theoretical Model in Physics?

Question

Is the phenomenon of "subjective consciousness" or "qualia" formally captured or defined by any state-of-the-art Theoretical Model in Physics? If so, can you share a brief summary of such formalization and references for further reading?

Answer 1

No it isn't. The whole point of the concept of qualia is that it is something outside of physics. The basis of the scientific method is that a fact can be objectively verified. Subjective consciousness by definition, is not objective, so it can't be analyzed using the scientific method, unless some radical new development occurs.

See Thomas Nagel's "What's it like to be a bat" or David Chalmer's "Hard problem of consciousness".

Answer 2

Qualia aren't physics. They are psychology.

To the degree that each science builds upon emergent properties of all the other sciences that are more basic, psychological theories are about physics. But that is a long stretch for no gain. (We just need to stop obsessing about physics like it is the pretty boy in the room and none of us are going to date any of the others. Or if you are on the other side of this, like he is the gang leader and if we cow him we are safe from all the others. Physics is A science. It is not The Science.)

From a defensible psychological perception theory, translated into philosophy by Dennett, qualia are labeled memories much in the same sense James and Lange characterized emotions. From the unified view of someone like Antonio Dimasio, this suggests that qualia, emotions and logical sense are all a single sort of thing, a broader category of 'emotional impressions' that the mind handles in a fairly uniform fashion.

We form these after we have already reached enough certainty to act, and we incorporate them into explanatory narratives, which we experience and record in their place.

We know the first of these because many responses that depend upon given qualia or express a given emotion start before awareness of the qualia or emotional state and their potential reporting. We know the second because we can modify people's supposed real-time accounts, even their visual memories, over time by suggestion or in real time by psychological manipulation.

Since we also have a neurological model of memory, these fit into the realm of things that we can vaguely explain with physical processes.

Answer 3

Here are a selected few physicalist theories of consciousness, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Consciousness:

Bernard Baars' Global Workspace Theory describes consciousness in terms of a competition among processors and outputs for a limited capacity resource that “broadcasts” information for widespread access and use.

According to Jesse Prinz's Attended Intermediate level Representation theory (AIR), a conscious perception be a Representation of a perceptually Intermediate property (such as colors, shapes, tones, and feels) that is Attended to with gamma (40–80hz) vector activity in sensory cortex.

Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) identifies consciousness with integrated information of the relevant sort.

A sampling of recent neural theories might include models that appeal to global integrated fields (Kinsbourne), binding through synchronous oscillation (Singer 1999, Crick and Koch 1990), NMDA-mediated transient neural assemblies (Flohr 1995), thalamically modulated patterns of cortical activation (Llinas 2001), reentrant cortical loops (Edelman 1989), comparator mechanisms that engage in continuous action-prediction-assessment loops between frontal and midbrain areas (Gray 1995), left hemisphere based interpretative processes (Gazzaniga 1988), and emotive somatosensory hemostatic processes based in the frontal-limbic nexus (Damasio 1999) or in the periaqueductal gray (Panksepp 1998).

The physicist Roger Penrose (1989, 1994) and the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff (1998) have championed a model according to which consciousness arises through quantum effects occurring within subcellular structures internal to neurons known as microtubules.

Well! No shortage of physicalist theories I would say. Too bad there's not even a hint of consensus in sight. Maybe next year!

Answer 4

Subjective consciousness and qualia are issues discussed also in the context of computational models of the brain. Although these models do not belong to physics, they are studied within the field of neuroscience.

One of the first computational models is due to Tononi, see "Giulio Tononi: Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto. Biol. Bull. 215: 216-242". Tononi uses as the basic theoretical concept the qualia space (p.224), the high-dimensional state space of the brain. A quale is a specific configuration in qualia space (p.227).

A more recent survey is "James A. Reggia: The rise of machine consciousness: Studying consciousness with computational models. Neural Networks 44(2013) 112-131". The survey reviews different computational models, including Tononi's Integrated Information Theory.

If you are interested in these papers I could send you a copy.

Aside: I doubt that a model based on physics exists because such models rely on the concept of information. It would seem a bit far fetched to consider information a concept from physics.