Royal College of Psychiatrists: Philosophy SIG Winter Conference 2026 - The mind-body problem revisited: Could physics help? - 7th Dec 2026

[fst]

So, by some unknown set of rules, some pattern of electrical potentials must mean plaintive sweetness to something in a nerve cell. Or it might mean, to the cell, 'I forgot the washing' or 'the Pope is unwell'. Sensed meaning has to be experienced so it has to occur in an experience now, here.

But why can't this meaning be derived from the structural properties of our neuronal connections, i.e., the neuron for recognizing a minor third is connected to the "feeling sweet" neuron. Why do we need to invoke a "intrinsic interpreter" in a quantum field? That was my original point.

Edit: Ok I think I get it. Something needs to interpret the "feeling sweet" neuron.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

How exactly does one define "conscious experience" in all of this? And if one invokes QFT, why specifically invoke neurons? What is so different between me crossing the street vs a plant?

I am happy to define conscious experience the way David Chalmers does. A conscious experience is whatever sort of event leads us to report consciously experiencing something - I saw a black cat. As Eisntein points out, physics is only ever the search for a set of rules that can predict what human experience is likely to follow, in the context of earlier ones.

It is generally agreed that the rich representations of the world with visual and auditory aspect etc. that we report as being in our experiences must be based on neural events. Whether skin and liver cells have conscious experiences or not we are unlikely ever to be able confirm or refute directly.

The interesting thing about plants is that they have complex behaviours, even if a bit slow, that look remarkably like ours, yet have no central brain. Octopuses are a bit like that but not quite. Bean plants send their shoot tips round in circles to find a pole and when they sense being nearly at a pole (maybe be light or sound effects) they can bend over backwards the other way and then throw themselves to exactly the place where the pole is. They then repeat this until they catch on.

In a way the plant example is a neat way to show the logic of cellular consciousness. In a bean plant the only units that can receive and respond to information are individual cells because the response requires metabolic switches that operate in individual cells. I think it very plausible that bean plant cells have experiences rather like ours but they will represent the world in terms of a simpler set. of parameters. The guy who studies plant consciousness most is Paco Calvo. He has some great videos.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Edit: Ok I think I get it. Something needs to interpret the "feeling sweet" neuron.

Yes, there is no point in having a neuron that fires when there is a nice minor third unless there is another neuron to get the message that a sweet minor third is being played. Representation has to do something. This has relatively recently been written about by a guy called William Ramsay. There has to be an event of representing to something. Otherwise it is whistling in the wind.

 

[EndME]

A conscious experience is whatever sort of event leads us to report consciously experiencing something

I have never reported to consciously experience anything, I've just experienced things. But maybe Penrose would argue that I've never been under anestesia and that's why I've not had to differentiate between different forms of happenings.

Similarly, to the best of my knowledge, I've never been dead, but wouldn't the funny implication of skin or liver cells having conscious experiences not be that dead humans are beings of consciousness? Or does the cellular consciousness for some mystical reason not transfer over to the larger being, unlike when the living me sees a cat and consequentially there is also no human conscious experience? If transfer is needed for human conscious experience don't you end up in a similar situation of postulating an "emergent phenomenon" out of individual cellular consciousness?

In a way the plant example is a neat way to show the logic of cellular consciousness. In a bean plant the only units that can receive and respond to information are individual cells because the response requires metabolic switches that operate in individual cells. I think it very plausible that bean plant cells have experiences rather like ours but they will represent the world in terms of a simpler set. of parameters. The guy who studies plant consciousness most is Paco Calvo. He has some great videos.

Yes, this a priori seems more natural to me than the opposite.

 

[Sparkly Unicorn]

Blimey, typical pseudoscience - invoke quantum and everything is fine!!!

Some big , (and interesting questions here) but please get the philosophers in! Not psych hacks desperate for answers!

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I have never reported to consciously experience anything, I've just experienced things.

You just reported that now. (I take consciously as tautological here but some disagree.)

But maybe Penrose would argue that I've never been under anestesia and that's why I've not had to differentiate between different forms of happenings.

But you have been asleep, I presume. Not sure what differentiation you are referring to.

wouldn't the funny implication of skin or liver cells having conscious experiences not be that dead humans are beings of consciousness?

And what is wrong with that? Many great thinkers have assumed that is probably so, over the centuries. Although of course the consciousness belongs to the cells individually, rather than some colonial 'being'.

Or does the cellular consciousness for some mystical reason not transfer over to the larger being, unlike when the living me sees a cat and consequentially there is also no human conscious experience?

Why should consciousness ever 'transfer over to the larger being'. There is no need to posit that. The consciousness that we report (and you just reported above) belongs to some domain associated with our bodies but we have no idea how big a domain or how many such domains are similarly conscious at a time. William James explains this 100 years ago. Such a 'transferring' would render the theory as incoherent as the systems theory.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Some big , (and interesting questions here) but please get the philosophers in! Not psych hacks desperate for answers!

Actually, the philosophers, together with the physicists, generally make just as much of a dog's breakfast of this as the psychiatrists.

 

[Wyva]

In a way the plant example is a neat way to show the logic of cellular consciousness. In a bean plant the only units that can receive and respond to information are individual cells because the response requires metabolic switches that operate in individual cells. I think it very plausible that bean plant cells have experiences rather like ours but they will represent the world in terms of a simpler set. of parameters. The guy who studies plant consciousness most is Paco Calvo. He has some great videos.

You might like the movie Silent Friend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Friend

"Silent Friend (German: Stille Freundin) is a 2025 historical drama film written and directed by Ildikó Enyedi. Starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Léa Seydoux, Luna Wedler, Enzo Brumm, Sylvester Groth and Martin Wuttke, it follows a single ginkgo tree through three loosely connected stories in different eras: 1908, 1972, and 2020, taking place in the old university town of Marburg, Germany."

It is an artsy, sciency, philosophical type of movie in a university setting. Probably not all of it is grounded in science and some of it is fiction and speculation but I thought you might still like it as there is a lot about plant consciousness in it, that is what they are studying in the film. I would say the plants are the real main characters in this movie. It is not science fiction but a pretty serious but also charming art film.

 

[Utsikt]

Knowing is input. X will know X's input but only Y can know X's output.

I understand that only Y can know their meaning of X’s output, but does X experience sending an output?

But experience is only ever based on an event now. Past events no longer 'exist for me' other than as feeders to the event now. As i say, if you try to base experiences on events distant in spacetime you blow apart the whole of physics. You become God.

What are feeders in this context? The parameters that determine what input A will mean to receiver B?

And if those parameters exist, can they reasonably be called states?

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I understand that only Y can know their meaning of X’s output, but does X experience sending an output?

Everything we know from neuroscience indicates that output can only be inferred from further inputs signifying that there was such an output. All the studies on vision and on muscle control indicate this.

At a more basic logical level to experience an output makes no sense if experience is, by definition, knowing or receiving information, i.e. input. How you divide up events gets a bit complicated if you want to introduce a physics basis but the basic principle seems to be inviolable. The logical position is that any event X can only know of its output - i.e. its impact on Y, Z etc. through inferences made on subsequent inputs from Y and Z indicating their inputs. And of course, being indirect and defeasible, this inference cannot be known to be reliable.

This becomes directly relevant to the individual cell consciousness model. Cells may be fed a narrative of what 'I' am doing, including a narrative of what I just did, based on the output from some of these cells being fed the narrative. But that narrative is likely to be fed to many cells that did not actually do (fire) what the narrative attributes to 'I'.

What are feeders in this context?

By feeders I just meant prior events.

 

[chillier]

@Jonathan Edwards a question I've been pondering a while but this thread seems a good time to ask. Assuming consciousness comes directly from an event at dendrites, some acoustic properties of the cytoskeleton or something, is this just totally incidental or does this actually matter for humans to do things, aka is it an evolutional adaptation or a coincidence. AI has none of this structure - just transistors - so can't be conscious in this model, but appears to functionally be able to do everything that a human would need to do, so the consciousness can't be that important.

How do we know we are conscious? If the brain is basically a computation machine which also spits out conscious experience at the dendrites, why would a human behaviourally ever notice and report that it is experiencing anything? It suggests that if a physical dendrite event causes a conscious experience event, that conscious experience event also causes some other neurological physical event that neurons and brains can process and lead to a mouth to say the words 'I experienced something.'

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Assuming consciousness comes directly from an event at dendrites, some acoustic properties of the cytoskeleton or something, is this just totally incidental or does this actually matter for humans to do things, aka is it an evolutional adaptation or a coincidence. AI has none of this structure - just transistors - so can't be conscious in this model, but appears to functionally be able to do everything that a human would need to do, so the consciousness can't be that important.

As usual, let's follow Gottfried. He assumes that action and perception are two sides of the same coin in every event in the universe. To happen is both to receive information and to put out information. Receiving information is perception. Putting out information is action (you can cut this at different joints but this is what it boils down to). But human consciousness is not merely perception. It is apperception, implying that it includes concepts that relate to events elsewhere in time or space including a narrative of 'self events' very often but that is not critical.

An electron mode in a semiconductor in this model will have a rich experience of the complex coulomb field provided by the metal nuclei. We can have no idea how this might 'seem' to the mode or what it might 'mean' to it, but it will not have a referent meaning about dogs barking in the passageway.

The evolutionary value of our experiences is not that they are unique or richer than others but that the natural richness of field events has been harnessed to a network of rather computer-like units that feed intricate representations of distant events into dendritic trees. The experience can mean that hyenas are shuffling in the trees. In the semiconductor the field pattern, however rich, is only ever of two types, one for on and one for off. The pattern itself does not affect the computing.

I can only speculate but I have a strong hunch that this is also why humans can do certain things, and in particular generate new connecting ideas, better than computers. In a computer gate the answer follows simple qualitative rules. You can describe it in terms of numbers but these numbers do not in any sense indicate quantities. The 1s are not the same size, nor bigger than 0s. They are just two qualitative alternatives.

In real physical interactions quantities matter. We live in a real quantitative spacetime world. Neurons integrate signals within a real quantitative spacetime structure and quantity matters. Most obviously, when signals are sent to a bank of neurons the one that fires quickest inhibits all the others. Neurons compute the best answer, not the right answer.

I have a suspicion that acoustics fits this well because when acoustic modes fit their filed context well you have resonance. Blow across a flute moutpiece and you get white noise. Blow with the skill of James Galway and press the keys for E flat and you will get a pure E flat tone. Moreover, over the centuries musciains have found that unusual combinations of fingers on keys produce unexpected notes because resonance is not just a matter of tube length. Half open holes a little bit along can transform the 'best' answer. Oscar Peterson discovered that new combinations of ten notes at once on the piano produced music of a sort nobody had ever dreamt of before.

I use to think that the secret of human computation was that it used geometry rather than algebra to model a world that used geometry rather than algebra and that this required interactions across more than one dimension. However, dendrites are essentially one dimensional, so that argument seems weak. I now think that it is simply quantity that is the difference (in a way the true root of geometry I guess).

And to get back to Gottfried. Early in his career he tried to develop a way of cataloguing all ideas on the basis that all ideas could be assigned a ratio of two numbers. It sounds crazy but it is actually the essence of set theory, which has work on logic made possible. He wanted it to be more than that and for quantity to be relevant, so that it mattered that 3x7=21 (which assumes that every 1 is the same amount). If you think about it the implication of the model I favour is that all our ideas are based on ratios and their resonance dispositions - extraordinarily complicated ratios but just quantity ratios. A compute can write out those ratios but never discover that there is a better answer to what fits than the answers it is programmed to look for because it never actually checks the fitting quantitatively anywhere. If you programme it with math that predicts unusual resonances maybe it will be as good as us but it will use up all the water in Loch Lomond to do the computation.

 

[chillier]

As usual, let's follow Gottfried. He assumes that action and perception are two sides of the same coin in every event in the universe. To happen is both to receive information and to put out information. Receiving information is perception. Putting out information is action (you can cut this at different joints but this is what it boils down to). But human consciousness is not merely perception. It is apperception, implying that it includes concepts that relate to events elsewhere in time or space including a narrative of 'self events' very often but that is not critical.

An electron mode in a semiconductor in this model will have a rich experience of the complex coulomb field provided by the metal nuclei. We can have no idea how this might 'seem' to the mode or what it might 'mean' to it, but it will not have a referent meaning about dogs barking in the passageway.

The evolutionary value of our experiences is not that they are unique or richer than others but that the natural richness of field events has been harnessed to a network of rather computer-like units that feed intricate representations of distant events into dendritic trees. The experience can mean that hyenas are shuffling in the trees. In the semiconductor the field pattern, however rich, is only ever of two types, one for on and one for off. The pattern itself does not affect the computing.

I can only speculate but I have a strong hunch that this is also why humans can do certain things, and in particular generate new connecting ideas, better than computers. In a computer gate the answer follows simple qualitative rules. You can describe it in terms of numbers but these numbers do not in any sense indicate quantities. The 1s are not the same size, nor bigger than 0s. They are just two qualitative alternatives.

In real physical interactions quantities matter. We live in a real quantitative spacetime world. Neurons integrate signals within a real quantitative spacetime structure and quantity matters. Most obviously, when signals are sent to a bank of neurons the one that fires quickest inhibits all the others. Neurons compute the best answer, not the right answer.

I have a suspicion that acoustics fits this well because when acoustic modes fit their filed context well you have resonance. Blow across a flute moutpiece and you get white noise. Blow with the skill of James Galway and press the keys for E flat and you will get a pure E flat tone. Moreover, over the centuries musciains have found that unusual combinations of fingers on keys produce unexpected notes because resonance is not just a matter of tube length. Half open holes a little bit along can transform the 'best' answer. Oscar Peterson discovered that new combinations of ten notes at once on the piano produced music of a sort nobody had ever dreamt of before.

I use to think that the secret of human computation was that it used geometry rather than algebra to model a world that used geometry rather than algebra and that this required interactions across more than one dimension. However, dendrites are essentially one dimensional, so that argument seems weak. I now think that it is simply quantity that is the difference (in a way the true root of geometry I guess).

And to get back to Gottfried. Early in his career he tried to develop a way of cataloguing all ideas on the basis that all ideas could be assigned a ratio of two numbers. It sounds crazy but it is actually the essence of set theory, which has work on logic made possible. He wanted it to be more than that and for quantity to be relevant, so that it mattered that 3x7=21 (which assumes that every 1 is the same amount). If you think about it the implication of the model I favour is that all our ideas are based on ratios and their resonance dispositions - extraordinarily complicated ratios but just quantity ratios. A compute can write out those ratios but never discover that there is a better answer to what fits than the answers it is programmed to look for because it never actually checks the fitting quantitatively anywhere. If you programme it with math that predicts unusual resonances maybe it will be as good as us but it will use up all the water in Loch Lomond to do the computation.

Much of this is far beyond me! I enjoyed the ideas here I think more than I understand it. I've wondered what it is about a note with a tritone above it, with stacked fourths above that, that is one of the most moving and sentimental sounds I know. I like the idea that all animal conscious experience is about harmonic resonance.

Also implied in what you said is the idea that an electron moving around a metal nucleus also has a conscious experience event or two associated with it, I wonder what that feels like.

About computers, even in our real spacetime world it's only binary, in terms of software AI does seem to work basically as animal neurons do, with each e-neuron assigning a weight to each of its many e-neuron inputs that can be adjusted. Even if there are technicalities about how biologocal neurons do that modulation that differ from AI I don't see how that couldn't be modellable in software.