Comment on “A thermodynamic approach to the problem of consciousness”

• Published in: Medical hypotheses Vol. 136; p. 109500
• Main Authors: Ahmadvand, Seyedsaeid, Peik, Bijan, Azarfar, Babak
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Ltd 01.03.2020
• Subjects: Consciousness; Entropy; Humans; Thermodynamics
• ISSN: 0306-9877; 1532-2777
• DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2019.109500

Recently, Beshkar has published a paper on the nature of qualia. His argument is based on several assumptions leading to a conjecture that qualia have a negentropic nature and so as consciousness. The assumptions are: 1) quale (singular of qualia) is the building block of consciousness and thus they are equivalent, 2) qualia and consciousness are both subjective and non-observable by any experiment, 3) qualia/consciousness are negentropic (ΔS<0) structures and yet the product of a universal evolution (ΔS≥0) in an attempt to maximize entropy (ΔS=0), 4) “quale is a structure generated by a specific region of the cerebral cortex”, 5) subjectivity/non-observability of qualia/consciousness stems from quantum laws erasing the trace of negentropic processes. Herein, the fundamental assumptions of this conjecture are disputed from the thermodynamic point of view, and subjectivity is scrutinized in more details. Throughout this paper, the word “observer” implies a conscious observer.