Consciousness as a superposition of collective neuronal excitations

We first point out that the “hard problem” of David Chalmers has the same status as "why is there something rather than nothing?" I.e., it may or may not have meaning for human observers embedded within nature. For this reason, we focus exclusively on the search for scientific understanding of consciousness, and propose a simple but apparently novel description: Consciousness is a dynamically weighted superposition of collective neuronal excitations (or collective excitations of quantum fields from a physics perspective), corresponding to sensations, emotions, and thoughts. This interpretation is based on many examples from physics of how collective modes, and not just localized structures, have profound physical reality. A rough analogy is a superposition of the modes of a vibrating string, with each mode corresponding to a specific element of vision, memory, etc. Since a brain is a vastly more complex structure, it supports a vastly richer set of collective modes. A simple formal mathematical model of this basic idea will be presented. We suggest experimental tests of this broad model, to distinguish it from proposals based on specific structures or regions of the brain, information per se, quantum coherence, etc., including the evolving descriptions of Crick and Koch.