How Black Holes Help Solve the Mystery of Consciousness

Life’s revolt against nature’s entropy, and the pivot points of cosmic transformation

Consciousness is one of the strangest things in the universe. Why is some matter conscious at all? How can any material object, like the brain, be conscious?

Given the scientific standpoint, how can anything which is fundamentally objective have a subjective point of view such that there are facts about what it feels like to be that object? Philosophers call these subjective, oddly private facts of what it’s like to see red, to hear rainfall, or to feel angry or happy “qualia.” So are qualia simply miracles? Is the plain existence of consciousness in a universe of objects and unconscious events already supernatural?

The Thermodynamic Essence of Life

Whatever consciousness is, its oddness must be tied to yet another oddity, which is the existence of life. Why is there life in the universe? How does life arise from nonlife, and what’s the fundamental relationship between the two?

We can surmise, at least, that the nature of consciousness depends on the role of subjectivity, and that the latter depends, in turn, on the nature and role of life. After all, as far as we know, consciousness is found only in living things, and both are anomalous, which isn’t likely coincidental.

The physicist Erwin Schrodinger provided an invaluable thermodynamic perspective on life in his book What is Life? in which he pointed out that “It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic.” Every process in nature, he elaborates, increases the entropy or disorder in its region.

Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy — or, as you may say, produces positive entropy — and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy — which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.

In short, “the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.” And that orderliness the organism draws from its environment is food, which is crucial to maintaining its metabolism.

What seems to me crucial in this interpretation of life is its pinpointing of a fundamental dualism, entropy and negative entropy, disorder and order, or death/nonlife and life. Life is essentially that which temporarily avoid death (maximum entropy) by slowing its collapse into entropy, and life does so by robbing some orderliness (in the form of food) from its environment.

Thus, although most organisms reach homeostasis or balance with their environment, that balance is belied by a deeper antagonism. Life is possible only if the universal trend in nature (towards entropy) can be suspended. In thermodynamic terms, the existence of life is that suspension. In other words, life is fundamentally opposed to nonlife. Life resents, as it were, the tendency of any interactive system in nature to decay into chaos, and life puts that resentment into practice to defend itself against the onslaught of decay by absorbing bits of order, cannibalizing other living things.

Life is an open system, transferring energy and matter with its environment and thus increasing entropy by generating heat. But life struggles to escape its decay and death that are due to the second law of thermodynamics (that entropy increases because of the imperfection of such transferences). A living thing is thus anomalous in trying to compensate for entropy by reaching out to other open systems (organisms) and devouring them for food to add to its health and longevity. Thus, all living things are parasites.

Organisms feed off the order in their environment, including the order in the bodies of their fellow life forms. Organisms stand up for themselves against the universal tendency of decay, by robbing order from each other, scrambling to prolong their life to turn the tide that’s against them.

Life’s Revolt Against Nature’s Inherent Lethality

But eating isn’t the only solution that reflects this resistance against the entropic threat posed by the nonliving universe, since organisms also exploit useful parts of their environment to build shelters or tools and in general to live out their life cycle, to grow, mate, raise their young, compete with rivals, and fulfill their anti-entropic capacities to please themselves, to learn how the world works, to be heroic or villainous, and so on.

Life complexifies, evolving into animals, mammals, and people, and the latter, of course, take the struggle against entropy to its Promethean, theologically “satanic” limit. Not only do we enslave or exterminate many species, and threaten to destroy the world’s ecosystems, but we set our sights on expanding throughout the cosmic wilderness, to exploit all known natural weaknesses by way of engineering a replacement world known as “civilization,” an artificial refuge from nature’s indifference towards our welfare.

It’s likely no coincidence, then, that people are the life forms that both master the hunt for negative entropy and that enjoy the most sophisticated brains and states of consciousness or self-awareness. Perhaps this is another clue as to why qualia are so strange.

An Analogy: Black Holes and Conscious Life

But how exactly does the seeming immateriality or ghostliness of conscious states fit into this thermodynamic pattern?

There’s an analogy which I think sheds light on this question. If we’re looking for another antagonistic relationship in the universe, we need look no further than that of the black hole to its surroundings.

A black hole is a spatial-temporal singularity, formed from a collapsing star or from a perturbation in the density of the early universe. The gravity of a star or a ripple in the early universe becomes so concentrated that it warps spacetime and the mass disappears from nature as a “singularity,” which is just to say that current science doesn’t know what happens to it. However, the singularity leaves behind the warped spacetime behind an “event horizon.” Whatever falls into the black hole, past that horizon can never escape, as it’s caught in the immense gravitational pull.

There’s an asymmetry here which is like that of consciousness’s relation to its unconscious environment. Objects travel one way, from outside the event horizon towards the singularity, not the other way around. Likewise, a conscious organism perceives its environment, the data being transduced by the sense organs and processed by the brain which (somehow) generates conscious states. And the privacy or subjectivity of those states is like the unidirectional flow of events into the black hole.

Once past the event horizon, not even light can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull and return to tell the tale. And once transduced, a perception can be directly experienced only by the perceiver. We can communicate that experience to others, but no one else can have that very experience apart from the perceiver. This subjective privacy of our mental states is essential to our being conscious of having them.

The Metaphysical Duality

A second point of analogy is the seeming metaphysical duality between the interior and the exterior in either case. Whatever’s deep inside the black hole is nothing like the ordinary spacetime outside it. Einsteinian physics breaks down within the black hole, as matter is crushed infinitely by the gravitational force. If a miracle is a violation of natural law, we can say that relative to the natural order that’s presently explained by Einsteinian physics, the black hole’s interior is miraculous or at least supremely mysterious.

Similarly, what emerges from the brain — the conscious, qualitative states or qualia — is nothing like the unconscious, material universe. Assuming the entire universe isn’t somehow conscious, and the brain alone is sentient, there’s nothing it feels like to be a rock or the wind or the vacuum of outer space. Once past the event horizon of an organism’s perceptual field, as it were, consciousness begins and in that rarefied space of subjectivity, the perceived material objects in the outer world are broken down to what we take to be their conceptual or emotional essence.

Immense Concentrations of Matter and Information

A third point of analogy is that this duality is the result of an immense concentration of matter. In the case of a black hole, something very large is crushed into the tiniest point, producing the ferocious gravitational tides and the event horizon which suck in the outer natural order towards a point of no return.

And in the case of a conscious mind, the brain represents an immense concentration of information via neural connections which amass contents from the outer world indirectly, by mentally representing them and processing their meaning. A human brain’s 100 billion neurons can support 100 trillion connections.

Indeed, the brain’s concentration of information led neuroscientist Giulio Tononi to formulate the integrated information theory of consciousness, according to which consciousness is the result of certain tightly integrated causal relationships, such as those between neurons.

The Interior’s Struggle to Reshape the Exterior

A fourth and final point of analogy is the effect of this duality on the outer world. Supermassive black holes are found at the heart of most giant galaxies, since their gravitational pull gives the galaxy structure, and cosmologists theorize that primordial black holes may have been instrumental in turning the extremely dense early universe into the star-friendly universe we observe today. Those early black holes would have condensed to form the cosmic pivot points, as it were, around which nebulae and galaxies would later form.

Likewise, as I said earlier, living things reshape their environment to suit themselves. In the seemingly advanced stage of this Promethean revolt, personal selves team up to conduct a full-scale war against nature, investigating its operations with science and applying that knowledge with technology and with civilization that replaces the wilderness with a more life-friendly, meaningful, moral habitat.

In short, primordial black holes may have “galactified” the universe, while at the forefront of life’s existential struggle against entropy and nature’s indifference, people “humanize” the wilderness with artificial fulfilments of their preferences (with symbols, cultures, tools, machines, cities, empires, and so on).

The Cosmic Role of Qualia

I should stress that the point of this analogy between black holes and conscious minds isn’t that the former causes the latter in any illuminating sense. If black holes support the formation of galaxies, then indirectly they cause everything that’s formed by stars, including conscious life, but that would be only a highly indirect relationship between the two.

Instead, the point is that there may be a more general pattern here of which black holes and conscious minds are instances. Specifically, this pattern may account for the relative strangeness of consciousness.

After all, these mega-transformations imply startling dualities. Gathering the interstellar medium into galaxies seems to require implacable pivot points. Black holes gobble up spacetime and matter and energy, but only to evolve the epoch in which the cosmos as we know it can flourish, in which stars and planets achieve stable orbits around the black hole singularities.

And the domain of meaning, value, and intelligent design can come into being only around the pivot point of conscious subjectivity. Black holes and conscious minds are antithetical to the starless universe and to the indifferent, entropic wilderness, respectively, and they reshape their surroundings to create a new order. The strangeness of the interiors — the gravitational singularity and qualia — is a harbinger of what they mean to produce from the transformation of their environment. These interiors are, as it were, representations of the ideal which the interiors are poised to realize by their all-encompassing effect on their surroundings.

Why, then, is the interior of a black hole so strange compared to its Newtonian or Einsteinian surroundings? Because the singularity was the pivot point needed to turn the starless early universe into the present starry order.

And why is consciousness so bizarre — so intangible, ethereal, private, and subjectively meaningful — compared to material objects? Because life seems to be another pivot point or hinge around which the wilderness turns into civilization. The strangeness and preciousness of consciousness motivates life’s war against nonlife.

In a mechanical lever the fulcrum is distinguished from the input and output forces at either end of the beam. Similarly, consciousness lies in the balance between the natural facts that are observed and the more ideal scenario the organism intends to bring about. Just as the fulcrum stands apart mathematically from the forces at either end, by determining the advantage according to the forces’ ratio (given the fulcrum’s placement under the beam), conscious states stand apart from the perceptual inputs and artificial outputs.

In our prehistory, for example, our species observed the wilderness, imagined it was otherwise with animistic myths and superstitions, and eventually approximated those humanizing ideals with applications of our knowledge: we largely replaced the indifferent, absurd wilderness with artificial domains that facilitate life or at least our species. We build the panoplies of culture and civilization, including governments, schools, hospitals, and militaries to defend ourselves and our way of life.

But we could hardly do so if we were dead or wholly objective inside or if we had no inkling that such a transformation were possible. We seized on the notion of an ideal, mythologizing and deifying our concepts of perfection and goodness by identifying them with the apparent transcendence of our inner states.

At our subjective core, we ourselves seem free from material corruption because conscious states aren’t experienced as having spatial locations. Their immediate qualities can’t be shared with the outer world because they’re found only privately across a qualia-making event horizon (roughly equivalent to the blood-brain barrier). We know that mental states are tied to neural ones, but they never seem like that when experienced from the first-person perspective.

Why, then, is consciousness in some ways the opposite of objective states? Because consciousness propels life to vitalize dead matter, to reverse entropy and nature’s indifference towards life, and to preserve what seems from within like a precious inner flame.