The VGF, Consciousness and Objectivity
This QDO or quantum derived objectivity is the actual objectivity of the classical material world in which we live, as determined and measured by science. In physics this objectivity is a construct of "pointer states" derived from quantum decoherence.
In contrast, what we consciously experience as the material world is a predictive neural construct of our brain function, the "prediction" being constantly updated through our sensory interaction with the actual objectivity of the world, or QDO. But the point about this world that we experience is that it exists in our conscious phenomenology. And we have this phenomenology regardless of any lack of scientific knowledge of consciousness-as-such, or how conscious phenomenology arises. In fact, it stands in its own right, regardless of science.
If we put aside the attempt to derive where conscious phenomenology comes from, the objective aspect of the phenomenologically perceived world we live in and naturally relate to, can be referred to as the human NDPO, or non-derived phenomenological objectivity.
We refer to it as the "human" NDPO because it is effectively our uniquely human Umwelt. Other species have their own Umwelt, through which they can often experience different aspects of the QDO that we cannot. The use of the word "experience" here, doesn't necessarily imply anything that we might want to call "consciousness". But also, it may, depending on the case. We can even conveniently speak of a bacterium as "experiencing" its environment, as we may often do in science itself, without necessarily implying consciousness.
So the human NDPO - the world that we humans consciously experience - is not the same thing as the QDO. In terms of time, the QDO is 13.8 billion years old. In stark contrast, the human NDPO which depends on the brain is only about 300 million years old, although this does not imply it appeared suddenly, and its evolution is arguably more than 600 million years old. But even this evolutionary time is still a tiny fraction of the age of the QDO.
What we individually consciously perceive and experience, and ordinarily just call "the material world", is "subjective" because it is subject to the individual psychology of perception. However, whilst we do have such things as uniquely personal perceptions and indeed private imagination, we do experience the world at large as objective.
In the first instance this is because the objectivity of the human NDPO and the objectivity of the QDO are connected, but they are not the same thing. In the second instance, as quantum decoherence theory has established, the principle of objectivity arises through the principle of redundancy, not through the principle of what is objective being ontologically separate from anything else. In physics now the classical objective world in which we live is indeed objective, but it is also still quantum, meaning, quantum coherence has never truly been lost. Rather, it is effectively hidden from access. Fundamentally, still, nothing is separate from anything else.
The way in which it is redundancy that is at work behind the appearance of objectivity, in physics, is not something we can get into here. But we can draw an analogy. When everyone agrees on something being objectively present in the world, such as the sky or the Sun, it is precisely in the redundancy of people who can see the same thing, albeit in different ways, that the objectivity consists. At the same time, however, it is a modern neuroscientific fact that what anyone actually consciously experiences as the sky or the Sun, is a neural construct of their own brain function.
So what we perceive as the Sun, for example, is part of the human NDPO. What science describes as the Sun, is part of the QDO.
The standard scientific story can be represented roughly as:
On this account, the structures eventually capable of conscious experience arise within a physical history whose earliest stages are described quantum-mechanically. In that sense, the QDO scaffolds the evolutionary emergence of the NDPO.
But once the NDPO exists, something new enters the relation. Quantum coherence, decoherence, Hilbert spaces, density matrices, experimental records, and even the concept of a “quantum domain” are not simply present as scientific knowledge independently of phenomenology. They become empirical evidence only through observation, measurement, conceptual discrimination, mathematical representation, and scientific judgement—all activities occurring through the NDPO.
So there is also a reverse epistemic relation:
What does not follow
It does not follow that the NDPO therefore creates the physical world, nor that the actuality of quantum coherence depends for its existence in our world upon human consciousness. Nor does it follow that quantum coherence IS consciousness.
What does follow is that the proposition:
“The NDPO is nothing but the QDO”
cannot simply be read straight off the success of physical science, because physical science itself is an achievement occurring within the NDPO.
What we are looking at in VGF terms is a recursive closure:
This exposes the hidden assumption. If we argue:
- physics explains the physical processes from which brains evolved;
- brains support conscious phenomenology;
- therefore phenomenology is exhaustively reducible to the physical ontology described by physics;
then step 3 does not follow from steps 1 and 2.
What has been established is an evolutionary dependency relation. What has not been established is an ontological identity relation.
The danger of self-erasure
The physical ontology used to describe the evolutionary origin of the NDPO is itself the result of the investigative capacities that appear with the NDPO. Consequently, using that ontology to eliminate the epistemic domain through which the ontology itself became scientifically accessible risks a form of self-erasure.
This does not refute physicalism. But it places a significant burden upon reductive physicalism. It must explain how a world described exclusively in QDO terms produces not merely neural processing, but a domain in which there are:
- experienced observations,
- meanings and concepts,
- mathematical intelligibility,
- judgements about evidence,
- distinctions between appearance and objective actuality,
- and ultimately what amounts to the scientific concept of the QDO itself.
And it must do this without quietly importing those NDPO capacities into the explanation.
For a short dropdown outline of the relevant part of VGF analysis click on the heading below.
This doesn't mean that the psycho-mythopoeic use of human symbolic intelligence which is tens of thousands of years old is superior to the more recent, scientifically disciplined use of our symbolic intelligence. What it means is that what is needed is something other than scientific theory, that is nonetheless scientifically disciplined, that serves as an interpretation framework, that enables us to talk about both scientific facts and conscious phenomenology, including spiritual phenomenology itself, through the same framework, but without collapse of registers.
The first thing to emphasise about VGF analysis is that it is not a scientific theory. At no stage does it claim to be (although this does not prevent it being "closed" into a scientific theory). This does not, however, mean that it is not scientifically disciplined as an interpretation method.
VGF analysis is an interpretation framework for correlating both scientific facts and conscious phenomenology, based on a scientifically disciplined representation of evolution that can be applied to all evolutions.
VGF analysis describes all structure as structure of closure in infinite iteration. It then articulates the way in which greater degrees of freedom or possibility space in a VGF "beta domain" are reduced through VGF decoherence to fewer degrees of freedom or reduced possibility space in a VGF "gamma domain". Gamma domain closure is where we find "objectivity" based on redundancy, just as we do in quantum decoherence itself. Beta domain closure is where we find what we could informally call the "struggle for survival" of competing closures, that leads to what survives as stable and persisting closure in the gamma domain.
The VGF formulation
The mistake would be to treat the evolutionary emergence sequence:
as though it implied
in the strong sense that everything objectively available within the NDPO must already be exhaustively describable in the objectivity regime of the QDO.
That need not follow.
Instead, the NDPO may be understood as a new closure and therefore a new regime of objectivity that has been scaffolded by the QDO but is not thereby reducible to the descriptive coordinates of the QDO.
A later closure may depend historically upon an earlier closure without being exhaustively describable within the possibility space of the earlier closure.
That is exactly what recursive evolution would lead us to expect. A later closure inherits constraints from what came before, but it can also establish new relations, new degrees of freedom, and new forms of access to the VGF.
The NDPO turns back upon the QDO
Once the NDPO has stabilised, something remarkable occurs: it becomes capable of turning back upon the QDO from which it arose.
Here QDO* means not the physical domain itself, but the QDO as reconstructed and scientifically understood by the human symbolic intelligence that in fact is still NDPO-based.
What has happened in the discovery of quantum mechanics? The NDPO discovers that the apparently stable classical world from which its ordinary ontology was constructed is itself a stabilised outcome of processes involving coherence, superposition, entanglement, and decoherence. In other words, human NDPO-based symbolic intelligence discovers empirically that its own naïve γ-world is not ontologically primitive.
That immediately opens a reciprocal question:
If the NDPO-based intelligence has discovered that the apparently self-evident ontology of the classical QDO is the result of deeper generative dynamics, why should we assume that the apparently self-evident ontology of the conscious self—or indeed the NDPO itself—is exhausted by that classical QDO?
The key implication
This is not an argument against the physical scaffolding of human consciousness. It is an argument against silently converting the fact that:
“The NDPO evolved through QDO processes”
into:
“The NDPO therefore contains nothing ontologically or objectively significant that is not already exhausted by a QDO description.”
Those are very different propositions.
Rather, once the NDPO has stabilised, QDO and NDPO can be understood as recursively coupled objectivity regimes. The QDO constrains what the NDPO can be; the NDPO provides the epistemic and phenomenological possibility space within which the QDO can become scientifically known.
This reciprocal relation means that the brain–consciousness problem is not simply a problem of deriving consciousness from matter, but is a question of understanding how one evolved regime of VGF objectivity gives rise to another regime capable of discovering, modelling, and reopening the first.
The VGF is not an ultimate "object" that "explains everything". That is not what is happening here. Rather, it is a scientifically disciplined approach to interpreting both our conscious phenomenology and scientific fact based on the objectivity of our world, that does not collapse registers, but allows paradigm change in the way we are thinking.