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意識比量子對世界而言更根本嗎？

2026-04-30 20:34:06　來源: 科學的歷程

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意識比量子物理學對實在而言更根本嗎？

物理學家們長期以來一直秉持著“萬物皆可自下而上構建”的觀點。如今，一種以意識體驗為中心的新型科學正在興起，它或許能夠揭開宇宙最大的奧秘。

作者：卡梅拉·帕達維奇-卡拉漢

2026年4月28日

想象一下，你可以用一個宇宙攪拌碗，從零開始烹制實在。這會是一種奇特的烘焙方式，最終成品會包含從時空、衛星到貓和宇宙網絡的一切。但問題是：你需要用到的最基本原料是什么？

我第一次接觸到這類問題是在七年級，當時我坐在一門從未上過的課上：物理課。雖然這門入門課主要講的是小球滾下山坡，但我學到的是，物理學的方法應該具有無限的適用范圍——這種觀點被稱為還原論。物理學應該能夠識別現實的基本組成部分，并展示如何從零開始將它們組合成任何事物。

我當時立刻決定成為一名物理學家。但如今，多年過去，拿到好幾個學位之后，我開始懷疑物理學是否真的能解答所有問題。就拿我的自我認知來說吧：它真的只是某個我們尚未推導出的方程式的結果嗎？如果我深入思考這類問題，就會感到不安，甚至開始懷疑自己是不是成了一個糟糕的物理學家。

于是，我決定認真思考這些疑慮，弄清自己對實在本質的真實看法。最近有兩本書給了我啟發，它們分別從截然相反的角度探討了這些問題。其中一本認為，所有實在都僅僅由量子場構成。“其他一切都只是我們頭腦中的產物。我們所有的概念都是幻覺。”該書作者利亞姆·格雷厄姆如是說。另一本書則堅持認為，實在最根本的要素是意識體驗。“這才是根本的真實。”該書的合著者之一、紐約州羅切斯特大學的亞當·弗蘭克說道。

決定這兩種立場——或者介于兩者之間的某種立場——的正確性不僅僅關乎我個人的安心。所有科學研究都基于一些基本假設，而這些假設可能長期以來一直阻礙著我們解答一些最棘手的科學謎題。

物理學的力量

從歷史上看，將紛繁復雜、主觀臆斷的人類經驗轉化為簡潔抽象的數學，一直是科學，尤其是物理學，擁有強大力量的秘訣之一。伽利略·伽利萊和艾薩克·牛頓通過觀察地球和天體，并量化它們的運動，為世界做出了革命性的貢獻。盡管數學和推理早在方程式出現之前就以其他形式存在，但方程式的出現無疑推動了數學的發展。其他物理學家將諸如冷熱之類的經驗概念轉化為溫度的數值系統。數學模型使我們能夠預測未來，加深我們對宇宙的理解，并催生了無數技術。我們得以更清晰地觀測星空，并制造出了可運轉的蒸汽機。

隨著20世紀20年代和30年代量子理論的出現，物理學家開始掌握當時已知最小的物理世界組成部分。粒子物理學的標準模型植根于量子理論，并以列表形式呈現。所有已知的基本粒子和力，都是經過最精確檢驗的科學理論。值得注意的是，盡管量子糾纏（粒子在極遠距離上保持量子聯系）等現象仍然超出大多數人的直覺，但我們已經利用它們制造出了可運行的量子計算機。

弗蘭克說，這一切讓物理學家們產生了一種不受約束的權力感。“一開始你會覺得物理學會解答你所有的問題，只要告訴我物理定律，我就能構建出一切——袋鼠什么的都解釋得通！我能解釋一切，”他說。他不同意這種觀點，他與天文學家馬塞洛·格萊澤和哲學家埃文·湯普森合著的最新著作《盲點》認為，即使是最成功的科學理論也不應該忽視經驗的作用，以及經驗如何揭示其解釋力的局限性。

將世界抽象化使我們能夠制造出蒸汽機之類的技術。Arterra Picture Library/Alamy

格雷厄姆的觀點恰恰相反，這一點從他的著作《物理學解決了所有問題》的標題便可看出。他認為，即使是極其復雜的問題，例如意識是什么以及它是如何產生的，原則上也可以從物理學的角度來解釋。最基本的物理構成要素。事實上，他更進一步，認為任何否認物理學最終能夠描述意識的人，本質上都是在訴諸鬼魂和精靈。他的哲學立場被稱為嚴苛的物理主義，你可以將其理解為還原論中最不妥協的一種形式。“真正存在的，就是物理學在最底層所描述的一切，”他說。

目前，這意味著量子場，即遍布整個空間的基本量子對象。但是，要從最底層的量子場一直追溯到人類意識，并非易事：我們我們必須找到一條穿越涌現這一復雜領域的方法。涌現的概念是指整體的性質可能與其組成部分截然不同。例如，水是濕的，但單個水分子卻不是。如果原則上能夠根據描述各部分的方程預測這些更高層次的性質，那么該系統就被稱為弱涌現系統。然而，如果這些預測是不可能的，那么整體就確實大于其各部分之和，該系統就被稱為強涌現系統。

涌現現象似乎自然而然地解釋了為什么科學會被劃分成不同的學科。生物學、化學、物理學以及介于兩者之間的所有學科——每個學科都有自己的研究機構。“雖然萬物皆有物理屬性，但我認為你不應該指望物理系來幫助你預測和理解像人類這樣的系統，”倫敦國王學院的哲學家大衛·帕皮諾說道。到目前為止，心理學無需探究大腦中每個電子的活動，也能很好地發揮作用。

我的學術經歷也印證了這一點。我在大學和研究生階段學習的是物理，幾乎從未和主修植物生物學或醫學的同學一起上過課。但他們在各自的領域都取得了成功。我甚至不需要了解量子波函數是什么，而這曾是我工作的核心。但這真的反映了實在的本質嗎？還是僅僅是人類，由于大腦能力有限且偏好官僚主義，將現實分割成碎片的方式？

格雷厄姆認為這些劃分是錯誤的。事實上，他認為這些劃分阻礙了科學進步。他指出，過多的專業化分支，每個分支都使用自己的語言，會讓科學家們對自己知道和不知道的東西變得不那么坦誠。此外，他認為這種概念本身就存在問題。他認為涌現的概念具有誤導性，甚至完全無用。他指出，涌現僅僅掩蓋了我們尚未了解的物理機制。當“濕潤”這類屬性涌現時，我們唯一能真正理解它的方式，是將其歸結為分子間內聚力和粘附力的平衡，而這又可以進一步簡化為基本粒子和場。與此同時，濕潤的體驗本身是一種錯覺——正如所有涌現概念一樣。

在這種嚴謹的物理主義觀點中，諸如意識或生命起源等看似強烈涌現的現象，也可以自下而上地構建出來——即使我們尚未完全實現這一目標。“相信強涌現現象就如同相信花園里有小精靈一樣，”格雷厄姆在他的書中寫道。

意識在一些哲學家中仍然是一個強有力的涌現論者，但嚴謹的物理主義者必須否定這一觀點。為了理解這一點，不妨設想一個思想實驗：在未來，我們對意識的理解已經非常透徹，以至于可以構建人工意識。想象一下，未來有一位科學家，他畢生致力于研究顏色的本質以及構成主觀體驗的純粹物理機制。科學家可以精確記錄人工智能意識在看到紅色番茄時內部發生的物理變化，但由于某種奇特的巧合，他自己從未真正體驗過紅色。然后，有一天早晨，他醒來，第一次看到番茄，突然感受到了它的顏色。

他們學到了什么新東西嗎？如果現實僅僅由物理學構成，那么答案應該是“否”，因為紅色體驗是在科學家通過對人工意識的研究已經理解的物理過程中產生的。但如果意識遠不止于此呢？與其說是某些物理過程和部分的總和，不如說是科學家學習新事物的空間。

想象力的極限

在格雷厄姆——這位嚴謹的物理主義者——看來，科學家并非缺乏知識，而是缺乏一種名為“想象理解”的思維能力。“一個能力更強的個體能夠獲取所有信息，并利用這些信息進行內部模擬，從而無需親眼見到紅色就能感知它，”格雷厄姆寫道。人類之所以無法做到這一點，是因為我們進化而來的思維和身體存在局限性；他認為，正是由于缺乏想象理解，我們才無法憑直覺理解量子物理學。

什么時候小時候，我看著祖父花園里那些鮮紅欲滴的西紅柿，它們會不會只是我大腦進化而來的、形狀像西紅柿的量子場，讓我產生它們看起來如此誘人的錯覺？這種想法讓我感到索然無味。然而，格雷厄姆卻認為，正是意識到我們理解力的局限性，才讓他更加欣賞我們所處物理世界的錯綜復雜。“（這）讓一切都顯得更加非凡，而不是（增添）某種神秘色彩，”他說。

番茄的紅色程度真的能用科學公式來表達嗎？

Mira/Alamy

對弗蘭克來說，將經驗納入考量既不神奇也不困難。“我無法獲得“除了經驗之外，世界別無他物，”他說道。那么，還有什么比經驗更真實呢？這種思想流派被稱為現象學。它最初由哲學家埃德蒙·胡塞爾提出，并產生了巨大的影響。其論點是，世界的本質無法僅僅通過量子場之類的抽象概念來把握，因為經驗是創造這些抽象概念的前提。“物理主義的世界是一個未經經驗且無法體驗的世界。它是一種非常有用的抽象概念，但它只能在科學家們生活和實踐的真實世界之后才能出現，”弗蘭克說道。

溫度的概念很好地說明了這一點。溫度的物理學定義它基于空氣粒子振動的平均速度。但物理學家之所以能發展出溫度的數學方程式，是因為他們最初擁有不同的經驗。如果沒有人注意到溫暖的房間和寒冷的房間之間的差異，溫度的概念就不可能出現。

如果沒有對冷熱的體驗，溫度（以及蒸汽機）就永遠不會被發明出來。DEEPOL 由 plainpicture/Fredrik Schlyter 拍攝

弗蘭克說，像溫度這樣有用且富有洞察力的概念，是物理學沿著“抽象螺旋”不斷攀升的歷史進程的一部分。但這個螺旋始終根植于經驗世界。他認為，如果說量子理論的方程比現實世界更真實，那就好比把地圖當成了疆域。寫道。

這個比喻幫助我理解為什么質疑物理學的本質真理會讓我感到緊張。一方面，沿著抽象的螺旋上升，最終達到越來越優雅簡潔的數學概念，這種感覺令人無比滿足。另一方面，腳踏實地地體驗實踐，感受其中蘊藏的豐碩成果，也同樣令人感到充實。

或許真相并非如此，量子場和意識體驗并非二者必居其一。加拿大多倫多大學士嘉堡分校的非還原論哲學家杰西卡·威爾遜（Jessica Wilson）就曾指出，或許存在這樣一種可能性。這是一種介于僅僅閱讀地圖和僅僅穿越領土之間的折中方法。“（經驗）是需要解釋的數據的一部分，”她說。我們無法感知量子場，但我們感知和體驗到的事物具有某種穩定性、完整性和因果力量，這些特質應該賦予它們某種現實性。威爾遜正在構建一個不同的現實結構框架，旨在兼顧微觀和宏觀層面，而不賦予其中一方比另一方更多的現實性。

還有其他一些思想流派，它們采取的是更為折衷的立場。對于哲學家來說北伊利諾伊大學的卡爾·吉列特認為，答案在于一種互利共生的觀點，在這種觀點中，任何一方都不可或缺。例如，一個活細胞是由其細胞膜構成的復雜整體。它由原子組成，原子本身是簡單的組成部分，它們本身沒有膜，但可以通過物理相互作用形成膜。然而，只有在超越原子自身的條件恰到好處的情況下，原子才會進行這些膜的生成過程。僅僅依靠物理作用是不夠的：各個組成部分都會受到正在形成的整體的影響。

關于實在的理論并不等同于實在本身。我們是不是一直把地圖誤認為是地形了？Connect Images/Alamy

所以，在接觸了一些關于實在本質的令人陶醉的想法之后，我最終會走向何方呢？低落？說實話，我還沒決定自己是否像格雷厄姆那樣是個真正的唯物主義者。我祖父種的西紅柿對我來說仍然帶有一絲超凡脫俗的意味。但即便我對自身與物質實在最深層層面的聯系有所懷疑，我作為科學家的訓練也促使我投身于實驗的世界，以此獲得內心的平靜。

我的大部分思考都集中在哲學領域，但威爾遜也指出，經驗檢驗或許有一天會起到決定性作用。例如，嚴謹的物理主義明確表示它對……強涌現之類概念不屑一顧。但是，如果實驗能夠證明意識的某個方面違反了已知的物理定律，進而引導我們發現大腦中某種新的非物理相互作用，那么強涌現仍然有可能成立。

認為物理學不存在客觀定律的物理學家

丹尼爾·奧里蒂對量子引力理論的研究使他得出了一個驚人的結論：自然規律并非獨立于我們而存在——這種視角轉變可能會帶來新的突破。

最終，我們對這些問題的立場可能會影響科學的開展方式。弗蘭克想要的是一種全新的科學，它不僅僅局限于遵循數學模型的無生命物體。他正與生物學家和信息科學家合作，開發一個框架。該框架承認擁有目標和欲望的主體（agents）所扮演的積極角色，它們可在這個世界里玩耍。他說，在這種“能動性物理學”中，存在著一系列全新的科學問題值得我們去探索。

物理主義者、互惠主義者、現象學家，無論他們自稱什么，他們都仍然相信科學及其最基本的原則能夠幫助我們更好地理解現實。“從某種意義上說，科學就是讓證據影響你的信念。我認為每個人都應該基于證據來建立自己的信念，”帕皮諾說道。這當然是一個我非常贊同的觀點。

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I first got introduced to this kind of question in seventh grade, sitting in a class I had never taken before: physics. Although this introductory class was mostly about balls rolling down hills, I was taught that the methods of physics ought to have limitless reach – an idea called reductionism. Physics should be able to identify the essential ingredients of reality and show how to combine them from scratch into anything and everything.

Immediately, I decided to become a physicist. But now, many years and several degrees later, I am less sure that physics holds all the answers. Take something like my sense of self: is that really a consequence of some equation that we haven’t yet derived? If I think about questions like these hard enough, I am left feeling rattled, wondering whether I have become a bad physicist.

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The power of physics

Historically, turning messy and subjective human experience into neat and abstract mathematics has been the one weird trick that makes science, and especially physics, powerful. Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton made revolutionary contributions to the world by observing objects on Earth and in the heavens, then quantifying their motion with equations – although mathematics and reason existed in other forms long before their time. Other physicists turned experiential notions such as hot and cold into the numerical system of temperature. Mathematical models allowed us to predict the future, drove our understanding of the universe and led to myriad technologies. We got a better view of the stars and a working steam engine.

With the advent of quantum theory in the 1920s and 30s, physicists began to grasp the as-of-now smallest parts of the physical world. The standard model of particle physics, which is rooted in quantum theory and tabulates all known fundamental particles and forces, is the most precisely tested scientific theory. Remarkably, even though phenomena such as quantum entanglement – where particles maintain a quantum link across extreme distances – still escape most people’s intuition, we have harnessed them to build working quantum computers.

Frank says all this gave physicists a sense of unbridled power. “You start off with this idea that physics is going to answer all your questions, just give me the laws of physics and I’ll be able to build everything up – kangaroos are no problem! I can explain it all,” he says. He disagrees with this view, and his most recent book, The Blind Spot, co-written with astronomer Marcelo Gleiser and philosopher Evan Thompson, argues that even the most successful scientific theories ought not to lose track of the role of experience and the way it informs where the limits of their explanatory power may be.

Reducing the world to abstractions enabled us to build technology like steam engines

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Graham has the opposite view, as may be evident from the title of his book, Physics Fixes All the Facts. He believes that even incredibly complex problems, such as what consciousness is and how it arises, can, in principle, be explained starting with the most basic physical building blocks. In fact, he goes further, arguing that anyone who rejects the ability of physics to eventually describe consciousness is essentially invoking ghosts and spirits. His philosophical stance is called austere physicalism, which you can think of as the most uncompromising flavour of reductionism. “All that there really is, is whatever physics says there is down at the bottom,” he says.

Currently, that means quantum fields, which are fundamental quantum objects that permeate all space. But cutting a path from those at the bottom all the way up to human consciousness isn’t exactly straightforward: we have to find a way through the thorny terrain of emergence. This is the idea that a whole can have profoundly different properties from its component parts. For example, water is wet, but individual water molecules are not. If you can, in principle, predict these higher-level properties from the equations that describe the parts, then the system is said to be weakly emergent. However, if these predictions are impossible, then the whole is truly more than the sum of its parts, and the system is strongly emergent.

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Emergence seems to naturally explain why science is compartmentalised into distinct subjects – biology, chemistry, physics and everything in between – each with their own institutions. “While everything is physical, I don’t think you should look to the physics department to help you predict and understand systems like human beings,” says philosopher David Papineau at King’s College London. Psychology has, so far, worked well without having to reference what every electron in the brain is doing.

My experience of academia reflects this. I studied physics in college and graduate school, and almost never shared a class with peers who focused on plant biology or medicine. They became successful in their respective fields without ever having to know what a quantum wave function is, which was the bread and butter of my work. But does this actually reflect the nature of reality, rather than just being how humans, with our limited brains and a penchant for bureaucracy, decided to chunk it up?

Graham regards these separations as false. In fact, he reasons that they put a damper on scientific progress. Having too many overly specialised branches, each speaking its own language, allows scientists to be less honest about what they do and do not know, he says. What’s more, he sees the concept of emergence as misleading – if not entirely useless. Emergence simply hides the bits of physics that we don’t yet know, he says. When a property like “wetness” emerges, the only real understanding of this is in terms of the balance of cohesive and adhesive forces among molecules, which can be further boiled down to fundamental particles and fields. The experience of wetness, meanwhile, is an illusion – as are all emergent concepts.

In this austere physicalist view, phenomena that seem strongly emergent, such as consciousness or the origins of life, can also be built from the bottom up – even if we aren’t entirely there yet. “Believing in strong emergence is equivalent to believing in pixies in your garden,” Graham writes in his book.

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Consciousness remains a contender for strong emergence among some philosophers, but an austere physicalist must reject the idea. To see why, consider a thought experiment set in an imagined future in which we finally understand consciousness so well that we can build artificial consciousnesses. Imagine a scientist in this future who has spent their life learning all there is to know about what colours are and the purely physical mechanisms that underlie subjective experience. They can record the precise physics of what happens inside an artificial consciousness when it is shown a red tomato, but, through some odd set of circumstances, the scientist has never actually experienced redness themselves. Then, one morning, they wake up and, for the first time, look at a tomato and suddenly experience its colour.

Have they learned something new? If all there is to reality is physics, the answer ought to be “no”, as the experience of red is created in a physical process that the scientist already understands from their studies of artificial consciousness. But if consciousness is more than a sum of some physical processes and parts, that leaves room for the scientist to have learned something new.

Limits of imagination

In Graham’s view – the austere physicalist view – the scientist doesn’t lack knowledge, just a mental capacity called imaginative understanding. “A more capable entity would be able to take all the information, use it to run an internal simulation and experience red without ever seeing it,” writes Graham. Humans can’t do this because of the limitations of our evolved minds and bodies; the same lack of imaginative understanding explains why we can’t intuitively understand quantum physics, he says.

When I looked at the richly red tomatoes in my grandfather’s garden as a child, were they just tomato-shaped quantum fields that my brain evolved to give the illusion of sumptuous vegetables? The idea feels joyless to me. Yet Graham argues that it is being aware of the limits of our comprehension that makes him appreciate the intricacy and complexity of our physical world all the more. “[It] makes everything seem even more extraordinary, rather than [adding] some sort of magical spirit,” he says.

Can the redness of a red tomato ever be truly conveyed as a scientific equation?

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For Frank, accounting for experience is neither magical nor a problem. “I have no access to the world except through experience,” he says. What could then be more real than experience? This school of thought is called phenomenology. First developed by philosopher Edmund Husserl, it became enormously influential, reasoning that the world’s essence cannot be captured just by abstract ideas like quantum fields because experience is the pre-condition for creating those abstractions. “The physicalist world is an unexperienced and unexperienciable world. It is a very useful abstraction, but one that only comes after the actual world that scientists live and practise in,” says Frank.

The concept of temperature illustrates this argument well. The physical definition of temperature is based on the average speed at which air particles jiggle. But physicists only developed mathematical equations for temperature because they had different experiences first. The concept of temperature couldn’t have arisen had someone not noticed the difference between a warm room and a cold one.

Temperature (and steam engines) would never have been invented without the experiences of hot and cold

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Useful and insightful concepts like temperature are part of physics’ historical ascent up the “spiral of abstraction”, says Frank. But that spiral is always rooted in the experiential world. To say that the equations of quantum theory are more real than that world is a case of mistaking the map for the territory, he writes.

This metaphor helps me understand why questioning the essential truth of physics left me feeling strained. On the one hand, the ascent up the spiral of abstraction towards ever more elegant and clean mathematical ideas is immensely satisfying. On the other, it is palpably fulfilling to keep my feet in the experiential muck, where the juicy tomatoes grow.

Perhaps the truth is that it isn’t a black-and-white situation where either quantum fields or conscious experience have to be fundamental. Jessica Wilson, a non-reductionist philosopher at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada, has certainly suggested that there might be a middle way between only reading the map and only traversing the territory. “[Experience] is part of the data to be explained,” she says. We don’t perceive quantum fields, but things that we do perceive and experience have the sort of stability, integrity and causal power that ought to imbue them with a kind of reality. Wilson is building a different framework for reality’s structure, aiming to accommodate both the micro and the macro, without infusing one with more reality than the other.

There are other schools of thought that strike more of a middle ground too. For philosopher Carl Gillettat Northern Illinois University, the answer is a mutualist view where neither can be discarded. A living cell, for instance, is a complex whole defined by its membrane. It is composed of atoms, which are simple parts that do not themselves have membranes, but can form one through physical interactions. But the atoms don’t undertake those membrane-producing processes unless the conditions that transcend them are just right. Physics alone isn’t enough: the parts are influenced by the emerging whole.

Theories of reality aren’t the same as reality. Have we been mistaking the map for the terrain?

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So, having exposed myself to some heady ideas about the true essence of reality, where do I ultimately come down? To be honest, I still haven’t decided whether I am a true physicalist, like Graham. Something about my grandfather’s tomatoes still feels a little transcendent to me. But even when I doubt my relationship with the deepest layers of physical reality, my training as a scientist implores me to look to the world of experiments as a way to afford peace of mind.

Much of my rumination has been in the realms of philosophy, but Wilson also suggests that empirical tests may one day be decisive. For instance, austere physicalism is clear about its disdain towards the concept of strong emergence. But if experiments can demonstrate a facet of consciousness that violates a known law of physics, which, in turn, leads us to find some new kind of non-physical interaction within the brain, then strong emergence still stands a chance.

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Ultimately, where we come down on these questions could influence how science is carried out. Frank wants nothing less than a new kind of science that includes more than inanimate objects obeying mathematical models. He is collaborating with biologists and information scientists to develop a framework that acknowledges the active role that agents, who have goals and desires, play in the world. In this “physics of agency”, he says, there is an entirely new range of scientific questions to go after.

Physicalists, mutualists, phenomenologists, whatever they want to call themselves, they are all still betting on science and its most basic tenets to give us a better grasp on what is real. “There’s a sense in which science is just a matter of letting evidence influence your beliefs. And basing your beliefs on evidence, I think everybody should do that,” says Papineau. That’s certainly a view I can subscribe to.

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