HOW MARY FINALLY SAW RED

By Aamir Butt

Blog 8/12 of #QuantumSurvivalTheory series

In Blog 1, I introduced Mary — the brilliant colour scientist who knew every physical fact about red but had never seen it. When she finally did, she seemed to learn something new. That gap between knowing the facts and having the experience is the heart of the Hard Problem.

QST dissolves it. Here’s how.

The Gap Was Between Two Substrates, Not Two Worlds

Mary’s exhaustive knowledge was about the electrochemical substrate: wavelengths, photoreceptor responses, neural firing patterns, cortical processing pathways. She knew everything at Level 1.

When she saw red for the first time, her microtubule networks entered quantum superpositions they had never occupied before. The collapse produced a novel quantum processing state — a specific configuration of tubulin states across entangled networks. That state is the experience of red.

The knowledge she gained wasn’t propositional (“red has wavelength 700nm”). It was processual — a new state her quantum processing system had never been in. You can know everything about swimming from textbooks. The first time you jump in the water, you learn something different: what swimming is as a process.

💬 The explanatory gap wasn’t between body and soul. It was between two information substrates: electrochemical and quantum. Two floors of the same building, not two different buildings. #QuantumSurvivalTheory

And this makes survival sense. An organism that has directly quantum-processed the experience of encountering a tiger has richer, faster, more adaptive responses than one that merely has abstract electrochemical representations of tiger-danger. Evolution would select for systems that build libraries of direct quantum processing states through experience.

Where Consciousness Begins

The boundary problem asks: which systems are conscious? QST gives a principled answer: any system that quantum processes information is conscious. The degree depends on three things: the extent of quantum coherence, the complexity of information being processed, and the degree of entanglement across the processing network.

This creates a natural continuum — exactly what evolution produces. A paramecium, with its simple microtubule network, has vanishingly minimal consciousness. An insect has more. A mammal has significantly more. A human, with 86 billion neurons connected by trillions of microtubule-linked gap junctions, sits at the high end of biological complexity.

There’s no magic threshold, no line in the sand where consciousness suddenly appears. Every incremental improvement in quantum processing capacity provides an incremental survival advantage. Evolution builds gradients, not cliffs.

How Micro-Experiences Combine

Panpsychism crashed into the combination problem: how do tiny sparks of micro-experience combine into your rich unified consciousness? The answer seemed impossible because panpsychism proposed no physical mechanism for combination.

QST has a specific mechanism: quantum entanglement. Entanglement is a well-understood physical process. It requires specific conditions — decoherence protection, correlation pathways — and evolution provided them: the microtubule lattice structure, MAP protein linkages between microtubules, gap junction networks between neurons, and ordered water shielding quantum states from thermal disruption.

Each expansion in the scale of coherence — from a single microtubule to a network of microtubules within a neuron to entangled networks across neurons — expanded the scope of unified consciousness. And each expansion provided a survival advantage: a more integrated model of the world, a more unified response to threats.

💬 Panpsychism said micro-experiences combine but couldn’t say how. QST says how: quantum entanglement. Evolution provided the conditions. Each expansion of coherence = each expansion of awareness. #QuantumSurvivalTheory

The Neural Correlates Problem

Neuroscience has spent decades mapping neural correlates of consciousness — which brain regions light up when you’re conscious of something. These correlations are real and robust. But correlates are not explanations.

QST explains why: neuroscience has been studying the electrochemical layer. Consciousness is the quantum processing layer. Studying neural correlates to understand consciousness is like studying keystrokes and screen outputs to understand what the CPU is doing. You’ll find strong correlations. You’ll never find the processing itself, because you’re looking at the wrong level.

The electrochemical layer doesn’t need to explain consciousness. It needs to interface with it. Evolution optimised that interface for speed and reliability, not self-transparency.