Ads/cft Duality and the Meta-challenge  Uziel Awret (Physics, Trinity Washington University, Falls Church, VA )   C10

Realist (non-illusionist) theories of consciousness holding that conscious and problem reports can be given topic-neutral explanations are vulnerable to debunking arguments that seek to portray them as cases of "unjustified true belief". In his 2019 response to Chalmers' 2018 "The Meta-Problem of Consciousness" Joe Levine agrees with Chalmers that non-reductionist realist theories of consciousness are constrained by solutions to the meta-problem but while Chalmers favors "meta-problem realizationism" in which consciousness realizes the meta-process Levine prefers a form of "meta-problem correlationism" that - loosens the connections between identity and necessity - so as to allow for -necessary correlations between seemingly independent entities. I will argue that modern physics is rich enough to loosen the connections between identity and necessity in philosophically significant ways and concentrate on duality, especially holographic gauge/gravity duality which has two major advantages, it allows information to be simultaneously realized in completely different ways and it is also crucial to certain new areas in condensed matter physics (making it relevant to "bulk matter" like brains). I will begin with a quick review of Duality in math and physics including projective duality, arithmetic duality, wave-particle duality, electro-magnetic duality, S-duality and T-duality and their relevance to traditional philosophical topics such as emergence, reduction, fundamentality, structuralism and realism. Next Ill concentrate on Maldacena's AdS/CFT duality (correspondence) between a string theory (gravity theory) on an anti-de Sitter spacetime (AdS) and a gauge theory (a conformal field theory, CFT) on its boundary. Example: a) We discover a rare two dimensional material that can be described by a conformal field theory possessing a dual description in three dimensions (Quantum Nernst effect). b) We discover that our best physical correlates of consciousness are partially constituted by a similar material (say they discover some relevant two-di conformal physics in the Claustrum). c) We discover the relevant constituents of one theory and how they transform into their duals. For example, entanglement in CFT transforms into temperature in Ads which is quite different. d) We discover that these transformation laws compress the psychophysical laws. I agree that "it isn't" immediately obvious whether duality transformations point to a representational redundancy or something new. (Elena Kastelani from her 2016 (Introduction to Special Issue on Dualities) however I am saying that dualities and especially the AdS/CFT duality can provide novel enough ways of loosening the connections between identity and necessity to overcome Chalmers' meta-challenge. The relevant Dual entities neither constitute nor cause each other, are necessarily correlated, completely different and yet identical! While S and T-dualities problematize reductionism and the metaphysics of fundamentality the Ads/CFT duality problematizes emergence and the relation between identity and necessity and can be related to Dieks, van Dongen and de Haro's "internal point of view" (unlike IIT's "internal view by fiat") and Vistarini's (necessary) Dual Aspect Monism. I will end by arguing that such dualities with their necessary correlations are preferable to realizationist attempts to overcome Chalmers' meta-challenge that still fail to explain how an absolutely intrinsic non-relational property manages to announce itself "relationally".