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The way I see it you have three-ish scenarios. Consciousness first, e.g. what you call matter is just a thing made up by your consciousness. No need to discuss

The way I see it you have three-ish scenarios. Consciousness first, e.g. what you call matter is just a thing made up by your consciousness. No need to discuss this one since it's not really a useful axiom when we want to explain the phenomena from the point of view of a physical world. Consciousness as a result of matter and ... The laws of physics are deterministic / rational / bounded / mathematics e.g. we are computers and consciousness is a computation. As a result basically everything that moves is conscious (although not necessarily the same "level" of conscious) since that movement is a computation all that is needed is to define a language for that movement that makes it a isomorphic projection to/from a identity for some "consciousness complexity class". The laws of physics are mystical, something may be special about us, free will, yada yada ... Then anything could make sense, lets go take ayahuasca!

randallsquared 9y ago
> As a result basically everything that moves is conscious (although not necessarily the same "level" of conscious) since that movement is a computation all that is needed is to define a language for that movement This doesn't seem right... computation requires causality. It's not enough that you can build a model complex enough to define a random sequence of states as equivalent to computing something; if any consciousness is computed thereby, it's the model rather than the random sequence of states that would be conscious, no? All this will be easier to reason about when consciousness is understood, assuming we ever get there.
- openfuture 9y ago
  Well the assumption is physics being sufficiently mathematic to be able to calculate the next state making any movement a computation (albeit beyond our understanding)
colordrops 9y ago
> No need to discuss this one since it's not really a useful axiom when we want to explain the phenomena from the point of view of a physical world. We can wave it off, but it seems as important as other explanations. I have a fourth theory: The nature of reality is dualistic, and the mind simultaneously creates the physical world while the mind arises from the physical world, supporting each other in a feedback loop. It's a dualistic phenomenon similar to particle-antiparticle pairs that form at a black hole's event horizon. two sides of the same coin. Subjective experience is commonly thrown out the door but what if it is just as important as objective reality?
- openfuture 9y ago
  IMO duality is contained in both/either the first and/or the second case since the idea is that consciousness and matter is a feedback loop of some sort you can pick the chicken or the egg as an axiom and derive the other one. But then again this is some serious arm chair philosophizing so I'm sure there's a case that isn't covered by that line of reasoning. Personally I'm a fan of defining the base of my reality as consciousness or subjective experience but I still like to think that there is Truth and that my experience contains at least a shadow of it. Edit: I do think duality is a really useful conceptualization since you can think of The World (or what I just called Truth above) as existing and then there is Absurd which is everything that doesn't exist (and you can't disprove because yay category theory!). Then you can say all of Existence can be categorized in some arbitrary way, there are X categories that can be nested to any depth and maybe there are some strange loops or whatever, we then convert that into a binary tree (losing some relations along the way maybe) and call the resulting dualities shadows of the True Pair (of Truth and Absurd). Now your problem is perceiving the world as it is, i.e. evaluating these 'perspectives', so you need some function to order them and pick the best one, lets call it 'religion'. If your religion function is to be effective we need a good assumption, one idea (suggested by some prior research) is to investigate the True Pair and assume that every other duality will have a part that corresponds to Truth and a part that corresponds to Absurd (or yin-yang, submissive-dominant, sender-receiver... whatever you prefer). A perspective that pairs things that cannot be interpreted as opposites becomes muddled and unsure about the nature of the information being evaluated. Anyway, you can investigate the assumptions famous researchers like Jesus, Muhammed, The Buddha and others have come up with and maybe concoct your own view from theirs or you can ignore the problem and use the default perspectives of your culture / language.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    Defining the base of reality as consciousness doesn't have to exclude universal truth if consciousness exists beyond the perception of your individual self. The way I see it is that the physical world is a model of consciousness as created by the consciousness itself. The model draws an illusory line between your body and the rest of the world, but the underlying fields are not actually separate, even in the model, e.g. magnetic and electrical fields, let alone the consciousness. One way I heard it out, I think by Alan Watts, is that seeing your true self is like trying to bite your own teeth.

randallsquared 9y ago

> As a result basically everything that moves is conscious (although not necessarily the same "level" of conscious) since that movement is a computation all that is needed is to define a language for that movement This doesn't seem right... computation requires causality. It's not enough that you can build a model complex enough to define a random sequence of states as equivalent to computing something; if any consciousness is computed thereby, it's the model rather than the random sequence of states that would be conscious, no? All this will be easier to reason about when consciousness is understood, assuming we ever get there.

openfuture 9y ago
Well the assumption is physics being sufficiently mathematic to be able to calculate the next state making any movement a computation (albeit beyond our understanding)

colordrops 9y ago

> No need to discuss this one since it's not really a useful axiom when we want to explain the phenomena from the point of view of a physical world. We can wave it off, but it seems as important as other explanations. I have a fourth theory: The nature of reality is dualistic, and the mind simultaneously creates the physical world while the mind arises from the physical world, supporting each other in a feedback loop. It's a dualistic phenomenon similar to particle-antiparticle pairs that form at a black hole's event horizon. two sides of the same coin. Subjective experience is commonly thrown out the door but what if it is just as important as objective reality?

openfuture 9y ago
IMO duality is contained in both/either the first and/or the second case since the idea is that consciousness and matter is a feedback loop of some sort you can pick the chicken or the egg as an axiom and derive the other one. But then again this is some serious arm chair philosophizing so I'm sure there's a case that isn't covered by that line of reasoning. Personally I'm a fan of defining the base of my reality as consciousness or subjective experience but I still like to think that there is Truth and that my experience contains at least a shadow of it. Edit: I do think duality is a really useful conceptualization since you can think of The World (or what I just called Truth above) as existing and then there is Absurd which is everything that doesn't exist (and you can't disprove because yay category theory!). Then you can say all of Existence can be categorized in some arbitrary way, there are X categories that can be nested to any depth and maybe there are some strange loops or whatever, we then convert that into a binary tree (losing some relations along the way maybe) and call the resulting dualities shadows of the True Pair (of Truth and Absurd). Now your problem is perceiving the world as it is, i.e. evaluating these 'perspectives', so you need some function to order them and pick the best one, lets call it 'religion'. If your religion function is to be effective we need a good assumption, one idea (suggested by some prior research) is to investigate the True Pair and assume that every other duality will have a part that corresponds to Truth and a part that corresponds to Absurd (or yin-yang, submissive-dominant, sender-receiver... whatever you prefer). A perspective that pairs things that cannot be interpreted as opposites becomes muddled and unsure about the nature of the information being evaluated. Anyway, you can investigate the assumptions famous researchers like Jesus, Muhammed, The Buddha and others have come up with and maybe concoct your own view from theirs or you can ignore the problem and use the default perspectives of your culture / language.
- colordrops 9y ago
  Defining the base of reality as consciousness doesn't have to exclude universal truth if consciousness exists beyond the perception of your individual self. The way I see it is that the physical world is a model of consciousness as created by the consciousness itself. The model draws an illusory line between your body and the rest of the world, but the underlying fields are not actually separate, even in the model, e.g. magnetic and electrical fields, let alone the consciousness. One way I heard it out, I think by Alan Watts, is that seeing your true self is like trying to bite your own teeth.