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Yes but consciousness is not in any way a foundation of the universe. It's a foundation of our own experience, but if you take a mechanicistic, reductionist app

Yes but consciousness is not in any way a foundation of the universe. It's a foundation of our own experience, but if you take a mechanicistic, reductionist approach, consciousness is pretty high in the ranking of things. I'm not saying its explanation must be necessarily complex, but so far the simple explanations didn't work. > Neural networks can be expressed in fraction of that complexity That's not an explanation. That's a rule to construct them. Same for evolution: one thing is to define a basic rule that underlies a phenomena, another thing is to explain why we like peanut butter and jelly using evolutionary psychology. The basic rule doesn't capture much. And sometimes, maybe, there's not even a basic rule to begin with, because we conflate a lot of stuff in concepts that have no root or relationships in the physical world.

sometime 8y ago
> Yes but consciousness is not in any way a foundation of the universe. The universe is fractally structured regarding simplicity: It is simple at its foundation upon which we find layers of evidently chaotic processes (e.g. brownian motion, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics), which in turn converge to metastable rule sets that are seemingly simple again (e.g. evolution, neural networks). Unpredictable fluctuation from the chaotic layers below are either exploited as a computational mechanism (e.g. for probabilistic modeling or adaptations of unpredictability in behavior) or averaged out by regulation (homeostasis), so simple rules remain plausible despite the underlying chaos. Those simple rule sets in turn produce complex processes (e.g. psychology, science), which in turn produce simple processes (e.g. game theory, economics). Of course the higher up in this hierarchy, the more unstable rule sets become, e.g. most economic theories make poor predictions, but evolution is an extremely reliable theory.

sometime 8y ago

> Yes but consciousness is not in any way a foundation of the universe. The universe is fractally structured regarding simplicity: It is simple at its foundation upon which we find layers of evidently chaotic processes (e.g. brownian motion, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics), which in turn converge to metastable rule sets that are seemingly simple again (e.g. evolution, neural networks). Unpredictable fluctuation from the chaotic layers below are either exploited as a computational mechanism (e.g. for probabilistic modeling or adaptations of unpredictability in behavior) or averaged out by regulation (homeostasis), so simple rules remain plausible despite the underlying chaos. Those simple rule sets in turn produce complex processes (e.g. psychology, science), which in turn produce simple processes (e.g. game theory, economics). Of course the higher up in this hierarchy, the more unstable rule sets become, e.g. most economic theories make poor predictions, but evolution is an extremely reliable theory.