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Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
- athenasword 5y agoGenuine question: how is conceivable-therefore-possible even a real argument here?
- k__ 5y agoI don't know much about philosophy, but as far as I know "conceivabel therefore possible" was an argument Anselm von Canterbury used.
- foxhop 5y agohttps://youtu.be/Em3XplqnoF4 https://youtu.be/Em3XplqnoF4 | David Lynch explains Transedental Meditation (clip from a 1 hour documentary) All physics and consciousness converge to the universal one. The unified field of one. TM is pretty easy, just come up with some nonsense sounds and repeat them over and over, this is a mantra. Eventually switch from saying you mantra out loud to saying it in your mind. Don't worry if thoughts roll in just keep your conscious on the mantra. It seems to work for me and I don't typically enjoy meditation. It takes practice. Good luck! Basically science and theoretical physics followed the observational science down to a place where they got stuck, the good news is throughout history, including today, spiritual people have already found and understood this truth. Everything in our universe is built fundamentally out of the same universal field of one: mass, spirit, and consciousness! Everything (mass and consciousness) is created out of this field, and the act of observing it can and does change it!
- messe 5y agoI'm a David Lynch fan, and a practitioner of meditation, but the connections between Transcendental Meditation and Physics are pseudoscience.
- foxhop 5y agoEverything yeilds from one. All creation grows from this field that science is finally proving exists. I link to this clip because David explains it better than I could, but it's not just TM.
- nabla9 5y agoComments from people who read the paper below this, please. (nothing wrong with starting the discussion from the title or abstract, but it becomes harder to find comments related to the article).
- foxes 5y agoIf I understand it, they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. However consider a cpu, it runs on known physical perspectives. But imaging trying to reverse engineer by examining what happens inside an operating system/program running on it. You can get quite interesting emergent behaviour from a relatively simple system (a processor). So just because physics seems relatively simple, I don't think that has to mean consciousness is easier. I feel its more emergent.
- lbrandy 5y ago> they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. This paper is doing the opposite. It's arguing that other papers/ideas advocating dualism are going the wrong way and purely physicalist explanations are the best path forward.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoPurely materialist explanations, you mean? Platonic dualism, as advocated by folks like Max Tegmark, isn't non-physicalist. And it needn't be dualist even — if the world is made of math and the materials emerge by implication.
- bobthechef 5y agoWhat does it mean to be "made of math"? This reads like gibberish to me. Mathematics deals with formal abstraction. Geometry, for example, abstracts the spacial characteristics of matter from matter and focuses on them solely while ignoring everything else. (This actually reminds me of Bertrand Russell's structuralist account of physics and how it omits much if not most of reality.) (Also, Platonism does posit an immaterial realm of the forms in which all material things participate. But this participation relation is problematic, something Aristotle pointed out in the Third Man Argument and something Plato himself knew.)
- dr_dshiv 5y ago"Gibberish": Plato, Russell, Penrose and Tegmark? Made of math is as Aristotle noted: "All is number" — Platonic-Pythagoreanism was at the heart of classical civilization and the enlightenment. I can only suppose that there is something about these ideas that deeply disturbs or even frightens. But I wouldn't dismiss them as gibberish.
- lbrandy 5y agoHere's my attempt at a tldr. 1. The laws of physics at the time scales, space scales, and energies of the human brain are "known" and we have deep reasons to believe that more will not be discovered. He spends a great deal of space explaining and arguing that the credence that physics is "complete" in this regime should be very, very high. 2. Given the current laws of physics, there is no place or room for non-physicalist explanations of consciousness (or, I suppose, for other dualist ideas like a soul) because there is no mechanism for them to effect change in the physical world. 3. Anyone who wants a non-physicalist approach to consciousness must either claim they can violate the laws of physics in our brains, or cannot affect the physical world.
- skohan 5y agoI remember once upon a time being pretty interested in understanding "what is consciousness". The more I have learned about neuroscience, the more plausible it seems that what we know as subjective experience is just an emergent behavior of this super complex lump of jelly in our heads. If you look at what the thalamus does, it seems like consciousness might even just basically be the function of that brain region.
- EMM_386 5y agoHow does free will play into this? If the world is run by all physical laws, then I had no choice typing this out and submitting it, rather then closing the tab right now. My "decision" isn't real. If it is an actual conscious choice, that was not calculatable by the exact state prior, then consciousness is fundamental.
- gnzg 5y agoOne possibility is that from an omniscient perspective, free will is indeed meaningless. But then again it can be argued that everything would be meaningless from an omniscient perspective: time, space, matter, energy, freedom, love, whatever That is unless there is some sort of actual absolute meaning to the universe, which is a very boring and treacherous line of reasoning that i won't entertain here However he existence of an omniscient entity would completely break physics as we know it so any physicalist/rationalist approch to understanding the universe can fairly safely rule it out Free will may exist as a result of the unknown factors of human consciousness, their actions and consequences and their relations to the physicial world. Personally I find that thought quite pleasant, because it means that free will does exist from a human perspective, and I happen to posess one of those.
- skohan 5y agoThis paper reminds me of one of the "wow" moments I had when first studying neuroscience: a professor passed on the realization that everything in the universe we can observe and understand must have a neurobiological representation. Reality as we experience it is in fact always represented in brain activity.
- srean 5y agoBut is there infinite regress -- does it have a representation of itself representing itself. I find a more prosaic version of this question quite interesting too. If you can feel a touch/heat anywhere on or in your body its represented in the brain somehow, somewhere. For a moment (i) imagine the brain is sensitive to touch (it isn't because lack of 'pain' receptors) (ii) that the representation of a sensitive part of our body is localized in the brain rather than distributed. What this gives us is a mapping from the entire body (that includes the brain) into itself. Now, if there is a fixed point of this mapping, that fixed point is aware of itself. Is the brain insensitive to touch because its not biologically/physically possible for a localized region of space not to be aware of itself ? EDIT: Downvote ! That was rather unexpected.
- skohan 5y agoYeah sure it does - probably you can conjure a cartoon in your mind of a brain modeling a brain modeling a brain all the way out to infinity. Maybe you already did when you were coming up with this problem. edit: since the other poster edited their comment, this was only responding to the infinite regression question, not their bizarre point about touch sensitivity
- XorNot 5y agoSimilar to the idea of the "infinite image". Take a 640x480 square, and permute every possible combination of pixels. By definition: that space must contain a sizeable, or even complete, portion of all human knowledge that can ever be scrolled or exist in that image space. A lot of noise too, but the complete cure for cancer (if possible), FTL (if possible), immortality: what answers absolutely cannot be represented as several variations of the pixels of a 640x480 image?
- vehemenz 5y agoA few thoughts. 1. Sean is leaving CalTech at the end of next year. It's not a huge surprise, given his interests, that he is pursuing the issues in the philosophy of mind that intersect with quantum physics. Most work in this area is unadulterated quackery, and he is one of the few physicists who understands philosophy well enough to not make me cringe. 2. Most physicists implicitly engage in ontological metaphysics—that the world's fundamental construction is of objects, and not say, facts (Wittgenstein) or logical structures or relations (Carnap). Which I suppose explains why Carroll is interested in the mental aspects of ontology. 3. His conclusion is that the laws of physics explain consciousness, but not to the degree of satisfying everyone. We need to develop better philosophical models for understanding it, rather than positing new (ahem, outlandish) metaphysical theories such as panpsychism. Hard to disagree here. 4. I wonder if Carroll's future work in philosophy will cause him to revisit the many-worlds interpretation of QM, which a fair share of philosophers believe carries too much metaphysical baggage. The idea of many worlds "existing" is a philosophical idea; it's not something you learn from studying physics.
- mykowebhn 5y agoBut facts are only facts if they correspond with that to which they refer, oftentimes other objects, so when you include facts, ultimately it boils down to external objects. I think you also failed to include Idealism, that the world's fundamental construction is of Reason. For the uninitiated or the naive, the notion of Idealism often degenerates in their minds to Solipsism, but it is far from that.
- vehemenz 5y ago> But facts are only facts if they correspond with that to which they refer, oftentimes other objects, so when you include facts, ultimately it boils down to external objects. Only if ontological questions are legitimate questions about the world and not simply practical decisions about language. I, and many others, remain unconvinced.
- mykowebhn 5y ago
- sampo 5y agoPersonally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry. That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No need to postulate anything supernatural, or anything outside current physics and chemistry. Just interactions on the biological level. It seems surprisingly common that people don't accept this "boring" explanation, but go to search for explanations outside of the known laws of physics.
- tracedddd 5y agoThe implications are uncomfortable both existentially and ethically, so people will go to great lengths to search for evidence of the contrary.
- mvcalder 5y agoOr, most people’s subjective experience provides constant overwhelming evidence of the contrary.
- snarfy 5y agoAs a software guy I think of it as trying to understand the execution of a complex web app by examining the machine instructions. At that level, how things happen is very apparent but why they do is pretty much lost.
- Koshkin 5y agoExcept that the web app has not evolved naturally, i.e. by itself, from the machine instructions, like many emergent phenomena have.
- hsn915 5y agoWould it not surprised you if you learned that the program you wrote in C++ and compiled to machine code would produce "subjective" feelings in the CPU when executed?
- blamestross 5y ago"Peter Watts: Conscious Ants and Human Hives" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I
- philip142au 5y agoWhy do people think there is some magical "consciousness" thingy other than what we observe, a machine in a wet box
- messe 5y agoWhat does the observing?
- philip142au 5y agoWe are robots.
- Comevius 5y agoWe feel that we (and life, consciousness) must be special, but it's just thermodynamics. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-life-and-death-spring-from-disorder-20170126/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-life-and-death-spring-fro... https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.120604 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.10...
- linuxhansl 5y agoIt is interesting to me that the only thing in the universe that we can observe directly it's also thought to be the least understood. We experience physical phenomena by proxy only - through the senses and sensors we built, followed by an interpretation by our brain; while we can observe our consciousness by just observing ourselves from "within". I do not mean to question the paper, just pointing out that I find this fascinating. In fact I strongly believe that consciousness is - in the end - the result of physical processes. What I do question is that we understand what we mean by "physics". Physics is a model of the world, a model that we created based on our understanding how things ought to be, namely that all things are separate and that thus we can explain reality (and hence consciousness) by analyzing (i.e. dividing) the model more and more. Who says that that is a correct representation of the world?
- foxhop 5y agoAll things are separate until you dive as deep as we are now into physics, dividing things until you reach a universal field of 1. Then the model breaks and now we are trying to figure out what to do about that. Good news is we were prepared for the model to break. Consciousness is relative to the level of abstraction, as above so below. Observing the universe affects the universe. Consciousness has sensors all the way down to atoms and yet we can have supremely evil people and supremely good and everything in between. Nature and nurture, we have philosophy to help us now that physics and stuck when everything divides down to the same one, we learn that killing your neighbor is like killing yourself. Some people kill their neighbor or themselves, others grow a community garden. If you kill you neighbor you also kill your true self, all beings are of the the same consciousness, the goal is to individuate, to view the universe in new and novel ways, to teach others of the things you manage to bring back on your journey so that it manifests and propagates in this universe! We are not meant to observe we are meant to create! That said our creations must follow the trinity of love, freedom, and truth otherwise the creations quickly devolve into implements of oppression to control the literal minds of the masses.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoChris Langan (IQ of 195) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan "Chris Langan is a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID), a body that actually promotes ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID). His God is the god who created the world and his ‘proof’ is that the universe behaves like a mind, therefore this must be the mind of a god. Langan may be reputedly the most intelligent man in the United States" Source: https://www.quora.com/What-is-God-according-to-Chris-Langan-What-does-he-think-about-the-established-religions-such-as-Christianity-or-Islam https://www.quora.com/What-is-God-according-to-Chris-Langan-...
- hall0ween 5y agoIQ has never been linked to intelligence, considered there is no agreed upon definition for intelligence.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoYeah maybe, but that's a little like claiming Usain Bolt isn't the fastest man in the world because there is no agreed definition of "fastest man", because everyone can have their own definition of what is means to be the fastest man. IQ is the best measure we have to compare how fast your brain stores and processes information compared to others.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoSure, that could be a reasonable thing to say about IQ. But "fastest man" is well defined, because speed is well-defined. "being fast at storing and processing information" is a candidate for a definition of intelligence, but far from the only one. So no, it's nothing like claiming that Usain Bolt isn't the fastest man in the world. Or maybe it is: Bolt is almost certainly not the fastest person over 100 miles, so what kind of speed / intelligence are we discussing?
- dukeofdoom 5y ago
- Arun2009 5y agoOne of the things I want to do before I die is to acquire an authentic knowledge of classical Indian philosophy (particularly the monistic idealistic strands of thought in it) and the modern scientific account of reality, and evaluate for myself how their claims fare against that of the other. I don't understand why more Indians and particularly Hindus are not doing this. This looks to me like a thrilling intellectual and even spiritual adventure, and one of the few things that are truly worth doing in life.
- foxhop 5y agoMe too! However why stop at Indian philosophy?
- Arun2009 5y agoMy aim is evaluate the metaphysical claims of Indian philosophy from the perspective of the most holistic account of reality that we can acquire in the 21st century. This will obviously include studying other streams of knowledge that has anything to say about reality. As to why Indian philosophy - this primarily stems from my Indian background. I have always wondered if the claims of Indian philosophy can be validated scientifically. For e.g., how might a Nagarjuna or Shankara have argued for their claims if they were born in the 21st century? I suppose I don't have any deeper reasons other than sheer inquisitiveness or jijnAsA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jijnasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jijnasa) :-)
- Koshkin 5y ago> other streams of knowledge The Road to Reality by Penrose, perhaps.
- Arun2009 5y agoThat book has been gathering dust on my shelf for the last 10 years :-) I only recently completed an undergraduate sequence in quantum mechanics. I still have general relativity and quantum field theory left, which will take some more time to do properly. I also don't know how moral it'd be to wade into those waters without being on a first name basis with Jackson and Goldstein. Suffice it to say that there's a lot of work to do. But time is something that I have!
- snail44box 5y agoThere's two classes of people in this world. The ones wishing to believe in nonsense and the others that prefer logic. Consciousness is just a human word that expresses nothing more than a fallacy that attracts people that prefer faith. Similar to quantum mechanics if one is ever capable of understanding superdeterminism. Hilariously the support that exists for the former, reflects the state of society and how humanity will continue to progress in the wrong direction until nothingness.
- sweetheart 5y agoGeneralizing everyone into either "believes in nonsense" or "uses logic" seems like a great way to have a bad time interacting with the other several billion members of our species.
- perfmode 5y agologic can’t describe reality Godel, Wittgenstein, et al
- sdwr 5y agoThe author is edging the gap between hard materialism and something more. Axioms of hard materialism: - physical events have physical causes - everything is a physical event the associated tenets of science support a kind of intellectual "clean room", isolating rational thought (stories about things) from being contaminated by specks of human emotion/desire/serendipity. Other ontologies (including my lived experience) have different core principles.
- DoomHotel 5y agoPeter Watts covered the possibility of "zombie" intelligences pretty well in his novel Blindsight. One thing I took from it is that such an intelligence could not possibly behave exactly like a human being, because a lot of what we do as humans involves interaction with other humans where we have a mental model of their consciousness being much like our own. Expressing sympathy toward another person, for example, would be inconceivable without consciousness.
- Koshkin 5y agoThe equation (2) on page 8 does look like the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.
- Koshkin 5y ago> Aristotle (2002). Metaphysics Right...
- galaxyLogic 5y agoTo me consciousness is very simple. It is simply us observing our brain at work. We can can experience light, that is how we observe many processes in the external world. But what we really experience is some changes going on in the neurons in our brains. Then we can also experience sounds and touch etc. That means we can experience and observe our own neural activity. Consciousness is the "sixth sense" that allows us to experience what is going on in some specific parts of our brain with which we "observe our brain's observation activity". (So to be clear I'm not talking about any paranormal sense. If that exists it is the 7th sense. Consciousness is the 6th)