3 ms·
(Thanks to fauigerzigerk for helping me post this to the right story on HN haha) The HN conversation yesterday about the complexity of the proton, in particula
by jcims 4y ago
(Thanks to fauigerzigerk for helping me post this to the right story on HN haha)
The HN conversation yesterday about the complexity of the proton, in particular how we poke and prod at it to suss out its qualities and quantities, got me thinking about the subatomic particles of my personal subjective conscious experience.
We can trace, with quite a bit of precision, how a certain photon cocktail results in me perceiving the orange title bar at the top of HN. But where's the orange paint in my brain? What is it made of and how could we inspect it like we inspect the guts of a proton? And furthermore, where's the camera that puts all of those particles of paint onto the same stage? We know where the visual cortex is, yes, but where's the camera that can see the whole stage at one time?
That part, the integration of all of our perception into a single 'stage', is where I've long felt there has to be some kind of quantum or possibly field effect at play. Then I wondered if it might actually be possible for there to be an 'afterlife' of sorts in which the quantum relationship between particles is sustained beyond our life.
Dunno. Trippy to think about though.
- simonh 4y agoYou might wonder in the same way how a digital camera stores information about colour, and processes that to identify a picture of a red apple. There are many ways to store and process information, and the same information can be encoded in many different ways. The computer stores and represents colour in an image file in one way, the neural net in an image classifier also stores it in a digital system but in a very different way. Our brains store it in yet another completely different way but also in a neural net. Yet all of these store the information that the apple is red. The point is the underlying substrate and encoding system doesn't matter, the information about the redness of the apple is correlated across all these systems, and it's that correlation that is meaningful. It seems unlikely that awareness is a quantum effect, because it manifests in brain activity across a significant part of the brain. The brain is too hot and chaotic, with too many constant low level interactions, to maintain a macroscopic entangled quantum state for significant time at that level without it decohering.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dsego 4y agoHow does the correlation result in qualia or the experience of color?
- jcims 4y agoThat's the point I was getting at originally. I'm not as interested in tracing the neurophysical effects of perception. I'm interested in the components and coordinate space inside the 'game engine' where my perception is rendered.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoConsciousness and quantum mechanics are both weird and are thus the same.
- jcims 4y agoKind of a low effort dunk don't you think?
- spywaregorilla 4y agoAs far as I can tell, this is your argument. You don't understand how the brain works. You don't understand how quantum mechanics work. Therefore they must be related.
- dsego 4y agoYes, supposedly the consciousness interacts with the physical body and is able to migrate from one world-line reality to another world-line reality. Warning, this is all pretty much woo woo land, I don't think this person is well mentally, but has some really weird and interesting ideas. https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/consciousness-migration-for-world-line-travel/ https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/consciousness-migration-... There's a bunch of other bizarre articles on the website.