Post by skytroll on Aug 16, 2007 17:02:01 GMT -5
"The Big Wow"
Is consciousness a fundamental parameter of the universe?
From the Introduction of Zizzi's paper:
What is consciousness? Everybody knows about his own consciousness, but it is impossible to communicate our subjective knowledge of it to others. Moreover, a complete scientific definition of consciousness is still missing. However, quite recently, it has been realized that the study of consciousness should not be restricted to the fields of cognitive science, philosophy and biology, but enlarged to physics, more precisely, to quantum physics.
Joy: Yes, those dratted physicists do want to intrude upon the mechanistic world of neuro-zombies - those reductionist materialistic types who believe minds are magical effects of neurons instead of causal agents in the world of physical manifestation. Physics, as the 'First Science' must belong to this quest [IMO] if the findings are to be useful to science's FAPP job description. More from Zizzi's intro -
The most popular (and conventional) description of consciousness is based on the classical computing activities in the brain's neural networks, correlated with mental states. In that picture, mind and brain are identified, and are compared to a classical computer. That approach… is called in various ways: physicalism, reductionism, materialism, functionalism, computationalism.
However, although the brain can actually support classical computation, there is an element of consciousness which is non-computable (in the classical sense), as it was shown by Penrose []. Moreover, the seminal paper by Stapp [] clarified why classical mechanics cannot accommodate consciousness, but quantum mechanics can. Finally, reductionism cannot explain the "hard problem" of consciousness, which deals with our "inner life", as it was illustrated by Chalmers [].
Joy: All this work by philosophers of science, physicists, cosmologists, etc. in the quest does not silence the reductionist critics, of course. However, there does seem to be something 'more' intuited about consciousness by most people, and reductionism can only reduce things so far before encountering the non-deterministic realities of QM. Which is, far as we are able to tell, the substrate of all classical reality. Continuing -
A quite different line of thought about consciousness is the one which comprises panpsychism, pan-experientalism, idealism, and funda-mentalism. Pan-experientalism states that consciousness (or better, proto-consciousness) is intrinsically unfold in the universe, and that our mind can grasp those proto-conscious experiences. […]
More recently, Penrose interpreted the occasions of experience as the quantum state reductions occurring at the Planck scale, where spin networks [] encode protoconsciousneess. This is a pat-experiential approach to consciousness which is consistent with quantum gravity, and is called "Objective Reduction" [OR] []. A further development is the Penrose-Hameroff "Orchestrated Objective Reduction" [Orch-OR] [] which deals with the self-collapse of superposed tubulins in the brain. […] Finally, Chalmers [] claimed that physical systems which share the same organization will lead to the same kind of conscious experience (Principle of Organizational Invariance). As physical systems which have the same organization (no matter what they are made of) encompass the same information, it follows, from the above principle, that information is the source of consciousness.
Joy: we are quite used to thinking of living organisms as high-level information processors, but Zizzi goes ahead and takes Chalmers' hypothesis to its logical extrapolated non-biological conclusion: the universe is conscious! To wit -
[…] At this point, a conjecture arises very naturally: the early universe had a conscious experience at the end of inflation, when the superposed quantum state of 10=n quantum gravity registers underwent Objective Reduction. The striking point is that this value of n equals the number of superposed tubulins-qubits in our brain, which undergo Orchestrated Objective Reduction, leading to a conscious event. Then, we make the conjecture that the early universe and our mind share the same organization, encompass the same quantum information, and undergo similar conscious experiences. In other words, consciousness might have a cosmic origin, with roots in the pre-conscious ingrained directly from the Planck time.
Joy: The paper is very entertaining for anyone interested. It explores the quantum gravity registers of the early inflationary universe (which also, as an added benefit IMO, tends to debunk the continually-proliferating multiverse scenarios so popular among reductionist materialists who can't wrap their heads around reality as-is). It goes on to explore the cybernetic principles these quantum gravity registers follow, it examines autopoiesis and self-reproduction together with the no-cloning theorem in terms of Chalmers' Principle of Organizational Invariance. From this examination Zizzi derives a "Principle of Alternating Computational Modes" which begets consciousness.
After more in-depth examination of the Penrose model as responsible for the actual [measured] entropy of the universe, Zizzi goes on to conclude that the "Boolean observer" is a necessary product of the postinflationary universe - concentrated dynamic consciousness. Life, intelligent enough to observe the universe and mind-travel along the past trajectory.
This is an entertaining and very detailed account of that odd view we've heard rumored coming from quantum circles, that future "emergent" observers consciously contemplating the past are themselves causal… (this can be mind-dizzying, but a fun ride). If, as I have long suspected, life and its directional evolution into ever more conscious states has always been a specified progression inherent to the nature of reality itself, ideas such as these cannot be arbitrarily dismissed by the die-hard reductionists just because they don't like the philosophical implications. There's no religion here, but there might be superior "functor Futures" of some possible description to us here in a relative "functor Past." Which of course doesn't matter one bit to the science.
Intelligent design. Because according to these scientific models, there's not much random going on at all…
telicthoughts.com/the-big-wow/
skytroll
Is consciousness a fundamental parameter of the universe?
From the Introduction of Zizzi's paper:
What is consciousness? Everybody knows about his own consciousness, but it is impossible to communicate our subjective knowledge of it to others. Moreover, a complete scientific definition of consciousness is still missing. However, quite recently, it has been realized that the study of consciousness should not be restricted to the fields of cognitive science, philosophy and biology, but enlarged to physics, more precisely, to quantum physics.
Joy: Yes, those dratted physicists do want to intrude upon the mechanistic world of neuro-zombies - those reductionist materialistic types who believe minds are magical effects of neurons instead of causal agents in the world of physical manifestation. Physics, as the 'First Science' must belong to this quest [IMO] if the findings are to be useful to science's FAPP job description. More from Zizzi's intro -
The most popular (and conventional) description of consciousness is based on the classical computing activities in the brain's neural networks, correlated with mental states. In that picture, mind and brain are identified, and are compared to a classical computer. That approach… is called in various ways: physicalism, reductionism, materialism, functionalism, computationalism.
However, although the brain can actually support classical computation, there is an element of consciousness which is non-computable (in the classical sense), as it was shown by Penrose []. Moreover, the seminal paper by Stapp [] clarified why classical mechanics cannot accommodate consciousness, but quantum mechanics can. Finally, reductionism cannot explain the "hard problem" of consciousness, which deals with our "inner life", as it was illustrated by Chalmers [].
Joy: All this work by philosophers of science, physicists, cosmologists, etc. in the quest does not silence the reductionist critics, of course. However, there does seem to be something 'more' intuited about consciousness by most people, and reductionism can only reduce things so far before encountering the non-deterministic realities of QM. Which is, far as we are able to tell, the substrate of all classical reality. Continuing -
A quite different line of thought about consciousness is the one which comprises panpsychism, pan-experientalism, idealism, and funda-mentalism. Pan-experientalism states that consciousness (or better, proto-consciousness) is intrinsically unfold in the universe, and that our mind can grasp those proto-conscious experiences. […]
More recently, Penrose interpreted the occasions of experience as the quantum state reductions occurring at the Planck scale, where spin networks [] encode protoconsciousneess. This is a pat-experiential approach to consciousness which is consistent with quantum gravity, and is called "Objective Reduction" [OR] []. A further development is the Penrose-Hameroff "Orchestrated Objective Reduction" [Orch-OR] [] which deals with the self-collapse of superposed tubulins in the brain. […] Finally, Chalmers [] claimed that physical systems which share the same organization will lead to the same kind of conscious experience (Principle of Organizational Invariance). As physical systems which have the same organization (no matter what they are made of) encompass the same information, it follows, from the above principle, that information is the source of consciousness.
Joy: we are quite used to thinking of living organisms as high-level information processors, but Zizzi goes ahead and takes Chalmers' hypothesis to its logical extrapolated non-biological conclusion: the universe is conscious! To wit -
[…] At this point, a conjecture arises very naturally: the early universe had a conscious experience at the end of inflation, when the superposed quantum state of 10=n quantum gravity registers underwent Objective Reduction. The striking point is that this value of n equals the number of superposed tubulins-qubits in our brain, which undergo Orchestrated Objective Reduction, leading to a conscious event. Then, we make the conjecture that the early universe and our mind share the same organization, encompass the same quantum information, and undergo similar conscious experiences. In other words, consciousness might have a cosmic origin, with roots in the pre-conscious ingrained directly from the Planck time.
Joy: The paper is very entertaining for anyone interested. It explores the quantum gravity registers of the early inflationary universe (which also, as an added benefit IMO, tends to debunk the continually-proliferating multiverse scenarios so popular among reductionist materialists who can't wrap their heads around reality as-is). It goes on to explore the cybernetic principles these quantum gravity registers follow, it examines autopoiesis and self-reproduction together with the no-cloning theorem in terms of Chalmers' Principle of Organizational Invariance. From this examination Zizzi derives a "Principle of Alternating Computational Modes" which begets consciousness.
After more in-depth examination of the Penrose model as responsible for the actual [measured] entropy of the universe, Zizzi goes on to conclude that the "Boolean observer" is a necessary product of the postinflationary universe - concentrated dynamic consciousness. Life, intelligent enough to observe the universe and mind-travel along the past trajectory.
This is an entertaining and very detailed account of that odd view we've heard rumored coming from quantum circles, that future "emergent" observers consciously contemplating the past are themselves causal… (this can be mind-dizzying, but a fun ride). If, as I have long suspected, life and its directional evolution into ever more conscious states has always been a specified progression inherent to the nature of reality itself, ideas such as these cannot be arbitrarily dismissed by the die-hard reductionists just because they don't like the philosophical implications. There's no religion here, but there might be superior "functor Futures" of some possible description to us here in a relative "functor Past." Which of course doesn't matter one bit to the science.
Intelligent design. Because according to these scientific models, there's not much random going on at all…
telicthoughts.com/the-big-wow/
skytroll