Registered: Dec 2003
Posts: 179

Hello,

I've posted here before about my views of physics and related topics.

The idea I'm currently looking for feedback to relates to consciousness and how it may be found in simple programs like a model of nature.

The idea I have is that consciousness is not related to the human being, the brain, or anything neuro-centric for that matter.

Consciousness, in this new view, is described as any instance where the Universe observes itself.

Consciousness is not humanist. Its not a quality of a specific organism. It has to do with the Universe itself.

Let me know what you think:
http://www.techmocracy.net/science/time.htm

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Registered: Mar 2004
Posts: 19

If consciousness is any event where the universe observes itself, then the universe would, to my way of thinking, be conscious down to the merest whatever it may be.

Now the universe cannot observe all its parts all the time,,,we know this, but if any part were to be isolated, unobserved and therefore unconscious, then this would be a revelation and very important I think.

But perhaps it would be well to define what the universe is doing when it observes itself?

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Registered: Mar 2004
Posts: 132

Mike,

your boldness gives me confidence.

This sort of talk, I know, raises a brow or two for the many people that have thought about it before and dismissed it as a historical piece of thier own life of thought. Sometimes I think that the main reason why topics like this are so nervous revolves around the familiarity, as well as the general undecisiveness of the problem coupled with the ubiquitous dogmas and paradigms of traditional scientific progress.

Anyways, I've thought about this idea quite a few times and from the experience I've had just by doing that (not to say that the process was rigorous), as well as of course listening to what other people think, I would not argue that the idea is new at all. Instead, I'd say that it is a very, very old concept that predates objective thought in general.

I have to stop there. I'm no expert in philosophy and so my credibility has run out as far as solid statements go.

But some thing to consider as an approach, and somewhat a response to Jasons comments is that the answer to the questions that are not readily answered with your model are greatly related to the theorem proving process and trivalent networks. There is so much to those things.

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Registered: Dec 2003
Posts: 179

Jason said:
>But perhaps it would be well to define what the universe is doing when it observes itself?

The universe observes itself whenever information about part of the universe is found in the universe.

For example, instead of a photomultiplier which I talked about before, lets change it to a spectrometer. The spectrometer detects a photon and determines its frequency. It then encodes this frequency somehow. I don't know exactly how. It might broadcast sound waves that state the name of the color, it might draw some number of chicken scratches on a cave wall.

The difficult part in realizing when an observation has been made is translating the language of the observer into something you could understand.

For example, even if we created a human being in our model, capable of very sophisticated conversation in the Enlglish language with other human beings in the model, this does not mean it will be easy to understand what the human is communicating in the model. We would have to translate the digital sound waves in the model to analag ones to understand him. That is in the best case scenario where we have an English speaking creature. Something not very likely to be acheived anytime soon.

But there could be simpler ways. For example, when a magnet turns to a pole, or when a sunflower follows a sun accross the sky. We can see that the system (be it a horshoe magnet or a flower) is interacting with some other system, there is information about the second system that may be cleaned from the first.

Thus, there is information about the universe in the universe, and an observation has been made.


Jesse said:
>I would not argue that the idea is new at all

You are right. Many of the ideas here are thousands of years old. But understanding them in terms of computed system, and also understanding quantum and relativistic phenomena in this framework is a bold step in physics.

I say this because there are really two domains here:

1. the Universe, an objective reality
2. nature, the produce of our conscious experience

See science looks only at nature to describe it. It sees out and tried to place laws in what it finds. It has found the principle of relativity and the principle of uncertainty.

But my approach is different, truly a new kind of science.

Instead of looking out a nature and tryign to describe it, the approach here to describe something deeper than nature. This is the Universe. We can describe it without uncertainty and without relaitivity because the goal is to create nature as a by-product of the Universe.

By creating the Universe with algorithms as consciousness, we can create a nature from which emerges the principles of science, as opposed to designing a model Universe with those principles as rules or axioms.

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Registered: Oct 2003
Posts: 69

Re. the following:

But my approach is different, truly a new kind of science.

Instead of looking out a nature and tryign to describe it, the approach here to describe something deeper than nature. This is the Universe. We can describe it without uncertainty and without relaitivity because the goal is to create nature as a by-product of the Universe.

By creating the Universe with algorithms as consciousness, we can create a nature from which emerges the principles of science, as opposed to designing a model Universe with those principles as rules or axioms.

Comment:

Suppose - just suppose - that the old-timers had it right.

That the Universe of our sense perceptions is mere shadow play on the cave-walls of our Ignorance.

Would it not follow, then, that the modus operandi of modern science is truly off-the-wall in that, while it permits us to model aspects of the shadow play, it leaves us ignorant about the why and how of the shadow play itself?

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Registered: Dec 2003
Posts: 179

Gunnar,

Yes, I agree. If the Universe is in fact made of both an objective reality and a conscious reality then whatever is not in the conscious reality can be said not exist for all practical purposes of the conscious being.

If it doesn't exist, it can't be known, by definition.

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Registered: Sep 2004
Posts: 3

David Chalmers proposes a related idea in "The Conscious Mind."

The first part of the book proposes that there is actually a "Hard" problem of consciousness.

The second part proposes that we can deduce some general laws about how consciousness intervenes on physics and suggests that information is the key link.

The third part, and most relevant to your post, is some speculation about consciousness and physics/information, including the strongly argued idea that the quantum mechanical wavefunction itself is in fact the bedrock of consciousness and pervades not just the entire universe but the entire quantum physical many worlds.

It is, he admits, a pan-psychic point of view, but is basically a statement that the wavefunction is information and that information is double aspect, meaning it has a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect.

I thought this might be of interest in some way because of the ambiguity about observership in quantum mechanics coupled with the idea of a conscious many-worlds wavefunction.

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