My Own Personal Nothingness: From childhood hallucination to theoretical physics
nautil.us
nautil.us
1) Lightman's description of his hallucinationish experience at the age of nine, wherein he perceived all time in one instant [or had the sensation of doing so], reminds me of Julian Barbour ["The Discovery of Dynamics"] and his hypothesis that all spacetime exists simultaneously -- not in a Minkowski-eque 'loaf,' but in a static collection of mathematical configuration spaces, each of which represent a "now" [which word, coincidentally, concludes Lightman's article].
2) I can relate to Lightman's notion of 'Nothingness' as it relates to quantum field theory -- when I first cracked Tony Zee's "QFT in a Nutshell," I'm pretty sure I experienced the same feeling of complete inconsequentiality described by Lightman, though for totally different reasons.
One day, physicists will learn to recognize when they're doing 17th century philosophy.
http://www.platonia.com/ideas.html
Thanks for reference.
But, it takes a physicist to make associative connections of that feeling to Quantum Field Theory. His article is a particularly good read in that regard, thanks for sharing! It made me revisit my understanding of Quantum Fields. How full of something the supposed "nothingness" actually is!
or perhaps some parasite or virus which requires a host body. in which case you must concern yourself with your own survival, the survival of your host and the stability of the host/virus system, often tending towards co-dependence to ensure future generations. these types of entangled systems are how life tends to really operate, from the dust mites on your skin to the bacteria in your gut it's a giant complicated mess of competing and cooperating hierarchical dependencies which are taking a rather more risky route towards increasing entropy than an icy comet orbiting our sun every few thousand years.
human cognitive experience is a tiny sliver of the humanity engine, and often breaks in quirky ways- see drugs.
Many migratory birds have a sort of fifth sense (I don’t recall the nomenclature) that allows them to “feel” the earth’s magnetic field, and do not have the the red-blue-green combination for their primary colors - the world view of a bird and a human in a skyscraper looking down at the scenery below/around would already be significantly different.
Or fish, for example, it’d be interesting to imagine life in the water, moving around at the flick of a tail.. The point being, one’s experience of reality is highly dependent on the physical apparatus one is equipped with.
Pure thought is the ultimate nature of consciousness because it has the fingerprint of the universe - interaction - without referencing it -- only manifested by it.
A bunch of machine learning neurons on my computer have no notion of anything lest I feed it to them. But calculation -- ie. interaction - they are given..and based on. In fact, giving them sensory input about the world is nice but isn't the inherited notion of computation, calculation, and information/memory/storage much more fundamental and genetic to this universe? Not some specific form like a curated data set?
Everything in this universe has the mark of its laws and ultimate fundamental nature. But I think the simpler systems show much more of an imprint.
Pure thought is one of the most distilled fingerprints of the nature of fundamental interaction of this universe.
> Pure thought lacks space..lacks sense of self.
I think this is stretching the definition of 'thought' past the point of meaninglessness. If you remove all interaction with the rest of the universe, any closed system will still have self-interaction.
And if you take it to the extreme, any collection of matter can be seen to 'compute' some function.
Which one of those systems 'thinks'? All of them? Every sub-system of every system?
Thoughts in a human's biological apparatus are essentially neurons firing off in the brain, e.g. replaying an incident stored in memory. A computer can do much the same thing, with different apparatus of course, yet it’d not be considered conscious. Not that it couldn’t be (it could well be possible for a lifeform to be constructed of circuitry, it just isn’t (yet) known if or how), just that it wouldn’t be.
If the above is indeed true, it’d be inferred that consciousness is of the nature of consciousness itself. If the abstract notion of thinking can be reified either in a human (biological) form or an electronic form, it stands to reason that the only thing different between the two must be that which distinguishes the human from the machine, i.e. consciousness.
Thus, in the paradigm of “thought” in this discussion, all consciousness is, is the awareness of the process of thinking, or of the thoughts as they come and go. Because a thought cannot be considered to be aware of itself, it can only be the object of awareness, the subject being the consciousness manifested in said human. The same reasoning applies to paradigms other than “thought”, e.g. “experience”.
A computer with sensors can detect itself falling to the floor, as can a human with their senses. An appropriately programmed computer can even take preventive action (e.g. some hard disks disconnecting/parking the head) as can a human, by virtue of their instincts/memories. But a computer would not be considered to be conscious of the fall. Only an entity in possession of consciousness can be considered to truly experience things. So neither thoughts nor senses are determinants of consciousness. Nor are they of the nature of consciousness. Only consciousness is of the nature of consciousness, everything else is a simulation thereof.
It is a coincidence (or part of a grand design, for the theologically inclined) that the particular configuration of matter in a human supports the manifestation of consciousness. It is questionable if all life forms are indeed capable of consciousness. Equally questionable if there can exist varying levels of manifestation of consciousness. Plants, presumably would be at the lower end.
What doesn’t make sense is a computer also has calculation + memory. So is the computer conscious?
If the answer is yes, then okay, computers are conscious and the only reason they don’t feel pain (etc.) is the lack of appropirate sensors and the lack of programming to process the input from those sensors.
If the answer is no, then consciousness must be something separate from both calculation and memory.
I think human bias will play a large role in whether one answer yes or no above.