Tag Archives: quantum theory

What if everything is conscious?

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That’s the headline of a pretty long article by Sigal Samuel at Vox. I’ve done some reading about consciousness and posted here with some frequency. The idea that everything is conscious has been around a long time. It’s called panpsychism.

Panpsychism, the view that consciousness or mind is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality, has a long and rich history in philosophy. From the musings of the ancient Greeks to contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, panpsychism has captured the imagination of a diverse range of thinkers. Luminaries such as Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead have all explored panpsychist ideas, and in recent years the theory has seen a resurgence of interest among philosophers like David Chalmers, Galen Strawson, and Philip Goff. (Perplexity)

Consciousness shows up in most of my reading on quantum theory. (My incomplete reading list) I, for one, hope “the hard problem of consciousness” is never solved.

The Emperor’s New Mind

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“According to quantum mechanics, any two electrons must necessarily be completely identical. […] This is not merely to say that there is now way of telling the particles apart: the statement is considerably stronger than that. If an electron in a person’s brain were to be exchanged with an electron in a brick, then the state of the system would be exactly the same state as it was before, not merely indistinguishable from it! […] What distinguishes the person from his house is the pattern of how his constituents are arranged, not the individuality of the constituents themselves.”

—The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose

A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality

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“Proietti and co’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist. In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions—the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea that we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality—must be wrong.”

— Technology Review [Additional reading]

What is Reality?

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“Emergence theory is a new physics model currently being developed by a Los Angeles based team of scientists. Emergence theory intricately – yet simply – weaves together quantum mechanics, general and special relativity, the standard model and other mainstream physics theories into a complete, fundamental picture of a discretized, self-actualizing universe.”

“Physics allows the possibility that all the energy of the universe can be converted into a single, conscious system that itself is a network of conscious systems. Given enough time, what can happen will eventually happen. By this axiom, universal emergent consciousness has emerged via self-organization somewhere ahead of us in 4D spacetime. And because it is possible, it is inevitable. In fact, according to the evidence of retro-causality time loops, that inevitable future is co-creating us right now just as we are co-creating it.”

Dark Matter

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Screen Shot 2016-08-27 at 11.51.17 AMIn this novel the multiverse is real (are real?) and the protagonist (and others) can visit these other realities which include other versions of himself. One would expect a novel based on quantum entanglement to get confusing and this one did. (There were moments in the story that reminded me of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series.) If you’ve ever pondered what you life would have been like if you had taken that other fork in the road, you might enjoy this novel. I found it well written but disturbing. I was eager to get to the end. (Amazon)

The Mind-Body Problem

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“The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that.” — Philosopher David Chalmers

From Consciousness: The Mind Messing With the Mind (NYT)

“Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing. “The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Dr. Graziano said. And it calls the magic consciousness.”

I think this is what is commonly referred to as “the hard problem.” How minds are generated by brains.

“Some philosophers and scientists have been driven back to the centuries-old doctrine of panpsychism — the idea that consciousness is universal, existing as some kind of mind stuff inside molecules and atoms. Consciousness doesn’t have to emerge. It’s built into matter, perhaps as some kind of quantum mechanical effect.”

I like the idea of universal consciousness. Until there’s solid, scientific consensus on how the brain creates consciousness… this is as good an explanation as any.

Reading list: Consciousness

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  • The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself – Sean Carroll | My notes
  • Consciousness and the Social Brain – Michael S. A. Graziano | My notes
  • What Technology Wants – Kevin Kelly | My notes
  • The Ego Trick – Julian Baggini | My Notes
  • The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity – Bruce Hood | My Notes
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman | My notes
  • Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain – David Eagleman | My notes
  • The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self – Thomas Metzinger | My notes
  • Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness – Bruce Rosenblum | My notes
  • Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe – Robert Lanza | My notes

The Big Picture

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The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. By Sean Carroll

Life is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary.

For a long time, there has been a shared view that there is some meaning, out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered and acknowledged. There is a point to all this; things happen for a reason. […] Gradually, our confidence in this view has begun to erode.

“Life” and “consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems.

At a fundamental level, there aren’t separate “living things” and “nonliving things,” “things here on Earth” and “things up in the sky,” “matter” and “spirit.” There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many different forms. […] We will ultimately understand the world as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself. That’s a big deal.

The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing it. Continue reading →

How the World Can Be the Way It Is

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how-the-worldHow the World Can Be the Way It Is: An Inquiry for the New Millennium into Science, Philosophy, and Perception Zen and Quantum Theory are really hard for me to wrap my head around, and Steve Hagen has big dollops of both in this book. I followed maybe 75 percent of the book. The stuff I highlighted won’t make much sense out of context but this is for my reference, so…

For it is sufficient, I think, to live by experience, and without subscribing to beliefs — Sextus Empiricus

(To believe, to hold an opinion) refers to a state of mind which we are powerless to choose.

His mind was changed because it was overwhelmed by a new awareness. In the moment in which he became aware of something new, his mind was different.

We must learn to rely solely on what we see rather than upon what we think.

We proselytize others because it makes us feel better. And the reason it makes us feel better is because we’re unsure of what we believe ourselves.

(Being fully awake is) Seeing without any mental bias — without concepts, beliefs, preconceptions, presumptions, or expectations.

You can’t choose to doubt.

We should always be prepared to take another look at what we believe and begin to doubt it. […] We should doubt until we no longer hold fast to any thing at all.

Whatever you think, is delusion.

“The world is not objectively real but depends on the mind of an observer.” — John von Neumann

The mind is what the brain does.

Apart from their functions, relationships, and components, we do not seem to know what things are at all. […] A thing receives its identity as much from what it is not as it does from what it is. […] When an object appears in the mind, we conceive it as a solitary thing unto itself. […] It is only as singular entities that our objects of consciousness can form in our mind. […] All things receive their identity as much from what they are not as from what they are. […] Spring can only be spring if we account for what it is not (e.g., summer) as an intrinsic part of its identity.

“How can one be ‘wrong’ about what one actually perceives?” — Roger Penrose

We simply have no direct experience of anything outside the mind. And to assume the existence (or, for that matter, he nonexistence) of anything outside the mind simply contradicts direct experience.

Three types of “recognition”
1) Naming a thing (labeling and categorizing. Purely conceptual)
2) What the thing does (function and utility)
3) Just seeing (pure perception, no conceptual overlay)

The more we learn about quantum physics, the more the universe appears like a thought rather than a thing. (Pointed out by Sir Arthur Edington)

Consciousness

It’s because we can easily conceive of (but never perceive) a time or place outside of our consciousness that we persist in holding this belief (that matter precedes consciousness) […] We never directly experience a time (or anything else) which precedes consciousness.

We don’t actually experience Consciousness Itself “originating” anywhere, or anywhen. Consciousness — the awareness that “something’s” happening — is ever-present and immediate. We never directly experience Nothing.

Consciousness (is) the originator, instead of the product, of place and time.

No one is ever conscious of not being (or not having been) conscious.

Consciousness is the conceiving (the making) of parts, or mind-objects, from the Whole. […] The “parts” — the physical and mental objects of consciousness, i.e., concepts — are merely appearances resulting from the working of Consciousness.

Consciousness splits the Whole, immediately creating an ego — an identity — which then sees all other things in opposition to it.

To gain information is merely to sink deeper into conceptual reality. […] We gain information at the expense of wisdom.

What you or I do right here, right now affects everything that ever was, is, or will be. Whatever you do is constantly affecting everything that has ever happened or will happen.

We “exist” not in being but in becoming — and in fading away.

We do not experience an I — we assume it. We only experience perception, thought, and consciousness.

Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information

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I confess the title of this book hooked me. I saw an interview with Oxford professor Vlatko Vedral and was intrigued by the idea that everything (me and the universe) can be reduced to bits of information. (Wikipedia)

But I can’t say I enjoyed (or understood) most of the book. I suspect he knows his stuff but just isn’t very good at explaining it to non-phyicists. Better reads: Quantum Enigma; Biocentrism.