Today I had an interesting insight... It's not fully developed but is the start of resolving a problem I've been working on for a long time... specifically, how conscious experiences get physically embedded in the universe and what that implies about consciousness. I'm just going to cut and paste it here so you can see how this crazy brain thinks...
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The history of facts is embedded in the universe… gather enough information and one (God) can extrapolate backward to past events.
However, if I had a particular feeling (e.g., conscious state C1), that “information” can’t be embedded in the universe in the same way… because no one else (including God?) can know or understand the FACT of my particular feeling without experiencing it, and I am the only one who could have experienced that feeling/state (because conscious states can’t be repeated, and also because the only way to experience C1 was to have experienced all the previous conscious states leading up to it… which is to say the only way to experience C1 is to be me).
It's not enough for someone else to gather lots of information and then “describe” how I felt, the same way he might say “particle X impacted particle Y.”
The only way to “fully describe” my experience at conscious state C1 is to BE ME, experiencing that state. It’s not enough to just say that I was “sad,” for example, since any given experience is so rich with detail.
Also C1 embeds all prior conscious states, which helps to underscore just how “rich with detail” C1 is.
What this is all leading to… My current conscious experience embeds the history of my prior conscious experiences, just as the current physical state of the universe embeds its own history. If my conscious experience permanently ends, then where is the history of my conscious experiences?
C1 may be complicated and “rich with detail,” but it is
still a FACT that I experienced it. If
that fact gets embedded in the physical history of the universe…
That implies that C1 is itself an event… like how a quantum collapse event gets embedded…
Imagine a ball in deep black space… pretend for a moment that there aren’t lots of photons, neutrinos, etc., to interact with or localize it… it has a last interaction at time t1… it travels a long time (and its location gets fuzzy)… until some later time t3… so what’s going on at t2? There are no new facts or events or whatever, right? It can’t “experience” anything at t2, because any fact of its experience then has to be physically embedded in the universe, right? But I already know that Wigner’s Friend is physically impossible, so why am I using it as a thought experiment?
My point is that the FACT of my experience at state C1 means that something is happening… new information is being created… there are events, etc., that are getting physically embedded in the universe.
So to say that there is a fact about my experience of state C1 means that something happened in the physical world that didn’t have to happen (or could have happened a different way).
This underscores that consciousness is motion, but
specifically unpredictable motion associated with constant creation of information…
For example, state C1 will not change to C2 until there is new information to embed in the universe… and even if that takes a year, state C1 will subjectively be experienced infinitesimally...