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...
We often hear of the hard problem of consciousness. Why is there qualia or experience of anything in the first place? I would submit there is an even harder and more important question – why do I seem to be a specific individual experiencing a specific subset of qualia? This is the most important question that must be asked and answered but rarely is. As a matter of fact, there seems to be a huge blind spot when it comes to this in discussions of consciousness. If material reductionism is to be relevant to the big questions, then it must explain not how brains generate consciousness but how the specific brain in my head could create the specific consciousness I seem to be looking out of the eyeballs of this specific body. Why do I PERSONALLY EXIST as an individual in the first place?
ReplyDeleteOut of the infinite matter in the universe how is it that only the three pounds in my head could create me? What is different about that three pounds for this to occur? Consider that billions of bodies showed up before this one. Billions showed up after this one. None of them seem to have created my existence. This body could be running around without it being ME just like these billions of others All bodies are made of the same elements. All brains have the same basic anatomy. If all brains are basically the same and are creating consciousness then there should only be ONE consciousness looking out of every set of eyeballs simultaneously. A hopelessly superimposed existence from every possible viewpoint at once. I’m sure that materialists would claim that no, no, brains are so complex they are all different. Ok, so what would have to be recreated in another brain for me to exist looking out of another set of eyeballs? When the ontologies purporting to explain consciousness are examined critically it becomes obvious that all materialist/reductionist strategies fail completely in attempting to address the individuality question. If an exact copy of my body was suddenly created in Antarctica, would I find myself to exist freezing there while also sitting in the comfort my living room? According to the physicalists that would have to be true or their argument collapses into incoherence.
Materialism already fails since it cannot find a transfer function between microvolt level sparks in the brain and any experience or qualia. In addition, it’s not possible for materialistic ontologies to address this question of individuality since no measurement can be made that could verify my consciousness vs your consciousness and therefore no materialist ontology could make any coherent statements about the subject.
As far as other ways of thought are concerned only Dualism and Idealism can account for our sense of individuality. Dualism assumes we are all individual spirits/souls matched up to a body through some undefined process. Idealism, which states that consciousness is primary also answers the question of why I seem to exist as an individual.
One consciousness exists looking out of every set of eyeballs and in the process the illusion of individuality is created in each case.
At a greater level of reality I am you, you are me, we are one.