[deleted]
Hi James,
I think you hit on the central question of consciousness in physics: "I rely on results to say for themselves that 'Nonsense cannot produce us.'"
From previous discussions, I take it that you identify "nonsense" with randomness (as I expect most people do). Fact is, though, we don't have any sure means of distinguishing random from pseudo-random. I'm thinking of Einstein contemplating Brownian motion, and correctly predicting the source of apparently random motion as collisions between the Brownian particles and energetic atomic particles. Once one knows how that observed motion is randomized, can one say that it is truly random? Well, aren't the atomic motions random as well? -- what has one explained, if not a painfully obvious tautology that the source of random motion is random motion?
Thing is, though, if the source of randomness is everywhere, there is no true randomness anywhere. Why so? Imagine, from where you stand right now, that everything around you in your 3-dimensional world is collapsing instantaneously into a 2-dimension plane -- and being sucked into one single point on the horizon while you observe. There are mathematical ways to describe this 3-dimensional reality as a projection of 4-dimensional information onto a 2-dimensional plane (e.g., my topological explanation in ICCS 2006, as a continuous backward-forward projection between S^1 and S^3, and in the holographic principle.
Then consider the Joy Christian framework that converts random events into determined outcomes; i.e., the extra degree of global freedom that nature imparts instantaneously with each freely observer-chosen measurement event, predicts quantum mechanical correlations as 100% locally real and deterministic.
Einstein employed what he coined as "Mach's principle" to frame general relativity. Mach -- the true relativist -- had proposed that the motion of all bodies is dependent on the instantaneous state of motion of every other body. Mach's view is pure relativity, because space plays no role. Einstein shows that spacetime -- a physically real, independent phenomenon -- mediates that motion. Einstein's theory is actually modified relativity, because it introduces an absolute global standard of measurement by which we give up instantaneity in favor of local reality.
So one does not have to accept that "nonsense produced us" if one can accept that random events are purposeful expressions of an infinitely varied and creative universe. With that realization, consciousness inheres in every particle and every system of particles, producing us and everything else.
Tom