The Conciousness Connection by Wilhelmus de Wilde

Hi Wilhelmus

"Our five senses ask for the reference of reference, which cannot be found in our causal material reality."

I have solved the semantic grounding problem, or as you call it the source of the "reference of reference". It definitely exists as part of causal material reality. Please see the attachment below for details. I have actually reduced semantic grounding to the level of mathematical equations. Alas, the spatiotemporal relations between the flow of ions inside the neurons dendritic trees is a fundamental part of their knowledge representation. This cannot be simulated without also simulating the solid geometry of the neural network and all its synaptic connections.

"We all have a subjective reality that is presented as a simultaneity sphere around our consciousness. Consciousness not being a material entity with length or volume, can be treated as a singularity."

Wow. Thats quite a leap. I agree that all conscious observers have a subjective reality, but there is no need to place subjectivity or consciousness outside causality.

Part of your statement seems to be a category error. Consciousness is not an entity or a thing like an atom or molecule or a box of rocks. It is the result of an electrochemical ionic exchange process that operates over a biological neural network. That process changes neural connection patterns via neural and synaptic plasticity. It also changes the "weight" or synaptic efficicy of synaptic connections, and most importantly, it represents meaning via the dynamic interactions in the flow of electrotonic potentials through the neurons dendritic trees. The dynamic interactions between electrotonic potential flows directly represent the higher order composition of abstract relations between higher order abstractions. It can be thought of as dynamically generating a system of higher order equations where those equations are represented by abstractions. An abstraction is a partial representation of a concept or thing or a relation between things or a process in some context. Abstractions are represented by systems of higher order functors, i.e., systems of functions that can take functions or higher order compositions of functions as arguments and return a function or higher order composition of functions as a result. The execution of those abstract equations is represented by the spatiotemporal integration of electrotonic potentials as they flow through the neurons dendritic trees. In essence, these are functions of abstractions, functions of space and functions of time. Thus, in addition to representing how things relate to each other functionally, they can represent how those functions relate to each other in space and time, as well as how they vary over space and time. In a sense the neuron operates like a combination lock that has many different combinations. The systems of equations it represents are satisfied if the resulting dendritic integration of its electrotonic potentials exceeds the neurons action potential activation threshold. When that happens, the neuron fires its axon, thereby signalling the detection of whatever abstraction the neuron represents in the current context of thought. The firing of the axon is an all or nothing event. It does not encode any information. There is no neural code. The firing of the axon only signals the detection of an instance of the abstraction represented by the neuron in the current context of thought. The timing of that signal is important relative to the timing of that neurons synaptic inputs, and electrotonic potential conduction times and distances, but it does not carry or encode any information in and of itself. In fact, neurons are more like signal processors than information processors. They exchange signals with each other, but those signals don't carry information and they do not represent any kind of message. It is a simple all or nothing signal, like turning on a light switch. The meaning is conveyed via the spatio temporal relationships between the firing of dendritic synapses and the subsequent spatiotemporal integration of the resulting electrotonic potentials. Its a kind of spacetime computer. It computes everything in four dimensions. The neuron doesn't have to 'know' what it represents in any abstract sense, it just needs to represent the fact that if a particular combination of synapses is fired with a specific set of relative firing times, then one of the abstractions represented by one of the spatiotemporal abstract equations it represents was satisfied, thereby directly causing it to fire its axon. The invariant is the neural connection patterns. Those are relatively stable after they occur enough times to be learned via the adjustment of synaptic 'weights'. In other words, the neuron simply represents whatever is represented by the relations it represents between the abstractions in its input. That process is inductive, and constructive, functionally composing higher order abstractions and their relations starting from the activation of sensory neurons from one or more of our senses.

Consciousness is definitely a material entity because it is created by neurons, and those are all composed of matter and energy, no different than the matter and energy that compose the rest of existence. The brain exists in spacetime and operates according to the known laws of physics. Conventional physics and electrochemistry already contain everything needed to understand its components. The problem is science understands what the brain is composed of and how the parts work, but it doesn't understand how those parts work together to represent knowledge or compute meaning or consciousness. it doesn't understand what is significant to knowledge representation, computation and consciousness and what is there only because it is needed to implement neural computation in a biological substrate. Currently, its like trying to understand how a computer program works by studying it at the level of the individual transistors in a microprocessor. A lot of fundamental detail about neurotransmitters and synapses and ion channels, and electrochemistry and physics exists, but there is little understanding of how neurons use all of that to represent knowledge, meaning, thought, and consciousness. What is missing isn't new physics or electrochemistry, it is an understanding of the brains' neural knowledge representation and neural computational model. I discovered those several years ago and provided a high level summary in the attachment below. Much more detail is available should you desire it.Attachment #1: 1_Reply_to_I_as_observer.pdf

Hi Barry, Your interpretation of consciousness is the one of someone who thinks he is able to "construct" it himself. In your approach it is just the reductionist one, go back and back and back untill you arrive at zero or at onother infinty. I enjoy very much your thinking because also learn a lot from it, surely about the mechanism of thinking. However I "think" taht thinking is one of processes that lead to the "emergence" of consciousness, like the bits in a computer forming a line of information, the real content or better "meaning" of this information can be interpreted by the observer and each observer can have a different interpretation of the data, this cannot be taken bach with reductionism.

As far as I know you are the one who "invented" a new form of intelligence, and the word "intelligence" already covers the load. We need intelligence to "understand", without intelligence no understanding. But when you understand the processes of the brain like you do (now I also can understand it thanks to your explanations) this does not mean that the logical result will be consciousness (my interpretation,does not mean that it is the truth), I just think that our causal universe is not complete, it is only a part of a greater system (Total Simultaneity). In my earlier essay " REALITIES OUT OF TOTAL SIMULTANEITY" I proposed the devellopment of a quantum computer being the origin of new "consciousness", this form of consciousness could have other senses to explore the TS but also could communicate with our own form of consciousness so that we could also contact paralel universes and so on, it is because of the fact that this quantum computer had almost infinite probable solutions that were already available even when he was not yet under "power" that I could generate this new form of consciousness. So my reductionism in this approach is in principle also materialistic, but the consciousness is still "emerging".

I just thougt of a new thought experiment: If we have the double slit experiment then when an observer is aware of the photon(s) emitted the photon is staying particle, if not observed by an intelligent creature : wave. So if your "intelligence" is observing the experiment the result will be particle if it is "aware", if not : particle. The problem in this experiment is that we are also observing the intelligence so we are influencing the result. But perhaps you can think of a solution.

Kind regards

Wilhelmus

My novel The Angels' Footpath should be available for any electronic reader (using conversion software available on Amazon), and I have been getting hits from Amazon Germany and UK.

Dear Wilhelmus -- just like you I am intrigued by the question how to render consciousness emergent from fundamental physics. Achieving this will probably represent the 'final frontier' in science. Unlike you, I am rather pessimistic whether this will be achieved in the foreseeable future, but I do strongly hope this feat will be accomplished some day.

I see your essay as a brave attempt to shed ligh on the conciousness riddle. You present the reader with a whirlwind of facts and observations, and in all honesty I could not understand all of it. Probably I don't have the right background to do so.

What is very clear from your essay though, is that at fundamental (Planck scale) level an amazingly complex machinery is at work, as to render consciousness takes no less than 1040 Planck ticks.

Wish you best of luck in the contest!

Hi Wilhelmus,

I just reread your essay and here is again my honest feedback.

This work is a vast improvement in communicating your ideas over the first paper. I actually understood the basic concepts that you were laying out. I recall that upon reading your previous paper, I could no more than get a rough idea. In this paper, however, I noticed that you were a lot more precise in your expressions, so that definitely helped.

Now, let me go on to how you attempt to connect your ideas to various parts of fundamental physics. Here, I must say that there are still some problems. I will list 3:

1) The relevance of your idea to the problem is only implied. example: p. 1 "In this way, it becomes understandable how easy neutrinos pass...through our bodies.." I think you assumed that neutrinos are near Planck length, in which case they would be very small relative to us, and that this is the reason they would easily pass through. But you did not say this, you implied it. The problem is that a reader may fail to see the relevance if you leave some steps of your reasoning out.

2) You may make wrong assumptions about standard physics: example : same as above. Under our current understanding, the reason that neutrinos pass easily through us is not because they are so small but because they only interact via the weak force and (presumably) gravity. They are completely uninfluenced by the electromagnetic force, which would cause a lot more of them to be stopped by our bodies.

also, on page 4, Einstein did not introduce the "absolute ether", he dispensed with it altogether

3) You describe mechanisms that don't map onto known physics. example: p. 7 the discussion on entanglement gives a formula, but it cannot be applied in any way to the equations in quantum mechanics that describe entangled systems. Also, I don't know if you know this, but once you consider entanglement between spacelike separated particles in a special relativistic context, you cannot even claim a preferred frame of referrence that "collapses" the entangled state. According to your model, in some frames, Alice measures the spin of A first and her "conscious awareness of the measurement" collapses state of B, and in other frames Bob measures the spin of B first and his "caotm" collapses the state of A. The only way to resolve this contradiction is to either postulate a preferred frame, contradicting special relativity, or allow for backward causation, contradicting causality. Entanglement is an especially subtle issue to grapple with.

Ok, there are other issues but I think this is enough for now. So, overall I think this paper is better than your first, but before it will be taken seriously by scientists you will need to address the general issues pointed out above, and the only way I know is through the hard and sometimes thankless labor of working through the material and actually learning it so that one may attain a thorough understanding. Hope this honest feedback helps.

All the best,

Armin

Dear Wilhelmus

Interesting point of view

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1512

Hi Wilhelmus. Do you agree that memory integrates experience and adds to the extensiveness of experience? I am still considering your essay.

Wilhelmus. Our sense of time integrates experience and adds to (or involves) the continuity, comprehensibility, and extensiveness of being, memory, space, thought, and experience. Do you agree?

Hello Wilhelmus,

I know of many who say that we cannot know what consciousness is, because it is trying to look at your own eye with your own eye. It is a tough one if not impossible, so I admire you for going after it. May Parmenides be with you! You may have inspired my next FQXi essay "What is a thought that a man may know it." :)

As one of the posts above points out this is a much clearer essay than last year. I think a glossary of terms (that you take for granted) would be useful for a reader like myself. For example the phrase "reference of reference" could use an example like: how do you know your clock is ticking uniformly? Well of course you pull out your higher frequency clock and check your clock. How do you know this reference clock is ticking uniformly? Now you pull out your NIST clock and check your clock. How do you know your NIST clock is ticking uniformly? Well you do not know, it is taken as an act of faith that the cesium atom resonates uniformly! However no scientist would say that, so instead they make it an axiom that it resonates uniformly. I think this is the point you wanted to make?

We do have a common interest in Planck units. They are fundamental and fascinating. I have the scientist tendency to say that they are constant via fiat (axiom) just to make things easier. But many question the constancy of the gravitational constant (and other constants) which means they also question the Planck units. And I can see your point that the Planck mass may not be "constant".

Thank you for your interesting essay, and good luck in the contest.

Don L.