Dear Dr. Klingman,
I found your presentation and novel approach to the subject among the most refreshing and coherent ones of the bunch.
Your critique of the FQXi problem question and transition to the primal importance of shared experience (by contrast with shared abstraction) is clear and convincing. An early draft of my own essay adopted a similar track, from Rovelli's ideas concerning cause-and-effect and "meaningful information" to the concrete/abstract dichotomy, promotion of belief systems, and beyond. Ultimately, I scrapped this line of thought due to length restrictions.
Your statement: "The ubiquitous contribution of our conscious minds to math makes 'mindless math' an open question" invites a comment that reveals my take on the ill-posedness of the FQXi question:
Mindless math is an open question only insofar as frogless tadpoles are an open question. There ain't no stinkin'...!
If math is only an abstraction (basically, a language) created by semi-autonomous biological beings, and not used by the raw physical Universe (as humans use it) the questions of the "function" of mind and consiousness in the Universe and of the purposefulness of the Universe as a whole remain. I find it most curious how prevalent is the desire to see the Universe as purposeful---even as the prevailing Big Bang cosmology supports the more dismal view that its purpose extends for but a wink of cosmic time---after which its sound and fury fizzles out, signifying nothing.
You have equated consciousness with awareness and will; and mind as the possession of consciousness. Since you have stated awareness and will to be "subjectively defined," being linked on the same chain, mind and consciousness are also subjectively defined. We thus appear to be stuck, with no clearcut criteria by which to decide between, a collection of more or less convincing or comforting stories about humanity's role in the cosmos (with the Big Bang/Big Crunch heat deaths looming all the while).
How might the flavor of these stories change if it should turn out---as you've allowed---that general relativity (GR) contains errors by whose repetition have become "truth"? My essay, Rethinking the Universe, discusses a huge, yet accessible gap where GR has not yet been tested. I predict that the result of a simple experiment that probes this gap will be a big surprise and expose a rather large error.
If this proves to be the case, it would follow that space, matter and time are interdependent (unified) physical elements. The direction of time is such that it always increases (things always get older, never younger). The interdependence referred to above means that time only increases because space and matter also only increase. Physical reality is a unified, growing continuum whose overall density never changes.
I have often thought of consciousness as being a part of this continuum, such that self-awareness---the feeling of being "one with the Universe" is part of the same arrow: only increasing---at least potentially, at least globlally. If true, it's up to humanity as a species to put this into effect.
The stuckness of these discussions about consciousness, I would argue, traces back to errors in our conceptions of space, time, matter, and gravity. As circumstantial evidence, I would point to the Hollywood-like proliferation of inflatonic multiverses of singularity-ridden amplituhedronal holographic string-branes.
My guess is that the result of a simple physical experiment will allow disposing of all this embroidered garbage and facilitate not only a more cogent (abstract) argument for, but the veritably psychedelic experience of "limitless mind connected to everything."
