Erik P Hoel,

Thanks for your kind comment. You note that consciousness is the 'secret sauce' and believe it does not apply to such things as bacteria or a sponge, lacking neural nets, or plants. As you know I posit that a universal consciousness field interacts with neural nets, but I have in previous comments and essays been more specific in that the field interacts with mass in motion. In this sense bacteria, sponges, and plants are composed of cells; cells are incredibly complex organisms, with many moving parts (see Alberts, Molecular Biology of the Cell):

Flows through nuclear pores, Myosin, a motor protein that moves along microtubules, vesicles that flow through the cell, ATP pathways, DNA polymerase sliding along DNA strands, Helicase enzymes that can move along DNA and RNA, floating lipid rafts, the dynamics of endocytic vesicle formation, protein pumps, filament dynamics applied to both actin filaments and microtubules, cytoskeletal rearrangements, the mitotic spindle and cell division, RNA splicing by spliceosome, ribosome producing factories, protein folding, molecular chaperones, transcription of proteins, the list is endless!

There is no reason that I can think of to suppose that a universal consciousness field would be dormant until the organism develops neural networks. Living cells are incredibly dynamic organisms, and the consciousness field as I envision it operates on momentum density, not mass per se. Thus a field that embodies awareness and volition would have quite a playground in a living cell. Even 'logic' is there, in spades, but the consequent 'intelligence' that follows would be a different order than the 'thinking processes' that depend on neural net pathways. Yet splicing and editing DNA sequences, etc, certainly constitutes some type of intelligence!

Lacking such a field, one has to postulate almost an infinity of trials and errors, and any in-depth knowledge of cell machinery argues strongly against the probabilities of billions and trillions of atoms "accidentally" constructing the living cell, regardless of 'survival of the fittest'. And note that every cell that did not survive is lost to perpetuity; perhaps some of its pieces can be recycled, but the process of assembling them still has to begin again from scratch.

Thanks for reading and asking an excellent question that allowed me to treat aspects that were beyond my essay.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Gene Barbee,

As I recall, we agree on the big picture, with perhaps a different view of specific details. You summarize so many key points of my essay in one paragraph that I feel guilty for using nine pages!

I don't blame you for being concerned about the word consciousness, as it is used in many, often conflicting, ways. For this reason I define it very specifically (yet ultimately subjectively) and try to remain consistent in my use of the word.

I agree that "a thinking network can create information", but I believe information comes into existence when a structural change occurs in a physical system, and not until. At first I hesitated at your use of the physical 'separations' you quote from Genesis, but, on second thought, I see that these structural changes sorta fit my definition.

I agree that the brain is primarily a neural network-based processing machine, and the many processes involved from sensory input to 'processed signal' involve information storage and transfer. None of this leads, in my opinion, to 'awareness' or 'volition', any more than the gears of a clock lead to 'awareness of time'. These are the areas where 'mindless math' reigns. So I tend to doubt the statement that "the overall response of millions of neural interactions throughout the brain leads to perception". Similarly, "our eyes gather light energy but our brain gathers information. This produces consciousness...".

If consciousness is "produced", it is an artifact, no matter how 'natural' the evolution of the complex machine that produces it. In this case consciousness is 'added' to an inherently 'dumb' or 'dead' universe. This contradicts the experience I discuss wherein many claim to experience the universality of consciousness, as there is no way that I can see that such artificial productions, scattered here and there on the earth, would in any way be considered 'universal'. You sort of acknowledge this when you say "the network that results in thought is highly improbable, but we know this occurs." In my theory, "thought" represents a product of intelligence, which combines the logic of the neural network with the awareness of the universal field. Absent the field, logical combinations of physical energy flows occur, and production and storage of information, but there is no awareness, hence no mental thought.

So I will try to study your viXra paper to understand more, but my immediate response is that you very well understand the many physical aspects that go into 'thought', but these physical phenomena do not give rise to awareness (as we know it) from dead matter. And the chain from particle physics to human thought is too long, with too many gaps, to ever be proved. This is why I posit experience over narrative.

Your well thought out essay is enjoyable, and reminds us in detail what a wonderful mechanism we are!

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Edwin,

I found much to like about your essay. Your notion that mathematical laws are essentially projections upon the world, rather than discoveries within it, is close to some of my own thinking---in fact, I believe that many problems, especially in the explanation of consciousness, stem from the mismatch between mathematical---and ultimately, computational---explanation, and the non-computational world. Thus, there appear to be these mysterious, ineffable, inexplicable, subjective things which there's just no accounting for; but they're ultimately perfectly ordinary parts of the world that appear mysterious only if viewed under the aegis of a mistaken explanatory paradigm.

But I have some more trouble with the notion of a 'consciousness field'. The idea has been proposed before, maybe most notably by Benjamin Libet (he of the alleged 'no free will'-experiments), but I simply don't see how to make it work.

First of all, it seems a bit of a non-explanation to me: like panpsychism, we just postulate that there's conscious 'stuff' that somehow adheres to normal matter. Now, that may be how things actually work, but to me, it would be sort of a disappointment---essentially, we'd be left with an unreducible mystery, a brute fact about the world we'd merely have to accept. But then again, nature is under no obligation to work in a way I'd find satisfying (again something physicists all too often appear to presume)...

But there's also more quantitative questions about the proposal. If it's supposed to be, at least in some aspect, a physical field, then it must interact with other physical fields. Now, you claim that the consciousness field is essentially classical; do you also believe that the other physical fields are?

If they are not, then coupling a classical field to quantum fields is something that's very hard to do---indeed, the general belief is that it's impossible, which is a major motivation for the search of a quantum theory of gravity. But if that then means that your consciousness field ought to likewise be quantum, it's hard to square with the experimental evidence: due to crossing symmetry, any field that interacts with ordinary matter can also be produced by ordinary matter, meaning that evidence of your field ought to be discoverable in particle accelerators; and if it's to interact appreciably, then it ought to have been found long ago.

And otherwise, if the standard model fields are supposed to be classical underneath it all, there's a heavy empirical burden to meet---writing down a classical theory able to explain all of the observed phenomena is not an easy feat. I think the best one might be able to do is something like Nelson's stochastic theory, or Bohmian mechanics; neither of which I would exactly call 'classical' (and neither of which, I think, has a consistent, fully relativistic formulation).

In short, you kind of want the best of both worlds of both dualism and monism: a special sort of stuff able to carry conscious properties (dualism), yet a unified framework for everything to interact (monism). That's a good idea on the fact of it, but I'm not sure it's really any less problematic than either of the traditional approaches on their own.

That said, I applaud your empirical spirit in this: too many people trying to explain the mind have never experimented with it even a bit.

    Jochen,

    Thank you for your gracious comments and for the thought you put into my essay. You perfectly capture the essence of the problem in your first paragraph:

    "...there appear to be these mysterious, ineffable, inexplicable, subjective things which there's just no accounting for; but they're ultimately perfectly ordinary parts of the world that appear mysterious only if viewed under the aegis of a mistaken explanatory paradigm."

    Not surprising that you have more trouble with the notion of the consciousness field... and don't see "how to make it work." It wasn't until I tried to see how to make it work that I took it seriously. I asked myself how the field would couple to the physical world (say neural nets). As I wrote to Dan Bruiger above:

    In physics, "couple" means interaction or force. Typical forces are F=qE, the force on charge q of electric field E and F=mG, the force on mass m of gravity field G. So we might hypothesize F=iC, the force on intelligent substance i, of consciousness field C, however I reject the idea of "intelligent substance", i. So where do we go? We recall that F= qE qv x B, that is, we include the force of the magnetic field B on charge current qv. So we might hypothesize F = mG mv x C, for the force of consciousness field C on momentum mv. What momentum? The momentum of mass flowing in axons and across synaptic gaps. If one plays around like this, one might come up with very interesting results, including the fact that the field energy ~C**2 has mass equivalence and thus couples to itself. Try it. See where it takes you. [See also my reply to Erik P Hoel above.]

    You probably see where that's going, so you ask if the classical field couples to quantum fields. I believe in a Bohmian (particle AND wave)-like theory that is briefly indicated here, along with crucial aspects of GR typically glossed over

    The Nature of Quantum Gravity

    This can be shown to be compatible with nonrelativistic QM. Relativistic QM requires all masses be put in 'by hand', is focused on 'point particles' and 'virtual particles' [the greatest fudge factor ever invented!] and leads to a 120-order-of-magnitude error or discrepancy between QFT vacuum and the vacuum of physical space. In short, RQFT is a bookkeeping scheme, based on Fourier transformations, that is an "effective field theory". So my focus is to derive the mass of the elementary particles from first principles (not there yet) and explain the three families of particles (think I'm there!). QCD is another narrative that I can't treat here, but I can note that the LHC physicists were predicting a quark gas from Au-Au and Pb-Pb collisions when I was predicting a perfect fluid, from which any number of particles condense in the form of jets. Guess who was right. But why treat one self-interacting field when you can claim eight self-interacting colors? [...the easier to 'fit' things with, although lattice QCD 'fits' do not impress me.]

    The problem is the Quantum Credo which almost all physicists subscribe to. That is why I list mathematical structures that have been projected onto reality for almost a century, beginning and ending in confusion. I've spent the last year analyzing these structures and writing up the analysis. I think it will cause even the most ardent subscribers to think twice. I did this because I found no one will pay attention to a classical theory no matter how complete, in view of the Quantum Credo. But this is clearly beyond an FQXi comment.

    So while it's not just conscious 'stuff' that somehow adheres to normal matter, it is a physical field that interacts with normal matter, and relieves normal matter from having to understand itself -- from gnats and mosquitos, to Einstein. This is perhaps disappointing to one who hopes for a complete reductionist answer, but that's not in the cards in any way, shape, or form.

    To avoid the problem of dualism and monism, one would have to show that the monism "condensed" into material form with which it interacts as a field. If this were the case would it meet your objections?

    I love your last line.

    Thanks again,

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

    Dear Eugene,

    I have read your work (as we usually say this, after of brief checking the material!)

    I shall express my impression how you are hard worker, and hope you can understand that I just cannot somewhat to study the big volume of your rich references right now.

    However, I can surely think already that you have presented one of nice work in the contest.

    It is well formatted, the meaningful content is well narrated, and, which is more significantly to me, it seems earnestly by itself. I mean the author does not try to convince others something such, when he is himself not convinced in that matter.

    I think also that we not need talk about significance of math, of natural laws, or about of fundamental principles because it will be the repetition of ours works what we know already and mainly we can be agree each to other, as I believe from your comment.

    Coming to a contest question, we (or, me only) can be agreeing just, that the question is formulated somewhat not so correct (subtly speaking!) Therefore, we (or, me only) have no right to spend the time on this, but we initially should to decide for ourselves that this task hardly could have some perspective. We do not know even the nature of force that presses to us in our chair, as well as how is constructed the nucleons etc. and meantime we hope to explain how working our brain! Excuse me, I never will try do this, even I have there some definitely ideas on this matter. I will never sound on this matter, as I am sure this will empty occupation, as nobody can prove it, to accept it, or use it etc. I would say the things should have their time, - first need to build the ground floor, then next ones. Maybe I am so critical, but we do not have the real chance to solve such category of questions, as we do not have even the real basic natural science for today ....

    Your essay is really highly appreciable in my view!

    Best wishes

      Hello Eugene,

      I enjoyed reading your essay, an impressive product.

      I wonder if you have considered the possibility that there is not a "Mind Field" but rather an "Ideas Field". I my essay "Reality ReEnvisaged" I set out the argument that minds are living patterns of information that inhabit the interface between the physical world and the "Ideas Field".

      Please have a look at it, I think we can have a rich dialogue.

      Best regards, ...george...

      Dear George Kirakosyan,

      I'm very happy that you enjoyed my essay (as I did yours) and agree that there is no need to repeat here the many points we agree upon which are expanded upon in our essays. You make the point we do not even know the nature of the force that presses us in a chair, nor the nature of the nucleons, yet we would explain the brain! In this regard I would also point out that life is almost defined (from slime mold to human) by its ability to sense and work against gravity.

      It is good so many FQXi essayists seem to be finding the same truth, albeit seen from different perspectives.

      My best regards,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Dear George Simpson,

      You say that, in your model, "minds feed on, create, manipulate, and act on ideas and concepts. Ideas and concepts are passive, minds act on the Ideas field and act on the physical world." You also seem to believe matter is built on information. I do not believe "information" exists in any material sense, but information is registered when energy/momentum causes a structural change in a material system, and even then can only be interpreted or given meaning via a given context or through code-books. Unless and until interpreted, it's only energy flowing through space and rearranging material structure.

      You envisage reality as a three-part system, consisting of the physical world, the world of ideas and concepts, and minds connecting the two. It's unclear how the brain fits into this. Whereas you define mind as an information pattern, I believe the information pattern is found in the neural network. I see the mind as possessor of consciousness, which I propose exists in a universal field that physically interacts with matter in motion. You seem to be saying something similar when you say the individual mind takes its shape from "idea gestures" which seem to originate in the brain. You posit the mind gives physical form to concepts, whereas I propose the form is derived from physical flows in the brain, sensed by the consciousness field.

      So while somewhat related, I don't see the ideas field congruent with consciousness field. Usually, when we go so far on a given path, it's hard to leave the path. Unless I've missed it you do not specify 'how' the ideas field interacts with matter.

      Best regards, and congratulations on tackling the 'hard' problems.

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Hi Edwin,

      "You also seem to believe matter is built on information." Quantum mechanics, as I understand it, establishes information as a foundational component of reality. It is information that determines the outcome in the twin-slit experiment. However, this is not central to my argument.

      "Unless and until interpreted, (information is) only energy flowing through space and rearranging material structure" Agree. Therefore minds are needed.

      "It's unclear how the brain fits into this. Whereas you define mind as an information pattern, I believe the information pattern is found in the neural network." I am a bit nonplussed here - I thought it would be obvious to readers that the information pattern exists in the brain, constructed on the infrastructure offered by neurons. I could have been more explicit about this.

      "I see the mind as possessor of consciousness, which I propose exists in a universal field that physically interacts with matter in motion." I'm sorry here I think you are going off the deep end, hypothesising something enormously hard to verify and understand. Why would we think that matter in motion would always interact with mind? And motion is relative to some frame - there is always a frame in which the motion is zero.

      We can verify that there are information patterns in brains, and we can verify that actions in the physical world take place as a result of the changing configurations of these patterns - i.e., what they believe.

      "the individual mind takes its shape from "idea gestures" which seem to originate in the brain" Idea gestures are simply the analogue of physical gestures, which we already know rely on a causal link between activation patterns in the brain and motion of the body.

      "you do not specify 'how' the Ideas field interacts with matter" You are right, I did not specify this explicitly, and should have. My "idea gestures" in the mind, which are patterns of activation, can remain internal to the mind, not affecting the areas associated with motor control, or they can interact with these, resulting in motion of the body.

      congratulations on tackling the 'hard' problems. THANK YOU!!!

      Dear Edwin,

      Very deep, clear analysis, important ideas and conclusions to search for ways to overcome the crisis of understanding in fundamental science .

      Yours faithfully,

      Vladimir

        Dear Vladimir,

        You begin,"But how can we see the world in integrality, the world as whole?" and note that the ontological meta-paradigm, Universum as a whole, has been pushed into "philosophical backyards" of science. I agree that "the physics of particles informs us, strictly speaking, on fundamental structures of the nature, but not on fundamental particles." Yes, the 'particles' are much more abstract than 50 years ago. This is extremely well stated and agrees with my observation that physicists have projected mathematical structures onto reality. Of course the great scientists were religious. They were not one-dimensional, merely focused on 'points' as convenient simplifying concepts, that facilitated applications of set theory, etc. This is probably as far away as one can get from the "The Self-Aware Universe".

        I always enjoy your essays, focused on the reality of consciousness versus the artifice of interpreting symbolic structures as reality.

        My best regards,

        Edwin Eugene Klingman

        Dear Edwin,

        I enjoyed reading your essay, courageously and mindfully challenging the mainstream dogmas. To your worldview, I have some questions. First, assuming it is correct, what or who may be responsible for the laws of nature, which are such highly specific things? Since your 'mind field' is just a part of nature, it cannot be responsible for the whole, can it? If it still can, what would be the difference between that mind field and transcendental Creator? I am giving you a high score. Your comments to my essay are very welcome.

        All the best,

        Alexey Burov.

          Hi Alexey Burov,

          The problem with Cartesian dualism, as you note, is the lack of interaction between material and mental. For a number of reasons I concluded that consciousness is best represented as a field, but it was only when I asked myself how the field interacts with my material body that I could start investigating possibilities. For example should the field interact with mass, with charge, or with some undiscovered attribute? Is the field undiscovered, or is it simply that this attribute of a known field was never imagined or tested. Local or universal?

          You discuss a young man who "takes it on faith that all that is called discovery is, in the end, just chemistry of his brain..." In other words, it is devalued upfront, a mere 'hiccup' in the atoms. After reading this I looked up my JBS Haldane quote to give you, then read to the end of the paragraph where you present the quote! However, I don't believe you quoted CS Lewis, so here goes:

          "Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning."

          [Having finished your paper, I see that you reference CS Lewis, but I don't believe you quoted him.] Anyway, you certainly put your finger on a big part of the problem. Meaninglessness is meaningless. As always, yer pays yer money and yer takes yer cherce, but who would choose meaninglessness? You label it "cognitive suicide", and you are right. Even people who claim to believe in such sterility, do not live as if they believe it.

          You claim that "every error should leave the thinker a possibility of correction." As you know, I discuss errors that have propagated through GR and QM for 100 years. The problem (for a young man) is that correcting such errors offends all those heavily invested in the errors [unknowingly, until you spill the beans] and this is not career enhancing. (Probably why the most productive people I know in this matter are retired.)

          You mentioned that Thomas Nagel pins his hopes on panpsychicism. Chalmers is agnostic but states "panpsychicism is not as unreasonable as is often supposed, and there is no knockdown argument against it."

          You ask, "if my 'mind field' is just a part of nature, it cannot be responsible for the whole, can it?" That depends on how far the field can be pushed, and I have pushed quite far [far beyond what an essay or short comments can relate.] However to be accepted, certain current interpretations [due to repeated errors] must be cleared up, so that is where my current efforts lie.

          Thanks for your excellent essay; very impressive.

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Quote

          The diagram shows the

          transformation of measurement data into best feature vectors, and the dynamical processes that produce

          eigenvalues, generally taken as representative of the object system. Feature extraction based on distances

          obtained from numbers is constructed from physical structures that can function as gates, implementing

          logic operations, which can be combined to count to produce integers and to add to produce distance

          maps and then compare distance maps to get difference maps (gradients) from measurements. The nature

          of the process of making math maps is thus rooted in the physical universe.

          end of quote

          A question your last sentence raises. Do you think that the processing generalized mathematical mappings mirrors reality? Seriously ?

          You are implying that the math mappings themselves are closedly linked to reality. Is this with respect to eignvalues and eignvectors ?

          Or do you mean maps in a more general sense ?

            Edwin,

            Thanks again. With you, I have a special option to discuss very delicate questions. One of those: I cannot agree with Chalmers that "panpsychicism is not as unreasonable as is often supposed, and there is no knockdown argument against it." The key question is one we stressed in our criticism of Thomas Nagel: "However, were mentality but a part of nature, by what means could this part be responsible for the laws of the whole? In what way could it install and maintain them through the Big Bang and up to now? Nagel does not see that such a powerful and unshakable authority over nature implies the transcendence of this power." Apparently, Chalmers does not see that either.

            Cheers,

            AB.

            Ha! Someone does read the endnotes!

            Thanks Andrew.

            The problem I addressed was how a robot, making raw data measurements, could build a theory of physics. It would begin with no preconceptions or categories ['baggage' in Tegmark's terminology] it would have eyes, force sensors, effectors (to kick a rock, say, and track it) but would not recognize any particular aspect of reality.

            I showed that, given realistic distributions of numbers (raw data such as reflectance or illumination, but derivatives also, such as velocity or acceleration) the measurement numbers, (in the plane at left) can be clustered via 'inter-set' and 'intra-set' distances [described in my reference 5] which reduce the N numbers to n clusters. Then a minimum-error Karhunen-Loeve or a maximum-entropy mapping can reduce the n features to m 'best' features, where m is less than n. This yields a feature vector or 'eigenvector', which is "generally taken to be representative of the system."

            I made no assumptions other than that the measurement numbers were not uniformly distributed (which would defeat the 'clustering' operations.)

            The robot, his sensors and effectors and computers that process the numbers, were real, the measured phenomena were assumed real, so every aspect of the system was rooted in the physical universe. I taught the robot how to treat the measurement numbers, but I did not teach it categories, features, etc. These are derived automatically by the process I describe. Of course if one limits oneself to, say, atomic spectra, then the 'eigenvectors' will be more easily mapped to our current concepts, but the process works with any measurements, including those randomly (but repeatedly) performed.

            Yes, the mappings represent reality. They don't represent it as well as thousands of conscious physicists, working over generations and building on previous work, can represent reality, but, for a stupid robot, they yield a primordial "theory" of physics.

            Thanks for reading the endnotes and asking excellent questions.

            My best regards,

            Edwin Eugene Klingman

            Alexey/Lev,

            Chalmers is not a physicist, I don't recall what Nagel is. As a physicist I began with a Self-interaction Principle, from which the operative laws [Newton, Klein-Gordon, etc.] are derived. It is the 'Master law' that generates the laws you are concerned about. But we have terminology issues. In my terminology "mentality" is consciousness plus the logic circuits [typically the brain]. This is not what is responsible for the laws of the whole. The self-interaction of the field does not "install and maintain them", it just self-interacts, at all scales.

            Best regards,

            Edwin Eugene Klingman

            Klingman throughout the essay seems to hold a regularist point of view about the nature of physical law that we share. For instance:

            "Math maps projected on the physical territory form the substance of physics.

            I have awareness of only one physical universe, but I have many maps of the universe, and I use experience of the physical universe to qualify the maps."

              Dear Rudolfo Gambini,

              Thank you for reading and commenting on my essay.

              You discuss an event ontology and the possibility that events in the brain can be accessed physically in a third person sense, but also mentally in a first-person sense as perceptions. Is this 'mental' access occasioned by the neural network itself, or by physical field, or what? As you know, I postulate a physical field that possesses the attribute of awareness: awareness of itself (hence Yang-Mills type non-linearity) and awareness of momentum/energy density. This postulate actually takes one quite far in a physical world that includes consciousness and intelligence in myriad entities.

              As you note, I am 'regularist' in the sense that I believe we project structure onto regularities of nature. The 'necessitarian' interprets the structural projections in terms of 'laws' governing system evolution, despite that QM is only a statistical bookkeeping system that depends from the evident universality of the partition function.

              One would think that the underdetermination that is obvious from the existence of five or more 'interpretations' of quantum mechanics, would give pause to Quantum Credo-ists, but this is met head-on with "shut up and calculate". As a means of solving specific problems, this may be good advice. As a means of determining ontological reality, not so good.

              You note that in a universe that is life-friendly and phenomenic in character one can always find purpose in its inhabitants, and this may imply "a universe capable of observing itself". With a consciousness field it is almost a foregone conclusion that local observations of self will evolve. If, instead, only a possibility exists that life and neural networks will evolve, given sufficient time, the possibility would also seem to exist that such would never happen, leading to absurdity and nihilism.

              Best regards,

              Edwin Eugene Klingman

              Edwin,

              If you have not already done so, I recommend that you read the essay by Ronald Racicot.

              Best Regards and Good Luck,

              Gary Simpson