Consciousness Bootstrapped by Philip Gibbs

Branko Zivlak, thanks for raising this central point. I agree with the theme in your essay that there is really just one whole. Semantics can cause confusion. At one time the word "world" meant all of material existence, now we are comfortable with the idea that "world" means just our planet and there are many other worlds. The word "universe" is heading the same way and, like you, I am not sure it is a helpful direction. In most of my essay I used the word "cosmology" in place of "universe", and "landscape" in place of "multiverse" to try and get round this, but in a few places I slipped up and used the word "universe" as if it was one of many. Well at least it beings the discussion into the open.

Some physicists talk of multi-levels of multiverse. The only level I see is the quantum mechanical sum or path integral over all possible classical configurations. Even that may be more of an algebraic abstraction than a real "multiverse" I don't think the eternal inflation version of the multiverse is likely to be correct at all. It is a very speculative idea and neither the maths nor the physics works out. I am surprised that it is given as much credence as it does.

However, I do think there is a landscape of vacuum solutions to the "master theory" of physics, whether that be an extension of string theory or something else. When you do the path integral in quantum mechanics you have to include all paths no matter how far away from the physical solution they are. If you don't then you lose unitarity. This means that other vacuum solutions cannot be entirely ignored except as some practical approximation. They are there and they are connected to our reality, even if we do not have the technology to detect them.

Gary, Hi, The subject of Earth-like planets is fascinating and its a story that will keep running. It will be amazing if we can discover a planet with an atmosphere rich in oxygen when telescopes like Webb get in on the act in a few short years.

However, I do think that talk of plentiful Earth-like planets must be taken with a pinch of salt. I wrote a bit about that a while back when I was maintaining the viXra blog. See https://vixra.wordpress.com/category/exoplanets/

Let's take Trappist-1 as an example. It sounds great with so many planets in the habitable zone and the good news is that dwarf stars can stay stable for even longer than one like our Sun. The bad news is that the planets are probably locked tidally to the star so that one side is very hot and one side is very cold. Furthermore, the planets are close enough together to have significant tidal effects on each other which will dissipate their orbital energy. I doubt the planets have been in a stable configuration for long enough to allow advanced life to evolve. They are probably on an inward trajectory towards their star having been outside the habitable zone earlier on.

The general problem is that truly Earth-like planets are going to be rare. They need a Sun like ours which have a narrow habitable zone. They need to be the right size and sufficiently clear of other planets. Our large moon plays a vital role in stabilizing the Earth's rotation and it produced ocean currents that "keep the pot stirred" so that the oceans are more hospitable. Our Earth's magnetic field is another essential feature for protecting the planet from the solar wind that would otherwise strip off the atmosphere and bombard us with harmful cosmic rays. So our planet needs the right amount of iron core and isotopes of uranium and thorium to keep it hot in the middle. Volcanic activity and plate tectonics are probably also essential to bring elements like sulphur and phosphorus to the Earth's surface. These are absolutely essential to life as we know it. In fact many other elements are essential to life in some way so the Earth has to have a good chemical mix. Let me give one example of that. The rare element Molybdenum is used by certain bacteria to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into a form that plants and animals can then use through the food chain. A scarcity of molybdenum in the oceans for the first two billion years of our Earth has been blamed for limiting evolution during that time.

Even given another planet identical to ours in all relevant respects it may still be rare for intelligent life capable of technological advance to evolve. It has required several mass extinctions to clear the way for evolutionary progress, but without them being too violent to set it back. Life tends to settle down into stable ecosystems that will not change for millennia unless the environment changes, and when they do change there is no guarantee that life will advance.

Of course life may be more versatile and adaptable than I give it credit for but my view is that there are no viable alternatives to DNA based life and many features of terrestrial biology including the complex flora/fauna inter-relationship are probably the only way for advanced life to develop. This implies a high level of fine-tuning in nature. I think there will be many planets with low forms of life and perhaps a few rare cases where life has developed into advanced multi-cellular forms, but advanced life like ours will be very rare indeed, even in a universe with many varied planets. Let's face it, if I am wrong the Fermi paradox is hard to account for.

Thanks to everyone who is posting comments. I will try to answer all of them but please be patient because I have many other duties at the moment and may not be able to respond quickly. I will also read other essays in due course and leave comments there when I have something interesting to say about them. Even if I don't comment I can say that I enjoy reading a wide range of different ideas, whether they agree with mine or not. It is exciting to be in the FQXi essay competition again. Good luck to all.

I will be rating essays positively, looking for things like engaging writing and originality. I won't mark down because I don't agree with the basic idea of an essay, so long as it is well argued. I will also mark up people who respond to comments on their essays. Participation in a friendly and helpful spirit is much more important than the prizes. The real test of how valid our ideas are is how good they will look in the future when more is known. If we could be sure of the right answers now we would not need the contest. I thank FQXi and sponsors for providing this opportunity to participate again.

George, thanks for your comment.

I did not mean to sound so negative about the prospects for progress. Our understanding has always been moving forwards and I don't doubt that it is doing so now, even if it sometimes takes time to realise which ideas are the most useful. However, there have always been people who stood up and said that we have nearly reached the end, only to be proved wrong. I still think we have a way to go.

I don't know what you mean when you ask if "mindless mathematical laws" is a crime. It's not a statement or an action that can be judged as a crime. Perhaps you mean it is a crime to think in terms of mathematical laws being mindless. Maybe when I read your essay I will understand better what you mean.

You say that math is a description and a result of human creation. Different people mean different things when they use the word mathematics. Some people think of it as just a language while others think it is a logical structure that is always there. In my essay I described mathematics as a tool we use to explore logical possibilities. I think those possibilities are independent of us but as I explained in another essay, some parts of mathematics are universal concepts that we discover and others are arbitrary constructs that we invent.

I look forward to reading your essay to get a better feel for your point of view.

Hello Wilhelmus, it's good to see you here again.

I agree that time important. It is essential to our sense of consciousness which requires memory of the past so it is the arrow of time that counts. I can envisage a universe without time but I can't imagine anything like life being a part of it.

It is true that our life is very short compared to the timescale on which our cosmology works. Of course you can also think about paradoxes like the enormous coincidence that we are alive now given that for most of the age of the universe we are not there. I think this indicates that it is our experience that is fundamental, even more fundamental than the universe itself.

I will certainly read your essay later.

Luke, thank you for your questions

You are asking why the processes of astrophysics are without goals. Goals are set by intelligent minds so if astrophysics have goals they must have been set by higher beings that we would call God(s). It is not for me to tell people that their religions are wrong. The premise of my essay is to provide an alternative way to understand the universe. I wrote that to set up the case that goals arise along with life and are set by people. The universe does not start with a goal such as a goal to produce life by creating stars and planets. It is a beautiful and remarkable process that we need to understand but it is mindless. This is just my hypothesis for the essay and I am happy to hear other views.

I don't have a definition for consciousness. I am not sure that it is something that can be defined in precise physical way. It is our sense of self-awareness and requires, memory, intelligence and the ability to sense our surroundings. I am not sure we can say much more than that.

All I am saying here is that no scientific explanation is required beyond what can be provided by psychology and biology. The explanation within those bounds may be complex and not yet well understood. My point is that it is wrong to search for new physics such as proposed by Penrose, or spiritual explanations such as something like a soul. Of course there are philosophical points to be made too, such as the ones in the essay.

Hello Jim, I am glad you brought this up.

I think Jeremy England is right to make connection between thermodynamics and evolution, and I agree that there must have been a spontaneous emergence of life. However, I don't agree with his thesis that life is self-organised to efficiently dissipate heat.

It seems to me that the most efficient way to dissipate heat is to be a black surface that absorbs radiation and radiates it back as black body radiation. You don't need nucleic acids for that. I may be doing him an injustice because I have not read his work in detail so perhaps he is saying something more sophisticated than the pop-sci version. Perhaps if you define "efficient way to dissipate heat" in the right way then he is right.

The surface of the Earth is a non-equilibrium system which dissipates heat from the sun (mostly) and such non-equilibrium systems have complex emergent behavior. Note that tides and nuclear heating in the Earth's core are other energy sources which are also important in evolution and possibly in the emergence of life too. A simpler setup would probably not have worked.

The overall effect of life on how well heat is dissipated must be very small. What life does well is build up ever more complex systems that can self-replicate. Ultimately this leads to a high level of intelligence. While life is dissipating heat, what really matters is that it creates a little bit of localised order in exchange, rather than disorder. I think memory is the improtant link with thermodynamics. There is instinctive memory in the genes and short-term memory in our brains. Memory is connected to the arrow of time.

I think this happens because chemistry and physics is fine-tuned to make DNA based evolution and then intelligence possible. This is the bootstrapping. To do this it takes advantage of principles of non-equilibrium physics that we probably don't understand well enough yet, but there are many examples of self-organisation on planetary surfaces of a less extreme nature (e.g. the formation of sand-dunes) but there is a limit to how far that can go. You don't expect sand-dunes to keep increasing their complexity until they replicate genetically.

I think the best way to put it is that life is an accident waiting to happen. It requires chance events but the odds are stacked in favour of those chance events happening somewhere, so for practical purposes it is inevitable. This happens on different levels. Firstly the number of possible vaccua solutions in the master theory means that enough fine-tuning is going to happen in some of them. Secondly this creates a universe big enough with fine-tuning so that evolution will inevitably happen somewhere, with enough chance events to produce rare intelligent life in some cases.

I'd like to add this link which discusses the inevitability of evolution

Generating Life on Earth: Five Looming Questions, by Holmes Rolston III

Hello, Lawrence. I already saw your essay but will need to read it again. As usual you are heavy on the maths!

I have gone for a birds eye view covering the range from mathematical beginnings to consciousness so nothing is covered in any depth.

There is always something in common with our ideas so it is a pleasure to read your work.