Consciousness Bootstrapped by Philip Gibbs

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.

Steve, you make a fair point. First let me say the following: None of us know how rare or common life is beyond Earth. What we do know is that life is common and diverse on Earth, and that so far there is no sign of life elsewhere. It is not obviously present on other planets in the solar system, and if there is intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy it is not doing anything to make its presence known in verifiable ways. We also now know that there are many rocky planets around other stars so the opportunity for extraterrestrial life to evolve is there.

My essay is a hypothesis for how things may have come into being. What I say in my essay are predictions based on that hypothesis, not claims of fact. I should perhaps have made that clearer in the conclusion but I reached the word count limit.

My statement about rarity is that intelligent life is rare beyond Earth. This is a prediction based on observations of fine-tuning and the accidental events that made our evolution possible. It is consistent with the absence of signals from extraterrestrials, but it could still easily be wrong and I don't intend to pretend otherwise.

I do think that primitive bacterial life could be much more common than intelligent life. Early bacteria on Earth would have modified the atmosphere. There were several mechanisms for producing oxygen before chlorophyll took over. Oxygen would not be maintained in the atmosphere without some biological mechanism. There is a good chance we will be able to determine whether oxygen is present in exoplanet atmospheres within the next few years.

I do think that present claims about Earth-like exoplanets is being over-hyped. It is easy to get optimistic about life being common because we would like it to be so. Perhaps it is common, but my prediction is that the circumstances that make life evolve to higher levels are very rare. I think your more optimistic view is more the norm now.

Hello Peter, it is good to be back in a new essay contest.

My statement "no scientific explanation is required..." is causing some confusion. I was just trying to say that there is no magic element involved. This statement has to be taken in the context of what I wrote about consciousness in the main part of the essay. I should have explained it more clearly.

I do think QM has some relevance to consciousness, but not in the extraordinary kind of way that people like Penrose do. I think our consciousness in a quantum world is a sum over many possible experiences. A deterministic intelligence in a computer might be less conscious if it is not connected to the quantum world by its senses. Well it is just my view.

The RNA-world idea is fascinating. I wish I had a second life to spend studying biology rather than physics so that I could know more about it. I have not been very good with references but start in wikipedia and follow the numerous sources in there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world

By the way, when I talk of bootstrapping I am thinking of how a computer starts up. I short piece of hardwired code tells it to read and run a longer code segment in the operating system on disk. This can happen through several levels. My view is that the fine-tuning in physics is like a short piece of code that sets off evolution and then reasoning in the brain. Perhaps the analogy is not that perfect. Bootstrapping can also mean a top-down causality and yes there is some of that too.

I will of course be reading you essay and I look forward to it.