Dear Philip E. Gibbs:

Quoting you, "If an artificial intelligence is able to interact with the universe and be aware of itself then it is certainly conscious." I fully endorse your view; consciousness is an emergent property. Nature allows intelligence and the best possible 'intelligence' evolves naturally and it has consciousness.

AI is our creation; we have to provide the environment for it; that is, AI evolves in an artificial environment. To 'interact with the natural universe' it will always need our help. To remove this middleman, we have to create an AI based on the structure nature has selected. That is, if ever humans create an 'AI' having consciousness, it will resemble humans; we will end up creating ourselves.

In my opinion, the theoretical existence of 'all possible universes' and 'all possible conscious beings' are identical and is the best premise to start with. However, at the end it may turn out that the laws of mathematics, together with top-down causal effects, restrict the possibility to just 'one unique structure for the universe' and 'one unique structure for the conscious beings'.

Jose P Koshy

    Thank you, I think our views are not very far apart. My view is that when you take "all possible universes" (or as I prefer to say: "all logical possibilities") and start looking at the relationships between them, then that forms a unique structure. You can call it the universe, or the multiverse as you wish.

    Philip,

    I like your early statement: 'The universe must be read as a whole.' I also agree with your insistence that 'no miracle was required'. Maybe I could paraphrase: The universe is what it is - let's go figure out why.

    Like your work, my essay 'The Cosmic Odyssey of Matter' has a broad scope, from the early universe to its current state including conscious humans. However, I did not tackle the hard problem of 'why consciousness (or goals)', I simply formally described the progression that brought humans to this point. In doing so, I hope to contribute to 'reading the universe as a whole'.

    If you have a few minutes I would much appreciate your review of my essay.

    Regards, Ed Kneller

    Philip,

    Thanks for your comments. I think the England theory needs more study.

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    Jim

    Here is the link direct

    http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.600.7312&rep=rep1&type=pdf

    Hi Philip,

    I hope you are not fatigued by now. We have discussed my past essays which we share the philosophy and some technicalities. I have made some significant developments since then. Particularly I generate Newton's law for gravity and I link the system to some more standard physics. And I think I now know how to almost directly translate the standard physics techniques ,like path integral and operators to my system. Please read the notes in the comments for some corrections.

    Thanks

    my essay

      Thank you, that sounds interesting. I will get to your essay in due course.

      Hi Mr Gibbs,

      It is indeed a big puzzle.Sometimes I imagine all these 1000 billions of galaxies with their stars and planets.I say me that the numbers and probabilities in inserting the combinations of lifes with different paramters than on earth,that becomes troubling.We are Inside an universe with so many planets that it becomes logic to extrapolate these combinations with quantum gravitation and electromagnetism.At this present they drink,eat, think, dream, live,evolve,cry,laugh,...like us ,it exists probably civilizations less Evolved, others more.These numbers and the quantum gravitation imply an ocean infinite of combinations.Already Inside our milky way ,we do not know it,already,it is a problem of special relativity and limits due to space.Our galaxy is of 100000 Light years and us we are at 27000 LY of the central supermassive BH.Plants,animals and vegetals have many secrets to show us.The combinations are incredible when we consider this quantum gravitation and coded of adaptation with electromagnetism.The animals, vegetals can have so many shapes and functions.The adaptation like foundamental also.We know so few Mr Gibbs, even our technology is Young,we have worked the standard model and thermo and electreicity and correlated photonic waves.In 150 years like if we had all understood.It is the same with the waves.SETI for example looses its time with these electromagnetic waves.We cannot speak at a kind of present.If an Advanced civilization exists so they utilise the waves of gravitation,whic are not relativistic.But like we do not check this quantum gravity ,so we cannot send or receive these signals.We are just youngs Mr Gibbs.We are in fact so weak in technologies still.The quantum gravitation is the new era of sciences.But we are at the beginning only.

      All the best

      People like to write about how aliens at a distance of up to 60 light years will be listening in on our early radio and television broadcasts. Likewise we should be able to detect them, they say. But what is happening to our transmissions? TV and radio is moving first to satellite and then to the internet. Satellite does not point into space. For the internet we may use wi-fi but what will that look like from space. Everything is becoming digital and the signals are compressed to the point where they appear as noise. Eventually the bandwidth we require will be so high that everything will be transmitted as directional signals that cannot be seen from space. We still use a bit if old-fashioned analogue VHF for some purposes but soon that will be as obsolete as smoke signals and it will stop. Aliens will be able to see our signals for about a hundred years before we will become invisible again.

      What then happens when it becomes possible to transfer our consciousness to electronic brains? If we can give ourselves as much pleasure as we need in virtual reality will we want more? When happiness is available at the press of a button, will we keep pressing the button or will we look for something else like knowledge? What then happens when we know everything and more seems futile? Will we carry on? If our emotions evolved to help as survive, how long will we want to preserve them just for the sake of it? And if we switch them off will we still have goals and purpose?

      Philip,

      I applaud your clear-minded and well-written essay, and your ability to deal in a reasonable way with such a vast range of questions. There's one point in particular I'd like to focus on - that "our universe is fine-tuned to make complex processes possible."

      I don't think either of your alternative ways of explaining this are really helpful. I won't bother to criticize the "higher intelligence" approach, since neither or us thinks that's useful. I do briefly consider in my essay how we would go about inventing a universe ex nihilo, if it were up to us - but that's just to illustrate the difficulty involved in defining any kind of meaningful information, with no given context to work in. For example, having equations for gravity or an electromagnetic field don't do you any good unless you can define all the terms in the equations.

      Of course, mathematicians don't need to define all their terms... but a basic fact about our universe is that all its many kinds of information - space and time, mass and charge, all the variables of motion, the dozens of parameters in the Standard Model - all are meaningfully definable and physically measurable in terms of each other. And the evidence seems to be that it takes a lot of fine-tuning to accomplish that. For example, none of the parameters of physics would be empirically definable in a world without stable, uniform atoms that interact in a number of highly predictable ways.

      As to the "sufficiently large landscape of cosmologies" - this is kind of like saying, if we wait long enough, eventually an elephant will spontaneously self-assemble. Sure, ok... but it's so much more illuminating to trace how elephants evolved. Likewise if we can clarify what it takes for a universe like ours to define all this physically meaningful information, we may be able to trace its emergence from simpler kinds of self-defining systems.

      If this interests you, the point of my essay is to draw out analogies between quantum measurement, biological reproduction and human communication as meaning-generating processes. "Meaning" is understood in a broad sense, relating to the ability of these recursive processes to repeatedly regenerate the conditions for their own repetition, subject to natural selection. I cover roughly the same territory as your essay, from a rather different viewpoint.

      Thanks again for your eminently sensible contribution.

      Conrad

        Conrad, thanks for your comments. Your essay sounds interesting so I look forward to reading it. I have a long list to go through.

        As you point out my essay covers a wide range of subjects. The downside of this is that nothing is covered in enough detail so people rightly point out things I have said without sufficient justification. Fine-tuning is one of those. Of course several people have written whole books on that. Perhaps my controversial bit is the claim that chemistry is fine-tuned for life.

        You say that a sufficiently large landscape is like waiting for an elephant to appear spontaneously. The amount of information needed to form an elephant spontaneously is enormous, even the information in an elephants DNA is a few gigabits, but I have said that the amount of information needs to pick our cosmology out of the landscape is just a few thousand bits. The complexity of the landscape is already enormous but not nearly as enormous as the complexity that evolution produces.

        Thanks, Philip. I see your point... but can you clarify something for me? If only a few thousand bits are needed to pick out our universe, it seems the "landscape" must already include a great deal of definition, i.e. a certain number of dimensions of continuous spacetime, certain specific types of quantum fields with all their rules of construction and interaction, basic parameters like mass and charge, linear and angular momentum, etc. So unlike Tegmark, for example, who allows for any mathematical system, perhaps your landscape is limited to string theory?

        If you do have a way of defining a universe ex nihilo with so little information, that would be a strong argument against the thesis of my essay!

        Dear Dr. Gibbs,

        I have been following your essays on FQXi for several years, and they are always interesting, clear, and provocative. This one is no exception.

        I agree with most of your arguments, and my essay ("No Ghost in the Machine") addresses similar issues.

        However, while you conclude that

        "Our conscious mind emerges from biology and psychology, requiring no further explanation, ..."

        I argue in contrast that such an explanation is essential. Further, our collective difficulties in understanding intelligence and consciousness are due to a series of illusions about their nature. I argue that consciousness may reflect a simple evolved brain structure based on a neural network that constructs a simplified virtual environment and recognizes self, other agents, and causality, thus creating a narrative. Such a structure may be emulated in electronic systems, enabling true artificial intelligence.

        Alan Kadin

          So the question is, how do you get from Max Tegmark's mathematical universe where any mathematical structure is as valid as our universe, to something like the landscape of string theory where all the basic principles of physics are already in place? I agree that this is a huge reduction from something that requires unlimited information to describe, down to something that requires only a few thousand bits.

          I first proposed an outline solution to that problem over twenty years ago before Tegmark had even made his ideas public. You can still find it on archive.org at this link

          http://web.archive.org/web/19971011074729/http://www.weburbia.demon.co.uk/pg/tot.htm

          I said more about it in the last essay and a little in this one.

          My answer is that a principle of universality comes into play and a pre-geometric master-theory for physics emerges from the complexity of the system of all logical possibilities. Of course this is just a hypothesis and I cannot provide the mathematical details, but I think my arguments make the idea plausible. I would now identify this master-theory with something like M-theory but if M-theory is not right the idea may still work with whatever is right.

          Note also that the few thousand bits only describes the low energy vacuum solution that determines the laws of particle physics in our cosmology. Within that solution many different histories are possible according to the laws of quantum physics, so the vastness of the original "multiverse" has not gone away. It is just being seen through the principle of universality that makes general principals of physics emerge.

          Dear Philip Gibbs

          I invite you and every physicist to read my work "TIME ORIGIN,DEFINITION AND EMPIRICAL MEANING FOR PHYSICISTS, Héctor Daniel Gianni ,I'm not a physicist.

          How people interested in "Time" could feel about related things to the subject.

          1) Intellectuals interested in Time issues usually have a nice and creative wander for the unknown.

          2) They usually enjoy this wander of their searches around it.

          3) For millenniums this wander has been shared by a lot of creative people around the world.

          4) What if suddenly, something considered quasi impossible to be found or discovered such as "Time" definition and experimental meaning confronts them?

          5) Their reaction would be like, something unbelievable,... a kind of disappointment, probably interpreted as a loss of wander.....

          6) ....worst than that, if we say that what was found or discovered wasn't a viable theory, but a proved fact.

          7) Then it would become offensive to be part of the millenary problem solution, instead of being a reason for happiness and satisfaction.

          8) The reader approach to the news would be paradoxically adverse.

          9) Instead, I think it should be a nice welcome to discovery, to be received with opened arms and considered to be read with full attention.

          11)Time "existence" is exclusive as a "measuring system", its physical existence can't be proved by science, as the "time system" is. Experimentally "time" is "movement", we can prove that, showing that with clocks we measure "constant and uniform" movement and not "the so called Time".

          12)The original "time manuscript" has 23 pages, my manuscript in this contest has only 9 pages.

          I share this brief with people interested in "time" and with physicists who have been in sore need of this issue for the last 50 or 60 years.

          Héctor

          Thank you, I saw your essay already and agree with the message entirely. I hope to get back to it for full read.

          When I said in my conclusion that "Our conscious mind emerges from biology and psychology, requiring no further explanation, ...", this did not get my message over very well. In fact it would have been better to say "Our conscious mind emerges from biology and psychology, requiring no ghost in the machine, ..." but I didn't think of that at the time :-)

          I am pleased you find my essays "interesting, clear, and provocative" especially provocative. Although my views are generally mainstream, I do try to shake things up in areas where our knowledge is very uncertain. I would much rather have an essay that people disagree with than one that fits other people's views. Prizes are nice but I don't write to win.

          Dear Philip,

          Excellent essay with in-depth analysis revealing the directional process of becoming the Universe that is aware of itself, with ideas and conclusions that will help us overcome the crisis of understanding in fundamental science through the creation of a new comprehensive picture of the world, uniform for physicists and lyrics filled with meanings of the "LifeWorld" (E.Husserl). I invite you to read and evaluate my ideas.

          Yours faithfully,

          Vladimir

          Dear Philip,

          your essay really covers a wide range of topics, and it must have been a pleasure to be able to concentrate in a single text the variety of things that have kept you busy in the last decades!

          Talking about 'pleasure': the reason for the appearance and success of this 'trick' in the context of darwinian evolution (in sexual reproduction) is obvious. But you also write:

          "Higher organisms such as ourselves have developed positive and negative emotions as one way of aiding survival but these also result in us setting ourselves goals that give us pleasure without affecting survival. These include the curiosity driven will to understand nature."

          I wonder whether one can really say that human curiosity to understand nature is completely independent from survival-related goals, and, in that case, what origin it might have...

          I like the final parts of your text, and in particular I fully agree with:

          "Does this imply that a simulated mind is not conscious? No, our brain is just a wet computer whose workings can be replicated electronically. If an artificial intelligence is able to interact with the universe and be aware of itself then it is certainly conscious."

          Although I tend to consider this as an obvious statement, I have recently experienced vigorous opposition against this viewpoint - still a form of human vanity? (but this is not too relevant to the focus of the context).

          Best regards

          Tommaso

            I think it is true that many animals show genuine curiosity, especially when young. It may be part of the playfulness that teaches them about the world around them which helps them survive later on, especially for animals that need to use some ingenuity to hunt. So yes, that would make curiosity a survival related trait. Even the level of curiosity that humans exhibit could help us to learn and get on better as social animals. It's an interesting point that would be worth exploring at more length.

            When I first saw this essay topic I was a bit stuck about how to tackle it. I thought of a few things including trying to find some kind of computer simulation that would demonstrate how negentropy could arise. That is just too hard, but I see your essay is looking at entropy in cellular automata so I will be interested to read it more fully. In the end I took the opportunity to give a high level view of how some of my favourite ideas hang together, and you are right that this was a pleasure once I got going.

            Thanks for your comments

            6 days later

            Hi Philip,

            I have read your interesting article and I have some minor comments.

            In your paragraph where you are explaining "Experience is a relative concept". I was reminded of a short story by Larry Niven (don't remember the title.) of a being that only existed if you believed it existed. The being would show up to eat you, but you wouldn't believe it existed and it would disappear. The being eventually went extinct.

            Next comment. My problem with studying higher maths, including but not limited to Algebraic structures, Galois Theory, free Lie group, free Lie algebra, and Galois Theory of Grothendieck, is that all these maths do not need time for them to proceed. Time is something we tack on at the end. What if time is part of the very existence of the universe, part of it's space, part of it's very math? I have other objections to the higher maths also, but here is not the time nor the space to discuss them.

            You do a good job presenting your case considering the limited knowledge base of your expected readers. Thanks for that, me being of limited knowledge.

            Jim Akerlund