Christi Stoica,
This was an enjoyable, thought-provoking article, just as the few others of yours I have read over the years have been. (Do you remember me from the collection of essays on time?)
I was glad that I could find at least a few points to disagree with which prompted this response. Please take these remarks for whatever you might extract from them.
|7> What is the sound of one universe rhyming? Discontinuity lurks within every koan.
|8> Emergent goals:
If I may offer my own phenomenal definitions: a sentient being is an individuated organism which is connected to and reacts to the variations in its environment by way of receptor and proprioceptor nerve endings. By this definition a worm can be sentient. Consciousness is the subjective phenomenal experience of the qualia of sentience as a first-person observation of the present moment in interaction with an external environment. An agenda somehow comes out of this and presents itself directly to the subject. It would occur to us in retrospect that the veracity, completeness and therefore the predictive power of this internalized observation of reality would serve an organism well. But this would beg the question: how, on the evolutionary trail, did an organism's acquisition of an agenda to extract meaningful and relevant information for survival arise? Somehow, it must be connected to existential threat. But how does the organism come to sense that existential threat? My simplistic answer is that an organism's nerve endings, no matter how primitive, provide the initial feedback. All sentient beings have skin in the game. But there still remains the problem of how that feedback might be converted into sentience and the sensation of jeopardy. {Insert hand waving here} Once the sense of jeopardy has been detected, the obvious back reaction would be a teleological bias to fulfill the dual agendas: stay in the energy flux and avoid destruction. This would go for the tubeworms living near a steam vent or, as more neural circuitry is thrown at the problem in service of this agenda, an investment banker competing for her share of the billions in bonuses available to maintain herself far from equilibrium.
|10> I take the a priori existence of mathematical structures as the most comfortable and fruitful metaphysical position to jump to. But I guess that abstract existence of math is fundamentally different than its in-rebus implementation. My wild guess is that the ongoing collapse of the wavefunction turns potential existence into physical existence.
Existence, sentience, consciousness and the nature and mechanism behind the collapse of the wavefunction remain elusive mysterious. But are they intractable? The in-rebus causal lattice calculator is now busily humming away at that halting problem. Of course we have a para-logical tendency to personify this process (a short circuit to a simplistic answer at which point all further inquiry stops) and give it goals. But this bestows an enormous amount of baggage onto a mathematical structure, no matter how complex. Certainly, any goals or agendas must be present as potential eigenstates in the math for them to be able emerge in physical form.
Also, I think comparing the abstract with the imaginary is a category error. Imaginary is dependent upon an imaginer; the abstract is not.
Notes on the notes:
17. Here I find an excellent openness to new descriptions of reality.
18. When I see the word pure, which points to an abstract attribute, I want to see the conjugate attribute against which it can be discerned. Then I see that in order for any attribute to be manifested by the universe, then both it and its conjugate must be present.
Thank you so much for providing me with so much thought-provoking material for these cogitations.
Jim Stanfield