Laurence,
I need to correct myself. I did rate your essay on 1/23.
Jim
Laurence,
I need to correct myself. I did rate your essay on 1/23.
Jim
Without con.sciousness we can not become conscious about anything. Thus, it is an entity that pre-exists in nature and pre-exists creation of the universe. It has created our material universe being itself not material. Nothing created everything and it is a fact of existence! Science is a mere discipline of Philosophy as man came on the scene with his thinking and thoughts. Similarly, the Creator though invisible, has created the universe with super-human logic that compelled man to think of God!
When i went through the essay and the comments made there-on, i could note how we the people play with words that too we generated and gave their meanings. Thus, we generated our own playground and rules of the play and then we start judging the result of the game we are playing. It is a kind of a run-about, we built at cross roads in order to avoid collisions! Now we generate overpass and under-pass and may be we will build airways and make our machines fly in the atmosphere. Are we heading the technology through our fanciful mind. Will mind control our actions, leaving the life force, viz. our soul no role to discriminate. There comes the consciousness of the cosmos Nature that! has built our habitation!Philosophy provides us free thinking but it so free that we start playing with Nature the way we fancy. Let us build disciplined laws through disciplined minds of ours. We need to enrich humanoty and temper out technology accordingly. Otherwise the 'Monstor' we created will ensure our disappearnce from the gloe we call Earth!
Laurence,
One logical attribute of fundamental is that it is not fully definable within the confines of its emergent properties. Which would seem to be one of the problems of understanding consciousness.
The logical fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would be an ideal of knowledge and judgement from which we fell, yet the fact is that it would be the opposite: The essence of sentience from which we rise. More the new born babe, than the wise old man. Though religion is more about social order, than spiritual insight, so it is better to frame it around wisdom, than raw awareness.
If I may, I would describe reality as a dichotomy of energy and form. Energy manifests form, as form defines energy. Proof of this as useful description is that after a few billion years of evolution, we developed a central nervous system to process form, aka information and the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process the energy to manifest that form.
Now we associate consciousness with the central nervous system and that processing of information, yet consider what that entails: There is significant energy flowing around us and carrying what amounts to enormous amounts of information, from which we extract momentary flashes of cognition, in order not to be overwhelmed and have a cognitive whiteout.
So what framing devices does this process assume? Sort of like a geocentric cosmology assumes our point of view as the center of reality, when it is only our center of reality. We still see the sun as rising in the east and setting in the west.
When we reconstruct reality from those flashes of perception, we naturally tend to think of this sequence of events as fundamental, much as a geocentric cosmology seemed fundamental, but consider whether time is really the point of the present, "flowing" past to future, or is it change turning future to past? As in tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns.
Going back to energy and form, as energy is dynamic, it is constantly changing form, such that the energy goes from prior to succeeding form, as these forms coalesce and dissolve. Thus energy and form go opposite directions of time. Energy past to future, form future to past.
Consider how this permeates our reality, such as between processes and entities. Think of a factory, where the product goes start to finish, while the production line points the other direction, consuming material and expelling product.
Life is similar. The individual goes from birth to death, being in the future to being in the past. While the species goes the other direction, onto new generations, shedding old, past to future.
Then consider as well the relationship between consciousness and thoughts, these perceptions we extract from the dynamic of reality. As consciousness goes from one thought too the next, past to future, thoughts go future to past.
As such, consciousness is like an energy and the process of thinking is its particular manifestation, particularly for those organisms which specialize in processing information, rather than more physical endeavors.
The current scientific assumption seems to be that it is the processing of information which effects consciousness, as with artificial intelligence, yet it would seem consciousness is the medium, rather than the message.
More the light shining through the frames, than the images on them.
Dear Laurence
Your statement - ".....belief in the non-fundamentality of consciousness does not fit comfortably with the subjective experience of being conscious." is vindicated by my paper - "What is Fundamental - Is C the Speed of Light". that describes the fundamental physics of antigravity missing from the widely-accepted mainstream physics and cosmology theories resolving their current inconsistencies and paradoxes. The missing physics depicts a spontaneous relativistic mass creation/dilation photon model that explains the yet unknown dark energy, inner workings of quantum mechanics, and bridges the gaps among relativity and Maxwell's theories. The model also provides field equations governing the spontaneous wave-particle complimentarity or mass-energy equivalence. The key significance or contribution of the proposed work is to enhance fundamental understanding of C, commonly known as the speed of light, and Cosmological Constant, commonly known as the dark energy.
The paper not only provides comparisons against existing empirical observations but also forwards testable predictions for future falsification of the proposed model.
I would like to invite you to read my paper and appreciate any feedback comments.
I am also attaching another paper - "A Universal Model Integrating Matter, Mind, & Consciousness Resolves the Hard Problem & Cosmic Conundrum." that vindicates your approach to consciousness. I would appreciate any feedback on this paper if possible at avsingh@alum.mit.edu.
Best Regards
Avtar SinghAttachment #1: Manus_Sc_of_Consciousness_SD_2017_A_Universal_Model.pdf
Laurence, may i request you to atleast respond to the many comments made on your essay here, not a word from you here though you did comment on our essay with compliments for us!Your personality appears to be unique and winning one for i can see quite a bit common among us being about the same age group, i am just past 85! After 90 i may really become senile and useless for the society at large!
Narendra, you are correct that I have used the time available for comments to discuss other essays rather than my own. I think this is the most useful approach that I can take, and I plan to continue with this practice. However, I can say something here specifically about what you and some others have said about my discussion of consciousness. In my essay I do not take a position on the mind-body problem, nor do I take a position on the hard problem of consciousness. Instead, I consider a related but somewhat different issue. I can explain the issue in the following way. Suppose that we start with the question for this year's contest, "What is 'fundamental'?" We then accept that some truths about the world are fundamental, while other truths are derivative. The next step is to assume that the fundamental truths contain nothing pertaining specifically to consciousness. In other words, all truths about consciousness are derivative. We then ask what the implications of this assumption are. I argue that the implications include some which assign consciousness perhaps a minor role among the phenomena of nature. If this is the actual status of consciousness, then we cannot change the truth, and we must face the truth as it is. Nonetheless, this truth might not be completely welcome, because we are conscious and because the content of our conscious experience is perhaps too often not what we would like it to be. Acceptance of a particular view about the status of consciousness does not combine well with the ongoing content of conscious experience. The essay is about this combination. Perhaps these remarks will clarify the theme of the essay.
Dear Laurence
If you are looking for another essay to read and rate in the final days of the contest, will you consider mine please?
A couple of days in and semblance of my essay taking form, however the house bound inactivity was wearing me. I had just the remedy, so took off for a solo sail across the bay. In the lea of cove, I had underestimated the open water wind strengths. My sail area overpowered. Ordinarily I would have reduced sail, but this day I felt differently. My contemplations were on the forces of nature, and I was ventured seaward increasingly amongst them. As the wind and the waves rose, my boat came under strain, but I was exhilarated. All the while I considered, how might I communicate the role of natural forces in understanding of the world around us. For they are surely it's central theme.
Beyond my essay's introduction, I place a microscope on the subjects of universal complexity and natural forces. I do so within context that clock operation is driven by Quantum Mechanical forces (atomic and photonic), while clocks also serve measure of General Relativity's effects (spacetime, time dilation). In this respect clocks can be said to possess a split personality, giving them the distinction that they are simultaneously a study in QM, while GR is a study of clocks. The situation stands whereby we have two fundamental theories of the world, but just one world. And we have a singular device which serves study of both those fundamental theories. Two fundamental theories, but one device? Please join me in questioning this circumstance?
My essay goes on to identify natural forces in their universal roles, how they motivate the building of and maintaining complex universal structures and processes. When we look at how star fusion processes sit within a "narrow range of sensitivity" that stars are neither led to explode nor collapse under gravity. We think how lucky we are that the universe is just so. We can also count our lucky stars that the fusion process that marks the birth of a star, also leads to an eruption of photons from its surface. for if they didn't then nebula gas accumulation wouldn't be halted and the star would again be led to collapse.
Could a natural organisation principle have been responsible for fine tuning universal systems? Faced with how lucky we appear to have been, shouldn't we consider this possibility?
For our luck surely didnt run out there, for these photons stream down on earth, liquifying oceans which drive geochemical processes that we "life" are reliant upon. The Earth is made up of elements that possess the chemical potentials that life is entirely dependent upon. Those chemical potentials are not expressed in the absence of water solvency. So again, how amazingly fortunate we are that these chemical potentials exist in the first instance, and additionally within an environment of abundant water solvency such as Earth, able to express these potentials.
My essay is an attempt at something audacious. It questions the fundamental nature of the interaction between space and matter Guv = Tuv, and hypothesizes the equality between space curvature and atomic forces is due to common process. Space gives up an energy potential in exchange for atomic forces in a conversion process, which drives atomic activity. And furthermore, that Baryons only exist because this energy potential of space exists, and is available for exploitation. Baryon characteristics and behaviours, complexity of structure and process might then be explained in terms of being evolved and optimised for this purpose and existence. Removing need for so many layers of extraordinary luck to eventuate our own existence. It attempts an interpretation of the above mentioned stellar processes within these terms, but also extends much further. It shines a light on molecular structure that binds matter together, as potentially being an evolved agency that enhances rigidity and therefor persistence of universal system. We then turn a questioning mind towards Earths unlikely geochemical processes, (for which we living things owe so much) and look at its central theme and propensity for molecular rock forming processes. The existence of chemical potentials and their diverse range of molecular bond forming activities? The abundance of water solvent on Earth, for which many geochemical rock forming processes could not be expressed without? The question of a watery Earth? is then implicated as being part of an evolved system that arose for purpose and reason, alongside the same reason and purpose that molecular bonds and chemical process arose.
By identifying process whereby atomic forces draw a potential from space, we have identified means for their perpetual action, and their ability to deliver perpetual work. Forces drive clocks and clock activity is shown by GR to dilate. My essay details the principle of force dilation and applies it to a universal mystery. My essay raises the possibility, that nature in possession of a natural energy potential, will spontaneously generate a circumstance of Darwinian emergence. It did so on Earth, and perhaps it did so within a wider scope. We learnt how biology generates intricate structure and complexity, and now we learn how it might apply for intricate structure and complexity within universal physical systems.
To steal a phrase from my essay "A world product of evolved optimization".
Best of luck for the conclusion of the contest
Kind regards
Steven Andresen
Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin
Dear Laurence,
I really appreciated your entry in this year's contest. You chose to explore an unusual and very original angle: what if consciousness is an ordinary, merely weakly emergent epiphenomenon, without any claim to fundamentality, hence, without "honor" (or "metaphysical clout") -- it then makes the burden of consciousness even more annoying, because not only must we experience the aches and pains of conscious life, but the whole damn thing is a pointless side-effect of mindless physics (and/or mathematics)!
Reading you essay made me recall one of my favorite scenes in the British TV series Doctor Who: in the episode "Forest of the Dead", the Doctor's companion Donna has been experiencing a relatively ordinary life for the past few years (subjective time), without knowing that she was living in a virtual body, within a virtual environment in a vastly speeded up virtual world. Finding herself back in her real body after exiting the simulation, and learning the truth, she erupts: "But I've been dieting!"
It is surprising that very few essays in this year's contest have dealt with the issue of the fundamentality of consciousness. Your essay certainly acknowledged the significance of the question, no matter what the truth of the matter turns out to be.
For my part, I think that consciousness is an unavoidable (hence fundamental?) aspect of any world, because it is only by virtue of containing conscious observers that any universe can be said to be physically real (as opposed to a mere mathematical structure within the ensemble of all abstractions). For better or for worse, there is no escaping consciousness --- within the infinite branching multi-level paths of the Maxiverse, even death is a temporary solution to a permanent problem. ;)
All the best,
Marc