- Edited
Increasingly, it seems, there is talk of consciousness being a fundamental aspect of matter. But there is not much talk about the nature of this consciousness.
I contend that consciousness is a functional aspect of matter; consciousness is the necessary information, about matter and its local surroundings, that a viable system needs in order to operate. This type of basic-level consciousness can be symbolically represented in something like the following form:
(category1=number1 IS TRUE) AND (category2=number2 IS TRUE) AND (category3=number3 IS TRUE),
where the categories are basic-level categories like mass and position.
However, how come that where 2 entangled particles are separated by large distances, a change in one of the particles A could have a physical effect on the other particle B? (As I contended above, both A and B only have information about themselves and their local surroundings.)
Without resorting to wildly hypothesising that a new type of particle which would violate causality, tachyons, must exist, it is clear that “law of nature” relationships between categories, while they are an integral part of the structure of the world, they are independent of space and time. These “law of nature” relationships between categories, taken seriously, are seemingly the only things that could potentially explain an A-B outcome that is independent of distance and time.
Is physics taking these “law of nature” relationships between categories seriously, when it comes to causality?