A Landscape of Consciousness

Ulla Mattfolk You tell an important point about the life and the most primitive organisms like a bacteria, it is about communication and others and not nerves or brains only, that is why it is important to differenciate the intelligence and the consciousness, The levels of intelligence and complexity are one thing, the consciousness an other ,

Lorraine Ford consciousness is an everyday, minute by minute, second by second, all-encompassing reality for all ordinary human beings, (and other living things too).

Yes, this is a basic trait, the flow of conscious moments.

Chalmers already found two kinds of consciousness, the easy problem, about which you talk, and the hard problem, where the feelings are central. Also minute feelings and sensations are important like an attraction or repellation. In fact Damasio showed we cannot do decisions without small feelings.

The knowledge as information is not the hard problem. In fact Knowledge 'eats' the consciousness, so the more informed we are the less conscious we are? We reject possibilities that does not 'fit'. This if we take consciousness as fundamental from quantum or the measurements. There are models that talk of an optimization as fitness also. Hoffman is one.

This also leads to an image where consciousness is not computational at basic level. Esp.the part we see as subconscious is hard to compute. How do we compute feelings? Arithmetics and other ways meet Gödel... And also if we put some artificial number for consciousness, like a Pythagorean triangle, we have hard time finding its physical correlate. From our material view it is not credible. This leads to consciousness as something 'unseen' or dark if we use this metaphor from physics. Maybe a 5D? Actually this dimensional computing is interesting. It can be we have also more dimensions involved. Infinitesdimensional even? This is something we begin to explore now.

Many of our experiencies use lower dimensions also, like Seth talk of. Experience is not bound to 3D?

You notice the many ? I hope.

Steve Dufourny Intelligence versus consciousness.

In my thinking consciousness is the basis from which we select. Intelligence is how well we select. (This is also a kind of measurement problem. Even if we reject something does not mean it vanish from the consciousness pool, it just makes no subjective sense to ourselves. You know how difficult it is to communicate ideas.) They are two different. If we take an AI using equations it is our knowledge we insert in them, so they must be conscious at some basic equational level, but this is not enough? We should also be careful to compare to human consciousness here. We are so much more.

Turing test is passed already for AI, but there is an urgent need for better tests. We should though not wait human consciousness from them. We can maybe say AI-consciousness is possible?

Ulla Mattfolk it tells us a lot about what is the consiousness when we compare our human consciousness in relation to other forms of lifes, The interations with the environments and the stimuli for the survival can permit to give roads, So a bacteria for example utilise the stimuli but not a kind of developped thought or in all the cases a less developped thought for the choices and free will. These bacterias have a consciousness and a kind of intelliegence, but they are not the same, like for us. The difference between the bacterias and us is the complexity , we have a more complex momory, imagination, abstract thinking permitting even to understand the time and the past, present and future and so we make decisions , so the abilities are different but it is not a reason to tell that our consciousness is more than the consciousness of a bacteria, It implies debates of course about the philosophy and sciences , are we more conscious than a bacteria or are we all conscious at a kind of same level considering a foundamaental universal principle of consciousness. So in resume have we a special quality of consciousness or is it similar to the othe simplest organisms.
This consciousness is mainly an universal trait for me , It is not appeared in humans only , it is a thing starting in thre simplest organism, and even we can go farer in telling that it begins even at this quantum scale. We arrive at deep philosophical questions about the matters and the energy and the consciousness. If the consciousness and the responses to envoronments and adaptations, processings, simuli, survivals for the bacteria , plants , animals exist, so from this perspective, there is a common thread tyring all together with experiences and mechanism and complexities. and even needs. It is like if we had a vast universal interdependent web of consciousness with no higher or lower states of consciousness but utilised personally and singulary and subjectivelly speaking.

Steve Dufourny The objectivity is one thing and this subjectivity an other actually.,

Yes, 1p is very different from 3p perspective, and a big problem. Objectivity is the holy graal of science, but we observe or percieve subjectively, every cell does. If we draw a parallell to the famous cat analogy we are in the closed box, and the friends of Wigner are around us observing us and our behaviour, concluding if we are conscious or not. Observation is indirect, as you said. Now living systems have solved this by allowing a surplus of energy flowing through, forcing the system to be open. So now Wigner and his friends can now something about us, maybe just if we moves or not?

Open systems becomes a problem when we go to self-adjoint quantum systems, because also those must be open to 'live'? The systems form many-body systems etc. Non-Hermitian systems can be such?

Steve Dufourny These bacterias have a consciousness and a kind of intelliegence, but they are not the same, like for us. The difference between the bacterias and us is the complexity , we have a more complex momory, imagination, abstract thinking permitting even to understand the time and the past, present and future

A bacteria maybe has not much reason to predict the future, but also very primitive organisms can give warning signals, so this is a prediction like a 'knowledge in beforehand', so they can adapt their behaviours.

Actually also for us these predictions require most of our energy if we look to the brain work. It is important for us to predict our next step, and this is maybe what our subconsciousness does for us? Note the similarity to AI and its predictions of 'next step' or word.... I think this is really a quantum charachter, so AI are quantum computers already? We should maybe analyze better what the statistical entropy is?

I would recommend we start with a simple observation that consciousness may be the process of examining what is consciousness.

Steve Dufourny
Steve and Ulla:

I’m saying that:

• Just like higher-level matter is constructed out of smaller units of lower-level matter, higher-level consciousness is constructed out of smaller units of lower-level consciousness. And conversely, when (e.g. in death) matter breaks down into smaller units, consciousness also breaks down into smaller units.
• Consciousness and matter are different aspects of the world, requiring different methods of symbolic representation (symbols like AND, OR and IS TRUE are required to represent consciousness), but they always exist together. There is no free-floating consciousness.
• Low-level consciousness has a function; it is the necessary knowledge aspect of the world, whereby the world can know itself, i.e. know its own law-of-nature equations, categories (like mass and position), and numbers that apply to the categories.
• Consciousness is a basic aspect of the world like particles, atoms and molecules are basic, and like laws-of-nature, categories and numbers are basic. So, being a basic aspect of the world, the question of how consciousness feels, or doesn’t feel, is actually irrelevant.

I am a theoretical physicist, interested, among others, in foundations of quantum mechanics and its relation to consciousness. I think that "the hard problem of consciousness, in the way it is usually thought of, is harder than hard, it's impossible." Consciousness is fundamental, one cannot explain how consciousness arises from the brain activity, because the brain as a physical object is already being experienced in consciousness. Trying to explain (my) consciousness as an activity of my brain is like a serpent eating its own tail. Trying to explain how consciousness arises from the brain activity of other people is mixing two different levels of representation: other people's brain activity (if I observe it by means of suitable equipment) is just a representation in (my) consciousness, a picture within a picture, a story within a story... (see "Goedel, Escher, Bach" by Hofstadter for further insight). But such a view faces the problem of solipsism.

There is a way to avoid solipsism as follows. Wave function is a representation of a quantum state which in my interpretation is consciousness.There are many possible wave functions/quantum states. One is such that I experience myself being a person A, experiencing the world that includes a person B as a picture in (my) consciousness. Another wave function (quantum state) is such that I experience myself being the person B, experiencing the world that includes the person A. There is a common cross-section world of both persons (and all other persons) that they interpret as an objective world. In both cases there is the "I", first person's experience, "me feeling". Consciousness is fundamental, the "external" world is a part of consciousness, and yet in this setup there is no solipsism. Objective reality is the Hilbert space of all quantum states, which are the states of different possible streams of consciousness.

Lorraine Ford Hi Lorraine, your general ideas about this consciousness are interesting philosophically and physically, I see differently but I recognise that the categories and laws of nature could be a key also. Now we need of course to know more about these basic units and what they are really considering the informations and their properties and why these basic units with their oscillations and motions create all the other properties like mass, momentum , positions, consciousness, numbers, .... that becomes relevant in considering the main primary informations and what they are but we have limitations still like I told because we don t know what are these primary informations and even what are these foundamental objects. Strings, points in 1D , spheres,.....or a mathematical universe like the works of Max Tegmark, we don t know .

Lorraine Ford Lorraine has the same like Moran in her # it is the necessary knowledge aspect of the world, whereby the world can know itself, i.e. know its own law-of-nature equations, categories (like mass and position), and numbers that apply to the categories." Gödels metastates are not easy to put in. It is like a supersymmetry I think?

Also this "Consciousness is a basic aspect of the world like particles, atoms and molecules are basic, and like laws-of-nature, categories and numbers are basic. " This has been debated so much and nobody so far can prove it right, I think. This is why I have gone into the dimensional thinking.

Matej Pavsic I look now at fractal dimensions and they show common pitches like the harmonic A in music, a pure state. Maybe we are instruments for consciousness?

It is good you have two or more waves. The cat analogy is not so good when it has only one wave that is scattered into two states, as wave they must be sin and cos. But then the simultanous measurement of both are not possible, I think, only 'almost simultan'. And as a closed box the cat must know which.

Regarding the Landscape it is a difficult task to compare like this, and many theories fall in several categories. It is some kind of guide maybe? There are also missing theories.

Lorraine Ford the question of how consciousness feels, or doesn’t feel, is actually irrelevant.

How do you proceed without the hard problem of consciousness? I don't understand this.

Steve Dufourny You raised important points. Some of them are attempted to be clarified in the video "Biocentrism: A Physics Perspective" My talk offers an impartial and unbiased analysis of the implications of quantum mechanics. It has roots in the last part of my book The Landscape of Theoretical Physics: A Global View (Kluwer Academic, 2001), since 2005 available, by permission of the publisher, at https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0610061. A more technical discussions is in Sec. 4 of the scientific paper https://www.academia.edu/43640633/The_Embedding_Models_of_Induced_Gravity_with_Bosonic_Sources, published in Foundations of Physics in 1994. I also intend to discuss and try to clarify all this here, but I think that looking at the works mentioned above could help understanding my points and facilitate further discussion.

Ulla Mattfolk
Steve and Ulla:

I have tried to concisely explain, in a clear and organised way, what I think consciousness actually IS. What is YOUR positive model of what consciousness actually IS ? And, in the context of MY model of what individual consciousnesses actually ARE, I think that how consciousness feels, or doesn’t feel, is irrelevant because it is just a basic characteristic of consciousness.

Here is a quick question: are you saying that individual consciousnesses are:

1. Functional ?
2. Non-functional ?

My answer is 1, individual consciousnesses are functional.