Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
philpapers.org
Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
1–10 of 184 posts
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#2Genuine question: how is conceivable-therefore-possible even a real argument here?
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#3https://youtu.be/Em3XplqnoF4 | David Lynch explains Transedental Meditation (clip from a 1 hour documentary)
All physics and consciousness converge to the universal one. The unified field of one.
TM is pretty easy, just come up with some nonsense sounds and repeat them over and over, this is a mantra. Eventually switch from saying you mantra out loud to saying it in your mind. Don't worry if thoughts roll in just keep your conscious on the mantra.
It seems to work for me and I don't typically enjoy meditation. It takes practice. Good luck!
Basically science and theoretical physics followed the observational science down to a place where they got stuck, the good news is throughout history, including today, spiritual people have already found and understood this truth.
Everything in our universe is built fundamentally out of the same universal field of one: mass, spirit, and consciousness!
Everything (mass and consciousness) is created out of this field, and the act of observing it can and does change it!
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#4Comments from people who read the paper below this, please.
(nothing wrong with starting the discussion from the title or abstract, but it becomes harder to find comments related to the article).
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#5If I understand it, they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. However consider a cpu, it runs on known physical perspectives. But imaging trying to reverse engineer by examining what happens inside an operating system/program running on it. You can get quite interesting emergent behaviour from a relatively simple system (a processor). So just because physics seems relatively simple, I don't think that has to mean consciousness is easier. I feel its more emergent.
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#6Here's my attempt at a tldr.
1. The laws of physics at the time scales, space scales, and energies of the human brain are "known" and we have deep reasons to believe that more will not be discovered. He spends a great deal of space explaining and arguing that the credence that physics is "complete" in this regime should be very, very high.
2. Given the current laws of physics, there is no place or room for non-physicalist explanations of consciousness (or, I suppose, for other dualist ideas like a soul) because there is no mechanism for them to effect change in the physical world.
3. Anyone who wants a non-physicalist approach to consciousness must either claim they can violate the laws of physics in our brains, or cannot affect the physical world.
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#7This paper reminds me of one of the "wow" moments I had when first studying neuroscience: a professor passed on the realization that everything in the universe we can observe and understand must have a neurobiological representation. Reality as we experience it is in fact always represented in brain activity.
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#8Genuine question: how is conceivable-therefore-possible even a real argument here?
I don't know much about philosophy, but as far as I know "conceivabel therefore possible" was an argument Anselm von Canterbury used.
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#9https://youtu.be/Em3XplqnoF4 | David Lynch explains Transedental Meditation (clip from a 1 hour documentary) All physics and consciousness converge to the universal one. The unified field of one. TM is pretty easy, just come up with some nonsense sounds and repeat them over and over, this is a mantra. Eventually switch from saying you mantra out loud to saying it in your mind. Don't worry if thoughts roll in just kee…
I'm a David Lynch fan, and a practitioner of meditation, but the connections between Transcendental Meditation and Physics are pseudoscience.
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#10If I understand it, they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. However consider a cpu, it runs on known physical perspectives. But imaging trying to reverse engineer by examining what happens inside an operating system/program running on it. You can get quite interesting emergent behaviour from a relatively simple system (a processor). So just because physics seems relatively simple, I don't think that has…
> they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism.
This paper is doing the opposite. It's arguing that other papers/ideas advocating dualism are going the wrong way and purely physicalist explanations are the best path forward.