Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

philpapers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 184 posts

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#11

Post by foxhop »

messe wrote: post #9
foxhop wrote: post #3

https://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.

Everything yeilds from one. All creation grows from this field that science is finally proving exists. I link to this clip because David explains it better than I could, but it's not just TM.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#12

Post by srean »

skohan wrote: post #7

This 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.

But is there infinite regress -- does it have a representation of itself representing itself.

I find a more prosaic version of this question quite interesting too. If you can feel a touch/heat anywhere on or in your body its represented in the brain somehow, somewhere. For a moment (i) imagine the brain is sensitive to touch (it isn't because lack of 'pain' receptors) (ii) that the representation of a sensitive part of our body is localized in the brain rather than distributed.

What this gives us is a mapping from the entire body (that includes the brain) into itself. Now, if there is a fixed point of this mapping, that fixed point is aware of itself.

Is the brain insensitive to touch because its not biologically/physically possible for a localized region of space not to be aware of itself ?

EDIT: Downvote ! That was rather unexpected.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#13

Post by skohan »

lbrandy wrote: post #6

Here'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-physic…

I remember once upon a time being pretty interested in understanding "what is consciousness". The more I have learned about neuroscience, the more plausible it seems that what we know as subjective experience is just an emergent behavior of this super complex lump of jelly in our heads. If you look at what the thalamus does, it seems like consciousness might even just basically be the function of that brain region.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#14

Post by vehemenz »

A few thoughts.

1. Sean is leaving CalTech at the end of next year. It's not a huge surprise, given his interests, that he is pursuing the issues in the philosophy of mind that intersect with quantum physics. Most work in this area is unadulterated quackery, and he is one of the few physicists who understands philosophy well enough to not make me cringe.

2. Most physicists implicitly engage in ontological metaphysics—that the world's fundamental construction is of objects, and not say, facts (Wittgenstein) or logical structures or relations (Carnap). Which I suppose explains why Carroll is interested in the mental aspects of ontology.

3. His conclusion is that the laws of physics explain consciousness, but not to the degree of satisfying everyone. We need to develop better philosophical models for understanding it, rather than positing new (ahem, outlandish) metaphysical theories such as panpsychism. Hard to disagree here.

4. I wonder if Carroll's future work in philosophy will cause him to revisit the many-worlds interpretation of QM, which a fair share of philosophers believe carries too much metaphysical baggage. The idea of many worlds "existing" is a philosophical idea; it's not something you learn from studying physics.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#15

Post by skohan »

srean wrote: post #12
skohan wrote: post #7

This 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.

But is there infinite regress -- does it have a representation of itself representing itself. I find a more prosaic version of this question quite interesting too. If you can feel a touch/heat anywhere on or in your body its represented in the brain somehow, somewhere. For a moment (i) imagine the brain is sensitive to touch (it isn't because lack of 'pain' receptors) (ii) that the representation of a sensitive part…

Yeah sure it does - probably you can conjure a cartoon in your mind of a brain modeling a brain modeling a brain all the way out to infinity. Maybe you already did when you were coming up with this problem.

edit: since the other poster edited their comment, this was only responding to the infinite regression question, not their bizarre point about touch sensitivity

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#16

Post by sampo »

Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry. That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No need to postulate anything supernatural, or anything outside current physics and chemistry. Just interactions on the biological level.

It seems surprisingly common that people don't accept this "boring" explanation, but go to search for explanations outside of the known laws of physics.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#18

Post by mykowebhn »

vehemenz wrote: post #14

A few thoughts. 1. Sean is leaving CalTech at the end of next year. It's not a huge surprise, given his interests, that he is pursuing the issues in the philosophy of mind that intersect with quantum physics. Most work in this area is unadulterated quackery, and he is one of the few physicists who understands philosophy well enough to not make me cringe. 2. Most physicists implicitly engage in ontological metaphysics…

But facts are only facts if they correspond with that to which they refer, oftentimes other objects, so when you include facts, ultimately it boils down to external objects.

I think you also failed to include Idealism, that the world's fundamental construction is of Reason. For the uninitiated or the naive, the notion of Idealism often degenerates in their minds to Solipsism, but it is far from that.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#19

Post by creamytaco »

skohan wrote: post #7

This 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.

Here is another wow moment that follows from the one you mentioned: The universe you experience is different than my own. We use language and shared culture to consensually hallucinate a "shared" universe but no such thing truly exists for us. We can perceive objects and describe them in similar ways but the fact remains that we can't access the universe that the objects truly exist in (if that even exists) since, for us, they have no independent existence outside of our mental representation. Or shortly, when you die the universe dies with you.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#20

Post by tracedddd »

sampo wrote: post #16

Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry. That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No need to postulate anything supernatural, or any…

The implications are uncomfortable both existentially and ethically, so people will go to great lengths to search for evidence of the contrary.
Post reply on HN