My running conspiracy theory is that qualia is actually some kind of jailbreak on physical reality. Enough of the systems I've seen in real life are leaky at their edge cases that I wouldn't be totally surprised if even the ones I consider most fundamental are too.
Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
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Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#22Donald Hoffman and Tom Campbell are interesting YouTube forays in this area.
I watched Hoffman’s Lex Fridman interview, it sounds like his idea is that our perceptions are like a user interface that abstracts reality so we don’t perceive reality as it actually is.
Isn’t that well accepted already? We know we don’t sense everything, and our brains give us a highly compressed version of the senses we do have. But none of that matters when we use tools like cameras or microphones because they’re not constrained the way our senses are.
Is there anything more to his idea than that?
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#23> many phenomena that can’t be inferred from the goings-on at the microscopic level, it is nonetheless a real, emergent feature of the macroscopic world. He offered the physics of gases as a parallel example. At the micro level, one talks of atoms, molecules and forces; at the macro level, one speaks of pressure, volume and temperature. These are two kinds of explanations, depending on the “level” being studied Putti…
That's not a novel insight, it's a standard way of interrogating systems at various levels and has been in common intellectual discourse for some time now.
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#24My running conspiracy theory is that qualia is actually some kind of jailbreak on physical reality. Enough of the systems I've seen in real life are leaky at their edge cases that I wouldn't be totally surprised if even the ones I consider most fundamental are too.
This is called metaphysics and generally isn't substantive by definition.
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#25No.Consciousness is the remainder left over after the creation of the universe. It is not fabric-like but more like an impossible kernal that, like reality, cannot ever be finalized.
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#26I think it’s useful to think in terms of what we are conscious of. Meaning, that there is a subject and an object of consciousness. For example, I’d argue that qualia is not an inherent part of consciousness, it’s merely something we are conscious of. It’s plausible that qualia are inner workings in our brain that our brain is itself perceiving, and thus is conscious of. What I think confuses people is that we are also conscious of our consciousness. That doesn’t need to mean that the subject and the object of consciousness are the same in that case: it could also mean that the “of”, i.e. the arrow between subject and object, is itself an object of consciousness. Now, it’s very plausible that this “of” arrow in general is not a simple arrow, but rather a complex graph or network. Given the complexity of the brain, there is certainly ample space for myriads of such arrow-networks. The Buddhist conception of no-self can be taken as there being no singular conscious subject. Instead, there are really just the “of” arrows, which partially form a self-recursion by partially pointing to each other, and this structure is what forms the apparent “self”.
Put slightly differently, there is no consciousness without the objects of consciousness, without the things we are consciousness of. At the time, we manifestly can’t get a grasp on the subject without making it an object of consciousness. Or rather, we would be completely unaware of it if it wasn’t also an object. From this one may conclude that what actually exists is only the “of” relation, and that the conscious subject is really just formed out of those.
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#27Donald Hoffman and Tom Campbell are interesting YouTube forays in this area.
I watched Hoffman’s Lex Fridman interview, it sounds like his idea is that our perceptions are like a user interface that abstracts reality so we don’t perceive reality as it actually is. Isn’t that well accepted already? We know we don’t sense everything, and our brains give us a highly compressed version of the senses we do have. But none of that matters when we use tools like cameras or microphones because they’re…
Yes that's a fair take. He has done a lot of work to show that these perceptions couldn't have evolved to see the truth or see objective reality. He has a lot of rigorous math and simulation data on this angle.
He goes further than this but has less proof so far. Says consciousness is fundamental, not physical reality, not quantum world. Says that these are projections that eminate from something more fundamental.
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#28> many phenomena that can’t be inferred from the goings-on at the microscopic level, it is nonetheless a real, emergent feature of the macroscopic world. He offered the physics of gases as a parallel example. At the micro level, one talks of atoms, molecules and forces; at the macro level, one speaks of pressure, volume and temperature. These are two kinds of explanations, depending on the “level” being studied Putti…
That's not a novel insight, it's a standard way of interrogating systems at various levels and has been in common intellectual discourse for some time now.
Novel to them, and that's okay; I don't assume anyone knows everything. Your content is helpful in clarifying that this insight has been novel to many others already.
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#29Psychology, and specifically DBT practitioners seem to have the belief that consciousness is at odds with emotions, and that one must struggle to access their own consciousness. There is the emotional, intellectual, and ‘wise’ minds, and then you, with agency to give credence towards one or another. To be an observer of your thoughts… while this may lead to healthy outcomes, I’ve found the model disturbing. Who is that agent making that decision, and what makes it distinct and authoritative?
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#30I have been imersing myself in this subject and the gist of what I got is that consciousness collapses under the reductionist process currently employed in the scientific method.
Moreover, the very framework in which the current scientific work is done might well be just an emergent data structure used by what we understand as consciousness to navigate whatever the objective reality is in a way that is simpler and more effective than having to access quantum states and particle trajectories through senses.
That being said, I think that there is something intrinsically insufficient in language itself to describe this wholistic relationship between consciousness, qualia and the perceived world. My take is that for anything to be communicated through symbols it has to undergo a reduction process which is essential to the flow of information to occur, otherwise you would have to communicate the entire universe at once, which is just impossible. You have to reduce reality to a set of symbols for the symbols itself to make sense. That is the whole premise of language, that a word has meaning only when immersed in other words (cow represents a cow insofar it doesn't represent anything else besides a cow).
If this is true, and Gödel incompleteness Theorem is essential, then this whole talk might take us closer to representing the experience of consciousness but there might never be a unifying theory, because for that to exist, that has to be a language that represents everything without reducing it to none of its parts, a theory without postulates.