Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

[Constance]

As an aside, coms and NDEs seem to happen when (as we measure it now) brain activity is low - but I don't know a lot about this ... @Constance?

The book to read is von Lommel's:



I read it when it was published and won't try to summarize all the evidence that it covers in a forum post. The amazon page provides a long list of significant review statements by well-known researchers, and some of the customer reviews provide overviews of various aspects of what von Lommel presents.

 

[smcder]

This may be of interest, the interview can be downloaded as mp3.

Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011)

How much do we know about our stream of conscious experience? Not much, if Eric Schwitzgebel is right. In his new book Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2011), Schwitzgebel argues for skepticism regarding our knowledge of the phenomenology of conscious experience.

We don’t know if we dream in color or black and white, we don’t know whether tilted coins look elliptical or round,

and we don’t know whether conscious experience is confined to what we are paying attention to or more abundant.

Schwitzgebel’s position is based on close examination of historical philosophical texts and current psychological experiments that show radical variability in reports of experience that seem unlikely to reflect radical differences in the experiences themselves. In this wide-ranging interview, Schwitzgebel considers whether psychologist Edward Titchener was on to something with his training of expert introspectors, why current theories of the neural correlates of consciousness are question-begging, and how reports of conscious experiences may be grounded in analogies to familiar media.

and we don’t know whether conscious experience is confined to what we are paying attention to or more abundant

@Soupie

Does this address your ideas about the man whose foot is hit by a rock and then is distracted ... ? Experience as radically abundant?

Perplexities of Consciousness - Ch. 6 - Do You Have Constant Tactile
Experience of Your Feet in Your Shoes? - Eric Schwitzgebel

Do we have a constant, complex flow of conscious experience in many sensory modalities simultaneously? Or is experience limited to one or a few modalities, regions, or objects at a time?

Philosophers and psychologists disagree, running the spectrum from saying that experience is radically sparse (e.g., Julian Jaynes) to saying it's radically abundant (e.g., William James).

Existing introspective and empirical arguments (including arguments from "inattentional blindness") generally beg the question. I describe the results of an experiment in which I gave subjects beepers to wear during everyday activity. When a beep sounded, they were to note the last conscious experience they were having immediately before the beep. I asked some participants to report any experience they could remember. I asked others to report simply whether they had visual experience or not. Still others I asked if they had tactile experience or not, or visual experience in the far right visual field, or tactile experience in the left foot.

Interpreted at face value, the data suggest a moderate view according to which experience broadly outruns attentional focus but does not occur anything like 100% of the time through the whole field of each sensory modality. However, I offer a number of reasons not to take the reports at face value.

I suggest that the issue may, in fact, prove utterly intractable. And if so, it may prove impossible to reach justifiable scientific consensus on a theory of consciousness.

 

[Constance]

Interpreted at face value, the data suggest a moderate view according to which experience broadly outruns attentional focus but does not occur anything like 100% of the time through the whole field of each sensory modality. However, I offer a number of reasons not to take the reports at face value.

The statement highlighted in blue does not mean that experiences not focused upon disappear from consciousness. Rather they are gathered in the subconscious mind and remain available for conscious reflection and thought, often cropping up when we are pursuing conscious strains of thought to which they are relevant. We also process experiences not focused upon at the time of the experience later on, while we are dreaming and perhaps in other sleep states. And of course the whole global nature of what we have experienced in the world -- consciously and unconsciously -- influences the general tenor of our personal world view, our relationships, our expressive capacities (in thinking, writing, and artistic creation), and our emotional vitality, vibrancy.

 

[smcder]

The book to read is von Lommel's:



I read it when it was published and won't try to summarize all the evidence that it covers in a forum post. The amazon page provides a long list of significant review statements by well-known researchers, and some of the customer reviews provide overviews of various aspects of what von Lommel presents.

Skeptiko has an interview with von Lommel - I'll start there for an intro.

 

[smcder]

The following appears to be one of the more formal papers on the topic I have found; and it's one that I learned of from you! (You! I learned it from watching you! )

Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium

Consciousness as a "state" of matter = Consciousness is information.

As I've noted, I believe that this model is a form of CPPP. It may not be "Russelian" as that will hinge on whether information is an intrinsic or extrinsic property of matter. ( @smcder @marduk any thoughts on that? )

Furthermore, this view is rejected out-of-hand by many for the same reasons PPP is rejected: namely, that it logically leads to a lot of physical systems having/generating consciousness (if only phenomenal consciousness) that we - as humans - would not intuitively believe have/are conscious. However, I think it's an error to discard/dismiss a model simply because it does not intuitively appeal to us. The origin and nature of consciousness is probably not intuitive.

Interestingly, although it was specifically in reference to IIT, both Chalmers and others have said it does not answer the hard problem. Now, IIT is a specific form of the "information philosophy of mind" model, so IIT may introduce an element I'm not aware of, but I think IPoM does answer some of the hard problem (in the same way that CPPP does).

An individual named Scott Andrews stated that: If the mind is information, and a human was said to generate this information, we can still conceive of the person as a zombie, i.e., having no consciousness.

To that I say, what!? How is that conceivable?

If a mind is information, and a human has mind/information, we can conceive of them as not having mind/information? I don't follow...

We posted this Tegmark article a while back on this thread ... I'll find the link, the discussion then might be helpful.

An individual named Scott Andrews stated that: If the mind is information, and a human was said to generate this information, we can still conceive of the person as a zombie, i.e., having no consciousness.

Do you have a link for this quote?

However, I think it's an error to discard/dismiss a model simply because it does not intuitively appeal to us. The origin and nature of consciousness is probably not intuitive.

Hmmm ... who do you sound like here?? ;-)

 

[smcder]

http://www.skeptiko.com/randi-prize-exposed-in-new-book/
McLuhan's blog at Paranormalia

@Constance
Paranormalia
I’ve been talking to Society of Psychical Research and they’re going to make a lot of their interesting early articles by people like Frederick Myers and Hodgson available on their website for free so that hopefully people will be able to go on and download it. I’ll be providing links on my website. It’s about trying to start a conversation, but also sort of nudging people to check things out for themselves.

Society for Psychical Research

 

[smcder]

@Soupie - Here's Constance's original post of the Tegmark paper
@marduk, instead of consciousnessiton - Tegmark proposes Computronium

Max Tegmark of MIT has just published a paper exploring this theory, downloadable as a PDF at this link: [1401.1219] Consciousness as a State of Matter
A general introduction to the paper is provided here:
Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium
Tegmark's abstract for the paper:
[Extacts from the paper:
…the only property of consciousness that Hugh Everett needed to assume for
his work on quantum measurement was that of the information principle: by applying the Schrodinger equation to systems that could record and store information, he inferred that they would perceive subjective randomness in accordance with the Born rule. In this spirit, we might hope that adding further simple requirements such as in the integration principle, the independence principle and the dynamics principle might suffice to solve currently
open problems related to observation.
In this paper, we will pay particular attention to what I will refer to as the quantum factorization problem: why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular
Hilbert space factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space, say), and more generally, why do we perceive the world around us as a dynamic hierarchy of objects that are strongly integrated and relatively independent? This fundamental problem
has received almost no attention in the literature [9]. We will see that this problem is very closely related to the one Tononi confronted for the brain, merely on a larger scale. Solving it would also help solve the “physics-from-scratch" problem [2]: If the Hamiltonian H and the total density matrix pfully specify our physical world, how do we extract 3D space and the rest of our semiclassical world from nothing more than two Hermitean matrices,which come without any a priori physical interpretation or additional structure such as a physical space, quantum observables, quantum field definitions, an “outside"
system, etc.? Can some of this information be extracted even from H alone, which is fully specified by nothing more than its eigenvalue spectrum? We will see that a
generic Hamiltonian cannot be decomposed using tensor products, which would correspond to a decomposition of the cosmos into non-interacting parts -- instead, there is
an optimal factorization of our universe into integrated and relatively independent parts. Based on Tononi's work, we might expect that this factorization, or some
generalization thereof, is what conscious observers perceive, because an integrated and relatively autonomous information complex is fundamentally what a conscious observer is!
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we explore the integration principle by quantifying integrated information in physical systems, finding encouraging results for classical systems and interesting challenges introduced by quantum mechanics. In Section III, we explore the independence principle, finding that at least one additional principle is required to account for the observed factorization of our physical world
into an object hierarchy in three-dimensional space. In Section IV, we explore the dynamics principle and other possibilities for reconciling quantum-mechanical theory with our observation of a semiclassical world. We discuss our conclusions in Section V, including applications of the utility principle, and cover various mathematical detail in the three appendices. Throughout the paper, we mainly consider finite Hilbert spaces that can be viewed as collections of qubits; as explained in Appendix C, this appears to cover standard quantum field theory with its infinite Hilbert space as well.
. . . In all three cases, the answer clearly lies not within the system itself (in its internal
dynamics H1), but in its interaction H3 with the rest of the world. But H3 involves the factorization problem all over again: whence this distinction between the system itself and the rest of the world, when there are countless other Hilbert space factorizations that mix the two?

 

[Constance]

= Menu = HomeAboutDecoherence Detection
Comments on Tegmark’s ‘Consciousness as a State of Matter’
By Riedel •May 13, 2014 Philosophy, Physics
[Edit: Scott Aaronson has posted on his blog with extensive criticism of Integrated Information Theory, which motivated Tegmark's paper.]

Max Tegmark’s recent paper entitled “Consciousness as a State of Matter” has been making the rounds. See especially Sabine Hossenfelder’s critique on her blog that agrees in several places with what I say below.

Tegmark’s paper didn’t convince me that there’s anything new here with regards to the big questions of consciousness. (In fairness, I haven’t read the work of neuroscientist Giulio Tononi that motivated Tegmark’s claims). However, I was interested in what he has to say about the proper way to define subsystems in a quantum universe (i.e. to “carve reality at its joints”) and how this relates to the quantum-classical transition. There is a sense in which the modern understanding of decoherence simplifies the vague questions “How does (the appearance of) a classical world emerge in a quantum universe? ” to the slightly-less-vague question “what are the preferred subsystems of the universe, and how do they change with time?”. Tegmark describes essentially this as the “quantum factorization problem” on page 3. (My preferred formulation is as the “set-selection problem” by Dowker and Kent. Note that this is a separate problem from the origin of probability in quantum mechanics[1].)

Therefore, my comments are going to focus on the “object-level” calculations of the paper, and I won’t have much to say about the implications for consciousness except at the very end. However, Tegmark’s paper cannot be understood without looking at the list of principles in Table II on page 3. At my level of understanding, the thrust of the paper is this: “Here is a list of English words with intuitive but imprecise definitions that, at the least, seem to be necessary conditions for anything we might reasonably call consciousness. Let’s postulate that these are well measured by some very simple abstract mathematical quantities. Then, by looking at some toy models, let’s try to get a sense of the types of classical and quantum systems that extremize these quantities.”

The paper has 5 sections. Section I is the introduction, and Section V is the extensive concluding section with much discussion on the outlook for future work. The middle three sections compose the main text, and they are titled after the principles that are explored through toy models: “Integration”, “Independence”, and “Dynamics and Autonomy”.

Main critique

The principles that Tegmark identifies are the following: “information”, “dynamics”, “independence”, “integration”, “utility”[2]. He does not spend much time justifying these choices in terms of consciousness (leaving this mostly to Tononi). Instead, he jumps quickly into introducing some mathematical quantities (hereafter: “metrics”) which might measure these intuitive principles and then exploring them in toy models, looking especially for states and Hamiltonians that extremize the metrics. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much out of the toy model calculations. The importance of most of the metrics (e.g. “energy coherence”, “probability velocity”, “independence time scale”) that are postulated by Tegmark to capture the aforementioned principles remain unclear to me, even after seeing their definitions and their calculated behavior. Here is a test: if we replaced each of these motivating words with, say, their Irish Gaelic translation–a mere relabeling–would the results (now unattached from lofty language about consciousness) lose their appeal? I’m afraid they might.

Taking the principles at face value, I have a hard time being convinced that they are pointing toward consciousness in even a rough way. It looks like a Turing machine running a near trivial program satisfies all the criteria (save “utility”, I suppose[3].) So maybe the idea is that maximizing the criteria bring us closer to consciousness? I don’t see how; I think you’ll just find a pathalogical quantum state that artificially maximizes whatever crude metric you’ve chosen, as happens several times in the main text every time an extremization is attempted. I found no examples where the principle of “integration”, as captured by any of the metrics used by Tegmark, ever lead to the kind of rich and robust information processing ability I’d expect to find in a conscious being.

Aside

I think this paragraph touches on something important:

In summary, the quantum factorization problem is both very interesting and very hard. However, as opposed to the hard problem of quantum gravity, say, where we have few if any observational clues to guide us, physics research has produced many valuable hints and clues relevant to the quantum factorization problem. The factorization of the world that we perceive and the quantum states that we find objects in have turned out to be exceptionally unusual and special in various ways, and for each such way that we can identify, quantify and understand the underlying principle responsible for, we will make another important stride towards solving the factorization problem.

Folks who look doubt that the field of “quantum foundations” has much value may look on this with alarm. In quantum gravity, we have a plausible excuse for lack of progress: no data. On the other hand, non-relativistic quantum mechanics has been studied to death, and we are awash with data. I think the claim then has to be that (a) there is some huge hole in our understanding yet (b) there will not be actual experimental departures from quantum mechanics even when it is understood. So are we even doing science, or are we just making ourselves feel better? I’ll address this in a different blog post in the future, but it’s worth highlighting for now.

Concluding remarks

In general, I thought this paper was simply premature. Lots of suggestions and poorly motivated toy calculations, but not many concrete results that I might personally build from. There’s nothing wrong with Tegmark putting this paper out there, but I put in some time working my way through it without feeling like I got much out of it. The paper is hard to summarize because there are many small ideas and suggestion, but no central claim or result.

The introductory and concluding sections (I and V) are lucid. My suggestion, if you’re interested in this, is to read through them. You’ll note that the Summary of Findings [section V-A] in the concluding section is rather long and has many minor claims that are hard to integrate together, and I think this accurately represents the main contents of the paper found in Section II, III, and IV. The rest of the concluding section [V-B through V-E] can thankfully be read largely independent on the main text of the paper. It can be taken on its own merits as a manifesto of sorts for Tegmark’s view of what the important questions are in understanding the “physics from scratch” problem, among them the “quantum factorization problem” so dear to my heart.

Finally, a word about consciousness versus classicality.[4] In short, I don’t think that consciousness is key to understanding classicality because I think that a sensible (and essentially unique) classical universe existed before life appeared. So we ought to be able to derive the classical domain without reference to consciousness, and then–conditional on new physics being unnecessary–we might then eventually understand consciousness as a purely classical phenomenon.

I suppose it’s conceivable that there are many incompatible classical domains on equal footing, but only a small number (or only just ours) is compatible with consciousness. (In that case, consciousness would crucial to deriving our classical domain.) But that seems unlikely to me.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

1. The problem of probability as described by Weinberg: “The difficulty is not that quantum mechanics is probabilistic—that is something we apparently just have to live with. The real difficulty is that it is also deterministic, or more precisely, that it combines a probabilistic interpretation with deterministic dynamics.” HT Steve Hsu.↵
2. Tegmark also uses “autonomy” as a combination for “dynamics” and “independence”.↵
3. “Utility” is only mentioned briefly in the conclusions, especially Section V-D1, and is not discussed in the main text.↵
4. Thanks to David Steglet for prompting me to address this.↵

Comments on Tegmark’s ‘Consciousness as a State of Matter’ - foreXiv

 

[Soupie]

Comments on Tegmark’s ‘Consciousness as a State of Matter’

Anderson appears to be an intelligent individual. And his critiques of both Tegmark's paper and also, separately IIT, are rational and well reasoned (with the exception of his dismissal of panpsychism). However, imo, his legitimate critics do not rule out the general concept that consciousness/cogito is fundamentally constituted of information. His critiques, imo, has so far identified weakness in the effort to formalize this concept/idea.

Will it eventually turn our that consciousness must be constituted of something other than information? Yes, perhaps.

 

[Soupie]

Soupie: "However, I think it's an error to discard/dismiss a model simply because it does not intuitively appeal to us. The origin and nature of consciousness is probably not intuitive."

Hmmm ... who do you sound like here?? ;-)

Considering that roughly 95% of what I've shared here about my thoughts on consciousness has left you and Constance completely baffled and confused, I'd say I sound like myself.

 

[smcder]

Considering that roughly 95% of what I've shared here about my thoughts on consciousness has left you and Constance completely baffled and confused, I'd say I sound like myself.

There's an opportunity to clarify ... The paper with the experiment from Scheitzgebel on consciousness and awareness?

 

[Jeff Davis]

I also know that there are also those contending that consciousness is at least partially synonymous with what is black matter.

I posted something a while back on "shadow matter" - not sure if that's along the same line ... I'll paste it here below, it's more on subtle bodies and OOBEs, entities, etc.

But this is also a chance to say that there is a challenge in terms of defining consciousness ... on the one hand, even if consciousness is an emergent property of the organization of matter "generated" (as @Soupie would say) by the brain - it is also not a thing, it is subjective experience and a purely private matter, that consciousness doesn't have mass, doesn't extend in space, so it's not matter - and that's why we have to be careful how we think about consciousness and what makes the hard problem, so hard (for physicalists) ... if we come up with machines that can project what you are thinking ... you may see and hear images and the person might say "yes, that's what I'm thinking" but what it is like to be that person doesn't convey - even if you hook the machine up directly to the brain, I know what you are thinking only as me ... now that could be very interesting, because I think people would quickly learn to hide their thoughts again and the technology would have to be upgraded, etc and the war for the mind would be on.

So while we might manipulate the brain and so alter consciousness (we do this all the time already), we would I think always be reliant on reports from the subject as to how consciousness was altered ... this is different from televisions, radios, computers were an outside observer can see the effects of changing the technology - as @marduk said (paraphrasing) from the outside all I see is your brain and I argue that's about as close as we may ever get.

But if you're saying though that consciousness is a thing and it can be manipulated transparently and objectively from the outside - then that is very interesting.

Shadow Matter

Earlier in this thread that idea was tied in to the idea of "shadow matter" by physicist John Hagelin, I’ll see if I can find the post where I transcribed that part of the conversation:

Consciousness and the Paranormal | Page 33 | The Paracast Community Forums

213. John Hagelin, Ph.D. - Buddha at the Gas Pump

Here you go, discussion of hidden sector matter and subtle bodies from the BATGAP interview #213 of John Hagelin

62:13

Hidden sector matter/shadow matter and subtle bodies


63:42 JH anyone who has for a variety of reasons and it can happen for a variety of reasons, finds themselves projected outside their physical body and are seeing and perceiving and functioning from a different place where you could literally turn around and observe your physical body sitting there, can’t deny the existence of levels of our human, say subtle physiology, that are independent of the gross physical physiology, connected to a degree, but more or less independent.

So I must say from a from a physics perspective that has been very hard to accept for physicists because What we know about the universe, what most physicists know about the universe is that its comprised of four forces, light, gravity, etc its comprised of known particles, like quarks and leptons, electrons, protons, neutrons and we pretty much know, nothing else. Whatever this subtle body’s made of – some kind of subtle matter - you can almost rule it out from the standpoint of physics and experiments that have been done.


But there’s a loophole and the loophole is there is a certain type of matter predicted by superstring theory, never predicted before superstring theory to exist. And its called “hidden sector matter” its, you’re starting to hear reference to it as shadow matter in the scientific literature, but it is a whole 'nother category of matter with its own set of forces and its own set of particles of a very different kind and that exists almost independently of us, fills this room, this is what had been thought - only interacting with us, by virtue of whatever gravitational mass it might have and due to its mass, any gravitational influence – but the gravitational influence between things of ordinary size, between you and me, even at this proximity is essentially zero, negligible – never measure it

RA You have a little bit more gravity than I do.

JH I’ve got twice the gravity you do, in every respect, um but the loophole in these calculations pointed out by I forget whom, but still relatively unknown fact is that this extra set of matter, extra forces, extra particles, and we don’t know a whole lot about the details of what those are like, but the caveat has now shown in most cases, in addition to its negligible gravity influence upon us and vice versa, there will be a weak electromagnetic tie a weak electromagnetic influence for reason that are comlex to go into and b/c of that electro-magnetic influence on us we could subtly see and feel the presence of these things.

But b/c that influence is rather weak its probably not something that the human eye is going to see well its not something that particle detectors have yet been able to discern although we’re looking the variety of tests looking mostly for what’s called dark matter in this hidden sector matter is in effect a form of dark matter a specific form predicted by superstring theory so were looking for dark matter we may find evidence of this stuff but the interesting thing about it is b/c it interacts with us electromagnetically it is really through a subtle, an alternate form of light that it could be perceived in principle . . . dimly perceived dimly perceived (sic) now the eyes, may be too dim for the eyes however through complicated mechanisms this stuff b/c its attraction to us electromagnetically it’s a little bit like cling-wrap.

It’s an electro-static attraction a faint electro-static attraction between this stuff and ourselves so for example its very easy, relatively easy to take a piece of glad wrap off of a cantaloupe even though it tends to cling its removable like that this subtle body if it were made of this HS matter or shadow matter could be removed from our physical body and could live quite independently of it – hidden sector matter would be very cold, cold is a relative thing, but it would be less than two degrees above absolute zero which is a good thing in a sense because it means it would be a deeply quantum mechanical world, a world that’s covered by quantum mechanics and if these HS particles happen to be bosons and there almost certainly would be some they would be super-fluid bosons and they would have all kinds of properties that would be very reminiscent of mind these bodies might be very much an aid to the physical human brain in the process of thinking maybe even in the process of transcending.

So could a body made of this stuff firstly cling together into a body and not just a pile of gas? Yes, it could. Could such a body be a vehicle of thought? That is it could think independently of the human brain if the human brain were to have a problem, maybe it even brings elements to the human brains ability to think that the human brain wouldn’t be very good at itself including possibly the ability to transcend? Yeah, so there’s very little known about it, very speculative area, not a lot of people thinking about it besides myself, but provided such people are seeing such things and for anybody who’s ever found themselves outside the physical body, as a physicist if you’re willing to admit such experiences exits, you kind of have to, as a physicist you should know right away this must be a body made of HS matter or shadow matter.

Now *this* was COOL! I love the way that this guy (John Hagelin) just sort of moves along...no big deal...really appreciate the way he's thinking deep and visually as he goes. Speculatively brilliant and inspiring. Thank you!

Somehow, it's seems incredibly special to be physical and temporal when considering how pervasive and magnanimous this HS matter is. Even in this short dance we call a lifetime, the atomic kingdom is indeed the rare variety of matter. There is great strength in being the exception, but there is also an overbearing sense of being humbled as we are forced to live apart from the rule. The bottom line for me, with respect to logical support for the external aspect of consciousness, is relativity. Existence is impossible without it, and for consciousness to exist with respect to "being", there most be a two part interchangeability of all things relevant. That which is internalized, must be externalized. Therefore consciousness exists like everything else in the universe. It's a constant coexistent interaction. We both produce it uniquely (spirit or the self relevant shadow matter), and interact with it naturally (environmental reflectivity).

In string theory literature we run into two camps. One, you have those that are strictly numbers oriented thinkers that support the reflecting of orthodox speculations, and then there are those like John above, who do understand the numbers, but they also possess an additional dimension of capability as thinkers which renders vision. This is that which gives them the most important quality of all, namely the unbound, yet stage or context relevant, imagination. In other words they can think outside the box without getting too eccentric to maintain a proper orbit surrounding the context's nucleus.

The former camp (numbers) carefully postulate the graviton as being that which in a quantum particular sense can transition between dimensions. Hence the materialists speculations concerning UFO technology. Before I go any further, it's incredibly relevant to point out that IMO, UFOs are 100% paranormal. This means that I group UFOs in the same precise category as Ghosts/Demons/Sasquatch/ and a plethora of other documented paranormal considerations. This is because IMO, all these reflect our lack of understanding for what is this hidden sector's matter relevant environmental interchangeability with the atomic sector that we exist in routinely.

Anyhow, it is my belief that identity signified consciousness (read: individual sentient experience) is interacting with the hidden sector environmental consciousness like a wave moving through matter/space. It finds relevance due to our time based cognition. The most interesting thing about all this is the notion that in and of our physical selves, we are not complete, but rather are a fractional representation of a greater whole as demonstrated via temporal experience. This notion gives way to many fascinating possibilities including the paranormal reality we all find so fascinating as a non temporally bound demonstration (read:human observations) of the interactive nature of what may be two consciousness relevant fields of awareness relevant to a single signature.

In this hidden sector realm there may in fact be such a distortion of time as a dimensionally relevant aspect of physical existence that when we do get a glimpse of the paranormal here in the physically relevant atomic environment, the best we can do is witness it for what seems like a fleeting moment in time. Here, they (UFOnauts) might be cruising extremely slowly, taking a month or two to cross a single country, or simply hovering for hours on end and then moving straight up super slowly, but due to this overarching perceptual observation field of distortion, it may seem very momentary, or extremely fast while they seemingly just vanish in a blur . This being as they utilize the hidden sector's non-temporal attributes while creating an envelope of synthetic consciousness through which to make observations that to them would normally not be possible.

I am also thinking that these beings that are possibly indigenous to this hidden sector environment may be able to target individual signified consciousness in such a way that they attempt communications with us by inducing the "Oz", or "High Strangeness" attributes of many encounter experiences via what I have come to term loosely as "sentient translation" technology. IMO, UFOnauts are not from way "out there" in our physical spacetime relevant universe. They live in, and are indigenous to this hidden sector, right next to us all the time.

In short we are like ants on a hill in a woods through which a traveler passes by. They don't see in temporally bound snap shots that create the illusion of superposition like we do. They see everything, or all points in time, at once due to their own environmentally relevant stance.These are beings that evolved outside the constraints of time and atomic physicality. They enter into as much like we would enter into an under water environment. They create an artificial environment around them that interfaces our reality, not our air space.

 

[marduk]

@Soupie - Here's Constance's original post of the Tegmark paper
@marduk, instead of consciousnessiton - Tegmark proposes Computronium

One challenge with using the observation problem (collapsing superposition) as a test or requirement for consciousness is that you don't actually need a conscious thing to collapse the superposition. In other words, QM doesn't seem to care about consciousness.

"Of course the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature. The observer has, rather, only the function of registering decisions, i.e., processes in space and time, and it does not matter whether the observer is an apparatus or a human being; but the registration, i.e., the transition from the "possible" to the "actual," is absolutely necessary here and cannot be omitted from the interpretation of quantum theory."

- Werner Heisenberg
​

More here: Observer effect (physics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Soupie]

Also life is much easier to see coming from matter than consciousness ... once you get rid of " vitalism "

Do you think there could be a correlative or even a causal relationship between life and consciousness?

That is, what, if any, is the relationship between living matter and conscious matter?

 

[Pharoah]

Have you read the Stoica paper?

http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Stoica_taoofitandbit_1.pdf

No I have not. Thanks for the link.

This interview is worth listening to from beginning to end
http://www.shrinkrapradio.com/images/329-The-Emotional-Foundation-of-Mind-with-Jaak-Panksepp2.mp3

Panksepp has asked me, "Do you have a set of differential predictions that may help me focus on what differences there may be between my empirical work & perspectives, and your HCT formulation? I do see the many surface similarities. . . but are there differential empirical predictions that HCT would make that Affective Neuroscience views would not?"

I am awaiting his reply to my reply.

 

[Constance]

Hi Pharoah. Would you share with us your reply to his question and his subsequent reply? I doubt he would object (he appears to be a very open person committed to the progress of thinking about nature and consciousness), but you might ask him first if you're in doubt. Also, are you planning to present key points in your conversation with him on your website, provided that he authorizes the presentation?

 

[Constance]

Extracts from the Stoica paper:

"This is why Wheeler's it from bit should not be used to support the simple digital physics, which just claims that "everything is information"; nor should it be rejected by reducing his ideas to that phrase [15]. Wheeler made a much more profound point than that, as we have seen. On the other hand, most of his arguments are based on the fact that we can only know bits of information, and on the delayed choice experiment. Besides the participatory role of the observer, which is difficult to deny, one should admit that the bits are subjective, pertaining to the observer. The fact that we can only collect bits of information doesn't really mean that there is nothing else but information."

"This is why I think that the complete picture is not it from bit, but rather it from bit & bit from it."

"In addition, delayed initial conditions provide a way that free-will is compatible with deterministic laws [19, 17, 18]."

"Here is why I find compelling the idea that our universe is mathematical. First, what we learn about anything, are relations. We don't know what water is, but we know its relation to our senses. Even its physical and chemical properties, follow in fact from interactions, hence from relations. Everything we know is defined by its relation with something else. If
there is anything that can be mathematized, this is the relation. In fact, any mathematical structure is a set, along with a collection of relations defined between that set and itself [28].

Second, let's say that there is a book containing every truth. It will therefore contain the physical laws, and any truth about the state of a system at a given time -- the full description of the universe. Possibly the book is infinite. Maybe there is an infinite subset of propositions from the book, from which everything else follows, or maybe not. Godel's theorem seems to say that there is no such infinite subset, but maybe there is a finite subset from which everything follows by infinite length proofs. Anyway, it seems very plausible that there may be a (possibly infinite) collection of propositions which contains all the truths about the universe. In this case, we have a theory (of everything). To the theory we can associate a model, in the sense of model theory [29]. A mathematical model is just a set with a collection of relations between its elements, a mathematical structure. So, whatever the collection of the truths about the universe is, the same propositions hold for that mathematical structure. The universe is isomorphic to a mathematical structure [30]."

"We arrive again at the conclusion that, to have bits which don't contradict one another, an underlying it which satisfies to those bits should exist."

 

[Constance]

Prologues to What is Possible
II
The metaphor stirred his fear. The object with which he was compared
Was beyond his recognizing. By this he knew that likeness of him extended
Only a little way, and not beyond, unless between himself
And things beyond resemblance there was this and that intended to be recognized,
The this and that in the enclosures of hypotheses
On which men speculated in summer when they were half asleep.

What self, for example, did he contain that had not yet been loosed,
Snarling in him for discovery as his attentions spread,
As if all his hereditary lights were suddenly increased
By an access of color, a new and unobserved, slight dithering,
The smallest lamp, which added its puissant flick, to which he gave
A name and privilege over the ordinary of his commonplace—

A flick which added to what was real and its vocabulary,
The way some first thing coming into Northern trees
Adds to them the whole vocabulary of the South,
The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring,
Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself,
The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes.

--Wallace Stevens

 

[Constance]

Another response to the Tegmark paper . . .

"Lorraine Ford wrote on Feb. 4, 2014 @ 01:17 GMT

I congratulate physicist Max Tegmark for daring to include consciousness in the realm of physics. ("Consciousness as a State of Matter"). But I disagree with his characterization of consciousness and his characterization of information. He has found no real use for consciousness, and his view of information is not supported by any evidence.

Tegmark mainly sees consciousness as a system that stores and processes information. He claims that conscious systems have special characteristics (corresponding to principles). He conjectures that consciousness is a state of matter ("perceptronium") just like a liquid or a gas is a state of matter, and he develops equations that attempt to model the special characteristics of conscious systems to see where the equations lead. His "conscious" system seems to be just fundamental reality doing its normal thing, but in special situations.

But when most people talk of consciousness they mean its most curious aspect: subjective experience/qualia. But Tegmark doesn't have much to say on the matter. He says that perceptronium is "the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware", and he says that "consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways". One can only conclude that, in his view, subjective consciousness/qualia is in essence a useless adornment with no particular role, because information processing is what it is really all about.

But what if the clue to consciousness is actually to be found in subjective experience/qualia rather than information processing? Far from being useless, I would speculate that consciousness/subjective experience/qualia is necessary: it is like an efficient solution to a potential problem handling and differentiating large quantities of information. Subjective experience is necessary in order to handle multiple simultaneous information category streams: every information category stream "feels" different or presents differently (presumably even for a particle). For living things, I'm talking about e.g. visual information, auditory and tactile information, as well as more complex information pertaining to the recognition of objects and situations. Consciousness/subjective experience/qualia IS this information, it is not separate from this information; subjective experience is the compact apprehension of large amounts of information.

Seemingly the only other way of keeping track of large amounts of information involves massive sequential lists of information category parameters, each category and subcategory having an associated number representing a quantity or magnitude. But nature seemingly doesn't do things that way: instead of lists, mathematical methods and performing line-by-line or instruction-by-instruction mathematical calculations/computations (the way the science and mathematics community does things), nature seems to merely employ subjective experience and law of nature relationship.

So this brings me to my second disagreement with what Tegmark posits: his view of information seems to presuppose the existence of bits, the apprehension of codes, and the reality of behind-the-scenes computations in the universe. But where are they? There is no evidence of this. Instead of binary codes and processing, all that has been found when seemingly natural categories of physical information, like mass energy and momentum are measured is that there seem to be interrelationships which can be represented in the form of "law of nature" mathematical equations. The physical outcomes found in nature are seemingly NOT the result of the complex laborious clunky calculations that WE need to do to estimate physical outcomes: physical outcomes found in nature seem to be the result of a network of information category interrelationships representable by e.g. "+ - ÷ x" and "=", and subjective choice (where the symbols "+ - ÷ x" and "=" represent non-measurable aspects of reality, and "choice" represents an aspect of reality where physical outcomes are not precisely representable by mathematical equations)."

FQXi Community

 

[Constance]

One challenge with using the observation problem (collapsing superposition) as a test or requirement for consciousness is that you don't actually need a conscious thing to collapse the superposition. In other words, QM doesn't seem to care about consciousness.

Perhaps (likely) not within the quantum substrate of the classically defined reality in which we exist and think. But does it follow that in the classically evolved universe consciousness does not continually collapse the superpositions presented to it in experience and also in the variety of concepts concerning the nature of reality developed in our species' philosophy and science?