Complex Numbers

Consciousness

So, yeah, I took some time off to indulge vices (other vices than posting stuff here, anyway), but I'm back home now. And I have a difficult article to present today.

http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious

Is Matter Conscious?
Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics.

I'm of the considered opinion that most headline questions are answered "No."

What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics?

Math, too, has its limitations. Try as we might, for example, we can't precisely describe the shape of a cloud, or a tree, using math. Attempts to do so often result in something resembling a cloud or a tree, but not a particular cloud or tree.

Modern science has given us good reason to believe that our consciousness is rooted in the physics and chemistry of the brain, as opposed to anything immaterial or transcendental. In order to get a conscious system, all we need is physical matter. Put it together in the right way, as in the brain, and consciousness will appear.

Fair enough. But, again, try as we might, even if we could put everything together in the right place to recreate a human (or other animal), such an object would lack life. Life is still an elusive mystery in many ways, but we know it has to come from life, in an unbroken chain all the way back to the first life - whatever that was. Despite our certainty of our identities as individuals - as well as others' identities as individuals - there's a real, non-metaphysical, connection through time and space to all other life as we know it. That's why it will be so important to discover extraterrestrial life: is it connected in some way to ours, or was there a parallel to our own evolution?

My point is that "put it together in the right way" isn't as easy to do as it is to say.

If we were somehow granted knowledge of every physical detail and pattern in the universe, we would not expect these problems to persist. They would dissolve in the same way the problem of heritability dissolved upon the discovery of the physical details of DNA. But the hard problem of consciousness would seem to persist even given knowledge of every imaginable kind of physical detail.

This sort of thing always bugs me. Is it even possible to have knowledge of every physical detail and pattern in the universe? Magic 8-Ball says "No" - if only due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. And also because to fully model the universe, you'd need something at least as complex as the universe, which you can't have, because of the definition of "universe." Even if some of the wildly speculative alternative-universe hypotheses are true, you'd then have to model those, and the problem persists.

We take it for granted, however, that physics can in principle tell us everything there is to know about the nature of physical matter.

For previously unknown values of "we," anyway. Because I, and a whole lot of people who are smarter and more knowledgeable than I am, don't accept this premise.

There is already a tradition for connecting problems in physics with the problem of consciousness, namely in the area of quantum theories of consciousness.

Which collides with my personal tradition of dismissing, out of hand, any article that discusses "quantum theories of consciousness."

The article continues by going way over my head with the philosophy. I kind of get the impression that the author is trying very, very hard not to use words like "god" or "deity," instead mincing around the theological implications. But I could be projecting my own bias; I don't know.

Mind you, I'm not saying the article is wrong, or right, or doesn't have decent points. It just seems to me to be another approach to the "god of the gaps" issue - that is, there are always gaps in our knowledge, no matter how much we learn about the physical universe, and at that point you might as well ascribe the unknowns to an entity of great knowledge and/or power. Science cannot disprove the idea; again, the gaps are always there, and you can't prove a negative. It just seems like a cop-out.

Then again, I've thought that maybe the entire universe could be, itself, conscious; I mean, look at a map of the universe   and compare it to a neural network of the human brain  .

But that doesn't mean the two have any similarities beyond the superficial.