Can you explain more about that? I'm not aware of it. What is it?

Another awesome reply. You should see my post on consciousness on.. it might be page 2, my idea of how we could hypothetically create it in a machine. Either way, really good post. I am on the same page as you with consciousness.

The human body, still to this day.

Think about if humans were capable of building a machine that could do everything the human body could.

How big would that machine have to be?

Now realize all those functions are stuffed into human sized packages.

@numberguy not letting me quote you directly for whatever reason. But anyways.


I don’t find your answer very satisfying. Biological organisms have different chemical profiles than non-organic entities. Okay, great. That doesn’t provide any insight into what conditions consciousness may manifest under. Ultimately it’s all neutrons protons and electrons. We’re just calling a certain arrangement of atoms and the molecules they make “organic” because they’re the building blocks for life.

There’s no reason to think the ability to self replicate is exclusive to carbon based life. Non-organic entities could be under “natural” selection, in which case an information processing system could evolve consciousness similar to humans if it helps with replication. To say our carbon-based chemistry is necessary for consciousness without the faintest clue of how it mechanistically leads consciousness, is silly.

We see convergent evolution everywhere on earth. Perhaps when we expand the study system to something like a galaxy, unrelated “beings” could have similar traits, including consciousness.

Thanks I appreciate that, i love talking about this stuff but it becomes time consuming; you can't just write a few sentences because you need to lay the foundational knowledge as well unless you're talking to others who're in the field or has taken years to build up the foundational knowledge in some way

I'll do my best to explain the many worlds interpretation, it's complex in the detail but i think the general idea isn't too hard to explain

[edit] well fuk i wrote a reply but i get an error every time i try to post it, had to put it in multiple posts see below:

Firstly it requires a basic grasp of quantum mechanics; as you probably already know, there's 2 regimes for how particles behave, the quantum regime and the classical regime. The quantum regime is what stuff looks like before it becomes entangled with the rest of the world (or less accurately, but for the sake of simplicity its how small stuff behaves when we're not 'measuring' it or interacting with it)

Quantum evolution, no matter what theory of quantum mechanics you follow is described by the Schrodinger equation, this is a fairly simple linear partial differential equation and it tells us how a system evolves over time in the quantum regime. For the purposes of this explanation, let's just focus on one particle, let's focus on a single electron.

Now, at the quantum level, how the electron will behave over time is described by the Schrodinger equation, but the Schrodinger equation essentially gives you a probability matrix; not just one answer. It gives you the probability of an electron being at different positions when it's measured, and ultimately it will end up in one of these positions, some positions are more likely than others but ultimately all could in theory happen. (Well technically it exists in all those places in superposition until decoherance, but let's not confuse things for now - see double split experiment for an explanation if you desire one)

This is called 'the measurement problem' and is one of the biggest issues in quantum physics; what happens when you switch from quantum to classical (i.e from schrodinger equation, to classical newtonian mechanics), why does this happen and what does it mean? How does the solid macro world that we see and experience arise from the Schrodinger equation/quantum mechanics which is let's just say a bit 'fuzzy'?

The most popular interpretation is the Copenhagen interpretation, it basically says the measurement problem isn't something we should worry about, all we should worry about is the predictions that are made, and basically one of the solutions of the Schrodinger equation is selected randomly when decoherance (switch from quantum to classical regimes) occurs. If you're interested in the history it's worth noting Einstein didn't like this interpretation and had very legitimate concerns, and there was dialogue between Bohr & pals of the Copanhagen interpretation, and Einstein and pals. See the "EPR Paradox" if you want to read about these concerns (that we still have today, although John Bell proved that we probably have to violate locality at the very least for entanglement to work as it does - see bells inequalities if you want to learn more about his proof on this).

Many worlds interpretation takes a different approach, it takes the Schrodinger equation at face value and says, every solution exists not just the random one we see, and the universe essentially 'branches' off each time decoherance occurs. So basically what it's saying is that when we measure that electron, there will be a version of us that measures every solution to the Schrodinger equation. I personally think this is a better interpretation of the Schrodinger equation because it doesn't arbitrarily hand wave most of the solutions away, and it takes them all seriously.

It is a little more complex than that, but that's the basic tenant. Basically it says that the universe is constantly branching, and so there's a huge (probably not infinite but unfathomly huge) ammount of 'branches' of the universe, basically the reason we see something as classical when we measure isn't because the wavefunction collapses, its because we become entangled with what we're measuring and we end up viewing it at a specific 'amplitude' of the wave function. I understand some of this may be difficult to grasp and requires a grasp of wave mechanics, but simply put; the universe is always branching at every quantum event. So if you were to measure an electrons spin, for example, it can only be spin up or spin down, and the many worlds interpretation says it's both, the universe just branched and so one version of you saw spin up, one version spin down.

When you really get into the math and understand how wave dynamics work, it's actually quite beautiful as it explains the measurement problem and gives a more intuitive understanding of what quantum entanglement is (in my opinion), it's not merely just a correlation as in other theories; but it's an artefact of becoming entangled with your environment and being in a specific part of the wave function. It also gives us another arrow of time beyond just standard boltzman entropy (at least i think it does), because the future will always have more 'branches' of the wave function (there's something called von neuman entropy which is basically entanglement entropy, which i think is tightly coupled with the 'branches' of the wave function if you follow the MWI)

I can't go deeper because it requires a deep understanding of quantum entanglement; but i hope i did it some justice. If you want more, youtube sean carroll, he's a great physics educator and he is one of the researchers in this theory; he wrote a paper called "mad dog everettianism" on this:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.08132

As for the infinite statement you made; you may be right, but we have to be very careful about drawing probability based conclusions based on infinities. It could be, for example that even if the universe is infinite, matter is limited, or it could be that it's so sparsely populated elsewhere that it's essentially in a vacuum state and therefore not much is really happening - truly though who knows. If you don't want to sleep tonight, google boltzman brains which is basically an reductio ad absurdum of exactly this point. It's easier to explain away infinite time than infinite space though to be honest, because even if the universe is infinite in time, we're moving towards equilibrium which stops every possible thing that could occur occurring, despite infinite time.

As for consciousness, the leading theory is information integration theory as numbersguy alluded to; basically you reach a 'threshold' of information integration and consciousness emerges. Honestly i don't find the idea very satisfying and i still don't think even if it was true it answers the 'hard problem of consciousness'; how does qualitative experience arise from interactions of matter in a mathematical universe?

I think the honest truth about consciousness is we're fukin clueless, we know memories, experience etc are stored in structure in the brain, but we have no idea how the actual qualitative experience of consciousness arises, and we're just throwing out random ideas to havesomething. I'm honestly not sure we'll ever know the answer to this one; it's so ineffable and it's seemingly impossible to test for consciousness in experiments, because systems will display the same behavior regardless of inner experience or not, since they are just obeying the laws of physics. How do you measure an internal, qualitative experience with numbers, data and math, especially when the systems behavior wont change regardless of inner experience or not? It also seems fairly clear that consciousness is a spectrum and not just an 'on/off', which is why we're able to manipulate it with things like anesthesia, despite not really understanding how it works. We use anesthesia like a dimmer switch for consciousness


(Sorry for the multiple replies; it wouldn't let me put it in one or even two posts and kept erroring :S)

Why human beings who actively post on a forum dedicated to bodybuilding have never lifted a weight in their entire lives.

A mystery more deeply profound that the depths of the unseen multiverse.

Holy ****. I had to pause reading this outloud a few times and just laugh at how mind blowing it is. I'm educated enough in this field to understand thatyouunderstand this better than I, and that you're not spewing bs. In other words, I'm smart enough to recognize how smart you are in this field. Just... mind boggling. I'm really glad you posted in here whoever you are and this was my hope for the thread. Anyway, I have a few questions and comments.

1. What's your education in physics? It seems to me like you have some high level formal education, Youtube can only take you so far unless you really invest some serious time. I don't have any formal education in any of this, but, I've watched enough videos/lectures that I'm actually able to grasp what you're saying -specifically the first section of yours I quoted about entanglement/Many Worlds-. I actually understood what you said, and that makes me proud -not having the formal education- and just... stunned at this theory.


2. Back to entanglement and the Many Worlds theory... it's just mind blowing. I agree that it's a bit more intuitive and it explains the quantum/classical... why would all these possibilities just not exist, universes branching off shows they do exist, we just caught that specific wave. The weird thing for me to wrap my head around is why... I mean, I guess there's no "why" but it's so hard for me to imagine multiple universes. If the universe "branches"... then there are all these separate forks in the road and paths. Presumably, there could be so many versions of me right now reading this with a slightly different outcome, right? Meaning, all these different consciousnesses? It's so hard to imagine another "existence" existing outside of our own physical universe. As in... where does it go? I guess I have a very literal mind, and our universe/"branch" occupies our space, so I have a hard time trying to literally understand where these other branches go and into what physical space. Wow this is a weird thought. This has to blow your mind too, right?

#2 part B: I once heard this theory -or thought experiment- about consciousness, that if your consciousness "dies" in this "branch", your mind doesn't actually die because the consciousness transfers to another branch where you didn't die in that option. Who knows. I know there's no evidence for this but it's an interesting thought. It's especially interesting to me because I went through some really, really tough times growing up where I almost didn't make it, in fact the only way I was going to make it through was if some really significant good things happened to me, and those things did. The chances of those "good things" happening to me to let me survive, I would bet are very slim. My life went from so bad to so good -in some ways- that I often have this thought that maybe I just didn't make it, died and went to heaven. The chances of me living this life and going from one extreme to another are so slim that it almost adds more interest to this thought experiment about consciousness, if that makes sense. Do you think consciousness is something special or just a result of evolution and the amount of data we can process?

Edit: I had to only quote one of your posts because it wasn't letting me do the rest either.


edit #2: It wouldn't let me post this either, and I've heard the forum has a current issue with parentheses so I removed all of those and replace them with dashes, and it works. Hmm.

how you can shut down the country over a flu with a 99.5% survival rate

Haha thanks man i appreciate that, I'm nothing special though, i've just been into this for a long time, and have some formal education in it

1. I have a bachelors in physics, and a masters in CS. But i did go to a bunch of postgrad physics classes for fun and it's been a hobby of mine for 10 years since i got my undergrad, but the undergrad gave me the foundational knowledge to be able to easily understand further concepts, you could probably learn it without formal education but you'd need to find a curriculum somewhere so you can tackle the correct material in the correct order. Doing the actual work/math is key to developing a physics intuition, mere words won't get you there. Words usually miss out on a lot of nuances because language isn't really equipped to deal with these highly abstract ideas; the math itself expresses it. I also read papers rather than sensationalist pop culture articles; and therefore i look at theories in the way the originator intended, with the math and all.

If you want to learn more; i'd say start with special/general relativity, then quantum field theory. Understanding these first is key since they are the theories we most often use to describe the two regimes of the universe with, so most theories are built ontop of these.

I'm glad the ball dropped for you though with MWI, maybe you can see why i like this interpretation of QM now, it goes some way to explaining the fundamental issues with QM other theories don't even attempt to answer, and i think it's the most logically consistent framework we have. Even though it's not the leading theory; it's interesting to note that most computer scientists and those working on quantum computing & quantum information theory are proponents of the many worlds interpretation.

2. This is where mere words become harder to express and the math is more powerful. When it 'branches' it's not branching in physical space as such, rather you're becoming entangled in a specific 'slice' of the entire wave function of the universe, calling it 'branching' is just a way to express this idea without having to go into mathematical depth. But yes, there would be many versions of you and I guess many instances of subjective experience; think of an Amoeba when it splits in two, which is the original? They both come from the same amoeba so it's not obvious at all which one of the two 'new' amoeba is the original. I'm not sure how much you know about waves, but think of constructive and destructive interference; when you put all the branches together they combine to make the wave function of the universe.

The thing people seem to struggle with in the many worlds interpretation is they think every possibility is played out and this is wrong; rather every superposition of quantum mechanics exists when entanglement occurs, which is not the same as every possibility. There's likely a finite (but huge) space of possibility, and many branches will probably look exactly the same, even though they have slight quantum differences; these differences may have no visible effect in the macro world.

It does blow my mind a bit, but i'm comfortable with it because i have a very abstract way of thinking, so abstract concepts are not too uncomfortable to me, but yes if it's true the universe is MUCH bigger than we thought. I don't even necessarily think it's the answer; but i do think it's the best theory we have because as i mentioned earlier, it's the only one giving satisfactory answers to the measurement problem and such.

One implication of the many worlds interpretation is it's fully deterministic and does away with probability. If you think about it, the entire evolution of the universe is played out exactly as the Schrodinger equation states so it's fully deterministic; the only reason it appears probabilistic to us is because we only end up entangled with one solution to the Schrodinger equation. This means we have to use different language, and instead of a probability distribution we talk about the 'amplitude' or 'thickness' of certain events in MWI.

Another implication is that as the universe evolves, branches will end up looking more and more alike due to the increase in entropy, and ultimately during the 'heat death' of the universe when it reaches equilibrium, all branches of the wave function will end up looking the same. I suppose it will also end up branching slower because when we reach high entropy, less and less stuff is becoming entangled with each other.

One final thing i like about the theory is it's not human centric, it treats humans like everything else, hence why we become entangled with what we're trying to measure just like any other particle, whereas other theories treat entanglement as something different to measuring; but why? Why would humans not become entangled with systems just like any other particles when there's an interaction?

2B. This is a thought experiment known as quantum immortality and as you correctly point out this is a thought experiment about the many worlds interpretation. It's probably easier for you to youtube it rather than me explain it :-)

As for the second part, what you have to consider is that most quantum measurements don't make much difference to what's going on in the macro world, and probability would tell you that it's most likely the way your experience has branched would be among the ensemble of possible branches that is 'most common', or in the language of MWI, has the highest amplitude.

As for consciousness, honestly I don't know, define special? I don't think it exists outside the laws of physics or anything. I think the fact that the universe appears to be cold and dead, and follows equations of motion, yet here we are and we each know we have a first hand experience is at least a little out of place in physics. The world could easily be exactly as it is, with humans behaving exactly as they do thanks to the laws of physics without any inner experience and thus nobody actually 'observing' it (google philosophical zombie), yet we have consciousness. I also think the fact we can't really test for it, because it doesn't change how systems behave make it near impossible to verify or test for if consciousness did, in theory emerge in machines or similar.

I think we have a good idea of how consciousness arises, and the evolutionary mechanisms that could lead to it (animals leaving water, being able to see much further, and earl ability of abstraction and planning emerges which leads to consciousness), but the actual process of qualia (google if you don't know the term; basically means subjective/inner experience) arising from physical matter is something that is really hard to reconcile sensibly to me. For example; the fact we interpret light is no problem to understand; we have systems in place that take in light and can filter by wavelength, and we have various pathways and circuits in the brain that deal with sight; but why we have the inner experience of a color is a mystery to me that i can't really see any good path to understanding. How can an internal picture of the world emerge from physical matter doing 'stuff'?

I am not satisfied with the information integration theory though; and I don't personally think it's just an artefact of how much data we can process but I'm not an expert on consciousness and i don't have a good alternative to offer.

Ha. You are something special man, well done. I'll bump this thread a few times just in hopes other people see your posts. I'd read any of your posts. It's fascinating, and interesting to me that you're perplexed by consciousness. Compared to the average person, I have a pretty good grasp on physics/things (I think). Compared to you, I'm entry level, so to hear that you're interested in consciousness and all of that makes it more interesting to me.


If you get bored, I'd love to hear what theories you have, or any other interesting thoughts you have about physics, mysteries, etc. Thanks for posting.

No worries man and I appreciate that, but like i said i think a lot of it is just about putting the time in rather than me being special :P. Physics doesn't have to be that hard, it just takes a long time to build the foundational knowledge necessary, and normal human intuition is largely worthless in physics, you need to build a physics intuition which can take a long time, and yeah your grasp is definitely above average.

Consciousness is interesting and perplexing to me because i can't see any good path or way to even begin explaining qualia, in fact it's kind of annoying hah!

My inbox is open, if you ever want to discuss any of these ideas feel free to PM me

Are the colors spectrum we experience the world with all the colors that are possible to see? Kind of strange to have a finite color spectrum available to consciousness in an infinite world.

In other words, is the finite spectrum colors we experience as human beings a limitation of our neurochemistry or a limitation of the fabric of consciousness itself?

Another question may be why does red look the way it does? Where exactly lies the mapping of wavelengths to the qualitative experience of it?

Also, how have the Proboscis monkey survived evolution? I mean, how have they mated? I cannot imagine one proboscis monkey looking at another and thinking "Yeah I want to bang that."

Well 'color' doesn't exist in the real world, atoms and fundamental particles do not have a color. Color is the response of your brain chemistry to specific wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e the force carried by photons), and we've evolved being able to see the most 'useful' wave lengths of light on earth for our particular purposes and that's where we get color. 'Visible light' is just a label we give to a range of wavelengths in the electro magnetic spectrum (see below). This isn't the only part of the EM spectrum available to 'consciousness' either, some other animals can see different parts of the EM spectrum that we don't see, but it is continuous. You can get waves as long as you want in theory, but they will still just be radio waves and will carry very little energy. You can also go as short as you want (although it's constrained by certain quantum mechanics rules) but you're just gonna end up with higher and higher energy gamma rays.



For example it wouldn't be evolutionary useful for us to interpret say, gamma rays and other high energy wavelengths, because there's not many of them on earth (the earths magnetosphere protects us from them) and they carry so much energy that they would cause us serious damage. 'Visible light' is a completely arbitrary label that is specific to humans, it's just a label we've given to the bit we see.

There are other animals that see completely different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum to navigate the world, and in fact we have telescopes that look at space with completely different wavelengths like UV and gamma rays, because just seeing visible light doesn't paint a full picture of the universe. Visible light is just a small slice of the information the electromagnetic spectrum carries, but it's the slice that is probably most useful for humans to see and navigate the earth; hence why we evolved to interpret these wavelengths.

Red looks the way it does because that's how your brain interprets that specific wavelength of light to give you a coherent picture of the world. For all you know, your red could look completely different to other peoples reds, but as long as the colors you see are logically consistent (i.e your red is different to your green and blue etc), then you would have no real way to tell if your red is different to someone elses red (and in reality it's unlikely to be identical to someone elses). This basically ties into the question of consciousness above and why we have inner/subjective experience at all and how it works; experience of the color red is what i referred to earlier as a 'qualia', and it's a bit of a mystery really. How does an inner, qualitative experience arise from what is just matter and information?

Maybe the world is just as we perceive it. All the scientists go around saying we live in a black and white world and neurochemistry is what gives objects color. And then you have Kant saying god knows what and other things. But what if the world is just as it is? The objects are really there, the colors really are there on the objects, and our eyes just perceive reality. Some people say everything is wavelengths and atoms and Buddha says everything is an illusion but what if it's not? What if everything is real? Sounds crazy but I'm keeping an open mind.

Like, why does the mapping from wavelengths to the qualia of the color have to happen in the mind? Why doesn't it just automatically map?
Say you emit a certain wavelength of light on a pixel of a computer screen - would it be unreasonable to assume you're actually creating "green" in the real world - in opposition to just light that has to be interpreted in the mind as color?

In for later

It's worth it. This thread just gets better.

Taking into account that girls don't poop, why do they consistently go thru half a roll of toilet paper after every bathroom usage?

Trying to think about it will lead to bad mental health (srs)
Same as religion, the only logical view is an agnostic one. We don’t know anything, therefore we cannot believe anything. We’ll either find out when we die or we never will, focus on the important things in life that you can control.

I don't see how learning this science leads to bad mental health, I've learned about it and have good mental health.

Why do things seem the way they do but aren't?

bump

@Reliance, since I too cannot quote your post

Wanted to respond to this. Beyond the specific atoms in question, I think what Im getting at is more just the biological makeup [from structure to composition] that perhaps has something to do with it. Computers dont get hungry [they dont have metabolisms and cant feel anything] and they dont have feelings of hate or love [the very notion of feelings of hate and love seem to be related to chemicals/molecules in the brain]....I dont see why it's some huge jump from these kinds of things to feelings of self-awareness, or consciousness, whatever that is. Life on earth is obviously organic. Water is the solvent in life on earth, life has its own form of metabolism, and it has DNA or RNA. Is it possible that there is some life elsewhere that uses different elements like Si in its molecules, uses a different solvent, different hereditary molecule, in short has a different biochemistry? Perhaps yeah, although such life is not evidenced yet. But even if different, it'll still be some kind of biochemistry [contrast to some kind of artificial computing machine].

One problem is that no two people usually agree on what consciousness even is, so discussions on the topic are not that meaningful. To continue the point in my last post though about the other animals- I like Sagan's response in the Q&A about consciousness as a human conceit in this video [skip to 1:09:54]:



It all depends what one even means when talking about consciousness, it's not well defined. He talks about what he thinks is "consciousness" in other primates, particularly the chimps. I dont think the notion, even if it could be reasonably defined, would be unique to humans at all. Perhaps it is specific though to "life" [if we could attempt to define this word]. Again....all speculation, about a question which is not well-understood, or even well-defined.

On the OP topic, some open questions of interest:

-Abiogenesis, or the origin of life on earth
-Are we alone? Does ET life exist

I don't understand the origins of life on earth either. I used to wonder how that's ever possible - how does essentially nothing all the sudden turn into a cell that splits and multiplies and has a desire to multiply? I didn't get it.

I still don't, but I think I watched a video on it once that convinced me that it is possible. Supposedly Earth having oceans and tides helped with it - I think I read that a lot of it started on coastal rocks, where tides would fill up and evaporate and fill up again, little tide pools, something like that.


Another great question (and on topic) is the great filter. Some think it's ahead of us, one article I saw the author thought maybe it's behind us. Maybe the chances for live developing are so rare (the tides, planet, goldilox zone, magnetic field, ozone, etc) that maybe the great filter is behind us.

I say consciousness. Followed in second by life, although I argue the two are coincident; consciousness implies life and vice versa.



Not just because it is scientifically intractable, but because the ebb and flow of subjectivity research, theoretical biology, phenomenology, cognitive science etc. is strongly suggesting we need to abolish the idea of "objective reality" and reconceive what is meant by nature, as something intrinsically inclusive of meaning, context, subjectivity etc. It's an exciting time to be involved in this sort of research.


There is a real problem with the rate at which cutting edge research trickles down from the ivory tower, but we're envisioning a future where the special sciences are not subservient to the traditionally harder sciences.