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proto-consciousness field theory

As far as I can tell that article is real. Probably originated in a black hole that decided it wanted to break into pop science articles.
 
Darat said:
As far as I can tell that article is real. Probably originated in a black hole that decided it wanted to break into pop science articles.
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I am not a physicist, so I am limited to science journalism when it comes to physics. I cant understand many of the new things like quantum physics unless it is simplified for me.

But this one got my woo sensors activated, so I am asking for a serious answer.
 
Red Baron Farms said:
But this one got my woo sensors activated, so I am asking for a serious answer.
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I think it is probably rubbish. The article concerns two religious belief systems, firstly that things only exist because people are observing them. (Dualism). The second is "Panpsychism".

However Panpsychism also doesn't make any sense. It claims stars have choice or volition, rather than follow rules of physics. It had been claimed that panpsychism could replace dark matter to explain why stars behaved in a way not known to physics. But that doesn't make any sense. Why would stars all at equal distance to Earth, all still behave in the same way if it was by "individual star choice", rather than unknown rules of physics?


I suggest you read this abstract on the question you asked. This abstract doesn't really make any sense and seems to be religion dressed up as science.

Can Panpsychism Become an Observational Science?
https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/579
 
It's probably not true/real, but I've loved the theory for quite a while now. It's unproven, but it's not exactly woo, per say. It's (probably) falsifiable one way or the other.
 
Everything we empirically know about consciousness stems from it emerging from the physiology of our brain, and we are slowly but surely ironing MORE details about out HOW it emerges, by investigating in that direction; even if there are still some mysteries left. See Susan Blackmore's books or Antonio Damasio's "Self Comes to Mind" for examples.

Any claim that consciousness is "fundamental to the Universe" is missing that vital element of empirically driven progress towards a reliable explanation of anything, at all.
 
There are two ways to think about panpsychism. (Or rather, two extremes of a continuum, which are helpful to point out.) One extreme is, everything is conscious because consciousness is something very mysterious and wonderful that pervades the universe. That's the view in which stars move volitionally, ocean waves are like brain waves, and even rocks sit there quietly contemplating. The other extreme is, everything is conscious because consciousness is nothing special. Rocks don't do anything we don't observe them doing; they don't think or remember, but they are conscious nonetheless. "Consciousness and change are the same thing" is an example of a viewpoint near the latter extreme.

One problem with the first extreme is addressing this assertion: "Everything in the universe is conscious, except an anesthetized human brain." If an anesthetized human, who we'd normally describe as unconscious, is at least as conscious as a rock, then haven't we just re-defined "conscious" to mean "unconscious?" And if an anesthetized human is less conscious than a rock, what magical property of anesthetic drugs makes that possible?
 
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Myriad said:
There are two ways to think about panpsychism. (Or rather, two extremes of a continuum, which are helpful to point out.) One extreme is, everything is conscious because consciousness is something very mysterious and wonderful that pervades the universe. That's the view in which stars move volitionally, ocean waves are like brain waves, and even rocks sit there quietly contemplating. The other extreme is, everything is conscious because consciousness is nothing special. Rocks don't do anything we don't observe them doing; they don't think or remember, but they are conscious nonetheless. "Consciousness and change are the same thing" is an example of a viewpoint near the latter extreme.

One problem with the first extreme is addressing this assertion: "Everything in the universe is conscious, except an anesthetized human brain." If an anesthetized human, who we'd normally describe as unconscious, is at least as conscious as a rock, then haven't we just re-defined "conscious" to mean "unconscious?" And if an anesthetized human is less conscious than a rock, what magical property of anesthetic drugs makes that possible?
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The way I look at it, consciousness is a result of information processing. The more information processing in a locale, the stronger the consciousness. Very little information processing goes on in a rock, vast more in an amoeba and vasty, vastly more in a human brain. And if that human brain is anaesthetised, or dead, then that level of consciousness is reduced accordingly.
 
Scptt Aronson's slightly unkind take on the new-panpsychism:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823

Personally, I give Giulio enormous credit for having the intellectual courage to follow his theory wherever it leads. When the critics point out, “if your theory were true, then the Moon would be made of peanut butter,” he doesn’t try to wiggle out of the prediction, but proudly replies, “yes, chunky peanut butter—and you forgot to add that the Earth is made of Nutella!”

Yet even as we admire Giulio’s honesty and consistency, his stance might also prompt us, gently, to take another look at this peanut-butter-moon theory, and at what grounds we had for believing it in the first place.
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One must come to the realization that everything we experience is filtered through and interpreted by our mind. Without it, the universe doesn't exist at all or at least, not without some sort of consciousness observing it
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The second sentence does not follow from the first. It's like saying that because I've only ever seen Scarlet Johansson on a screen that if screens didn't exist Scarlet Johansson would cease to exist.

I think the more parsimonious explanation is that Johansson exists regardless of whether or not I'm aware she exists.

As for the rest of the article, I see nothing compelling there. I see no argument why human consciousness is necessary for the universe to exist.

I have read some good sci-fi stories by Greg Egan, which approach the idea that human consciousness creates the universe. The most notable are Quarantine and Distress. Permutation City also has a premise that touches on similar ideas. I'll spoiler them for length, and because it discusses things which aren't revealed until a third or half-way through the novel:

The novel begins by following a series of experiments being done on a virtual simulation of a person (it's commonplace for people to be simulated in this way, as a kind of afterlife) to see whether the virtual person can experience changes to the way their consciousness is computed. As their behaviour is deterministic within the virtual environment, it's possible to take a starting point and from that to extrapolate what state the mind will be in at a future point in time. So one experiment is to have the person count to ten, but to have each numeral being spoken processed in different computers in different locations all over the world at different times and then re-compiled into one coherent memory.

As it's discovered that the virtual person can't perceive this at all it's reasoned that it's possible to create a virtual computer/virtual environment/virtual people by seeing the dust that's scattered throughout the universe as bits of information. If you take all the bits of dust in throughout the whole of time and space and pick and choose different particles from that whole range, there will be an arrangement that "compute" the environment you want to create with the people you want to create at time t, and an arrangement that does the same at time t1, etc. and so you can "run" this computer programme and thereby create an infinite, unlimited computer simulation of whatever you want.


It seems to me that some of the arguments for consciousness existing in the universe due to being an emergent property of data processing share some premises with this idea. One key difference, it seems to me, is that Egan has a Q & A on his website where he explains why the "dust theory" is nonsense, whereas it seems that some people take seriously the idea that the sun is conscious and acts with volition with no real argument for it.

Besides, I don't think we yet have an adequate explanation of what consciousness is. Certainly not a universally-accepted one. It's so lacking in definition that we also can't define what it means to lose consciousness, and so there is no scientific consensus even on how anaesthetics work.

It seems to me that that's a question that needs answering before we can determine whether or not rocks are conscious.
 
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I answer questions on Quora all the time, and we get a lot of these sorts of things.

I do a lot of layman-level reading in neuroscience, and I think it’s safe to say that most folks have little idea of just how complex the human brain is. That what we think of as consciousness is an “emergent property” of this vastly-complex activity does not seem open to dispute.

Much of the “we create the universe with our minds” nonsense is just Solipsism carried to the utter level of absurdity. As one biologist said.... “If we generate reality with our minds, what did the universe look like when there was nothing more evolved than a sea-slug?

Many people seem to have little idea that the universe had to have existed for some billions of years before it was even possible for something to be alive.... Much less conscious....
For a long time there wasn’t much more complex than a hydrogen atom.
 
Bikewer said:
I answer questions on Quora all the time, and we get a lot of these sorts of things.

I do a lot of layman-level reading in neuroscience, and I think it’s safe to say that most folks have little idea of just how complex the human brain is. That what we think of as consciousness is an “emergent property” of this vastly-complex activity does not seem open to dispute.

Much of the “we create the universe with our minds” nonsense is just Solipsism carried to the utter level of absurdity. As one biologist said.... “If we generate reality with our minds, what did the universe look like when there was nothing more evolved than a sea-slug?

Many people seem to have little idea that the universe had to have existed for some billions of years before it was even possible for something to be alive.... Much less conscious....
For a long time there wasn’t much more complex than a hydrogen atom.
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That's a somewhat disingenuous interpretation of the notion that 'consciousness creates reality'. It doesn't mean that there is nothing until consciousness thinks it up, then it appears, it refers more to the notion that reality is pure potential until acted on by consciousness, at which point it gains all the attributes we normally associate with materialist observations. Right or wrong, there is no conflict between this idea and that of a universe devoid of life.
 
Myriad said:
One extreme is, everything is conscious because consciousness is something very mysterious and wonderful that pervades the universe.
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I immediately run in to a problem with that. Is my kidney conscious and, if so, where is that consciousness perceived?
 
Matthew Ellard said:
I think it is probably rubbish. The article concerns two religious belief systems, firstly that things only exist because people are observing them. (Dualism). The second is "Panpsychism".

However Panpsychism also doesn't make any sense. It claims stars have choice or volition, rather than follow rules of physics. It had been claimed that panpsychism could replace dark matter to explain why stars behaved in a way not known to physics. But that doesn't make any sense. Why would stars all at equal distance to Earth, all still behave in the same way if it was by "individual star choice", rather than unknown rules of physics?


I suggest you read this abstract on the question you asked. This abstract doesn't really make any sense and seems to be religion dressed up as science.

Can Panpsychism Become an Observational Science?
https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/579
Click to expand...

But a gathering of stars is called a Clique- they all start acting alike. Because ummm, the consciousness of the one acts on the others too.... and umm, and ummm, billions of people, billions of stars, and ummm.... Bengazi!!!!!
 
baron said:
The way I look at it, consciousness is a result of information processing. The more information processing in a locale, the stronger the consciousness. Very little information processing goes on in a rock, vast more in an amoeba and vasty, vastly more in a human brain. And if that human brain is anaesthetised, or dead, then that level of consciousness is reduced accordingly.
Click to expand...


I think generally the same. But I think the kind of processing matters too.

Back in the early 1970s when the number of switches in the world's automated telephone exchanges first exceeded the number of neurons in a human brain, several science fiction authors wrote stories about the telephone system spontaneously becoming sentient as a result. That idea seems really naive today, after decades of experience with far more powerful information processing systems. Lots of repetitive computation by systems designed to perform a specific task predictably doesn't meet our intuitive notions of how conscious systems should emerge.

That specificity, the idea that only certain kinds of computations result in consciousness, opposes panpsychism (no matter where on the spectrum I mentioned). But it does still allow for certain things other than human brains to be conscious. In principle, biological evolution could be the neurology of a conscious biosphere, for instance. And strong AI would be possible.
 
Red Baron Farms said:
I am not a physicist, so I am limited to science journalism when it comes to physics. I cant understand many of the new things like quantum physics unless it is simplified for me.

But this one got my woo sensors activated, so I am asking for a serious answer.
Click to expand...
Kudos for admitting you don't know enough to tell if any of this is credible. Millions of New Age believers have no such perception of their own limitations. The currency these ideas have, IMO, rests mostly on respect for Roger Penrose. But for every Penrose there are probably easily 100,000 people who don't what he's talking about but think it sounds cool.

If someone tries to "simplify" quantum physics for you there's a pretty good chance you're not getting an accurate view.

These ideas are popular, I think, because they seem to justify the feeling that "something" exists beyond strict materialism. I find that appealing myself. But I don't think I will ever personally be able to assess these arguments.

Anyway, these ideas are not new, they've been kicked around for decades, mostly among people who don't have the background in math and physics to understand what's being said.
 
Minoosh said:
Anyway, these ideas are not new, they've been kicked around for decades, mostly among people who don't have the background in math and physics to understand what's being said.
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More like approaching three thousand years as opposed to decades.
 
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