joigus

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.05129.pdf Also: I suppose Carlo Rovelli's excellent book on quantum gravity should be next.

I agree with this. In fact, I look at this kind of exercise as a useful one when it comes to defining most difficult/slippery concepts: Constructively jettison any connotations that are suspect of being just contingent as regards the concept to be defined. In this case: emotions, sight, touch or other specific senses. There would have to be some sensors, granted. Whether those sensors are 'internal' or 'external', to me, is not that clear, as the boundary is surely a fuzzy one at some level of description (I don't perceive my nails or hair as 'self'). They would have to be measuring stimuli around here, not at different spots hundreds of miles away.

No version of the internet --that I can see, or foresee, now-- could replicate the functionality that I've tried to describe as, How does this projection occur and how does it coalesce into a continuous integrated perception is, to me, the only 'hard' standing problem. It's not just about harvesting data from the environment, not even in a chain of 'downward' or 'downstream' causation --however that concept presents itself to me as possibly necessary for any conscious entities worth the name. The internet, or a bee, jellyfish, or any other data-processing entity could, for all I care, gradually or otherwise, turn into (or forever have been) a mumbling, stupid, forgetful, incoherent conscious entity, and it would still conceivable be a conscious entity. The step from conscious to self-conscious, to me, is not the hard part.

Because gods are human creations, unable to go beyond what humans can conjure up?

I don't think the internet fits the bill --it's not so much a problem of scales, as it is a problem of functionalities. A bee might... But this would make me stray away from the role of mere spectator I wanted to play here, until I hear more arguments.

I think it was clear that your a-b system cannot be a photon. Gimme a derivation of Einstein's field equations, and I will pay more attention, I can assure you. So far, my focus is on what's wrong with your idea, rather than what could be right. Spin-statistics, give me something. Do your particles satisfy Pauli's exclusion principle?

But this hypothesis is manifestly incomplete. You assert something can be constructed, and you do not provide even the faintest idea of how this construction can proceed. So the obvious follow up question to your 'hypothesis' is, How? On the contrary, Fermat's principle, is either true or false experimentally. It makes no constructive assumption. The time is either minimal or not. There are no shady areas in that statement.

But the corpus callosum is an area of the brain, not a mechanism, or process. Expressed like that, it's very much like Descartes saying the ghost in the machine is in the pineal gland. I think it's more along the lines of what @exchemist said: (My emphasis.) or certain patterns of activity. I think you agree with this, AAMOF, if I understood you correctly before. One would think so. But this is, e.g., what Daniel Dennett has to say about that 'integrated collaboration' (I have set the video to the time when the relevant comments are made): Daniel Dennett In fact, I think it's plausible that apparently synchronized macro-behaviours generally arise from much more uncoordinated (unruly) micro-behaviours. This is what Dennett seems to be suggesting here, and what happens in other emergent patterns we know of. A simple example --perhaps too simple to be susceptible to extrapolate to something as complex as the human brain-- is the pressure of a gas. The extreme regularity comes from a jumble of disconnected jerks in the molecules. Edit: Actually, you said it here, @Peterkin. That's why I got confused when you seemed to suggest the corpus callosum as 'the seat of consciousness'. You must have meant something else, or --more likely-- I misunderstood.

Can you formulate your hypothesis in a simple sentence? I'll give you an example of a hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_principle

No. Inertia is locally indistinguishable from the gravitational field. (Equivalence principle.) (My emphasis.) I was talking quantum mechanics, which the way we know Nature to behave. That's not how science works. If you want to have people consider your new concept, first understand all that's been already understood. Doesn't seem like you really understand inertia, gravitation, and their intimate relationship; or 'quantum' vs 'classical', or chirality/helicity, or gauge charge. You want to build physics from scratch, and there's no change in the world that this will ever work. If you think it will, as Swansont said, make a prediction, or a derivation of some long-known feature. Neither Einstein, nor Copernicus, were fools on a hill. They were very knowledgeable about the status of physical theories at their time. All experiments are limited, of course. Do not ever trust any statement that represents itself as unlimited.

They don't have inertia? How come? Field degrees of freedom exchange energy via couplings. The reason we say that is that there's a precise mathematical definition to hypothesize it; and methods have been developed to check the predictions. In physics, you can't just utter a sentence and hope it will make sense somehow. Example: space-time gains acceleration via vacuum energy. Yeah right, but that responds to a mathematical model. You haven't shown us a mathematical model, however crude. You have a motion cartoon and a bunch of intuitions. That's not what I hear. LIGO's still active, ATLAS at CERN, James Webb Space Telescope, and so on, and so on.

The question of what consciousness is hasn't been settled IMO. I would assume that such a question is even farther from being settled.

I think you both overlooked my words: 'Then human kind as a whole is superconscious, so to speak. And the internet too' is not my stance* here. My point is Koch's criterion is kind of a loose-ended one to me. Any higher-level structure could, under right auxiliary assumptions, be considered a meta-consciousness by that token. Not that I consider it an absurd idea --if cells could think they would be none the wiser about what's going on at the tissue --> organ --> organism levels. According to Daniel Dennett, neurons are not very much collaborative agents. So it's not exactly coordination between them, as much as a process which is a competition of sorts. But I may have misunderstood his claims. But my main point has been missed: What exactly is the mechanism by virtue of which firing of neurons in different areas of the brain result in this overall one-faced projection, so to speak, that any conscious being experiences as the 'illusion' --if you will-- of I am here and now? It's obvious that neither the growth of my nails, nor the activity of my smooth muscles makes it to my state of awareness. So which exactly are those signals and how do they coalesce into that unmistakable impression of here's 'I' here and now? * I apologise. I should've said: 'Then human kind as a whole would be superconscious, so to speak. And the internet too.'

That still puzzles the simple minds (like mine). I'll take a back sit, for the time being, and learn more. @MigL, make some room for me, please.

You've just arbitrarily re-defined 'unexplained' as 'supernatural'.

I actually was thinking about deep physics. I have a feeling that whatever consciousness is about, it must be deeply ingrained in something physical that divides systems and their local environments according to information. And information is physical, as we now realise. The tree in the forest question, the 'is my blue the same as your blue' question, the question 'is a kelp colony aware', the question of time, that seems to be challenged by solving a dynamical problem and plotting it à la Descartes... All these are questions that don't require a high degree of sophistication, and seem to be standing in the face of all scientific analysis so far, and are very ancient. This is very interesting, and it does seem to be going in that direction. I should've paid more attention to those paragraphs. But by that token, if, Then human kind as a whole is superconscious, so to speak. And the internet too. Does that make sense? Then, how does it feel to be that superconscience now? I'm missing the part that --for lack of better words-- I will express as, 'that integrated projection of sensorial data into one consistent flow of here and now these things going on'. No matter how much it takes a particular conscious being to forget: I do believe a person suffering from Alzheimer does experience that same projection, even if they forget a couple of seconds later. Imagine this taken to the extreme: No consistency at all, and yet I'm here and now, being alive. Thanks a lot! I'm very positive about these attempts. I think they're kind of converging towards necessary --if not sufficient-- criteria. I'm certainly no expert; not even close. But somehow I have this feeling that something very primal about the whole thing escapes us. Me too, of course. I'll be following closely, because I'm learning a lot. Agreed. I think most of us agree on this. And that we all are quite ready to accept other varieties, or as you say, flavours, of awareness, consciousness, etc. @beecee was very honest in trying to address the OP's concerns. Unfortunately that would lead us back to downright dualism. I have enough problems detecting sneaking dualism.

It's pay-walled, and I can't see an abstract. I've caught an abstract from a paper* developing the same idea, apparently: It seems to be applicable only to humans --what about octopi, or jellyfish?--, and I don't seem to find the idea of grading levels of consciousness in it. You know: Does an ant have some kind of limited, more 'pixelated' version of consciousness? That kind of question. Certainly an ant reacts to past events and is affected in some way by its past, even though it hasn't got a hippocampus... *Same paper.

Polarity is directional; charge is a scalar (it has no direction).

🤣 I can only quote Christof Koch at this point: Being sexy? It's more of a Rod Stewart problem.

Scalars and vectors are particular (if trivial) examples of tensors, so don't worry too much about that. Every time you say 'vector' or 'tensor' to talk about an invariant or scalar, it makes your argument so much less convincing. You should worry a lot more about how your model fits any known features of particles. I still don't know what you mean by 'polarity'.

Well, I'm not implying it. It just cropped up somewhere on similar matters and I'm incorporating it to the discussion.

I don't think the problem of consciousness is going to be solved any time soon. And yet I value immensely all these discourses on the matter by people like Searle, and Dennett, and Koch. If nothing else, they clarify the discussion and I hope they converge towards a much less naive setting. My poor man's version of the problem of (perception of) colours: R,Y,B Primary colours. Any combination of these reproduces any perception of colour I may experience. Let's introduce a permutation of primary colours, for example, a cyclic shift: \[\pi\left(R\right)=Y\] \[\pi\left(Y\right)=B\] \[\pi\left(B\right)=R\] How do I program a machine to perceive the colour blue exactly as I perceive the colour red, and so on? My poor man's version of the problem of (perception of) time: A second ago, I can see in its wake. My nephew's just smiled, my sister's cat's just yawned. But I have no idea what she will do next. Even less of an idea of what he will do*. My nephew's quite unpredictable. How come? I don't think beta decay has much to do with my nephew's behaviour, TBH. ------------------- The deepest questions, the nature of time, entropy, chirality, and internal charges, physical horizons, and perhaps other physical variables as yet undiscovered must have something to do with these puzzling questions. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that consciousness, in all likelihood, must be very deeply ingrained in very deep physics. Some level of description in which the boundary between being and knowing gets blurry. I suppose my battle cry for this questions (as I can't help significantly) would be: Go deeper! Entropic horizons, Maldacena dualities, ambiguity between interior and exterior physical variables à la HUP, stuff like that. But hey, who knows. *Probably poke my neck with his tiny finger. I somehow picture this 'downward causation' as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for consciousness. Can consciousness be graded? is another interesting question that our grumpy member Holmes introduced previously in a thread I forget, only noticed by @studiot. You're getting dangerously close to the interesting question: Can consciousness be graded? 👍

I know this from a documentary by Iain Stewart.

I need a coping mechanism right now.

I don't have a very sophisticated knowledge of this. I can distinguish two types: a priory probability (when you have a knowledge about the make-up of the system. In that case, you can predict the probabilities. Laplacian probability for the proverbial die being just one example of a system in which, from symmetry, you can infer equiprobability. Other example is quantum mechanics, in which you have a dynamical law (the Schrödinger equation) which allows you to predict the probability density. It doesn't have to be always symmetry. Mathematics makes all this a lot less vague, of course. In the case of pre-bigbang scenarios, the statistical hypothesis would come from extrapolations of the known physical laws that are particularly 'natural' or 'simple'. And I do know how vague terms as 'natural' or 'simple' are. But I also think you can get an idea of what I mean by that. The other version of probability is the phenomenological one. You reproduce the experiment over and over again, and get an idea of how sound your probabilistic hypothesis is. This is the kind of concept that universe, and time itself with it, is not amenable to. The example you mentioned of the Monsoons is one that perhaps resists a simple criterion. On the one hand, Monsoons are regularities, but OTOH, there are exceptions. We know Monsoons fail from time to time. Now, please, tell me about the third one.