Georges Lemaître died fifty years ago today, on 20 June 1966. If anyone deserves the title “Father of the Big Bang,” it would be him. Both because he investigated and popularized the Big Bang model, and because he was an actual Father, in the sense of being a Roman Catholic priest. (Which presumably excludes him from being an actual small-f father, but okay.)
John Farrell, author of a biography of Lemaître, has put together a nice video commemoration: “The Greatest Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.” I of course have heard of him, but I agree that Lemaître isn’t as famous as he deserves.
The Greatest Scientist You've Never Heard Of from Farrellmedia on Vimeo.
zarzuelazen:
You’re equivocating with your definition of equivalence. Sean describes two different perspectives of the same phenomenon using different language: macroscopically, you have water as a fluid; microscopically, you have a complex interaction of polarized molecules of oxygenated hydrogen. But what you’e doing is leaping from that very mundane description straight to a Platonic essential conclusion that hydrogen atoms are made of water.
Sean’s got at least half a dozen videos on his home page devoted to the arrow of time. And it is, indeed, true, that the arrow of time is essential to the functioning of consciousness. As Sean puts it, the arrow of time is why you can remember the past but not the future. But, while there’s a great deal we still don’t know…the arrow of time at human scales is thoroughly understood. It’s entirely because entropy is higher today than it was yesterday — and the reason entropy was lower yesterday is because it was even lower still the day before.
Physics at the level where there’s no arrow of time also doesn’t have an arrow of space. There’s no up nor down. But we live in a very special environment in which there is an arrow of space; we do have an up and a down. And that’s entirely because we live in close proximity to a very dominating gravitational field — that of the Earth itself. The arrow of time is no different; we also live in close proximity to a very dominating condition of low entropy: the Big Bang. We don’t know why entropy was so low in the Big Bang…but, however that came to be, the arrow of time was as inevitable a consequence as up and down are consequences of planetary surfaces.
If you remain true to form, you’ll claim the Big Bang was conscious in some Platonic sense — but that’s no more defensible than claiming that quarks and electrons carry the essence of water within them.
Cheers,
b&
kashyap vasavada:
That is true, but very, very, very misleading. It implies that we know bugger-all about consciousness — when, in stark contrast, we know a great deal about it. Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to posit that we know as much about consciousness as we do physics; it’s just that consciousness is a much bigger puzzle, so we proportionally understand less.
Not even in principle. We know full well that our perceptions are quite flawed and very easily fooled. In your particular example…the only reason you (presumably) enjoy going to the movies is because you perceive consciousness in the flashing lights projected on the screen. Even mere puppets can trick you into perceiving consciousness.
Yes, of course; the boundary can be quite fuzzy. But that should pose no problem to us in the modern age. At what precise marking on the thermometer does water stop being warm and become hot? What is the wavelength of the place on the spectrum that splits blue from green? What is a planet, anyway, and why is or isn’t Pluto one? That those questions don’t have clear answers in all cases doesn’t mean that they’re useless…we’d all agree that 90°C water is hot and 10°C water is cold, we’d all agree that monochromatic 400nm light is blue and 700nm is red; and that Jupiter is a planet but the just-arrived Juno probe isn’t.
I don’t think any reasonable definition of consciousness would encompass unicellular life. There are certainly sensory reactive feedback loops in such wee beasties, but of such a limited and simplistic nature that it seems akin to arguing that 10°C water is “hot” because it’s not frozen. Sure, in the context of superconductors and deep space and cryonics and the like, 10°C is hot — but that’s not the context of the discussion.
In this context, consciousness is nearly universally understood as self-awareness — which is a remarkably useful self-descriptive term. Awareness we can see to a very limited extent in amoebas and even thermostats: it’s a mapping between some external and internal state. A sunflower is aware of the direction of the Sun; how else is it to track it during the day? No, the awareness isn’t even remotely close to conscious, and it’s certainly far from infallible. But it’s also very reasonable to identify the fact that there’s something internal to the plant that models at least one aspect of external reality. When you get past the profoundly-limited vision of the sunflower to more sophisticated visual systems, you see better and better models of external reality developing — with a giant leap coming with the development of neural systems. Most of those systems are at least originally and in part used to seek prey and avoid predators…and it’s a pretty obvious step to try to figure out if a particular predator is seeking you out or if a particular prey is aware it’s being stalked. Now you’ve got neural systems that model not just the Euclidean-style geometry of the surroundings but the neural systems of other organisms in the environment. And why shouldn’t that awareness of others also be turned inwards, creating a model of the self within the self?
That last step, of course, is what we call self-awareness, or consciousness.
And, again: it’s far from perfect. How often do you yourself not even know what you want? You can at times be as big a mystery to yourself as others. That alone right there should tell you that your internal perception of your self is cut from the same cloth as your perception of other people around you — and we’ve already begun to map out the “mirror neurons” responsible for that.
No, that’s as soundly debunked as any other primitive superstition. There’s no point in pondering if maybe the Philosopher’s Stone might really exist and permit transmutation of base metals into gold after all. We know far more than enough to know that that sort of thing is a waste of time without having to do any more experiments in alchemy.
Cheers,
b&
zarzuelazen:
I think you’re missing the very basic, fundamental concepts at the heart of entropy and thermodynamics. Entropy is simply the number of ways that you can rearrange the components of a system in such a way that it’s macroscopically indistinguishable. That entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways for things to be indistinguishable (high entropy) than not. Or, if something is happening, the change is much more likely to increase entropy than decrease it — again, merely because, if you count up all the possible states of a system, the number of high entropy states vastly outnumber the number of low entropy states. That really is pretty much all there is to entropy and thermodynamics; everything else follows as an inevitable consequence.
…thinking about it, I should jump in here with another bit. In common conversation, entropy and complexity are often conflated and confused…but they’re entirely different (though interdependent) phenomena. In general, maximum and minimum entropy are both minimally complex, with complexity arising from the transition from low to high entropy and diminishing as entropy approaches maximum. Nobody’s formalized that pattern, and it’s not even guaranteed…but the tendency is obvious and scale-invariant.
For example: carefully float cream on top of your coffee. That’s a low-entropy state; there aren’t many ways to arrange the atoms so you’ve got cream on top and coffee on the bottom. Stir it up and you increase the entropy, winding up with a mixture of cream and coffee that’s at maximum entropy because you can swap out the positions of any bits without making any macroscopic difference. The initial state is very simple; cream on top, coffee on bottom. The final state is very simple; creamy coffee everywhere. But in the transition, you get all sorts of whorls and vortices and streamers and other sorts of complex features; that’s maximum complexity. But it doesn’t have to get complex; just let the diffusion happen by itself and you get a smooth transition, a gradient that just gets fuzzier, and that’s pretty simple and non-complex.
The same thing with your room; a neat, clean, well-organized room isn’t very complex, but it is low entropy. Your room after a tornado has struck isn’t very complex, either, but it’s at maximal entropy. All the interesting stuff happens in the transition from low to high entropy…and, after entropy gets high enough, you have to take a break to clean your room if you want to be able to get any more work done.
And the Universe in general: the Inflationary Epoch, in particular, was extremely uniform, low entropy, low complexity. Right now entropy is about midway between minimum and maximum, and things are obviously extremely complex and interesting. But in a googol years, all matter will have accreted into black holes which will themselves have evaporated, leaving us with maximum entropy and, again, uniform conditions with no complexity.
Note how this is a complete (if very rough) accounting of the history of existence and its complexity and entropy, without the need to even hint at the hypothetical existence of consciousness or awareness or anything remotely like that?
Cheers,
b&
Ben:
“You’re equivocating with your definition of equivalence. Sean describes two different perspectives of the same phenomenon using different language: macroscopically, you have water as a fluid; microscopically, you have a complex interaction of polarized molecules of oxygenated hydrogen. But what you’e doing is leaping from that very mundane description straight to a Platonic essential conclusion that hydrogen atoms are made of water.”
We fully understand water and we know for certain that it’s an emergent property, so that’s why it would make no sense to say that atoms are made of water. We *don’t* know for certain that consciousness really is emergent. That is an *assumption* (and an unjustified one in my view). Consciousness *could* be a fundamental property, rather than an emergent one.
Ben:
“But, while there’s a great deal we still don’t know…the arrow of time at human scales is thoroughly understood. It’s entirely because entropy is higher today than it was yesterday — and the reason entropy was lower yesterday is because it was even lower still the day before.”
But we have no idea why the entropy was so low at the beginning of time. So I think I am justified in expressing some scepticism of your view that ‘the arrow of time at human scales is thoroughly understood’. Understanding the entropy/energy transfers in cooling coffee is a much simpler task than understanding the entropy/energy transfers going on the human brain no? Just *exactly* what is happening in terms of entropy/energy flows in the brain?
Consider a human making decisions: there’s a range of possible actions, but decisions are not made at random. A given person is far more likely to take some actions than others….they have ‘propensities’. You must admit, this is at least vaguely analogous to the ‘arrow of time’ in something much simpler like a cup of hot coffee….there’s two macroscopic possibilities consistent with physics in that case (cooling or heating), but cooling is the ‘propensity’ of the coffee (it’s statistically far more likely based on thermodynamics).
I would like to see an *exact* (technical) description of what’s happening in the brain in terms of thermodynamics. Remember, the brain is *way* more complex than the case of the cooling coffee. There could be surprises lurking here….
@zarzuelazen
Why would you want to describe the inner workings of the brain in terms of thermodynamics?!
The fact that entropy accounts for the arrow of time as such should not be equivocated with a claim that the higher brain function is best described in terms of thermodynamics.
A meaningful use of thermodynamics in the context of the brain may be to describe heat convection, radiation, conduction and perspiration from the human body based on the temperature differences between internal temperature set by the neural networks in the hypothalamus and the organism’s external temperature.
But the decision making which seem to puzzle you so much is handled by electrical signaling and neurotransmitters passing between the neurons in your brain. If a neuron or cluster of neurons end up being excited or inhibited in the adequate manner it may trigger a particular decision being made in your prefrontal cortex. The fact that there appear to be propensities for certain decisions and not for others is pretty well accounted for by the nature of neurons and a rough understanding of neural networks.
Again, scientists have plenty of work to do in attempting to learn more about these biological phenomena, but we have no indications whatsoever that we’re in need of pseudoscience beyond regular biology, chemistry and physics in order to better describe what’s going on.
Simen:
“Again, scientists have plenty of work to do in attempting to learn more about these biological phenomena, but we have no indications whatsoever that we’re in need of pseudoscience beyond regular biology, chemistry and physics in order to better describe what’s going on.”
I think you probably *could* give an account of the workings of the brain purely in physical terms – personally I don’t think any ordinary laws of physics are being violated in the brain, and I do think that consciousness is in some sense *equivalent* to physical processes.
But a purely physical description wouldn’t necessarily be a very useful or informative account of what’s going on – you’d miss a lot. For example, imagine that you have a computer in front of you running ‘Microsoft Word’ and you wanted to know how the software worked. ‘Microsoft Word’ doesn’t violate any laws of physics, and sure, you could describe it all in terms of a hugely complex pattern of electrical firings in silicon chips and long-strings of 0s and 1s in machine code. But you’d learn almost nothing useful about ‘Microsoft Word’ that way.
We don’t actually know for certain that consciousness is ’emergent’. It could be a fundamental property of the universe that is present in most things. So I’m just exploring that possibility and looking around to see what common physical property it could be associated with – ‘the arrow of time’ is one possibility (since thermodynamics works almost everywhere , with the possible exception of the subatomic level).
Being a fairly literate programmer, I’m sure I’d gain good understanding of what the software does by reading the underlying source code (preferably not in assembly). Also, I could learn from software architecture drawings, component APIs, and knowledge of the OS on top of which the software is intended to run. However, the “emergent” model of Microsoft Word that you may be interested in would be more akin to the concepts described in the user manual. But you have to agree that the experience of using Microsoft Word to author documents in a ribbon controlled MDI interface is an emergent experience, and that the underlying assembly code are the tiny parts from which this emergent experience is created.
If you agree that the we could give an account of the workings of the brain in purely physical terms, then the various elements of consciousness are necessarily emergent. Your ambivalent use of the word “equivalent” (referring to mass-energy equivalence) makes no sense in the context of the brain (as Ben pointed out). Everything we know about the inner physical/biological workings of the brain indicate that they combine to create an emergent phenomena of consciousness.
And it’s not like scientists are neglecting the idea of defining more emergent models of consciousness either. That would fall under the field of psychology.
Simen:
“Being a fairly literate programmer, I’m sure I’d gain good understanding of what the software does by reading the underlying source code (preferably not in assembly). Also, I could learn from software architecture drawings, component APIs, and knowledge of the OS on top of which the software is intended to run. ”
Sure, but notice that none of the above involve a ‘physics’ explanation. They are an ‘informational’ (IT) explanation. To gain the understanding you had to switch modes…from the physics framework to the IT one. An expert in physics who knew absolutely nothing about programming would be seriously perplexed…. 😉
Perhaps think back to the time when you knew nothing about programming or IT….when you first learnt to program you actually learned a whole *new* way to think about the world. The sort of framework you might need to understand consciousness could be just like learning to program for the first time….an entirely new way of thinking might be required.
“If you agree that the we could give an account of the workings of the brain in purely physical terms, then the various elements of consciousness are necessarily emergent.”
Not necessarily! Here’s an analogy: think of a black hole and ‘gravity’. Gravity is *not* an emergent property, it is fundamental- every individual bit of matter creates a tiny gravitational field. In the case of the black hole, the massive gravitational field is simply the combination of the individual bits of matter that fell in.
It could be that way with the brain and consciousness. Consciousness *could* be fundamental in a way analogous to gravity – it could be the case that every single bit of matter already has a little bit of consciousness associated with it, and the brain is simply combining and amplifying the individual bits of consciousness that were always there.
“Your ambivalent use of the word “equivalent” (referring to mass-energy equivalence) makes no sense in the context of the brain (as Ben pointed out). ”
It would make no sense if consciousness is emergent. But it makes perfect sense if consciousness is fundamental.
@ zarzuelazen
You wrote:
“Sure, but notice that none of the above involve a ‘physics’ explanation. They are an ‘informational’ (IT) explanation.”
I beg to differ. The programming language is in a sense an emergent (and sensible) way of talking about what happens to the physical electromagnetic signalling within the CPU on some bus, in a cache or some other storage medium. Hence programming statements are never pure information in any non-physical sense. It always boils down to physics.
Sure I was fascinated by the new world of programming once I was exposed to it. Perhaps in the same way that scientists were fascinated by neurons once we gained knowledge of their existence.
You wrote: “think of a black hole and ‘gravity’”
Yes, lots of condensed matter will have a strong gravitational pull. Nobody questions the existence gravitational fields. But it doesn’t translate to consciousness because we know from particle accellerator experiements that no additional “consciousness”- force exists in such a way that it could have a strength and reach to have impactc on the particles in the biological substances in your brain.
On the contrary, we are making significant progress in understanding the workings of the brain without any such force. There seems to be no need for your hypothesis.
Simen:
“I beg to differ. The programming language is in a sense an emergent (and sensible) way of talking about what happens to the physical electromagnetic signalling within the CPU on some bus, in a cache or some other storage medium.”
You’ve got to be joking man 😀 Programming principles are totally independent of the physical details of CPU etc., as shown by the fact that you can port over the same piece of software on to many different machines. Programming principles started being developed long before any modern computers existed, going right back to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage.
“But it doesn’t translate to consciousness because we know from particle accellerator experiements that no additional “consciousness”- force exists in such a way that it could have a strength and reach to have impactc on the particles in the biological substances in your brain.”
Just to be clear, I never suggested that consciousness is a ‘force’. My actual hypothesis is that consciousness is ‘the arrow of time’, which is defined as a thermodynamic statistical tendency inherent in all (or most) things.
@zarzuelazen:
And when you state it that way specifically, it is obviously nonsense. Non-reversible phenomena exist; consciousness is one example of a non-reversible phenomenon; therefore, all non-reversible phenomena are consciousness? How can you even think that this makes sense?
The universe is expanding non-reversibly; photons are being emitted by the sun with high energy, hitting the earth, and being radiated back out to space non-reversibly — why are you focused on the nonsensical proposition that the (relatively) small-scale phenomenon of consciousness is the same as those large-scale non-reversible phenomena?
(going back up a bit)
@zarzuelazen:
And this makes no sense, because the brain isn’t just a static thing, that has consciousness inherently — it’s the whole process of physiology, where blood flow brings nutrients and oxygen to brain cells, and takes away waste products, and all of those brain cells are in constant neurological contact with each other, and with the outside world via the sensory organs and nerves.
Your model would imply that the brain of a person who is brain dead still has consciousness. The real world contradicts your nonsensical model.
Not unless the folks at CERN are profoundly deluded or incompetent or otherwise in error.
The error you’re making is, again, noting that we don’t have a real-time millimeter-scale map of the Earth; therefore, brave explorers still might yet find Atlantis in the middle of the ocean. We don’t need that depth and / or detail of information to rule out certain possibilities. Do you, for example, have a complete catalogue of all living things in the room with you right now? All the mites, bacteria, mold spores, and what-not? Clearly no. But are you willing to consider the possibility that there therefore could be an angry hippo in the room with you and it’s about to eat you?
Let’s stick with hippos. There are hippos in Africa and zoos. But hippos still remain utterly irrelevant to any considerations of the cataloguing of the life in the room with you right now. As far as your room goes, hippos might never have existed at all.
In the exact same way, it matters not how entropy reached the minimum state it did a baker’s dozen billion years ago; it did, and the rest follows. What came before, even whether or not it makes sense to think of a “before,” is as irrelevant to the state of the universe today as hippos in Africa are to your room.
Thermodynamics is very much the worng tool for that job. The most significant part of such an analysis is going to be that the body radiates waste heat in certain limits proportional to the food you eat…which is an oversimplification that tends to get overweight science-minded folks in dietary trouble. They somehow mistake the body for a perfectly-efficient heat engine and fail to recognize that all sorts of factors play into what does and doesn’t get digested in the first place, that it takes much more energy to rebuild muscles after a workout than is expended doing mechanical work, and so on. With thermodynamics so inadequate to the seemingly-related task of weight management…the thought of applying it to cognition is over-the-top absurd.
Remember, thermodynamics is a statistical description of a system, and therefore a very coarse and high-level description. You could use statistics to explain the emergence of bell curves in the plots of frequencies of patterns of a coin toss, but you couldn’t use statistics to explain the outcome of a single toss — and you’re effectively asking for the latter.
Then the discussion is over. Imagine we have two universes. In both, physics as we know it is able to give a complete account of a given phenomenon. In one, that’s all there is; in another, there’s also something else going on — but, again, you don’t have to make mention of that something else to explain what’s happening. In either case, the universe would look exactly the same. Occam tells us that, until evidence is adduced supporting the “something extra,” it might as well not exist and there’s no point in pretending it’s real.
The history of science abounds with examples. Michelson and Morley failed to discover the Luminiferous Aether, so we no longer think it’s real. We know something that behaves like cold dark matter interacts with galaxies, and there’re all sorts of competing hypotheses as to what that something actually is, ranging from exotic supersymetrical particles to primordial black holes to parallel universes…but, if we ever figure it out, we’ll drop the competition and stick with the winner.
You are, once again, proposing a zilbot particle that would have been created at the LHC. It wasn’t.
Why not? It’s clearly a decomposable macro-scale phenomenon. Drink some beer and you’ll selectively lose parts of your consciousness that will return when you sober up. That only makes sense if it’s emergent.
You know what’s even more amazing?
On my kitchen counter, I’ve got bottles of water, soy sauce, sake, mirin, sesame oil, and more — and they all have the exact same temperature! Clearly, therefore, temperature must be fundamental, right?
…and just yesterday, driving down the road, coming to a red light, a few cars next to each other, all different makes and models, not only had the same velocity, but the same acceleration, too!
And you don’t even have to invoke different computer architectures; the motto of Perl programmers is, “TMTOWTDI,” pronounced, “Tim Toady,” which is an initialism for, “There’s More Than One Way To Do it.”
This goes back to your earlier attempts to reify information. What you’re thinking of as a Platonic ideal is merely a pattern of fixed magnetic fields in the case of Winchester-type hard drives, or pits in aluminum in the case of CDs, or varying electromagnetic pulses in the case of wired networks, and so on. it’s a very effective description.
I could tell you that I have a few dozen red and green apples arranged in the pattern: RRGRRRRGRGRGRRGRRGRRRRRGRRRGRRRR. You could engrave a similar pattern into a CD, with the red apples represented by a raised part and the green apples represented by a pit. A CD drive will spin the disc as it shines the laser and that might trigger a series of high and low voltages on a piece of wire. Keep following that pathway to a programmer’s tool and it’ll tell you that your apples are really DEAD BEEF — or, at least, that that’s the hexadecimal representation of that arrangement of ones and zeroes. Given that, you could yourself go out and buy a couple bags of red and green apples and arrange them in the same pattern, yourself. Does that mean that your apples really are hamburger? Clearly not; it’s just one possible way of arranging different things in similar patterns…
…exactly like all the bottles on my kitchen countertop have the exact same average molecular kinetic energy (aka, “temperature.”).
For the purposes of this macro-scale discussion, we know exactly what the arrow of time is, and it’s nothing remotely like consciousness. There’s as much pizza in the arrow of time as there is consciousness.
Cheers,
b&
@zarzuelazen:
I just want to clarify what I wrote a bit:
Or rather, your model would imply that someone who is dead dead — no heartbeat, no breathing, no brain activity at all, body cooled to room temperature — still has consciousness.
@zarzuelazen
Portability of software between different pieces of hardware is accomplished by the OS specifically implementing driver support for the particular physical devices and/or by having software compiled into something compatible with a runtime environment (like JRE or the .NET runtime) which in turn has to be customized for each OS.
But on a specific computer, the programming statements (and the higher level emergent experience of using the software) always has a very physical deeper level representation in the hardware.
Owlmirror
“I am struck by this statement: but regarding the Bible, I have said elsewhere that the Bible is a revelation, not a hypothesis.
But earlier you wrote: I argue from a hypothesis; that the Bible is divine revelation. I frequently test my hypothesis across various spheres of knowledge. (emph added)”
To clarify
The Bible purports to be a revelation of the fundamental framework within which man exists. My belief in it as such is a hypothesis for me, during those times when I am evaluating why I believe. In fact it is probably now an implicit assumption most of the time.
Ben
God wants us to see our under-developed immaturity and insecurity, that is certain. Try and tell me you or anyone else except Christ are something else and I won’t bother taking you seriously.
Simen S
We have certainly assembled a system of conjecture with a degree of internal consistency saying the universe is 13 billion years old. I wouldn’t stake too much on it personally.
Simon Packer:
Indeed — and it is trivial to demonstrate how that framework has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on reality. Right from the get-go, and on every page after. The two creation chronologies aren’t even consistent with each other, and the actual history of the Universe is as radically different from the Biblical account as the Biblical cosmology of a flat Earth and metal-dome sky is from reality. And animals don’t talk, there weren’t even any regional floods, no modern species (let alone “baramin”) has a genetic chokepoint of only two (or seven?) individuals — and we’re not even to the end of the first book.
In one sense, the Bible is a science text, insofar as it makes specific and testable claims about reality. It’s just that it’s a very bad science text, in that its claims are falsified by independent observation and its explanatory theories are internally inconsistent and incoherent.
Try to tell me that a storybook character who will condemn to infinite torture all those who love their families more than him is mature and secure, and I’m not going to bother taking you seriously, either.
So, how do you explain galactic redshift and the cosmic microwave background? Those observations are trivially within reach of amateur astronomers today and only make sense if the Universe is a baker’s dozen billion years old. Or are we to expect that Satan has infected all our telescopes? Or that Jesus is so perverse that he wants us to believe the Universe is younger than the Pyramids despite the fact that he created everything to look a dozen orders of magnitude older?
You know, there’s a very simple way to look at this. Were we in an universe where everything actually looked young, Christian theologians would cite that as evidence for the veracity of the Bible. But that also means that the fact that everything actually looks to be a baker’s dozen billion years old must count as evidence against the veracity of the Bible.
And so it goes for so many theological claims. Were there no evil, theologians would cite that as evidence that a just and merciful god was shepherding them; therefore, the fact that there is evil — and, for that matter, evil that can be mitigated by something as trivial as an anonymous call to 9-1-1 — is evidence that no such god is active on Earth. Were the Bible written more clearly than any human textbook ever authored, theologians would cite that as evidence for its divine inspiration; the fact that it’s a complete and total mess must be evidence that no deity like the one claimed had any influence over its authorship. And, as Sean likes to observe, the fact that the initial entropy of the Universe was something like 10^10^120 times lower than it needed to be for life on Earth also has to count as overwhelming evidence against any claims that the Universe was created for life on Earth — because, again, were that parameter finely tuned for life, said fact would be cited by theologians as evidence for divine creation.
So you can certainly take all your supportive theological arguments for why whichever gods should or must be real and consider those arguments in isolation and conclude that the gods therefore are real. But, once you add in even one such consideration, any good Bayesian is going to recognize that that posterior observation radically skews the evaluation away from the divine — and we’ve got a never-ending list of such examples to account for.
Cheers,
b&
@owlmirror:
“Or rather, your model would imply that someone who is dead dead — no heartbeat, no breathing, no brain activity at all, body cooled to room temperature — still has consciousness.”
In the case of a living person, all the little individual bits of consciousness in matter would be *integrated* into a single consciousness. Think of many little bits of matter with ‘arrows of time’ associated with them , where each arrow points in the same direction – I’m saying that the brain is what causes all the arrows of time to point in the same direction.
With a dead person, the individual little bits of matter would still have consciousness associated with them, but the ‘arrows of time’ no longer point in the same direction- think of all the arrows pointing in a random direction. So the consciousness is no longer integrated, but split into multiple little bits.
@Simen
“Portability of software between different pieces of hardware is accomplished by the OS specifically implementing driver support for the particular physical devices and/or by having software compiled into something compatible with a runtime environment (like JRE or the .NET runtime) which in turn has to be customized for each OS.
But on a specific computer, the programming statements (and the higher level emergent experience of using the software) always has a very physical deeper level representation in the hardware.”
Well of course, you can translate any ‘informational’ description into a ‘physical’ description, so yes, I think ‘information’ and ‘material processes’ are *equivalent* (just like ‘consciousness’ and ‘material processes’ are *equivalent*.
But I think you are taking your IT knowledge for granted now- again, I would suggest you think back to when you didn’t know anything about IT or programming. If all you knew was physics, you would find it extremely difficult to understand the workings of software and computers.
The principles of programming and computation actually look nothing like the language of physics, even though it is true that you can translate one into the other.
And the correct principles for understanding consciousness won’t necessarily look anything like physics language either, even though yes , I agree that when we have these principles (whatever they are), I’m sure you could translate them into physics.
But can Sean or Ben with all their physics knowledge tell you how consciousness works now? The answer is no. And the reason is because they don’t yet have the correct ‘language’ for the job.
@Ben
“This goes back to your earlier attempts to reify information. What you’re thinking of as a Platonic ideal is merely a pattern of fixed magnetic fields in the case of Winchester-type hard drives, or pits in aluminum in the case of CDs, or varying electromagnetic pulses in the case of wired networks, and so on. it’s a very effective description.”
I think the existence of your own consciousness pretty much proves that the ‘information’ is not just a description, but actually a real platonic thing. If you change your ‘description’ of the information in your brain, does that mean that you’d suddenly become unconscious? Of course not! If someone changes their ‘description’ of your brain state, does that mean that they can suddenly just use and abuse you like an inanimate object? Of course not! So the ‘information’ is in no way just a ‘description’.
@zarzuelazen
You wrote:
“Think of many little bits of matter with ‘arrows of time’ associated with them , where each arrow points in the same direction”
To my inner eye this looks like steam from the spout of Russel’s teapot.
zarzuelazen:
Were this true, no matter what form your micro-consciousness would take, it would have been detected by the LHC — and it wasn’t.
The universe has but one single universal arrow of time that applies equally everywhere to everything. It has no scale nor degree. Individual particles most emphatically do not have their own arrows of time, and even more emphatically there couldn’t possibly be any sort of polarity involved.
Were that true, then people with multiple personality disorder would be time travelers. But they’re not.
The same is true for chemistry, thermodynamics, and any other emergent phenomenon. We’re not even remotely close to being able to derive chemistry from Quantum Mechanics, though we are in a position where we should have overwhelming confidence that that is the case.
No; the answer is that our understanding of consciousness is rough and incomplete. But, at the same time, we’ve got the broad outlines of all the major pieces and we know what sorts of ways those pieces can and can’t fit together. One of the already-excluded possibilities is anything that requires or implies as-yet-unknown physics — which is what you’re proposing.
You are laboring under some very powerful misconceptions here.
When you drink a beer, the alcohol in the beer alters the physical arrangement of the material stuff in your brain, and you consciously perceive this as being drunk.
When you look at something, photons reaching your retina cause physical electrochemical cascades that alter the physical structure of your brain in a way that directly (though imperfectly) correlates with whatever you’re looking at; you perceive this as seeing whatever you’re looking at.
When we hook people up to advanced medical imaging equipment and have them think various thoughts, we can observe in real-time their brains physically changing in ways that directly correspond with their thoughts.
When you undergo general anesthesia, the anesthesiologist makes a physical change to your brain and you lose consciousness in a matter of mere seconds.
And there’re some very emotionally moving videos on YouTube of conscious patients undergoing corrective brain surgery where the surgeon does, essentially, play the patient like a musical instrument. Indeed, there’s one of a young tenor who is asked to sing an aria while the surgeon does his work to make sure that he doesn’t damage the patient’s ability to sing. At one point, the poor guy goes from singing beautifully to being incoherent before unsteadily coming back again. By the end of the procedure, he’s a bit shaken and exhausted but clearly on the road to recovery. Does that qualify as “being used like an inanimate object”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obiARnsKUAo
Cheers,
b&
@Simon Packer:
Your final two sentences are completely in contradiction to each other. A hypothesis is something testable which you would be willing to let go of when it is falsified; which you would agree has been falsifed when that falsification is shown. Whereas it being an implicit, or rather, a dogmatic assumption, means that you reject any and all falsification.
It’s like a flat-earth being a dogmatic assumption for a flat-earther, or astrology for an astrologist, or geocentrism for a geocentrist.
And what underlies those dogmatic assumptions is the unstated assumption that logic and what exists in the real world simply do not actually matter.
Why should anyone believe that you know what God says when you can’t even use English words in a non-contradictory way?
Besides, I can make up fake quotes and intentions for a fake superperson, too. Shiva the Destroyer laughs at Yahweh, and says that Yahweh is a pathetic fraud, and that Yahweh’s followers are gullible fools who have blinded themselves to reality. See how easy it is?
Can you actually summarize the evidence and reasoning of what you’re sneering at and why you think it’s wrong, or are you just going to fall back on your sockpuppet saying “Nope! It’s way less than 13.7 gigayears, and the evidence of reality doesn’t matter.”?
@Ben Goren:
If you had written “there weren’t even any regional floods that could reasonably have been Noah’s flood“, I wouldn’t disagree.
FWIW, here’s a summary of the Nova episode “Secrets of Noah’s Ark”.
In particular:
“The narrative of the show did not try to claim that a global flood, or even a single large local flood (of Mesopotamia) ever happened — indeed, they pointed out that the massive (local river) flood deposits that were found in different Babylonian cities were not simultaneous, but were in fact dated as having occurred in different times over the course of a thousand years (Ur in 3500BCE, Uruk in 2900BCE, Shuruppak in 2700BCE, Kish in 2500BCE).”
There’s a Youtube link to the episode in the comment following the summary, if you’re interested.
It’s possible that by “regional”, you intended what I wrote above — that is, a single large local flood of all of Mesopotamia has not been shown to ever have happened. But “regional” can have broad or narrow meanings, and there were river floods in the various regions of Mesopotamia listed above.
@zarzuelazen:
Why are you trying to rescue your nonsense with even more nonsensical word salad?
The whole point of the arrow of time is that there only is one! One arrow of time! It “points” from the past to the future! It’s the same arrow of time for the brain of a live and awake person non-reversibly metabolizing and consciously perceiving reality non-reversibly, and for the brain of a dead person beginning to undergo the non-reversible process of cooling and decay.