Interesting article on why consciousness is so difficult to grasp...

https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/why-the-problem-of-consciousness-is-so-hard-121d6a2d51f

"The reason that humans are having such a hard time understanding consciousness is that it’s an illusion, and the thing that’s trying to understand it is the illusion itself.”

Jim,

I think simulated reality does take us just a little bit closer to understanding consciousness. Your book Digital Consciousness certainly pushes the envelope. As you know my whole connection to this thing is that consciousness has to be intertwined with nature of reality. The "singularity" (Ray Kurzweil's coining term for the moment in time that the first successful human mind upload occurs) cannot happen until we know what consciousness is … or more precisely learn how to find it, even though we can never actually "speak" (what it is).

The "ineffable" aspect of consciousness tells us that it is non-local -- meaning that the "biological" mind cannot imagine it or explain it, so instead we are channeling it rather than creating it.

I actually take this philosophy of consciousness very personal. I look at it this way. If I were a universe where all is one and everything is the one, and the universe is me; then I would be pretty lonely. Think about it. I am not saying I am the universe, but simply imagining that I am the universe. Even though the universe is so vast and infinite, if I was that universe, and all I had was me ... wouldn't I want to create a truly "independent" intelligence so that one day I could have someone to commune with?

Really, what I am talking about is first a reason for consciousness. We do not have to be able to know or explain exactly what consciousness is just to be able to know and explain why it is. The answer for me was obvious. The universe is ... and wants to be ... more. It creates us and now we have to find our own. God bless the child whose got its own.

I think "free will" is important. The whole materialist reductionist fiasco plays a big hand in the struggle of scientists and philosophers understanding consciousness. So I take a "programming consciousness" approach to understanding conscious rather than "viewing consciousness." If I am the result of a programmer trying to program consciousness within a simulation, then maybe the penultimate of my programming is to myself program another consciousness within my consciousness. In other words, to create my own simulation within this simulation. And that is me.

I think one would necessarily first have to know how to program consciousness in a machine, before one could possibly even think about putting it into a mind (an operating system).

The "skeptic" approach to programming consciousness is to create a "Deterministic free will." This is much different than a compatibilist inevitability approach, because any such compatibilist approach begins with the proposition that free will is inexplicable. It is not.


(Recall Dennett is basically a compatibilist at heart thinking that free will is "compatible with determinism')

I tend to agree with Dennett that Probabilistic free will is false. Such "fuzzy" logic merely allows randomness to guide choice which is not a choice at all. It may be true that the "will" or perhaps even the "volition" part of probabilism works fine for programming purposes. However, if a programmed calculator of evolved avoidance capabilities in intelligent agents ever became ready to rise to the level of free will (or "choice" algorithm), the "free" part would have to be based on a deterministic personality pre-condition setting. And we would call this 'pre-setting" a "personality" because it would be an overriding force in how consciousness of the universe is ultimately channeled. We would not necessarily know what consciousness is to be able to program a personality setting. This personality would both allow and control how the consciousness gets channeled.

The "personality" of the agent is set and "determined" at birth (time of creation). It is then given a minimal degrees of freedom to evolve through experience. The ineffability of experience then enables self changes (rather than prevent them). The reflex agent becomes a learning agent through trial and error. Free will is not just compatible with determinism. Free will requires determinism to win the battle over a probabilistic imprisonment.

And I know you have heard me say this before (in one of the few times we spoke on the phone) or read it in here in the forum: "people (even you and me) are a lot less self-aware than we are fooled into thinking." The Programmer of our consciousness really would like us to be more self-aware and to have more free will, but for the most part we remain only instinctual and deterministic.

Our state is not so much as Descarte stated, "I think therefore I am" but rather more of an "I think therefore I might become." The Latin "cogito ergo sum" might actually be translated a little closer to this anyway, don't you think?

I am with you Bot-tee

If virtual is not reality, you would think non-virtual should be reality. It's not.

Kind of makes you wonder if the opposite of true is false, but non-false is not necessarily true either.

Hey! Where's the Like button?

WOW! Such great responses and ideas from you both - jdlaw and Bot - thanks! I'll try to respond more later, but at the moment, these thoughts come to me...



Completely agree with this - those who are much more spiritually advance than I all say the same - God/ATTI needed separate consciousnesses to create a much more rich and rewarding universe. An alternate POV is that ATTI IS consciousness and it was a logical outgrowth of universal evolution that by splitting/individualizing consciousness, it would evolve faster through interaction and experience.



Thanks for the links, Bot. Got some good reading ahead of me.

Re. the positionless position and non-false idea, it reminds me so much of QM, doesn't it? In superposition, everything is in multiple states simulataneously, like qubits. Non-false makes sense, no?

Dear Bot-tee (I hope you do not mind when I give you the shortened nickname for you online Avatar);

I am so encouraged that you were able to state this in such simple terms. I think we are in total agreement and have reached consensus reality between us on this question about why humans have such a hard time understanding consciousness.

I guess I would add that once a "shared" objective reality observation is made in disagreement (i.e. no consensus between or amongst two or more independent observers) —we as individuals are then given a true choice. We can choose to remain locked in our disagreement or we can seek for another objective reality observation. Quantum collapse does not have to take place unless and until another objective reality observation is shared.

The University of Miami theoretical physicist named Colin McGinn says we can never understand consciousness. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/06/10/can-we-ever-understand-consciousness/

I tend to also lean more towards the works of Jon Stewart Bell who created the famous "Bell's Theorem" or "Bell's inequality."

I have taken McGinn's and Bell's approach and write my own theorem for the 'Non-virtual" this way


Where "Ontic" = all non-hidden variables and "Phenom" = all hidden variables

This way we do at least understand the "why" of consciousness and even a little bit about the "how" of consciousness even if we can never actually have consensus on the "what" of consciousness. This particular equation is the counterintuitive interpretation (or corollary to Bell's equation) because Bell assumes that there are always more hidden variables than non-hidden variables, I would say that it always takes at least two brain cells to come up with one imagination.

As another friend in this forum "Neo" once said, "there is no spoon."

Bot-tee, unfortunately I do not have any peer reviewed articles (in this subject area). If you were interested in legal topics, I do have published articles in several legal periodicals.

As for my personal interests, this has been a long time "hobby" of mine. I have long been interested in the topics of understanding and programming consciousness.

I warn you that one of the goals (of what I am about to provide links to) —is putting very complex topics into extremely concise terms. These writings are my open and public response to the question what is consciousness? And as you will see, my approach focuses (primarily) on the topic what is free will?

My writings on this topic make a background assumption that the readers of the "non-virtual" blog site are already in tune with and considering just the very narrow topic of programming consciousnesses in a machine.

In Jim's books "The Universe - Solved" and "Digital Consciousness - A Transformative Vision" he tackles the much broader topics (from beginning to end) about the very nature of reality and what we as humans actually "experience" here during our earthly lives. Jim's books remain very scientific throughout, and though not condescending to religions, he does not tackle the more spiritual views (though a little in his second book). Whereas my approach looks at science really as its own form of religion. I came to the realization that a "doubt" is nothing more than a "belief" of the negative proposition to faith. The spiritual and scientific are actually the same thing —just from different perspectives. (i.e. doubt is merely a belief that something is false).

You can read the general statement of my work and interests at Foundations of Skeptical Operating Systems Using Non-Classical Suspension of a Logic Gate

I think personal my favorite "publication" of my own work, however, is in this "crazy man's manifesto" chart (of sorts) that I developed (que weird Sci-fi music). I think of this chart as my "secrets of the galaxy" paper. This chart assumes that the reader already has a deep appreciation for the "new god argument" which is a transhumanist approach to making a case for "beneficent force" in the universe that controls our programming. As Man Is (note this is a graphic meant to be displayed full screen on a 4:3 HD monitor).

Hey Bot-tee, you ask for it. Now you've got it.

Terence McKenna - Live In The Light Of Paradox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF2q_V582i8

@2.34

This whole discussion about the information qubit and Terrence McKenna reminds me of something that is perhaps much less "spiritual."

Electrical engineers use in their circuit board diagrams and building of the memory and boards we use in processing information in machines today a little something called "right-hand rule." And that rule has always amazed me. Only of late (for me about 2012 or so) I started realizing that "right hand rule" is nothing more than a convention —meaning something we chose. Right hand rule is totally man-made. We use it because it aligns with our understanding of positive and negative and what we call positive or negative charge. But, because we have used it for so long, it already relates back into what we are talking about here in observation reality.

If you have not worked in physics or magnetic fields much, the right hand rule is just an handy tool for predicting or measuring magnetic fields

The only reason the right hand rule is the "Right-Hand" rule and not the "Left Hand" rule is because the calculations will only work out properly using the x-y-z coordinate systems. For some reason our scientists chose to make the positive direction (in linear vectors) to the right and negative the left.

When we think of existence in the ATTI to include things outside earthly reality (or consensus reality) then Bell's inequality could face toward the phenom. When we think of existence ATTI to include only things within earthly reality (or consensus reality) then Bell's inequality faces toward the ontic which is our only observable reality.

Right hand rule consistency in the Qubit is that the opposite of true is always false, but the opposite of false is not always true. And non-true is not necessarily false and non-false is not necessarily true. True, however, is always true, but only because our consciousness has chosen to accept that view of the quantum collapsed state. By allowing true to always be true, we create our own objectivity.

I have to think about this some more There is no Spoon

It IS a great article!

jdlaw, can you say more about # non-hidden variables being > # hidden variables? i'm still trying to process that one.