I have been imersing myself in this subject and the gist of what I got is that consciousness collapses under the reductionist process currently employed in the scientific method.
Moreover, the very framework in which the current scientific work is done might well be just an emergent data structure used by what we understand as consciousness to navigate whatever the objective reality is in a way that is simpler and more effective than having to access quantum states and particle trajectories through senses.
That being said, I think that there is something intrinsically insufficient in language itself to describe this wholistic relationship between consciousness, qualia and the perceived world. My take is that for anything to be communicated through symbols it has to undergo a reduction process which is essential to the flow of information to occur, otherwise you would have to communicate the entire universe at once, which is just impossible. You have to reduce reality to a set of symbols for the symbols itself to make sense. That is the whole premise of language, that a word has meaning only when immersed in other words (cow represents a cow insofar it doesn't represent anything else besides a cow).
If this is true, and Gödel incompleteness Theorem is essential, then this whole talk might take us closer to representing the experience of consciousness but there might never be a unifying theory, because for that to exist, that has to be a language that represents everything without reducing it to none of its parts, a theory without postulates.
You have a good grasp on this. Have you looked at Tom Campbell? He has a separate angle than Hoffman but very similar conclusions.
The batshit crazy thing about Tom is that he shows you ways that you can individually experiment and prove through your own experiences the things he's positing. His My Big Toe trilogy goes into all this, but I shudder to recommend it. Tedious slog.
If you really want to prove it to yourself, it's not too hard. This book by Kenneth Daz, "The Last Astral Projection Book You'll Ever Need", is the best way I've found, he's read endlessly and summarized it into a hundred pages.
So far I've rolled out of my body twice now. Floated through my front door and got down my road a fair ways. Fully conscious, able to make choices, full memory after returning to my body. No psychedelics involved. You can't of course talk to anyone about this. My wife knows but she's been naturally OBE'ing since she's a kid.
(Edit, I can't believe I'm not being down voted to oblivion here. Love HN).
A thing with Out-of-Body-Experiences is that if you were able to shift outside of your body, then why would you still be constrained to the body of the earth?
If you were able to roam around free of physics, then certainly you would leave not only your human body, but you would have to take account of the earth moving around the sun as well (at breakneck speed, mind you). You'd probably be either a few kilometers inside our planet or up in the air, and then in space, in practically no time.
So, call me unconvinced about OBE's. It's most likely just your mind playing tricks on you.
If I could, I would. Most of what you wrote is anathema to evidential scientific conversation. If you've got no evidence for it besides the subjective, then it's not provable.
I've no idea who Tom is, so I followed up on what you wrote and believe I have enough of a glimpse to see he's a crackpot theorist. Being a physicist doesn't abscond one of the burden of proof. Apparently he's been cooking up a new double slit experiment for the past decade+.
Yeah... OK... let's not even get started on falsifiability.
I think it is because this is the few times where mysticism and science meet and wrestle. How to communicate something inherently transcendental without talking about this inward journey through consciousness? It might take sometime to separate fact from fiction, but at this point we are in, untethered exploration is essential.
I've been interested for some time in Astral, thanks for mentioning it. I've had very intelligent, credible people suggest it is possible. Similar for remote viewing
In the crux of Tom's argument - what can one prove via Astral?
Great take. Alan Watts described the issue pretty eloquently:
> It's beyond all categorization whatsoever, and so the Upanishads say, “all we can say of it positively is the negative.” Neti neti; 'it is not this, not that.
The above was specifically referring to “god”, however it’s pretty much the same concept. Anything we can symbolize is effectively not the ineffable thing that we want to represent with the symbols
I've got the same vibe, starting at "consciousness collapses under the reductionist process currently employed in the scientific method." Uuuhh yeah, like most abstract things, consciousness is an emergent property of simpler processes, so naturally if you look at it the other way and decompose the world to understand it, at some point it will collapse.
The next part about the scientific framework being a data structure used by our consciousness blabla quantum particles...seems like just a complicated way to say: we are conscious, even if we don't know everything.
Then, language being necessarily insufficient? Boy you like using lots of complicated words so much, you must be an expert at communicating things. Basically what I get here is: words represent concepts. (Wanking represents wanking insofar it doesn't represent anything else besides a wank. Except when I use the word 'wanking' as a metaphor for mental ejaculation).
Then we start again making dubious links between particle physics and humanities (and of course declaring that one is impossible because of the other, for some reason.) This is the signature move of pseudo-science: using scientific words to appear as an authority to an audience, but then dismissing the pursuit of truth for reasons unrelated to the actual challenges of scientific research.
I'm sorry it came out this way to you. I guess when we risk talking about things we don't understand we risk making a fool out of ourselves, but in any case how else can we evolve?
What I tried to convey what I understood from the ideas Donald Hoffman expressed in a couple of podcasts I listened to (currently in the process of reading his book).
All this debate is more in the realm of philosophy in my opinion, which of course doesn't exempt anyone the burden of proof and consistency, but I don't think the scientific method itself is useful here, since we are talking about fundamentals that precede the scientific method itself (for instance, the question "can apply the scientific method to everything we perceive, including our subjective experience?"). It might pass as mysticism or pseudoscience, hell even Hoffman sounds like that a lot, but I don't think I am qualified to question his insights and dismiss them as academic wankery.
Thanks for the helpful post. I especially liked the part where you called it “pseudoscience” without engaging points they listed. Helped me to really be convinced.
But humans are special. They have to be special. Right? Not just what happens once nematodes evolve to survive better. Otherwise, why are we here?
It gets worse for this kind of philosophy as machine learning gets better. Machine learning is a rather simple operation replicated a huge number of times, fed with lightly filtered data about the world. As you add more units and feed in more raw data, it gets smarter.
Now we have a clue about how intelligence really works, and it's upsetting some people.
You are confusing accurate automation with intelligence. And I suspect you haven't thought too deeply about consciousness. Intelligence and consciousness are not the same, chicken have consciousness and dream.
The classic childish confusion of how vs what is also something to be wary of.
Imagine a program in a computer figuring out it is made out of instructions and bits and bytes, that's how its world works but what exactly is that program? Information? A bunch of complex logic gates? An encoding of logic according to the conscious intent of the programmer? Are programs really at the end of the day a representation of human intent?
Much in the same way, this complex piece of software that we are and our limited awareness of our world such as understanding quantum mechanics (like the program understanding bits and instructions) is just describing how things are not what we, the consciousness (not the one ones) ultimately are.
I suspect a lot of the quantum weirdness might be humans looking at the equivalent of "transistor current" , at such a low level that meaning is obscured where at a higher level things just work in bits represented by low/high volage (digital), without minding specific voltage sampling (analog). Just my unfounded speculation though.
Sarcasm aside, the state of the art tells us that humans are not special. A couple hundred lines of python and a shitload of data can produce an "intelligence" that can rival the less intellectually gifted people.
So, given that relatively simple structures can become intelligent when exposed to sufficient data, it can be argued that intelligent structures might be all over the universe, they may not need to be biological, undergo evolution, nor be capable of reproduction. As for where the data comes from, well, the cosmos showers every object with shitload of data from every corner of the depths of the universe.
We know that humans are not special, and intelligence is less complicated as we thought (after removing the overhead of reproduction). Intelligence could be everywhere. The idea of panpsychism is strengthened with recent developments in AI, IMHO.
> Since Galileo’s time the physical sciences have leaped forward, explaining the workings of the tiniest quarks to the largest galaxy clusters. But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”
Everything we know about anything is mediated through our subjective understanding and perception. Be it mathematical formulas that describe the universe or feelings about something. If you remove people, we don’t know what there is, because we have no way of knowing
Sure you can remove some people and have others observe, but that is still mediated by people
We can never truly know anything that we don’t perceive ourselves - so it is just impossible to know anything about a universe that doesn’t include our perception of it
To me, the quote and your questions seem like different concepts
Regarding your questions:
There is a difference between intellectual knowledge and experience
Sometimes the concept of gnosis is used to differentiate them
So for example, you can read a book about riding a bike, maybe the book is very detailed and tells you everything there is to “know” about riding a bike, but unless you actually ride a bike, you can never “truly know” (experience) what riding a bike is
Now regarding our perception and the universe:
We live in the universe, we are part of it, we can’t ever separate ourselves from it
Then how would we ever be able to remove our perception from it? It’s impossible to truly know
Of course we can speculate and we can come up with endless ideas, but we can never truly know anything that we don’t experience
In that sense, even our ideas are mediated through our inner perception of them
And of course this is my own subjective perception of my reality, as it is all I have
I was not expecting panpsychism to pop up on HN. Years ago I explored the topic out of curiosity; at first it seems pretty absurd, but you can find some interesting discussions and insights about it. At the very least, it can encourage you to think differently about consciousness, and perhaps even question some of your own assumptions about consciousness.
I went to a talk by John Cleese, of Monty Python. He made a point about a recent thought that he landed through meditation.
He said he believes less and less that consciousness is in the brain. Maybe it's something external, shared, and our brains work more like a camera, and make whatever is out there our own.
The idea has been somewhat famously illustrated in the concept of the muse, an external entity or influence that is the actual source of the ideas that we then channel into our reality
Similar also to what Michelangelo once said:
> The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
On a similar vein of the “not in the brain” concept, there are many proponents of the “embodied” consciousness, meaning that consciousness is in the whole body, not just our brain/nervous system (this is also very briefly touched upon in one episode of the AppleTV series Extrapolations)
Quote Investigator has located no substantive evidence that Michelangelo or any other great sculptor made this remark. A comment of this type was published in 1858 in “The Methodist Quarterly Review” without any overt humor. The essay discussed poetry, and the author compared the methods of adroit sculptors and poets.
The most miraculous thing to me is being thrown into the world as an individual, and I think this idea of a tapped consciousness is meant to reconcile with that. There's the perspective also that it's entirely illusory like the self, but that's not satisfying by itself. Life in other things seems abstracted away, like machines running on electricity, but being me, right now, you can't help but ask things like "why am I in this body and reduced to an individual? How is it that I can experience this, and presumably, others can too?". It's crazy.
Many people arrive at the same idea/perception, be it through meditation and/or with the help of psychedelics.
I think it was Terrence McKenna who described the brain as an antenna that tunes in to a certain band of the universal consciousness, and that's what we consider to be the thoughts of an individual.
More or less same idea, slightly different way of phrasing it.
I believe some buddhist practitioners also have a similar way of thinking.
I've wondered about this and whether it might someday be testable. One thing I keep coming back to is the brain's apparent search power: you see a 5s video clip and can recall the show. This means your brain can trawl all your memories of all the movies and shows that you've ever seen, without generating a fraction of the heat energy of search done in a computer. It's pretty weird to think our brains can actually do this without help...
> many phenomena that can’t be inferred from the goings-on at the microscopic level, it is nonetheless a real, emergent feature of the macroscopic world. He offered the physics of gases as a parallel example. At the micro level, one talks of atoms, molecules and forces; at the macro level, one speaks of pressure, volume and temperature. These are two kinds of explanations, depending on the “level” being studied
Putting aside the issue of consciousness for a moment, this is actually a great insight
I wonder if something like this should be applied in physics/astronomy to solve the whole dark matter issue
At a “micro level”, we can talk about planets, stars and gravity, but maybe at a “macro level”, those concepts stop being useful to describe the behavior of the universe, and different models might be needed
No, it's not a great insight - unless you have not studied physics before.
It's the standard context for thermodynamics (macro) and statistical mechanics (micro) explanations. Sometimes called coarse-graining and fine-graining.
For dark matter there are 3 potential levels:
- micro would be be new dark subatomic particles (WIMPs), or sterile right-handed neutrinos in the Standard Model (see Turok);
- meso is macroscopic clumps of those particles (dark stars) /OR/ no micro, but dark conventional matter objects, like naked black holes, neutron stars or brown dwarves (MACHOs), or perhaps just lots of dust;
- macro would be the truly cosmological state of the whole universe (a stat mech theory over the micro/meso). Think dark matter fluids, and phase changes to dark superfluids, that might have MONDian effects on gravity at the galactic level - and beyond!
So according to you, nothing that anyone has discovered before is a great insight?
Now, regarding the dark matter issue, maybe there are more levels that models can be separated in. It seems overly simplistic to separate the whole immensity of the universe in only 3 levels
That's not a novel insight, it's a standard way of interrogating systems at various levels and has been in common intellectual discourse for some time now.
Novel to them, and that's okay; I don't assume anyone knows everything. Your content is helpful in clarifying that this insight has been novel to many others already.
So? What’s your point? That it can’t be used for anything else because some people, including you, already knew about it, hence it can’t be applied in novel ways?
If consciousness is "the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings" then it depends on dualism, ie, this and that.
Is the fabric of the universe dual or non-dual? If it is non-dual it can have no consciousness. Because the universe would be able to see a "non-universe".
IMHO, consciousness arises out of the universe via the creation of duality by the human mind.
The fabric is unknowable and that frustrates scientists so they make up theories like panpsychism. But is it really just the same sort of anthropomorphic delusions that they have always suffered from. "If I am aware, then so the universe." Guess what, we are not Gods, we are humans.
Adding that consciousness is just when my brain compares a new sense object with an already brain encoded sense object (memory).
Unfortunately we will never truly know, as the only way we can experience the universe is through our consciousness, in that sense, from a human perception perspective, the universe and our consciousness are inextricably intertwined and any theory or explanation we try to come up with is just our own subjective observations
No, there is another way (perhaps the only way) to find some objective knowledge - by the interaction of many consciousnesses. This is the scientific method.
Comparison of experiences, with agreement, or refutation, can produce more reliable knowledge than any individual. See Popper, Lakatos, et many al that you seem unaware of.
We do not experience the universe through our consciousness. We cannot comprehend the universe through consciousness. Consciousness is a subset of the universe.
The connection of memory to consciousness is a fascinating thing to consider. If we had no memory whatsoever, then even with our huge brains I suspect we'd be as conscious as a plant, or possibly even less so (plants have timekeeping ability and thats a rudimentary memory of sorts). Perhaps 'blue' and 'chocolatey' are the interpretations a memory state makes of new input.
I want to add as well that genetics are a type of memory as well, and there might be two types of "conscioucness", one of the brain and one of the body.
Readit News
Moreover, the very framework in which the current scientific work is done might well be just an emergent data structure used by what we understand as consciousness to navigate whatever the objective reality is in a way that is simpler and more effective than having to access quantum states and particle trajectories through senses.
That being said, I think that there is something intrinsically insufficient in language itself to describe this wholistic relationship between consciousness, qualia and the perceived world. My take is that for anything to be communicated through symbols it has to undergo a reduction process which is essential to the flow of information to occur, otherwise you would have to communicate the entire universe at once, which is just impossible. You have to reduce reality to a set of symbols for the symbols itself to make sense. That is the whole premise of language, that a word has meaning only when immersed in other words (cow represents a cow insofar it doesn't represent anything else besides a cow).
If this is true, and Gödel incompleteness Theorem is essential, then this whole talk might take us closer to representing the experience of consciousness but there might never be a unifying theory, because for that to exist, that has to be a language that represents everything without reducing it to none of its parts, a theory without postulates.
The batshit crazy thing about Tom is that he shows you ways that you can individually experiment and prove through your own experiences the things he's positing. His My Big Toe trilogy goes into all this, but I shudder to recommend it. Tedious slog.
If you really want to prove it to yourself, it's not too hard. This book by Kenneth Daz, "The Last Astral Projection Book You'll Ever Need", is the best way I've found, he's read endlessly and summarized it into a hundred pages.
So far I've rolled out of my body twice now. Floated through my front door and got down my road a fair ways. Fully conscious, able to make choices, full memory after returning to my body. No psychedelics involved. You can't of course talk to anyone about this. My wife knows but she's been naturally OBE'ing since she's a kid.
(Edit, I can't believe I'm not being down voted to oblivion here. Love HN).
If you were able to roam around free of physics, then certainly you would leave not only your human body, but you would have to take account of the earth moving around the sun as well (at breakneck speed, mind you). You'd probably be either a few kilometers inside our planet or up in the air, and then in space, in practically no time.
So, call me unconvinced about OBE's. It's most likely just your mind playing tricks on you.
I've no idea who Tom is, so I followed up on what you wrote and believe I have enough of a glimpse to see he's a crackpot theorist. Being a physicist doesn't abscond one of the burden of proof. Apparently he's been cooking up a new double slit experiment for the past decade+.
Yeah... OK... let's not even get started on falsifiability.
Perhaps.
But proving it to anyone else at all is a hell of a leap in difficulty from there.
In the crux of Tom's argument - what can one prove via Astral?
> It's beyond all categorization whatsoever, and so the Upanishads say, “all we can say of it positively is the negative.” Neti neti; 'it is not this, not that.
The above was specifically referring to “god”, however it’s pretty much the same concept. Anything we can symbolize is effectively not the ineffable thing that we want to represent with the symbols
The next part about the scientific framework being a data structure used by our consciousness blabla quantum particles...seems like just a complicated way to say: we are conscious, even if we don't know everything.
Then, language being necessarily insufficient? Boy you like using lots of complicated words so much, you must be an expert at communicating things. Basically what I get here is: words represent concepts. (Wanking represents wanking insofar it doesn't represent anything else besides a wank. Except when I use the word 'wanking' as a metaphor for mental ejaculation).
Then we start again making dubious links between particle physics and humanities (and of course declaring that one is impossible because of the other, for some reason.) This is the signature move of pseudo-science: using scientific words to appear as an authority to an audience, but then dismissing the pursuit of truth for reasons unrelated to the actual challenges of scientific research.
What I tried to convey what I understood from the ideas Donald Hoffman expressed in a couple of podcasts I listened to (currently in the process of reading his book).
All this debate is more in the realm of philosophy in my opinion, which of course doesn't exempt anyone the burden of proof and consistency, but I don't think the scientific method itself is useful here, since we are talking about fundamentals that precede the scientific method itself (for instance, the question "can apply the scientific method to everything we perceive, including our subjective experience?"). It might pass as mysticism or pseudoscience, hell even Hoffman sounds like that a lot, but I don't think I am qualified to question his insights and dismiss them as academic wankery.
Deleted Comment
It gets worse for this kind of philosophy as machine learning gets better. Machine learning is a rather simple operation replicated a huge number of times, fed with lightly filtered data about the world. As you add more units and feed in more raw data, it gets smarter.
Now we have a clue about how intelligence really works, and it's upsetting some people.
The classic childish confusion of how vs what is also something to be wary of.
Imagine a program in a computer figuring out it is made out of instructions and bits and bytes, that's how its world works but what exactly is that program? Information? A bunch of complex logic gates? An encoding of logic according to the conscious intent of the programmer? Are programs really at the end of the day a representation of human intent?
Much in the same way, this complex piece of software that we are and our limited awareness of our world such as understanding quantum mechanics (like the program understanding bits and instructions) is just describing how things are not what we, the consciousness (not the one ones) ultimately are.
I suspect a lot of the quantum weirdness might be humans looking at the equivalent of "transistor current" , at such a low level that meaning is obscured where at a higher level things just work in bits represented by low/high volage (digital), without minding specific voltage sampling (analog). Just my unfounded speculation though.
So, given that relatively simple structures can become intelligent when exposed to sufficient data, it can be argued that intelligent structures might be all over the universe, they may not need to be biological, undergo evolution, nor be capable of reproduction. As for where the data comes from, well, the cosmos showers every object with shitload of data from every corner of the depths of the universe.
We know that humans are not special, and intelligence is less complicated as we thought (after removing the overhead of reproduction). Intelligence could be everywhere. The idea of panpsychism is strengthened with recent developments in AI, IMHO.
Everything we know about anything is mediated through our subjective understanding and perception. Be it mathematical formulas that describe the universe or feelings about something. If you remove people, we don’t know what there is, because we have no way of knowing
Sure you can remove some people and have others observe, but that is still mediated by people
We can never truly know anything that we don’t perceive ourselves - so it is just impossible to know anything about a universe that doesn’t include our perception of it
The optimistic take for me is that this is a fundamental feature of the Universe.
Is this true? What about logical deductions? Can't you use math and logic to know things without perceiving them?
Regarding your questions:
There is a difference between intellectual knowledge and experience
Sometimes the concept of gnosis is used to differentiate them
So for example, you can read a book about riding a bike, maybe the book is very detailed and tells you everything there is to “know” about riding a bike, but unless you actually ride a bike, you can never “truly know” (experience) what riding a bike is
Now regarding our perception and the universe:
We live in the universe, we are part of it, we can’t ever separate ourselves from it
Then how would we ever be able to remove our perception from it? It’s impossible to truly know
Of course we can speculate and we can come up with endless ideas, but we can never truly know anything that we don’t experience
In that sense, even our ideas are mediated through our inner perception of them
And of course this is my own subjective perception of my reality, as it is all I have
He said he believes less and less that consciousness is in the brain. Maybe it's something external, shared, and our brains work more like a camera, and make whatever is out there our own.
It made an impression on me.
The idea has been somewhat famously illustrated in the concept of the muse, an external entity or influence that is the actual source of the ideas that we then channel into our reality
Similar also to what Michelangelo once said:
> The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
On a similar vein of the “not in the brain” concept, there are many proponents of the “embodied” consciousness, meaning that consciousness is in the whole body, not just our brain/nervous system (this is also very briefly touched upon in one episode of the AppleTV series Extrapolations)
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/22/chip-away/
Quote Investigator has located no substantive evidence that Michelangelo or any other great sculptor made this remark. A comment of this type was published in 1858 in “The Methodist Quarterly Review” without any overt humor. The essay discussed poetry, and the author compared the methods of adroit sculptors and poets.
I think it was Terrence McKenna who described the brain as an antenna that tunes in to a certain band of the universal consciousness, and that's what we consider to be the thoughts of an individual.
More or less same idea, slightly different way of phrasing it.
I believe some buddhist practitioners also have a similar way of thinking.
Putting aside the issue of consciousness for a moment, this is actually a great insight
I wonder if something like this should be applied in physics/astronomy to solve the whole dark matter issue
At a “micro level”, we can talk about planets, stars and gravity, but maybe at a “macro level”, those concepts stop being useful to describe the behavior of the universe, and different models might be needed
It's the standard context for thermodynamics (macro) and statistical mechanics (micro) explanations. Sometimes called coarse-graining and fine-graining.
For dark matter there are 3 potential levels:
- micro would be be new dark subatomic particles (WIMPs), or sterile right-handed neutrinos in the Standard Model (see Turok);
- meso is macroscopic clumps of those particles (dark stars) /OR/ no micro, but dark conventional matter objects, like naked black holes, neutron stars or brown dwarves (MACHOs), or perhaps just lots of dust;
- macro would be the truly cosmological state of the whole universe (a stat mech theory over the micro/meso). Think dark matter fluids, and phase changes to dark superfluids, that might have MONDian effects on gravity at the galactic level - and beyond!
Now, regarding the dark matter issue, maybe there are more levels that models can be separated in. It seems overly simplistic to separate the whole immensity of the universe in only 3 levels
Btw, no one said it was a novel insight
Is the fabric of the universe dual or non-dual? If it is non-dual it can have no consciousness. Because the universe would be able to see a "non-universe".
IMHO, consciousness arises out of the universe via the creation of duality by the human mind.
The fabric is unknowable and that frustrates scientists so they make up theories like panpsychism. But is it really just the same sort of anthropomorphic delusions that they have always suffered from. "If I am aware, then so the universe." Guess what, we are not Gods, we are humans.
Adding that consciousness is just when my brain compares a new sense object with an already brain encoded sense object (memory).
Comparison of experiences, with agreement, or refutation, can produce more reliable knowledge than any individual. See Popper, Lakatos, et many al that you seem unaware of.
For more on 'blue' and 'chocolatey', check out this video...
How did consciousness evolve - with Nicholas Humphrey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QWaZp_2I1k
I want to add as well that genetics are a type of memory as well, and there might be two types of "conscioucness", one of the brain and one of the body.