Agent intellect meets intelligibility (Aristotle) is a duet with each correspondent fully active.
Like water and its fluidity, substance and its form are distinct yet inseparable.
For this conversation, my point of attack upon the question of the place held by consciousness within physics focuses upon a thought experiment about the perfect and complete replication of a human individual, Sean Carroll, as discussed by Kuhn and Carroll himself within the video.
When Carroll talks about his replication being an ordinary event that high technology might eventually effect, with each Carroll going his own way and thereafter having separate experiences, I think he makes a mistake in his reasoning. This is a bit complicated, so let me say I think Carroll is correct about consciousness being fully within the capacity of physicalist science to replicate.
The mistake stems from Carroll trying to contain consciousness locally. Consciousness, being non-local in the sense of superposition, possesses in its own format, the wave/particle duality. Therefore, when you perfectly and completely replicate Carroll, you don’t have two Carrolls able to go their separate ways, as he assumes. Instead, you have one Carroll now in superposition.
Carroll in superposition is one type of contradiction, a paradox of self/not self as expressed by one identity in two different places simultaneously. It’s important to understand the profound difference between this state of superposition of one self versus two identical selves existing independently.
I argue that the latter state of two identical selves existing independently, which Carroll assumes as part of his claim there’s nothing special about the ontic state of consciousness i.e., it’s just more physics, presents as an impossible contradiction, whereas the former state of one self in superposition i.e., simultaneously in two places at once presents as a possible contradiction.
Here’s the complicated business: speaking theoretically, I claim superposition isn’t really a contradiction in hyper-cubic space; it’s only a contradiction in cubic space. Hyper-cubic space is bounded by cubic space, so it affords material things an additional dimension of spatial expansion, and this addition allows a superpositioned material thing to unfold its four-space configuration.
A paradox is a higher-dimensional configuration in collapsed form at a lower-dimensional expansion.
The crux of my argument says that physics cannot replicate the non-locality of consciousness within a three-space reality. In order to complete the replication, physics must upwardly evolve the paradox of superposition. This is expressed as the ascension from cubic space to hyper-cubic space, wherein the collapsed higher-dimensional configuration in collapsed state as a paradox unfolds into full expansion, thus resolving the paradox.
The critical issue herein is that the physicality of consciousness, like the critical line of the zeta function that organizes prime numbers, requires a higher order of complexity.
Also, the requisite higher order of complexity (for physicalist replication of consciousness) evidences the fact that the singularity of a human individual is preserved across the ascension from cubic space to hyper-cubic space.
Consciousness does possess an innate stamp of individuality. At The level of cubic space, which is the level of our human world, the individuality of the human individual cannot be fully replicated without invoking superposition. This is to say that such a replication at the level of cubic space preserves
one individual, albeit in paradoxical superposition. At normal energy levels for humans within our cubic reality, and given the entanglement of observer and observed, macro-scale superposition is improbable.