OP Part 2

My argument that supports leaning far over towards Kuhn and far away from Carroll without, however, reaching a binary conclusion about one man being right and the other man being wrong, is based upon an imaginative speculation about what might happen if technology actually replicates perfectly and completely Sean Carroll.

Assuming the replication to be a process over time, I speculate the replication will progress to near completion with nothing out of the ordinary occurring. However, when the process crosses the critical threshold dividing approximate replication in progress to perfect and complete replication, I speculate that something extraordinary might happen: the absolutely identitical two Sean Carrolls, occupying two different places simultaneously, will merge into one Sean Carroll, albeit one Sean Carroll paradoxically occupying two different positions simultaneously. This is what it means to perfectly and completely replicate one human individual.

These two individuals will not, as Carroll claims in the video, go their separate ways and have their independent experiences. The paradox dictates: one Sean Carroll simultaneously in two different positions. To talk about them having independent experiences is to talk in contradiction. Two almost identical Carrolls can have independent experiences; one Carroll in two positions simultaneously cannot.

In order for one Carroll in two positions simultaneously to be functional as opposed to being a physical non-starter, the two Carrolls as one must explode upwardly into a higher spatial dimensional matrix. Specifically, the two Carrolls as one must ascend upward from cubic space into hyper-cubic space.

The extra spatial dimension will be required to resolve the non-functional paradox at our level of cubic space. At our level, the hyper-cubism of one Carroll in two positions simultaneously is the hyper-cubic version of one Carroll in two positions simultaneously in its collapsed, non-functional state.

At the level of hyper-cubic spatial extension, the paradox can be resolved with the unfolding of the hyper-cubic Carroll in two positions simultaneously as a four-space human individual.

At our present cubic spatial extension experience, we can’t talk empirically about a four-space human experience of the world. I do suspect, however, that at the hyper-cubic level, Carroll in two positions simultaneously is just three-space talk with little bearing on the reality of four-space cognitive experience.

OP Part 3

The hyper-cubism of my speculation throws fog on the subject/object interweave, but its introduction takes us back to the interweave by showing us how objective examination of subjectivity involves an enlightening manipulation of the two modes: subjective/objective such that the symmetry linking the two modes is preserved across dimensional expansion with respect to an emergent property: consciousness. The causal power of consciousness as an emergent property is the stamp of singularity it imprints upon the individual in possession of it.

All of my science-fiction sounding speculation posits a situation wherein exact replication can be approached, but not finalized: one Carroll simultaneously in two positions is an essentially non-local identity that cannot be contained spatially (physically speaking) or proven axiomatically (cognitively speaking).

If Gödel, Schrödinger, Heisenberg apply at the level of four-space, then we have incompleteness, non-locality and uncertainty integrated into a unified wholeness hard if not impossible for us to imagine at the level of our three-space experience.

This four-space wholeness suggests a superlative freedom of being wherein the “whereness” of a unified, four-space being is, by our standards, unimaginably rich.

Russell’s Paradox, with the ascension to four-space, ceases to be a paradoxical prison, instead transforming into a liberation into a more complex utilization of the space all around us.

I'm firmly with Kuhn here. I think there's close to zero chance that physicalism will turn out to be able to explain consciousness -- unless you just stipulate that anything that's real is physical, therefore consciousness is physical, QED, but that's no explanation at all. Or I suppose you could do a Dennett and "explain" consciousness by trying to show that it isn't real. Carroll's attempt to reduce the issue to a manner of speaking is hopeless. Kuhn's case for the two Seans is pretty good, and he's right to deny that it's a parallel with the Ship of Theseus. But we're waiting on the science here.

I'm way out of my depth on your other speculations. I'll watch the thread and see what I can learn.

My premise lies rooted in the encounter between agent intellect (subjectivity) and intelligibility (objectivity). This encounter plays in real space as the form/substance interweave. — ucarr

This sounds like a ghost in the machine. Is that what you mean?

When Carroll claims there’s nothing special about consciousness, I think he’s saying the human individual is not unique and that with sufficient technology, perfect and complete replicas of human individuals are possible — ucarr

I think that Sean Carroll perfectly exemplifies what Thompson, Gleiser and Frank designate the blind spot of science. This is, according to them, is the exclusion of the subject from scientific reckoning. First spelled out in a 2019 Aeon essay, and now a book, the authors argue that the experience of the objects of analysis is indispensable to the understanding of them. They say that since the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we're going, but we've gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it; but that when we try to understand reality only through external objects projected from this perspective we lose sight of reality as experienced. This is what lies behind the subject-object divide in the thread title. The book goes into great detail on the origin of this 'cartesian divide' and its historical precedents and consequences.

So, why would Sean Carroll not see that? In what he says about consciousness as 'a way of speaking about physical things', he doesn't see that he or anyone else is only able to engage in those speech acts because we're conscious. Of course 'consciousness' is not an object as such, rather it is the ground of the awareness which allows us to say anything whatever (as Descartes affirmed). But there is nothing objective about it, save for the fact that we can infer that it is something that others share with us. If that seems like philosophy 101, it is, but Carroll doesn't see it.

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.

- No further comment.

I chose not to continue with the conversation because I don’t understand a lot of what you’ve written. It seems you’ve picked up on some of the ideas swirling around the internet about the fusion of quantum physics and consciousness and are trying to fashion them into a coherent system of thought, but to be brutally honest they’re not working out. ‘Consciousness being non-local because of superposition’ ?? Honestly the expression 'nonsense on stilts' comes to mind.

One of my guiding principles is that the subject of philosophy is the human condition and the place of w/man in nature. Clearly that has to take into account scientific discoveries, but I question whether philosophy should allow itself to be defined in those terms. Philosophy as I understand it is very much a matter of stance and attitude. Certainly it must draw on and acknowledge whatever empirical science demonstrates, but philosophy considers very subtle questions, that are beyond the scope of science not because they're incredibly complicated, but because they're generally very simple questions with a lot of depth.

I think Carroll is correct about consciousness being fully within the capacity of physicalist science to replicate. — ucarr

I strongly object to that proposition, not for sentimental reasons, but because of an impossibility in principle which is inherent in the nature of scientific method.

This does not mean, as many here seem to conclude, being anti-science or science denialism. It’s a matter of one of the fundamental assumptions of science since Galileo, that the domain of science is what is objectively observable and measurable. That ought not to be a controversial statement. And the reason ‘consciousness’ (I prefer ‘mind’) is intractable within that framework, is because it is not objective. Sure we can be more or less objective in our judgements about the matter, but the basis of the difficulty is stated clearly by David Chalmers in his 1996 paper:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. — Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers

In line with what I said above, I think there's a very simple reason that this question is not scientifically tractable, but it's not a technical matter or something that requires advanced mathematics or sub-atomic physics to understand. When David Chalmers talks about 'what it is like to be...', he's referring to being. And being is not an object. This is something that Sean Carroll, despite his expert knowledge in physics, doesn't seem to grasp (whereas many of the specifically Continental philosophers and existentialists do.)

I appreciate your response to my note asking you to extend your correspondence with me, however briefly.

It seems you’ve picked up on some of the ideas swirling around the internet… and are trying to fashion them into a coherent system of thought… — Wayfarer

Yes. A would-be theoretician needs some thought-provoking feedback. Here are some of your points directing me towards additional thought:

‘Consciousness being non-local because of superposition’ ?? — Wayfarer

… the subject of philosophy is the human condition and the place of w/man in nature. — Wayfarer

Philosophy… is very much a matter of stance and attitude. — Wayfarer

…philosophy considers very subtle questions… they're generally very simple questions with a lot of depth.
— Wayfarer

… one of the fundamental assumptions of science since Galileo, that the domain of science is what is objectively observable and measurable. That ought not to be a controversial statement. And the reason ‘consciousness’… is intractable within that framework, is because it is not objective. — Wayfarer

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. — Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers

When David Chalmers talks about 'what it is like to be...', he's referring to being. And being is not an object. — Wayfarer

Ideas and time; these are my valuable things.

I appreciate your response... — ucarr

You're welcome.

:up: