As an illustration, take a 5 year old child, confine him to a cell for 50 years and let him out into the world on his 55th birthday. — TheMadFool

What has he done to deserve that? You think the poor child will survive at all? He will go mad as hell. The only stuff he can relate are empty walls and the food she gets. Or they will just die of boredom. They even performed such torture to rats. The ones in empty cages had less developed brains. I could have guessed this without torture.

Basically, if you have a low IQ, you're a child trapped in an adult body and vice versa for high IQ folks. — TheMadFool

This preassumes IQ as a measure of being grown up. A quite childish assumption.

TV is just a medium. I could compare air and people shouting in it in the same way to the brain and the mind. But somehow, that image is less convincing, not to mention useless. Where is the connection to cognitive science you mentioned? You made me curious.

This is where you get to explain just how the processes could fail to be accompanied by a conscious experience — apokrisis

Because these processes are just theoretical constructions, no matter how refined, evolved, sophisticated, or advanced they are. They are projected onto subject stuff that isn't material by nature. So how can they explain it? There has to be more present than matter, no matter how complex the processes involved. Do you really think that a complex material process, with eyes and ears, a face, a body, a brain, etc, can experience pain if hit by a piece of stone? You can of course say it can, and it is necessary in order to react, hence the face to show the pain, express it. You can say the pain is an illusion accompanying these proces, but still it doesn't explain it. It merely puts material processes in the driving seat of reality, hence it's called an illusion. I don't put material processes in the driving seat, though I don't deny them. They are the surface. The content is consciousness.

I sometimes have black hole days and I wonder if psychological black holes are in any way parallel to physical ones — Jack Cummins

Well, you can't get out of physical ones, not even if you are shining light for help. Untill now I always came out of the psychological ones. But in both it can be pretty dark and give you tunnel vision ,and the feeling of getting ripped apart is present in both. It is even claimed that physical black holes form a portal to new and fresh universes, which is nonsense, but it certainly applies to psycho holes. From the outside their appearance is stretched in time and compressed in space. From the inside it's all in a flash and stretched out in space. Somehow, a psychological black hole seems to be the inverse, but both are singularities.

What's that got to do with "The hidden placeholders of identity as reality"? — Banno

Ignoring electron masses or GR effects renders them massless or non-existent effectively in the situatiòn at stake. So the hidden placeholder of a zero-mass electron or non-existing GR effects shapes the identity of the reality for that moment. It worked for Newton, who even thought that gravity was a force, which has taken a prominent place(holder) in high school physics books, shaping high school pupil's reality about falling or orbiting objects (saying for example that for a circular orbit two balancing forces keep an object in circular motion, which makes no sense).

I happens everywhere indeed. What is considered irrelevant is left out of the argument. A fundamental Christian leaves out evolutionary arguments, while a quantum physicist leaves out gravity (usually). In celestial mechanics, classical mechanics leaves out general relativity in general, though for satellite orbits this leads to divergences. When I paint a scene, many aspects of the colors I use I leave out. I only look at the color, plasticity, stickiness, brush interaction, and smell occasionally. That's the temporal and local reality. On other occasions I include other aspects, while leaving the mentioned ones out, like drying time or possibility to dilute it. In almost all aspects of life comparable mechanism ring the bell.

Who did that, where? — Banno

In calculating atomic masses, for example.

You need to study the thermodynamics of dissipative structures that are enclosed by a Markov blanket - that have an epistemic cut or a modelling relation with their environment — apokrisis

Here I totally agree. Some organisms even developed brains to simulate the physical world. Still, there is no explanation of consciousness to be found in Friston. Neither in Markov blankets, however usefull they are in describing non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

I'm not interested in the specifics and that's not what this thread is about. I'm happy with the general outline applying to all organisms that evolved. If the right stuff is present slow periodic exposure of it to starry heat and nightly cold (like breathing in and out) will force it to get dissipatively in form, never allowing that right stuff to reach thermodynamical equilibrium because the direction of heat low follows a sine pattern, reaching (relatively) +1 on a star day and -1 in the night, which constitutes a dynamical equilibrium. The total will not heat up or cool down. Small initial structures will diverge more and more from thermodynamic equilibrium. That this evolution is dissipative seems pretty obvious, as the structures develop non-reversible. The structures develop in a mutual dependence. And look at the variety of species that came to be! Some structures anchored in the Earth, others decided to roam around, still others wanted to stay small and tiny, while others grew to immense proportions. A part of them stayed in the waters, another part ventured to the land or air, all in a huge variety of habitats. I can't see why the situation around stars should be vastly different from the situation in our solar system.

The thread is about the explanation of consciousness. However sophisticated your theory it doesn't explain consciousness. You can construct theories of the workings of the brain connected inseparably to body and the outside world. But it will remain just that. A theory. Not an explanation. The only thing that can explain is consciousness itself. The felt experience. That's how you can explain your consciousness to others. No theory can do that. You can say that seeing colors is necessary in a world with a lot of chemicals that contain useful information about fodder, but that doesn't explain the conscious experience of colòrs. The processes corresponding to seeing color could just as well occur without an accompanying conscious experience of color. And that's exactly what is the case if you semiotically describe consciousness. It takes the color away and replaces it by structured processes, which are called an explanation.

If it works for you, that's fine. For me, it doesn't.

Not sure what you are talking about but I consider the conscious experiences as not explicable by any mechanism. However sophisicated. I'm fully aware how organisms evolved on Earth, but it still doesn't offer an explanation of consciousness. That's why it's called the hard problem. I think life evolved in the majority of stellar systems. There are high chances that there are the right sized planets with the right rotation, and the needed basic stuff. The structures which we call life can do nothing else but evolve towards low entropy states, being situated periodically in the heat baths of the star and the cold bath of the void of night. Nothing special about that. The special part kicks in when the content of these inevitable processes breathes consciousness in these processes. I bet my life that life exist around most stars, and the exception is the lack of life.

This is bullshit. I posted Friston’s presentation. If you can’t muster the energy to consider what the world’s premier thinker on the subject has to say, then that’s on you. — apokrisis

Whatever he has to say, it can't explain consciousness. No matter how premier he thinks about it. All talk about dissipative structures evolving non-reversible into orderly structures, by means of night and day, is bound to leave out what's crucial for consciousness However you look at the problem, the materialistic approach won't work. The materialist might disagree though.

I might take the trouble to look into it if I think it's worth it. I don't see any reason to. You haven't given a prima facie reason why the modelling must feel like something. You've asserted it and said the burden of proof is on the doubter, which is rhetorical nonsense. — bert1

:100:

It seems that there are two options from here. We either regard consciousness as a fundamental property (a property like charge for example in which we accept that there are no more fundamental descriptions of it; some things just exist the way they are without the need for further explanation) or we can try to come up with a more fundamental theory, that goes beyond surface-level descriptions of consciousness. — tom111

String theory sees charge as a vibrational mode of strings. It's this vibrational mode that gives the coupling strength to other strings. I don't agree with the string approach, but it goes to show charge can be described as emergent. The question of what charge is is shifted though to the question how a string can vibrate as vibration requires forces, and interactions, forces, are described by vibrating strings which obviously is not applicable to the vibrational motion of strings themselves.

Every description of consciousness is bound to touch the surface only. Of course there is a correspondence between description and experience. Seeing colors and hearing sounds have their neuronal counterparts. The visual cortex spatiotemporally differently organized than the auditory one. Eyes and ears give a different input and already in the embryonic stage your visual and auditory cortex are stimulated by retinal patterns in the developing eye or comparable patterns emerging from the developing ear, just to prepare you for the world you are thrown in. Likewise for pain, experiences for hot and cold, the feeling of itch on your back (which, when scratched, can give rise to spikes of itch on other body parts), thoughts and feelings, or whatever conscious experience.

The descriptions in terms of flowing patterns of spike potentials on the network of interconnected neuron cells and their relation to the physical world via the senses, offers no explanation for that what's the content of the patterns, i.e, the conscious experience. It offers no explanation why organisms with faces have a conscious experience, though it's hard to imagine how it could be else, i.e, people or animals doing their things without being conscious. You can consider all living creatures as dynamical complex structures with an unbroken bond to the past universe, but in doing so you leave out a component that constitutes that what's beneath the surface. Let's call it charge.

No, you're not scientifically unorthodox, you're ascientific: your beliefs concerning nature are not impinged by scientific facts. — Kenosha Kid

Then the orthodox view is non-scientific just the same. There is just no scientific evidence the orthodox view is the correct one.
All physical examples thus far contain no evidence whatsoever regarding the nature of the wavefunction, or more generally, quantum fields, a cross section of which delivers the wavefunction. If you have scientific evidence that the wavefunction is a probability measure without further explanation, it would be in the headlines. All explanations of the wavefunction and its behaviors, be it in the context of decoherence (offering only an apparent solution to the measurement problem), the MWI, or hidden variables, have no experimental backup yet. Clinging to one of them is just a matter of belief so far.

I've already given an example: the electric moment of ground state hydrogen. — Kenosha Kid

The ground state of hydrogen has no electric moment (maybe if you could shake the proton, which would imply that the state is not a groundstate anymore though, like shaking the electron), but even if it had this would not constitute evidence.

Like I said, any evidence would be hot as hell. Which brings to my mind a Gedanken Experiment (involving arrival times) to discern if pure chance governs particles or something deeper.
To bring the experiment outside the realm of thought is very difficult though, and it's a pity I can't find it online. I saw it mentioned on a forum for physics. It is already shown that hidden variables are non-local, which is no surprise as they are introduced to explain non-local features like collapse.

I'm not sure you quite grasp MWI, or superposed states generally. Even if no branching occurs, and a particle's superposition of being here or there remains coherent, it still has a mass. You don't need branching or collapse to encounter issues like superposition. — Kenosha Kid

The MWI or superpositions generally are not that difficult to grasp. Of course a particle still has a mass when being in an isolated coherent state of superposition, but solving the measurement problem by decoherence is simply inconsistent with the Copenhagen interpretation, because that asserts an objective macrostate in which the isolated coherent state is embedded, giving rise to decoherence upon interaction, which makes the solution circular.
The embedding of an isolated coherent system in a universal wavefunction makes collapse superfluous altogether, but introduces parallel universes to achieve this. Giving rise to understandable questions like the question how energy can be conserved when the wavefunction unitarily breaks up in two disconnected wavefunctions after a measurement by an observer Energy or mass are simply conserved, just like mass and energy are conserved in any superposition. A superposition of two electron states doesn't mean there are suddenly two electron masses involved.

The observer and the coherent state he measures are just considered part of an all-encompassing state in which just one observer is distributed in disconnected states over the total state after a measurement, while before the measurement the coherent superposition is a still connected small part of the whole. Hawking, RIP, even used this universal wavefunction to account for the initial condìtions of the big bang, which obviously had to be such to give rise to the universe as we see it (I'm talking about different initial configurations and initial parameters like interaction strengths or particle masses). And there are quite a lot initial conditions, which all can be accommodated by a universal wavefunction and thus retroactively and trivially collapse the wavefunction to the state as we perceive today, while the MWI denies the collapse but conjectures a state in which all possible sub-states live happily side by side. You can even consider this in a timeless fashion, like I already wrote, in a block universal mode, which leaves open the question though of how the evolution in time "happens". If there are just branches of a universal wavefunction, then how one progresses from a coherent still superimposed state to non-coherent, disconnected states after a measurement? The same could be asked in a block universe where all worldlines are part of a static universe. How can one move in such a timeless universe?
The point of the initial fine-tuning doesn't need a universal wavefunction. If we keep that wavefunction within the domain of of the physics in our part of the universe, it suffices to conjecture that life is bound to emerge.

There is no reason to introduce a universal wavefunction, or parallel worlds to save unitary development, or a seemingly resolution of the measurement problem by decoherence if you don't accept the orthodoxy. Wigner's friend watching Schrödinger's cat, while the universe retroactively collapses, will become part of an evil fairytale.

You just asked about evidence. Try and at least follow your _own_ end of the discussion. — Kenosha Kid

I'm not sure what you mean by this. It feels you are throwing in a bucket of red or blue herrings. Do you mean I have to stop questioning the orthodoxy? Where in history have we seen that before, when science questioned the orthodoxy of the church? I have the inkling feeling you are the one defending God and rejecting evolution.There is no scientific evidence for the orthodoxy. I defend a hidden variables view.

That's excatly what I do. By questioning the other ends. What does a a unitary evolution of the wavefunction in the MWI entail for me as an observer? I know there is conservation of energy or mass, but what does it mean in that context? That I have a chance of ending up in following parallel worlds? Which makes it still hard to believe though that mass is conserved, but you can distribute it nicely. The MWI can ensure energy conservation by assigning the right weights. Still, the concept is ridiculous. The split might be unitary, but it makes me feel totally non-unitary, kind of a split personality, the ultimate schizoid.

I'm talking about the interpretation.

You don't see where God and evolution enter into the realm of fundamental beliefs that conflict with scientific evidence? Curious... — Kenosha Kid

What scientific evidence you are talking about? The Copenhagen view is a belief all the same. And why should you take scientific evidence seriously in the first place? If you do science yes. And there is no scientific evidence in the case of QM.

It assigns branch widths according to the Born rule. — Kenosha Kid

So still a probability distribution. If one state has 0.1 (squared) weight and another 0.9, what does this entail for the corresponding two parallel universes? That the connecting branches have different widths? But what does that mean for the two univeres after the branching?

I did, because it is. You're not making an argument here, you're just reasserting outdated beliefs. There's nothing more here than someone insisting that evolution is untrue because God made everything. — Kenosha Kid

Why should I make an argument? I just belief it. Juat like you belief your stuff about the wavefunction. I don't see where God and evolution enter here. My view is just unorthodox.

MWI doesn't say it's pure chance. — Kenosha Kid

But it still assigns probabilities to branching points.

The fundamental belief here being that a particle cannot be in more than one place. Remove the belief and the question vanishes. All that remains is to falsify or verify that belief. — Kenosha Kid

A partìcle can be in all places it likes. But not at the same time. Call it a fundamental belief. If you think this all weird stuff of QM vanishes. You might ask yourself if that wouldn't generate, in the case of an electron, EM radiation, the electron hopping around weirdly like a Brownian particle. But a smeared out electron is just as weird.

That's just a fundamental belief. For all we know it's spot on. (I don't believe so either, but I don't claim to know things that haven't yet been determined.) — Kenosha Kid

I don't say it is not spot on. It's indeed my fundamental belief that the wavefunction as a mathematical entity is a kind of Platonic view on reality, the metaphysical world of math being the world itself. How can a particle be at several places at the same time and how can it be pure chance (whatever that means without a deterministic substrate) that determines?

That's not right. The wavefunction is a mathematical entity. MWI came from taking that entity as a literal description of the universe. — Kenosha Kid

That's exactly what I mean. But it is no literal description.

It would look like Bohmian mechanics. — Kenosha Kid

Yes. Like. The point is that it came too late. Giving birth to weird paradoxes like Schrödingers cat or Wigners friend. Or even weirder, the MWI. It gave Eels though...

Do you know of any theory in physics or other sufficiently mathematized science that doesn't do exactly that? — SophistiCat

All of them. Math is just a way to describe physical stuff.

So... MWI then? — SophistiCat

No. My point is that the the MWI is caused by the wavefunction being seen as a mathematical entity. Giving rise to the problem of a non-unitary collapse. And according to the rules of QM this wavefunction has to evolve unitarian which it doesn't when measured. This is also mathematically done by a unitary time operator, which is of course only done by people, as there truly is no time propagating operator in nature.

As was decided in Copenhagen once. And eversince has been pushed in the minds of students, incĺuding mine. But who says that Nature is inherently probabilistic? How can this be? How can there be a mathematical distribution of chance, without a deterministic substrate, as it was decided back then? And also Einstein had this thought though he bases it on the understandable chances as seen in the throwing of a dice, after which Gòd lets a particle take position, so to speak.

If it was decided back then to start a search for a deeper theory, which de Broglie proposed more or less (by means of physical pilot waves), who knows what the theory would have looked like these days? But people were satisfied to shut up and calculate, leaving room for dozens interpretations. Among which hidden variables. Now these variables might seem just as obscure as pure, undetermined chance, but they somehow feel more satisfactory. Local hidden variables are ruled out by experiment, but the ones needed are obviously the non-local ones. But exactly what is hidden then? The mystery...

For example, humans are still trying to create something (AI) that is at least as complex as a human. In speculation, it's possible that human culture will eventually create a race of robots that are equal-to or superior-to humanity. — Gnomon

People will never be able to create a human outside the womb of an already existing human being. By the very nature of human beings (or other organisms). All humans contain the contain a part of the history of the entire universe and creating people would mean creating a universe.
Hence AI can never be as complex as beings.

But, if you start counting at 0 (zero), the first step is infinitely wide, and the math-machine just spins its wheels. — Gnomon

That's because there is nothing before zero. Postullating a time zero, as in the big bang model within the confines of general relativity implies an impossibility to start, as there is nothing to get things started. Hence GR fails in the Planck era.

The problem with wavefunction-collapse is that it's a mathematical collapse, leaving room for two interpretations. Or better, three. One that says the collapse happens on observation, one that says every interaction makes it collapse, and one that says there is no collapse at all (MWI, merely relocating unitarity to branching points, which obviously are non-unitary and which made Hugh Everett happily smoke three packets a day, drink a bottle in between, eat what he liked, and a daughter kill hersellf in the happy thought she would meet him in a parallel state).

The first interpretation sticks to the most to the axioms of QM. The second assigns an objective existence to a mathematical entity (the wavefunction), which is absurd. I won't mention the third option again...

What's left is assigning a physical reality of what the wavefunction describes. And only such an interpretation can make all nonsense disappear like a bad dream.

Very important for discussion is to say if human are nature 100% ? where did you get all "unnatural things", — Nothing

By making them on the base of a certain kind of knowledge. Scientific knowledge. That knowledge is again based on an approach that situates people oppositely to the very stuff they interact with, i.e, nature. The knowledge gathered is artificial in the sense that it's obtained from situations cut loose from the nature people found themselves in before the scientific approach came to be.

The paradox lies in the fact that science claims to see nature as it is, while at the same time it introduces situations that were nowhere to be seen in nature before people started to investigate it scientifically. It is known how the universe looked 10exp-43 seconds (or a bit more) after the beginning (which itself could be a an intermediate), while it is claimed that a theory of everything is almost found. There is knowledge of all kinds of artificial situations created in experiments. There are terratons of stuff made on this basis. But at the same time the unperturbed nature it claims to investigate is further away than ever. It is known how DNA looks like but at the same time knowledge of plants, animals and people is more perverted than ever because interaction with them has been placed in artificial domains. Off course still natural, but at the same time unnatural as hell.

↪Cartuna
If you put 1 ton of plastic bottles in your yard, my premise is, you didnt do unnatural thing, but just nature is going bad, like if basketball player miss the shot, he didnt do it on purpose but he didnt figure it out yet.... Nature breaking bad. Not annatural, we just wont get what we want — Nothing

If that's your premisse then nothing is unnatural. But then, when it becomes bad? If it does harm to nature? But how can that be if everything is nature? Is there a good and a bad nature?

I'm not sure how a number can be rethorical. To which parts of engineering you refer? How materials respond to force when pushed or pulled? If you push or pull a material, like steel, or hit hit with a hammer, it will usually react linearly. A piece of steel will produce soundwaves constituted by harmonic oscillators. But all this behavior is preassumed when constructing buildings or bridges and this is what I meant by applying small forces. But the most interesting things happen above yielding, where non-linearity kicks in. Bridges snap, structures disrupt, crack, or break. Irreversibly. And it's that what matters.

I mean, to visualize 1+1=3, say, you'd need to show something along the lines of there being an apple and adding another apple and not in any way adding yet another apple — onomatomanic

A bit off-thread maybe, but equating 1+1 with 2 already presupposes two different things. Equalized by a neutral math. The numbers might be the same, but still 2 can be different from 1+1. And believe me, 1+1 can't be 3. Unless two snowballs hit, break up, and continue in 3-fold.

. Take Hooke's law into 3D (with shear) and you get linear elasticity, the backbone of 90% of engineering mechanics from 19th century through the present day. — SophistiCat

Where did you get that from? 90%? No way. Hooks law doesn't apply to most materials. Even with shear it can't be applied to most materials. Maybe for very small forces, or tiny displacements. Mostly though, a linear algebra just isn't applicable. For a metal spring in the physics class it will do. For an atomic nucleus inside an electron cloud, a Hooke approximation will do.

I'm not sure what you are trying to convey here. Man made nature is not natural anymore if it replaces the nature of man or the nature of nature. You can walk through the wilderness with veggie cloths and woody boots on a curly path the elephants already made for you. Or you can lay down a tarmac strip with computer- and satellite-connected sensors in it to autodrive your bullet-free, metallic-sprayed, state-of-the-art(ificial) electric motor drive, luxurious car with sound blaster, while a state-of-the-art(ificial) electric hart pumps your blood. I think you can guess which of the two examples is natural and which one not.

Plastic is an artificial material like a superconductor, graphene, or one of the zillions of other present-day materials. They say art imitates but what is imitated? Natural stuff. All artificial materials have a counterpart in nature. They have to. They are natural in the sense that they owe their existence to natural processes. But we could just as well had chosen not to make them and be happy with their natural counterparts, which are there not because we made them but because they have to (be there). And give attention not to art that not imitates but expresses.

Stuff made by man, insofar it replaces natural stuff, is unnatural. Viewed in this way, we live in an extremely unnatural world.

Virtual philosophy
— TheMadFool

Anybody here have any idea on that? — TheMadFool

Just take a look around on this forum... I guess you saw that one coming.

I don't understand what your intentions are here. The first thing that came up in my mind though was a character jumping up 12 levels for no apparent reason. Turned out to be caused by a cosmic particle entering the undermoony from the celestial sphere. Causing a 1 or 0 in the memory to flip.

Now if that ain't magic.