Comments

  • Does anyone know about DID in psychology?
    It’s very interesting studying people with DID. They can offer many clues about consciousness.
    Normally a brain creates a single thread with the conscious mind feeling as a single individual, that’s how humans evolved but it looks like the brain is capable of splitting up a thread and continue with many threads. Maybe there are areas of the brain like cores that generate new identities. These being physically connected all sorts of things happen. It seems that for example one of the cores can have more control over the body or areas if the brain. The extraordinary thing is they can communicate with each other directly through neuronal signals.
  • Imaging a world without time.
    Regardless it is absolute or relative time is a dimension where the energy is conserved.
    For example you could have a one dimensional universe plus time. The x dimension have be a series of field values from 0 to A, and can consist of discrete positions form 0-X. All along the time axis the sum of the field values in each point is constant.
    The illusion of motion is observing new values for each position along the t axis.
    Now let’s introduce another space axis y and remove time. Now, You can have any pattern of values everywhere or you may set some rule but scanning along x or y the total energy is not conserved otherwise it would be a time axis
    What if we remove space and add two time axes?
    The energy would conserve on both axes and there will be some symmetrical patterns possible like a line at a 45 deg but this restricts the possibilities substantially
  • The continuity of the conscious experience

    There is a concept of a 5minute universe where it is hypothesized that the universe appeared 5 minutes ago with everything there is in it, all memories. Of course this is not true but how can you distinguish between such an universe and our universe? The same way the brain can create a single instance of a self, then another, each one of them is distinct, but the last one always believes it has experienced all the past when in fact the past was experienced by other identities exactly as identities of completely different people. I hope you now understand the idea.
    You could for example freeze the brain of someone conscious then resume the activity. Is the person going to be the same as before. It certainly will feel the same. What if you make two clones, they will also feel they have lived since childhood but they were created only recently. That’s why they are all different.
    Is it any difference between freezing a brain and waking it up and making a copy of a being then destroy the original and wake the copy up? I don’t think there is any difference. They copy will say it has he mashed his fingers in a door and the memories are in his brain not other’s
  • The continuity of the conscious experience
    the memories are in your brain. It keeps all these memories. But each conscious moment the brain generates based on those memories is unique and has an unique identity exactly like a different person has a different identity than you.
  • The continuity of the conscious experience
    My claim is that the persistence of identity is an illusion. You, right now, experience the world and your brain contains all the memories of the previous past experiences but they were like different persons that experienced the world and they are all gone. You remember their conscious experiences and think it was you who did it but the hypothesis is it was not you who are conscious now that experienced the world in the past.
  • Mind Has No Mass, Physicalism Is False
    The brain has its activity and it changes its state. It enters a new state every iteration. Each state generates a conscious experience. Without a brain I don’t see how a conscious experience can exist. But why or how exactly the brain generates the experience nobody knows.
    The experience is generated by a physical thing and it exist. I don’t know if you can call it physical or not. Maybe it’s ok to say it’s not physical but it is sustained by the physical things. I don’t see how it can survive outside a physical world I can’t even imagine such a possibility.
  • Towards Theory/Definitions of Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom
    o clarify my prior point on the 'free will' thread, I should also point out that call conscious decisions must be based on data and information, which according to my above definitions necessarily must be "the result of the interactions between the fundamental constituents the brain is made of or whatever makes the thought possible", which contradicts your definition approach. So, my proposed definitions would seem to perform better than yours.
    So you mean the brain as a machine creates the thoughts but then these thoughts can cause nature to veer off it’s normal course?
    It seems a better definition. At least mine doesn’t make room for free will. Yours lives more room for interpretation in the sense you define something that may be possible although I don’t see how it could do it, I can’t exclude it with certainty.
  • Towards a Scientific Definition of "Free Will"
    I don't see how that definition works b/c any conscious decision will always be based on interactions with the unconscious that is creating the context and perceptions that conscious thought works within, which makes grounded thoughts possible. maybe you can better refine your definition in this light.
    Maybe you want a definition by which free will is possible but you can see that even from a definition free will is not possible. Anyway my definition seems not to allow this freewill but it doesn’t say that explicitly and for some people it would not mean free will by this definition doesn’t exist. Or as you said the definition needs to be reconsidered.
    My definition is actually similar to yours. You say that a free agent would be able to make the nature deviate from the principle of the least action. I said that the decision is not a result of the laws amongst them the principle of least action. So if the decision doesn’t come from the laws, it comes from the agent so the agent causes things to deviate from PLA.
    If we accept the theory of evolution and we see how from simple mechanisms, lifeforms got more complex then developed a nervous system for centralized coordination then they simply got better and better it doesn’t seem any way free will would simply appear at some point in these brains. But the feeling we have about ourselves, the others and animals that they have free will is so strong.
  • Is Murder Really That Bad?
    In some cases death could be preferable instead of hard torture, it’s hard to tell or to generalise.
  • The Ultimate Truth! The Theory Of Everything! The Contradiction!
    To me a contradiction worse than an unproved assumption. It simply shows something is not right, whereas with the assumption everything works well but you still can’t prove your assumption is certain. With an assumption and no contradiction you have good chances the assumption is correct whereas with a contradiction you are certainly right. However, every theory starts with assumptions anyway
  • Towards a Scientific Definition of "Free Will"
    To me free will is the claimed ability to take a decision without this decision being the result of the interactions between the fundamental constituents the brain is made of or whatever makes the thought possible.

    1. Quantum Free Will: the freedom for pure quantum systems to probe all possible valid paths and/or states of energy in space and time, but no freedom to make an action on any of them except for the actions prescribed by the Principle of least action (PLA).“
    A quantum can take any path except the path with the minimum action has the highest probability.
    The system is in a superposition of going through all paths until the path is determined. Why calling this quantum free will?
    Any particle can deviate from the minimum action path, so everything has what you call primitive free will. The deviation is random
  • There is definitely consciousness beyond the individual mind
    One description of exo-individual consciousness might be that of distributed cognition.
    The dissociative identity disorder may be an example where multiple regions of the brain generate separate identities while sharing or exchanging information. The difference from a set of different brains in different bodies is the speed of communication between the individual conscious minds is much slower and can be less accurate. The feeling of an extension of your body when using some tool for example can enhance your experience. Communicating with others doesn’t feel so direct because it slow but sometimes I think it can be felt almost like sharing the other person’s sensing organs when they can communicate fast. Anyway consciousness requires something physical to produce it in my opinion. Brains are very complex machines so I can’t imagine it occur in some much simpler system.
  • The Domino Effect as a model of Causality
    The way the universe works is similar to an abstract way of domino effect. This abstract definition would be like starting from a state in which we have a space, time and local micro states of entities (can mean field values) effects are produced to all surrounding micro states of entities. These effects propagate at a constant speed and jump from one micro region of space to the next micro region of space (will have to be quantized and it’s not a problem since there is no evidence for infinities in nature). The jumping speed seems to be constant, that’s why this speed can never be exceeded like in a mechanical domino effect where all bits have equal mass and are placed at the same distance to one another. This also means there can’t be a slower speed either. In relativistic spacetime when things are stationary they travel at the same speed but in the time direction. Or you could view massive particles as spending time on a different direction than the direction of travel or interaction with a field(Higgs field)
  • Do I have to trust past experience because past experience tells me that?
    Past experience means you remember what to expect if the conditions are similar and you remember how to react. If you are satisfied with the previous results then you can act similarly. But you may want to do certain changes to improve the results, then there may be small steps you want to improve every time. We know from experience that nature is reliable, given the same conditions the outcome can be almost exactly the same (only at small scale of quantum effects the outcome can be unpredictable but the probabilities still hold well). That means you can trust prior experience. At the same time making radical changes can lead to a far better result or a far worse one, usually if you don’t have experience and you don’t do something that can be clearly evaluated it has more chances to be worse.
    You also have to be very careful of subtile changes where you may think the situation is similar but something important has changed.
  • There is definitely consciousness beyond the individual mind
    Consciousness is not only inside an individual brain, and this relationship explains the transition of life when the body dies
    Can you explain how do you imagine consciousness outside of a brain?
    While we are conscious the brain receives information from the eyes, ears, touch, etc. If you imagine surviving without these it will feel pretty scary, unless you think this mind has access to some information. You may claim anything, like some sort of vision without actually having eyes but still seeing images the the eyes capture them?!
    In life the fittest survives. I don’t see why would some lifeforms like us would have more chances if the consciousness survived beyond the body. Or you may think it the same way, like the fittest conscious minds survives. Anyway, I don’t see how a conscious mind could survive the physical destruction of the brain.
    During general anesthesia we know people don’t remember anything. So claim they do. So the conclusion is the mind can work without a brain? Or that the anesthesia didn’t stop consciousness completely. The last one seems plausible because it doesn’t assume anything other that what we already know. The first is just a claim nobody can prove.
    My opinion is that not only the conscious cannot survive without a brain but in fact we only live an instance in a series of conscious individual experiences that the brain generates. But the last one always feels it has lived ever since it has born.
  • Irrational Numbers And Reality As A Simulation
    The quantum mechanics describes reality using quantized elements so it doesn’t lead to singularities or infinities afaik. But the theory of gravity does (general relativity). However, it is expected that spacetime is quantized as well.
    On the other hand a simulation could be made in wich aparent infinities would exist because you only need to simulate the brains. More over it is likely we don’t have free will so it’s funny that the Universe may not necessarily be a simulation but a mere playback of brain activity. In my opinion it’s not possible to create or simulate free will other than an illusion
  • Has science strayed too far into philosophy?
    I think it’s quite the opposite. After the discovery of quantum mechanics scientist started to distinguish better between philosophy and scientific method.