Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness.
It wasn't that long ago that the study of consciousness was considered to be too abstract, too subjective or too difficult to study scientifically. But in recent years, it has emerged as one of the hottest new fields in biology, similar to string theory in physics or the search for extraterrestrial life in astronomy.
In anticipation of things to come, if the subject of consciousness will be approached from a scientific point of view, I' ll move this to the GDF.
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Its interesting that physics canīt define consciousness, they try to explain the universe, but when it comes to consciousness some ignore it. Some scientist would say that it is not physics job to explain it, like if it was juts psychology, or philosophy business, but in my opinion this is just a way to avoid problem, this is what was implicit in one book I read by Roger Penrose. There is a attemp by Alan Turing to define consciousness, it is like called Tuting test and it is like this:
a human judge engages in a conversation by computer with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine, a AI trying to imitate human behavior. if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.
I donīt like this, because it seems that consciousness exists, just because the human judge would think that the AI has consciousness in case that it(the AI) pass the test. For me its stupid it is too say that people have consciousness because we believe that they have conciousness. If I didnīt believed you have consciousness, then you wouldnīt have one. Consciousness would be like a ilusion if this is true.
Consciousness cannot depend on belief, because it is needed for belief to exist. Thats what some physicists believe, if consciousness is just a illusion then physics donīt have to explain it.
This implementation of consciousness in physics will make impossible for physics to explain the universe in a impersonal way, which the scientific method is based on. For example in quantum mechanics, you know that its impossible to tell what is going to happen, you can know only the probabilities of that happen. Lets say we have a possible result A which is, "You observed a living cat."; and B which is "You observed a dead cat." and they can happen with a probability of 50% each, quantum mechanics canīt tell us what we will see. They say that the cat is in a superposed state of two possibilities called "wavefunction", it is neither alive, or dead. It is only one of those when you measure it(thats why I had the opinion I had in the "If a tree falls in the woods..." thread). The physics describes the universe this way, as a giant superposition of states, a big wavefunction. Anyway the point is that we never see this superposition of states, what we do see is individual states, like an alive cat only, or a dead cat only. In other words physics is ignoring how we see the world. If you ask a physicist that doesnīt like Penroseīs theory he would say that we the "observer" are inside each possibility so we can never see the reality of the superposition. But in reality this superposition is purely metaphysical, it does not do the science job which is to explain the observations, since we donīt observe it, and it is impossible to observe. It is like God, cannot be observed.
Conciousness is everywhere as in the new fields of science are starting to discover/rediscover...Even a book I've posted a site for shows how It's everywhere, and how we effect it...
Yup.. Iīve read that when you posted it in another thread. Really Cool !
If they found evidence about this, I canīt imagine why its not on the news in the first page, or in TV. I bet if they created a quantum theory of gravity, and explained the meaning of everything, today people will never even hear about. They would to busy watching... whatever they watch !
I believe this will one day lead to showing and inter-connectedness of everything.............a universal conciousness if you will.......which will weigh heavily in an all inclusive theory of everything.
Totally cool, and I agree with it...There has been much published on it, but why it's not taught in schools...I don't know...Maybe it would do away with the superstitiousness of religious beliefs, and we can't have that happen...Can't let the truth get out there...we might have some common ground and belief on what is true....And the Newtonian laws are now becoming absolute...why has this not been taught in schools either.
I have also talked about non locality....It's cool.
It is interesting that science try to make a description of the observed facts in the universe in a impersonal way. When it comes to quantum mechanincs... to remain impersonal( and because its not possible to do something else)... what is described is not what we see, but all the possibilites that we could possibly see. This kind of description of the universe seems to not agree with the fact that science must describe what is observed by us. You know... Iīm saying that those many possibilies are purely metaphysical, no one observed them... they re just for calculus, so it would be strange to accept their existence, as it seems to go against what science is supposed to do : explain "observed" facts.
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I agree; this is something I see all the time. I once had an epiphany, I was sitting in the shadows and I had a hair stuck to my face, I grabbed the hair and before I throw it aside, I looked at it. I could not see any hair, but I knew it was there. I then spun it between my finger, and because of the lighting, I could see it and then not, over and over again. I thought to myself, how many hairs do I have in my hand? Of coarse, I had one hair, but I could not see it all the time, so did I have no hair in my hand. Could I have had a hundred hairs in my hand? No, I only had one hair, just because I can't observe something does not mean that it is more than one thing. The uncertainty principle does not mean that there is more that one "thing", just that we don't know were it is after we measure it.
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Aug 8th, 2005 07:27 PM
