(2017-10-05, 04:31 PM)Bucky Wrote: [ -> ]Indeed Faggin is a very bright mind.
From taking a glance at various articles (some of which I think I already encountered years ago) I take it that he's a classic panpsychist... Am I wrong?
He suggests that consciousness is a property of "the primordial energy of the big bang", as he puts it.
It's an attractive idea and it's also the first alternative (to materialism) I've encountered when reading Steiner a decade ago or so. However there are so many problems with how sophisticated sentience emerges from aggregating proto-conscious particles that I find it hard to digest.
(Kastrup has written a couple of very bright essays on this subject)
Maybe rocks are indeed aware to some degree, and maybe Tononi & Koch are onto something with their idea that specific configurations of information are required to manifest advanced states of awareness. It just seems borderline impossible to verify these assumptions on a large scale (i.e. not just on a handful of well selected systems that seem to confirm the theory)
Cheers
From Part 4, The Nature of Consciousness:
Quote:"Loosely speaking, awareness is the inherent capacity of the primordial energy to observe itself and direct its evolution as it transforms into space, time, and matter of ever increasing complexity. Awareness is then an irreducible, self-reflecting property of the primordial energy, where self-reflection contains the germs of observation, identity, perception, feelings, memory, experience, knowing, learning, understanding, imagining, deciding, acting, willing, intending, creating, and many other higher aspects, all co-evolving together with the material forms."
From Part 6, Explaining Consciousness:
Quote:"....the self-knowing that each individual consciousness learns by embodying and interacting with other embodied consciousness in the virtual reality simulator we call the physical universe, allows each interacting consciousness to figure out completely the structure of the non-material pattern that exists within itself that produces the observed behavior. That abstract structure then, by definition, is the self-knowing. I am talking about a pattern existing within consciousness, of which consciousness is not yet completely conscious about, that manifests in the observed interactions, thus gradually revealing to an attentive self the previously hidden order or structure. This is therefore the essence of the mechanism by which consciousness knows itself through an experience in the physical world."
.............................................
"This view postulates the nature of the universe as a co-evolution of consciousness and material forms, starting from a common unified seed.
The material forms, then, are physical representations of the self-knowing achieved by the evolving consciousness of the universe. The intuition here is that for consciousness to know itself it needs matter to function as a dynamic mirror, reflecting to itself its own ever-changing and ever growing self-knowing.
Thus, matter and consciousness are tightly coupled, constituting the co-evolving inner and outer aspects of reality respectively."
A few thoughts on this.
Conscious awareness and self awareness are described as an irreducible inherent innate essence of the primordial energy of the Big Bang, presumably with no further elucidation possible. This still leaves as mysteries the ultimate nature of it, its origin, and the answer to Chalmers' "hard problem" of qualia. Presumably because it is considered futile to look any deeper into this. The ultimate "nature of consciousness" is not explained.
There is a lot of lyrical and elegant prose expressing ideas incorporating elements of panpsychism, varieties of monism, the "virtual reality simulator supercomputer" concept as metaphor, and even a little interactional dualism. Note that this still doesn't actually explain the ultimate nature of consciousness. Maybe that is too much to expect - I think this is probably fundamentally unknowable to humans. Is that something like "mysterianism" in philosophy? Not terribly important, but Part 6 says "self-knowing" is a capacity originating, being learned and evolving through consciousness being embodied in matter, but Part 4 says self awareness is an inherent capacity of the primordial energy.
There are a lot of problems with panpsychism, and for that matter with monism. The "What's wrong with panpsychism" thread under Philosophical Discussions goes into this. Some of these difficulties with panpsychism identified there by Titus Rivas can be summarized as:
- Panpsychism seems incompatible with a substantial personal self or soul.
- Panpsychism leads to parallelism.
- Panpsychism seems incompatible with data from research into psi and survival (empirical objection).
The Universe comprises an incredibly complex interdependent system of natural laws following many beautiful mathematical constructions, that is also incredibly fine tuned for life as we know it. This gives at least the strong appearance of design by a focused, sentient superintelligence that creatively invents. By analogy, in our experience the only source of highly complex specified information (in the form of intricate machines and mechanisms or for that matter works of literature) is focused sentient human intelligence. This sort of conscious intelligence just doesn't look to me like Faggin's concept of consciousness in the Universe.
Some sort of "evolution" of consciousness into matter is assumed as a given, but that only opens up a host of questions. What does that really mean?
Its process is not examined or described. Is this In his writings it appears to be evolution like a modified Darwinian process involving semi-random heritable changes combined with natural selection. Cosmologically, what is the mechanism of inheritance and how does the selection work? Darwinism has a lot of problems when it comes to things like the origin of life (doesn't even apply), the Cambrian Explosion, and macroevolution in general. What about a sort of Lamarkian inheritance of acquired characteristics? Does consciousness somehow directly change itself, its own nature and capabilities, in response to experience? Evolution of consciousness would seem to need a mechanism of some sort - why does our reality happen to incorporate that mechanism?