Federico Faggin on consciousness and physics

But I guess he is saying physical matter has no real existence outside of conscious awareness.

But I guess he is saying physical matter has no real existence outside of conscious awareness.

He is definitely saying this. 

The way I interpreted it: he says we are creating our world and all the things in it, from information (tokens) in the ispace. Which is a second order thing,,, whereas consciousness (the Cspace) is a first order thing, ie: it is more fundamental.

I didn't quite follow the flaw that you stated in the first post.

He confirms my thought in the next section.

In other words, the existence of consciousness for elementary particles can be inferred in exactly the same manner in which scientists have already established that an elementary particle produces a gravitational field without ever having measured it directly on an isolated particle. This conclusion means that consciousness should be accepted as a fundamental property of nature, a property that exists at the lowest organizational level of matter and therefore it should be scientifically studied. 

Knowing whether or not consciousness is ontological, or an epiphenomenon, is of fundamental importance, with the potential to change the direction of science, and the direction of human destiny. Yet surprisingly there is almost no research money to study the physics of consciousness.
 
It may be worth noting here that I expect the rules of aggregation of consciousness to be far different than the rules of aggregation of mass. Mass grows linearly with the sum of the masses of the component parts that join together. The total mass of an object, however, is independent of the specific organization of its parts. Consciousness, on the other hand, grows with the number and the level of integration of the interacting parts; where integration is another word for organizational complexity. Therefore, if we take a man and a disorganized pile of atoms with the same number and types of atoms that compose that man, the two objects will have the same gravitational mass. However, the consciousness of the pile of atoms will be infinitesimal in comparison with the consciousness of the man.

I watched the posted video and am now 1/3 through the documents combined by ML.

I think there is one deep flaw to his construct. 

He says:


But he states quite clearly that consciousness is omnipresent and the other side of the coin from matter.

Therefore even "non-living" matter must be related in some way to consciousness.

He seems to hint at the idea of a holarchy: all holonic levels have some degree of interiority coupled with a perceivable (to us, and to a lesser extent other living forms) exteriority or appearance. Materialists tend to be monistic, thinking in terms only of exteriority, and hence are left with the hard problem of whence comes the interiority that we all experience through one form or another of perception. Idealists tend to be monistic interiorists, saying that all appearances have their root in consciousness, which is the primal, essentially inexplicable source of all.

Federico seems, in a way, to avoid granting primal reality to either interiority or exteriority: they are, as you hint, two sides of the same coin, coexisting and co-evolving in tandem because they are essentially two different views of the same thing. An elementary particle isn't just a particle: it has properties, and through these properties is able to interact with other particles of the same or different kind. When an electron collides with another particle, it experiences something, though probably doesn't have self-reflective awareness of that.

Bernardo Kastrup seems to say that we mustn't think in terms of everything having consciousness (panpsychism). Increasingly, however, I'm having doubts about that, because of Federico's articles among other things. Sure, MAL or Source or God or whatever is in the end unfathomable, the ultimate source of all, but to our level of consciousness, MAL seems to express itself in terms of holarchically coupled interiority and exteriority.

It could be that there's not a distinct difference between living and non-living forms, in the sense that the former are dissociated alters, whirlpools in the great ocean of consciousness, whilst the latter are part and parcel of MAL's natural orderliness and exist within MAL, accounting for our ability to share experiences of reality. Doesn't that seem to hint at a kind of dualism?

I don't know. Federico's ideas have stirred up a hornet's nest in my mind and I feel somewhat less sure about Idealism than formerly. It may be that I'll have to wait a while until things settle down a bit and I can think more clearly.

[Laird]

Subsequently I investigated his thoughts on his foundation's web site where they are laid out in a series of 7 articles -- which I've collated in a word document attached below for the convenience of anyone wanting to read them without ploughing through separate web pages.

Not wanting to be a buzzkill, Michael, but did you check with Frederico that it was OK to do this? His articles have a copyright notice down the bottom, so on the face of it this sort of reproduction would be illegal. It's probably a polite thing to ask in any case.

Not wanting to be a buzzkill, Michael, but did you check with Frederico that it was OK to do this? His articles have a copyright notice down the bottom, so on the face of it this sort of reproduction would be illegal. It's probably a polite thing to ask in any case.

Fixed. Collated document removed and only the link to the article pages remains.

I came across Federico's work via a mention of it on Bernardo Kastrup's forum.

Subsequently I investigated his thoughts on his foundation's web site where they are laid out in a series of 7 articles -- which I've collated in a word document attached below for the convenience of anyone wanting to read them without ploughing through separate web pages.
-- read the series from the page linked to above.

I'll also post one of his many Youtube videos for your perusal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txh3qAcFM5s

The reason I'm posting this is to get your thoughts and impressions. To me it's very interesting because Federico is a bona fide scientist, who designed the first commercial microprocessor, but also appears to have seriously taken on board the idea that consciousness is primal, and is looking for a way to develop new physics and mathematics to accommodate his ideas.

Thanks this is very interesting.

Over at Skeptiko, Kindagamey has mentioned a video of Donald Hoffman at the science and non-duality conference:




I see that he's making a start on mathematising a new physics based on the idea that consciousness is primal. I love his desktop metaphor to explain the fact that scientists have reified what they see as reality, but says that isn't true reality, rather just a model of it that they've constructed in their minds. He also draws, in part, on the neo-Darwinian model  of evolution to set the context, but I can forgive him for that!

TV has never been about anything other than ratings.  Battles of Titans are always good TV and the atheist vs Christian/Jew/Hindu/Islamist debate is a good draw.

The more thoughtful, less dogmatic "spiritualist" just doesn't seem acerbic enough.

"TV has never been about anything other than ratings.  "

Not sure I can agree there. TV is about promoting a worldview, trying to represent a particular dreamworld which it wants people to sleepwalk inside.

That's why I hardly watch much TV at all - in its entirety it is marketing something which seems pretty alien to me. The aim of TV producers is to hold people trapped within that dream.

"TV has never been about anything other than ratings.  "

Not sure I can agree there. TV is about promoting a worldview, trying to represent a particular dreamworld which it wants people to sleepwalk inside.

That's why I hardly watch much TV at all - in its entirety it is marketing something which seems pretty alien to me. The aim of TV producers is to hold people trapped within that dream.

Shouldn't this type of post be 'sent' to conspiracy theories? 

Only kidding Typoz. I agree with you. Just making a point, hope you don't mind?