Why consciousness is not reducible to nonconscious things

[qraal]

It is Anaximander's apeiron of course. I was very surprised to study these issues for about 20 years and to eventually find the very first philosopher of record got it spot on at the beginning.

Of course, it is quite difficult to be certain about what Anaximander really thought, however scholars like Kahn have done some careful work.

I myself equate the apeiron to Peirce's later (equally fragmentary and sketchy) notion of vagueness. And in turn to infinite symmetry.

So apeiron = vagueness = symmetry.

And it is a (vague) kind of monism. But which then separates dichotomously into polar opposites. So becomes dual in some crisply developed sense. And then the two become the three as the complementary things mix. You end up with the triadic state that is a hierarchy, where two levels of being have the thirdness which is their interaction.

The modern view of the apeiron as the unbounded and the unlimited would seem to have more in common with quantum foams, hilbert spaces and non-commutative geometry. Places where there is action in all directions and so no directions clearly exist.

Do you have your own view about this?

The idea of the undifferentiated primordial stuff becomes definite via differentiation appears in so many ancient accounts of reality, so it's hardly new to Anaximander. He tried to give the first non-mythological account based on the properties of the primordial stuff itself. I can see the appeal, but I am unsure it's even conceivable to test.

My own view. Take Shankaran advaita, mix with Whiteheadian pan-experientialism and filter it through Neo-Platonism. Roughly that. When I'm not focussing on the physical world and being a physicalist for the sake of the argument. Each perspective provides valid observations on the short-comings of the others.

 

[apeiron]

The idea of the undifferentiated primordial stuff becomes definite via differentiation appears in so many ancient accounts of reality, so it's hardly new to Anaximander. He tried to give the first non-mythological account based on the properties of the primordial stuff itself. I can see the appeal, but I am unsure it's even conceivable to test.
.

Agreed that Anaximander had Hesiod's Theogeny as a template for order out of chaos. And that Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising was very similar, and eastern ideas generally similar.

It is quite possible that the same ideas were obvious independently, or that ideas flowed from west to east or vice versa.

 

[apeiron]

Checking out Shankaran advaita reminds me of a key difference I would have to Anaximander and also Buddhist doctrines like pratîtya-samutpâda.

The usual idea is that the monadic indefinite gives rise to definite things, which can then dissolve back into that deep oneness. Things rise and then subside or decay again. The eternal cycle.

But my view is that once the one divides, it cannot go back. This is a second law approach. Once a symmetry is broken, it is divided in ways that it cannot repair. History could be reversed in a theoretical sense, but there would not actually be the "free energy" to do so.

My notes also remind me of the Kyoto School. A blending of east and west.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/

Then Rivero, a string theorist on these forums, has speculated on the original possible east-west link.

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0309104

 

[qraal]

Hi apeiron

I too am sceptical of claims of universal dissolution and self-renewal - like Steinhardt and Turok's various "Clashing Branes" attempts at "Phoenix universes" that endlessly expand and then blaze into life again. They seem to make time meaningless, which doesn't seem to accord with reality.

Shankara's advaita has meant different things to different interpreters. I take the oneness/non-duality to only be achieved at the very "highest" level of reality, with the merger of subject-object - a cosmic level unity -, but all lower levels experience differentiation. Multiplicity and flux aren't things to escape from in a "return to Godhead" kind of way. Moksha is more an attitude than an objective transformation of the subject, though it can be that too. I am too world-affirmative to take the path of renunciation that many of Shankara's admirers embraced.

Checking out Shankaran advaita reminds me of a key difference I would have to Anaximander and also Buddhist doctrines like pratîtya-samutpâda.

The usual idea is that the monadic indefinite gives rise to definite things, which can then dissolve back into that deep oneness. Things rise and then subside or decay again. The eternal cycle.

But my view is that once the one divides, it cannot go back. This is a second law approach. Once a symmetry is broken, it is divided in ways that it cannot repair. History could be reversed in a theoretical sense, but there would not actually be the "free energy" to do so.

My notes also remind me of the Kyoto School. A blending of east and west.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/

Then Rivero, a string theorist on these forums, has speculated on the original possible east-west link.

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0309104

Japanese theology I've only just recently opened a book on, but what little I have seen intrigues me. No doubt the philosophy will be similarly delightful in surprises of insight.

 

[apeiron]

Shankara's advaita has meant different things to different interpreters. I take the oneness/non-duality to only be achieved at the very "highest" level of reality, with the merger of subject-object - a cosmic level unity -, but all lower levels experience differentiation. Multiplicity and flux aren't things to escape from in a "return to Godhead" kind of way. Moksha is more an attitude than an objective transformation of the subject, though it can be that too. I am too world-affirmative to take the path of renunciation that many of Shankara's admirers embraced.

So many ways of dancing around this subject. I have to agree that this also expresses the same general thoughts probably.

The way I would phrase it is that what is possible is both stasis and flux, being and becoming, the passive and the active way. Always the dichotomies that together make for a complete mapping of what is possible.

So we want a world view that is both constantly changing yet also somehow eternally the same.

And one way of doing this is through the notion of equlibrium. The state where all is changing but change no longer looks like change.

So I would treat the apeiron, the vague monadic beginning, as an equilibrium (but a symmetry state that proved unstable - the old pencil balanced on its point analogy)

And then the final state of reality, its crisply broken development, would also be a return to equilibrium. But now a stable and final outcome because it has broken. The pencil has fallen.

So outcomes are also equilibriums. Monadic in that sense. But dualistic and triadic in their internal organisation. So overall there has been a change, an actual development.

If we were applying this to religious ideas (which I'm not, but Hegel and others might) then a return to a vaguer state of oneness might seem wrong. It is instead the developed state of oneness which is the natural way to go.

Of course, in cosmological terms, this final outcome for our universe is in fact likely to be its heat death. A cold dark void that is just empty space populated by a last fizzle of event-horizon radiation - photons with a wavelength of the visible universe as Lineweaver suggests.

Not exactly godhead in most people's view. But I actually like this vision.

What was the meaning of existence? To create precisely nothing. To dissipate all flux and multiplicity into as little as logically possible. Of course, there will still be a void. Three dimensions of space and one of time. Plus any wee string dimensions or other features which prove irreducible, like protons. So absolute nothing will not be achieve.

But as we know, the interesting question is why a something rather than a nothing. And the answer in this view is that, well, the universe was doing its best to get there!

 

[qraal]

So many ways of dancing around this subject. I have to agree that this also expresses the same general thoughts probably.

The way I would phrase it is that what is possible is both stasis and flux, being and becoming, the passive and the active way. Always the dichotomies that together make for a complete mapping of what is possible.

snip

Of course, in cosmological terms, this final outcome for our universe is in fact likely to be its heat death. A cold dark void that is just empty space populated by a last fizzle of event-horizon radiation - photons with a wavelength of the visible universe as Lineweaver suggests.

Not exactly godhead in most people's view. But I actually like this vision.

What was the meaning of existence? To create precisely nothing. To dissipate all flux and multiplicity into as little as logically possible. Of course, there will still be a void. Three dimensions of space and one of time. Plus any wee string dimensions or other features which prove irreducible, like protons. So absolute nothing will not be achieve.

But as we know, the interesting question is why a something rather than a nothing. And the answer in this view is that, well, the universe was doing its best to get there!

I am less accepting of such a fate for the Universe.

There's a lot in what you have said, but let's try to get back to consciousness/nonconsciousness. For me consideration of the Differentiation of the One, the apeiron, means that consciousness and the contents of thought, sprang from the same source as the physical Universe. John Wheeler's concept of "It from Bit" and the recent work on quantum information by Anton Zeilinger et al provides some validation that I am on the right track with this thought, but its origins lie in my readings of Kabbalah, the Greeks and the philosophical Church Fathers like Clement of Alexandria.

Considering these and the Subject-Object complex that has attracted so much thought and discussion in Hindu and Buddhist thought - thus Shankaran advaita, which I learned of chiefly from Sharma's "A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy" - plus the question of the nature of Truth, especially mathematical truths, I have come to believe the Universe is evolving towards a state of Cosmic Mind. Akin to Tipler's "Omega Point" though I am unconvinced of his stance on physics. All truths will be known by the ultimate Observer, whatever He/She/It/They might be when that end-point is reached.

However that by no means that all truths are as yet set, like in a Parmenidean Eternity/Block universe. There's an open-endness to the Participatory Universe of Wheeler that I wholeheartedly agree with. But it may go deeper than he imagined - though I kind of doubt much escaped his physical intuitions - and that may allow surprises in the cosmic process, miracles if you will. Radical emergentism.

So the question of "consciousness from non-consciousness" may well miss the point, that consciousness may well underlay reality, but reality may in turn feedback into consciousness. Dual-structure producing triadic reality as you put it.

 

[apeiron]

Considering these and the Subject-Object complex that has attracted so much thought and discussion in Hindu and Buddhist thought - thus Shankaran advaita, which I learned of chiefly from Sharma's "A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy" - plus the question of the nature of Truth, especially mathematical truths, I have come to believe the Universe is evolving towards a state of Cosmic Mind. Akin to Tipler's "Omega Point" though I am unconvinced of his stance on physics. All truths will be known by the ultimate Observer, whatever He/She/It/They might be when that end-point is reached.

However that by no means that all truths are as yet set, like in a Parmenidean Eternity/Block universe. There's an open-endness to the Participatory Universe of Wheeler that I wholeheartedly agree with. But it may go deeper than he imagined - though I kind of doubt much escaped his physical intuitions - and that may allow surprises in the cosmic process, miracles if you will. Radical emergentism.

So the question of "consciousness from non-consciousness" may well miss the point, that consciousness may well underlay reality, but reality may in turn feedback into consciousness. Dual-structure producing triadic reality as you put it.

I would have to disagree with the Omega Point approach. Although with Kurzweil's singularity and the recent rise of Evo-Devo, it is an idea very much in vogue.

My take is based on second law and entropy degrading, or dissipative system theory. Complexity in the form of life and mind arise as systems that merely accelerate entropification. And this kind of complexity must reach a peak at the middle scale of things. It does not exist at the end - where there is only an empty heat death.

So the second law gradient runs from simplicity to complication - the simplicity of big bang initial conditions and the messy disorder or complication of a heat death. Complexity in the form of stars, galaxies, planets and other stuff is localised order that arises along the way because globally it serves to acclerate the decline.


complexity
^
l
l
simplicity>------------>complication

(diagram won't format, but complexity is supposed to arise in the middle)

From this point of view, finding complexity at the end of things would be a "miracle" as once gradients are spent, complex stuff like mindfulness, however we defined it, would have no energy to drive it.

Any theory that wants to claim otherwise would have to either find some plausible source of energy (harnessing the cosmological constant?) or show that consciousness has nothing to do with energy-based realities. Which would then also be actual dualism rather than merely the differentiation~integration dichotomy that I have in mind as the basis of all things.

 

[imiyakawa]

If matter is considered void of consciousness, then C is not reducible to that.

Wow nice.
Then if C were reducible to microphysics/matter, wouldn't this suggest an emergent property and thus an escape from causality which we have no reason to believe has ever happened in this universe based on observations?

 

[qraal]

I would have to disagree with the Omega Point approach. Although with Kurzweil's singularity and the recent rise of Evo-Devo, it is an idea very much in vogue.

I admit it's speculative, but it's logical too.

My take is based on second law and entropy degrading, or dissipative system theory. Complexity in the form of life and mind arise as systems that merely accelerate entropification. And this kind of complexity must reach a peak at the middle scale of things. It does not exist at the end - where there is only an empty heat death.

In a Universe without a cosmological constant, entropy can go to infinity as can information. Depending on how you measure "information" that is.

 

[apeiron]

In a Universe without a cosmological constant, entropy can go to infinity as can information. Depending on how you measure "information" that is.

That is the point surely here? Max ent would be max disorder. So "information" would be as disordered as possible and thus as meaningless as possible.

Omega points and singularities depend on orderly information. So the second law just does not point in their direction. In the heat death, all order is maximally degraded by definition.

 

[qraal]

That is the point surely here? Max ent would be max disorder. So "information" would be as disordered as possible and thus as meaningless as possible.

Omega points and singularities depend on orderly information. So the second law just does not point in their direction. In the heat death, all order is maximally degraded by definition.

Not so. Entropy can go to infinity so long as there's a temperature gradient so useful heat-flow can still occur. In a Universe with a constant cosmological constant there is a finite ultimate temperature, and thus a heat death, but there's no guarantee that the cosmological constant will remain "constant".

 

[bjb34]

Isn't conciousness simple having the intellegence to be aware of ones own existence? Or is it more that conciousness is simply having an existence with or without a brain that is capable of conceptual thought.

 

[bjb34]

Or am I thinking in a box?

 

[apeiron]

Not so. Entropy can go to infinity so long as there's a temperature gradient so useful heat-flow can still occur. In a Universe with a constant cosmological constant there is a finite ultimate temperature, and thus a heat death, but there's no guarantee that the cosmological constant will remain "constant".

Not following. In the case of a cruising to a halt heat death scenario (no lambda) it is true that approach to maximum entropy would be asymptotic and so infinite in a sense. But it would get eventually so cold and spread-out that there would be no usable gradients to support even local islands of order, let alone the kind of global order of an omega point mind state. The finite temperature is absolute zero - nothing left but a quantum sizzle.

And a cosmological constant would simply accelerate that outcome.

What kind of gradients do you envisage at heat death that could be employed?