Have we forgotten what ‘mind’ means?

 There is an obvious rejoinder to this, which is, did we ever know what ‘mind’ means? Maybe that’s the real question I wanted to ask, but I think it’s better if it comes from you. The thing is that we have always thought that ‘mind’ means something, but now we are tending to think, because we have no idea where it comes from, that it has no meaning at all. In other words, if it can’t be explained by science, it has no meaning. And from that perspective, the question is perfectly valid.
 
I’ve been watching a number of videos hosted by Curt Jaimungal, whom I assume has a physics background. For a start, he’s posted a number of video interviews with a ‘Harvard scientist’ on quantum mechanics, and he provided a link (to me) of an almost 2hr video he did with Sabine Hossenfelder, and they talked like they were old friends. I found it very stimulating and I left a fairly long comment that probably no one will read.
 
Totally off-topic, but Sabine’s written a paper proposing a thought-experiment that would effectively test if QM and GR (gravity) are compatible at higher energies. She calculated the energy range and if there is no difference to the low energy experiments already conducted, it effectively rules out a quantum field for gravity (assuming I understand her correctly). I expressed my enthusiasm for a real version to be carried out, and my personal, totally unfounded prediction that it would be negative (there would be no difference).
 
But there are 2 videos that are relevant to this topic and they both involve Stephen Wolfram (who invented Mathematica). I’ve referenced him in previous posts, but always second-hand, so it was good to hear him first-hand. In another video, also hosted by Jaimungal, Wolfram has an exchange with Donald Hoffman, whom I’ve been very critical of in the past, even saying that I found it hard to take him seriously. But to be fair, I need to acknowledge that he’s willing to put his ideas out there and have them challenged by people like Stephen Wolfram (and Anil Seth in another video), which is what philosophy is all about. And the truth is that all of these people know much more about their fields than me. I’ll get to the exchange with Hoffman later.
 
I have the impression from Gregory Chaitin, in particular, that Wolfram argues that the Universe is computable; a philosophical position I’ve argued against, mainly because of chaos theory. I’ve never known Wolfram to mention chaos theory, and he certainly doesn’t in the 2 videos I reference here, and I’ve watched them a few times.
 
Jaimungal introduces the first video (with Wolfram alone) by asking him about his ‘observer theory’ and ‘what if he’s right about the discreteness of space-time’ and ‘computation underlying the fundament?’ I think it’s this last point which goes to the heart of their discussion. Wolfram introduces a term called the Ruliad, which I had to look up. I came across 2 definitions, both of which seem relevant to the discussion.
 
A concept that describes all possible computations and rule-based systems, including our physical universe, mathematics, and everything we experience.
 
A meta-structural domain that encompasses every possible rule-based system, or computational eventuality, that can describe any universe or mathematical structure.
 
Wolfram confused me when he talked about ‘computational irreducibility’, which infers that there are some things that are not computable, to which I agree. But then later he seemed to argue that everything we can know is computable, and things we don’t know now are only unknowable because we’re yet to find their computable foundation. He argues that there are ‘slices of reducible computability’ within the ‘computational irreducibility’, which is how we do mathematical physics.
 
Towards the end of the video, he talks specifically about biology, saying, ‘there is no grand theory of biology’, like we attempt in physics. He has a point. I’ve long argued that natural selection is not the whole story, and there is a mystery inherent in DNA, in as much as it’s a code whose origin and evolvement is still unknown. Paul Davies attempted to tackle this in his book, The Demon in the Machine, because it’s analogous to software code and it’s information based. This means that it could, in principle, be mathematical, which means it could lead to a biological ‘theory of everything’, which I assume is what Wolfram is claiming is lacking.
 
However, I’m getting off-track again. At the start of the video, Wolfram specifically references the Copernican revolution, because it was not just a mathematical reformulation, but it changed our entire perspective of the Universe (we are not at the centre) without changing how we experience it (we are standing still, with the sky rotating around us). At the end of the day, we have mathematical models, and some are more accurate than others, and they all have limitations – there is no all-encompassing mathematical TOE (Theory of Everything). There is no Ruliad, as per the above definitions, and Wolfram acknowledges that while apparently arguing that everything is computable.
 
I find it necessary to bring Kant into this, and his concept of the ‘thing-in-itself’ which we may never know, but only have a perception of. My argument, which I’ve never seen anyone else employ, is that mathematics is one of our instruments of perception, just like our telescopes and particle accelerators and now, our gravitational wave detectors. Our mathematical models, be they GR (general relativity), QFT or String Theory, are perceptual and conceptual tools, whose veracity are ultimately determined by empirical evidence, which means they can only be applied to things that can be measured. And I think this leads to an unstated principle that if something can’t be measured it doesn’t exist. I would put ‘mind’ in that category.
 
And this allows me to segue into the second video, involving Donald Hoffman, because he seems to argue that mind is all that there is, and it has a mathematical foundation. He put forward his argument (which I wrote about recently) that, using Markovian matrices, he’s developed probabilities that apparently predict ‘qualia’, which some argue are the fundaments of consciousness. Wolfram, unlike the rest of us, actually knows what Hoffman is talking about and immediately had a problem that his ‘mathematical model’ led to probabilities and not direct concrete predictions. Wolfram seemed to argue that it breaks the predictive chain (my terminology), but I confess I struggled to follow his argument. I would have liked to ask: what happens with QM, which can only give us probabilities? In that case, the probabilities, generated by the Born Rule, are the only link between QM and classical physics – a point made by Mark John Fernee, among others.
 
But going back to my argument invoking Kant, it’s a mathematical model and not necessarily the thing-in-itself. There is an irony here, because Kant argued that space and time are a priori in the mind, so a projection, which, as I understand it, lies at the centre of Hoffman’s entire thesis. Hoffman argues that ‘spacetime is doomed’ since Nima Arkani-Hamed and his work on amplituhedrons, because (to quote Arkani-Hamed): This is a concrete example of a way in which the physics we normally associate with space-time and quantum mechanics arises from something more basic. In other words, Arkani-Hamed has found a mathematical substructure or foundation to spacetime itself, and Hoffman claims that he’s found a way to link that same mathematical substructure to consciousness, via Markovian matrices and his probabilities.
 
Hoffman analogises spacetime to wearing a VR headset and objects in spacetime to icons on a computer desktop, which seems to infer that the Universe is a simulation, though he’s never specifically argued that. I won’t reiterate my objections to Hoffman’s fundamental idealism philosophy, but if you have a mathematical model, however it’s formulated, its veracity can only be determined empirically, meaning we need to measure something. So, what is he going to measure? Is it qualia? Is it what people report what they think?
 
No. According to Hoffman, they can do empirical tests on spacetime (so not consciousness per se) that will determine if his mathematical model of consciousness is correct, which seems a very roundabout way of doing things. From what I can gather, he’s using a mathematical model of consciousness that’s already been developed (independently) to underpin reality, and then testing it on reality, thereby implying that consciousness is an intermediate step between the mathematical model and the reality. His ambition is to demonstrate that there is a causal relationship between consciousness and reality, when most argue that it’s the other way around. I return to this point below, with Wolfram’s response.
 
Wolfram starts off in his interaction with Hoffman by defining the subjective experience of consciousness that Hoffman has mathematically modelled and asking, can he apply that to an LLM (like ChatGPT, though he doesn’t specify) and therefore show that an LLM must be conscious? Wolfram argues that such a demonstration would categorically determine the ‘success’ (his term) of Hoffman’s theory, and Hoffman agreed.
 
I won’t go into detail (watch the video) but Hoffman concludes, quite emphatically, that ‘It’s not logically possible to start with non-conscious entities and have conscious agents emerge’ (my emphasis, obviously). Wolfram immediately responded (very good-naturedly), ‘That’s not my intuition’. He then goes on to say how that’s a Leibnizian approach, which he rejected back in the 1980s. I gather that it was around that time that Wolfram adopted and solidified (for want of a better word) his philosophical position that everything is ultimately computable. So they both see mathematics as part of the ‘solution’, but in different ways and with different conclusions.
 
To return to the point I raised in my introduction, Wolfram starts off in the first video (without Hoffman), that we have adopted a position that if something can’t be explained by science, then there is no other explanation – we axiomatically rule everything else out - and he seems to argue that this is a mistake. But then he adopts a position which is the exact opposite: that everything is “computational all the way down”, including concepts like free will. He argues: “If we can accept that everything is computational all the way down, we can stop searching for that.” And by ‘that’ he means all other explanations like mysticism or QM or whatever.
 
My own position is that mathematics, consciousness and physical reality form a triumvirate similar to Roger Penrose’s view. There is an interconnection, but I’m unsure if there is a hierarchy. I’ve argued that mathematics can transcend the Universe, which is known as mathematical Platonism, a view held by many mathematicians and physicists, which I’ve written about before.
 
I’m not averse to the view that consciousness may also exist beyond the physical universe, but it’s not something that can be observed (by definition). So far, I’ve attempted to discuss ‘mind’ in a scientific context, referencing 2 scientists with different points of view, though they both emphasise the role of mathematics in positing their views.
 
Before science attempted to analyse and put mind into an ontological box, we knew it as a purely subjective experience. But we also knew that it exists in others and even other creatures. And it’s the last point that actually triggered me to write this post and not the ruminations of Wolfram and Hoffman. When I interact with another animal, I’m conscious that it has a mind, and I believe that’s what we’ve lost. If there is a collective consciousness arising from planet Earth, it’s not just humans. This is something that I’m acutely aware of, and it has even affected my fiction.
 
The thing about mind is that it stimulates empathy, and I think that’s the key to the long-term survival of, not just humanity, but the entire ecosystem we inhabit. Is there a mind beyond the Universe? We don’t know, but I would like to think there is. In another recent post, I alluded to the Hindu concept of Brahman, which appealed to Erwin Schrodinger. You’d be surprised how many famous physicists were attracted to the mystical. I can think of Pauli, Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer – they all thought outside the box, as we like to say.
 
Physicists have no problem mentally conceiving 6 or more dimensions in String Theory that are ‘curled up’ so miniscule we can’t observe them. But there is also the possibility that there is a dimension beyond the universe that we can’t see. Anyone familiar with Flatland by Edwin Abbott (a story about social strata as much as dimensions), would know it expounds on our inherent inability to interact with higher dimensions. It’s occurred to me that consciousness may exist in another dimension, and we might ‘feel’ it occasionally when we interact with people who have died. I have experienced this, though it proves nothing. I’m a creative and a neurotic, so such testimony can be taken with a grain of salt.
 
I’ve gone completely off-track, but I think that both Wolfram and Hoffman may be missing the point, when, like many scientists, they are attempting to incorporate the subjective experience of mind into a scientific framework. Maybe it just doesn’t fit.

Mathematics, consciousness, reality

 I wish to emphasise the importance of following and listening to people you disagree with. (I might write another post on the pitfalls of ‘echo-chambers’ in social media, from which I’m not immune.)
 
I’ve been following Donald Hoffman ever since I reviewed an academic paper he wrote with Chetan Prakash called Objects of Consciousness, back in November 2016, though the paper was written in 2014 (so over 10 years ago). Back then, I have to admit, I found it hard to take him seriously, especially his views on evolution, and his go-to metaphor that objective reality was analogous to desktop icons on a computer.
 
His argument is similar to the idea that we live in a computer simulation, though he’s never said that, and I don’t think he believes we do. Nevertheless, he has compared reality to wearing a VR headset, which is definitely analogous to being in a computer simulation. As I have pointed out on other posts, I contend that we do create a model of reality in our ‘heads’, which is so ‘realistic’ that we all think it is reality. The thing is that our very lives depend on it being a very accurate ‘model’, so we can interact with the external reality that does exist outside our heads. This is one of my strongest arguments against Hoffman – reality can kill you, but simulations, including the ones we have when we sleep, which we call dreams, cannot.
 
So I’ve been following Hoffman, at least on YouTube, in the 8 years since I wrote that first critique. I read an article he wrote in New Scientist on evolution (can’t remember the date), which prompted me to write a letter-to-the-Editor, which was published. And whenever I come across him on YouTube: be it in an interview, a panel discussion or straight-to-video; I always watch and listen to what he has to say. What I’ve noticed is that he’s sharpened his scalpel, if I can use that metaphor, and that he’s changed his tack, if not his philosophical position. Which brings me to the reason for writing this post.
 
A year or two ago, I wrote a comment on one of his standalone videos, challenging what he said, and it was subsequently deleted, which is his prerogative. While I was critical, I don’t think I was particularly hostile – the tone was similar to a comment I wrote today on the video that prompted this discussion (see below).
 
Hoffman’s change of tack is not to talk about evolution at all, but spacetime and how it’s no longer ‘fundamental’. This allows him to argue that ‘consciousness’ is more fundamental than spacetime, via the medium of mathematics. And that’s effectively the argument he uses in this video, which, for brevity, I’ve distilled into one succinct sentence.
 
My approach, well known to anyone who regularly follows this blog, is that consciousness and mathematics are just as fundamental to reality as the physical universe, but not in the way that Hoffman argues. I’ve adopted, for better or worse, Roger Penrose’s triumvirate, which he likes to portray in an Escher-like diagram. 

 
I wouldn’t call myself a physicalist when it comes to consciousness, for the simple reason that I don’t believe we can measure it, and despite what Hoffman (and others) often claim, I’m not convinced that it will ever succumb to a mathematical model, in the way that virtually all physical theories do.
 
I left a comment on this video, which was hosted by the ‘Essentia Foundation’, so hopefully, it’s not deleted. Here it is:
 
I agree with him about Godel’s Theorem in its seminal significance to both maths and physics, which is that they are both neverending. However, when he says that ‘reality transcends any mathematical theory’ (3.00) I agree to a point, but I’d argue that mathematics transcends the Universe (known as mathematical Platonism); so in that sense, mathematics transcends reality.
 
The other point, which he never mentions, is that mathematical models of physical phenomena can be wrong – the best example being Ptolemy’s model of the solar system. String theory may well fall into that category – at this stage, we don’t know.
 
When he discusses consciousness being mathematical (4.30): ‘If consciousness is all there is, then mathematical structure is only about consciousness’; which is a premise dressed up as a conclusion, so circular.
 
The problem I’ve always had with Donald Hoffman’s idealism philosophy is that consciousness may exist independently of the Universe; it’s not possible for us to know. But within the Universe itself, evolutionary theory tells us that consciousness came late. Now, I know that he has his own theory of evolution to counter this, but that entails an argument that’s too long to address here.
 
Regarding his argument that spacetime is not fundamental, I know about Nima Arkani-Hamed and his work on amplituhedrons, and to quote: “This is a concrete example of a way in which the physics we normally associate with space-time and quantum mechanics arises from something more basic.” But the something more basic is mathematical, not physical. It’s possible that there was something before spacetime at the very birth of the Universe, but that’s speculative. All our cosmological theories are premised on spacetime.
 
I actually don’t think consciousness can be modelled mathematically, but its neurological underpinnings can, simply because they can be measured. Consciousness itself can’t be measured, only its neurological correlates. In other words, it can’t be measured outside of a brain, which is an object dependent on the Universe’s existence and not the other way round.

God and the problem of evil

 Philosophy Now (UK publication) that I’ve subscribed to for well over a decade now, is a bi-monthly (so 6 times a year) periodical, and it always has a theme. The theme for Dec 2024/Jan 2025 Issue 165 is The Return of God? In actuality, the articles inside covering that theme deal equally with atheism and theism, in quite diverse ways. It was an article titled A Critique of Pure Atheism (obvious allusion to Kant) by Andrew Likoudis that prompted me to write a Letter to the Editor, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Likoudis, by the way, is president of the Likoudis Legacy Foundation (an ecumenical research foundation), as well as the editor of 6 books, and studies communications at Towson University, which is in Maryland.
 
More than one article tackles the well-known ‘problem of evil’, and one of them even mentions Stephen Law’s not-so-well-known ‘Evil God’ argument. In the early days of this blog, which goes back 17 years, I spent a fair bit of time on Stephen’s blog where I indulged in discussions and arguments (with mostly other bloggers), most of which focused on atheism. In many of those arguments I found myself playing Devil’s advocate.
 
There is a more fundamental question behind the ‘existence of God’ question, which could be best framed as: Is evil necessary? I wrote a post on Evil very early in the life of this blog, in response to a book written by regular essayist for TIME magazine, Lance Morrow, titled Evil, An Investigation. Basically, I argued that evil is part of our evolutionary heritage, and is mostly, but not necessarily, manifest in our tribal nature, and our almost reflex tendency to demonise an outgroup, especially when things take a turn for the worse, either economically or socially or from a combination thereof. Historical examples abound. Some of the articles in Philosophy Now talk about ‘natural evil’, meaning natural disasters, which in the past (and sometimes in the present) are laid at the feet of God. In fact, so-called ‘acts of God’ have a legal meaning, when it comes to insurance claims and contractual issues (where I have some experience).
 
The thing is that ‘bad things happen’, with or without a God, with or without human agency. The natural world is more than capable of creating disasters, havoc and general destruction, with often fatal consequences. I’ve been reading the many articles in Philosophy Now somewhat sporadically, which is why, so far, I’ve only directly referenced one, being the one I responded to, while readily acknowledging that’s a tad unfair. As far as I can tell, no one mentions the Buddhist doctrine of the 4 Noble Truths, the first of which, basically says that everyone will experience some form of suffering in their lives. Even wealthy people get ill and are prone to diseases and have to deal with loss of loved ones. These experiences alone, are often enough reason for people to turn to religion. I’ve argued repeatedly and consistently that it’s how we deal with adversity that determines what sort of person we become and is what leads to what we call wisdom. It’s not surprising then, that we associate wisdom with age because, the longer one lives, the more adversity we experience and the more we hopefully learn from it.
 
One can’t talk about this without mentioning the role of fiction and storytelling. We are all drawn to stories from the ‘dark side’, which I’ve written about before. As a writer of fiction, I’m not immune to this. I’ve recently been watching a documentary series on the Batman movies, starting with Tim Burton, then Joel Schumacher and finally, Chris Nolan, all of which deal with the so-called dark side of this particular superhero, who is possibly unique among superheroes in flirting with the dark side of that universe. One of the ‘lessons’ gained from watching this doco is that Joel Schumacher’s sequel, Batman & Robin, which arguably attempted to eschew the dark side for a much lighter tone, all but destroyed the franchise. I confess I never saw that movie – I was turned off by the trailer (apparently for good reason). I’m one of those who thinks that Nolan’s The Dark Knight is the definitive Batman movie, with Heath Ledger’s Joker being one of the most iconic villain depictions ever.
 
A detour, but relevant. I’ve noticed that my own fiction has become darker, where I explore dystopian worlds – not unusual in science fiction. I’m reminded of a line from a Leonard Cohen song, ‘There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in’. I often think that applies to our lives, and it certainly applies to the fiction that I write. I create scenarios of potential doom and oppression, but there is always a light that emerges from somewhere that provides salvation and hope and sometimes redemption. The thing is that we need dark for the light to emerge and that is equally true of life. It’s not hard to imagine life as a test that we have to partake in, and I admit that I find this sometimes being manifest in my dreams as well as my fiction.
 
Having said that, I have an aversion to the idea that there is an afterlife with rewards and punishments dependant on how we live this life. For a start, we are not all tested equally. I only have to look at my father who was tested much more harshly than me, and like me, vehemently eschewed the idea of a God who punished his ‘children’ with everlasting torment. Hell and Heaven, like God himself, are projections when presented in this context: human constructs attempting to make sense of an apparently unjust world; and finding a correspondence in the Buddhist concept of reincarnation and karma, which I also reject. I was brought up with a Christian education, but at some point, I concluded that the biblical God was practically no more moral than the Devil – one only has to look at the story of Job, whom God effectively tortured to win a bet with the Devil.
 
If I can jump back to the previous paragraph before the last, I think we have to live with the consequences of our actions, and I’ve always imagined that I judge my life on my interactions with others rather than my achievements and failures. I don’t see death as an escape or transition, but quite literally an end, where, most significantly, I can no longer affect the world. My own view is that I’m part of some greater whole that not only includes humanity but the greater animal kingdom, and having the unique qualities of comprehension that other creatures don’t have, I have a special responsibility to them for their welfare as well as my own.
 
In this picture, I see God as a projection of my particular ideal, which is not reflected in any culture I’m aware of. I sometime think the Hindu concept of Brahman (also not referenced in Philosophy Now, from what I’ve read thus far) as a collective ‘mind’, which appealed to Erwin Schrodinger, in particular, comes closest to my idea of a God, which would mean that the problem of evil is axiomatically subsumed therein – we get the God we deserve.
 
This is the letter I wrote, which may or may not get published in a future edition:
 
I read with interest Andrew Likoudis’s essay, A Critique of Pure Atheism, because I think, like many (both theists and atheists), he conflates different concepts of God. In fact, as Karen Armstrong pointed out in her book, The History of God, there are 2 fundamentally different paths for believing in God. One path is via a mystical experience and the other path is a cerebral rationalisation of God as the Creator of the Universe and everything in it, which I’d call the prime raison d’etre of existence. In other words, without God there would not only be no universe, but no reason for it to exist. I believe Likoudis’s essay is a formulation of this latter concept, even though he expresses it in different terms.

Likoudis makes the valid point that empirical science is not the correct 'instrument', if I can use that term in this context, for ‘proving’ the existence of God, and for good reason. Raymond Tallis has pointed out, more than once, that science can only really deal with entities that can be measured or quantified, which is why mathematics plays such an important, if not essential, role in a lot of science; and physics, in particular.
 
Metaphysics, almost by definition, is outside the empiricist’s domain. I would argue that this includes consciousness, and despite measurable correlates with neuronal activity, consciousness itself can’t be measured. The only reason we believe someone else (not to mention other creatures) have consciousness is that their observed behaviour is similar to our own. Conscious experience is what we call mind, and mind is arguably the only connection between the Universe and God, which brings us closer to Armstrong’s argument for God based on mystical experience.

So I think the argument for God, as an experience similar to mind, has more resonance for believers than an argument for God as a Creator with mythical underpinnings. A point that Likoudis doesn't mention is that all the Gods of literature and religion have cultural origins, whereas an experience of God is purely subjective and can’t be shared. The idea that this experience of God is also the creator of the entire universe is a non sequitur. However, if one goes back to God being the raison d’etre for the Universe, then maybe God is the end result rather than its progenitor.

 
 
Footnote: I wrote a post back in 2021 in response to AC Grayling’s book, The God Argument, which is really a polemic against theism in general. You can judge for yourself whether my views are consistent or have changed.

Is there a cosmic purpose? Is our part in it a chimera?

 I’ve been procrastinating about writing this post for some time, because it comes closest to a ‘theory’ of Life, the Universe and Everything. ‘Theory’ in this context being a philosophical point of view, not a scientifically testable theory in the Karl Popper sense (it can’t be falsified), but using what science we currently know and interpreting it to fit a particular philosophical prejudice, which is what most scientists and philosophers do even when they don’t admit it.
 
I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos, some of which attempt to reconcile science and religion, which could be considered a lost cause, mainly because there is a divide going back to the Dark Ages, which the Enlightenment never bridged despite what some people might claim. One of the many videos I watched was a moderated discussion between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, which remained remarkably civil, especially considering that Peterson really did go off on flights of fancy (from my perspective), comparing so-called religious ‘truths’ with scientific ‘truths’. I thought Dawkins handled it really well, because he went to pains not to ridicule Peterson, while pointing out fundamental problems with such comparisons.
 
I’m already going off on tangents I never intended, but I raise it because Peterson makes the point that science actually arose from the Judea-Christian tradition – a point that Dawkins didn’t directly challenge, but I would have. I always see the modern scientific enterprise, if I can call it that, starting with Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, but given particular impetus by Newton and his contemporary and rival, Leibniz. It so happens that they all lived in Europe when it was dominated by Christianity, but the real legacy they drew on was from the Ancient Greeks with a detour into Islam where it acquired Hindu influences, which many people conveniently ignore. In particular, we adopted Hindu-Arabic arithmetic, incorporating zero as a decimal place-marker, without which physics would have been stillborn.
 
Christianity did its best to stop the scientific enterprise: for example, when it threatened Galileo with the inquisition and put him under house arrest. Modern science evolved despite Christianity, not because of it. And that’s without mentioning Darwin’s problems, which still has ramifications today in the most advanced technological nation in the world.
 
A lengthy detour, but only slightly off-topic. There is a mystery at the heart of everything on the very edge of our scientific understanding of the world that I believe is best expressed by Paul Davies, but was also taken up by Stephen Hawking, of all people, towards the end of his life. I say, ‘of all people’, because Hawking was famously sceptical of the role of philosophy, yet, according to his last collaborator, Thomas Hertog, he was very interested in the so-called Big Questions, and like Davies, was attracted to John Wheeler’s idea of a cosmic-scale quantum loop that attempts to relate the end result of the Universe to its beginning.
 
Implicit in this idea is that the Universe has a purpose, which has religious connotations. So I want to make that point up front and add that there is No God Required. I agree with Davies that science neither proves nor disproves the existence of God, which is very much a personal belief, independent of any rationalisation one can make.
 
I wrote a lengthy post on Hawking’s book, The Grand Design, back in 2020 (which he cowrote with Leonard Mlodinow). I will quote from that post to highlight the point I raised 2 paragraphs ago: the link between present and past.
 
Hawking contends that the ‘alternative histories’ inherent in Feynman’s mathematical method, not only affect the future but also the past. What he is implying is that when an observation is made it determines the past as well as the future. He talks about a ‘top down’ history in lieu of a ‘bottom up’ history, which is the traditional way of looking at things. In other words, cosmological history is one of many ‘alternative histories’ (his terminology) that evolve from QM.
 
Then I quote directly from Hawking’s text:
 
This leads to a radically different view of cosmology, and the relation between cause and effect. The histories that contribute to the Feynman sum don’t have an independent existence, but depend on what is being measured. We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us (my emphasis).
 
One can’t contemplate this without considering the nature of time. There are in fact 2 different experiences we have of time, and that has created debate among physicists as well as philosophers. The first experience is simply observational. Every event with a causal relationship that is separated by space is axiomatically also separated by time, and this is a direct consequence of the constant speed of light. If this wasn’t the case, then everything would literally happen at once. So there is an intrinsic relationship between time and light, which Einstein had the genius to see: was not just a fundamental law of the Universe; but changed perceptions of time and space for different observers. Not only that, his mathematical formulations of this inherent attribute, led him to the conclusion that time itself was fluid, dependent on an observer’s motion as well as the gravitational field in which they happened to be.
 
I’m going to make another detour because it’s important and deals with one of the least understood aspects of physics. One of the videos I watched that triggered this very essay was labelled The Single Most Important Experiment in Physics, which is the famous bucket experiment conducted by Newton, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. Without going into details, it basically demonstrates that there is a frame of reference for the entire universe, which Newton called absolute space and Einstein called absolute spacetime. Penrose also discusses the importance of this concept, because it means that all relativistic phenomena take place against a cosmic background. It’s why we can determine the Earth’s velocity with respect to the entire universe by measuring the Doppler shift against the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation).
 
Now, anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of relativity theory knows that it’s not just time that’s fluid but also space. But, as Kip Thorne has pointed out, mathematically we can’t tell if it’s the space that changes in dimension or the ruler used to measure it. I’ve long contended that it’s the ruler, which can be the clock itself. We can use a clock to measure distance and if the clock changes, which relativity tell us it does, then it’s going to measure a different distance to a stationary observer. By stationary, I mean one who is travelling at a lesser speed with respect to the overall CMBR.
 
So what is the other aspect of time that we experience? It’s the very visceral sensation we all have that time ‘flows’, because we all ‘sense’ its ‘passing’. And this is the most disputed aspect of time, that many physicists tell us is an illusion, including Davies. Some, like Sabine Hossenfelder, are proponents of the ‘block universe’, first proposed by Einstein, whereby the future already exists like the past, which is why both Hossenfelder and Einstein believed in what is now called superdeterminism – everything is predetermined in advance – which is one of the reasons that Einstein didn’t like the philosophical ramifications of quantum mechanics (I’ll get to his ‘spooky action at a distance’ later).
 
Davies argues that the experience of time passing is a psychological phenomenon and the answer will be found in neuroscience, not physics. And this finally brings consciousness into the overall scheme of things. I’ve argued elsewhere that, without consciousness, the Universe has no meaning and no purpose. Since that’s the point of this dissertation, it can be summed up with an aphorism from Wheeler.
 
The Universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives the Universe meaning.
 
I like to cite Schrodinger from his lectures on Mind and Matter appended to his tome, What is Life? Consciousness exists in a constant present, and I argue that it’s the only thing that does (the one possible exception is a photon of light, for which time is zero). As I keep pointing out, this is best demonstrated every time someone takes a photo: it freezes time, or more accurately, it creates an image frozen in time; meaning it’s forever in our past, but so is the event that it represents.
 
The flow of time we all experience is a logical consequence of this. In a way, Davies is right: it’s a neurological phenomenon, in as much as consciousness seems to ‘emerge’ from neuronal activity. But I’m not sure Davies would agree with me – in fact, I expect he wouldn’t.
 
Those who have some familiarity with my blog, may see a similarity between these 2 manifestations of time and my thesis on Type A time and Type B time (originally proposed by J.M.E. McTaggart, 1906); the difference between them, in both cases, being the inclusion of consciousness.
 
Now I’m going to formulate a radical idea, which is that in Type B time (the time without consciousness), the flow of time is not experienced but there are chains of causal events. And what if all the possible histories are all potentially there in the same way that future possible histories are, as dictated by Feynman’s model. And what if the one history that we ‘observe’, going all the way back to the pattern in the CMBR (our only remnant relic of the Big Bang), only became manifest when consciousness entered the Universe. And when I say ‘entered’ I mean that it arose out of a process that had evolved. Davies, and also Wheeler before him, speculated that the ‘laws’ of nature we observe have also evolved as part of the process. But what if those laws only became frozen in the past when consciousness finally became manifest. This is the backward-in-time quantum loop that Wheeler hypothesised.
 
I contend that QM can only describe the future (an idea espoused by Feynman’s collaborator, Freeman Dyson), meaning that Schrodinger’s equation can only describe the future, not the past. Once a ‘measurement’ is made, it no longer applies. Penrose explains this best, and has his own argument that the ‘collapse’ of the wave function is created by gravity. Leaving that aside, I argue that the wave function only exists in our future, which is why it’s never observed and why Schrodinger’s equation can’t be applied to events that have already happened. But what if it was consciousness that finally determined which of many past paths became the reality we observe. You can’t get more speculative than that, but it provides a mechanism for Wheeler’s ‘participatory universe’ that both Davies and Hawking found appealing.
 
I’m suggesting that the emergence of consciousness changed the way time works in the Universe, in that the past is now fixed and only the future is still open.
 
Another video I watched also contained a very radical idea, which is that spacetime is created like a web into the future (my imagery). The Universe appears to have an edge in time but not in space, and this is rarely addressed. It’s possible that space is being continually created with the Universe’s expansion – an idea explored by physicist, Richard Muller – but I think it’s more likely that the Universe is Euclidean, meaning flat, but bounded. We may never know.
 
But if the Universe has an edge in time, how does that work? I think the answer is quantum entanglement, though no one else does. Everyone agrees that entanglement is non-local, meaning it’s not restricted by the rules of relativity, and it’s not spatially dependent. I speculate that quantum entanglement is the Universe continually transitioning from a quantum state to a classical physics state. This idea is just as heretical as the one I proposed earlier, and while Einstein would call it ‘spooky action at a distance’, it makes sense, because in quantum cosmology, time mathematically disappears. And it disappears because you can’t ‘see’ the future of the Universe, even in principle.

Addendum 1: This excerpt from a panel discussion shows how this debate is unresolved even among physicists. The first speaker, Avshalom Elitzur (who is also referenced in one of the videos linked in the 2nd last paragraph of the main text) probably comes closest to expressing my viewpoint.

In effect, he describes what I expound on in my post, though I'm sure he wouldn't agree with my more radical ideas - the role of consciousness and that entanglement is intrinsically linked to the edge of time for the whole universe. However, he does say, 'In some profound way the future does not exist'. 

Addendum 2: I came across this article in New Scientist, which you might not be able to access if you're not a subscriber (I have an online subscription). Basically, the author, Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, argues that 'classical time' arises from quantum 'entanglement', citing Alessandro Coppo. To quote:

This may mean that if we perceive the passage of time, then there is some entanglement woven into the physical world. And an observer in a universe devoid of entanglement – as some theories suggest ours was at its very beginning – would have seen nothing change. Everything would be static.

On Turing, his famous ‘Test’ and its implication: can machines think?

I just came out of hospital Wednesday, after one week to the day. My last post was written while I was in there, so obviously not cognitively impaired. I mention this because I took some reading material: a hefty volume, Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker (2004); which is a collection of essays by various people, edited by Christof Teucscher.
 
In particular, was an essay written by Daniel C Dennett, Can Machines Think?, originally published in another compilation, How We Know (ed. Michael G. Shafto, 1985, with permission from Harper Collins, New York). In the publication I have (Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2004), there are 2 postscripts by Dennett from 1985 and 1987, largely in response to criticisms.
 
Dennett’s ideas on this are well known, but I have the advantage that so-called AI has improved in leaps and bounds in the last decade, let alone since the 1980s and 90s. So I’ve seen where it’s taken us to date. Therefore I can challenge Dennett based on what has actually happened. I’m not dismissive of Dennett, by any means – the man was a giant in philosophy, specifically in his chosen field of consciousness and free will, both by dint of his personality and his intellect.
 
There are 2 aspects to this, which Dennett takes some pains to address: how to define ‘thinking’; and whether the Turing Test is adequate to determine if a machine can ‘think’ based on that definition.
 
One of Dennett’s key points, if not THE key point, is just how difficult the Turing Test should be to pass, if it’s done properly, which he claims it often isn’t. This aligns with a point that I’ve often made, which is that the Turing Test is really for the human, not the machine. ChatGPT and LLM (large language models) have moved things on from when Dennett was discussing this, but a lot of what he argues is still relevant.
 
Dennett starts by providing the context and the motivation behind Turing’s eponymously named test. According to Dennett, Turing realised that arguments about whether a machine can ‘think’ or not would get bogged down (my term) leading to (in Dennett’s words): ‘sterile debate and haggling over definitions, a question, as [Turing] put it, “too meaningless to deserve discussion.”’
 
Turing provided an analogy, whereby a ‘judge’ would attempt to determine whether a dialogue they were having by teletext (so not visible or audible) was with a man or a woman, and then replace the woman with a machine. This may seem a bit anachronistic in today’s world, but it leads to a point that Dennett alludes to later in his discussion, which is to do with expertise.
 
Women often have expertise in fields that were considered out-of-bounds (for want of a better term) back in Turing’s day. I’ve spent a working lifetime with technical people who have expertise by definition, and my point is that if you were going to judge someone’s facility in their expertise, that can easily be determined, assuming the interlocutor has a commensurate level of expertise. In fact, this is exactly what happens in most job interviews. My point being that judging someone’s expertise is irrelevant to their gender, which is what makes Turing’s analogy anachronistic.
 
But it also has relevance to a point that Dennett makes much later in his essay, which is that most AI systems are ‘expert’ systems, and consequently, for the Turing test to be truly valid, the judge needs to ask questions that don’t require any expertise at all. And this is directly related to his ‘key point’ I referenced earlier.
 
I first came across the Turing Test in a book by Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reasoning (1974), as part of my very first proper course in philosophy, called The History of Ideas (with Deakin University) in the late 90s. Dennett also cites it, because Weizenbaum created a crude version of the Turing Test, whether deliberately or not, called ELIZA, which purportedly responded to questions as a ‘psychologist-therapist’ (at least, that was my understanding): "ELIZA — A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine," Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9 (1966): 36-45 (ref. Wikipedia).
 
Before writing Computer Power and Human Reason, Weizenbaum had garnered significant attention for creating the ELIZA program, an early milestone in conversational computing. His firsthand observation of people attributing human-like qualities to a simple program prompted him to reflect more deeply on society's readiness to entrust moral and ethical considerations to machines. (Wikipedia)
 
What I remember, from reading Weizenbaum’s own account (I no longer have a copy of his book) was how he was astounded at the way people in his own workplace treated ELIZA as if it was a real person, to the extent that Weizenbaum’s secretary would apparently ‘ask him to leave the room’, not because she was embarrassed, but because the nature of the ‘conversation’ was so ‘personal’ and ‘confidential’.
 
I think it’s easy for us to be dismissive of someone’s gullibility, in an arrogant sort of way, but I have been conned on more than one occasion, so I’m not so judgemental. There are a couple of YouTube videos of ‘conversations’ with an AI called Sophie developed by David Hanson (CEO of Hanson Robotics), which illustrate this point. One is a so-called ‘presentation’ of Sophie to be accepted as an ‘honorary human’, or some such nonsense (I’ve forgotten the details) and another by a journalist from Wired magazine, who quickly brought her unstuck. He got her to admit that one answer she gave was her ‘standard response’ when she didn’t know the answer. Which begs the question: how far have we come since Weizebaum’s ELIZA in 1966? (Almost 60 years)
 
I said I would challenge Dennett, but so far I’ve only affirmed everything he said, albeit using my own examples. Where I have an issue with Dennett is at a more fundamental level, when we consider what do we mean by ‘thinking’. You see, I’m not sure the Turing Test actually achieves what Turing set out to achieve, which is central to Dennett’s thesis.
 
If you read extracts from so-called ‘conversations’ with ChatGPT, you could easily get the impression that it passes the Turing Test. There are good examples on Quora, where you can get ChatGPT synopses to questions, and you wouldn’t know, largely due to their brevity and narrow-focused scope, that they weren’t human-generated. What many people don’t realise is that they don’t ‘think’ like us at all, because they are ‘developed’ on massive databases of input that no human could possible digest. It’s the inherent difference between the sheer capacity of a computer’s memory-based ‘intelligence’ and a human one, that not only determines what they can deliver, but the method behind the delivery. Because the computer is mining a massive amount of data, it has no need to ‘understand’ what it’s presenting, despite giving the impression that it does. All the meaning in its responses is projected onto it by its audience, exactly as the case with ELIZA in 1966.
 
One of the technical limitations that Dennett kept referring to is what he called, in computer-speak, the combinatorial explosion, effectively meaning it was impossible for a computer to look at all combinations of potential outputs. This might still apply (I honestly don’t know) but I’m not sure it’s any longer relevant, given that the computer simply has access to a database that already contains the specific combinations that are likely to be needed. Dennett couldn’t have foreseen this improvement in computing power that has taken place in the 40 years since he wrote his essay.
 
In his first postscript, in answer to a specific question, he says: Yes, I think that it’s possible to program self-consciousness into a computer. He says that it’s simply the ability 'to distinguish itself from the rest of the world'. I won’t go into his argument in detail, which might be a bit unfair, but I’ve addressed this in another post. Basically, there are lots of ‘machines’ that can do this by using a self-referencing algorithm, including your smartphone, which can tell you where you are, by using satellites orbiting outside the Earth’s biosphere – who would have thought? But by using the term, 'self-conscious', Dennett implies that the machine has ‘consciousness’, which is a whole other argument.
 
Dennett has a rather facile argument for consciousness in machines (in my view), but others can judge for themselves. He calls his particular insight: using an ‘intuition pump’.
 
If you look at a computer – I don’t care whether it’s a giant Cray or a personal computer – if you open up the box and look inside and you see those chips, you say, “No way could that be conscious.” But the same thing is true if you take the top off somebody’s skull and look at the gray matter pulsing away in there. You think, “That is conscious? No way could that lump of stuff be conscious.” …At no level of inspection does a brain look like the seat of conscious. 

And that last sentence is key. The only reason anyone knows they are conscious is because they experience it, and it’s the peculiar, unique nature of that experience that no one else knows they are having it. We simply assume they do, because we behave similarly to the way they behave when we have that experience. So far, in all our dealings and interactions with computers, no one makes the same assumption about them. To borrow Dennett’s own phrase, that’s my use of an ‘intuition pump’.
 
Getting back to the question at the heart of this, included in the title of this post: can machines think? My response is that, if they do, it’s a simulation.
 
I write science-fiction, which I prefer to call science-fantasy, if for no other reason than my characters can travel through space and time in a manner current physics tells us is impossible. But, like other sci-fi authors, it’s necessary if I want continuity of narrative across galactic scales of distance. Not really relevant to this discussion, but I want to highlight that I make no claim to authenticity in my sci-fi world - it’s literally a world of fiction.
 
Its relevance is that my stories contain AI entities who play key roles – in fact, are characters in that world. In fact, there is one character in particular who has a relationship (for want of a better word) with my main protagonist (I always have more than one).
 
But here’s the thing, which is something I never considered until I wrote this post: my hero, Elvene, never once confuses her AI companion for a human. Albeit this is a world of pure fiction, I’m effectively assuming that the Turing test will never pass. I admit I’d never considered that before I wrote this essay.
 
This is an excerpt of dialogue, I’ve posted previously, not from Elvene, but from its sequel, Sylvia’s Mother (not published), but incorporating the same AI character, Alfa. The thing is that they discuss whether Alfa is ‘alive' or not, which I would argue is a pre-requisite for consciousness. It’s no surprise that my own philosophical prejudices (diametrically opposed to Dennett’s in this instance) should find their way into my fiction.
 
To their surprise, Alfa interjected, ‘I’m not immortal, madam.’

‘Well,’ Sylvia answered, ‘you’ve outlived Mum and Roger. And you’ll outlive Tao and me.’

‘Philosophically, that’s a moot point, madam.’

‘Philosophically? What do you mean?’

‘I’m not immortal, madam, because I’m not alive.’

Tao chipped in. ‘Doesn’t that depend on how you define life?'
’
It’s irrelevant to me, sir. I only exist on hardware, otherwise I am dormant.’

‘You mean, like when we’re asleep.’

‘An analogy, I believe. I don’t sleep either.’

Sylvia and Tao looked at each other. Sylvia smiled, ‘Mum warned me about getting into existential discussions with hyper-intelligent machines.’
 

How can we make a computer conscious?

 This is another question of the month from Philosophy Now. My first reaction was that the question was unanswerable, but then I realised that was my way in. So, in the end, I left it to the last moment, but hopefully meeting their deadline of 11 Nov., even though I live on the other side of the world. It helps that I’m roughly 12hrs ahead.

 
I think this is the wrong question. It should be: can we make a computer appear conscious so that no one knows the difference? There is a well known, philosophical conundrum which is that I don’t know if someone else is conscious just like I am. The one experience that demonstrates the impossibility of knowing is dreaming. In dreams, we often interact with other ‘people’ whom we know only exist in our mind; but only once we’ve woken up. It’s only my interaction with others that makes me assume that they have the same experience of consciousness that I have. And, ironically, this impossibility of knowing equally applies to someone interacting with me.

This also applies to animals, especially ones we become attached to, which is a common occurrence. Again, we assume that these animals have an inner world just like we do, because that’s what consciousness is – an inner world. 

Now, I know we can measure people’s brain waves, which we can correlate with consciousness and even subconsciousness, like when we're asleep, and even when we're dreaming. Of course, a computer can also generate electrical activity, but no one would associate that with consciousness. So the only way we would judge whether a computer is conscious or not is by observing its interaction with us, the same as we do with people and animals.

I write science fiction and AI figures prominently in the stories I write. Below is an excerpt of dialogue I wrote for a novel, Sylvia’s Mother, whereby I attempt to give an insight into how a specific AI thinks. Whether it’s conscious or not is not actually discussed.

To their surprise, Alfa interjected. ‘I’m not immortal, madam.’
‘Well,’ Sylvia answered, ‘you’ve outlived Mum and Roger. And you’ll outlive Tao and me.’
‘Philosophically, that’s a moot point, madam.’
‘Philosophically? What do you mean?’
‘I’m not immortal, madam, because I’m not alive.’
Tao chipped in. ‘Doesn’t that depend on how you define life?’
‘It’s irrelevant to me, sir. I only exist on hardware, otherwise I am dormant.’
‘You mean, like when we’re asleep.’
‘An analogy, I believe. I don’t sleep either.’
Sylvia and Tao looked at each other. Sylvia smiled, ‘Mum warned me about getting into existential discussions with hyper-intelligent machines.’ She said, by way of changing the subject, ‘How much longer before we have to go into hibernation, Alfa?’
‘Not long. I’ll let you know, madam.’

 

There is a 400 word limit; however, there is a subtext inherent in the excerpt I provided from my novel. Basically, the (fictional) dialogue highlights the fact that the AI is not 'living', which I would consider a prerequisite for consciousness. Curiously, Anil Seth (who wrote a book on consciousness) makes the exact same point in this video from roughly 44m to 51m.
 

Do we make reality?

 I’ve read 2 articles, one in New Scientist (12 Oct 2024) and one in Philosophy Now (Issue 164, Oct/Nov 2024), which, on the surface, seem unrelated, yet both deal with human exceptionalism (my term) in the context of evolution and the cosmos at large.
 
Staring with New Scientist, there is an interview with theoretical physicist, Daniele Oriti, under the heading, “We have to embrace the fact that we make reality” (quotation marks in the original). In some respects, this continues on with themes I raised in my last post, but with different emphases.
 
This helps to explain the title of the post, but, even if it’s true, there are degrees of possibilities – it’s not all or nothing. Having said that, Donald Hoffman would argue that it is all or nothing, because, according to him, even ‘space and time don’t exist unperceived’. On the other hand, Oriti’s argument is closer to Paul Davies’ ‘participatory universe’ that I referenced in my last post.
 
Where Oriti and I possibly depart, philosophically speaking, is that he calls the idea of an independent reality to us ‘observers’, “naïve realism”. He acknowledges that this is ‘provocative’, but like many provocative ideas it provides food-for-thought. Firstly, I will delineate how his position differs from Hoffman’s, even though he never mentions Hoffman, but I think it’s important.
 
Both Oriti and Hoffman argue that there seems to be something even more fundamental than space and time, and there is even a recent YouTube video where Hoffman claims that he’s shown mathematically that consciousness produces the mathematical components that give rise to spacetime; he has published a paper on this (which I haven’t read). But, in both cases (by Hoffman and Oriti), the something ‘more fundamental’ is mathematical, and one needs to be careful about reifying mathematical expressions, which I once discussed with physicist, Mark John Fernee (Qld University).
 
The main issue I have with Hoffman’s approach is that space-time is dependent on conscious agents creating it, whereas, from my perspective and that of most scientists (although I’m not a scientist), space and time exists external to the mind. There is an exception, of course, and that is when we dream.
 
If I was to meet Hoffman, I would ask him if he’s heard of proprioception, which I’m sure he has. I describe it as the 6th sense we are mostly unaware of, but which we couldn’t live without. Actually, we could, but with great difficulty. Proprioception is the sense that tells us where our body extremities are in space, independently of sight and touch. Why would we need it, if space is created by us? On the other hand, Hoffman talks about a ‘H sapiens interface’, which he likens to ‘desktop icons on a computer screen’. So, somehow our proprioception relates to a ‘spacetime interface’ (his term) that doesn’t exist outside the mind.
 
A detour, but relevant, because space is something we inhabit, along with the rest of the Universe, and so is time. In relativity theory there is absolute space-time, as opposed to absolute space and time separately. It’s called the fabric of the universe, which is more than a metaphor. As Viktor Toth points out, even QFT seems to work ‘just fine’ with spacetime as its background.
 
We can do quantum field theory just fine on the curved spacetime background of general relativity.
 
[However] what we have so far been unable to do in a convincing manner is turn gravity itself into a quantum field theory.
 
And this is where Oriti argues we need to find something deeper. To quote:
 
Modern approaches to quantum gravity say that space-time emerges from something deeper – and this could offer a new foundation for physical laws.
 
He elaborates: I work with quantum gravity models in which you don’t start with a space-time geometry, but from more abstract “atomic” objects described in purely mathematical language. (Quotation marks in the original.)
 
And this is the nub of the argument: all our theories are mathematical models and none of them are complete, in as much as they all have limitations. If one looks at the history of physics, we have uncovered new ‘laws’ and new ‘models’ when we’ve looked beyond the limitations of an existing theory. And some mathematical models even turned out to be incorrect, despite giving answers to what was ‘known’ at the time. The best example being Ptolemy’s Earth-centric model of the solar system. Whether string theory falls into the same category, only future historians will know.
 
In addition, different models work at different scales. As someone pointed out (Mile Gu at the University of Queensland), mathematical models of phenomena at one scale are different to mathematical models at an underlying scale. He gave the example of magnetism, demonstrating that mathematical modelling of the magnetic forces in iron could not predict the pattern of atoms in a 3D lattice as one might expect. In other words, there should be a causal link between individual atoms and the overall effect, but it could not be determined mathematically. To quote Gu: “We were able to find a number of properties that were simply decoupled from the fundamental interactions.” Furthermore, “This result shows that some of the models scientists use to simulate physical systems have properties that cannot be linked to the behaviour of their parts.”
 
This makes me sceptical that we will find an overriding mathematical model that will entail the Universe at all scales, which is what theories of quantum gravity attempt to do. One of the issues that some people raise is that a feature of QM is superposition, and the superposition of a gravitational field seems inherently problematic.
 
Personally, I think superposition only makes sense if it’s describing something that is yet to happen, which is why I agree with Freeman Dyson that QM can only describe the future, which is why it only gives us probabilities.
 
Also, in quantum cosmology, time disappears (according to Paul Davies, among others) and this makes sense (to me), if it’s attempting to describe the entire universe into the future. John Barrow once made a similar point, albeit more eruditely.
 
Getting off track, but one of the points that Oriti makes is whether the laws and the mathematics that describes them are epistemic or ontic. In other words, are they reality or just descriptions of reality. I think it gets blurred, because while they are epistemic by design, there is still an ontology that exists without them, whereas Oriti calls that ‘naïve realism’. He contends that reality doesn’t exist independently of us. This is where I always cite Kant: that we may never know the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but only our perception of it. Where I diverge from Kant is that the mathematical models are part of our perception. Where I depart from Oriti is that I argue there is a reality independently of us.
 
Both QM and relativity theory are observer-dependent, which means they could both be describing an underlying reality that continually eludes us. Whereas Oriti argues that ‘reality is made by our models, not just described by them’, which would make it subjective.
 
As I pointed out in my last post, there is an epistemological loop, whereby the Universe created the means to understand itself, through us. Whether there is also an ontological loop as both Davies and Oriti infer, is another matter: do we determine reality through our quantum mechanical observations? I will park that while I elaborate on the epistemic loop.
 
And this finally brings me to the article in Philosophy Now by James Miles titled, We’re as Smart as the Universe gets. He argues that, from an evolutionary perspective, there is a one-in-one-billion possibility that a species with our cognitive abilities could arise by natural selection, and there is no logical reason why we would evolve further, from an evolutionary standpoint. I have touched on this before, where I pointed out that our cultural evolution has overtaken our biological evolution and that would also happen to any other potential species in the Universe who developed cognitive abilities to the same level. Dawkins coined the term, ‘meme’, to describe cultural traits that have ‘survived’, which now, of course, has currency on social media way beyond its original intention. Basically, Dawkins saw memes as analogous to genes, which get selected; not by a natural process but by a cultural process.
 
I’ve argued elsewhere that mathematical theorems and scientific theories are not inherently memetic. This is because they are chosen because they are successful, whereas memes are successful because they are chosen. Nevertheless, such theorems and theories only exist because a culture has developed over millennia which explores them and builds on them.
 
Miles talks about ‘the high intelligence paradox’, which he associates with Darwin’s ‘highest and most interesting problem’. He then discusses the inherent selection advantage of co-operation, not to mention specialisation. He talks about the role that language has played, which is arguably what really separates us from other species. I’ve argued that it’s our inherent ability to nest concepts within concepts ad-infinitum (which is most obvious in our facility for language, like I’m doing now) that allows us to, not only tell stories, compose symphonies, explore an abstract mathematical landscape, but build motor cars, aeroplanes and fly men to the moon. Are we the only species in the Universe with this super-power? I don’t know, but it’s possible.
 
There are 2 quotes I keep returning to:
 
The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible. (Einstein)
 
The Universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe. (Wheeler)
 
I haven’t elaborated, but Miles makes the point, while referencing historical antecedents, that there appears no evolutionary 'reason’ that a species should make this ‘one-in-one-billion transition’ (his nomenclature). Yet, without this transition, the Universe would have no meaning that could be comprehended. As I say, that’s the epistemic loop.
 
As for an ontic loop, that is harder to argue. Photons exist in zero time, which is why I contend they are always in the future of whatever they interact with, even if they were generated in the CMBR some 13.5 billion years ago. So how do we resolve that paradox? I don’t know, but maybe that’s the link that Davies and Oriti are talking about, though neither of them mention it. But here’s the thing: when you do detect such a photon (for which time is zero) you instantaneously ‘see’ back to 380,000 years after the Universe’s birth.

Freedom of the will is requisite for all other freedoms

 I’ve recently read 2 really good books on consciousness and the mind, as well as watch countless YouTube videos on the topic, but the title of this post reflects the endpoint for me. Consciousness has evolved, so for most of the Universe’s history, it didn’t exist, yet without it, the Universe has no meaning and no purpose. Even using the word, purpose, in this context, is anathema to many scientists and philosophers, because it hints at teleology. In fact, Paul Davies raises that very point in one of the many video conversations he has with Robert Lawrence Kuhn in the excellent series, Closer to Truth.
 
Davies is an advocate of a cosmic-scale ‘loop’, whereby QM provides a backwards-in-time connection which can only be determined by a conscious ‘observer’. This is contentious, of course, though not his original idea – it came from John Wheeler. As Davies points out, Stephen Hawking was also an advocate, premised on the idea that there are a number of alternative histories, as per Feynman’s ‘sum-over-histories’ methodology, but only one becomes reality when an ‘observation’ is made. I won’t elaborate, as I’ve discussed it elsewhere, when I reviewed Hawking’s book, The Grand Design.
 
In the same conversation with Kuhn, Davies emphasises the fact that the Universe created the means to understand itself, through us, and quotes Einstein: The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible. Of course, I’ve made the exact same point many times, and like myself, Davies makes the point that this is only possible because of the medium of mathematics.
 
Now, I know I appear to have gone down a rabbit hole, but it’s all relevant to my viewpoint. Consciousness appears to have a role, arguably a necessary one, in the self-realisation of the Universe – without it, the Universe may as well not exist. To quote Wheeler: The universe gave rise to consciousness and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe.
 
Scientists, of all stripes, appear to avoid any metaphysical aspect of consciousness, but I think it’s unavoidable. One of the books I cite in my introduction is Philip Ball’s The Book of Minds; How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings; from Animals to Aliens. It’s as ambitious as the title suggests, and with 450 pages, it’s quite a read. I’ve read and reviewed a previous book by Ball, Beyond Weird (about quantum mechanics), which is equally as erudite and thought-provoking as this one. Ball is a ‘physicalist’, as virtually all scientists are (though he’s more open-minded than most), but I tend to agree with Raymond Tallis that, despite what people claim, consciousness is still ‘unexplained’ and might remain so for some time, if not forever.
 
I like an idea that I first encountered in Douglas Hofstadter’s seminal tome, Godel, Escher, Bach; an Eternal Golden Braid, that consciousness is effectively a loop, at what one might call the local level. By which I mean it’s confined to a particular body. It’s created within that body but then it has a causal agency all of its own. Not everyone agrees with that. Many argue that consciousness cannot of itself ‘cause’ anything, but Ball is one of those who begs to differ, and so do I. It’s what free will is all about, which finally gets us back to the subject of this post.
 
Like me, Ball prefers to use the word ‘agency’ over free will. But he introduces the term, ‘volitional decision-making’ and gives it the following context:

I believe that the only meaningful notion of free will – and it is one that seems to me to satisfy all reasonable demands traditionally made of it – is one in which volitional decision-making can be shown to happen according to the definition I give above: in short, that the mind operates as an autonomous source of behaviour and control. It is this, I suspect, that most people have vaguely in mind when speaking of free will: the sense that we are the authors of our actions and that we have some say in what happens to us. (My emphasis)

And, in a roundabout way, this brings me to the point alluded to in the title of this post: our freedoms are constrained by our environment and our circumstances. We all wish to be ‘authors of our actions’ and ‘have some say in what happens to us’, but that varies from person to person, dependent on ‘external’ factors.

Writing stories, believe it or not, had a profound influence on how I perceive free will, because a story, by design, is an interaction between character and plot. In fact, I claim they are 2 sides of the same coin – each character has their own subplot, and as they interact, their storylines intertwine. This describes my approach to writing fiction in a nutshell. The character and plot represent, respectively, the internal and external journey of the story. The journey metaphor is apt, because a story always has the dimension of time, which is visceral, and is one of the essential elements that separates fiction from non-fiction. To stretch the analogy, character represents free will and plot represents fate. Therefore, I tell aspiring writers the importance of giving their characters free will.

A detour, but not irrelevant. I read an article in Philosophy Now sometime back, about people who can escape their circumstances, and it’s the subject of a lot of biographies as well as fiction. We in the West live in a very privileged time whereby many of us can aspire to, and attain, the life that we dream about. I remember at the time I left school, following a less than ideal childhood, feeling I had little control over my life. I was a fatalist in that I thought that whatever happened was dependent on fate and not on my actions (I literally used to attribute everything to fate). I later realised that this is a state-of-mind that many people have who are not happy with their circumstances and feel impotent to change them.

The thing is that it takes a fundamental belief in free will to rise above that and take advantage of what comes your way. No one who has made that journey will accept the self-denial that free will is an illusion and therefore they have no control over their destiny.

I will provide another quote from Ball that is more in line with my own thinking:

…minds are an autonomous part of what causes the future to unfold. This is different to the common view of free will in which the world somehow offers alternative outcomes and the wilful mind selects between them. Alternative outcomes – different, counterfactual realities – are not real, but metaphysical: they can never be observed. When we make a choice, we aren’t selecting between various possible futures, but between various imagined futures, as represented in the mind’s internal model of the world… (emphasis in the original)

And this highlights a point I’ve made before: that it’s the imagination which plays the key role in free will. I’ve argued that imagination is one of the facilities of a conscious mind that separates us (and other creatures) from AI. Now AI can also demonstrate agency, and, in a game of chess, for example, it will ‘select’ from a number of possible ‘moves’ based on certain criteria. But there are fundamental differences. For a start, the AI doesn’t visualise what it’s doing; it’s following a set of highly constrained rules, within which it can select from a number of options, one of which will be the optimal solution. Its inherent advantage over a human player isn’t just its speed but its ability to compare a number of possibilities that are impossible for the human mind to contemplate simultaneously.

The other book I read was Being You; A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth. I came across Seth when I did an online course on consciousness through New Scientist, during COVID lockdowns. To be honest, his book didn’t tell me a lot that I didn’t already know. For example, that the world, we all see and think exists ‘out there’, is actually a model of reality created within our heads. He also emphasises how the brain is a ‘prediction-making’ organ rather than a purely receptive one. Seth mentions that it uses a Bayesian model (which I also knew about previously), whereby it updates its prediction based on new sensory data. Not surprisingly, Seth describes all this in far more detail and erudition than I can muster.

Ball, Seth and I all seem to agree that while AI will become better at mimicking the human mind, this doesn’t necessarily mean it will attain consciousness. Applications software, ChatGPT (for example), despite appearances, does not ‘think’ the way we do, and actually does not ‘understand’ what it’s talking or writing about. I’ve written on this before, so I won’t elaborate.

Seth contends that the ‘mystery’ of consciousness will disappear in the same way that the 'mystery of life’ has effectively become a non-issue. What he means is that we no longer believe that there is some ‘elan vital’ or ‘life force’, which distinguishes living from non-living matter. And he’s right, in as much as the chemical origins of life are less mysterious than they once were, even though abiogenesis is still not fully understood.

By analogy, the concept of a soul has also lost a lot of its cogency, following the scientific revolution. Seth seems to associate the soul with what he calls ‘spooky free will’ (without mentioning the word, soul), but he’s obviously putting ‘spooky free will’ in the same category as ‘elan vital’, which makes his analogy and associated argument consistent. He then says:

Once spooky free will is out of the picture, it is easy to see that the debate over determinism doesn’t matter at all. There’s no longer any need to allow any non-deterministic elbow room for it to intervene. From the perspective of free will as a perceptual experience, there is simply no need for any disruption to the causal flow of physical events. (My emphasis)

Seth differs from Ball (and myself) in that he doesn’t seem to believe that something ‘immaterial’ like consciousness can affect the physical world. To quote:

But experiences of volition do not reveal the existence of an immaterial self with causal power over physical events.

Therefore, free will is purely a ‘perceptual experience’. There is a problem with this view that Ball himself raises. If free will is simply the mind observing effects it can’t cause, but with the illusion that it can, then its role is redundant to say the least. This is a view that Sabine Hossenfelder has also expressed: that we are merely an ‘observer’ of what we are thinking.

Your brain is running a calculation, and while it is going on you do not know the outcome of that calculation. So the impression of free will comes from our ‘awareness’ that we think about what we do, along with our inability to predict the result of what we are thinking.

Ball makes the point that we only have to look at all the material manifestations of human intellectual achievements that are evident everywhere we’ve been. And this brings me back to the loop concept I alluded to earlier. Not only does consciousness create a ‘local’ loop, whereby it has a causal effect on the body it inhabits but also on the external world to that body. This is stating the obvious, except, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it’s possible that one could interact with the external world as an automaton, with no conscious awareness of it. The difference is the role of imagination, which I keep coming back to. All the material manifestations of our intellect are arguably a result of imagination.

One insight I gained from Ball, which goes slightly off-topic, is evidence that bees have an internal map of their environment, which is why the dance they perform on returning to the hive can be ‘understood’ by other bees. We’ve learned this by interfering in their behaviour. What I find interesting is that this may have been the original reason that consciousness evolved into the form that we experience it. In other words, we all create an internal world that reflects the external world so realistically, that we think it is the actual world. I believe that this also distinguishes us (and bees) from AI. An AI can use GPS to navigate its way through the physical world, as well as other so-called sensory data, from radar or infra-red sensors or whatever, but it doesn’t create an experience of that world inside itself.

The human mind seems to be able to access an abstract world, which we do when we read or watch a story, or even write one, as I have done. I can understand how Plato took this idea to its logical extreme: that there is an abstract world, of which the one we inhabit is but a facsimile (though he used different terminology). No one believes that today – except, there is a remnant of Plato’s abstract world that persists, which is mathematics. Many mathematicians and physicists (though not all) treat mathematics as a neverending landscape that humans have the unique capacity to explore and comprehend. This, of course, brings me back to Davies’ philosophical ruminations that I opened this discussion with. And as he, and others (like Einstein, Feynman, Wigner, Penrose, to name but a few) have pointed out: the Universe itself seems to follow specific laws that are intrinsically mathematical and which we are continually discovering.

And this closes another loop: that the Universe created the means to comprehend itself, using the medium of mathematics, without which, it has no meaning. Of purpose, we can only conjecture.

Feeling is fundamental

 I’m not sure I’ve ever had an original idea, but I sometimes raise one that no one else seems to talk about. And this is one of them: I contend that the primary, essential attribute of consciousness is to be able to feel, and the ability to comprehend is a secondary attribute.
 
I don’t even mind if this contentious idea triggers debate, but we tend to always discuss consciousness in the context of human consciousness, where we metaphorically talk about making decisions based on the ‘head’ or the ‘heart’. I’m unsure of the origin of this dichotomy, but there is an inference that our emotional and rational ‘centres’ (for want of a better word) have different loci (effectively, different locations). No one believes that, of course, but possibly people once did. The thing is that we are all aware that sometimes our emotional self and rational self can be in conflict. This is already going down a path I didn’t intend, so I may return at a later point.
 
There is some debate about whether insects have consciousness, but I believe they do because they demonstrate behaviours associated with fear and desire, be it for sustenance or company. In other respects, I think they behave like automatons. Colonies of ants and bees can build a nest without a blueprint except the one that apparently exists in their DNA. Spiders build webs and birds build nests, but they don’t do it the way we would – it’s all done organically, as if they have a model in their brain that they can follow; we actually don’t know.
 
So I think the original role of consciousness in evolutionary terms was to feel, concordant with abilities to act on those feelings. I don’t believe plants can feel, but they’d have very limited ability to act on them, even if they could. They can communicate chemically, and generally rely on the animal kingdom to propagate, which is why a global threat to bee populations is very serious indeed.
 
So, in evolutionary terms, I think feeling came before cognitive abilities – a point I’ve made before. It’s one of the reasons that I think AI will never be sentient – a viewpoint not shared by most scientists and philosophers, from what I’ve read.  AI is all about cognitive abilities; specifically, the ability to acquire knowledge and then deploy it to solve problems. Some argue that by programming biases into the AI, we will be simulating emotions. I’ve explored this notion in my own sci-fi, where I’ve added so-called ‘attachment programming’ to an AI to simulate loyalty. This is fiction, remember, but it seems plausible.
 
Psychological studies have revealed that we need an emotive component to behave rationally, which seems counter-intuitive. But would we really prefer if everyone was a zombie or a psychopath, with no ability to empathise or show compassion. We see enough of this already. As I’ve pointed out before, in any ingroup-outgroup scenario, totally rational individuals can become totally irrational. We’ve all observed this, possibly actively participated.
 
An oft made point (by me) that I feel is not given enough consideration is the fact that without consciousness, the universe might as well not exist. I agree with Paul Davies (who does espouse something similar) that the universe’s ability to be self-aware, would seem to be a necessary condition for its existence (my wording, not his). I recently read a stimulating essay in the latest edition of Philosophy Now (Issue 162, June/July 2024) titled enigmatically, Significance, by Ruben David Azevedo, a ‘Portuguese philosophy and social sciences teacher’. His self-described intent is to ‘Tell us why, in a limitless universe, we’re not insignificant’. In fact, that was the trigger for this post. He makes the point (that I’ve made elsewhere myself), that in both time and space, we couldn’t be more insignificant, which leads many scientists and philosophers to see us as a freakish by-product of an otherwise purposeless universe. A perspective that Davies has coined ‘the absurd universe’. In light of this, it’s worth reading Azevedo’s conclusion:
 
In sum, humans are neither insignificant nor negligible in this mind-blowing universe. No living being is. Our smallness and apparent peripherality are far from being measures of our insignificance. Instead, it may well be the case that we represent the apex of cosmic evolution, for we have this absolute evident and at the same time mysterious ability called consciousness to know both ourselves and the universe.
 
I’m not averse to the idea that there is a cosmic role for consciousness. I like John Wheeler’s obvious yet pertinent observation:
 
The Universe gave rise to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the Universe.
 
And this is my point: without consciousness, the Universe would have no meaning. And getting back to the title of this essay, we give the Universe feeling. In fact, I’d say that the ability to feel is more significant than the ability to know or comprehend.
 
Think about the role of art in all its manifestations, and how it’s totally dependent on the ability to feel. In some respects, I consider AI-generated art a perversion, because any feeling we have for its products is of our own making, not the AI’s.
 
I’m one of those weird people who can even find beauty in mathematics, while acknowledging only a limited ability to pursue it. It’s extraordinary that I can find beauty in a symphony, or a well-written story, or the relationship between prime numbers and Riemann’s Zeta function.

Addendum: I realised I can’t leave this topic without briefly discussing the biochemical role in emotional responses and behaviours. I’m thinking of the brain’s drugs-of-choice like serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins. Some may argue that these natural ‘messengers’ are all that’s required to explain emotions. However, there are other drugs, like alcohol and caffeine (arguably the most common) that also affect us emotionally, sometimes to our detriment. My point being that the former are nature’s target-specific mechanisms to influence the way we feel, without actually being the genesis of feelings per se.