Why Consciousness is Causal

The original title of this post was “Is Consciousness Causal?”  The last few days I’ve had some incredible insights.  Here is my original post from October 4, which I had not yet had a chance to post:

I had a few insights yesterday, while at the Models of Consciousness2024 conference, at which I presented my talk, “Artificial Intelligence Cannot Be Conscious.”

Start with a physical system in state S1 at time t1.  The laws of physics dictate that that state will cause or determine the next physical state S2 at time t2, subject only to new information (quantum collapse events).  In other words, starting at S1, there WILL be a following state S2, and what determines that is S1 plus any new information.  You cannot “destroy” or “erase” a physical state – all information remains embedded in the current physical state of the system.  Information never disappears from the universe.  Time always moves forward (because time travel isimpossible) and the physical world is physically irreversible.  Every physical state evolves in time to a next physical state, either with or without new information, that embeds all information from the earlier state.

It seems like conscious states are similar.  I have shown, or am in the process of showing (Youtube video), that every conscious state inherently embeds every prior conscious state.  For example, to get conscious state C2 at time t2, what you have to do is start with conscious state C1 at earlier time t1 and let it naturally evolve in time, along with the addition of new sensory stimuli (such as from our five senses).  That is, it seems like C2 is determined – i.e., caused – by C1 and any additional sensations. 

The alternative is that conscious states are NOT causal, in which case they happen to arise purely by accident (e.g., as an “emergent” characteristic of an underlying physical state).  Of course, this notion already produces its own problems, particularly that of how consciousness could have arisen by Darwinian natural selection.[1]  Still, if consciousness is not causal, then when S1 “accidentally” produces C1, and then the physical world changes to S2 (through time evolution from the laws of physics plus new quantum information), why should it be the case that state S2 “accidentally” produces conscious state C2?  After all, C2 feels (i.e., is experienced) as if C1 was experienced just prior, immediately followed by the experience of new physical sensations.  In other words, C2 feels like a natural and continuous flow from C1.  Why should that be the case?  In other words, conscious states are experienced as if they were causal and continuous: C1 (plus some sensations) seems to create C2, which (in combination of more sensations) seems to create C3, and so forth.  If conscious states actually are not causal, then we need a good explanation for this incredible coincidence. 

But another problem, perhaps related to the one above, is why physical states cannot produce more than one instance of a conscious state anywhere in spacetime (which is my landmark proof here).  For instance, say that physical state S6 produces conscious state C6, and S7 produces C7, and S8 produces C8.  I have already proven that conscious states can’t repeat, which means that it is impossible for next physical state S9 to produce, for example, (already experienced) conscious state C7.  If conscious states are not causal, then what could explain this?

Notice, by the way, that the underlying physical state determines (at least in part) what physical sensations a person experiences, which means that whether or not consciousness is causal, a given conscious state depends at least in part on the underlying physical state (e.g., any new quantum information).  But if conscious states ARE causal, then just as conscious state C2 depends on physical state S1, S2 must also depend on C1. 

For example, imagine that I am driving and coming to an intersection, where I see a stop light turn red:

·         If consciousness is NOT causal, then the universe does not “care” how I experience the color red – that is, my experience is entirely inconsequential.  My next conscious state will depend only the next physical state, which will be independent of my experience of the color red.

·         If consciousness IS causal, then the way the universe physical evolves depends at least in part on how I consciously experience the color red, which means my next conscious state also depends on that experience.  (I have neglected talking about free will in this post, but obviously if consciousness is not causal then there is no free will, but if it is causal, then there is a possible opening for free will, somehow related to conscious experience, to affect the underlying physical state.)

Another thing… if consciousness is causal, then there does not seem to be any way to stop it or destroy it.  You can’t destroy or reverse the information in a given physical state… every physical state produces a next physical state.  Similarly, if consciousness is causal, then the same is true of consciousness: every conscious state produces a next conscious state.  I have already shown that you can’t reverse a flow of consciousness and, analogously to the underlying physical system, if we start with a conscious state C1, all we or the universe can do is add new information (e.g., visual or auditory stimuli), which will inherently produce a next conscious state C2.  There is nothing we can do to end or stop that stream of consciousness, just as there is nothing we can do to stop the flow of time or the time evolution of the physical state of the universe.

Either consciousness is causal or it is not. 

Here’s a related thought.  Physical states embed their entire histories.  State S3 tells us everything about state S2, as well as what new information appeared since then.  State S2 tells us everything about state S1, plus all new information, and so on back.  It certainly seems (but have I properly shown/proven?) that conscious states are perfectly analogous.  I could not experience my current conscious state C3 without first experiencing state C2 and any intervening physical sensations, and I could not experience C2 without first experiencing C1, and so on back. 

In a very real sense, physical state S3 is the indestructible physical manifestation of its entire history of events or facts (as I discuss here).  It can’t be destroyed because the universe only produces new information; it does not destroy information.  Analogously, isn’t my current conscious state C3 the evidential manifestation of my entire conscious history (including all my physical stimuli and how I consciously experienced/perceived them)?  If my consciousness could somehow be destroyed, then where in the physical universe would that evidence/history of consciousness reside? 

If that were possible, then consciousness is not only non-causal, but it arises as a cosmic accident and does not affect the physical world.  Of course, that seems ludicrous to me.  But the only other alternative is that consciousness is causal, which means that my current conscious state C3 just IS the universe’s evidence of my conscious history, in which case it is as indestructible as the universe’s physical state.  It would also imply, as I already believe, that the way I consciously experience the physical world actually affects it (whether or not free will is involved).

This isn’t a proof, but I am noticing a close analogy:

·         Physical states are irreversible.  (I have proven that) Conscious states are irreversible.

·         Physical states are history-dependent and embed their entire histories.  The same is true of conscious states.

·         Physical states are causal.  It seems like conscious states are causal.

·         Physical states cannot be destroyed because information (facts about the universe) cannot be destroyed.  My conscious experiences (e.g., experiencing the redness of a traffic light, or feeling sadness or whatever) are indestructible facts about the universe, and those facts must be embedded in the universe.  It seems like those facts are embedded in my conscious state, so it seems like my conscious state cannot be destroyed for the same reason.  The only rebuttal is if conscious states accidentally, non-causally, and inexplicably arise from conscious states. 

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Then, yesterday, I had some more insights and was able to prove – yes, logically prove – that consciousness is indeed causal.  The following is not well organized or edited, but the insight was so important and poignant that I wanted to just post what I’d written:

My conscious awareness/identity is nonlocal, which means that it is not contained inside (or entirely produced by) my body/brain.  But the physical sensations I receive (via my body) are certainly localized, and if my consciousness is causal (and/or I have free will), then the effects are also localized.  Couple thoughts:

·         When I have a certain conscious experience (e.g., I feel happy), that is a fact that gets embedded in the history of the universe. 

·         Let’s say someone wants to kill me… i.e., permanently end my consciousness.  Let’s say he tries to destroy my body (although the body itself does not have an identity… it has lots of parts that are put together… so “destroying” would simply mean adding more information by way of, e.g., slicing up the body parts).  Certainly the body affects my conscious experience, but if we already know that conscious identity is NOT localized in the body (or anywhere), then why would adding local information to a physical system somehow destroy conscious identity?

It seems to me right now that consciousness is causal… but causation also implies a time delay.  When I experience sensations at state C2, that state may affect subsequent physical states S3, S4, etc.  This seems to imply:

·         Not every aspect of my conscious state needs to be physically embedded, and those that are not (which are still facts about the universe) must still be permanently embedded in the universe.

·         That “leading edge” of C2 can’t yet be physically embedded, but because it’s a fact about the universe (my experience of feeling happy at C2 is a fact), it cannot be destroyed.

In my proof, I assumed locality in a thought experiment to show that two spacelike separated instances of C1 that evolved to C2 and different C2’ results in a contradiction, because the local C2 could not also experience C2’ (which is outside of its light cone).  Thus I proved that consciousness is nonlocal.  But doesn’t that imply that my (nonlocal) identity could experience stimuli from spacelike separated sources/bodies?  For example, if my earthly body was destroyed, there’s no problem with the thought that I might still perceive stimuli from a different body (even light-years away).  Or what about perceiving information from far away?  Either: conscious experience is not subject to special relativity; or (the information in) any conscious experiences that get embedded locally must still somehow be delayed by special relativity; or something like that.

Assume consciousness is non-causal... then:

·         My experiences are inconsequential.

·         The evidence of (the facts about) all my feelings/experiences are already embedded in the physical state of the universe.

I showed that conscious identity is nonlocal, and I know (but can’t prove) that I have an identity.

Clearly there is something physically fundamental about conscious identity.  The reason that S7àC7, S8àC8, S9àC7 isn’t possible is because:

·         I have been assuming that C arises from an underlying physical state, but I think C is part of that state…

·         If S7 and S9 can both create the same C7, then that implies that some subset of S creates C, but I’ve already shown that’s not true.  Therefore my consciousness literally depends nonlocally on the entire universe, including facts/events the information of which are spacelike separated from me!

·         But wait… imagine the result of some quantum outcome could produce S9 or S9’… if they would produce the same C9 then, again, C would not depend on that part of S, so C would depend on a subset of S, which is false.  But that means (assuming that S creates C) that every single event/fact in the universe must produce/correlate to a different C state.  But that’s ludicrous.  Yes, at my current state in life, there are lots of possible consciously distinct states that I could have experienced, but that’s much much MUCH smaller than the amount of information in the universe.  (This is what Aaronson doesn’t realize… the idea of consciously distinct states is a fantastic insight.)

·         Therefore, the assumption (that S creates C) is false.

Assume C is non-causal.  Then C is caused or arises (inexplicably, emergently, accidentally) entirely from S – that is, there is nothing else involved in creating a conscious state/experience other than an underlying physical state.  I proved that C cannot arise from any local region of S, which means that it must arise nonlocally.  But I showed above (… because the amount of info in the universe – i.e., the number of possible states it could have been in – vastly exceeds the number of possible distinct conscious states that I can experience…) that C cannot nonlocally depend on S.  So if C can neither locally nor nonlocally arise from S (which are the only two possibilities), then we have a contradiction, so the assumption (that C is non-causal) is false.

Wow!

Therefore, the way I consciously experience the world indeed affects not only my next conscious experience but also the physical world!  (Be careful here… I don’t want to say that C is nonphysical… simply that when I refer to physical state S, I am referring to the world as physics currently describes it, which does not include a “consciousness particle” or whatever.)

So that means… I am having conscious experience C1… the physical world changes (e.g., new quantum information, although I don’t think new information is necessary… even deterministic physical evolution could, I think, result in physical stimuli that I consciously register as “new”)… I get stimuli from my senses… C1 and those new sensations cause conscious experience C2… but C is part of the causal physical world, so C2 (at least sometimes) causes changes in S3, etc.

But if I am now considering C to be part of the causal physical world (comprising C+S), then maybe not all conscious experiences have to immediately (or ever?) manifest themselves in S:

·         Indeed, if C is causal, then (as I pointed out previously) there are at least some conscious experiences on the “leading edge” that can’t yet be physically embedded in S.

·         C cannot permanently end because there is always (at least) that “leading edge” of conscious experience, which is a fact about the universe, that cannot yet be embedded into the physical structure of the universe.

·         What does this tell me about free will?

·         Are there some conscious experiences (like thinking inside a sensory deprivation tank) that I can (measurably?) experience long before they affect and/or correlate to S?

I wonder if that “leading edge” (those conscious experiences that haven’t yet, or can’t have yet, embedded in S) has anything to do with my experience of “now.”

I am in state C1.  It will cause next state C2, but that experience will also depend on physical sensations, and those will depend on S1, which was caused by S0 and any new information.  That new information could be quantum, but it could also be new information caused by my experience at C0.  (This also implies that my experiences and their effects – including my decisions if I have free will – on the physical world are not physically predictable; if they were, then S would evolve independently of C and C would not be causal.)

 

Let’s look more closely at the “leading edge,” which is my current conscious state (although my current conscious state also embeds my entire conscious history…)…

Let’s first look only at consciously distinguishable stimulus frames… say there are N of them (a billion?)… My next state C2 is created by C1 as well as (my experience/perception of?) the next stimulus frame, of which there were N possibilities.  (Although how many were actual possibilities?  Those stimulus frames were caused by S1 and any new information, and realistically they could have produced only a small fraction of N.)  Let’s imagine that the situation is such that S2, with certainty, produces only 1 possible stimulus frame. 

I guess what I’m trying to figure out is: how many possible (different) conscious experiences could I have at C2, and (since C2 is causal) how much information it could insert into physical state S2?

The simplest example of this would be… a psychologist showing someone pictures and then asking the patient about their emotional reaction.  Let’s assume for simplicity that there’s only one possible consciously distinguishable stimulus frame for the patient (looking at a photo).  (I need to be careful… even if only one frame is physically possible, C doesn’t “know” this… from C’s perspective there could be lots of possibilities… OK maybe <<N, but maybe the patient doesn’t know what the next photo will be… there are lots of possibilities, and each could then elicit lots of different conscious states/experiences.)

Now I understand that (because C is causal), the patient’s conscious experience must (at least sometimes) provide new information to S that is fundamentally unpredictable (by the psychologist or even anyone who “perfectly” knows S).

I am trying to figure out how much new information could be “contained” in a conscious state… or how much of that does or could causally embed in a physical state.  Let’s say that a certain conscious experience could embed Z bits to S… maybe it actually embeds something less than Z bits… maybe it doesn’t do it all at once… maybe it slowly adds that information… but then how could a state in the distant past, which doesn’t exist anymore, add information?[2]  Anyway, Z might even be as low as 1… maybe just a yes or no situation/decision.  (And maybe some conscious states would have Z=0, but at least sometimes Z would have to be at least 1.)

By the way, it seems that… if the total information Z that a conscious state could embed into S is ever more than what it actually embeds, then the conscious state itself will forever carry along that remaining information, causing the person to be forever physically unpredictable.

The way the patient (in state C1) will react to the photo (to create C2) will depend on C1 (and the stimulus frame… the photo… of course).  As I explained in the paragraph above, the patient is probably thinking about something (or having some conscious experience) that is not (perfectly) predictable.  But even if all Z bits from a person’s every conscious experience get embedded in S, there is still a lag (because of causality).  So, because Z bits from C1 could not yet have embedded in S1 (if they ever will at all), the patient’s reaction will depend on C1, which was physically unpredictable.  Said colloquially, there is no possible way for the psychologist to know (exactly) what the patient was thinking about (as the only way to know exactly is to BE the patient) when he shows him the photo, so the patient’s reaction to (and subsequent response about) the photo, which depends at least in part on what he was already thinking, provides new information.  My question is… how MUCH information?

I’m starting to wonder now if maybe C1 is, or at least carries with it, all of the information it could have embedded (but didn’t?) into S.  That would certainly help to explain why the “now” is so clear while distant memories seem to fade.

Hmmm… so given a particular conscious state AND a given stimulus frame, how many possible bits Z could be added to S?  I have no idea.

I just realized that I that my proof that consciousness is nonlocal is really a proof that consciousness is not physically local… because that proof depended on the assumption that C supervenes on S… that C is non-causal.  I now don’t know whether C is local, but I know it’s causal, which is much more powerful!

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[1] If consciousness is not causal, then there can be no evolutionary pressures to select for either consciousness or a belief in free will, both of which seem to be essentially universal among humans.

[2] Well… maybe it causes an event in S, but it takes time for that to come back and make a difference to the consciously distinguishable stimulus frames of the patient, psychologist, etc.

Quelling the Fear of Death

My Mom, who is dying of pancreatic cancer, is at peace with dying, and I both admire and feel inspired by her calm.  Today’s post is my tribute to her bravery. 

Death is all around us on TV, the movies, and the news.  But we don’t seriously contemplate it or talk about it, in part because we’re too busy climbing the ladder and paying the bills and raising kids, and in part because it’s taboo.  We’re not really allowed, socially, to talk seriously about death until we’re directly faced with it, whether through loss of a loved one, a near death experience, or a diagnosis of a terminal illness.  OK, maybe the philosophers get a free pass on this, but for the rest of us, talking too much or too deeply about death is in poor taste.

Luckily, I’m a philosopher, and I don’t much care about having poor taste, but there are lots of other reasons I’ve been thinking deeply about death:

·       Mom. 

·       I’m 47, the perfect time for a midlife crisis.  I am, for the first time, witnessing the decay of my body.  I have significantly less energy and it feels like half of what I do is just to slow down the decay.

·       I am financially independent and no longer need to work to pay the bills.  My wife and I have no children, and I have few responsibilities, allowing me to be in the position that…

·       I think deeply about a variety of interesting problems in philosophy and physics, and one of those problems is, of course, death.

There are lots of reasons that it’s difficult to talk deeply about death, the most obvious of which is that it’s terrifying to many people.  We can see a skull at some historical site in Europe, or a beheading on Game of Thrones, or kids covered in fake blood on Halloween, because these are mere hints of death.  They’re not real, and even if they’re real, they’re not me.  I can imagine someone else’s death without having to imagine my own.

But death is nothing to fear.  Seriously.  OK, maybe there’s some justified anxiety about the unknown, the same a 16^th-century European might have felt boarding a ship bound for the New World, leaving his worldly possessions behind and not knowing what to expect in his new life.  But an absolute terror of death is unjustified and I’ll explain why.  I laid out the logic more clearly in a previous post, but essentially it comes down to this.  Either:

a)     There is no afterlife – in other words, your consciousness permanently ceases at death; or

b)     There is an afterlife – in other words, your consciousness does not permanently cease at death.

These are the only two possibilities.  If a) is true, then there is nothing to fear at death because you cannot experience pain or sadness or regret or any other scary emotion if your consciousness has permanently ceased.[1]  But if b) is true, then the afterlife is only something to be feared if it’s a net painful place, like the Christian Fundamentalist notion of Hell.  If it’s not – that is, if the afterlife is not, on net, a painful or pleasurable place – then the afterlife will continue, like life, to consist of a variety of sensations and experiences, some of which will be happy, sad, pleasurable, painful, insightful, boring, confusing, scary, liberating, etc.

I’m more than a little bit skeptical of the Christian Fundamentalist notion of Hell.  In my early college book, At Least in Hell the Christians Won’t Harass Me, I laid out some good evidence, much based on logic and even mathematics, that such a Hell does not and cannot exist.  The same evidence rules out an eternally pleasurable Heaven, of course, leaving the only remaining option that one will experience a wide variety of emotions and sensations, some positive and some negative, in the afterlife.

Hence, I don’t know how I’ll feel or what I’ll experience immediately after death, but I have just as much reason to expect pleasure as pain.[2]  In fact, if I am experiencing chronic pain in this earthly body prior to death, it’s likely that death will bring relief.  Certainly, like a 16^th-century explorer traveling to the New World, I’ll be sad about what (and whom) I’ll leave behind, but there is also good reason to be excited about what lies ahead.

Speaking of what I’ll leave behind, it’s important to realize that I don’t own anything, including the body in which I inhabit.  This body, my house, and everything around me will, in the blink of an eye, return to the earth as dust.  They are fleeting and ephemeral.  My wife’s body, the bodies of all my friends and family – they too are decaying and will soon be reabsorbed into the air and soil.  There is no saving them.  The face I see in a mirror will, very soon, look like an old man’s.  And soon I will no longer see out of these eyes at all, nor will I feel with this skin or hear with these ears.  They are not mine and they are not me.  I am my consciousness, my awareness.  I am my experiences and thoughts and memories.  I will continue to have thoughts and experiences and to make memories after this body has perished.  There is no reason to try to save what cannot be saved.  There is no reason to postpone the inevitable for the sake of postponement. 

Unfortunately, the fear of death and our general societal fixation on treating all human life as always worth living lead to cases in which life is irrationally extended even in cases of chronic pain and poor life quality.  Much of the suffering in the world is caused by the belief that any living – no matter what the conditions or how painful – is better than no living.  This belief causes people to increase their pain thresholds to be willing to endure almost anything, but to what end?  More pain, of course.  If people could rid themselves of their fear of death, then I posit there would be less suffering in the world.

Let me offer an analogy.  Imagine you’re at a party.  You’ve had a good time connecting with friends, dancing, whatever, but it’s getting late and you’re tired.  You’re not having fun anymore and it’s becoming positively painful to keep up the effort.  You’d leave, right?

Now imagine there’s a Magic Bus that takes you to every destination and event in your life.  As soon as you leave one event, you get on the bus and it takes you to the next one.  You don’t know what it will be – it could be home to sleep, another party, your niece’s high school graduation, a colonoscopy, your workplace, the DMV, a Nickelback concert, etc. 

Imagine again that you’re at a party.  You’ve had a good time but you’re tired and not having fun anymore.  You know that the Magic Bus is outside waiting to take you to your next (predetermined but unknown) destination.  You’d still leave the party, right?

Of course you would.  Why would you endure pain at Event A just to postpone the possibility of pain at Event B, given that: a) Event B is inevitable; and b) there is no evidence that Event B will be painful?

It’s the same with death.  Death is inevitable and there is no evidence that you’ll have a consciously painful experience after death.  It would be irrational to indulge your fear of the unknown and indefinitely postpone death at the price of, for example, chronic pain.

Having said that, we humans are irrational in many ways.  We often fear pain and loss more than we anticipate an equal amount of pleasure and gain.  For example, let’s say that someone is going to either give you $10 or take $10 from you based on the result of a coin flip.  It’s going to happen right now unless you pay a fee of $1 per hour to postpone it.  Rationally, you know it makes no sense to pay the “postponement fee.”  Now, change these win/loss values to something significant to you – for example, you’ll either win $100,000 or you’ll owe $100,000 – and you will probably be tempted to pay the postponement fee for at least a while.  Tempted or not, you know it’s a bad decision. 

Like my mother, I don’t want to fear death or irrationally extend life, paying a “postponement fee,” to procrastinate moving on to my next destination.  I want to get up in the morning because I am excited about living, not because I am terrified of dying.  I want to be prepared to die and even, ideally, looking forward to it, so that living is a courageous choice, not merely the default.  Life has to be good if it is to be worth living.

Of course, this isn’t an argument to leave the party the very moment you experience pain or discomfort.  Not every moment of a party is fun.  However, there does come a moment when you’re ready to go home, and that’s when it becomes irrational to stick around merely due to the fear of the unknown.

Mom is ready to go home.

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[1] This is an awful mistake made by the entertaining but death-obsessed Game of Thrones.  In Season 6, Jon Snow is revived from death by priestess Melisandre.  She asks: “What did you see [in the afterlife]?”  And he replies: “Nothing, there was nothing at all.”  But this is nonsensical.  You cannot experience nothingness.  If there truly was no afterlife, then Jon’s experience, after dying, would have felt like instantaneously awakening upon his revival.  He would not say that the afterlife felt like nothing, because he would not experience the passing of time, or an awareness of nothing, if he was not consciously experiencing anything.

[2] There is actually much more legitimate scientific literature on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) than I had expected, as in this article and this article.  One surprising observation is that the majority of those who have NDEs not only have a very lucid and positive experience, they also stop fearing death!  This is similar to the experience that some have while taking psychedelic drugs, like LSD or psilocybin, in therapeutic settings.  I talk about my own psychedelic awakening in this video.

YOLO, Midlife Crisis, and Meaning

Either consciousness is eternal or it’s not.  If it’s not, then there will be a point in time at which the only remaining/lasting legacy of our existence, our decisions and choices, our pleasure and pain, will be nothing more than the distribution of atoms, in one way versus another, throughout a cold, lifeless, quiet universe.  How could that matter?  If there is no one to whom it could matter, then it truly is meaningless.

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I am having an existential crisis.  I’m 44, so you might just say that this a midlife crisis, and maybe it is.  Not to minimize a midlife crisis, but I also think I’m in a fundamentally different situation from most people my age.  I am financially independent and don’t have children, so already I have significantly more time than most to wonder about purpose and meaning.  Add to that the fact I’ve spent the last few years thinking deeply about some of the hardest and deepest problems in philosophy and physics. 

It’s very hard to ruminate on deep questions about the universe without also contemplating the nature of existence itself.  For example, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years contemplating whether the physical world is deterministic or reversible, whether quantum mechanics implies the creation of new information, whether we have free will and how free will might relate to quantum mechanics, whether a conscious state is entirely determined by the physical state within a local volume (like within a skull), whether consciousness can be physically duplicated or instantiated on a computer, and so forth.  It’s hard to do these things nearly full time, without the distractions of children and debt, at an age that many would regard as midlife, without also staring down the barrel of my own mortality.

There are times when I envy my friends who have children and jobs and debt and never-ending to-do lists.  These constant distractions are, in some sense, a luxury that allows people to divert their attention away from the ticking clock.  But I stare at it.  And it’s terrifying, particularly when I mindlessly accept this overarching and pervasive societal message: you have to live meaningfully but you have very limited time in which to do it.  Life matters, but you only have a few years.  That irritating acronym “YOLO” (You Only Live Once) may not come up much in polite conversation anymore, but its message is everywhere.  Change the world.  Leave a legacy.  Do what matters.  And do it now because you’re running out of time. 

No wonder the world is anxious.  I, for one, am experiencing incredible anxiety and insecurity about how I should spend my time.  After all, now that I know my time on Earth is (at best) half over, and that what I’m capable of will likely decay with time, it’s hard not to freak out about how to live most meaningfully in the time I have left.

But the YOLO message is actually a contradiction, and all contradictions are false.  Let’s break the message into Premises 1 and 2:

1)     You have limited time; consciousness permanently ends at death.[1]  (Logically, it could end at some time other than physical death, which wouldn’t affect the following argument.  But most people who believe Premise 1 believe that the human brain is entirely responsible for creating consciousness[2], in which case death of one’s brain would bring about an end to his consciousness.)

2)     What you do matters; how you spend your time matters.

I will argue that these two premises are contradictory.  Either or both are wrong.

Certainly most people want to believe Premise 2; I don’t know anyone who wants to believe that life is pointless.  Many people who believe Premise 1 and want to believe (or do believe) Premise 2 give this line of reasoning: “Sure, the things I do on Earth won’t matter to me after I’m dead, since I won’t exist anymore.  But they still matter to other people, and that’s what gave them meaning while I was alive.” 

In other words: “My life matters because it matters to others.”  This is the notion of legacy that people like to leave, such as through descendants, lasting impacts on the world, and so forth.  The problem is that there’s a circularity to the logic (and circular arguments are not valid).  The life of A has meaning, even after A is dead, because of his impact on B.  But why does B’s life matter?  Well, it matters, of course, because of B’s impact on C.  And C’s life matters because of her impact on D, and so on down the line.  But what if D’s life in fact does not matter?  Then neither can A’s, B’s, or C’s, because their meaning all depended on the meaning of D’s.

If one’s life is only meaningful to the extent of one’s impact on others, and if the lives of those others are only meaningful to the extent of their impact on still others, and on and on, then meaning is a metaphysical Ponzi scheme.  If true, the meaning of life would depend on an eternally unbroken chain of consciousness – that is, there must always be something conscious in the universe that is impacted by the previous lives of other conscious beings to justify the meaning in their lives.

The problem here is that physicists (who overwhelmingly believe Premise 1) would nearly unanimously agree that at some point in time the very last conscious being will die – i.e., that there cannot always be consciousness in the universe because the universe will not remain hospitable to life indefinitely.  Specifically, even if the “Big Crunch” or the “Big Rip” don’t kill off everything, the eventual heat death of the universe will.

So if no one’s life has meaning in and of itself – if any given person’s life matters only to the extent of his impact on others – then all life is indeed meaningless.  I’m certainly not saying that one’s children, or the process of leaving one’s legacy, can’t be deeply meaningful to a person.  I’m simply saying that that can’t be the entire source of life’s meaning, otherwise no life could have meaning at all.  If life does have meaning, it must have meaning at least to some extent for its own sake.  A person who believes in Premise 1 and really wants to believe Premise 2 cannot make them compatible simply by claiming that “My life matters because it matters to others.”  That won’t work.

In many ways, I’ve said something far simpler.  If the net result of all of our lives and decisions is just the scattering of dust in a cold, lifeless universe, then what’s the point of it all?  (Cue Kansas’ Dust in the Wind…)  In other words, if Premise 1 is true, then there is no meaning to life and nothing matters.  You cannot bootstrap meaning in your own life by mattering to others, because, if Premise 1 is true, there is also no meaning to their lives.  It doesn’t matter that you matter to others who don’t matter. 

Here’s my point.  Either what I do matters or it doesn’t.  Premise 1 implies that it doesn’t, which is in direct contradiction with Premise 2.  They cannot both be true. 

So if Premise 2 is true then Premise 1 is false.  If what I do matters, then my consciousness will not permanently end at death (or at all), in which case I have plenty of time to do what matters.  But if Premise 2 is false – if what I do doesn’t matter – then why the fuck am I so worried about running out of time?

As it turns out, I believe that my consciousness is eternal, but I have been very much acting as if everything I want to do or experience must be done in the short term.  That’s irrational.

I have not tried to be precise in this post with my language or argumentation.  What it means for something to “matter” or “be meaningful” is subjective, and I certainly don’t claim that this line of reasoning proves the existence of an afterlife or eternal consciousness.  I believe I have, in papers and previous posts, proven some important and very relevant facts, such as that a conscious state cannot be copied or instantiated on a computer and that a conscious state cannot be entirely determined by the information in a local volume (such as a brain), among other things.  For instance, if the information that physically produces a conscious state is not (and cannot be) contained entirely in the brain, then already there is good reason to doubt the zealotry of scientists who claim, with arrogant certainty, that brain death permanently erases consciousness.  They don’t know.  Nevertheless, though I believe my consciousness is eternal, my goal here is not to prove it, if such a proof were even possible.

Rather, my goal here is to point out that the YOLO dogma is bullshit.  We are told from every angle that we must amount to something, we must live fully and meaningfully, we must make a difference and leave a legacy – AND that we only have one lifetime in which to do it before the lights go out for eternity.  But that makes no sense.  Those messages are contradictory.  Because if my lights go out for eternity, then what I did on Earth certainly won’t matter to me, and if your lights go out for eternity, then they won’t matter to you either.  If there’s no me to regret having failed to make a difference and leave a legacy, then why put in all the effort to make a difference and leave a legacy?  Why worry about not having enough time to do everything I want to do?  Either I have plenty of time (because my consciousness survives death) or, when I die, I’ll no longer be conscious and capable of regretting.  If death is an eternal lack of existence, then any impact I leave on other people will necessarily be lost, enduring legacies are impossible, and nothing I do matters.  But if death is not an eternal lack of existence, then I’m not running out of time to live meaningfully!

That’s not entirely the end of the story.  First, I still don’t know whether or not what I do matters (or how much it matters).  Eternal consciousness does not tell me much about how much meaning my life and decisions have, just that meaning is possible.  For example, maybe free will is an illusion, in which case I cannot do anything meaningful because I cannot choose to do anything at all.  I think much more likely is that some of what I do is meaningful, but I vastly overinflate the importance of most of it.

Second, even if (as I believe) consciousness is eternal, physical death certainly happens and at that time I don’t know what I’ll perceive or experience, but it’s unlikely I will experience consciousness through a human body on Earth.  There probably are a lot of opportunities that will be foreclosed at that time, so if I want to make a positive difference on Earth, then I should do it now, while I’m here.  I also have no idea whether I will be able to continue my relationships with people in the afterlife, so I would want to enjoy those relationships now while I can.

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[1] Note: Most people who believe Premise 1 don’t believe in God, and most who believe in God don’t believe Premise 1.

[2] I have shown this is false, but no one listens to me anyway.

Does the Brain Cause Consciousness? Part 3

Is there an afterlife?  Can a computer be conscious?  In Part 1, I pointed out that the popular science answers to these questions depend on the assumption that the brain causes consciousness.  In Part 2, I introduced two statements which, if taken together, imply that the brain does not cause consciousness.  I then explained why Statement 1 is true.  The two statements are:

1)     A brain can be copied.

2)     A person’s conscious state cannot be copied.

In today’s post, I’ll address Statement 2.  This statement is definitely more difficult to prove, which is why it’s so revolutionary.  The clearest explanation, I think, is this 23-minute video that I presented at the 2020 Science of Consciousness conference.  (There is also a more thorough video explanation here.)  The most detailed and precise explanation is in my paper.  But since my goal in this blog post series is to explain things to a lay audience without all the fancy bullshit, this post will (I hope) convince you of Statement 2 with a simpler explanation.

To convince you of Statement 2, I’ll start by assuming the opposite, and then show how it leads to a problem or contradiction.  So let’s assume that you’re in some conscious state that can be copied.  Let’s call that conscious state C1.  Since it can be copied, and we live in a physical world, there must be some underlying physical state that we can copy.  Maybe that physical state is the positions of all the atoms in your brain.  We don't have to know exactly what that physical state is -- the point is that there is some physical state that can be copied.  Let’s call that physical state S1.

Let’s be clear.  You are experiencing conscious state C1.  And that conscious state is entirely created by physical state S1.  So if we were to copy that state S1, and then recreate it somewhere else, then that copy of S1 would produce your conscious state C1.  That’s the whole point of the assumption.  If you are experiencing state C1, and we recreate state C1 on a distant planet in the Wazoo Galaxy (by copying the underlying physical state S1), then you would experience state C1 on that distant planet.[1] 

Now, let’s say we make a copy of physical state S1 (which produces your experience of conscious state C1).  We then recreate it on Mars (preferably in a habitable station), and then simultaneously kill you on Earth.  There’s no problem, right?  You would just experience being on Earth in one moment and then on Mars in the next.  It would just feel like you were teleported to Mars.[2] 

But what if we also recreate physical state S1 (which produces your experience of conscious state C1) on Venus?  What would you experience if there were two versions of you, both experiencing conscious state C1 created by underlying physical state S1? 

More specifically, what would you experience the moment after that?  Being alive on Mars and Venus would be vastly different experiences.  Let’s say that on Mars, your physical state S1 would change to S2_M (which creates conscious state C2_M), while on Venus, your physical state S1 would change to S2_V (which creates conscious state C2_V).  State C2_M might be the conscious experience of looking out at a vast orange desert, while state C2_V might be the conscious experience of looking out at a dark, cloudy, lava-scorched land.  I don’t know exactly what it would feel like, but certainly the two conscious states would differ.

Which conscious state would you experience, C2_M or C2_V?  There are only three possibilities:

·       Neither

·       Both

·       One or the other

Before proceeding, I should mention something important about physics: locality.  Generally speaking, you can only affect, or be affected by, things that are nearby (or “local”).  If you’re at a baseball game and worried about getting hit in the head with a fly ball, sit far away from home plate.  That way, you’ll have plenty of time to move if a fly ball is heading your way.  Even though the idea is simple, it’s an extremely important and fundamental feature of the physical world.  Einstein is famous for formalizing the concept of locality in his Special Theory of Relativity, which asserts that nothing, including information, can travel faster than the speed of light.

The speed of light is very fast (186,282 miles per second), but it is still finite.  Nothing that happens in a distant galaxy can immediately affect you, because it takes time for information of that event to reach you.  In fact, our own sun is about 8 light-minutes away, which means that if it exploded, it would not affect us for another eight minutes.  The only known violation of locality is quantum entanglement, but even quantum entanglement does not allow information or matter to be transmitted faster than light.

Getting back to the above example, when we recreate physical states S1 on Mars and Venus, those states are not local to each other, which means they can’t affect each other.  And Mars and Venus are far enough apart that subsequent physical states (S2_M on Mars and S2_V on Venus) also can’t affect each other.[3]

We already know that when we create state S1 on Mars (and kill you on Earth), you would experience being on Earth in one moment and then on Mars in the next, as if you teleported to Mars.  Your subsequent conscious states (C2_M, C3_M, C4_M, and so forth) would change according to what you experienced on Mars.

And if we had instead created state S1 on Venus (but not on Mars), you would experience being on Earth in one moment and then on Venus in the next, as if you teleported to Venus.  Your subsequent conscious states (C2_V, C3_V, C4_V, and so forth) would change according to what you experienced on Venus.

So what would happen if we create state S1 (which produces conscious state C1) on Mars and on Venus?  Which conscious state will you next experience, C2_M or C2_V?  As I said before, there are only three possibilities, which I’ll analyze below:

·       Neither

·       Both

·       One or the other

Neither.  Maybe it’s neither.  Maybe the universe doesn’t like it when we create multiple copies of a conscious state, so when you create two or more copies, they both get blocked or eliminated or something.  Here’s the problem.  When you are created on Mars, your conscious state cannot be affected by what is happening on Venus because the two events are nonlocal.  There is no way for your physical state S1 on Mars to “know” that state S1 was also created on Venus because it takes time for information to travel from Venus to Mars, even if that information is traveling at the speed of light.  Your physical state S1 will change to S2_M (which produces your conscious state C2_M) long before a signal can be sent to stop it.  Therefore, you will experience conscious state C2_M, so the correct answer cannot be “neither.”

Both.  Maybe you will experience both conscious states C2_M and C2_V.  I certainly have no idea what it’s like to experience two different conscious states at (what I would perceive as) the same time.  Nevertheless, maybe it’s possible.  But here’s the problem.  Your conscious experience of C2_M is created by physical state S2_M, which is affected by stuff on Mars, while your conscious experience of C2_V is created by physical state S2_V, which is affected by stuff on Venus.  For example, if state C2_M is your experience of looking out at a vast orange desert, it’s because light rays bouncing off Martian dunes interacted with your physical state S1 to produce S2_M.  But information about that interaction is inaccessible to whomever is experiencing state C2_V on Venus, once again because information does not travel fast enough between the two planets.  Therefore, whoever is experiencing state C2_V on Venus cannot also be experiencing state C2_M on Mars.  Therefore, maybe you’re experiencing state C2_M or C2_V, but you can’t be experiencing both.

One or the other.  The correct answer to the above question is not “neither” and it’s not “both.”  The only remaining option is that you experience either C2_M or C2_V.  But which one?  How could nature choose?  Maybe you experience the “first” one created.  The problem here is, once again, nonlocality.  Let’s say that, according to my clock on Earth, state S1 is created on Mars at 12:00:00pm, and state S1 is created on Venus at 12:00:01pm – in other words, one second later by my clock.  The problem is that there is no way for state S1 on Venus to “know” about the creation of state S1 on Mars (and to then prevent your conscious experience of state C2_V on Venus), because it takes much longer than one second for information to travel between the two planets.[4]  Therefore, the universe cannot “choose” between C2_M or C2_V based on time.  And because state S1 on Mars is physically identical to state S1 on Venus, there is no other physical means by which the universe can choose one over the other.  If S1 changes to S2_M (which produces C2_M) on Mars and S1 changes to S2_V (which produces C2_V) on Venus, there is no known physical means for the universe to somehow decide that you will experience only C2_M or C2_V (but not both).  Therefore, you cannot experience just one or the other.    

We have ruled out all three possibilities.  What does this mean?  It means that the original assumption – that a person’s conscious state can be copied – is wrong.  Think about the logic this way:

          i.          If statement A is true, then either B or C or D must be true. 

        ii.          But B, C, and D are all false. 

      iii.          Therefore, statement A must be false.

In this case, statement A is “a person’s conscious state can be copied” and statements B, C, and D correspond to “neither,” “both,” and “one or the other,” like this:

       i.          If a person’s conscious state can be copied, then we can put copies on Mars and Venus.  Either the person will experience neither copy, or will experience both copies, or will experience one or the other. 

     ii.          I showed that none of these are possible (because they conflict with special relativity). 

   iii.          Therefore, a person’s conscious state cannot be copied.

 

If you recall, this conclusion is the same as Statement 2 at the beginning of this post:

1)     A brain can be copied.

2)     A person’s conscious state cannot be copied.

If I have convinced you of Statement 2 in this post, and of Statement 1 in the previous post, then what do they imply?  This is what they imply:

 

If a brain can be copied, but a conscious state cannot, then the brain cannot create consciousness.

 

Certainly the brain can affect consciousness.  If someone sticks electrodes in my brain, I have no doubt that it will probably affect my conscious experience.  But consciousness cannot be produced entirely by the brain.  In other words, conscious experience must depend on stuff (events and states) beyond the skull. 

This conclusion should be shocking, but taken seriously, by anyone who wants to understand and scientifically study consciousness.  Its implications are significant.  For example, getting back to the big-picture questions posed in Part 1, can a computer be conscious?  A digital computer has a state that can be easily copied.  If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to copy files, buy software, or even run software.  But as I proved above, a person’s conscious state cannot be copied.  Therefore, a person’s conscious state cannot be embedded or executed on a digital computer, because if it could, then the person’s conscious state could be easily copied.  A digital computer cannot be conscious because conscious states cannot be copied.[5]  Also, mind uploading is impossible because if a computer can’t be conscious, then there’s no way to upload or simulate a conscious mind on a computer.  Also, consciousness cannot be algorithmic.  An algorithm is a set of instructions that can be executed on any general purpose computer.  Once again, an algorithm can be easily copied but a person’s conscious state can’t, so consciousness cannot be algorithmic.

And what about the other question posed in Part 1: Is there an afterlife?  Well, my arguments here certainly don’t prove that consciousness continues after brain death.  However, the strongest (and perhaps only) scientific argument against an afterlife depends on the assumption that the brain causes consciousness.  But I’ve shown that’s false.  Further, I’ve shown that consciousness transcends the brain, at least to some degree.  The fact that what we consciously perceive is produced by something beyond our brains is at least circumstantial evidence that the existence of consciousness does not necessarily depend on whether a brain is alive.

The brain does not cause consciousness.  Much of what science tells us about consciousness, to the extent that it relies on an invalid assumption, is likely false. 

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[1] If physical state S1 wasn’t sufficient to produce a conscious state of YOU – in other words, if physical state S1 is inadequate to produce your conscious identity – then consciousness must be produced in part by something nonphysical.  And that would be a real problem for scientists!

[2] If you weren’t also killed on Earth, this would be the “teleportation problem” that Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose discusses in The Emperor’s New Mind.

[3] To use physics language, the creation of states S1 on Mars and Venus (and their subsequent evolutions to S2_M and S2_V, respectively) are spacelike separated events.  The argument I’m making here applies equally to timelike separated events, which I discuss in my paper.

[4] In fact, there is no such thing as “simultaneous” events when we are talking about spacelike separated events.  Even though my clock may say that S1 was created on Mars first, the clock of another observer may say that S1 was created on Venus first.  There is no objective fact about which event occurs first if the events are spacelike separated.

[5] Maybe this argument doesn’t apply to quantum computers.  However, as I’ve explained repeatedly, a quantum computer sufficiently large to create anything we might regard as intelligent is just as physically impossible as producing Schrodinger’s Cat or Wigner’s Friend.