Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

 After a long hiatus, I am back -- focused and ready to continue tackling the difficult and fascinating questions in the philosophy of physics and consciousness.  I am also investing in my YouTube channel, focusing on clear explanations of difficult concepts to the lay audience.  Here's my most recent video, showing a logical proof why computers will never be conscious, mind uploading is impossible, and more than one instance of a person's conscious state can't exist at more than one place or time in the universe.


Saturday, April 16, 2022

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.



[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.

Saturday, April 9, 2022

Is Time Travel Possible? Part 2

In the last post, I introduced the notion of time travel into the past and pointed out that the potential for a temporal paradox would prevent time travel that allowed changes to the past.  Is it possible, as some have argued, to affect, influence, or participate in the past without changing the past?

No.

First, there is the Butterfly Effect.  You can get the general idea by watching the movie of the same name, but the idea is simple: small events get amplified over time into much larger consequences.  The Butterfly Effect is actually a mathematical result of chaos theory, whereby nonlinear relationships cause effects that seem to be entirely unpredictable over a long enough time period.  Perhaps one of the most fascinating papers I ever read was this one (“Gargantuan chaotic gravitational three-body systems and their irreversibility to the Planck length”), in which the authors show that even the largest objects in the universe are fundamentally unpredictable over a long enough time period.  They analyze initial conditions that are precise down to the Planck length, because that length, according to physicists, is the smallest length that has any possible physical meaning in the universe.  So if precision down to the Planck length can’t predict the motions of supermassive black holes, then nothing can.

The Butterfly Effect is a problem for time travel into the past, and here’s why.  You certainly can’t go back in time to kill one of your ancestors, as that would prevent your own existence and cause a temporal paradox.  But what if instead you did something seemingly inconsequential, but that event caused another event that caused another event… that prevented your own existence.  In the first installment of Back to the Future, Marty pushes his future father out of the road so that he didn’t get hit by a car, but of course that caused a chain of events that led to Marty’s future mother falling for him instead of his future father.

But what about something more subtle?  Say you want to go back in time just to observe your ancestors – you have no intention of killing or even interacting with them.  Say you’re just walking around and watching from a distance.  A malarial mosquito starts buzzing around you and you swat it away.  If you hadn’t been there, it would have just fed on some nearby rat.  But your swatting at it stimulates it; angry and hungry, it flies in the direction of your ancestors and stings one.  Maybe that ancestor dies from malaria before he reproduces.  Maybe he just gets sick and misses his opportunity to mate with the woman who would have been your ancestor.  Or maybe nothing serious happens at all.  Maybe he was already in the middle of having sex with her when he gets stung by the mosquito, and the brief moment he spends smacking the mosquito is enough to change which sperm cell ultimately fertilizes her egg.  That alone would be enough to change the identity of their descendants, and it would (arguably) prevent YOU from existing.

Physicists and philosophers who argue that time travel into the past is possible usually understand the Butterfly Effect and might retort something like, “Time travel into the past is possible as long as you don’t do anything, even something small that could chaotically amplify, that would change the facts of the present.”

Here’s the problem: THERE IS NO EVENT, NO MATTER HOW SMALL OR SEEMINGLY INSIGNIFICANT, THAT WOULD SATISFY THAT REQUIREMENT.

As I discuss in this paper, information in the universe is embedded in the relationships, correlations, and entanglements among and between all the particles and fields throughout the universe.  Whether the amount of information in the universe is constant or changing is a fundamental question.  Those who believe in the assumption of U (that quantum wave states always and universally evolve linearly) believe that the information content of the universe is fixed.  As you know if you read this blog or my papers (such as this or this), I have shown that U is false and that the information content of the universe is increasing – specifically, collapse of the quantum wave state upon irreversible correlation events is what produces new information.  Nevertheless, whether the information content of the universe is constant or changing, we can all agree that at the present moment there is a certain amount of information in the universe (and it is a staggeringly large amount).

In other words, there are a huge number of “facts of the present,” and every one of them correlates to some event in the past.  Every single event in the past gets embedded as a fact in the information structure of the universe.  (Those who believe in U would say that every event in the past is already embedded in the information structure of the universe, both past and future, in a block universe.)

What does this all mean?  Imagine a speck of dust a million years ago that might have flown in direction A or direction B depending, for example, on some quantum event.  There is necessarily some physical experiment that can be done today whose outcome would depend on whether that speck of dust went in direction A or B, whether or not anyone could figure out which experiment to perform.  In other words, that seemingly insignificant event from a million years ago is currently embedded in the information structure of the universe, which means that there is some feature of the universe today that depends on that event.  That feature may (or may not) be small, depending on the extent to which it was chaotically amplified, and it may not even be possible to know what kind of experiment would differentiate that feature.  But the point is that the happening of that event a million years ago MUST be physically embedded in the universe today.  (If it wasn’t, then it didn’t happen – which is the point I’ve been trying to make over and over regarding measurement and physical irreversibility.)

So here’s the problem.  If it was possible for you to travel back in time, even if you tried your best not to change the past, your mere physical presence would be a fact that gets embedded in the future information structure of the universe.  The universe, after all, is constantly measuring you and everything about you.  Trillions of air molecules are bouncing off your body every second.  Infrared radiation (heat) is constantly being emitted and absorbed by your skin.  Even your own minuscule gravitational field causes changes around you that constantly provide evidence of your presence.

Even if all you wanted to do was watch your ancestors in the past, and you were somehow able to send back just your eyeballs (or, even better, a tiny camera[1]), your eyes work by focusing and absorbing photons on your retina, and the FACTS about whether or not particular photons in the past got absorbed get permanently embedded in the universe.  At a bare minimum, in order to see something, you have to change the trajectory and/or presence of photons.  These would constitute events, the occurrence of which would forever affect the universe.

Therefore, there is no way to send anything physical to the past, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant – and thus there is no way to directly observe the past – without affecting the present.  If, for example, it was possible to travel to the past in some kind of super-insulated vehicle that managed to affect nothing in the past, except that it allowed a few photons to be absorbed by your retinas so that you could see something, the facts about the absorption of those few photons would be embedded in the universe in a way that would reveal measurably distinct outcomes at any time after, including the present. 

So here’s what I’ve pointed out so far:

·       You can’t travel back in time to kill an ancestor because this would cause a temporal paradox.

·       You can’t travel back in time to do much at all because, thanks to the Butterfly Effect, almost anything you do will get chaotically amplified over time in a way that somehow prevents your existence or your ability or willingness to travel back in time.

·       Nevertheless, if you did travel back in time (or sent something back in time), even if you did nothing, your very presence in the past would get embedded as permanent facts of the universe.  The way the universe is right now (or 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago) depends on whether you travel back in time.

The last point is key.

Imagine that there is some conscious experience you had 10 minutes ago (at time T) that depended, at least to some small extent, on whether you time traveled to the past.  Assume for simplicity that you observed something as blue – i.e., there is a fact, embedded in the universe, about your conscious experience of seeing blue at time T.  However, if you travel into the past, your mere existence gets embedded in the universe in such a way that, at time T, you instead experience seeing red.  So what did you actually experience?

Some may reply that this is just a case of memory erasure or modification, but in these papers (here and here) I argue that retroactive modification of conscious states is impossible.  I’m not saying someone can’t misremember something.  I’m saying that conscious states are history dependent, that the facts of past conscious states get embedded in future states much as past physical events get embedded in future states of the universe.  If there is indeed a fact about what I am consciously experiencing now, then it evidences facts about previous conscious states.  It is therefore impossible for me to experience my present conscious state (which, indeed, I am experiencing) if my past conscious states are not facts and can instead be retroactively changed.  And because time travel into the past implies the ability to retroactively change my own past conscious states, then it would imply that there is no fact about my current conscious state (and also no fact about the current physical state of the universe).  This is false.

Therefore, time travel into the past in any form, even just to observe it, is impossible.

One nagging objection to the above analysis is this: it all hinges on one’s ability to choose whether to travel into the past.  If there’s no free will, then it is either true or false that I’ve already traveled into the past.  But if I have, then that fact is already embedded in the present universe and there is nothing I can do to prevent myself from traveling into the past.  Of course, I believe that we have free will, but it remains one of the problems I am currently working on.

I’ve said enough for this post.  What other objections or thoughts do you have?



[1] But then where would the image information be sent?  On that note, if you were able to send back just your eyeballs to the past without the rest of your body and brain to consciously experience it, then what’s the point?

Friday, February 4, 2022

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 S2M (which creates conscious state C2M), while on Venus, your physical state S1 would change to S2V (which creates conscious state C2V).  State C2M might be the conscious experience of looking out at a vast orange desert, while state C2V 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, C2M or C2V?  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 (S2M on Mars and S2V 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 (C2M, C3M, C4M, 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 (C2V, C3V, C4V, 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, C2M or C2V?  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 S2M (which produces your conscious state C2M) long before a signal can be sent to stop it.  Therefore, you will experience conscious state C2M, so the correct answer cannot be “neither.”

Both.  Maybe you will experience both conscious states C2M and C2V.  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 C2M is created by physical state S2M, which is affected by stuff on Mars, while your conscious experience of C2V is created by physical state S2V, which is affected by stuff on Venus.  For example, if state C2M 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 S2M.  But information about that interaction is inaccessible to whomever is experiencing state C2V on Venus, once again because information does not travel fast enough between the two planets.  Therefore, whoever is experiencing state C2V on Venus cannot also be experiencing state C2M on Mars.  Therefore, maybe you’re experiencing state C2M or C2V, 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 C2M or C2V.  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 C2V 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 C2M or C2V 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 S2M (which produces C2M) on Mars and S1 changes to S2V (which produces C2V) on Venus, there is no known physical means for the universe to somehow decide that you will experience only C2M or C2V (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. 


[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 S2M and S2V, 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. 

Thursday, February 3, 2022

Does the Brain Cause Consciousness? Part 2

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 an often unstated assumption:

Assumption: The brain causes consciousness.

I am going to show in this and subsequent posts why there is very good reason to doubt this assumption, and why it’s almost certainly false.  To do that, I’m going to try to convince you of two statements [1] which, taken together, imply that the brain does not cause consciousness:

1)     A brain can be copied.  (Even if it cannot be done today due to technological limitations, there is no physical law preventing the physical state of a brain from being copied.)

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

In today’s post, I’ll address Statement 1.  First of all, I think most people, particularly scientists, would already agree with it.  And since my goal is to convince you, the reader, then if you already agree with it, there’s no need to read further.  Instead, just move on to the next post in this series, where I’ll address Statement 2.

Of course, no one thinks that a brain can be copied today.  But what physical law prevents copying a brain in the future?  The only known physical principle of which I’m aware is the quantum no-cloning theorem, which says that a quantum state cannot be copied.  And a brain, like all things in the universe, is presumably in a quantum state, so in that sense it can never be perfectly copied.  But that doesn’t matter as long as quantum effects are not relevant to the brain and its functions.  In other words, the only thing that would prevent a brain from being copied adequately to replicate consciousness is if consciousness depends on quantum effects. 

For example, if a conscious state depended on quantum entanglements with objects outside the brain, then there is inadequate information in the brain to specify a conscious state.  Quantum entanglement is “nonlocal,” which means that Object A can affect entangled Object B instantaneously, even if they are separated by a large distance, and the effect is not limited by the speed of light.  So if my current conscious state depends at least in part on an event in another galaxy (which we cannot detect until we receive light from the event), then consciousness is nonlocal.  This recent paper argues that consciousness is nonlocal, but I doubt many in the scientific community have taken notice.

Another way that consciousness may depend on quantum effects is if, to copy the brain, you’d have to measure the state of objects in the brain (like neurons) so precisely that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle kicks in, and the measurement itself starts changing the brain’s physical state.  For example, Scott Aaronson suggests in this paper that if a brain is “unclonable for fundamental physical reasons,” then that unclonability could be a consequence of quantum no-cloning if the granularity a brain would need to be simulated at in order to duplicate someone’s subjective identity was down to the quantum level. 

In general, though, few scientists believe that consciousness or brain function depend on quantum effects, and most who discuss the possibility are quickly dismissed as mystics or pseudoscientists.[2]  As long as consciousness does not depend on quantum effects, then we don’t need to worry about quantum no-cloning, and there is nothing that would prevent a future engineer from scanning a person’s brain and then reproducing a functional duplicate with the same conscious state.

Are you convinced of Statement 1 yet?… that a brain can be copied in principle?  Maybe you’re still concerned about possible quantum effects.  OK, here’s another argument.

The amount of information that can be contained in a volume of space is limited.  This is called the Bekenstein bound.  It’s a ridiculously large number but it’s still finite.  For example, the Bekenstein bound Wikipedia page calculates that the maximum information necessary to recreate a human brain, including its entire quantum state, is on the order of 10^42 bits (where a single “bit” of information is either a 0 or 1).  That’s a huge number… it looks like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, but it’s still much, much smaller than the number of particles in the universe.  Also, the Bekenstein bound for the brain is an upper physical limit that’s based on a brain so dense with information that it’s right on the verge of collapsing into a black hole!  I think it’s reasonable to surmise that we aren’t walking around with potential black holes in our skulls, so the actual information necessary to specify the quantum state of a brain is probably much, much, much, much smaller than 10^42 bits.  But it doesn’t actually matter.  Here’s why.

Even if we can’t in practice copy a human brain, the universe should be able to.  I’m referring to a Boltzmann Brain.  Physicists currently believe that essentially any physical state can be created by randomness (i.e., accident).  So even though it’s extremely unlikely, a physicist will say that there is some chance that atoms and particles will accidentally come together somewhere in the universe to create your brain.  And even if we include quantum effects, and even if that accidental collection of atoms has to specify the 10^42 bits that could potentially be specified in the physical state of your brain, there is some nonzero probability that it will occur. 

In other words, there is no known physical law that will prevent the exact recreation of your brain elsewhere.  The universe can copy your brain, even if your brain’s function depends on quantum effects.  Therefore, a brain can be copied.  Statement 1 is true.

In my next post, I’ll address Statement 2.  As for now, do you have any questions or concerns about Statement 1?


[1] As I mentioned previously, I would ordinarily try to be more precise with my words, arguments, and proofs.  But the purpose of this and subsequent posts is to write more colloquially without alienating lay readers.  Better precision can be found, e.g., in my papers.

[2] Don’t forget that consensus does not equal truth.  There is, and perhaps always has been, a bully culture in science, which is why scientific paradigms tend to be changed only by independent mavericks.

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Does the Brain Cause Consciousness? Part 1

I have spent so much time and effort trying (and ultimately failing) to successfully communicate with people in the physics and philosophy academies, using their complicated and abstruse language and math equations, that I’ve made many of my insights, discoveries, and contributions completely inaccessible to the rest of the world, including my own friends and family.

My close friend Adam recently asked me some important questions, like whether computers could be conscious.  Of course, I’ve answered this question many times, and in great detail, on this blog and in my papers (particularly this and this).  But I realized that I really only addressed people who already knew the language of quantum mechanics, computer science, philosophical logic, and so forth.  So in this and subsequent posts, I’m going to try to address some important questions in direct, ordinary language without all the bullshit jargon.

Today, I want to mention two such questions:

·       Is there an afterlife?

·       Can a computer be conscious?

Ask these questions of a physicist, biologist, or computer scientist, and probably the vast majority will answer firmly and with conviction: No, there is no afterlife; Yes, a computer can be conscious.  And if you probe them further as to why they are so certain of these answers, you’ll find that there is an (often unstated) assumption that pervades the scientific community about consciousness:

Assumption: The brain causes consciousness.[1]

Is that assumption true?  If it is, then it’s not unreasonable to believe that consciousness ends when the brain dies.  Or that someday we’ll be able to copy the brain and recreate a person’s consciousness.  Or that a person’s brain could be simulated in a computer, thus producing consciousness in a computer.

But again, all these popular ideas stem from that one assumption, and there aren’t many scientists who question it (or even acknowledge it as an assumption).  So that’s where I’ll start.  Consider, again, the assumption:

Assumption: The brain causes consciousness.

Several questions for you about that assumption:

·       Do you believe it?

·       If so, why?  What evidence do you have that it is true?

·       What evidence has the scientific community offered to support it?

·       Which beliefs depend on it?  For example, anyone who believes that consciousness ends with brain death necessarily makes the above assumption.  Anyone who believes that a computer will someday be conscious by simulating a brain also makes the above assumption.  Many, many other popular science beliefs depend on this assumption.

·       What if the assumption is incorrect?  Is it possible to prove that it is false?  How might it be disproven?  If the assumption could actually be disproven, how might that impact your beliefs?  How might it impact the popular scientific beliefs about consciousness?



Next in this series: Part 2
Last in this series: Part 3


[1] Note on this post: Ordinarily, I would try to be more precise with my words.  For example, the assumption is actually that a conscious state entirely depends on the physical state of a living brain, but this is where the eyes of ordinary readers start to glaze over.  So I won’t be so precise in this and related future blog posts.

Friday, March 19, 2021

The Folly of Brain Copying: Conscious Identity vs. Physical Identity

The notion of “identity” is a recurring problem both in physics and in the nature of consciousness.  Philosophers love to discuss consciousness with brain-in-a-vat type thought experiments involving brain copying.  The typical argument goes something like this:

i)          The brain creates consciousness.

ii)         It is physically possible to copy the brain and thereby create two people having the same conscious states.

iii)        Two people having the same conscious states each identifies as the “actual” one, but at least one is incorrect.

iv)        Therefore, conscious identity (aka personal identity) is an illusion.

I spent a long time in Section II of this paper explaining why questioning the existence of conscious identity is futile and why the above logic is either invalid or inapplicable.  Yes, we have a persistent (or “transtemporal”) conscious identity; doubting that notion would unravel the very nature of scientific inquiry.  Of course, you might ask why anyone would actually doubt if conscious identity exists.  Suffice it to say that this wacky viewpoint tends to be held by those who subscribe to the equally wacky Many Worlds Interpretation (“MWI”) of quantum mechanics, which is logically inconsistent with a transtemporal conscious identity.

I showed in Section III of the above paper why special relativity prevents the existence of more than one instantiation of a physical state creating a particular conscious state.  In other words, at least one of assumptions i) and ii) above is false.  For whatever reason, the universe prohibits the duplication or repeating of consciousness-producing physical states.  In Section IV(A) of the same paper, I suggested some possible explanatory hypotheses for the mechanism(s) by which such duplications may be physically prevented, such as quantum no-cloning. 

Nevertheless, the philosopher’s argument seems irresistible... after all, why can’t we make a “perfect” copy of a brain?  If multiple instances of the same conscious state are physically impossible then what is the physical explanation for why two consciousness-producing physical states cannot be identical?  I finally realized that conscious identity implies physical identity.  In other words, if conscious identity is preserved over time, then physical identity must also be preserved over time, and this may help explain why the philosopher’s brain-copying scheme is a nonstarter.

I’d been struggling for some time with the notion of physical identity, such as in this blog post and this preprint.  The problem can be presented a couple ways:

·         According to the Standard Model of physics, the universe seems to be made up of only a handful of fundamental particles, and each of these particles is “identical” to another.  For example, any two electrons are identical, as are any two protons, or any two muons, etc.  The word “identical” is a derivative of “identity,” so it’s easy to confuse two “identical” electrons as being indistinguishable and thus having the same (or indistinct) identities.  So if all matter is made up of atoms comprising electrons, protons, and neutrons, then how can any particular clump of atoms have a different identity than another clump made of the same type of atoms?

·         Let’s assume that consciousness is created by physical matter and that physical matter is nothing but a collection of otherwise identical electrons, protons, and neutrons.  In the above paper I showed that if conscious identity exists, then conscious states cannot be copied or repeated.  And that means there is something fundamentally un-copiable about the physical state that creates a particular conscious state, which would seem odd if all matter is fundamentally identical. 

·         Consciousness includes transtemporal identity.  Assuming physicalism is true, then conscious states are created by underlying physical states, which means those physical states must have identity.  But physics tells us that physical matter comprises otherwise identical particles.

I finally realized that this problem can be solved if particles, atoms, etc., can themselves have identity.  (I do not mean conscious identity... simply that it makes sense to discuss Electron “Alice” and Electron “Bob” and keep track of them separately... that they are physically distinguishable.)  An object’s identity can be determined by several factors (e.g., position, entanglements and history of interactions, etc.) and therefore can be distinguished from another object that happens to comprise the same kind of particles.  Two physically “identical” objects can still maintain separate “identities” to the extent that they are distinguishable.  And we can distinguish (or separately identify) two objects, no matter how physically similar they may otherwise be, by their respective histories and entanglements and how those histories and entanglements affect their future states. 

Where does physical identity come from?  It is a necessary consequence of the laws of physics.  For instance, imagine we have an electron source in the center of a sphere, where the sphere’s entire surface is a detector (assume 100% efficiency) that is separated into hemispheres A and B.  The detector is designed so that if an electron is detected in hemisphere A, an alarm immediately sounds, but if it is detected in hemisphere B, a delayed alarm sounds one minute later.  The source then emits an electron, but we do not immediately hear the alarm.  What do we now know?  We know that an electron has been detected in hemisphere B and that we will hear an alarm in one minute.  Because we know this for certain, we conclude that the detected electron is the same as the emitted electron.  It has the same identity.  The following logical statement is true:

(electron emitted) ∩ (no detection in hemisphere A) à (detection in hemisphere B)

But more importantly, the fact that the above statement is true itself implies that the electron has identity.  In other words:

[(electron emitted) ∩ (no detection in hemisphere A) à (detection in hemisphere B)]

à (the electron emitted is the electron detected in hemisphere B)

(On retrospect, I feel like this is obvious.  Of course physical identity is inherent in the laws of physics.  How could Newton measure the acceleration of a falling apple if it’s not the same apple at different moments in time?)

So if electrons can have identity, then in what sense are they identical?  Can they lose their identity?  Yes.  Imagine Electron Alice and Electron Bob, each newly created by an electron source and having different positions (i.e., their distinct wave packets providing their separate identities).  The fact that they are distinguishable maintains their identity.  For example, if we measure an electron where Electron Bob cannot be found, then we know it was Electron Alice.  However, electrons, like all matter, disperse via quantum uncertainty.  So what happens if their wave functions overlap so that an electron detection can no longer distinguish them?  That’s when Bob and Alice lose their identity.  That’s when there is no fact about which electron is which.  (As a side note, Electron Bob could not have a conscious identity given that when he becomes indistinguishable with Electron Alice, even he cannot distinguish Bob from Alice.  This suggests that conscious identity cannot even arise until physical identity is transtemporally secured.)

This realization clarified my understanding of conscious identity.  My body clearly has an identity right now in at least the same sense that Electron Bob does.  What would it take to lose that physical identity?  Well, it wouldn’t be enough to make an atom-by-atom copy of the atoms in my body (call it “Andrew-copy”), because Andrew-copy would still be distinguishable from me by nature, for example, of its different location.  Rather, the wave functions of every single particle making up my body and the body of Andrew-copy would have to overlap so that we are actually indistinguishable.  But, as I showed in this paper, that kind of thing simply can’t happen with macroscopic objects in the physical universe because of the combination of slow quantum dispersion with fast decoherence.

What would it take for me to lose my conscious identity (or copy it, or get it confused with another identity, etc.)?  Given that conscious states cannot be physically copied or repeated, if conscious identity depends only the particular arrangement of otherwise identical particles that make up matter, then we need a physical explanation for what prevents the copying of that particular arrangement.  But if conscious identity depends on not just the arrangement of those (otherwise identical) particles but also on their physical distinguishability, then the problem is solved.  Here’s why.  Two macroscopic objects, like bowling balls, will always be physically distinguishable in this universe.  Bowling Ball A will always be identifiably distinct from Bowling Ball B, whether or not any particular person can distinguish them.  So if my conscious identity depends at least in part on the physical distinguishability of the particles/atoms/objects that create my consciousness, then that fact alone would explain why conscious states (and their corresponding transtemporal identity) cannot be copied.

Let me put this another way.  Identity is about distinguishability.  It is possible for two electrons to be physically indistinguishable, such as when the wave states of two previously distinguishable electrons overlap.  However, it is not possible, in the actual universe, for a cat (or any macroscopic object) and another clump of matter to be physically indistinguishable because it is not possible for the wave states of these two macroscopic objects to overlap, no matter how physically similar they may otherwise be.  A cat’s physical identity cannot be lost by trying to make a physical copy of it.  It is not enough to somehow assemble a set of ≈10^23 atoms that are physically identical to, and in a physically identical arrangement as, the ≈10^23 atoms comprising the cat.  Each of those constituent atoms also has a history of interactions and entanglements that narrowly localize their wave functions to such an extent that overlap of those wave functions between corresponding atoms of the original cat and the copy cat is physically impossible.  (See note below on the Myth of the Gaussian.)

Imagine that someone has claimed to have made a “perfect copy” of me in order to prove that conscious identity is just an illusion.  He claims that Andrew-copy is indistinguishable from me, that no one else can tell the difference, that the copy looks and acts just like me.  Of course, I will know that he’s wrong: even if no one else can distinguish the copy from me, I can.  And that alone is enough to establish that Andrew-copy is not a perfect copy.  But now I understand that my conscious identity implies physical identity – that my ability to distinguish Andrew-copy from me also implies physical distinguishability.  There is no such thing as a perfect physical copy of me.  Even if the atoms in Andrew-copy are in some sense the same and in the same configuration as those in my body, and even if some arbitrary person cannot distinguish me from Andrew-copy, the universe can.  The atoms in Andrew-copy have a history and entanglements that are distinguishable from the atoms in my body, the net result being that the two bodies are physically distinguishable; their separate physical identities are embedded as facts in the history of the universe.

So if the universe can distinguish me from Andrew-copy, then why should it be surprising that I can distinguish myself from Andrew-copy and that I have an enduring conscious identity?  The question is not whether some evil genius can make a physical copy of my body that is indistinguishable to others.  The question is whether he can make a copy that is indistinguishable to me or the universe.  And the answer is that he can’t because making that copy violates special relativity. 

 

Note on the Myth of the Gaussian:

Physicists often approximate wave functions in the position basis as Gaussian distributions, in large part because Gaussians have useful mathematical properties, notably that the Fourier transform of a Gaussian is another Gaussian.  Because the standard deviation of a Gaussian is inversely related to the standard deviation of its Fourier transform, it clearly demonstrates the quantum uncertainty principle whereby the commutator of two noncommuting operators is nonzero.  An important feature of a Gaussian is that it is never zero for arbitrarily large distances from the mean.  This treatment of wave functions often misleads students into believing that wave functions are or must be Gaussian and that: a) an object can be found anywhere; and b) the wave states of any two arbitrary identical objects always overlap.  Neither is true. 

Regarding a), physics students are often given the problem of calculating the probability that his/her body will quantum mechanically tunnel through a wall, or even tunnel to Mars; the calculation (which is based on the simple notion of a particle of mass M tunneling through a potential barrier V) always yields an extremely tiny but nonzero probability.  But that’s wrong.  Setting aside the problem with special relativity – i.e., if I am on Earth now, I can’t be measured a moment later on Mars without exceeding the speed of light – the main problem is physical distinguishability.  The future possibilities for my body (and its physical constituents) are limited by their histories and entanglements. 

While some electron may, due to quantum dispersion or being trapped in a potential well, develop a relatively wide quantum wave packet over time whose width “leaks” to the other side of the wall/potential barrier, this requires that the electron remain unmeasured (i.e., with no new correlations) during that time period.  But the particles and atoms in a human body are constantly “measuring each other” through decoherence so that their individual wave packets remain extremely tightly localized.  In other words, my body doesn’t get quantum mechanically “fuzzy” or “blurry” over time.  Thus none of the wave packets of the objects comprising my body get big enough to leak through (or even to) the wall.  More to the point, the QM “blurriness” of my body is significantly less than anything that can be seen... I haven’t done the calculation, but the maximum width of any wave packet (not the FWHM of a Gaussian, which extends to infinity, but the actual maximum extent) is much, much, much smaller than the wavelength of light. 

As I showed above, physical distinguishability is an inherent feature of the physical world.  An object that appeared on the other side of the wall that happened to look like my body would be physically distinguishable from my body and cannot be the same.  That is, there is no sense in which the body that I identify as mine could quantum mechanically tunnel to Mars or through a wall – that is, there is ZERO probability of me tunneling to Mars or through a wall.  If I have just been measured in location A (which is constantly happening thanks to constant decohering interactions among the universe and the objects comprising my body), then tunneling to location B requires an expansion of the wave packets of those objects to include location B – i.e., my tunneling to B requires a location superposition in which B is a possibility.  But past facts, including the fact that I am on Earth (or this side of the wall) right now have eliminated all configurations in which my body is on Mars (or on the other side of the wall) a moment later.