Eps 1081: Conciousness and the meaning of life
— The too lazy to register an account podcast
) As far as I can tell, Evan Harris Walker's The Physics of Consciousness: Quantum Minds and the Meaning of Life discusses neither the physics of consciousness, quantum minds, nor the meaning of life.
(p.331) In order to understand this assertion, we need to think about quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
("Life is less mechanistic than we have been taught to believe [we obey probabilistic quantum mechanics, rather than the deterministic Newtonian physics]; since it disobeys no chemical or physical law, it is not vitalistic [i.e., there is nothing "magic" or "special" about life].
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Terrance Rodriquez
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Where physical and emotional life are generally considered complementary and equivalent, there is no evidence that all living beings have some kind of consciousness. We would also arrive at an evolutionary dimension of life without consciousness, and human consciousness might have had evolution, first with hominins and now within us.
Man has lived in a much simpler form for almost four billion years, and man has been in us for much longer.
Bacteria and shrimp, as far as I can tell, have no thoughts, feelings or ethics. If freedom is to make sense in the universe at all, consciousness is an epiphenomenon, and we cannot understand life in the sense of transcendence. The question of how consciousness and mind arise from the brain and how life appears in this universe is the wrong question. It establishes a relationship that transcends all other questions about the nature of life and its meaning, such as the meaning of consciousness.
It rejects mysticism in favor of panpsychism, which is associated with it and with other forms of philosophy such as philosophy of the mind, psychology and psychology.
Rather, the paper claims that reality is a living system from which reality exists in the conscious attitude. It is argued that the reports of these paradigms provide evidence that may not be conclusive that prefrontal activation is found in experiments that search for neural correlations of consciousness that are related to reports and not to the experience of reports. All in all, it seems reasonable to assume that there are neural correlations between reports and experiences, not between experiences and consciousness. This seems premature, however; it is believed that this is due to a lack of empirical evidence for the existence of a conscious state of mind.
This analysis leads to the conclusion that there is no basis for claiming that access to consciousness is flowing into phenomenal consciousness. However, if we look at it as a functioning memory, the situation is not what one might call strong evidence.
The definition of p - consciousness is hotly debated in the literature of consciousness, but it seems that most philosophers and empirical scientists agree that it refers to the subjective experience of a "p" consciousness that is supposed to be a certain state of mind. To understand the meaning of this abundance, of course, we must have a better understanding of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to consciousness in general.
From the early days of antiquity to the present, the nature of consciousness, sometimes called agony, has been a mystery. The meaning of this term is often used to explain the existence of the human mind, its nature and its relationship to life.
I find that many modern analytical philosophers of the mind believe that there should be no agony, which they call a meaningless universe of matter and emptiness. That is, they deny that there is torture, and argue that science can never meaningfully conduct a qualitative investigation.
This leads others to argue that conscious sensations such as pain exist, and that plants and trees must also be conscious. What I would have to explain is why most others are so sure we have no feelings at all. I feel no pain, no pain, not even the fear with which I hop around the kitchen.
On the other hand, in recent years, a handful of neuroscientists have come to believe that the problem of consciousness could finally be solved, and that there is enough evidence to accept that computers and the Internet may soon become aware. Some argue that this problem marks a limit that goes far beyond what science could ever explain. We now know about the existence of the human brain and also about the nature of life itself.
The 77-year-old playwright reveals his concerns in his play, which is about a young researcher who ponders what consciousness is and why it exists. The study of human consciousness has increased enormously since the first half of the 20th century, during which time the focus of much psychological research has shifted from purely observable behavior to the study of consciousness and its relationship to other aspects of life.
One of the problems with consciousness research is the lack of a generally accepted operational definition. Although consciousness is now generally defined as consciousness of one's own world, the various aspects of consciousness are still being discussed. Descartes proposed the idea of "cogito ergo sum," or "thinking to think," and suggested that the very act of thinking shows the reality of one's existence or consciousness.