• [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    . Evolution has conditioned our perceptions of the physical world to see icons rather than truth, but that doesn't necessarily imply our logical faculties have been conditioned the same way. — Art48

    RIght - just as I would have thought. Ties in rather neatly with the argument from reason. I'll continue to look for where he addresses this, though.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    The question I would have for Donald Hoffman is why is his theory not a product of the same evolutionarily-conditioned process that our perception of everything else is? What faculty is it that is capable of arriving at the judgement that he is making? I'm sure he must have considered this, or that it has been asked of him, but I'd like to see the answer.

    Incidentally there's a useful Q&A with Hoffman here The Evolutionary Argument against Reality, in which he says:

    Q: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they?

    A: Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.
  • Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
    A few posts seem to be quibbling over the word "exists". What word would you prefer instead? Subsist? Something else? — Art48

    It's far more than a quibble but I can see it's useless to try and explain why, so I give up.
  • Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
    ↪Richard B
    Apologies for not having explained the point with sufficient clarity.
  • Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
    Now I am curious, what is an example of something that is conceptually unreal? — Richard B

    The point I'm trying to make is simply that to depict the denizens of 'the realm of ideas', such as logical principles, or natural numbers, in terms of 'mindscape', suggests a 'landscape' - which is spatially and temporally extended. Whereas the 'domain of logical principles' or 'the domain of natural numbers' are neither. So my argument is that they're real, because they're the same for all who think, but they're not strictly speaking existent. They are real as the constituents and objects of rational thought. (I think this is the original, as distinct from the Kantian, meaning of 'noumenal'.) So this is a distinction which I am trying to make between the nature of the existence of perceptible objects (or phenomena), and the nature of intelligible objects, which are perceptible only to reason.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    The scientific method seems to be our best tool to protect us against building a high credence level, from a faith based origin. — universeness

    I think that's mistaken, because scientific method is a method, it is not a creedal statement. Following that leads only to 'scientism', as there are innummerable matters requiring judgement that are out of scope for science.

    Why would you choose to assign any significant credence 'at this stage' to the work done by Stevenson? — universeness

    Stevenson really did build a large portfolio of researched cases, each of them comprising sometimes hundreds of cross-checked factual accounts - names, ages, incidents, locations, dates of birth and death, and the like. (See his Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.) He had a number of cases of children born with birth defects or markings that seemed consistent with accounts of accidents and injuries in their previous lives. One of his sceptical critics remarked that, if the same standards were applied to Stevenson as to any other researcher then he would have proven his case, but that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', a very useful goal-post shifting technique for sceptics.

    BTW do you assign high credence to Rupert Sheldrakes morphic resonance? — universeness

    Something like morphic fields would provide at least a medium. Incidentally, it's worth noting that Stevenson never claimed to have proven the fact of re-incarnation. He simply said his research suggested it.
  • Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
    It's a short step to say all thoughts exist there, although, of course, the step has to be justified. — Art48

    As I said earlier, I think you need to distinguish thought in the sense of random neural chatter from the formal aspects of thought.

    I also think the basic problem with the 'mindscape' is that it is trying to project the activities of reason onto a kind of external or objective landscape, like the so-called 'ethereal realm' of Platonic objects. It draws on the sense of being located in physical environment as an analogy, as if there is a literal 'realm of ideas'. But that is a reification - there is no literal 'realm of natural numbers', although it is conceptually real.
  • Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
    The paradox exists. For how much longer? Can an idea stop existing? That doesn’t seem right. It seems if all humanity vanished tomorrow, Russell’s paradox would still exist — Art48

    I merged this thread with the older OP because they're substantially about the same question. You're dealing with the reality of abstract objects, such as ideas, numbers, universals, and so on. I agree with you that it's a valid question and an important question, and I also agree that such things as ideas, numbers, universals, and the like, are real. But they're not existent as phenomena, they are not real in the sense that tables and chairs and trees are real. That's the conundrum you're outlining - how can these ideas be real if they don't actually exist? It is a metaphysical question par excellence.

    So in my view, you're asking a question about the fundamentals of metaphysics. But I think that metaphysics as understood by classical philosophy has been more or less forgotten or abandoned in philosophy as whole except for in the case of classes and books specifically about that subject. I mean, the subject still exists, but it is not appreciated that the real basis of metaphysics as a living subject revolves around the very question you're asking. Because it asks us to deeply question what we take for granted as what is real, what exists. It introduces a wholly other dimension to the question.

    Russell, apparently, regards thoughts differently, as acts. He writes: “One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's.” — Art48

    Yes - but look at the context! He says 'universals are not thoughts, but when they're known, they appear as thoughts'. He distinguishes thoughts from universals, because he says that universals (such as whiteness) must be the same for all. Which is just the same for mathematical and geometrical proofs! They too are the same for all who can grasp them. So they can only be grasped by thought, but they're not the product of thought. I hope you can see this distinction. They exist as what tradition would call 'intelligible objects' i.e. they are real only as objects of reason, not as sense-able phenomena. But that distinction is largely lost in modern philosophy because of its exclusive emphasis on empiricism (what can be sensed).

    I'm trying to situate your ideas within the context of the debate about the reality of universals, because that's what I think you're actually talking about. I don't claim to be an expert but I'm someone who has noticed that it *is* a question, and also someone who believes that it is a central question of philosophy.
  • Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’sRussell’s Paradox entry has the following.

    Russell’s paradox is the most famous of the logical or set-theoretical paradoxes. Also known as the Russell-Zermelo paradox, the paradox arises within naïve set theory by considering the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Such a set appears to be a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. Hence the paradox.

    Some sets, such as the set of all teacups, are not members of themselves. Other sets, such as the set of all non-teacups, are members of themselves. Call the set of all sets that are not members of themselves “R.” If R is a member of itself, then by definition it must not be a member of itself. Similarly, if R is not a member of itself, then by definition it must be a member of itself.

    Did Russell’s paradox exist before he . . . discovered it? Or . . . invented it? Which is it, discovered or invented? If discovered, then yes, the paradox was there since before the Big Bang, just waiting to be found. If invented, then no, the paradox came into existence the moment Russell first thought of it.

    The paradox exists. For how much longer? Can an idea stop existing? That doesn’t seem right. It seems if all humanity vanished tomorrow, Russell’s paradox would still exist. But if an idea cannot cease to exist, then it obviously must exist for all eternity into the future. If Russell created the paradox, that would mean the idea is half-eternal, having a start time in the finite past but no end time in the future. It seems rather odd to say a mortal human being can create something which will exist for all eternity. It seems to make more sense to say that Russell’s paradox was discovered, not invented; that it has always existed.

    Existed where? One answer is: in the mind of God. But this answer assumes an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing being, which are more assumptions than we need. The minimum is merely to stipulate a place where all thoughts exist, without saying anything more about the place. I call the place the “mindscape.” [reference to this thread omitted]

    I don’t claim the above is a proof; any of the steps in thinking can probably be disputed. But it’s a train of thought—an interesting train, at least, for me—that leads to the idea of the mindscape.     — Art48
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    Has to do with the first-person perspective, as distinct from the third-person descriptions dealt with by science. Science is the indisputable champ for dealing with objects of experience, but humans are subjects of experience before they’re objects of analysis.
  • The hard problem of consciousness seems like religious mumbo jumbo with fancier words!!!
    This discussion was merged into Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    Merged from https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14163/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-seems-like-religious-mumbo-jumbo-with-fancier-words

    When you look at things from an evolutionary perspective and understand biology and biochemistry there doesn't seem to be any hard problem.

    Yeah living systems are really complicated... and yeah the chemistry and evolution that can happen over 4 billion years is really complicated.. but I don't think by making up fuzzy words like qualia and weird thought experiments like zombies you actually highlight any real problem or illuminate any gap in our knowledge!

    Yes humans have complex subjective experience and presumably all living systems even a mosquito have some sort of internal subjective experience...

    But it seems like neurology and biochemistry and evolutionary biology do a pretty good job of explaining what's going on and I don't see how any of that mumbo jumbo is creating any better science?

    In other words it seems like the science we have and the understanding we have does a pretty good job explaining things, and unless you're creating something better, it seems like you're just praying on the gullible and naive religious impulses by creating these weird philosophical niches!!!     — Metamorphosis
  • The difference between religion and faith
    These stories do interest me. — Tom Storm

    Stevenson remarked that Western people would say 'why are you wasting your time researching this? Eveyone knows it's just a myth.' Whereas people in Asian cultures would say 'why are you wasting your time researching this? Everyone knows it happens all the time.'

    People tend to be either fascinated or repelled, I've found. I'm neither, but I accept that it is something that happens.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    ↪Banno
    As you already said, GPT is often a bullshit generator, although at least in this case, I have an idea why: that account almost exactly matches the one in Wikipedia, which I strongly suspect was the product of the Guerilla Sceptics cabal, who make it their job to selectively edit articles of those kinds on Wikipedia. (Learned about them reading Mitch Horowitz, who's a parapsychology writer.)
  • The difference between religion and faith
    ↪Banno
    Any suggestions on how to test?
  • The difference between religion and faith
    ↪Tom Storm
    I find the cases Stevenson details quite compelling, but I'm don't obsess over it. The reason it provokes such strong reactions, I think, is because the idea of re-birth is twice taboo in Western culture - once from the original Christian anthematizing of the idea in around the 4th century, and now because it appears to undermine materialism. The only reason I brought it up was contra 180's point of there being 'no compelling public evidence' concerning such things as past lives, when Stevenson published a lot of cases over 40 years of research. But let's not pursue it, it's a dead letter on this forum.
  • Russell’s Paradox and the Mindscape (on the ontology of ideas)
    This discussion was merged into Where do thoughts come from? Are they eternal? Does the Mindscape really exist?
  • The difference between religion and faith
    ↪180 Proof
    I get it- cultural taboo. I won't press the point, other than to say that Stevenson's publications constitute public evidence, although for obvious reasons, most people will be repelled, rather than compelled, by it. (For the curious.)
  • The difference between religion and faith
    f. As for your "documented ... thousands of cases" of "past life memories", those anecdotes are not, in any rigorous sense, compelling public evidence. — 180 Proof

    On the contrary, the researcher Ian Stevenson conducted many investigations into alleged cases. He followed the same kind of methodology that would be used for missing persons cases, epidemiological evidence, and so on. It is of course true that almost all his work is dismissed or rejected by the scientific community, and it is also possible that he was mistaken or tendentious in his approach, but having read some of the literature, I think it is not feasible to declare that all of it was simply mistaken. There were many cases - hundreds, in fact - where the purported memories described by the subject children were then checked against documentary evidence including newspaper reports, birth and death notices, and many other sources.

    And the significance of that in this context is precisely because it is feasible to collect empirical evidence. If someone says 'I used to be called Sam and lived in a white house on a cross-roads with a flame tree beside it', and you find such a house, where a Sam used to live, prior to his death, then you at least have some actual empirical evidence. Do that several hundred times and a large amount of compelling public evidence is amassed.

    I think there's a possible naturalistic explanation for past-life memories and re-birth. It is that humans bequeath future generations with the results of their actions in this life, and not only by way of what they leave in their will. They set in motion causes which continue to ripple outwards into the future. Those yet to be born are inheritors of these causal factors, just as we have inherited the consequences of our forbears' actions. Genetics is part of it, but only a part - as epigenetics shows, gene expression is a causal factor, and that relies on environmental influences. The only factor that is absent from the mainstream naturalist accounts of such a causal matrix is a subtle medium through which memories propogate. But it doesn't seem to great a stretch.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    All the compelling public evidence — 180 Proof

    We've often discussed the evidence of children with past-life recall, they have been documented in thousands of cases, but of course if you refuse to believe it, then none of that will be considered evidence, because, well, it just couldn't be true.

    But I do understand that belief in nothingness is very soothing. Nothing to worry about, eh?
  • Penrose & Hameroff Proto-consciousness
    ↪prothero
    I like that Penrose is a kind of mathematical Platonist. One of his other Closer to Truth interviews is on that topic. In fact overall I really like Penrose, but there's a lot of what he says that I just can't understand.
  • Penrose & Hameroff Proto-consciousness
    You fundamentally implied you are not a monist?
    You also implied you limit any type of mental aspect to living forms?     — prothero

    I'd best not get into that here, it's completely different from whatever it is that Roger Penrose is describing. But I do agree that his 'proto-consciousness' seems pretty close to panpsychism, and also that it might be compatible with process philosophy.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    I am advising no one to throw himself out of the window because of a superman's fantasy in his head. — Raef Kandil

    :up: 'Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first' ~ Arab proverb.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    what can 'Perennialism' mean to – what existential role can (the) 'ultimate unity' play in – the ephemeral lives of discrete metacognitives like us, Wayfarer? — 180 Proof

    From whence we come, wither we go. You gotta choose who to listen to.

    How do you honestly distinguish between a fantasy and a non-fantasy. Honestly speaking, they all fall under one category: life experience. — Raef Kandil

    But it's very important to distinguish them, especially in this day and age, with its proliferation of media and entire artificial fantasy realms into which you can be consumed. There's billions of young adults spending all their time playing computer games. And being able to make sense of experience and differentiate the real from the unreal is a critical life skill.

    I think what you're trying to say is that even fictional characters have a kind of reality - which is true. It's also true that there are many elements of our inner world that are real, even if they don't have any outer existence. Many elements of the spiritual life are especially like this. But what's needed is to find an overall structure within which all these elements have a place.

    Here's an example that comes to mind from my experience. I once did a course on Buddhist studies. This included the books of Steven Collins who is a scholar of Buddhist studies and who has written extensively on Pali literature and language (Pali being the traditional language of Theravada Buddhism.) He uses the term "the Pali imaginaire" to refer to the collective mental images, symbols, and themes that are commonly associated with Pali literature and the culture it represents. It is a set of texts, ideas and images that have been constructed over time through the interpretation and re-interpretation of the Pali texts, as well as through the transmission of Buddhist ideas across different cultures and historical contexts. It encompasses a wide range of concepts, including karma, rebirth, meditation, and the nature of the self, and is characterized by a distinctive blend of rationality, empiricism, and mystical insight.

    The Pali imaginaire, he said, is not a static or fixed set of ideas, but rather a dynamic and evolving cultural phenomenon that reflects the ongoing dialogue between Pali literature and the societies in which it is read and studied.

    This is very much what Karen Armstrong has in mind as a 'mythos'. It's not just myth in the pejorative sense of 'a story that isn't true', but a narrative structure which accomodates all of those elements of existence by giving them a kind of over-arching metaphorical or symbolic structure. The Greek Myths and the Christian mythos are others. Even in modern Western culture many of these themes surface through super-hero movies and the like (per Joseph Campell, 'Hero with a Thousand Faces', one of the main sources for Star Wars.)

    That's where I would situate your undertaking.
  • Penrose & Hameroff Proto-consciousness
    ↪prothero
    I always appreciate your contribution, and I'm interested in improving my understanding of Whitehead and process philosophy, although you're right in saying that we come at these questions from highly divergent perspectives and it's a difficult division to navigate. I've been reading a book on philosophy of physics, Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin, which incorporates many of Whitehead's ideas. Still working through it.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    ↪Tom Storm
    You appear to have a view that there has been a kind of fall (paradise lost?) - that the numinous and integrated has been displaced by an ugly, modernist, secular, scientistic worldview, which has led us to nihilism and disenchantment. The evidence being our current, divided world and the coarseness of public discourse. — Tom Storm

    Thanks, kind of you to say so. I guess that is a fair description, although not all there is to it.

    If there is a transcendent ultimate concern, it will take care of itself and doesn't need us. — Tom Storm

    Wouldn't be too sure of that.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    ↪Tom Storm
    I suppose to try and articulate my own stance a little better, I think the higher religious traditions - by that I'm referring to Christian Platonism, and what I know of Vedanta and Buddhism - are grounded in an insight into a genuine higher truth. Not just as a matter of belief or faith, although they may be instrumental in coming to understand it. But that in some sense, humanity is part of the unfolding of the cosmos - the way I put it is, that through sentient beings, the Universe comes to understand itself. That is an intuition that is even shared by at least some scientists. So I allow that any one of them might be valid pathway to coming to know those higher truths, which is why I too am pluralist. But these things are very deep, hard to fathom, so they're expressed in the language of signs and symbols - you can't simply spell them out or describe them, as they require a complete re-organisation of the personality in order to understand - hence my earlier reference to 'realisation' or 'self-realisation'. Those ideas are much better explained in Hindu and Buddhist schools than in mainstream Christianity, although they're also there if you know where to look. Faith is part of that, but ultimately it is something to be known directly, although that kind of understanding is not part of the lingua franca of today's culture.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    And that's where the problem begins when that faith is foundational to mysogyny, homophobia, racism, anti-abortion and anti-birth control, etc. — Tom Storm

    Agree that religion is often incompatible with liberalism, and also that religious fundamentalism and fanaticism, and the politicisation of faith that we see in e.g. the American Christian Right, are deeply problematical. And also that we have to live in a pluralistic society which has to acomodate many different perspectives.

    The intuition that there's an invisible 'magic' creator thing... — Tom Storm

    It's often the case that everyone understands something different by the name of God. There sure are a lot of religious believers I wouldn't have any truck with. In fact there's probably quite a few to whom I would come across as atheist, and I wouldn't even try to persuade them otherwise.

    But I also believe there is a fact of existence that is over our limited cognitive horizons, which religions, at least sometimes, represent. I mean, not all religion is evil, although if your sole experience of it was through internet fora, you might be inclined to think so.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    Faith is a belief largely or wholly unsupported by empirical evidence. — Vera Mont

    You edited your answer after my previous response.

    You seem to be arguing that just because something is lacking in empirical evidence, then there are no grounds to believe it. But empirical evidence is limited in scope by our own sensory apparatus and by the way we categorise experience - the structures we hold in terms of which things are interpreted. But there are many things to which empiricism doesn't apply. Consider mathematical axioms: certain mathematical truths, such as the axioms of arithmetic or geometry, must be accepted as true without empirical evidence. They are considered to be self-evident and can be derived from logic alone. Many hold that at least some moral principles, such as the belief that it is wrong to kill or harm others, even in the absence of empirical evidence, based on intuition, reason, or philosophical arguments. We can often deduce the truth of certain propositions from other propositions that we already accept as true without empirical evidence, or arrive at knowledge through a priori reasoning, which is reasoning that does not rely on empirical evidence.

    I think it's more the case that modern culture has abandoned the structures and forms through which religious intuitions were previously expressed. There are whole classes of ideas which are then automatically flagged as being associated with religion - typically, as opposed to science - which are then designated as being the subject of faith and challenged on those grounds. It happens continuously in any threads here about philosophy of religion simply as an expression of the zeitgeist.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    ↪Vera Mont
    I would expect so!
  • Penrose & Hameroff Proto-consciousness
    How does this differ from some forms of panpsychism? In particular panexperientialism? — prothero

    Hey great to hear from you Prothero. He does seem to be reaching for a kind of pan-psychist solution. (Incidentally, where did those passages come from?)

    I perceive no essential dividing line between biology and physics (or between biology, chemistry, and physics)....such (putative) non-computational processes would also have to be inherent in the action of inanimate matter, since living human brains are ultimately composed of the same material, satisfying the same physical laws, as are the inanimate objects of the universe”. — Roger Penrose

    And this I profoundly differ with. I'm more inclined to accept the basically Aristotelian distinction between the living and non-living, and also between the sentient and non-sentient (e.g. animal and vegetative) and rational and non-rational (human and animal). These signify fundamental differences as far as I'm concerned. Trying to attribute consciousness to matter or work out how it is that matter can be or become conscious seems mistaken to me. And the idea that everything is composed of a single substance is lumpen materialism (which I don't think Penrose actually advocates.)

    I'll try and say what I feel is mistaken with Penrose's efforts in this regard. To me, he seems to be attempting to arrive at an objective account of the nature of consciousness (or mind). Whereas the way I see it, is that the mind (or consciousness or awareness) are not known to us as an object of experience (in the way that all material objects are, being spatially located and sense-able). Of course, I can infer all kinds of things about the nature of mind or consciousness through objective analysis within the scope of cognitive science, but what consciousness is, its essential nature, as the ground or basis of experience, is another matter. It seems to me that Step 1 in the investigation is acknowledging that limitation, which is a problem in principle, not simply a matter of acquiring more data.
  • Penrose & Hameroff Proto-consciousness
    Of course not all of it is bullshit. But some of it is. And it, and the reader, cannot tell which is which. Hence it is not an authoritative source. — Banno

    You know, I could quite easily have included that entire passage without any attribution whatever. I included the attribution for transparency. I suppose I could have read a bunch more material by and about Penrose so as to write a couple of hundred words of original text, but there are only so many hours in a day. And as I said, it does provide at least some elaboration of what Penrose means by proto-consciousness (which incidentally I am highly dubious of, as it happens.)
  • The difference between religion and faith
    Most faith, then is dependent on reason? — Vera Mont

    In many religious discourses, they are seen as complementary rather than antagonistic. Aquinas is an example. His articles are nearly always given in terms of reasoned arguments for and against the subject of the discussion.

    ↪180 Proof
    I know as much as I will ever need to know about your pathological aversion to all things religious, 180. You can really spare me the ongoing explanation. I'm trying to steer this particular OP towards a mode of discourse which is understandable in the context of philosophy of religion.
  • Penrose & Hameroff Proto-consciousness
    ↪Banno
    The idea that everything that it generates is bullshit is also bullshit. It is a convenient information source for summaries and sketches and I will continue to use it as I see fit, end of argument.
  • Penrose & Hameroff Proto-consciousness
    ↪Banno
    Of course it's not a f*ing authority. What it is, is a little more detail than a one-sentence question, for the benefit of others, who are quite welcome to do their own research and make their own contributions. :angry:
  • Penrose & Hameroff Proto-consciousness
    ↪Banno
    It's like a Wikipedia entry. (Besides the video link was to Penrose himself, explaining it in his own words.) If you want to read what he says, get Emperor's New Mind. If I can find my copy, I'll mail it to you, I couldn't make head or tail.
  • The difference between religion and faith
    ↪180 Proof
    Indeed. Had some of the gnostics prevailed, it might have been a very different story. But let's not throw the baby of gnosis out with the bathwater of dogmatic belief systems.
  • Penrose & Hameroff Proto-consciousness
    ↪Eugen
    They're deep questions, and Penrose is an exceptionally deep thinker. I bought his book The Emperor's New Mind years ago, and it was way over my head. (I notice that he says in this interview that the book actually failed, which is kind of a relief!) I've also seen his collaborator, Stuart Hameroff, present at a conference - you can find his interview here (LINK CORRECTED) - and couldn't make a lot of sense out of what he said, either. I'll leave it for others to comment further.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    set aside this bias... — noAxioms

    My trying to explain a philosophical view to you is not 'bias'. It's a philosophical view.

    The way sentience affects the interaction of things is irrelevant to an ontology not based on sentience. — noAxioms

    So, an ontology not based on sentience is described as what? Where in the philosophy text books or science textbooks do you find a description of such an ontology?
  • Penrose & Hameroff Proto-consciousness
    Penrose always says the Universe is not conscious, but that proto-consciousness is a fundamental property of it. Now I'm a bit confused. — Eugen

    I'm just providing a bit more detail from ChatGPT to provide some background:

    Roger Penrose, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, has proposed the idea of "proto-consciousness" as a potential explanation for how consciousness arises in the brain.

    According to Penrose, proto-consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe that exists independently of the brain. It is a non-computable aspect of the universe that has the potential to influence brain function and give rise to conscious experience.

    In Penrose's view, proto-consciousness is a property of the universe that is related to the collapse of the quantum wave function, which is the process by which a quantum system goes from a superposition of states to a definite state when it is observed or measured. Penrose has proposed that the collapse of the wave function is not a purely random process but is influenced by proto-consciousness, which he believes is a fundamental property of the universe.

    According to Penrose, proto-consciousness interacts with the brain in a way that enables conscious experience to arise. He suggests that the brain acts as a kind of "receiver" for proto-consciousness, which influences neural activity and gives rise to conscious experience.

    It is important to note that the idea of proto-consciousness is still a highly speculative hypothesis and has not been widely accepted within the scientific community. It is an area of ongoing research and debate, and further study is needed to fully understand the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world.     — ChatGPT

    You can also find an interview with Sir Roger Penrose in which he explains this here.

    My view is, based on the interview, that Penrose is saying something very close to: 'Hey, consciousness is a real mystery. And so is the collapse of the probability wave. Maybe they're related!' :razz:
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