‘mind’ as a concept refers collectively to relations of experience — Possibility

Yes. Scientists have looked for the correlates of consciousness in particular things. But, as you implied, the locus of Mind is in the relationships between things. Mind is meta-physical, like Mathematics, not physical, like neurons.

I am glad to hear that you are skeptical of conscious robots, at least the sorts of robots we have now. It drives me crazy when I see people claiming we have conscious machines already or will very soon have them, that it's just a matter of making our computers faster, or cleverly coding them. This kind of thing reveals a deep failure to understand just what it is that a computer does. If we are to create something that is conscious in the way we are, it seems to me that we need something qualitatively different from a computer. And we first need to really, deeply understand what consciousness is and how it works in us. We aren't there yet. Nobody really has a clue as to why we are conscious.

My own suspicion is that our consciousness is really just a highly organized form of something that is fundamental. What I mean to say is that basic subjectivity is there everywhere in nature at a very low level. But in the case of dirt or something like that, it isn't organized in the right way so as to yield an inner experience that is anything like ours in terms of its structure.

At the bottom-most level, there is probably no consciousness as we think of it. As at that level, there is no differentiation at all. There is only unity, and so there is no division of subject and object. Consciousness as we think of it always involves a subject and objects. One side of this relation does not occur without the other.

I sometimes think that it might be simply a matter of relation, but with the important consideration that there is being. What do I mean? When we normally imagine two things in relation, we see them both in our mind's eye as objects "out there" in a space, and we are apart from them or bracketed out. This misleads. Suppose you just have primitive Being, or Unity, or whatever, The Undifferentiated. Call it what you like. Then, somehow (don't ask me how!), it divides, or comes to relate itself to itself, as in a reflection, or something like that. Whatever the case, suppose you now have two things, A and B, and they are in relation. There is no perspective outside of these. There is no objective point of view. There is no third thing. We need to resist imagining it that way, as if we occupy a perspective separate from both A and B. There are only two perspectives. For A, B is an object. For B, A is an object. And for each, it is itself, a subject. For B, A is A. That seems trivial. But for A, "I am A." See the difference?

Maybe the primordial unity objectifies itself and thereby becomes a subject. Somehow! If this happens, it is a total mystery to me! And maybe this absurdity is the fatal flaw in my whole way of thinking!

The important point here though, which is something I think we usually miss, is the being aspect of this, which, seen from the inside, is the "I am-ness" of it. This world we are imagining isn't purely structural. It is substantial in the sense that there is something that is these things. From the point of view of A, that which is A is able to say, "I am A." Not literally! It isn't complex enough to have verbal thoughts. What I mean is that there is something that finds itself as A. This isn't simply a matter of empty, purely structural objects as we tend to picture in our minds. Think about yourself from your own perspective. You aren't an object to yourself. You look out. You are able to say, "I AM!" This is very different from saying, "That thing is." For me, you are. But for you, from your perspective, you say, "I am!" The world is inhabited, in other words. To use the language popular in Philosophy of Mind, there is "something it is like" to be something.

Consciousness is deeply indexical. The "hereness" and "thereness" that this entails is possibly its most essential feature. If we want to understand consciousness, we need to pay attention to this. And it will always be missed in any purely objective way of looking at things. In our scientific picture, since, trying to be objective, we deliberately bracket ourselves out, we miss it. We miss what's most essential about the world. We only see extension, only geometry, not the inner nature of things. And then we wonder how our interiority could possibly "emerge" out of special arrangements of these empty, purely structural, substanceless objects. No wonder there is a mind-body problem!

And we should keep in mind that there is always a symmetry with respect to subject and object. With each subject-object pair, for each subject, its object is for itself a subject. Each is for itself a subject and for the other an object.

We imagine the world to be empty of subjectivity, to be pure object, pure surface, pure exterior, only because we tend to visualize things as though from outside, and we bracket out ourselves and our perspective points. But if you realize that in order for a rock to really be, that there must be something that is the rock, a curious realization starts to emerge. And consciousness starts to seem slightly less mysterious, almost necessary even. It seems that this is just what it is for a thing to be. It must have its own side. Things must have interiors. Something finds itself as that thing. When people like Hawking ask, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?", this is the answer. It isn't that we have equations and then these somehow get actualized and substantialized. No, being is there from the start, and the equations only describe the way being relates itself itself to itself. And it is in the nature of being to be! It can't not be!

So I guess this is a kind of panpsychism, which is really a dissociated monopsychism. Every particle interaction is likely a sort of experience.

You might wonder then why I doubt a computer is conscious. My answer is that I think it is the relations between the substantial elements of the system that are important, since their interactions are likely atoms of experience. The abstract relations between pieces of code are not the substantial interactions that are happening in the chip. What is happening in the code is perhaps best seen as virtual, just a way for us to think at a high level about how to organize the low-level operations. But the chip is like a Turing machine, just erasing and writing 1s and 0s according to some simple rules, with no awareness of what this information represents. Even that is too high-level. A charge in a circuit, isn't to itself a '1' or a '0'.

I suspect that the way our consciousness manifests to us has to do literally with how the matter is arranged. To replicate it exactly, you'd need to arrange matter in exactly the same way. You'd have to copy the body in every atomic detail. If you have a computer that is running a simulation of a body, even if it simulates every particle interaction, these interactions are still simulated, and not real. You can't eat a virtual slice of bread, in other words. Since the substance is important here, we need to consider the physical substrate of the simulation. That's what's really happening. And that supercomputer and its operations are structurally very, very different from a human body interacting with an environment.

I was under the impression that the mind/body debate was about whether they are of the same substance. Are they both physical or is the body physical and the mind something else?

Your example of severing the mind from the body doesn't tell us this, since even when we sever the mind from the body we have no idea whether mind stops existing.

I want to add to my previous post that I suspect that what makes my phenomenal state have the peculiar character that it has is directly a function of the entire causal structure of the whole material situation that my relation to my environment involves. And it is unified and bound because ultimately, everything is one thing. But information integration, a la Tononi, plays a big role in what is accessible to and can be reported by mind in any given part of the world. For example, though your brain and mine are both part of the same ultimately unified whole, you'll never find my mouth reporting your experiences because the information about your experiences isn't causally directing my mouth movements. Your memories aren't in my head, in other words. But at bottom, we are one. And it is ultimately the same self-relating unity having the experiences of both of us.

But a computer running a simulation of a brain or whatever, has, in its physical substrate, a very different causal structure, one that probably lacks the kind of intentional content we want it to have when we want it to be conscious in the way that we are. So, I think, uploading our brains and hoping to live on as simulations is hopelessly misguided.

It does exist and the example shows this, just as it constatates that it requires a conduit in order to interact in the specified manner. A battery though not in use is still active though not an active participant.

Whether they're both physical or not shouldn't matter, as there are degrees of physicality, and a physical mind isn't necessarily biological. The battery example denotes this as well.

So essentially the mind to body is equatable to the sun and the effects it provides to the solar system; a big intelligent battery.

Interesting viewpoint.

Scientists have looked for the correlates of consciousness in particular things. But, as you implied, the locus of Mind is in the relationships between things. Mind is meta-physical, like Mathematics, not physical, like neurons. — Gnomon

Technically, I agree. But I don’t find this helpful as an either-or dichotomy, as if the metaphysical is not physical and vice versa. Mind refers to a capacity to interact with an aspect of reality that is not reducible to measurable/observable events or objects in spacetime. That aspect is not exclusive to mind or confined to certain ‘spooky’ elements of our experience - it is part of the relational structure of the universe that forms reality.

I enjoyed reading your long post, and found myself nodding throughout. I find the recent collaboration of Information Theory with QM (Rovelli) and with consciousness studies (Tononi and Chalmers) to be fascinating work, even if I can sometimes only follow from a philosophical standpoint.

My own suspicion is that our consciousness is really just a highly organized form of something that is fundamental. What I mean to say is that basic subjectivity is there everywhere in nature at a very low level. But in the case of dirt or something like that, it isn't organized in the right way so as to yield an inner experience that is anything like ours in terms of its structure. — petrichor

This is similar to my own view, but I tend to use the term ‘integrated’ rather than ‘organised’. I don’t think it’s simply a matter of organising matter in a particular way, but of building an integrated system by facilitating that ‘basic subjectivity’ from the ground level.

At the bottom-most level, there is probably no consciousness as we think of it. As at that level, there is no differentiation at all. There is only unity, and so there is no division of subject and object. Consciousness as we think of it always involves a subject and objects. One side of this relation does not occur without the other. — petrichor

The proto-consciousness at the bottom-most level, in my view, is a vague awareness of more than this-here-now, whose only evidence is a one-dimensional transfer of information/energy that is immediately integrated into the system. Try to imagine what it is like to be a particle (bear with me), with zero awareness of either itself or anything other than itself, colliding with another particle. It is the differentiation between the two particles at that point of collision that ‘informs’ each particle (ie. heat/energy transfer, trajectory, etc), but the particle can only be ‘aware’ of differentiation as a vagueness that has zero duration in time. So it’s not consciousness as we think of it. But it’s a start.

I think when we talk about subject-object in relation to consciousness, we need to recognise that these are concepts. The question of whether or not a particular subject or object can exist at the level in question is problematic both at this fundamental level and at the highest levels of consciousness, particularly from a materialist or physicalist perspective. From memory, I think Nagel’s ‘view from nowhere’ addresses this problem to some extent.

I sometimes think that it might be simply a matter of relation, but with the important consideration that there is being. What do I mean? When we normally imagine two things in relation, we see them both in our mind's eye as objects "out there" in a space, and we are apart from them or bracketed out. This misleads. Suppose you just have primitive Being, or Unity, or whatever, The Undifferentiated. Call it what you like. Then, somehow (don't ask me how!), it divides, or comes to relate itself to itself, as in a reflection, or something like that. Whatever the case, suppose you now have two things, A and B, and they are in relation. There is no perspective outside of these. There is no objective point of view. There is no third thing. We need to resist imagining it that way, as if we occupy a perspective separate from both A and B. There are only two perspectives. For A, B is an object. For B, A is an object. And for each, it is itself, a subject. For B, A is A. That seems trivial. But for A, "I am A." See the difference? — petrichor

I agree that relation is the key here, and the absence of the ‘third thing’ is precisely where QM in collaboration with Information Theory proves to be interesting, because for QM the observer must always be accounted for:

A physical system manifests itself only by interacting with another. The description of a physical system, then, is always given in relation to another physical system, one with which it interacts. Any description of a system is therefore always a description of the information which a system has about another system, that is to say, the correlation between the two systems. The mysteries of quantum mechanics become less dense if interpreted this way, as the descriptions of the information that physical systems have about one another. — Carlo Rovelli, ‘Reality is Not What it Seems’

We imagine the world to be empty of subjectivity, to be pure object, pure surface, pure exterior, only because we tend to visualize things as though from outside, and we bracket out ourselves and our perspective points. But if you realize that in order for a rock to really be, that there must be something that is the rock, a curious realization starts to emerge. And consciousness starts to seem slightly less mysterious, almost necessary even. It seems that this is just what it is for a thing to be. It must have its own side. Things must have interiors. Something finds itself as that thing. When people like Hawking ask, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?", this is the answer. It isn't that we have equations and then these somehow get actualized and substantialized. No, being is there from the start, and the equations only describe the way being relates itself itself to itself. And it is in the nature of being to be! It can't not be!

So I guess this is a kind of panpsychism, which is really a dissociated monopsychism. Every particle interaction is likely a sort of experience. — petrichor

We need to remember that a ‘rock’ is a conceptual object to you and me, but not to itself. If you break a rock in half it becomes two rocks, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the rock notices the difference. But the individual particles located at the break do integrate new information from different particles in the air that are now colliding with them. They oxidise, change in temperature, etc. That’s the extent of the awareness here: a one-dimensional, zero duration flash of more in each particle. The rock is a relational concept in our minds.

Scientists have looked for the correlates of consciousness in particular things. But, as you implied, the locus of Mind is in the relationships between things. Mind is meta-physical, like Mathematics, not physical, like neurons.
— Gnomon

Technically, I agree. But I don’t find this helpful as an either-or dichotomy, as if the metaphysical is not physical and vice versa. Mind refers to a capacity to interact with an aspect of reality that is not reducible to measurable/observable events or objects in spacetime. — Possibility

I agree with aspects of both analyses, but consider this. We're speaking as if what is 'physical' is known when it's not. Matter itself is actually a very mysterious thing. We have a culturally-inherited mental map of 'mind and matter' but in reality both terms are abstractions.

Furthermore we assume that, whatever 'mind' is, it's a product of evolution, which is understandable as an essentially physical process - so that mind has emerged from the evolutionary process. But I question the notion of the supremacy or ultimacy of the physical as being the source or origin of what we understand as 'mind' - even though it seems obvious that it must be that, and even though we don't have any clear alternative.

We imagine the world to be empty of subjectivity, to be pure object, pure surface, pure exterior, only because we tend to visualize things as though from outside, and we bracket out ourselves and our perspective points. But if you realize that in order for a rock to really be, that there must be something that is the rock, a curious realization starts to emerge. And consciousness starts to seem slightly less mysterious, almost necessary even. It seems that this is just what it is for a thing to be. It must have its own side. Things must have interiors. Something finds itself as that thing. When people like Hawking ask, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?", this is the answer. It isn't that we have equations and then these somehow get actualized and substantialized. No, being is there from the start, and the equations only describe the way being relates itself itself to itself. And it is in the nature of being to be! It can't not be! — petrichor

A good analysis. But I don't know if I agree that objects 'truly are' at all - this is one of the reasons why rocks (as paradigmatic 'objects') are denoted as being 'things' rather than 'beings'. I think that the ancients believed that objects were basically unintelligible (although I would have to dig for a reference) - and that this intuition tells us something about the nature of reality. This is that moderns instinctively regard the sensory domain as real, and then try and work backwards from that assumption to what the fundamental constituents are. But if the sensory domain is not intrinsically real, then there might be no such constituents. And this is pretty well consistent with where physics is at right now.

Might sound outlandish, but consider this passage:

The fundamental absurdity of materialism is that it starts from the objective, and takes as the ultimate ground of explanation something objective, whether it be matter in the abstract, simply as it is thought, or after it has taken form, is empirically given — that is to say, as substance, the chemical element with its primary relations. Some such thing it takes, as existing absolutely and in itself, in order that it may evolve organic nature and finally the knowing subject from it, and explain them adequately by means of it ; whereas in truth all that is objective is already determined as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing, and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think the subject away. Thus materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly. All that is objective, extended, active— that is to say, all that is material — is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction). But we have shown that all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufacture of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and ever active in time. From such an indirectly given object, materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the idea (in which alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law, are in truth to be explained. — Arthur Schopenhauer, WWR, Pp 32-33

(Regarding panpsychism, have a look at this thread. It's noteworthy that the author of the article that I was commenting on contributed to the thread.)

For example, though your brain and mine are both part of the same ultimately unified whole, you'll never find my mouth reporting your experiences because the information about your experiences isn't causally directing my mouth movements. Your memories aren't in my head, in other words. But at bottom, we are one. And it is ultimately the same self-relating unity having the experiences of both of us. — petrichor

Perhaps 'one' not in a numerical sense, but a qualitative sense, i.e. all of the one kind, not all part of the one thing.

You might wonder then why I doubt a computer is conscious. My answer is that I think it is the relations between the substantial elements of the system that are important, since their interactions are likely atoms of experience. The abstract relations between pieces of code are not the substantial interactions that are happening in the chip. What is happening in the code is perhaps best seen as virtual, just a way for us to think at a high level about how to organize the low-level operations. But the chip is like a Turing machine, just erasing and writing 1s and 0s according to some simple rules, with no awareness of what this information represents. Even that is too high-level. A charge in a circuit, isn't to itself a '1' or a '0'. — petrichor

A computer is made up of one-dimensional information systems, similar to the rock particles. The difference is that we have organised these systems so that the information they transfer with each interaction travels through the system with minimal noise in a pre-arranged way and collates according to a logical structure or algorithm that is a one-dimensional impression of what I consider to be a six-dimensional reality. The amount of one-dimensional information required to simulate even a four-dimensional event with any accuracy requires extremely complex calculations. So instructing a computer simulation to relate to even a single object or event on a five-dimensional level (value/significance) would involve ridiculous amounts of data.

But I have read that this has been achieved on a small and limited scale, where a computer simulation was capable of demonstrating a limited social ‘relationship’ with a ‘pet’. It was an interesting read (I’ll try to locate it).

The question can be put simply in this form: are computers subjects of experience? (I say 'no'.)

I agree with aspects of both analyses, but consider this. We're speaking as if what is 'physical' is known when it's not. Matter itself is actually a very mysterious thing. We have a culturally-inherited mental map of 'mind and matter' but in reality both terms are abstractions.

Furthermore we assume that, whatever 'mind' is, it's a product of evolution, which is understandable as an essentially physical process - so that mind has emerged from the evolutionary process. But I question the notion of the supremacy or ultimacy of the physical as being the source or origin of what we understand as 'mind' - even though it seems obvious that it must be that, and even though we don't have any clear alternative. — Wayfarer

I think that you and I are pretty much on the same page here, particularly in relation to evolutionary process - I make no such assumption here with regard to mind. An ‘alternative’, in my view, is that reality is six-dimensional from the point of origin, rendering what we term ‘physical’ or 4D reality as a limited perspective of the potential information available - like learning what an apple is purely from photographs.

:up:

But the biology of the living and recently deceased is the same. Like a computer that is on or off is the same.

So if it isn't mind, what is this separate power supply that determines whether an organism is on or off?

At some point the biology stops working, for instance the heart, leaving the body unable to maintain it’s structure, descending into the stages of death until it begins to decompose.

If we are to create something that is conscious in the way we are, it seems to me that we need something qualitatively different from a computer. — petrichor

Yes. What's missing from current computers is Qualia. 1s and 0s can be processed mathematically, but don't add-up to the quality of consciousness.

My own suspicion is that our consciousness is really just a highly organized form of something that is fundamental. What I mean to say is that basic subjectivity is there everywhere in nature at a very low level. — petrichor

I see that you have thought deeply about the mystery of Consciousness. And your conclusion is similar to mine, that something like the ancient theory of Panpsychism must be involved. As you hastened to point out, that doesn't mean that atoms or single-cell organisms are conscious, but they do "sense" their environment in exchanges of energy ("atoms of experience")

. You could call that "subjectivity" as a loose metaphor, but it wouldn't be anything like the New Age notion, which would attribute the "what it's like" feeling to every particle in the universe.

In my own worldview, I refer to that "something fundamental" as Information. That's why I call my personal theory of everything, Enformationism : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

Suppose you just have primitive Being, or Unity, or whatever, The Undifferentiated. Call it what you like. — petrichor

In my thesis, I call that source of all that is, BEING : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html

Maybe the primordial unity objectifies itself and thereby becomes a subject. — petrichor

For the purposes of distinguishing between the space-time world and the infinite-eternal BEING, I refer to the ultimate source as G*D, but only in a non-humanoid sense. As a form of PanEnDeism, we can imagine that the holistic G*D created our world to serve as something like a mirror. Thus, an undifferentiated BEING could become subject and object. I wouldn't take that metaphor too literally, but it might give us a clue to answer the old "why create an imperfect world?" conundrum.
G*D : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html

And then we wonder how our interiority could possibly "emerge" out of special arrangements of these empty, purely structural, substanceless objects. No wonder there is a mind-body problem! — petrichor

My answer to the Mind/Body problem is to note that both are forms of fundamental Information. We now know that Information is not just mind-stuff, but also material-stuff. Scientists have equated Information with Energy, and Energy with Matter. So, in my thesis the emergence of Mind/Consciousness from Matter/Body is a high-level instance of the Phase Changes that are found throughout Physics. I could go into much more detail, but for now, I'll just leave it as a speculation.
Mind.Body Problem : http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page30.html

information integration, a la Tononi — petrichor

Yes. Holism is essential to my theory of Enformationism

But a computer running a simulation of a brain or whatever, has, in its physical substrate, a very different causal structure, one that probably lacks the kind of intentional content we want it to have when we want it to be conscious in the way that we are. — petrichor

Yes. That's why computers cannot become conscious until they develop a point-of-view (self image) and are able to intend future actions that are not pre-programmed.
.

Thanks! I am surprised someone actually read all that! I regret to dump yet another, even longer one on you, but I can't help myself! I think you'll find it thought-provoking, even if you don't agree with everything. Oh well, even if it doesn't get read, I enjoy clarifying my thoughts in writing. But I would certainly appreciate any feedback, as I might be misleading myself!

I agree with most everything you've said!

I tend to use the term ‘integrated’ rather than ‘organised’. — Possibility

I usually do as well.

The proto-consciousness at the bottom-most level, in my view, is a vague awareness of more than this-here-now, whose only evidence is a one-dimensional transfer of information/energy that is immediately integrated into the system. — Possibility

Sounds close to the mark to me! Maybe the interaction itself and the consequent change in the state of the particle is what is experienced. After all, it is an encounter. What comes to mind is to think that in an interaction, the thing is no longer completely itself. Something of the other thing has entered into it or become part of it. This goes both ways.

Really, it seems to me, for two things to interact, some sort of unity must be involved. Two things cannot remain truly, fundamentally distinct and independent and at the same time interact. They must touch. And for them to touch requires that they are of a common substance. And if they truly touch, they become in some sense continuous with one another.

Alex Rosenberg, in his Atheist's Guide to Reality, page 178, argues that a collection of fermions and bosons cannot be "about" another collection, and that therefore, intentionality (in Brentano's sense), or "aboutness", is impossible. And this intentionality is often seen as a defining feature of consciousness. He is seeing the claim that we have thoughts about or experiences of something else as being a claim that a collection of fermions and bosons can be about another collection.

It seems to me that when thinking about particles, we tend to think of them as being like little rocks floating in true emptiness, little impenetrable things that are truly separate from one another, each one with its own independent existence, self-standing in some sense, or having "own-being". And every interaction, it seems, is imagined to be like billiards balls banging into each other, with nothing of one ever entering into another. But I think this has to be wrong. This would make each particle a distinct substance. And I think Spinoza showed that we can't have multiple substances like that. Two truly independent things with no common substance cannot conceivably interact. It is hard to see how they would even belong to the same space.

And things like billiards balls mislead our intuitions, as the only reason they can bounce off of one another is that they are elastic, and their elasticity is a property that results from the fact that they are composed of many particles held together by forces that allow for a changing shape. Truly elementary particles, the smallest possible things, can have no such parts, and so cannot have anything like elasticity. And they probably don't have anything like a surface.

What Rosenberg says seems to reflect a faulty intuition about particles. It's as if he is thinking that a bag of rocks cannot be about another bag of rocks, or in other words, cannot be "aware" of another bag, which seems intuitively correct. There is just an arrangement of rocks and that's it! But what you said about the "vague awareness of more than this-here-now", I think, speaks to an elementary sort of aboutness of just the sort that we need to make sense of consciousness in a large-scale system.

To understand consciousness, I think we need to understand some very low-level metaphysical matters. How can we have unity in multiplicity? What is interaction, really? What does it mean to touch? Can something be truly one thing and still have structure?

Any description of a system is therefore always a description of the information which a system has about another system, that is to say, the correlation between the two systems. — Carlo Rovelli, ‘Reality is Not What it Seems’

Your Rovelli quote is very interesting. I'll have to read that book. I suspect that he is putting his finger perhaps on just what consciousness is, without saying so. To be aware of something is precisely to be a system with information about another system.

Isn't it the case that all interaction actually involves the two interacting things becoming entangled? And doesn't entanglement involve a situation where it no longer makes sense to treat the parts of the system as separate? They become one thing, no? From Wikipedia:

An entangled system is defined to be one whose quantum state cannot be factored as a product of states of its local constituents; that is to say, they are not individual particles but are an inseparable whole. In entanglement, one constituent cannot be fully described without considering the other(s). The state of a composite system is always expressible as a sum, or superposition, of products of states of local constituents; it is entangled if this sum necessarily has more than one term.

But it is said that entanglement is broken when decoherence occurs. But decoherence, if I understand correctly, just means that the system in question is becoming entangled with the environment or the measuring apparatus.

Isn't it also the case that when one thing interacts with another, it is only then that it itself comes to have a defined state, one that is defined in relation to that of the other? Rovelli seems to say this.

Consider the following situation. There is one astronaut floating in space. There is nothing else in the universe. How fast is she moving? How much kinetic energy is she carrying? It is undefined, right? She can neither be said to be in motion nor to be motionless. But now suppose there are two astronauts. Now we have something! There is relative motion. Suppose the distance between is increasing. The total motion of the whole system of the two is undefined. We can't say that one is still and the other is moving away or that both are moving in opposite directions. All we can say is that each is moving relative to the other. If I am one of them, I know my own velocity (but only with respect to the other) because of my interaction with the other.

And that interaction is key. How do I know the other astronaut is there? Perhaps I have a light, which means that I receive photons that were reflected or emitted from the other body. Gravity is another factor. Each body also emits infrared photons. And so on. The only way I can know about the other is if something from them touches me.

We tend to imagine that when we see something, that there really is some sort of action-at-a-distance. Unreflectively, we think we really see "across" space. But this isn't so. It involves a local interaction in every case. But astronauts are large bodies. And there is opportunity for lots of photons to be emitted, yielding quite a good image of the other, or lots of information.

But what if, instead of astronauts, we have the smallest possible bits of matter, which are discrete and quantized? In this case, there are not many, many interactions as there are in the case of the astronauts. At any given moment, most likely, there are none at all! Particle interactions might be rare! An electron is not like an astronaut. Imagine one astronaut spinning around, firing a machine gun. If the other astronaut is nearby, they'll probably get hit. But the likelihood of a body the size of an electron getting hit is vanishingly small. An electron does not receive a constant shower of photons like a large body might. It doesn't have enough area for that. So basically, it is "in the dark". It doesn't know anything about the other particle. And this being the case, its own state is therefore undefined in the same way that the lone astronaut's was. If I am not interacting with anything else, how am I moving? Where am I?

But when an interaction does happen, suddenly I have a defined state, one defined in relation to the other thing interacted with. At the quantum level, this happens as a discrete, sudden change of state. Suddenly, some uncertainty about my state is reduced in proportion to what I have learned about the other thing.

I think this might be the basic reason why particles have the uncertainty associated with them that is so famous. It is very simply a result of each system's lack of information about the other. But this isn't a case of the other having a well-defined state while I just fail to know everything about it. No! Without this information that each has about the other, that state is simply undefined. The relation is absent and therefore such things as velocity, which is relational, is undefined.

It is important here to consider the consequences of the difference between a quantized, discrete physics with its smallest-possible elements and a continuous, infinitely divisible one. Suppose the latter, continuous case. What if light, instead of coming in discrete chunks, were actually just continuous radiation going out in all directions with a certain intensity? Then, even really, really small particles could conceivably "always see" all other things, no matter how dimly. Now it is no longer there-or-not bullets, but a continuous radiation of energy going out at all angles that inevitably arrives at the receiving body, even if with a very low intensity, no matter how small that body. The relational states of the bodies would therefore always be well-defined. And with infinitely divisible matter and infinite resolution, you could even conceivably have electron-sized astronauts, as you could have complex structure at any scale. A tiny, tiny particle would always be receiving light from all other objects in its light cone. Its position would therefore be "triangulated" always with perfect precision in relation to all those distant objects.

But for the discrete system with smallest-possible elements and energy packets, such continuous well-defined relations are impossible. And many lines of evidence suggest such discreteness in our universe. For one thing, consider that as you go down in scale, there are fewer and fewer unique structures, and they get simpler and simpler. This suggests very strongly that they are composed of smallest-possible things. You'll never find two planets exactly alike because there are so many ways of arranging such a large number of particles. But all electrons are alike. There are fewer unique subatomic particles than there are unique molecules and fewer different molecules than different basketball-sized objects. Smaller things being simpler and fewer in unique forms has always been found to be true. If matter were infinitely divisible, there would be an infinite number of ways to structure it, no matter the scale. You'd likely never see a situation like ours with many identical electrons.

The thing about these discrete interactions is that when no interactions are happening, an electron is necessarily completely blind! Its position and momentum are therefore undefined.

The puzzle to me is the question of how, if such a situation obtains, interactions ever occur at all! How is it determined that two particles actually collide if their positions before the collision are undefined? There must be something to this picture that I am missing. Maybe the problem here is in thinking of the space between as a pure emptiness, which, for such elementary particles, means complete isolation.

Going back to the idea of interactions as involving some kind mutual contact, involvement, internalization, unity, or whatever, I suspect that this is key in something like a bound phenomenal state. There is a very large complex of such interactions that, at least momentarily, there is a unity-in-multiplicity with a shape.

It seems impossible for something to have a shape without being composed of parts. And to have parts seems to mean that in the end, it is decomposable and there is really just a bunch of fundamentally disconnected parts, and these are the only real things. There is the intuition that for something to be a unity, it must be a mereological simple, for which shape seems impossible. And yet, in our conscious states, we find that they are bound. They are unified. There is a unity in multiplicity. And they have a shape. How is this possible? Somehow, it must be the case that multiple things, in their complex of interaction, truly comprise one thing. Maybe this has to do with a complex of basic causal interaction, or touching. For things to truly touch, they must in some sense be united. Is entanglement key here?

I have often thought it curious to realize that nobody has ever seen a photon in flight, "from the side", so to speak. From the side, we see a tennis ball flying through the air only because photons are arriving on our retina that came directly from the tennis ball. Without local photon impacts on the retina, there is no seeing. All photon detections are measurements of an increase in energy somewhere, a jump in an electron's energy level. Never is a photon seen between its source and its destination. If it is detected, that's it, it has arrived. The detection point is its destination, and it has been converted into something else. A photon, in other words, is never seen as a photon. It is always seen only as a loss of energy at the source or a gain in energy at the destination. A photon, for us to see it in flight, would have to be emitting photons!

Further, a photon is traveling at the speed of light. This being the case, according to Einstein's theories, in the frame of something traveling at light speed, length contraction reduces the distance between source and destination to zero! And the elapsed time from the perspective of the photon is also zero! From the photon's point of view, source-emission and destination-absorption are in the same place at the same time. Perhaps there is our unity, our contact! Maybe there is really no such thing as a photon in free space. A figment of our models? Rather, it is maybe the way we represent what is really the direct contact between two electrons. Emission and absorption maybe only appear separated in space and time because of how we are situated relative to the event. Or maybe a photon is what brings two electrons together. Or maybe, even more radically, the two electrons are in some sense the very same electron, at least in the photon's frame.

When a photon from a distant star is absorbed in your retina, we might say that in some small way, the star is actually touching your eye directly! This suggests that our conscious state might literally be a complex of unity-in-multiplicity, a large structure of contact-action that includes everything involved, all the information being integrated. So it isn't just in our heads. The things out in the world that our bodies are interacting with are literally part of that complex, part of that mental state. There are all sorts of interactions happening at once, some between neurons, some between retina and distant star, and so on. And all connected together, they make up a certain informational structure. This is probably what constitutes the complex, bound, qualia-rich mental state.


Here's the kicker though. Ultimately, everything is connected. It is one thing. There is just one big experience going on, one big causal network. Our personal mental states seem locally limited and personal only because the whole complex of information is not integrated in my little brain. Information about the whole universe is not available to my brain. Only a limited number of causal impacts are directed at my brain at any given moment. And my mouth can therefore never report on information that isn't causally antecedent to its movements. Our personal isolation is an illusion that results from the fact that the amount of information about the rest of the universe available to any particular part of the universe at any given time is limited. What is known anywhere is a function of how information is integrated, and what is within the light-cone of what sets an absolute limit. Though at our most fundamental level, we are one, I can't remember your childhood, and so I fail to realize that I am you at the bottom-most level. Even more inaccessible to Petrichor's brain are the memories of a distant alien outside his light cone.

We could put an amnesiac, Bob, in a room with a chalk board and have him record his observations on that board. If we ask him to report what he has seen, he will consult the board to find out. Suppose we move him to another room with another board and show him different things there. Only what he has seen and recorded in that room will he be able to "remember" and report. But that doesn't mean that Bob in room A is a different person than Bob in room B. Our two brains are analogous to Bob in the two rooms. This relates to such things as split-brain experiments where some people are led to the conclusion that the severance of the corpus callosum has resulted in the transformation of one experiential subject into two, since experiments show that one hemisphere can't report observations made only by the other. This does not show that we have two different subjects. It only shows a failure to integrate information. It is possibly quite analogous to Bob in the two rooms or your brain and mine.

There is another reason, which I have gone into elsewhere, to think there is a universal subjectivity at the bottom of things, one belonging to the one substance to which everything belongs. In a nutshell, it is the fact, from your perspective, that you find yourself occupying what would otherwise (if there were no universal subject) have to be seen as an extremely unusual and fortunate perspective, that of a human brain. From an objective perspective, it isn't so surprising when you see that someone wins the lottery. But when you find that you are that someone, you are right to be surprised and to consider yourself fortunate! If there really are different, truly isolated subjects finding themselves being different things, if you find yourself being a human, you have won the lottery of lotteries. Consider all the other 3 pound hunks of matter that find themselves in less ideal circumstances! Most aren't alive!

But if what finds itself in your shoes is the very same subject that finds itself in all shoes, then you shouldn't be surprised to find yourself as a human. It isn't lucky. It's inevitable! You find yourself everywhere. This is the real solution to the whole anthropic principle issue. Fine-tuning is explained.

Also, consider the foolishness of the idea (see my rock comment below) that anything is, in itself, a thing with a definite boundary and identity that excludes most of the universe. There is no magical boundary around your body or brain that makes you separate from everything else. Why are you just a brain and not the whole ecosystem? Why not a galaxy? You are a multiplicity, no? You are more than one neuron! Why does what you are stop at the skull? Or why are you not less? Why not a single quark? And if you think yourself identical with the matter composing your brain, consider that this same matter was once scattered all over in disparate regions of space, some in a carrot, some in a cow, some in the sky, and so on. Were you this same set of particles then, but not all the others that never end up being part of your brain?

You are all of it. It only seems like you aren't because of the local limitations of information access. In this brain, You don't remember being everything else because that information simply isn't part of this brain state.

Consider that you remember your childhood but not your future. Your present self in relation to your future self is like Bob in the two rooms. But strangely, your future self will remember your present self and identify himself with you. Do you identify yourself with him? How is your relation to him any fundamentally different than your relation to your future offspring, or to me, for that matter?


Also, if things are defined relationally, what happens from the perspective of the universe as a whole? What about prior to space and time? Is anything separated? Aren't space and time the very conditions of separation?

We need to remember that a ‘rock’ is a conceptual object to you and me, but not to itself. If you break a rock in half it becomes two rocks, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the rock notices the difference. — Possibility

Oh, I absolutely agree! When I spoke of a rock, I was being sloppy and was just using it as an example of what we think of as a thing, using the intuition of something being there occupying that position. A rock, it seems, represents our most basic intuition of a thing. But really, objects (not in the subject-object relation sense, but in the "this building is a thing" sense) just have to do with the way our minds carve up the world. I don't believe in the reality of objects in this sense. I think Graham Harman is a loony-tune with his object ontology! There are no boundaries out there in the world around particular collections of particles.


As for computers, there are relations and interactions happening for sure. And there is likely a complex of interactions. But I don't think the causal network this involves has anything resembling the structure of the causal network involved in our apprehensions. It isn't integrated in the right way. Imagine our mental state in a moment as being like a big lightning flash of interaction happening in a web-like fashion, a big causal network involving objects and neural firings and all of that. Its shape is a direct result of how the brain is organized, how the body relates to the environment, and so on. Map all the interactions and make a picture of this map. Now imagine, at a given moment, an Intel chip processing some information. Map all the interactions. Much different picture, right? The causal network here has a much different shape, a much, much simpler shape. Not many bits are even being processed at once. It is much less parallel and integrated. And even if it is simulating a brain, the causal network of the computer itself has a far different structure than that of a brain, and its this substantial causal network that matters. Actual energy exchanges, not virtual ones.

But I have read that this has been achieved on a small and limited scale, where a computer simulation was capable of demonstrating a limited social ‘relationship’ with a ‘pet’. It was an interesting read (I’ll try to locate it). — Possibility

I am very skeptical. Any "demonstration" only involves showing us behavior. We can never know for sure what it's like, if anything, for the computer, no matter how human-like the behavior looks. It probably just amounts to the execution of a lot of if-then conditionals.

Technically, I agree. But I don’t find this helpful as an either-or dichotomy, as if the metaphysical is not physical and vice versa. — Possibility

For clarity, I define Physical and Meta-Physical according to my personal interpretation of Aristotle (see Glossary). I also try to make a clear distinction between Real and Ideal. They are all various forms of universal Information, but for the purposes of dialog we must be more specific.
Meta-Physics : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html

Furthermore we assume that, whatever 'mind' is, it's a product of evolution — Wayfarer

I would say that mind as it is structured in us is shaped by evolution. But bare consciousness at its most fundamental level a product of evolution? No. You can't take purely objective, utterly non-conscious things, pure surfaces, and then put them together in a certain way and somehow, like rubbing Aladdin's lamp, get this magical interiority, this subjectivity, as a product, which would be an effect utterly unlike its cause.

But I don't know if I agree that objects 'truly are' at all - this is one of the reasons why rocks (as paradigmatic 'objects') are denoted as being 'things' rather than 'beings'. — Wayfarer

I have a tendency to agree here. All things are defined in relation and are partial. But the ultimate reality is just Wholeness, which in my view, must be formless and omnisymmetric. As a whole, Being is unrelated.

As for your Schopenhauer quote, it is interesting, and I encountered it recently as I am now in the process of reading The World as Will and Idea. I think in a lot of ways Schopenhauer had basically the right view. Most importantly, he saw the truth that we are all fundamentally expressions of one thing. Individuality is a fiction. But I see problems in some aspects of his system.

Perhaps 'one' not in a numerical sense, but a qualitative sense, i.e. all of the one kind, not all part of the one thing. — Wayfarer

I disagree. We are not simply both of the same kind only as two donuts are of the same kind or even of the same substance like two candles made from the same block of wax. No, the very self that looks out from behind my eyes (figuratively, not a humunculus in a cartesian theater) is that very same self that looks out from behind your eyes. I think this becomes obvious with sufficient reflection on the problems of personal identity and indexicality. I could go into that at length if anyone is interested, but I've probably exceed attention spans already.

It isn't that petrichor is Wayfarer, but rather that that which finds itself having the experience of being petrichor is also that very same one that finds itself having the experience of being Wayfarer. And it isn't anything like a soul transmigrating from body to body or even being multi-located. It is simply that there is only one ground of being, one root of the tree. That basic I-am-ness is that which is everything and every individual thing. When you point your inward glance toward the ultimate 'I' in you, the fundamental witness, and I do the same, we are both pointing at the same 'I'. We are both touching ground, so to speak, where we are no longer distinct. There, we are prior to all differentiation.

As Heidegger pointed out with his "ontological difference", Being is not a being among beings, not a thing in the world among other things. No, it is underneath them all, everywhere present to itself. Really, it is probably even better to locate the ground (or groundlessness?) I am talking about prior to being and non-being, as such a distinction only seemingly belongs to states of affairs in the world, but not to the world as a whole considered in its ultimate, bottom-most essence. Words just fail here. Every way of trying to talk about it shows itself as problematic.

I agree with most everything you've said. It seems we are mostly on the same page.

Yes. What's missing from current computers is Qualia. 1s and 0s can be processed mathematically, but don't add-up to the quality of consciousness. — Gnomon

I don't know if qualia is actually missing. I just think that, though being a modification of the same underlying substance, it must be quite different in structure. The thing about the 1s and 0s is that these are meanings that we assign to the computer's activities. Consider that we could decide for our purposes that a big wooden see-saw will represent a NOT gate. When one side is up, that's a 1. When a side is down, it's a 0. We can then designate one side as the input and the other as the output. Now, push your side down. Your input is a 0. The output returned by the see-saw is a 1. This is a very simple computer! It just inverts the input! But in the see-saw in itself, there is no such 0 or 1. The see-saw doesn't know what its orientation represents to us. Our computers are just like complex microscopic arrangements of such see-saws. All the meaning ascribed to their output is assigned by us. We use computers to help us think. It is like writing on paper. In the things-in-themselves, there is no grocery list on the page. That's only there for us. We represent groceries with marks on a page. Those marks are not in themselves about the groceries. In reality, there are bits of carbon located on a mass of cellulose. Well, even that is a very high-level description with all sorts of human meanings and carvings-up that aren't really there.

We might use a bunch of 1s and 0s to represent a little Italian man jumping on mushrooms and turtles, but what's there in reality is the actual physical arrangement of particles and their interactions. There is indeed a causal structure there. But its form has nothing to do with Mario. It doesn't know anything about Mario. Only we do. But the causal structure in the physical system there might well involve qualia. There might be a mental state associated with it. But it would have a form quite unlike anything we are familiar with. And it would be in no position to report to us what it is like. It isn't even in a condition to reflect on its state. And really, it is mostly serial processing and so the causal state is very simple. Ever seen what a Turing machine basically is? It can do any computation. Here is a wooden one:

https://youtu.be/vo8izCKHiF0

Is that machine aware of what the 1s and 0s represent? Does it know if they constitute a digital image? Are the 1s and 0s represented themselves aware of anything? Is the digital image represented by them itself aware of itself? No, no, no, and no.

The important point is that the form of the experience wouldn't be a function of what is (to us) represented by the 1s and 0s, but rather of the causal structure of the bottom-level underlying substantial physical system, the complex of all the elementary interactions.

Yes. What's missing from current computers is Qualia. 1s and 0s can be processed mathematically, but don't add-up to the quality of consciousness. — Gnomon

I don't know if qualia is actually missing. I just think that, though being a modification of the same underlying substance, it must be quite different in structure. — petrichor

Yes. The underlying "substance" is generic Information. Digital information is Quantitative (discontinuous), while Analog information is Qualitative (continuous). Computers process 1s & 0s as abstractions that never occur in reality. But humans process information in terms of values between Zero and 100%. That's the insight of Bayesian logic : binary logic is two-valued (absolute, either/or), while human logic is multi-valued (probabilistic; both/and). That's why programmers are now experimenting with Analog computers that use Bayesian logic to approximate human reasoning (inference). Such calculations allow freedom, but also errors. The role-playing robots in WestWorld are supposed to have analog brains, which makes them eerily life-like, but also unpredictable.

Bayesian Inference : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
BothAnd Principle : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html

Are the 1s and 0s represented themselves aware of anything? Is the digital image represented by them itself aware of itself? No, no, no, and no. — petrichor

No. Digital processing is unlikely to be aware of anything apart from voltage fluctuations. But Analog processing might be the first step toward self-awareness. Simple awareness is an inference from incoming information that something is out there. Higher level awareness (self-consciousness) might require more detailed inference that includes self-reference.

That’s quite a missive. I read it because I can relate to these thoughts - I’ve certainly thrown similar ones around over the last few years, so in many ways I understand where you’re coming from. I’ll reply in stages, if that’s okay.

Your Rovelli quote is very interesting. I'll have to read that book. I suspect that he is putting his finger perhaps on just what consciousness is, without saying so. To be aware of something is precisely to be a system with information about another system. — petrichor

Rovelli is a physicist who works on Loop Quantum Theory, so it’s no surprise that he’s deliberately avoiding discussions of consciousness. But Chapter 12: Information in the book certainly sheds light on how information acquired by a system could be explored as a kind of proto-consciousness (even if he refuses to say so). If we think of this vague awareness as one-dimensional, and then look at chemical reactions (ie. interactions with a duration forming a system in itself) as having the capacity for an integrated two-dimensional awareness, then I think the evolution of consciousness starts to take shape.

The puzzle to me is the question of how, if such a situation obtains, interactions ever occur at all! How is it determined that two particles actually collide if their positions before the collision are undefined? There must be something to this picture that I am missing. Maybe the problem here is in thinking of the space between as a pure emptiness, which, for such elementary particles, means complete isolation. — petrichor

You’re looking at space as something that already exists in and of itself. I’m thinking this is the error. When we talk about colliding particles in space, only we know that the space is there. To the particles, there is no space. There is not even the collision. There is only the information.

I have often thought it curious to realize that nobody has ever seen a photon in flight, "from the side", so to speak. From the side, we see a tennis ball flying through the air only because photons are arriving on our retina that came directly from the tennis ball. Without local photon impacts on the retina, there is no seeing. All photon detections are measurements of an increase in energy somewhere, a jump in an electron's energy level. Never is a photon seen between its source and its destination. If it is detected, that's it, it has arrived. The detection point is its destination, and it has been converted into something else. A photon, in other words, is never seen as a photon. It is always seen only as a loss of energy at the source or a gain in energy at the destination. A photon, for us to see it in flight, would have to be emitting photons! — petrichor

Understanding a photon’s ‘behaviour’ involves the fifth-dimensional aspect I was talking about before. We understand that there are three dimensions of space, plus the fourth dimension of time. We think of this as physical reality, because it can be observed/measured. A photon messes with this because we have evidence that a photon exists as an event - that is, we can detect a change in energy and even predict how this energy will manifest - yet it has no defined trajectory through spacetime. It has a probability, or a potentiality. Between the source and measurement, a photon exists in a range of potential locations, even though no time has lapsed. Furthermore, it’s only because we have narrowed down the source and the basic trajectory (ie. through the slit) that we can even calculate a probability with any confidence. A photon without such limitations could potentially be anywhere at any time.

A photon demonstrates the five-dimensional aspect of reality, as well as our capacity to interact with it. The photon exists regardless of its position in spacetime, and we ‘know’ it exists as a relationship between a measurable source and a measurable detection point in spacetime. But when we observe a photon mid-flight, it decoheres into a particle with a specific trajectory.

So if we go back to the colliding particles that were previously undefined, and see them as colliding photons instead, then spacetime is irrelevant. It is the collision or interaction itself that creates spacetime as a relation between the resulting particles.

When we think we see an object, we are not actually directly experiencing it, but instead looking at an image that our mind creates. Thus, we are not directly experiencing the object. — Tzeentch

How do you know that to be the case?

If we saw directly through the eyes we'd be seeing everything upside down.

Upside down in relation to what?

In matters like these it is difficult to speak of "knowing", but my reasoning is simple. Even without or with closed eyes we can still see images. When we dream, for example. The eyes provide input for the mind, but are themselves incapable of producing images.

As far as I know, physiology supports this.

As far as I know, physiology supports this. — Tzeentch

But physiology, by your own argument, is only based on images that the mind creates. In any case I don't agree that physiology tells us anything at all about the mind.

I'd like to see what a brain in a jar would be like. Taken from a normal person whilst alive. If you had just a brain, without ears and eyes, no senses at all but alive all the same. I think it would float there completely void of thought. It could respond to stimuli but with no incoming signals from any body part, no communication between brain parts would take place. Frozen in thought. So it would prove the uselessness of one without the other.

If you saw the living brain, separated from all inputs and it was void of all activity, would that assure you of a mind body duality to consciousness? It would me.

Further in the future it will be possible to upload a mind into a computer. At that point I think all this will become clear. The uploaded personality would begin acting different instantaneously.

As Heidegger pointed out with his "ontological difference", Being is not a being among beings, not a thing in the world among other things. No, it is underneath them all, everywhere present to itself. Really, it is probably even better to locate the ground (or groundlessness?) I am talking about prior to being and non-being, as such a distinction only seemingly belongs to states of affairs in the world, but not to the world as a whole considered in its ultimate, bottom-most essence. Words just fail here. Every way of trying to talk about it shows itself as problematic. — petrichor

Your posts are excellent.

I can't see how this conception is worlds apart from Christian mystical theology.

It is actually impossible to imagine a universe in which there is, say, only one hydrogen atom. That unique thing has to have someone else imagining it. Existence requires existing among other existents, a fundamental dependency of relation. If God also exists, then God would be just another fact of the universe, relative to other existents and included in that fundamental dependency of relation. — Pierre Whalon

"God does not exist" (a title which does not mean exactly what it seems to mean!)

Mind/body distinction is too old fashioned, because the situation is more complicated than we perceive. I distinguish between the conscious picture of reality that resides in our heads and has all parts as representations and the unconscious real state of things beyond representation, but functioning as the source of it. Consciousness has the world as a representation, the body as a representation, the mind as a representation and feeling as a representation. Unconsciousness has the world as a reality, the body as a reality, the mind as a reality and feeling as a reality. So everything inside conscious world has its double and is 'dualistic', representation and its real source. So we have only a distant idea of what we really are beyond our perception. Our bodies are only body-pictures and minds are only mind-pictures (representations).

Here's the kicker though. Ultimately, everything is connected. It is one thing. There is just one big experience going on, one big causal network. — petrichor

We may think of everything as ‘connected’, but some of it is only potentially connected, so we cannot assume a causal network at all. We also need to be careful how we use the term ‘thing’ here in saying that everything is “one big thing”. It isn’t ‘one big entangled physical system’ unless everything in it has interacted at some point in spacetime. We can be fairly certain this has not occurred, and is unlikely to happen in the future, given that the universe (from a 4D perspective) is expanding - everything is moving further away from each other. So this ‘connection’ we are talking about must exist irrespective of spacetime.

Our personal mental states seem locally limited and personal only because the whole complex of information is not integrated in my little brain. Information about the whole universe is not available to my brain. Only a limited number of causal impacts are directed at my brain at any given moment. And my mouth can therefore never report on information that isn't causally antecedent to its movements. Our personal isolation is an illusion that results from the fact that the amount of information about the rest of the universe available to any particular part of the universe at any given time is limited. What is known anywhere is a function of how information is integrated, and what is within the light-cone of what sets an absolute limit. Though at our most fundamental level, we are one, I can't remember your childhood, and so I fail to realize that I am you at the bottom-most level. Even more inaccessible to Petrichor's brain are the memories of a distant alien outside his light cone. — petrichor

I can’t remember your childhood - certainly not the way you do. But you can tell me about your experiences. The information you give me in this manner is limited, sure, but it’s more than I had before - and it’s more than you’d be able to pass on to, say, a chimpanzee. So I can connect to you and to your childhood - acquiring and integrating information via very different connections to those that enabled you to acquire the same information. It’s possible that I may not have even been born when your childhood occurred (I don’t know your age, this is hypothetical), making it impossible for me to ever actually experience your childhood myself. Yet I can relate to your experiences in such a way that enables me to integrate some information from those experiences as if I had experienced it myself. We ultimately derive from the same origin, but personally I think it’s more like ‘I am you’ at the highest levels of existence, rather than at the bottom-most level.

Really, it seems to me, for two things to interact, some sort of unity must be involved. Two things cannot remain truly, fundamentally distinct and independent and at the same time interact. They must touch. And for them to touch requires that they are of a common substance. And if they truly touch, they become in some sense continuous with one another. — petrichor

Yes. The unity of two or more things requires a relationship of some kind. But they don't always have to "touch" physically. The may also have a meta-physical relationship. For example, a group of stars. lightyears apart from each other may form a constellation from our perspective on earth. But that geometrical relationship is not based on the physics of energy exchange. Except for minimal light energy and gravity, there is no touching. Their connection is in the mind of the beholder. And they are known only as pin-point abstractions. That mathematical relationship is meaningful to humans for reasons that have little to do with the stars themselves. They are perceived as a system due to their participation in a common "substance" : Information, (EnFormAction) which touches everything.

Likewise, the mind is related to the body, not because of neurons touching ideas, but because they both participate in the holistic mind/body system. Is that spooky, or what?

Ultimately, everything is connected. It is one thing. There is just one big experience going on, one big causal network. — petrichor

The Mind of G*D : the First and Final Cause. That concept boggles my mind, so I try to remain agnostic. But it seems to follow logically from what we know about how information works in the real world.