"...I would not be satisfied..."
That's the judge that really matters to you. May you always look yourself in the mirror and see a man you respect.
Joyeux Noel!
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"...I would not be satisfied..."
That's the judge that really matters to you. May you always look yourself in the mirror and see a man you respect.
Joyeux Noel!
Thanks for passing by! I remember some interesting discussions that we had back in the days!
Happy new year to you and yours!
I am glad you were intrigued enough to remember. I cherish the useful criticism I gained by your generous interactions. Something I can perhaps intrigue you again with is the epiphany I recently had regarding consciousness. Because clairvoyance and precognition are statistically quantifiable, these properties of consciousness demonstrably exist, yet enable information to exceed the speed of light. I am struck that consciousness therefore isn't bound by the laws of physics, and appears to be something external to our physical universe - yet we experience it in the universe. This would explain why we can't actually directly detect consciousness, but only indirectly by observing the volitional actions of creatures able to demonstrate conscious decisions, such as single celled creatures learning to run a maze to get to food, which also shows that consciousness isn't created in brains, because single celled creatures don't have brains.
Recently I learned of the research of Michael Levin, whom has studied bioelectrical intercellular communications, and learned to interfere with those communications in ways that affect the physiological growth of multicellular organisms. He was able to induce limb regeneration in frogs, for example, despite frogs not doing so. He also showed that cancers disconnect from this bioelectrical communications network, and then proceed to proliferate a network of cancerous cells. He demonstrated that by restoring their connection to the network they disconnected from, their unchecked proliferation ceased. In doing this he did not correct any defects in the cancerous cells, or otherwise treat their faults.
I hope you find this as fascinating as I do, to good effect.
Happy New Year!
Hmmm, this lies quite far from my area of expertise. Therefore, I won't be able to comment a lot. Sorry.
As a physicist, I tend to be very cautious with concepts like consciousness, especially when they are framed in ways that seem to conflict with well-tested principles such as causality or relativity. Claims involving super-luminal information transfer, in particular, would require solid and reproducible evidence as they would fundamentally challenge a large body of established results. That being said, I do find work like Michael Levin’s (which I do not know much so that I had to check online) interesting. From what I have seen, it appears to remain grounded in measurable mechanisms even if some interpretations may go further than what the data strictly support.
For me, at the end the key issue is how to clearly define what we mean by 'consciousness' and how to design experiments that can isolate it from any other physical processes.
It is a conundrum indeed to design experiments quantifying something we can't even detect, as researchers into dark energy and matter surely lament. Just as they indirectly have evidence in the motions of the heavens, researchers into consciousness have only indirect evidence to go by. You well point out what we mean by consciousness is a major hurdle to such experiments, demonstrating we know so little our language but poorly identifies what we are discussing. Studies of precognition are hampered by the inability to create reproducibility, limited to case studies, far from the gold standard of research.
It is indeed not your specialty, but I thought you might find it interesting, as we wonder from time to time what we really are.