Consciousness and Reality

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Jump of the nearest high cliff without a chute and tell yourself it is all an illusion. Are you up to that challenge?
ruveyn

The bolded is a great point, R.
I've always said that we 'are' ( existent) or are actualized( conscious) at the end those firing neurons. And how could it be otherwise? It not, then it becomes a necessity to the invoking of some sort of mysterious spiritual life force that directs this "firing." Like an invisible 'soul" pushing down(typing ) on the keyboard buttons, directing our bodies and "mind" in some particular course.

There is evidence that we do not consciously decide, but we become consciously aware of that decision or that we have decided -- subconsciously, there is a delay or time lag before we "act."

Grebels, I have read several of Penrose's books, and the Emperor's new mind made a deep impression on me.
The danger as I see it of starting to think too much about these things without having the tools to get every step right is that we very easily end up using bad understanding of quantum physics to back up weakly formed ideas about something we don't understand, and then we try to apply it to our perceived experience.

What I got from Penrose was, first of all, a solid and very well structured history of human knowledge.
I have another book by him which attempts to be exactly that: The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. Whoa. Heavy stuff.
In my understanding the Emperor book made an extremely good case of showing that because Gödel was right, and if the human consciousness, or the mind, or soul, or whatever you choose to call it can be interpreted as a sufficiently complex formal system, it is not possible to describe that mind/soul/consciousness fully within the system (which is us).
Not only do we not know enough about how the mind works to understand it, we can never completely understand it.

The danger, or the problem, of reading these popularizations of deep, heavy ideas, is that not only are most of us not capable of understanding even the simplest implications of them, but we tend to latch on to bits and pieces of them that we think we understand and apply them where they don't belong.

In my (limited) understanding of Penrose, what he was saying was that not only do we lack some fundamental understanding of the universe to describe the mind sufficiently, but we might very well never be able to achieve an understanding deep and thorough enough to be able to create any form of believable artificial intelligence. And that's all. No implications on religious issues, no new age quantum interconnectivity, no "what the bleep do we know" sh**. We will not be able to build a robot that thinks like us. That was his point, if I understood the book. The important implications are in the field of AI, not newage or religion.


His latest one was super interesting, but no serious scientist will discuss it until he publishes that CCC theory in the proper scientific manner and opens it up for peer review. I was taken by his arguments. But I am not a cosmologist. I'm just a reader of books I can buy at airports.

Newtonian physics succeeded a great deal until we discovered there was more than what it explained.

If people knew exactly what was going on in their heads, I think for one, the mental health industry would be a lot different.

If people knew exactly what was going on in their heads, I think for one, the mental health industry would be a lot different.

The danger, or the problem, of reading these popularizations of deep, heavy ideas, is that not only are most of us not capable of understanding even the simplest implications of them, but we tend to latch on to bits and pieces of them that we think we understand and apply them where they don't belong.

There is no such thing as "mental health" because there is no such thing as mind. There is only brains and glands. To restate your point, people understood properly the workings of the human body, then the health industry would be a lot different.

ruveyn

There's no such things as "human bodies" because there is no such thing as matter. There is only vibrating energy and aether. To restate your point, people understood properly the workings of the physical work, then they'd accidently the whole thing.

EDIT:I really had to hold back with my autism and theory of mind joke.

There's no such things as "human bodies" because there is no such thing as matter. There is only vibrating energy and aether. To restate your point, people understood properly the workings of the physical work, then they'd accidently the whole thing.

EDIT:I really had to hold back with my autism and theory of mind joke.

You might be right in some technical sense. String Theory could be described in that way. As long as the "reality" as we perceive it (here between the micro sized environment at the sub-atomic scale and the macro sized environment between the stars) responds to us in a consistent way, I will continue to act as if it were real. Otherwise, no one could get out of bed to interact with our perceived reality. As Richard Dawkins points out, it is the only "reality" that we evolved to be able to relate to.

I have a suspicion that it's stranger than that. So strange that it could turn the insane sane and vice-versa.