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Have you ever wondered what the nature of thought, will and consciousness is?
Imagine yourself lying on a warm green meadow, dozing in the sunlight. You are inert, your mind blank. And then, as an experiment, you bend your right arm at the elbow and lift it in the air. What has just happened?
It was pulled into the air by your tendons, which can be explained by Newtonian physics. The tendon was pulled by at least one contracting muscle, which can be explained by chemistry and molecular physics. The muscle was activated by a nerve impulse, which went down a nerve from your brain. The impulse can be explained by physics as well.
But what had happened in the brain? Can we find out what caused this impulse? Can we work backwards, following the activations of different neurons? Perhaps we can. But can we work forwards? Can we pick a complete physical snapshot of the human body and find out that he will lift his right forearm in 4.34 seconds? Do we need a snapshot of a sphere that is 8.68 lightseconds wide to do that? If yes, can we enlarge that sphere (or ball, for you geometry nazis) to 2 lightdays wide and find out what the man will be doing in 24 hours? If we can, and in a Newtonian world (or even in an Einsteinian world) we can, then we've proven that thoughts have a physical nature.
But what about free will? If we can calculate that, does the man in question have any will at all? He doesn't control his body, physics control his body and his every step can be predicted. Is a man a criminal if he kills another man, then? He didn't *choose* to kill him, the impulses in his brain worked in that way. It was a natural sequence of events.
What is consciousness, then? Can we really set us and the world apart if our mind is completely governed by physics? Is our mind a "Chinese room", a very complex set of rules for processing input into output? Most people prefer to think that it's something bigger, that it can generate output without any input, but is it so? Sensory deprivation experiments demonstrate that people start going insane rather quickly when deprived of any input. Maybe it is simply a "Chinese dormitory", several interlinked rooms that can talk to each other and generate output until they run out of things to talk about? This can take a long time, but it cannot continue forever.
However, we also know that our world is not Newtonian. Its minute building blocks are both waves and particles that are governed by the uncertainty principle. We cannot tell what state they are in until we or something observes them. Of course, your arm is a macroscopic entity, and it's not raised by collapsing the wave functions of its every atom. But what about that ion that started the nerve impulse to raise the arm? It could've done something completely different, it could've found itself in a different neuron, so the arm wouldn't have been raised. But who or what collapsed it? Or rather, was the collapse a randomized event?
Well, there are a lot of observers in your brain, billions and trillions of atoms, but if the collapse was random, this means your whole thought process is just a random walk through the states of a multitude of wave functions.
Lick your upper lip.
Did you, or did you not just lick your lip? In any case, you've read the sentence, understood it, and then made a conscious decision to either lick your lip or not. But what made you decide? What was different in your brain? Was it random? Can you force yourself to lick a lip now? Is it still random?
Well, we cannot prove if the decisions are random or not, as we can see and are the result of the single outcome that did happen. Whether you licked your lip or not, that decision was the most logical and natural, because it was the one that did happen. However, what if the wave function was collapsed by our will? I don't know how, but what if that's what consciousness is? Being able to collapse the wave functions of your nerve impulses, creating thoughts. Picking one future out of many possible and not waiting for it to happen.
But where does this will, this consciousness reside? Do all living animals have it? Or are they merely more or less complex "Chinese dormitories"? Is it possible to upload your brain, your mind, your consciousness into a machine? Will it be able to collapse the electrons running along the circuits? Or will you turn into another non-sentient being, picking correct Chinese symbols according to a long set of rules? What if that computer is a huge difference engine, something utterly macroscopic, where there are no snowflakes starting avalanches? Does the hardware affect the software? Will it be noticeable to the others that the new mind is not conscious? He might still argue that it is. It's thought process will be deterministic, but add an RNG into the simulation software, and it no longer is. Can you tell from the outside if there's consciousness inside? Can you *prove* it?
Or maybe it's all a load of bull, and conscousness *is* a physical phenomenon? Maybe it *is* a "Chinese room", maybe it *is* a very complex set of rules from processing input into output with some quantum unpredictability thrown in? But who's me, then? I know that at least one consciousness does exist in this world, mine, and I don't feel like I cannot control my thoughts, that they are either predetermined or random. Am I wrong?
Imagine yourself lying on a warm green meadow, dozing in the sunlight. You are inert, your mind blank. And then, as an experiment, you bend your right arm at the elbow and lift it in the air. What has just happened?
It was pulled into the air by your tendons, which can be explained by Newtonian physics. The tendon was pulled by at least one contracting muscle, which can be explained by chemistry and molecular physics. The muscle was activated by a nerve impulse, which went down a nerve from your brain. The impulse can be explained by physics as well.
But what had happened in the brain? Can we find out what caused this impulse? Can we work backwards, following the activations of different neurons? Perhaps we can. But can we work forwards? Can we pick a complete physical snapshot of the human body and find out that he will lift his right forearm in 4.34 seconds? Do we need a snapshot of a sphere that is 8.68 lightseconds wide to do that? If yes, can we enlarge that sphere (or ball, for you geometry nazis) to 2 lightdays wide and find out what the man will be doing in 24 hours? If we can, and in a Newtonian world (or even in an Einsteinian world) we can, then we've proven that thoughts have a physical nature.
But what about free will? If we can calculate that, does the man in question have any will at all? He doesn't control his body, physics control his body and his every step can be predicted. Is a man a criminal if he kills another man, then? He didn't *choose* to kill him, the impulses in his brain worked in that way. It was a natural sequence of events.
What is consciousness, then? Can we really set us and the world apart if our mind is completely governed by physics? Is our mind a "Chinese room", a very complex set of rules for processing input into output? Most people prefer to think that it's something bigger, that it can generate output without any input, but is it so? Sensory deprivation experiments demonstrate that people start going insane rather quickly when deprived of any input. Maybe it is simply a "Chinese dormitory", several interlinked rooms that can talk to each other and generate output until they run out of things to talk about? This can take a long time, but it cannot continue forever.
However, we also know that our world is not Newtonian. Its minute building blocks are both waves and particles that are governed by the uncertainty principle. We cannot tell what state they are in until we or something observes them. Of course, your arm is a macroscopic entity, and it's not raised by collapsing the wave functions of its every atom. But what about that ion that started the nerve impulse to raise the arm? It could've done something completely different, it could've found itself in a different neuron, so the arm wouldn't have been raised. But who or what collapsed it? Or rather, was the collapse a randomized event?
Well, there are a lot of observers in your brain, billions and trillions of atoms, but if the collapse was random, this means your whole thought process is just a random walk through the states of a multitude of wave functions.
Lick your upper lip.
Did you, or did you not just lick your lip? In any case, you've read the sentence, understood it, and then made a conscious decision to either lick your lip or not. But what made you decide? What was different in your brain? Was it random? Can you force yourself to lick a lip now? Is it still random?
Well, we cannot prove if the decisions are random or not, as we can see and are the result of the single outcome that did happen. Whether you licked your lip or not, that decision was the most logical and natural, because it was the one that did happen. However, what if the wave function was collapsed by our will? I don't know how, but what if that's what consciousness is? Being able to collapse the wave functions of your nerve impulses, creating thoughts. Picking one future out of many possible and not waiting for it to happen.
But where does this will, this consciousness reside? Do all living animals have it? Or are they merely more or less complex "Chinese dormitories"? Is it possible to upload your brain, your mind, your consciousness into a machine? Will it be able to collapse the electrons running along the circuits? Or will you turn into another non-sentient being, picking correct Chinese symbols according to a long set of rules? What if that computer is a huge difference engine, something utterly macroscopic, where there are no snowflakes starting avalanches? Does the hardware affect the software? Will it be noticeable to the others that the new mind is not conscious? He might still argue that it is. It's thought process will be deterministic, but add an RNG into the simulation software, and it no longer is. Can you tell from the outside if there's consciousness inside? Can you *prove* it?
Or maybe it's all a load of bull, and conscousness *is* a physical phenomenon? Maybe it *is* a "Chinese room", maybe it *is* a very complex set of rules from processing input into output with some quantum unpredictability thrown in? But who's me, then? I know that at least one consciousness does exist in this world, mine, and I don't feel like I cannot control my thoughts, that they are either predetermined or random. Am I wrong?
@ Krill's perfectly unfortunate timing.
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