Matt Jones wrote:
> To say that we need something like a unified theory of physics before
> contemplating theories of consciousness just isn't realistic. That's
> not how classical physics arose, it's not how statistical mechanics
> arose, it's not how relativity arose (close, though), it's not how
> quantum electrodynamics or chromodynamics arose, it's not how modern
> evolutionary or molecular biology arose, it's not how psychology
> arose, etc etc etc.
>> It's just not how people do science. They start with what they -do-
> know, and speculate about things they -don't- know.
>> Cheers,
>> Matt
Matt -
I'm not going to disagree, but perhaps a representation of a point
omitted would be useful, where I wrote:
"Circumstantially it would appear that, ahead of such superunification
(i.e., unification of all five forces), defining consciousness in
physically meaningful terms may be too difficult. On the other hand,
one could also suggest that ahead of defining consciousness,
superunification may not be possible..."
My intent was to underscore the possible concurrency of acheiving
superunification in theoretical physics, and a theory of consciousness,
and what connections might exist between the models. I also wished to
offer up a choice, and not necessarily -the- choice; given that
contemporary science generally believes that a unified single model of
physics is in our (hopefully near) future, either it will precede a
physical theory of consciousness -- perhaps because consciousness cannot
be fully understood without such superunification -- or quite the
opposite, i.e., a physical theory of consciousness will precede a
complete cosmology, because a "theory of everything" requires first a
complete theory of the observer. Yet another possibility may be that
there is no connection between physics and consciousness at all, and
defining the observer's place in the physical world will remain a
philosophical question long after quantum gravity and wormholes become
old points of fact.
To my mind, science gets done by a progressive addition of new models
that are well supported by previous models which stand the test of the
best contemporary empirical methods, models ultimately accommodated to
signigicant accuracy by new, and proportionately accurate, observations.
It's as true now as it was 150 years ago, or 1150 years ago. I don't
think my statements contradict the fact that we, as those in the past,
have no detailed knowledge now of what theoretical and empirical
constructs -will- be like in the future, or whether new scientific
programmes will be solutions to the problems we now consider, and those
likely to accumulate while we're thinking about all this.
Implicit, and not to be forgotten, is the self-referential nature of the
observer defining the observer. It might be an absurd enterprise,
afterall, but we hope not. Note that the observer's theoretical status
changed significantly with the acceptance of Einstein, Planck and
quantum theory, so that now the observer defining the observer might
just make more sense physically than it did a century ago, and maybe the
observer defining the observer is an evolutionary event of some note
within the quarternary. But there is still something that appears to
me as -too- recursive in contemporary theoretical and empirical
approaches to evolutionary psychology and consciousness, and though a
quantum-mechanical basis is often presented as a best choice, the wave
function of a neuron is still an open research question, because of the
hopeless complexity of solving the problem of initial boundary
conditions. So is quantum-mechanical still a best choice? I really
don't know, but I suspect someone will eventually come up with a trick
or tool to make reasonable large-scale approximations, of single neurons
and even whole brain states, possible.
Best regards,
mjh
