I take a particularly rigorous path in approaching the concept of
consciousness; I'll share below a brief abstract of my current
speculative position.
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The Riemann Observer; Consciousness Coupled to Curvature
I believe that the leap of imagination required to grasp the concept of
"physical consciousness," is a leap made in two conceptual stages; the
first requires that we understand "conscious events" in a 4-dimensional
spacetime, as comprising a minimum of two events, defined with no metric
imposed. For the present, we'll call one event "detection," and the
other "perception."
The second, and most important stage, demands that we understand that
the relative accelerations of the seperation between the geodesics
corresponding to arbitrary detection and perception events, are not
governed by the density of mass-energy, p. We must instead consider
relative acceleration as being governed by the Riemann curvature of
spacetime [Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, 1973].
As a consequence of this reasoning, I argue that a "conscious event"
should be defined as an object whose geometry is the interval between a
"detection event" and a "perceptual event." Curvature is characterized
by the Riemann curvature tensor, which is defined by the relative
acceleration of nearby geodesics. In the Newtonian limit (i.e., weak
gravitational fields, low velocities and small pressures), Riemann can
be given as,
R = G,
where G is the Einstein tensor.
It follows from this that consciousness can be defined as changes in the
interval geometry; specifically, the anisotropic component of curvature
leftover from conscious events, propogated according to the Einstein
field equation, which, in the absence of all coordinates, can be given
in the limit as,
G = 8(pi)T = 0 = no matter, 0 curvature;
G = 8(pi)T = 4(pi)p = matter, curvature <> 0,
where T is the stress-energy tensor, and p is the density of
mass-energy.
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"I'm not sure..." - Werner Heisenberg
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Best regards to all,
Mark Jonathan Horn
