Say, let’s admit consciousness is the result of a physical process.
Then say this process only goes “forward” when our time coordinate increases. Just like an egg gets cooked when it’s temperature coordinate increases, but it doesn’t get more or less cooked when it’s temperature coordinate decreases.
This would mean that going back in time doesn’t result in any perceptible change, since your consciousness hasn’t evolved from it’s “former” state.
Thus making it possible for us to be travelling through plenty of dimensions in varied directions, only ever experiencing the brief times when you happen to be moving in increasing time. Or whatever combination of movement along varied dimensions makes it possible for you to be conscious.
TLDR: i need to take shorter showers
Sorry, my bad - wrong thread.
But if it’s not physical - what else could it be? Are you implying some magic that follows no laws and isn’t based on anything that can be measured or modeled?
No. No one is suggesting that it’s magic. One popular idea is that consciousness is an irreducible and fundamental (and, crucially, nonphysical) constituent of the universe. It must still follow laws even if this was the case, because it works with such regularity in our day-to-day lives (certain wavelengths of light reliably produce the same colour experiences, etc) which wouldn’t be the case if there were no laws at play.
An analogy can be made here to electromagnetism. For a while it was thought that electricity and magnetism could be reduced to other physical forces. We now know that’s not true. Electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces of nature. Its irreducible. Similarly: it was thought for a time that consciousness could be reduced to the physical. A growing number of researchers are now seeing that this can’t be done, so it might just be the case that consciousness is a fundamental constituent of the universe. Its nonphysical, and irreducible to anything but itself.
If there’s a new force or field, then it’s still physical, it’s just unknown. But that’s not what you’re talking about, I think. It’s more like the notion of life, which is self organizing matter - which appears at first to go against the laws of entropy. But we can see how a chance configuration that self replicates is a natural phenomenon and actually accelerates entropy in the longer term. Life is still physical even though we can describe it as a concept that might seem to transcend physicality. Consciousness can just be the same. And yes, you can consider consciousness as some sort of other fundamental order, but it’s not scientific - it specifically cannot be since we can not measure it.
That depends how you define your terms, but under most definitions I don’t think that this is always going to be the case
I’m not taking about life, I’m talking about consciousness which is a separate topic
Why?
We can measure it indirectly (eg by people telling us about their conscious experiences) which is good enough for empirical study
People explaining their own consciousness is really not good enough. Simple llm ai systems can do that. I’m pretty sure that dogs are conscience, but we can never get their perspective. You cannot know anyone other than yourself is conscious.
There is a lot of data that is out of reach (such as the experience of a dog) but we can generalize from the data we do have access to and see if we can pick up any meaningful patterns and then generalize from there. That’s how all science is done
Science is done by observing, theorizing, predicting and then testing. We cannot test anything on consciousness.
How do we know that certain wavelengths of light produce certain visual experiences (the colour red, green etc)? How do we know that electrical stimulation to certain parts of the brain can cause certain experiences (such as the hallucination of sounds or smells etc.)? That’s because we test on consciousness indirectly all the time, through first-person reports. So to say that we cannot test any hypothesis related to consciousness is demonstrably false.
Not really. We know that a human can detect those frequencies and output information related to them. Like any transducer. Like any computer. We cannot know what the experience is. The best we can do is describe our own experience, and compare the description to that which other people give, but that’s not really better evidence than what we’d get from a current llm ai which can do the same. It’s logical to assume other people have conscious, but we cannot test it empirically.