Shaun Higgins is a physicist, but he's not just a mathematician scrawling wiggly lines and esoteric symbols. He's considering what these equations really mean.
IMG source - ConsciousPhysics.Substack.com
"We are accustomed to thinking of the Universe as a machine that happens to think.
"Matter first, mind later.
"Complexity accumulates, chemistry stumbles into biology, biology into brains, and at some late hour consciousness flickers on like an accidental light.
"This story has explanatory power, but it also leaves something unresolved.
"It explains how systems behave once they exist, yet says remarkably little about why coherence appears at all, or why information so persistently resists dissolution."
You might ask whether information does actually resist dissolution. Information in my head isn't all that resistant to dissolution. Hell, I've forgotten my own birthday before. But physicists say that information didn't just vanish because I forgot it, because there were other places where it was stored. I was reminded it was my birthday because people wished me a happy birthday, so IME the physicists are right when they claim that information cannot be lost to the universe. They call this the No Hiding theorem, and point out that, just like my birthday, a particle falling into a black hole does not obliterate the information about itself, it's velocity, it's spin, charge, and etc, even as it is obliterated and completely erased from the universe itself. During it's passage to the black hole it left tracks, traces of itself during it's plunge into doom, that impacted other particles, such as it's infinitesimal gravitational force, it's charge that attracted or repelled other particles of like or opposite charge, and etc.
Those tracks reveal the information it contained, just like the tracks of an animal in mud reveal information about it. So, information isn't just resistant to dissolution, it's immune to it. That has a lot of implications, especially for people that have done wrong, like me. I've done a lot of things I am ashamed of, and I've come to be very grateful for shame. Shame is the primary reason I don't do a lot of those things again, because I don't want to be ashamed of myself. I don't just feel shame about things I got caught doing. I feel embarrassed about being caught doing shameful things, but I feel shame about things that nobody else knows I did. Yet.
That information, that I am the only person that knows, won't die with me. Just like a particle falling into a black hole, I will dissolve into the ecosystems of the Earth, but the information about me, and my shameful actions, will not. Someday someone else might learn of it, because people are clever and discover all manner of learning information. That booger I wiped on the Hotel coverlet will get traced back to me, I just know it. We might think no one is ever going to trace all the chemical reactions that lead back to my DNA in that booger, but AI will. Not to find me out by my DNA, but to backtrack evolution of the environment, to understand how things came to be as they are, or will be then. That particular discovery is going to become public knowledge someday, and I will be embarrassed.
I will be embarrassed, because I am information. I am not a pile of worm food. I pilot a pile of worm food. What I am, my person, is a conscious being with specific character traits, ethos, knowledge, and all sorts of information. I am pretty much purely information, so even when my body feeds worms, I will still exist, and someday I'll be embarrassed about that booger I clean forgot about in the millennia since I died when somebody, eventually, points out my lack of etiquette when I was a worm food pilot. Forever is a long time. Someday it'll be a topic of conversation.
"At the foundation of modern physics lies an uncomfortable truth…
"What we call “physical reality” is already abstract.
"Fields, probabilities, wave-functions, symmetries, these are not objects you can hold, but structures you can only describe.
"The closer we look, the more the Universe resembles not a collection of things, but a choreography of relations.
"Information sits quietly at the centre of this picture."
Reality isn't what it seems to us to be. It's not even how we picture it from textbooks. Atoms aren't little bouncy balls, not even collections of bouncy particles. A more realistic conception of those collections of particles is fields vibrating at frequencies that cause the particles to act as if they were little balls bouncing off each other or sticking together. But even that's a misconception, and goes into questions I can't so easily consider, much less answer. What is a field, really? What is vibrating? What is energy? And most difficult to answer of all, what is consciousness?
Most energies can be detected, measured, quantified, even bottled and sold as fizzy drinks. Not consciousness. There's no meter that measures it. No antenna that receives it. Honestly, no one has any idea what it is, where it comes from, or why. But it turns out to be fundamental to the physical universe we are in.
"Instead of information emerging from matter, matter may be the medium through which information expresses itself…
"Structure first, substance second.
"Pattern before particle.
"Dark Matter, Gravity, and Invisible Order
"Once this inversion is allowed, other puzzles begin to rearrange themselves.
"Dark matter, for example, is typically treated as missing substance, some invisible mass we have yet to detect.
"But what we actually observe are gravitational effects… galaxies rotating too coherently, structures holding together more tightly than visible matter alone permits.
"Gravity responds not to substance, but to distribution, stress, and curvature.
"It responds to structure."
In fact gravity is structure. I understand gravity as the shape of spacetime. It is matter that responds to structure, to the gravitational form of spacetime. What is behind the bouncy balls is all information, just as we are information. I would also phrase matter as consciousness expressing information, not as information expressing itself, but that's semantics.
"Consciousness enters this picture not as a magical ingredient, but as a specialised case of informational organisation."
I, despite appearances obvious to everyone following along, wonder just how specialized consciousness is. The bouncy balls and black holes are just as much information as you or me. How can we determine we are conscious and they aren't?
I don't think we can, because I don't think they aren't conscious, or, perhaps I think they are expressions of consciousness. Mind over matter, as it were. I know that each living cell is conscious. Dr. Michael Levin's research (among many others) shows this, and more. Levin has shown that our physiological form is agreed upon by the network of conscious cells that comprise our body. Not our DNA. Our DNA determines we have a nose. Our collective networked consciousness decides on the cute little shape of our nose as we form in the womb. Levin showed that this is a conscious decision because he can interfere with the bioelectrical network our cells communicate with one another over to determine such things. By interfering with that intercellular bioelectrical network he can make Planaria grow two heads, or even three. Planaria famously regrow whole bodies from amputated parts. When he cuts these Planaria up, they regrow bodies with two or three heads, as they decided before they got cut up.
I don't know that each particle, field, or wave isn't conscious, and I can't conceive of any way to ascertain whether they are or aren't.
Can you?
Higgins goes on in his post I linked above, and to read the rest of it, which, if you found this post interesting, you should, follow the link.
