On the nature of consciousness, universe & maths

Is the consciousness a result of the inconsistency of laws of physics? I may start my discussion with the citation of Gödel's incompleteness theorems: 1- If a consistent formal system with certain axioms (e.g. math) exists, then it is incomplete in the sense there is a statement constructed from those axioms that lies outside the scope of that system. 2- Any consistent formal system cannot prove its own consistency. These two theorems of logic are proved long ago by Kurt Gödel, and at the time they were a strong blow to the foundation of mathematics, now this is the math part, to the universe part, precisely, the quantum part. Quantum physics is famous for being inconsistent with classical physics and formal logic, it itself has contradictory equations and systems (the problem of measurement) and it is considered a hole in our understanding of physics and a missing part that will be discovered one day, but what if, this inconsistency is necessary for the existence of conscious observers that do the act of measurement in the first place? In the following section I will discuss how this may be true. Let us assume the consistency of our math -because if not, then lol this gonna be a very short discussion- this means (based on Gödels' theorems) that there will always be a statement or a program that a complete Turing-machine (fancy word for a computer) cannot compute (a.k.a construct an algorithm for it, e.g. the halting problem) and this is obvious because on the recognition of computers are based on set of logic gates that do arithmetic, and involving Gödel's 1st theorem, the aforementioned deduction follows, for example, the statement "This sentence is unprovable" is a very famous one, this sentence is neither provable (false) nor unprovable (true) in formal logic, and now here is where things get interesting, you & I and any human, can very clearly say: this sentence is true, and we all know it is true, another example is if I said the sum of two even numbers is always an even number, every kid knows this to be true, but it can not be proved within mathematics, we can not say formally it is true, and no computer can do that for you, so there is something fundamentally different between us humans a consciousness being and computers, that difference is, that we are inconsistent systems unlike computers. Now comes the catch, we are physical beings, our biology and brains follow physical laws of nature, but laws of nature are stated in a mathematical equations, and math is consistent, how come a consistent formal system such as math gives rise to an obviously inconsistent system as us? this leads down to two paths: 1st- Well, mathematics is inconsistent (and this is the boring route, also very controversial and needs its own thread) 2nd- Our math is consistent, the universe is not. Following the 2nd path, one can say if it is true, then perhaps quantum mechanics is not flawed, and its inconsistency is necessary to give rise to a conscious observer in the first place. Would love to hear your thoughts, objections & arguments on the matter.

>and now here is where things get interesting, you & I and any human, can very clearly say: this sentence is true, and we all know it is true, another example is if I said the sum of two even numbers is always an even number, every kid knows this to be true, but it can not be proved within mathematics, we can not say formally it is true, and no computer can do that for you, so there is something fundamentally different between us humans a consciousness being and computers, that difference is, that we are inconsistent systems unlike computers Isn't our inclination to think we 'know' these things just a consequence of being predisposed to flawed fuzzy logic though? For example people famously make the same mistakes on probability problems and have a very hard time correcting their thinking. Computers are capable of imprecise logic as well; think machine learning. For example I asked the GPT2 algorithm "This sentence is unprovable?" and it responded "Yep, it's a contradiction, and thus not provable." There is really nothing proving that humans are fundamentally separate from machines, at least on the level of consciousness. All of our behavior and thinking could be accurately emulated with a sufficiently advanced algorithm. That said though, I think there is a quantum physics style model contradiction between subjective consciousness and the logical consistency of reality. Our subjective experience can be said to be the foundation for all our knowledge of the world, but consciousness as we think of it cannot exist as an emergent property of physics. Consider the properties we assume are held by our existence, that we are unique and contained, seeing from one pair of eyes, living in a singular skull. Now consider what would happen if some alien with advanced technology scanned you and created an exact duplicate, the physical state of your brain the same as yours. Nothing about the situation would logically cause your consciousness to transfer to the clone, because you weren't physically affected yourself. Still, your claim to uniqueness is now void, because that uniqueness no longer has a physical representation; in that moment there is nothing that defines 'you' that the clone does not also have; there are now two people with your memories, both believing that they were one person just a moment ago, both having (from a physical perspective) equal claim. This suggests that a unique consciousness CANNOT be an emergent property of physics. From a purely physical perspective, or from the perspective of an intelligent entity without a sense of personal consciousness, there is only information processing, and the concept of a personal subjective experience can be seen as a delusion, a kind of magical thinking with no basis in reality, because we are of course physical beings that can be described in purely physical terms, and an abstraction that contradicts those terms must be a wrong one. Yet the point of perspective that is our personal experience, where we get all evidence by which we can construct a model of logic and physics, did come first in a way. There is no satisfying way to reconcile these models; you experience, therefore the universe, and, physical reality, therefore you are not.

It is physiologically impossible for human beings to observe reality as it is. Our sensory organs necessitate that a great deal of information is lost “in translation”. Mathematics is based on sensory experience which cannot be accurate representations of reality. It follows that mathematics do not represent reality.

>Quantum physics is famous for being inconsistent with classical physics and formal logic it might be famous for that, but that's not true. There are gaps in our understanding wrt how quantum physics relates to other non-classical theories such as general relativity, but quantum physics itself is fully consistent with itself, classical mechanics, and classical logic, I assure you. as an aside, any time someone brings quantum physics or godel's incompleteness theorems into a philosophical discussion, there is a 90% chance that they have no idea what they're talking about. >another example is if I said the sum of two even numbers is always an even number, every kid knows this to be true, but it can not be proved within mathematics that can be quite easily proved within mathematics. A natural number is defined as "even" if it is equal to 2*n for some other number n. So by the distributive law, for two even numbers x and y, we have x + y = 2*n + 2*m = 2*(n+m) which is by definition an even number. >so there is something fundamentally different between us humans a consciousness being and computers, that difference is, that we are inconsistent systems unlike computers. What do you mean by "inconsistent system"? Human minds are not formal axiomatic systems, obviously, so they can neither be "consistent" nor "inconsistent" in the way that godel's theorem uses those words. When we decide that the statement "this sentence is unprovable" we aren't using some inconsistent logic, we are making an inference based on our learned knowledge. You aren't born knowing that sentence is false. >>2813 >Nothing about the situation would logically cause your consciousness to transfer to the clone, because you weren't physically affected yourself. I think the problem here is that you make the assumption that consciousness is unique, self-contained, etc. etc. This is no different from the idea of a soul, just posed in non-religious language. Personally I don't view my own consciousness this way. I think it's a very useful fiction, but the actual experience of consciousness is ultimately an abstraction we use to make cognition more efficient. An absurdly complicated abstraction, of course, but an abstraction all the same, just like the color blue. >>2816 >Our sensory organs necessitate that a great deal of information is lost “in translation”. Mathematics is based on sensory experience which cannot be accurate representations of reality. It follows that mathematics do not represent reality. It does not follow. Your use of the word "accurate" is at issue here... our perception of reality can never be perfect, but it can be accurate. I can quite accurately see that my cup is in front of me, and I am absolutely sure of it. If I can perceive accurately enough to identify a particular object in space and time, why can't I perceive mathematics accurately enough to be correct? I would point out here that mathematics is *extremely* good at predicting the behavior of reality, in fact much better than the individual human mind can.

>>2817 Depends on what you mean by “accurately enough to be correct”. Let me make my point by analogy. Suppose you are practicing archery. The target is relatively far away and has a bullseye pattern. You consistently hit the target, but only on the outer areas. You don’t even get close to the bullseye center. Do you consider this to be successful archery? I would not. In warfare, arrows are often most effective against vulnerable points in body armor such as the neck or under the arm. Precision is necessary for survival in such a context. Mathematics may produce viable results, that is true. But just because statistical analysis provides better predictions than soothsayers doesn’t mean that it is “hitting the bullseye” as a methodology of understanding reality.

a universe cannot be consistent or inconsistent. that is a property of logical systems with a specific set of axioms. the universe is not a logical system, it is a universe. it's easy to confuse the map and territory here because there is mutual influence between the development of such systems and our subjective experiences (both sensory experience, and cognitive experience). one important distinction between the two is logical systems have a set of fundamental objects that are assumed to exist without justification (sets, propositions, etc.) but it is entirely possible (i would argue: likely) that the universe does not.

>>2818 >Mathematics may produce viable results, that is true. But just because statistical analysis provides better predictions than soothsayers doesn’t mean that it is “hitting the bullseye” as a methodology of understanding reality. To go back to your anology: we know mathematics is good and accurate enough to kill the enemy, so it would be a reasonable guess that you could use it to hit the bullseye too.

>>2820 Good enough to hit the enemy. Have you checked the corpse to see if it is dead? Can you?

>>2821 well, what are we using "Kill the enemy" to mean? Mathematics can quite literally be used to kill the enemy. I doubt the atomic bomb could have successfully been produced without mathematics. It can also be used to effectively solve real-world problems. With a good enough model, mathematics can be employed to great success. In some cases there is no "good enough model" and mathematics can tell us why. I guess I'm just wondering if there is a case where, metaphorically, mathematics is an applicable tool and it *fails* to kill the enemy.

>>2822 Please explain to me how one can use statistics, or any other form of mathematics, to have absolute certainty about anything in the world at large. “Facts” which refer ONLY to mathematics do not count, e.g. 1+1=2.

>>2823 “Absolute” being 100%, or “1:1”.

>>2823 All mathematical thought rests on some set of assumptions. You're barking up a tree that I don't think you have the background for.

>>2823 using mathematics, we can predict phases of the moon centuries into the future, and we can also quantify the error in our calculations, and the time at which our calculations will no longer work due to the imprecision of our instruments(using chaos theory). These calculations, in their most basic form, have been done and verified for centuries. using mathematics, we predicted the existence of black holes before we ever observed one. using mathematics, we could land machines on other planets millions of miles away, equivalent to "hitting a bullseye" less than a millimeter wide from a kilometer away. using mathematics, I can tell you with absolute certainty that without breaking these strings, you will never be able to deform one into the other, even if you could hypothetically stretch them any way you wanted. The list goes on. This is what I mean by "kill the enemy": being able to reliably predict the way the world behaves. >>2824 >“Absolute” being 100%, or “1:1”. is it even possible to have "absolute knowledge" about the world? I am not even convinced that Descartes' "I think therefore I am" maxim(which he never even wrote) is sound. What I am convinced of is this: there is an external world(or might as well be), and our senses and brains are good enough at perceiving it that humans have become the dominant animal species on the planet, mostly by making tools. Of the various tools that humanity has devised to understand the world, mathematics(and its sister, physics) is by far the most effective at predicting the behavior of the world as we observe it, and so we must assume that it is a good enough approximation of how the world works for all intents and purposes, in just the same way that my sight is good enough that I can see my cup in front of me. I think that this is good evidence that the mathematics *is* true, and the claim that mathematics is *not* true is what needs evidence. Also, an interesting note here: "100% probability" when dealing with infinite distributions is not the same as being absolutely true. It just means the set where the event does not happen has measure zero. As an example: if you pick a random integer, there is a 100% chance that you will not pick 1, but you could still pick 1.

>>2823 >>2826 for a philosophical treatise that goes along these lines, check out "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

>>2812 Math is only a system/tool that humans use to understand and communicate the world around them to each other. If there was no humans, a cell naturally splitting itself isn't thinking of how many pieces of it exist now. It isn't thinking at all. It's just splitting. Trying to understand the universe solely through the lens of math is only putting a man made device over your face and saying you see everything clearly.

I generally agree with you, I would add also life is the opposite of entropy. Perhaps even dark energy. It's interesting that living things break a lot of the rules of energy and physics already so saying that life juxtaposes the natural mechanical universe seems very fair.

>>2848 why does something have to be thought about to be real? A tool, yes; a tool which, perhaps, is the only tool we have that can express invariant capital-T Truth of the universe.

>>2848 >>2850 I think of math more as a language than a tool

>>2851 math is the compiler language reality is the source code

>>2852 this implies that reality "comes from" math, when I think it's the other way around, math is the only truly accurate description language.

>>2853 (for humans -- perhaps a conscious being could exist at the quantum scale, and general relativity would seem weird to them)

>>2853 I meant it as a system to organize and make sense of raw data. Sorry I couldn't think of a clearer way to put it. I guess maybe a different way to say it is math is the definition of a word and reality is the meaning? that might not work either. My point being it's a true tool to decode reality by relating it to other things.

>>2854 er, I mean that there might be a being that just happens to have just the right mental hardware that it can comprehend and perhaps communicate the universe, on its purest level, without math... I believe that math is simply the human way to understand, because we don't have that hardware for it. We call our brief contacts with perceiving the universe in full "divine revelation" and we are horribly bad at interpreting it in any language besides logic and math, across cultures and languages and centuries.

>>2851 Eh. You could think of any language as a tool. But thinking of math as both a language and a tool is a good idea, too. Because it is both. Math is the framework that we communicate these numerical ideas between each other and the device we use to uncover them for ourselves. >>2850 From the human perspective, something that isn't thought about might as well not exist. Think about how the europeans didn't know about north america. That continent pretty much didn't exist until they knew it existed. Of course it existed, but relative to europeans, it didnt exist. Not sure what that has to do with math, though. >the only tool we have that can express invariant capital-T Truth of the universe Maybe for the physical universe. Probably not anything within our minds. At most, I think statistical probability is the best we can do for the mind half of reality in relation to math. Math is good for understanding the physical matter things and communicating them between humans. Probably not for the true nature of reality. >>2855 I think of it as the other way around. Words are only signs to point us to what they are describing. A word is not literally what the word is describing. It's only a tool to indicate these objects to other people. Numbers are words. They're only indicating a distance or amount. Math isn't the definition of the word. Math is the word and reality is the definition and meaning

>>2862 >From the human perspective, something that isn't thought about might as well not exist. >Math is good for understanding the physical matter things and communicating them between humans. Probably not for the true nature of reality. Saying that math is good for understanding "physical matter things" is a tautological statement: math is good for understanding the things that math is good for understanding. Obviously it is, and obviously such things are part of the true nature of reality. It's not like there's two inherent categories "physical" and "aphysical", any such distinction is a metaphysical misconception. "physical" just means something that can be measured with physics, nothing more nothing less. If you mean to say that there are limitations to mathematics, that is correct; there are many important questions that humans have which mathematics and physics will never give us satisfying answers for, and that doesn't concern me one bit. Mathematics and physics are still the most reliable tools we have for expressing true things about reality. >Numbers are words. They're only indicating a distance or amount. Math isn't the definition of the word. Math is the word and reality is the definition and meaning We define math. Words are not their definition; definitions are just attempts at capturing meanings, which words correspond to. The definition of a cup is an open container typically used for storing liquid, but the meaning is those things that are cups, which may or may not correspond exactly to the definition I gave above. We make words to fit the meaning, nobody gives us definitions and we have to try and make them as accurate as we can. (Natural) numbers allow us to talk about abstract things which we can't sense with our eyeballs, but which we can perceive with our minds. We try to define it by saying "these are the integers, these are the rules for succession and counting and discreteness and so on and so on", what we're doing is trying to gives as accurate of a definition of numbers as we can, and seeing where that leads us. The difference between math and any other attempt at understanding such things, is that math attempts to be *as precise with meanings as possible*. You can interpret Zen koans however you wish, or not at all; the goal of math is that it has one and only one interpretation and meaning, and from that bedrock of mutual understanding we can express truths. That is the entire project of mathematics, in a nutshell.

>2863 addendum: I made a big fuss about the distinction between definition and meaning and then confused them myself. What I mean is, with math we try to make our definitions match our meanings *exactly*, and we restrict our domain of discourse so that this is possible.

>>2863 >>>2862 >"physical" just means something that can be measured with physics, nothing more nothing less. I guess that's just a different way to put what I was saying then. Some things cant be measured with physics though. Like thoughts. >If you mean to say that there are limitations to mathematics What I mean to say is that mathematics cant measure everything. >You can interpret Zen koans however you wish, or not at all; the goal of math is that it has one and only one interpretation and meaning, and from that bedrock of mutual understanding we can express truths. That is the entire project of mathematics, in a nutshell. I agree with everything your saying. I think it's important to understand how our reality works on a concrete numbers level while also understanding how it works on a subjective level. This subjectivity stems from everybody having different views on the same thing they're seeing. Both are important.

>>2812 As someone with basic mathematical training, this is one of the most retarded posts I've ever seen. The fact that the sum of two even numbers is always even can absolutely be proven in mathematics. Here, let me do it. "x is even" by definition means "x=2k for some integer k". Assume x and y are even. Then x=2k and y=2l for some integers k,l. Then x+y=2k+2l=2(k+l) =2m for the integer m=k+l. Thus x+y is even. Since x and y were arbitrary, this proves that the sum of two even numbers is always even. >we are inconsistent systems unlike computers The mathematical term consistent only applies to formal systems of deduction. Humans are not formal systems of deduction. You are using the word consistent in a completely nonstandard way and you have to define what you mean by it. Also math itself is pretty much unrelated to the physical world. The fact that there can be two contradictory physical laws says nothing about math itself nor its consistency. For example, we know that Newton's law of gravitation contradicts Einstein's theory of gravity, yet the contradiction is not at the level of mathematics, rather at the level of physics. Physical theories and laws mathematically expressed serve as merely definitions of what we're talking about.

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>>2812 >we are inconsistent systems unlike computers This lain thinks that computers (information engines) are consistent systems. Analog-to-digital or time-to-digital circuit engineers would like another word. Penrose had some interesting ideas about the relation of the consciousness to quantum phenomena, or like how gravity is actually responsible for the wave function collapse.

Surprisingly there are some good posts in this stupid thread, but of course OP didn't really reply to important points. Before anyone continues taking anything of this seriously, you could start by explaining these supposed "contradictory equations and systems" in quantum theory? And no, the measurement problem does not qualify as what you describe here.

The physical universe operates in more or less consistent ways. Over 4 billion years of evolution, those ways shaped the genetic make-up of living organisms because it made them better able to survive and reproduce. They were eventually encoded into brains and helped thinking creatures to survive and reproduce. In very advanced thinking creatures, these encodings were abstracted into mathematics and science. THat's why it's no accident that math and science can explain the physical universe so well. Living organisms are imperfect, and the patterns of the physical universe impressed into them by evolution are imperfect, so math and science are imperfect. But they are very, very good tools for interpreting the physical universe, because that's where the patterns tthat gave rise to them came from in the first place.

But it must be pointed here that, if biological perceptional tools are being selected for by evolution, then what they optimize for is survival and reproduction, and not necessarily truth about the universe. I remember someone likening it to a computer desktop for example: A desktop makes a lot of sense internally; you move a file it moves, you delete it it goes away, you put it in a folder here or there, you label them to organize, you open them to see their content. Very useful, very productive, it helps you get work done, it helps you survive. But a computer desktop is not showing you the truth at all. There are no files in your computer, there are no folders, it is all a useful lie, an abstraction very different from what's really going on with the atoms and electrons in the circuits and chips. The entire world, it seems, is built on layers and layers of abstraction. What would make our perception different? It could be that everything we see in the world is a useful "desktop interface", and doesn't represent fundamental reality at all. It could be that math and physics "make sense" only within the abstraction world. Trying to explain the world with atoms or quantum physics or numbers is like trying to explain computers by zooming on the screen until you see the pixels, and saying "folders are made of pixels!", where as pixels are only forming the abstract interface. My guess is that you can infer such a useful abstraction by its "leaks". It is near impossible to have an abstraction that's not leaky in one way or another, usually at the limits, or some edge-cases. And it seems to me that our world is full of such limits and edge-cases; plank-length (minimum size of a pixel), light speed (memory/execution word size, or clock speed), the uncertainty of physical state in motion, or the fundamental need for information loss and compression to form bounds around abstract objects or concepts.