Max Tegmark, "Consciousness as a State of Matter," FQXi conference 2014 in Vieques
About | Information | History | Online | Facts | Discovery
fqxi.org For slides to this talk, please go to:: http://fqxi.org/conference/talks/2014 The past century in physics seems to lead in a surprising direction: away from physics as a description of objects and their interactions, and towards physics as a description of the evolution of information. Is this the correct way to think about physics and the physical world? What is information? What does the term "information" even mean? What role does information play in quantum gravity, cosmology, thermodynamics, life and consciousness, and what links does it provide between these areas? FQXi's international, interdisciplinary conference on the Physics of Information brought together leading researchers to discuss the significance, meaning, and uses of information in physics.
Comments
-
If consciousness is truly a state of matter, I assume there has to be a specific configuration of particles by which consciousness would eventually emerge. That been said; I'm obligated to ask then: What's that particular configuration of particles like? Why hasn't it been discovered if it's just a matter of arrangement?
-
Very interesting talk,and i agree with Max...but does not seem like this is something fundamental there is still a way long to go to explain consciousness.
-
Consciousness exists in the electrical charge as does all life
-
we are gods
-
"Perceptronium"?! Max does not feel the diseases of the sun as if they are his eclipses..., unfortunately..., like other physicists....,
-
Fedora neckbeards type shit
-
A conscious system must have goals.Survival and reproduction.
-
Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, consciousness, and BBQ. The 6 states of matter.
-
The word 'consciousness' should be banned from science. Like Marvin Minsky said consciousness, is 25+ different things. Tegmark is good in information theory and math, but doesn't have a single clue of what consciousness is, and only makes a false dichotomy between 'conscious' and unconscious' matter, based on some '5' arbitrary principles full of anthropic bias. Then, at, 15:50 the Hopfield network is a bit irrelevant example, since 37+ bits are more than enough to represent higher intelligence.
-
What a brilliant mind 😀😀😀😀
-
Is Max Tegmark the smartest person on the planet???
Cheers - Mike -
I have a problem with the Integration principle, which suggests that systems like human civilization cannot be conscious because they consist of nearly independent parts - namely humans.
-
This occurred to me a year ago ... double slits experiment is a clear indicator that when energy aka matter is collected and assembled, it will change its characteristic behavior and behave as "solid" matter, not as a waveform (unconscious matter ). When we make a conscious effort to observe the behavior of energy, we are projecting consciousness to a level where consciousness does not exist, and the photons suddenly behave like solid "conscious" matter.
-
10:48 Alan Guth sleeping, lol
-
His paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
-
If consciousness is a state of matter, then surely there is some sort of proto consciousness in every atom?
-
Just a thought:
Matter emerges from the universe and consciousness comes from matter obviously. We just don't know why and under what conditions it can and does happen!
Some simple systems can be minimally conscious, some complicated systems can be unconscious, and two different systems can be functionally equivalent, yet one is conscious and the other one is not. How can that be explained?
Why is consciousness generated by the corticothalamic system – or at least some parts of it, but not by the cerebellum, despite the latter having even more neurons? Why does consciousness fade early in sleep, although the brain remains active? Why is it lost during generalized seizures, when neural activity is intense and synchronous? And why is there no direct contribution to consciousness from neural activity within sensory and motor pathways, or within neural circuits looping out of the cortex into subcortical structures and back, despite their manifest ability to influence the content of experience?
Also there is overwhelming data to suggest that when people experience cardiac arrest and many cases of deep coma, people can report rich experiences some may interpret as "hallucinations". However unlike normal hallucination, the memory of the experience is never forgotten and often times life changing as well as veridical. These cases Im referring to are the cases where brain activity is flatlined. So flatline = rich experience whereas general seizures with increased neural activity = blackout of experience and awareness?? A grab at a straw may be that the experience happens going in or out of a comma but it would still be quite a fascinating thing to have such an experience coming in or going into a death process or a coma! Why should this rich veridical experience occur IN ANY CONDITION?? We don't know.
There is also the mystery of brain injuries unlocking a wealth of knowledge and mental abilities. A number of people miraculously developed artistic, musical, or mathematical abilities as a result of a brain injury. There's Orlando Serrell, who was struck in the head with a baseball as a 10-year-old and found he could remember the weather for each day following his accident. There's Derek Amato, who woke up after hitting his head at the bottom of a pool and became a master pianist at 40, despite lacking any sort of musical training. There's Alonzo Clemens, whose verbal and cognitive abilities stopped developing at the age of three due to a head injury but who can assemble incredibly detailed sculptures of animals in a matter of minutes. There are many people who can do just incredible mathematical computation after head injuries! The same holds true with born savants.
Its as if the brain filters information and provides a balance to our mental life normally but in the extremes such as savants, acute head injuries, near death episodes or psychotropic hallucinations humans can get exposed to information that are often verified as accurate but we have no scientific explanation as to how it can occur as of yet. The opposite is true and in MOST cases damage to the brain causes lack of consciousness and a lack of being able to perceive certain things depending on the area of the brain effected. But the point is that it isn't ALWAYS the case. And if its demonstrated that head injury or near death episodes etc can sometimes produce "increased mental awareness and perception" then it means we
are in for a radical new way of exploring consciousness in order to understand these questions much less come to an understanding of what consciousness is and how it emerges. -
The universe is a subset of consciousness, not the other way around.
-
Close, but closer still might be the more general notion "Emergence as a State of Matter", where a special case is "Consciousness as a State of Matter". I think investigating the general notion will be more fruitful as simple cases of emergent systems can be investigated first, then their solutions can lead to solutions for more complex cases of emergence like consciousness. UNLESS... if it happens to be that all emergent systems--regardless of complexity--manifest some degree of consciousness. If so, the approach of "Consciousness as a State of Matter" is equally appropriate.
22m 9sLenght
156Rating