CONSCIOUSNESS IS A STATE OF MATTER: Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, sets out the fundamental problems that this new way of thinking raises. He shows how these problems can be formulated in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory. And he explains how thinking about consciousness in this way leads to precise questions about the nature of reality that the scientific process of experiment might help to tease apart. Tegmark’s approach is to think of consciousness as a state of matter, like a solid, a liquid or a gas. “I conjecture that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness,” he says. He goes on to show how the particular properties of consciousness might arise from the physical laws that govern our universe. And he explains how these properties allow physicists to reason about the conditions under which consciousness arises and how we might exploit it to better understand why the world around us appears as it does. Interestingly, the new approach to consciousness has come from outside the physics community, principally from neuroscientists such as Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I THINK IT WILL BE VERY INTERESTING TO SEE WHAT DEVELOPMENTS COME FROM THIS. THERE ARE PROBLEMS WITH THIS MODEL BUT WHAT MODEL OF PHYSICS DOESNT HAVE PROBLEMS AND ID LIKE TO THINK THE REASON WHY WERE SO DUMB IS BECAUSE WE DONT KNOW EVERYTHING. I GOT 37 PROBLEMS BUT A BIT AINT ONE. (Youll have to read the article to get that joke and even then it will only amount to a blow more air than normal out of your nose type of humor than a chuckle so just forget about that for now, but do come back to it if you actually read the article.) Here is the paper for hard-heads: arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v2.pdf And below, the article sums it up in conversational terms:
Posted on: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 23:19:21 +0000
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