Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts

Saturday, 26 May 2018

Thomas Campbell

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science



Thomas Warren Campbell (December 9, 1944) is a physicist, lecturer, and author of the My Big T.O.E. (Theory of Everything) trilogy, a work that claims to unify general relativity, quantum mechanics, and metaphysics along with the origins of consciousness. The work is based on the simulation argument, which posits that reality is both virtual and subjective. Campbell agrees with other notable philosophers and scientists including Hans Moravec, Nick Bostrom, Brian Whitworth,[1] Marcus Arvan[2] and others who hypothesize that reality is akin to a simulation generated by a computer (or peer-to-peer network according to Aravan),[3] while Campbell contends reality evolved from a "digital big bang". These ideas are heavily influenced by the concepts of digital physics.


Work with NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense[edit]

Campbell has had a long career as a scientist and physicist. He received a B.S. in Physics as well as an M.S. in Physics. His Ph.D. work specialized in Experimental Nuclear Physics with a thesis in low-energy nuclear collisions.[4] He worked as a systems analyst with U.S. Army technical intelligence for a decade before moving into the research and development of technology supporting defensive missile systems. Subsequently, he spent the better part of 30 years working within the U.S. missile defense community as a contractor to the Department of Defense.[4] Campbell most recently worked for NASA within the Ares I program (follow-on to the Shuttle) assessing and solving problems of risk and vulnerability to insure mission and crew survivability and success.[4]

Work with Bob Monroe[edit]

After receiving his master’s degree in physics in 1968, Campbell commenced on a Ph.D. program with a specialization in experimental nuclear physics.[4] During this time, Campbell enrolled in a Transcendental Meditation class and discovered an aptitude for it, a technique he says he would employ to discover errors in his computer code while working for U.S. Army Intelligence.[citation needed] Around this time, Campbell was introduced to Bob Monroe’s book, Journeys Out Of The Body, on out-of-body experiences. Upon learning that Monroe was looking for scientists to help him study altered states of consciousness, Campbell applied for the position and subsequently began working with Monroe at Monroe Laboratories. This research facility would evolve to become The Monroe Institute. Tom is the "TC physicist" described in Monroe's second book Far Journeys.[5] Both Campbell and electrical engineer Dennis Mennerich were instrumental in developing TMI’s "Hemi-Sync" technology, based on the binaural beat method for creating specific altered states of consciousness within subjects.[6] Campbell believes his research with Monroe informed many of his insights into the nature of reality and mechanics of what he calls "the larger consciousness system".

My Big TOE (Theory of Everything)[edit]

The My Big TOE trilogy develops a complete derivation (in outline) of consciousness. This derivation begins with two assumptions and then proceeds to logically derive all the attributes, limitations, properties, qualities, and mechanics of consciousness – what it is, where it comes from, and how it works. The two assumptions are 1) that consciousness exists as a self-changing information system capable of evolving and 2) that evolution exists as a process of natural selection. Neither assumption is particularly remarkable,[7] and both fit comfortably within common experience and everyday scientific understanding.[7]
Since its publication, My Big Toe has garnered an international following with Campbell’s videos, as of December 31, 2015 having had more than 2 million views on YouTube and 309 videos of his lectures, public appearances, interviews, and fireside chats explaining fundamentals, nuances, implications, and applications of his theory. He continues to lecture around the world, holding workshops on M.B.T., teaching workshops on the principles of simulation theory and speaking at conferences on the topic of consciousness.[8]

Reception and criticism[edit]

Upon completion of My Big TOE, Campbell sent copies of the book to leading physicists, and fellow scientists, but received little response. This prompted Campbell to forgo enlisting support from "the top," in favor of reaching out to lay audiences as a better way to share and spread his ideas about consciousness and the nature of reality.[citation needed]

Similarity to work done by Donald Hoffman[edit]

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist who has developed a theory he calls the multi-modal user interface (MMUI) theory of reality [9]. Like Campbell, he published a book laying out his ideas early in his career and has since spent much of his career promoting his theories.[10] Both theories draw on a simulation hypothesis of reality, both rely on conscious realism as an alternative foundation to physicalism and both theories rely on interpretive extrapolations of evolutionary theory. Additionally, both authors claim to have ways to test their theories. Campbell has put forth an experiment that he believes will show that reality is not what it seems. Donald Hoffman has done a variety of evolutionary simulations that he believes supports his own theory.[11]

References[edit]

  1. Jump up ^ http://brianwhitworth.com/BW-VRT1.pdf
  2. Jump up ^ "Marcus Arvan - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. 
  3. Jump up ^ "Scholar Citations By Google". 
  4. ^ Jump up to: a b c d ntrs.nasa.gov: Designing a Composable Geometric Toolkit for Versatility in Applications to Simulation Development (PDF)
  5. Jump up ^ Thomas W. Campbell at Google Books
  6. Jump up ^ MBTEVENTS (23 May 2010). "Tom Campbell and Dennis Mennerich Interview : Respect for All Life" – via YouTube. 
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b My Big Toe: Awakening, Discovery, Inner Workings: A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics Thomas W. Campbell at Google Books
  8. Jump up ^ "Tom Campbell". YouTube. 
  9. Jump up ^ S. Dickinson, M. Tarr, A. Leonardis, B. Schiele (Eds.). Object categorization: Computer and human vision perspectives. Cambridge University Press. pp. 148–165. 
  10. Jump up ^ [1]
  11. Jump up ^ experiments
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_W._Campbell&oldid=840569312"
at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Monday, 19 September 2016

This physicist says consciousness could be a new state of matter 'Perceptronium'.

Blogger Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science

agsandrew/Shutterstock.com
Ref Source Science Altert
BEC CREW
16 SEP 2016
Consciousness isn’t something scientists like to talk about much. You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, and despite the best efforts of certain researchers, you can’t quantify it. And in science, if you can’t measure something, you’re going to have a tough time explaining it.
But consciousness exists, and it’s one of the most fundamental aspects of what makes us human. And just like dark matter and dark energy have been used to fill some otherwise gaping holes in the standard model of physics, researchers have also proposed that it’s possible to consider consciousness as a new state of matter.
 
To be clear, this is just a hypothesis, and one to be taken with a huge grain of salt, because we’re squarely in the realm of the hypothetical here, and there's plenty of room for holes to be poked.
But it’s part of a quietly bubbling movement within theoretical physics and neuroscience to try and attach certain basic principles to consciousness in order to make it more observable.
The hypothesis was first put forward in 2014 by cosmologist and theoretical physicist Max Tegmark from MIT, who proposed that there’s a state of matter - just like a solid, liquid, or gas - in which atoms are arranged to process information and give rise to subjectivity, and ultimately, consciousness.
The name of this proposed state of matter? Perceptronium, of course.
As Tegmark explains in his pre-print paper:
"Generations of physicists and chemists have studied what happens when you group together vast numbers of atoms, finding that their collective behaviour depends on the pattern in which they are arranged: the key difference between a solid, a liquid, and a gas lies not in the types of atoms, but in their arrangement.
In this paper, 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.
However, this should not preclude us from identifying, quantifying, modelling, and ultimately understanding the characteristic properties that all liquid forms of matter (or all conscious forms of matter) share."
In other words, Tegmark isn’t suggesting that there are physical clumps of perceptronium sitting somewhere in your brain and coursing through your veins to impart a sense of self-awareness.
Rather, he proposes that consciousness can be interpreted as a mathematical pattern - the result of a particular set of mathematical conditions.
Just as there are certain conditions under which various states of matter - such as steam, water, and ice - can arise, so too can various forms of consciousness, he argues.
Figuring out what it takes to produce these various states of consciousness according to observable and measurable conditions could help us get a grip on what it actually is, and what that means for a human, a monkey, a flea, or a supercomputer.
The idea was inspired by the work of neuroscientist Giulio Tononi from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who proposed in 2008 that if you wanted to prove that something had consciousness, you had to demonstrate two specific traits.
According to his integrated information theory (IIT), the first of these traits is that a conscious being must be capable of storing, processing, and recalling large amounts of information.
"And second," explains the arXiv.org blog, "this information must be integrated in a unified whole, so that it is impossible to divide into independent parts."
This means that consciousness has to be taken as a whole, and cannot be broken down into separate components. A conscious being or system has to not only be able to store and process information, but it must do so in a way that forms a complete, indivisible whole, Tononi argued.
If it occurred to you that a supercomputer could potentially have these traits, that’s sort of what Tononi was getting at.
As George Johnson writes for The New York Times, Tononi’s hypothesis predicted - with a whole lot of maths - that "devices as simple as a thermostat or a photoelectric diode might have glimmers of consciousness - a subjective self".
In Tononi’s calculations, those "glimmers of consciousness" do not necessarily equal a conscious system, and he even came up with a unit, called phi or Φ, which he said could be used to measure how conscious a particular entity is.
Six years later, Tegmark proposed that there are two types of matter that could be considered according to the integrated information theory.
The first is 'computronium', which meets the requirements of the first trait of being able to store, process, and recall large amounts of information. And the second is 'perceptronium', which does all of the above, but in a way that forms the indivisible whole Tononi described.
In his 2014 paper, Tegmark explores what he identifies as the five basic principles that could be used to distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids, and gases - "the information, integration, independence, dynamics, and utility principles".
He then spends 30 pages or so trying to explain how his new way of thinking about consciousness could explain the unique human perspective on the Universe.
As the arXiv.org blog explains, "When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, why do we perceive this solution?"
It's an incomplete thought, because Tegmark doesn't have a solution. And as you might have guessed, it's not something that his peers have been eager to take up and run with. Tegmark himself might have even hit a brick wall with it, because he's never managed to take it beyond his pre-print, non-peer-reviewed paper.
That's the problem with something like consciousness - if you can't measure your attempts to measure it, how can you be sure you've measured it at all?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
More recently, scientists have attempted to explain how human consciousness could be transferred into an artificial body - seriously, there's a start-up that wants to do this - and one group of Swiss physicists have suggested consciousness occurs in 'time slices' that are hundreds of milliseconds apart.
As Matthew Davidson, who studies the neuroscience of consciousness at Monash University in Australia, explains over at The Conversation, we still don't know much about what consciousness actually is, but it's looking more and more likely that it's something we need to consider outside the realm of humans.
"If consciousness is indeed an emergent feature of a highly integrated network, as IIT suggests, then probably all complex systems - certainly all creatures with brains - have some minimal form of consciousness," he says.
"By extension, if consciousness is defined by the amount of integrated information in a system, then we may also need to move away from any form of human exceptionalism that says consciousness is exclusive to us."
Here's Tegmark's TED talk on consciousness as a mathematical pattern:

 
at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Wednesday, 18 November 2015

David Chalmers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia/Blogger Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science
 
Jump to: navigation, search
For the oil company owner, see David B. Chalmers.
David Chalmers
David Chalmers TASC2008.JPG
Chalmers in 2008
BornDavid John Chalmers
(1966-04-20) 20 April 1966 (age 49)
Sydney, Australia
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic
Main interests
Philosophy of mind
Consciousness
Philosophy of language
Notable ideas
Hard problem of consciousness; Extended mind; Two-dimensional semantics; Biological dualism
David John Chalmers (/ˈtʃælmərz/;[1] born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the area of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University. He is also Professor of Philosophy at New York University.[2] In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.


Life[edit]

Since 2004, Chalmers has been Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Centre for Consciousness, and an ARC Federation Fellow at the Australian National University.
A Rhodes Scholar raised in Australia, Chalmers received his PhD at Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995, and his first professorship was at UC Santa Cruz, from August 1995 to December 1998. Chalmers was subsequently appointed Professor of Philosophy (1999–2004) and, later, Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies (2002–2004) at the University of Arizona, sponsor of the Toward a Science of Consciousness[3] conference. After appearing as a plenary speaker at the first meeting, Chalmers has subsequently taken the role of co-organizer, alongside Stuart Hameroff, of this conference.
Chalmers' 1996 book, The Conscious Mind, was described by The Sunday Times as "one of the best science books of the year".[4] In the book, Chalmers argues that all forms of physicalism (whether reductive or non-reductive) that have dominated modern philosophy and science fail to account for the existence (that is, presence in reality) of consciousness itself. He proposes an alternative dualistic view he calls naturalistic dualism (but which might also be characterized by more traditional formulations such as property dualism, neutral monism, or double-aspect theory).
He is the lead singer of the Zombie Blues band which performed at the Qualia Fest in 2012[5] in New York.

Thought[edit]

Philosophy of mind[edit]

Chalmers on stage for an Alan Turing Year event at De La Salle University, Manila, March 27, 2012
Chalmers is best known for his formulation of the notion of a hard problem of consciousness in both his 1996 book and in the 1995 paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness". He makes a distinction between "easy" problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports, and the single hard problem, which could be stated "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" The essential difference between the (cognitive) easy problems and the (phenomenal) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the standard strategy in philosophy of mind: functionalism. Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physical explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist. Chalmers characterizes his view as "naturalistic dualism": naturalistic because he believes mental states are caused by physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems.
In support of this, Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the logical (though, importantly, not natural) possibility of philosophical zombies, although he was not the first to propose the thought experiment. These zombies, unlike the zombie of popular fiction, are complete physical duplicates of human beings, lacking only qualitative experience. Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible. Since they are logically possible, then qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone. Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties, and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms "psychophysical laws" that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism. Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding that the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries.
After the publication of Chalmers's landmark paper, more than twenty papers in response were published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. These papers (by Daniel Dennett, Colin McGinn, Francisco Varela, Francis Crick, and Roger Penrose, among others) were collected and published in the book Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem. John Searle critiqued Chalmers's views in The New York Review of Books.[6]
With Andy Clark, Chalmers has written The Extended Mind, an article about the borders of the mind.[7]

Philosophy of language[edit]

Chalmers has published works on the "theory of reference" concerning how words secure their referents. He, together with others such as Frank Jackson, proposes a kind of theory called two dimensionalism arguing against Saul Kripke. Before Kripke delivered the famous lecture series Naming and Necessity in 1970, the descriptivism advocated by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell was the orthodoxy. Descriptivism suggests that a name is indeed an abbreviation of a description, which is a set of properties or, as later modified by John Searle, a disjunction of properties. This name secures its reference by a process of properties fitting: whichever object fits the description most, then it is the referent of the name. Therefore, the description is seen as the connotation, or, in Fregean terms, the sense of the name, and it is via this sense by which the denotation of the name is determined.
However, as Kripke argued in Naming and Necessity, a name does not secure its reference via any process of description fitting. Rather, a name determines its reference via a historical-causal link tracing back to the process of naming. And thus, Kripke thinks that a name does not have a sense, or, at least, does not have a sense which is rich enough to play the reference-determining role. Moreover, a name, in Kripke's view, is a rigid designator, which refers to the same object in all possible worlds. Following this line of thought, Kripke suggests that any scientific identity statement such as "Water is H2O" is also a necessary statement, i.e. true in all possible worlds. Kripke thinks that this is a phenomenon that the descriptivist cannot explain.
And, as also proposed by Hilary Putnam and Kripke himself, Kripke's view on names can also be applied to the reference of natural kind terms. The kind of theory of reference that is advocated by Kripke and Putnam is called the direct reference theory.
However, Chalmers disagrees with Kripke, and all the direct reference theorists in general. He thinks that there are two kinds of intension of a natural kind term, a stance which is now called two dimensionalism. For example, the words,
"Water is H2O"
are taken to express two distinct propositions, often referred to as a primary intension and a secondary intension, which together compose its meaning.[8]
The primary intension of a word or sentence is its sense, i.e., is the idea or method by which we find its referent. The primary intension of "water" might be a description, such as watery stuff. The thing picked out by the primary intension of "water" could have been otherwise. For example, on some other world where the inhabitants take "water" to mean watery stuff, but where the chemical make-up of watery stuff is not H2O, it is not the case that water is H2O for that world.
The secondary intension of "water" is whatever thing "water" happens to pick out in this world, whatever that world happens to be. So if we assign "water" the primary intension watery stuff then the secondary intension of "water" is H2O, since H2O is watery stuff in this world. The secondary intension of "water" in our world is H2O, and is H2O in every world because unlike watery stuff it is impossible for H2O to be other than H2O. When considered according to its secondary intension, water means H2O in every world. Via this secondary intension, Chalmers proposes a way to simultaneously explain the necessity of the identity statement and preserve the role of intension/sense in determining the reference.

Philosophy of verbal disputes[edit]

In recent work, Chalmers has concentrated on verbal disputes.[9] He argues that a dispute is best characterized as "verbal" when it concerns some sentence S which contains a term T such that (i) the parties to the dispute disagree over the meaning of T, and (ii) the dispute arises solely because of this disagreement. In the same work, Chalmers proposes certain procedures for the resolution of verbal disputes. One of these he calls the "elimination method", which involves eliminating the contentious term and observing whether any dispute remains.

Bibliography[edit]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. Jump up ^ "The Thinking Ape: The Enigma of Human Consciousness"
  2. Jump up ^ philosophy.fas.nyu.edu
  3. Jump up ^ consciousness.arizona.edu
  4. Jump up ^ The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996), paperback edition, back cover.
  5. Jump up ^ NYTimes.com
  6. Jump up ^ Searle's review of The Conscious Mind 6 March 1997 (subscription required)
    Chalmers' response to Searle and Searle's reply 15 May 1997 (free access)
  7. Jump up ^ consc.net Analysis 58:10-23, 1998. Reprinted in The Philosopher's Annual, 1998.
  8. Jump up ^ for a fuller explanation see Chalmers, David. The Conscious Mind. Oxford UP: 1996. Chapter 2, section 4.
  9. Jump up ^ consc.net Philosophical Review, 120:4, 2011.

External links[edit]

Authority control
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Chalmers&oldid=688490984"
at No comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Reviving the Ancient Polymath Spirit to Meet Modern Challenges We can embrace interdisciplinary learning for innovative problem-solving. Posted January 16, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

  by   Nigel R. Bairstow Ph.D. Disconnection Dynamics Psychology Today Key points Ancient Arab polymaths excelled by integrating diverse kno...