4: Consciousness |
Additional Materials, Links and References |
A Model of Consciousness Proposed by Joss Earl.
Consciousness and Heat Further discussion of the relationship.
Borg or HumaNet? A discussion of the future of consciousness.
One Thousand Minds is a freeware project which is intended to test the model of consciousness as emergent from the deep structural interaction of ambient data with itself rather than as emergent from any particular brain architecture. It will do this by providing groupware to allow a large number of suitable and highly motivated people to form a team that is more conscious than an individual human.
As far as I can see, this is where the mystical types start to get worth reading. Blavatsky (and the loathesome Crowley) are below this line, Steiner and Gurdjieff are above it. She describes a telepathy that works by convergence to objective reality, and deep structure perception.
It's worth bearing the picture in "3: Reciprocal Cosmology" in mind and savouring this book slowly. Bell's philosophical rigour and sense, his willingness to recognise the unsolved problems, are quite wonderful.
Actually, it isn't explained at all, but Dennett povides a superb introduction to the fascinating field of Consciousness Studies.
All good, but particularly the sections on Charles Bennett and the energy value of information. This book was stuck in legal wrangles for 10 years, but now we can get Feynman's words on this remarkable result, so essential in Reciprocality.
Much on Bennett. I found the paper by Myron Tribus and L. Costa de Beauregard an inspiration. At a level where they demonstrate the equivalence of thermodynamic and information theoretical entropy, they observe that inductive reasoning is still not understood. This point convinced me that what I think of as a day to day occurence - and taught my students to also - needs a whole new chunk of physics to explain. Penrose was right - we will need new physics to build a synthetic consciousness. (Interestingly, the authors' point doesn't apply to linear consciousness, since that cannot do inductive reasoning. We could build linear consciousness out of kit to hand today.)
If you've never seen this book, it's a real treat. For some reason, the geometry of nature is very fractal.
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