Present awareness wrote: ↑June 21st, 2018, 11:50 pm
Consciousness could be thought of as a form of light. Light has energy and motion, but no mass as the following definition states: “Light is composed of photons, so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": the photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass, and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits.” So the question is, could we consider something without mass as being physical?
Got to get this straight. Light is called a "massless" particle becasue it has no rest mass. It does have mass of hv/c^2 where h is Plank's constant, v is the frequency of the light, and c is the speed of light.
A particle that has no mass cannot interract with other particles in a way that would indicate that it was there. Light does interact. The situation for a completely massless particle would be the same if it was there or was not as far as any other particle was concerned.
Light can be turned into particles through pair production and back into light by matter antimater anihilation.
Here is a way to look for what you are really trying to get at. You are asking the question under what circumstances matter is conscious. But before I go into that let me tell you a couple of problems you will have.
The first can be illustrated by considering the electromagnetic interaction of charged particles in the classical theory. Electricity and Magnetism were thought of as forces between particles. One particle exerted a force on another and changed its motion relative to straight line motion in an inertial frame of reference. That was what "electicity" was. There were earlier theories that thought of it as a liquid but let's forget them.
There was no reality of the electric force other than the changes it caused in what was considered real - the particles. To be sure the force was "real" in that it could not be derived from other forces or from inertia but its existence was dependent on the interactions of charged particles. It required the additional posits of the theory of electricity and magnetism but... The "action" of one particle was "on another" and "at a distance". Physicists imagined an electric force field around a particle which was considered an abstraction and just represented what effect one particle would have on another should I place a test charge at any point in the space with some electric charge. It would undergo a force and the field could be used to calculate what the force would be etc. Fine. But....
By playing with the equation science found that the fields were not static and if you moved a charge in a certain way it would generate a disturbance in the field that would go out from the charge at the speed of light. Science then realized that light itself was an example of this type of electro-magnetic disturbance. They realized that the disturbance could carry energy.
Then scientists were looking at the origens of the universe and they realized that there was sort of a chicken and an egg problem. Could it be that all light was created by charged particles or could the electro magnetic field have disturbances in it primordially. Why imagine a purely static electromagnetic fields initially? Why not just hypothesize that the electromagnetic field was never at a point where it was purely static, that electromagnetic waves were primordial and did not have their origens in particles? The electromagetic field became "real" and independent of particles and the photon was introduced to better describe its quantum like interactions with matter. This allowed scientists to consider the earliest descriptions of the universe to be of matter and electromagnetic radiation (and other radiation) in equilibrium, equilibrium meaning the radiation was creating particles and the particles were anihilating and creating radiation at an "equal rate". Equi- meant the relative rates of creation and anihilation are roughly the same.
So the first problem was what one physicist calls "materialist superstitions" i.e. that all being had origens in some form of material particles thought of as things and that electromagnetic waves were just abstractions. Latter physics became completely wed to the fact that these "fields" could create particles and that particles could create these field disturbances and you can just go look at the physics.
So the notion that you are looking for, that part of physics which is "real" - particles having rest mass for example, no longer is active in physics at all as far as I know, and is considered a superstion that there is such a thing. Even space which was nothing now has properties. There are a lot of web pages that decry quantum mechanics and relativity theory just because it violates these superstions. The best cure for this problem is to study the physics itself up to and including quantum mechanics and relativity theory.
So give up the idea of looking at what part of physics is the "real" part.
The second problem you will have is when you say something like "consciousness could be thought of as a form of light", or "consciousness could be an abstraction or pattern in matter". This is incorrect. Consciousness cannot be thought of as a form of light or an abstraction or pattern of matterial particles.
Let me compare two statements to illustrate. "Water can be thought of as H2O". "Consciousness can be thought of as a type of pattern of matter." Some think these statements are analogous. They are not.
First a preliminary logical consideration, imagine I say "All normal ants have 6 legs" and "All normal dogs have four legs". But then let's say, "But what if I consider this ant (presume as I write I mean "normal ant" when I say ant etc) to really be a dog? Then it could have four legs?" No. Can't do that. Why? Logic depends on the meaning of the terms. In the case of this sentence I could place an ant before you and count the legs and do the same for a dog. I could teach you that when I type "Ant" I mean the former and "Dog" the latter. Then if I could place one or the other before you and say "This is an ant" and you could look and verify whether my statement was true by looking. I could not then say something like "What if we thought of all ants as dogs?". Do you see why? Because it is a contradiction in terms. I do not have to go beyond my ideas of ants and dogs to find out if some ants are dogs. By definition of the terms they are different. Now if there were some hybrid creature fine. But we are just talking about normal ants and dogs. You can't say "All ants are dogs". It fails by equivocation of the two different terms. Ants are not dogs and "ants" - the word - refers to ants and does not refer to dogs and "dogs" refers to dogs and does not refer to ants.
Now let's look at a satement like "All water is H2O". Is this an equivocation? Some think so. I had one man tell me water is wet and H2O is not. He thought he had proved his point but he just didn't know that "wetness" had to do with how collections of particles beaded up on a table. He thought it was some vague phenomenological property.
"All water is H2O" is not a problem logically. Water is not an equivocation with H2O. In fact, all water is H2O". Here I can put a drop of water on the table and with sufficient instruments and experiences examine it closer and closer under a lot of circumstances and that is what chemistry courses do. You could then independently verify whether water was H2O or HO or H3O or C3Ag5. If you do you will find it is H2O.
Here the term "H2O" and "drop of water" are similar in that they refer to material objects. You can take the water and if you know what H2O means imagine that this drop is composed of many many molecules that you can't see without instruments. You can hypothesize based on the electrical polarity of H2O that it will have a kintd of surface tension and form droplets if sprinkled on a table due to surface tension. Many of the optical properties and spectra of the material could be predicted. There is no contradiction in terms. And when you say water is H2O you are saying that if you get a bunch of H2O molecules together we call that water. There is no contradiction in terms.
Now look at "Consciousness is a pattern in matter". There is nothing wrong formally. If we take some subset of all possible material patterns and designate those patterns as the ones that are "conscious" by definition then that is fine. But then we need another word for awareness, for the english word "consciousness" refers to awareness. Like what you loose when you go under anesthesiology.
Now look very clossely at that case. Imagine that I find that whenever a certain class of material patterns are present there is a conscious experiencing. Imagine I denote by "a conscious pattern" one of those matterial patterns. Can I now say that consciousness is a patter in matter?
If I have a material prejudice and start out as saying the only real thing is matter then I can by that prejudice determine that there is nothing more there than those things. And so the pattern itself must be consciouness. After all, given my prejudice, what else is there? Bring your instruments I will claim. You won't find anything else.
In fact, in a sense that is true, but it misses something. What if I do that anesthesia thing on *your* brain. You will notice that you loose what you might call "awareness" and get it back whenever the doctor makes the "conscious pattern" and then interrupts and re-establishes it. And you will need a word for it. We usually refer to awareness by using the word consciousness.
Now there is no possibility if you use those references to say that consciousness and the conscious pattern can be thought of as the same thing, and the interesting part is that it applies to any configuration of particles - any pattern. Any claim that "a pattern of particles" is "consciousness" is the logical problem of equivocation even if there are no ghosts, and no zombies, i.e. even if there are no consciounesses except when there is a certain class of pattern of material (no ghosts) and there is always consciousness whenever that patter occurs "no zombies".
Now I can in fact say that those particles are conscious. There is nothing wrong with ascribing consciousness to the pattern. But if I say that "consciousness is only the pattern of particles" then I must be *very* careful not to equivocate. If I have an ontological theory that says apriori that all that is is material and then I observe a brain then I can say that all that is there is the brain. I say this because I have already hypothesized it apriori. I can further establish a set of patters that I call "conscious" and say whether a given brian is one of those patterns. I can then say, "this pattern is a conscious one". But if I were that pattern, and wanted to express that I experienced when a conscious pattern was in effect in my brain and when the anesthesiologist changed it to a non conscious one I lost experiencing and did not experience again untill awakened when a conscious pattern was re-established (will skip problems of memory validity), then I need a word like what we normally use "consciouness" to make the *distinction* between the pattern and the awareness I am talking about. If I allocate the term "consciousness" to refer to that awareness and I alocate "conscious pattern" to refer to the pattern of the material in my brain and I further say that whenever there is a conscious pattern in fact there is consciousness, then it would be an equivocation to say that consciousness is the conscious pattern.
EIther you equivocate between "consciousness" and "conscious pattern" or you equivocate between two senses of "X is Y" where X and Y are variables. If by "X is Y" I mean that Y is the material that is there whenver X occurs that is one reference. If I mean that X refers to Y in the way water refers to H2O whenever I say "X is Y" then I must not equivocate to those senses.
So there is a problem of equivocation whenever I say "Perhaps consciousness is a pattern of matter in my brain" The only way to have that be true is to be very careful to change the normal terms we use to avoid equivocation. You must not equivocate between "consciousness" and "conscious pattern" and you must not equivocate in saying "X is Y" in one sense and having it mean the other sense to the listenter. If you do adopt language that does not equvocate you are still in trouble as you would be forced to use other terms like "awareness" or something else to avoid the equivocation. The fact is that consciousness in the sense of awareness does not refer to any pattern in matter at all. It refers to awareness in its standard use and it is a contradiction of terms to say otherwise and if you want to make it otherwise you will need new terms.
Does this mean that the distinction is purely terminological? After all it's just a contradiction *in terms*! Yes. But!!! Remember!!! We are forced by our reality to have two terms. There really is something that I refer to when I say "conscious" and you can re-define the term but I will need another because of the difference in the experience of consciousness and the experience of a pattern in a brain. For example I do not experience the pattern in your brain. I am conscious only of the pattern in my brain.
This all is overlooked very simply. Just commit yourself to saying that only matter exists. Then you will be able to say that all that consciousness is is a kind of unreal awareness. But you still have the problem, as there is the FACT of that awareness. You will need a term for it in the end and if you are to avoid superstion, you will have to admit the fact of it.
So now, assuming you have avoided those problems, to your question: Here is how to do it:
Modern physics allows us to associate a state vector in something called a Hilbert space with any material system. It provides a way, given the current state of the system to show how that state will evolve over time (I am going to ignore the measurement problem for now and certain practical problems). You then get another state vector at any point in the future from the field theory. You then have certain operators that allow you to determine from the state vector the probability that each physical properties has of occurring.
So what you first need is a terminological trick I use, for example, "red experiencing" to indicate the awareness of a color red where here I do not say anything about any material patterns at all. I do not mean that there is some "red" that I then "see". If I want to say that I say "I am seeing red". But I don't want to say that. I want only to say that I am conscious and that the experiencing I am having is red experiencing. I am not making any assertion that red exists of does not independent of my red seeing.
Now I make a set of all of the possible experiencings. So there is red experiencing, blue experiencing sound experiencing, truth experiencing, being experiencing, etc etc. I consider all of these possible experiencings a set and find some standard way to describe them. We already have a lot done. Seeing and hearing for example you will recognize that I am talking about different subsets of experiencing. So is needing to pee experiencing, etc.
Now you just take the standared quantum mechanics and run it but you provide aditional operators, which now map between the physical state and the experiencing that is occuring. So a certain operator will tell you the probability that seeing is in fact happening or not.
It might seem we know nothing of these operators but we actually know a lot. Guess what will happen to your red seeing if I shoot the back of your skull off and destroy the entire back of your brain. The state vector after the bullet goes through will be some state vector in hilbert space just as the state vector before the bullet goes through is. But the phenomenological operator will yield 0 probabilitiy (or very near) after the bullet and a very high probability before.
This will incorporate not just consciouness but its phenomenology (red, loud, etc) in the sense that Husserl defined it, into current physics.
Sorry, I have never been accused of short posts but I know of no way of reducing it given the time I have. I am impressed by the sincerity of your questioning. You seem actually philosophical. I wouldn't mention it to anyone. Most people kind of think its a waste of time.
- By Sushan