This seems to be trying to fit the problem to the method.
“ This theory is built up in such a way that systems which are doing a lot of recurrent processing — i.e. whose information processing is strongly integrated — exhibit a larger degree of consciousness than systems who are not doing any significant recurrent processing.”
This is backwards and really just anthropomorphic egocentrism. Our ability to process increasing amounts of information is a human trait, but it arises from consciousness. Flies have reaction times far faster than people, simply because they don’t have nearly so many circuits firing off. Does that mean they lack consciousness, or that it is just much less cluttered?
An example I try raising about just how biased our models of reality are, has to do with our concept of time. As mobile creatures, we experience life as a sequence of perceptions, as a function of navigation. Then as members of humanity, our culture arises from narrating stories to one another. So we naturally think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration and correlates them with measures of distance, to propose spacetime.
The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Time is an effect of physical activity, like temperature, pressure, color, sound. Think frequencies and amplitudes. Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don’t call them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
Energy is “conserved,” because it is the present. Its dynamic change creates time. So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
Given that consciousness goes past to future, while the thoughts and feelings generated go future to past, it would seem consciousness functions as energy.
Yet as these organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through and further organizes the information being projected, both internally and externally, by this energy. The heart and gut versus the head.?
Yes, the brain processes information, but is it really the source of this fire within, we refer to as consciousness, or simply a lens, lenses, filters, mirrors, through which it shines? All that recurrent processing.
Think about time; Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. That much of history has been about getting everyone on the same page, following the same stories, speaking the same languages, playing by the same rules, seeking the same goals, using the same measures, it might seem there should be some universal, Newtonian flow of time, but there is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time, earth time, etc. When everyone is playing the same game, for the same goals, it becomes a race and everyone is on rabbit time, yet the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.
As for the dimensionality of space, it really is just the xyz coordinate system. It’s mapping device, no more and no less. It’s no more foundational to space, than longitude, latitude and altitude are foundational to the biosphere of this planet.
Maps are not the territory. Our minds are reductionist, as we sort through the noise for the signals we need, but that’s not what nature is about. It works on feedback, not goals. When we boil the body down to the skeleton, that’s just the frame, not the seed. It is descriptive, not explanatory.
Epicycles were brilliant math, as a description of our view of the cosmos, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.
We are barely scratching the surface. Trying to explain consciousness through math is just putting it in a box of our best assumptions. It’s like we still think the earth is flat and trying to explain why the sun rises and sets.
