Craig Weinberg

Questioning assumptions about light, electromagnetism, gravity, time, life, and consciousness.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@stinor @MillerLabMIT The model is misguided. Unconscious forms have no power to inform each other. A child can use their fingers to count but the fingers don't know what counting is. Same with neurons. They are tangible objects. Information is intangible. There is an Explanatory Gap...a Hard Problem

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@gdesilet @MillerLabMIT @jasonbowden1000 Creatures don't read anything unless they are conscious. In the absence of consciousness there is no reading no need for reading.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@MillerLabMIT @stinor The brain is an organ. It doesn't 'represent' things, it does biochemistry. Biochemistry is essentially the geometry of large organic molecules. Geometry. Not sensations or feelings. Not even signals or information. Just forces overlapping in statistical inevitable ways.

[Stephen @gniksAtsuJmi]

@MillerLabMIT If you are a physicalist, then you have a hard problem.

Physicalism deliberately and explicitly removes experience from its ontological primitive.

It then cannot explain how to get experience back out of this ontology.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@srulibroocker @leecronin @fchollet I can't confirm what degree of conscious experience is exclusively mine, but I propose that it includes personal and intrapersonal scopes of experience as well interpersonal, transpersonal and impersonal.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@srulibroocker @leecronin @fchollet I suggest a different view. There is no 'pure' aware-ness or conscious-ness, it's just that existence is irreducibly aesthetic/experiential.

Unconsciousness is an inference made from within certain limited conscious experiences. W/o limits, consciousness is the Totality.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@srulibroocker @leecronin @fchollet Possibly. Or maybe forgetting is emergent from certain states of consciousness, which is otherwise eternal. Terminal lucidity cases suggest memory damage can be spontaneously bypassed.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@srulibroocker @leecronin @fchollet Experience can include computation but again, what role would experience play if experience were entirely computational? Why not just have a computation w/o experience?

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@leecronin @fchollet Consciousness alone makes existence seem real or unreal, physical or non-physical.

Seeming (appearance, qualia, conscious experience) is ultimately more 'real' than anything that seems physical to us.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@srulibroocker @leecronin @fchollet If reality were computational, experience would have no parsimonious function to contribute.

Computation (or any kind of mechanism/automation) should logically replace experience, not generate it.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@StuartHameroff I agree we can say that consciousness is 'collapse' but I think the reason that's true is because 'particles' like photons are sensations in the first place. Sensation is the fabric of physical appearance. It has nothing to do with humans.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@Philip_Goff Wouldn't that make masochism impossible?

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@richardgordon22 There is no experiment that doesn't end with a conscious person observing and interpreting events as a result. The entire concept of a quantum wave function or its 'collapse' is a pure abstraction inferred in consciousness.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@leebriskcyrano @getjonwithit Agree, and further, 'map' is an intellectual projection that we make onto anything that we use to refer to something else. Nothing is only a map or a sign, it's just that things we perceive can appear isomorphic in some way to another perception or idea.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@getjonwithit Physics alone can't encode. It has no access to codes or abstraction. Tangibility can be 'simulated' by hinting at it through other sense modalties (sight and sound) but only b/c our conscious experience typically includes access to all of those aesthetics and their associations.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@getjonwithit The map is only one way because mapping is not a physical effect. Whether it's microelectronics or abacus beads, there is no access to any abstraction without assuming rich, multimodal conscious experience.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@HedonicUrge @DavidDeutschOxf @charleswangb @CR The degree to which x appears to simulate y depends entirely on what modalities and scales of sensitivity are available within a given conscious experience. A glass of hydrogen peroxide is a simulation of water if you can only see it. A scarecrow simulates a farmer to a bird.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@BernardJBaars If an unconscious brain is 'using conscious access'... unconsciously, then it is an infinite regress. The issue is, how do unexperienced material conditions begin to have an experience?

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@StuartHameroff It's not that bodies *have* disembodied qualia, it's that the available qualia are defined by awareness. If you can see and touch on a micro scale, then a bacterial body may appear. If you can't feel or think on an equivalent scale, there's no shared subjective qualia available.

[Craig Weinberg @S33light]

@StuartHameroff Bacteria are already qualia. The issue is whether the visible and tangible qualia we access through a microscope are more descriptive of the whole phenomenon than the same qualia that define human bodies when accessed through a telescope. I don't see why they would be.