Is The Uncertainty Principle Incompatible With Determinism?

For more 'practical' theoretical examples of universe duplication, time separation and uncertainty...

See Rick and Morty season 2 episode 1, "A Rickle in Time".

 

What way? That is the beauty of everything. It is all random and always will be....we can express ourselves with numbers but never control everything with numbers....a safety valve so to speak. I cannot mathematically predetermine or control what my thoughts may be tomorrow either.
Isn't that what the beauty of it all really is all about?

 

Here's some questions to get you thinking about why this position might not be right:

Are a 6 month old child and a 50 year old man the same level of expert?

How about someone suffering severe brain damage and Albert Einstein?

How about a PhD neuroscientist who's spent 10 years meditating in a cave exploring his consciousness, and an alcoholic gun for hire who drinks himself to sleep every night?

As soon as you allow even a slight degree of differences in expertness, you agree that someone can be a complete idiot at their own consciousness, and there can be such a thing as a consciousness genius. The whole spectrum exists, just like with any domain of knowledge.

Simply having consciousness does not mean you've put in the work to understand your consciousness. There are people who will say things about their own consciousness that are not even correct for their own consciousness, because their level of analysis and discourse is poor.

I get what you're getting at here, but does it make sense to ask what something "looks like" outside of a brain? I think when we say "looks like", we implicitely mean "to a brain". What does a rose smell like to my computer speakers? Seems to not be a sensical question.

I'm not familiar with any arguments for determinism which require a "perfect universe" (whatever that means), and I've done extensive research in this area. All that is required is for there to be laws which the universe must follow in all occurences; then given knowledge of that universes' initial conditions, and said laws, we could know the entire future of that universe, and say it is determined. I'm also not aware of any argument against determinism which requires belief in a deity; there are plenty of arguments against it which invoke no such entity.

But you can't have an "exact" replica which also has a degree of imperfection; that's like a married bachelor. What if you didn't have even the slightest degree of imperfection in your copy of the universe? What then would prevent your copy from playing out exactly like our real universe? That is the *argument* of determinism, not an assumption.

You seem to know a lot about perfection . . . how are you defining it? What makes the universe as it is imperfect? Why does perfection mean a singularity?

Unfortunately, QM does not grant you free will; you replace the clockwork determinism of Newton for the random chance of Heisenberg. You still don't have a causal agent "acting" in this universe of "its own free will" . . . QM provides simply another flavor of determinism, one where a coin flip is a frequent way of determining the outcome of events.

IRQ42: Don't confuse an unintuitive reality for a false reality. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you or to our mathematics; nor are mathematics correctly describing the universe under any obligation to be intelligible to most people.

Our brains are not "finished products" you are working with a very messy and ad hoc conglomerate of neural tissue, and we are obviously bumping up against a glass ceiling of understanding.

 

Well to begin with, it's my birthday!!!

Secondly, I appreciate what you're saying. Some people have tried really hard to work out their consciousness, but have they truly been conscious of something special? Is my question. Couldn't it be that a mentally handicapped person experienced something more meaningful than Einstein? So really smart people may be conscious of more facts, but they're not necessarily conscious of more things or more instructive things. A handicapped person might be aware of what it's like to be loved despite of a handicap, for instance. Who can say what the value of that is? I would say these things are all a part of consciousness. It doesn't really matter who is better at sounding smart when they try to explain their consciousness; nobody really has explained their consciousness. People have just been aware of different things, and none can be said to be any better than the next.

Someone may have the most appropriate attitude towards consciousness, I suppose, but to me that still doesn't mean they know more about what consciousness is, because part of what consciousness is is all of our experiences. If I sit in a room by myself my entire life with a perfect attitude towards what my consciousness is, am I really more of an expert on what it is than someone who is out there experiencing life in its full?

There may be nothing that can see besides a brain. I guess AI may be able to see, and if they evolve at an exponential rate like some people expect them to, who knows what they will see? There may be brains more advanced than ours that can see in more dimensions than we can see, and they may have a superior vantage point as to what a brain really looks like in its true environment. But there's truly no way of knowing if what a brain interprets as reality is exactly like what is out there. We just have to assume that our brains are interpreting the world as it is. But for all we know, the brain could actually be any kind of information, and the information it is composed of just happens to construe itself as a brain, because it's not really good at processing itself as information.

We're really just chemicals decoding chemicals, but we don't really know what a chemical is for sure, because we have no way of knowing whether chemical interactions are any good at processing information. I don't see why they would be really good at processing information. I think it's more likely that the chemicals in our brains are more closely related to the chemicals in everyday objects, rather than the idea that the chemicals in our brains are super special chemicals gifted at determining what reality is. Maybe the reason why a chair is so stoic is precisely because it has a total grasp on what reality is. Maybe the reason we change so much is because the chemicals in our brains are especially bad at determining what reality is. Who knows.

To me what you seem to be saying is that things have no appearance if there is no brain to see them, which is a pretty "out there" thing to suggest, but maybe it's true and nothing does have an appearance if no one is around to see it.

 

Happy birthday!!

Think of it with another analogy; imagine instead of discussing consciousness, we are discussing the works of Shakespeare. Everybody can experience the works of shakespeare equally, right? Ultimately they are just occurences in consciousness, just like your observations of your own consciousness, are occurences in consciousness. Yet we know that there is a gradation of analysis and insight which on one end is gross and clumsy, and at the other is subtle and refined. The difference between a slacker high school student reading Hamlet and a PhD english teacher reading Hamlet might be as great as the difference between an orangutang being slowly read Hamlet and a slacker high school student reading it.

Simply being there to experience something does put you in a unique position to experience it, but not necessarily to understand it. And that seems to be what we're speaking out; the understanding of consciousness.

Actually we know for a fact that it is not exactly like what is out there; without even leaving basic physiology and physics, just look at vision. All our eyes can detect is a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum; we are actually blind to 99% of the light which is available to our eyes. It only gets worse from there! Our brains apply all manner of filter incessently to the flux of reality so as to render our subjective experiences intelligible to our neurology.

I'm actually making a fairly tame point, and it's based primarily on language; all I'm saying is that when we talk about what something "looks like", we really do mean "to a brain". What does my voice sound like to a pencil? Really ponder that question. For me, my knee jerk reaction is "Well wait, pencils don't seem to have any capacity to hear anything". So we do mean "to a brain", or even more generally, "to a conscious observer". Brains may come in all kinds of flavors and complexity, but by brain I just mean that organ which processes meaning.

 

Common sense man. For determinism to work, all quantum interaction would have to be absolutely 100% predictable 100% of the time. Not 99.999999999999999999999999999999999995% or determinism fails. Laws are human concepts, quantum universe doesn't give a shit about our 'laws" based on our limited understanding. Human uncertainty exists on a far lower resolution that the actual quantum world.

 

And yet, the slacker student can still have an expert perspective from his own unique experiences with life in relationship to reading Hamlet that is more of an understanding when compared to the snob teacher who thinks he knows it all already on a purely scholastic level.

 

Who or what is it that is experiencing Consciousness?

And also, everyone has their own authentic birthright to be an expert of their own perspective, which I think is the point that's trying to be made.

A 50 year-old may be more "advanced" with his consciousness in certain ways compared to that of a 5 year old but Wisdom is the understanding that actually there is a lot that the 50 year old is way more out of touch with than the 5 year old. So you can't really argue that just because he's lived longer, that the 50 year old is more of a master of his consciousness than the 5 year old. There's plenty of situations where it's actually the opposite.

I think that everyone IS Consciousness itself, and that Consciousness is timeless no matter what age you are, and that even outside of logical understanding and intellectual stuffiness, there are infinite layers and levels of intelligence, expertise, and genius to be accessed at any age or level of education.

Besides, generation gaps provide the understanding that expertise doesn't really boil down to age. A lot of people my age and younger know 20 times more about computers than most 50 year-olds, for example.

I would also say that being a master of your own Consciousness doesn't just comprise of having some sort of intellectual understanding of it. Consciousness is much more intrinsic and primordial than simply boiling it down to whether you intellectually understand it or not. If it were based just on intellectualism and linear logical understanding, then wouldn't Scientists have cracked the mystery of Consciousness by now?

Take an Olympic athlete, for example. In any sport, you could say that a master athlete at his/her best is completely being one with themselves and their surroundings. They are plugged in to Zen or Tao, and are being a master of their own Consciousness. You could say the same thing about a master Chef who is in a total flow even though a thousand things are happening at once. These people may know nothing about Zen, but they are still tapped in to it. They may have never even deeply contemplated their own Consciousness, but it doesn't really matter.

You don't have to have an intellectual understanding of Consciousness in order to be a master of your Consciousness. An intellectual understanding may help you or may hinder your progress.

 

This may be true in the general case, but I guarantee you that there are plenty of 50+ year olds out there that know far more about computers than I, possibly at a level I may never reach. Some of the most knowledgeable computer engineers and programmers are in their 50's and 60's or maybe even older, they were there close to the dawn of computing, so they have a reference point that we simply don't have. I'm talking about the guys that could patch punched tape, or read a computer program and find the bugs by feeling the holes. Our generation is thrust into the complexity of what it is, but we don't have that reference point that they do regarding how things evolved from what they were then to what they are now. We can study it sure, but we weren't there and they simply have decades more experience, and you can learn a lot in many decades. If you could prolong the human lifespan to twice what it is now, imagine how much one could learn and understand. You learn, gaining knowledge and understanding throughout your entire life (though some learn at a faster rate than others for various reasons. How much knowledge and understanding could one achieve if they were able to live for a millennium? Possibly the 35 year old who has devoted his life to academics could know more than a 1000 year old slacker who never cared to read a book or study anything ... but you get what I'm saying. People become experts in different things, we don't live long enough to become experts in all fields.

I might argue that reality itself doesn't really "look" like anything. It only looks like anything to things that "look". To clarify, our brains interpret signals from our senses (here the eyes) and incorporate them into its own model, which has a useful meaning to "our brain". The way things look to us may simply be because this is how our brains interpret it so that it makes the most sense for the purpose the brain serves. This system can be fooled easily though, there are all kinds of optical illusions that can fool the brain into seeing something differently than expected, for instance seeing curved lines that are actually straight lines with no curvature when measured with a straight-edge instrument.

 

Yeah I would just say that in general that there's an overall higher level of intelligence with computers from the average person in their early to mid twenties.. The average 50 year olds that i come across don't know how to hack, build computers, and the like. I personally don't know much about computers, but i sure have lots of friends my age who do.

 

Same goes with fMRI, PET and most all the other technology that is associated with measuring brain activity and often conscious states.

The irony of this state you describe, which in a sense accurately demonstrates a larger issue to the bulk of disagreement here is that when athletes are playing at extremely high level and get into "The Zone" many describe this state as playing "unconscious".

 

I've never heard that description before regarding "unconscious" and even if that term is used, it's not really a correct use of the term. As you mentioned in another thread, we don't have to get into the details of the poetic use of language, like a star "dying" (even though I find that to be much more literal than playing "unconscious").

 

If this is sarcastic, all I'm saying is that your younger average Joe tends to know how to navigate technology better than your average Joe who is older and hasn't spent their whole lives living with computers. I'm not talking about experts in their field here.

Just to expand the point, your average 50 year old knows much more about computers than your average 80 year old. The point of this metaphor being that age doesn't really determine how advanced your intelligence is, and also doesn't really determine whether you're a master of your Consciousness or not. You can be wise and young, old and ignorant, young and ignorant, old and wise, and everything in between.

And most importantly, intellectual intelligence does not determine how in touch you are or aren't with your own Consciousness.

I can agree that some people are relatively more in tune with certain things than others, but also feel that everyone is their own master. Even if they're not fully conscious of that fact, they're still a master of their moment.

 

I'm pretty certain I recall you and I discussing "qualia" before but if we accept what you are saying here, where does that leave us in regards to qualia?

My initial impression is that it suggest a Daniel Dennett type of view of consciousness, that qualia is essentially illusory in a sense, or perhaps maybe better viewed at as sort of secondary or tertiary aspects of consciousness, which may not be as fundamental to consciousness as it may seem. For instance, in regards to your optical illusion, there is still a "what is like to experience __________ ?" aspect but the phenomena of the optical illusion is presumably a misappropriation of the object.

Or does the fact that we can even ask the question still give some importance to the concept of qualia ?

 

As I think saying "Brain producing consciousness" is far, far less egregious an abuse of language than your star example as anything other than an anthropomorphization and even more precise than common parlance such as saying things like "Alcohol produces intoxication."

I'd probably qualify the statement if the bulk of the discussion was directed towards neuroscience discussion, might do the same as well if we actually defined consciousness to something specific.

No idea why you think that is sarcastic.. I am saying that it applies to other technology besides the personal computer as well, including brain imaging tech.

Well before we go off the deep end and start comparing how in tune someone is with their consciousness in the US who is 20 and cannot buy alcohol legally to someone who is 21, let's re-address the original comparison made by Writer..

Without deflecting to different comparisons, are there obvious differences in understanding of consciousness that present themselves in this example? Or is consciousness such a nebulous concept, that we cannot make any sort of assertion in regards to this discrepancy in your view?

 

I'm not sure how we can differentiate experiencing consciousness from understanding it. Who understands a pool of water better: the guy who knows it's H20 or the mentally challenged person swimming in it?

All I'm saying is that what an object looks like to a brain does not determine what the physicality of the object actually is, if indeed it can be said to be physical at all (and not some strange alien "matter".) Perhaps what this all really is is just the way some alien kind of information happens to function. Like, say, what a motor looks like is a piece of information, but we would never be able to perceive it from being inside the motor, floating around with the oil. There is no reason why the information this entire universe is happening in has to be any bigger than a speck of dust, and we're just how the speck happens to be. Who is to say what an alien speck of information has to be like?

I guess, in a way, I am even arguing that we can't talk about how an object looks like to a brain. We have to first trust the brain implicitly to know that it is the thing that is processing information. But we have no way of proving that the chemicals in our brains are capable of doing that. So, in my opinion, the whole brain sort of implodes in on itself in one big conundrum. We more or less only have a concept of a brain in the first place. We have a concept of neurons. We have a concept of brain science. We have only a concept of everything. We're totally blind, just feeling around in the dark, though we feel with our eyes and ears and nose as well as touch. But, as a matter of fact, we truly have no idea what is going on.

 

I think this statement about god is more-so an observation of our consciousness : God is steadfast , unchanging .
I consider consciousness to be quite egalitarian . You exist justly as so as when you were eggs , Wordy Birds ,
determined to sing .

This is how we love and respect a child .

Remembering all of who we are , of course we learn to note changes , life changes . Life from
beginning to end though is one consciousness - a sparkle .

What's to do about denial and forgetfulness ? Maybe nothing . Human compassion for the condition is goodness ,
yet not even that need do anything ... seems rather Tao

 

The qualia as I understand it, is "what it is like"; presumably to the one experiencing the qualia when the brain is activated in particular configurations that represent that particular qualia. It may or may not reflect external reality in a a meaningful way. We can see colors because of our unique physiology and psychology but "color" doesn't exist physically, at least not outside of out own heads. What is visible light is just a tiny slice of the EM spectrum, we can describe different varieties of "light" or colors by their wavelenghts but that's pretty much it. The color "purple" doesn't exist as a wavelength, but it is part of a qualia perceived when our eyes receive a mixture of red and blue wavelengths, and why the color purple looks similar to the color violet (which is a single wavelength shorter than blue) I'm not sure. A beam of "yellow" photons of a single wavelength look the same to us as a mixture of (roughly) red and green photons.

Regarding purple, there exists the concept of other "impossible colors" such as "yellowish-blue" (different than green, which would be expected from simply mixing those two) or "reddish-green"; I've had some success in "seeing" these colors but it's hard to without a carefully designed and controlled setup which I don't have access to.

I have noticed that strobing (flashing) rapidly between two complementary colors can produced some rather interesting effects when under the influence of LSD. The effect is more interesting than strobing between black and white, the complementary colors produce interesting patterns evolving into structures consisting of colors that aren't actually being produced by the display with dimensionality beyond the 2 dimensions of the screen (3-Dimensinal fractal like form constants and structures, sometimes containing recognizable words and phrases "inscribed" into them, and sometimes what appears to be "words" written in a strange language", or what looks like "code". If you focus it sometimes the structure will appear have a dimensionality higher than 3 dimensions, which I can only really describe as what appears to be a "veil" between the 3 dimensions and "something else"). I've noticed that different strobe rates change the perceived effects which I hypothesize may have something to do with either synchronization, or constructive/destructive interference with certain brain wave frequencies. Of course all of these can occur on LSD without assistance, but the strobe program seems to amplify certain things (and could probably also induce a seizure in an epileptic btw). I got the idea from a quite old program for DOS, "Flasher 3000" i believe it was called. I either couldn't find the program anywhere anywhere, or it wouldn't run on my modern OS, so I decided one day to write something similar in spirit, though I never really came back to work on it for further refinement, or "finish it" you might say.

 

Yes. This is the point I'm trying to make. You have equal access to accessing the depths of your Consciousness from a baby to an old man, that's because it's just a singular Consciousness the entire time. This Consciousness sees many changes, but it's still You the whole time. This is where the Buddhists will step in and say that it's just changingness the whole time, but something needs to not be changing in order to witness changingness.

 

There was another paper I read some weeks ago is actually a lot smaller, or thinner than it feels, and that our conscious mind isn't actually in charge, but instead is just mediating between different and seperate parts of the brain generating inpulses in an unconscious fashion, transferring the messages between these different regions, but having little to do with actual thinking or decision making. I don't have time to look up the paper right now, so can't say much more about that, maybe I'll try to locate it later and post a link.

There is the phenomenon of attention, which we generally feel like we have a lot of control over, but perhaps we don't have as much control over our attention as we think we do. Attention definitely plays a big part in what we perceive. Ever been in a quiet room with a clock ticking, the clock is always there but you may never hear it, until you notice the ticking and then you can't help but hear it until your attention shifts again and your brain filters that sound out completely. I've done this experiment with other people, asking them if they could hear the clock ticking, to which they answered no. In most cases I had to actually point out the clock to them and tell them to watch the seconds hand, and only then could they suddenly "hear" it, and it was quite loud and after that they couldn't help but hear it for some time.