Matti Pitkanen (matpitka@pcu.helsinki.fi)
Thu, 17 Jun 1999 11:06:05 +0300 (EET DST)
Dear Matti,
:) I could say: "Ah, you are discovering what I have also
discovered
about consciousness!" :) I apologize for the slowness in my replies to
your very thought provoking posts. I have been reading many papers and
books in an attempt to broaden my vocabulary so that I can communicate
more effectively with you and the others on the Time List. I have also
had a bit of "writer's block" and have been taking care of my new baby.
[MP]
Happy to hear that you are enjoying the best of the seasons of life!
My oldest son is visiting me and about 24 years ago I was in similar
situation as you now.
BTW, Thank you for the ps files. I will read them. I will spend weekend
on summer cottage of old friend and respond to next week. Summer is at its
best now in Finland.
[Stephen]
About dissipation and consciousness: I believe that the two processes
are the reverse of each other! This notion is inspired by Roger
Penrose's argument in The Emperor's New Mind were he shows that the
annihilation of information by black holes is balanced by the creation
of "flow lines" in a phase space container representing the entire
universe.
[MP]
Yes. Dissipation and consciousness are reverse in the sense that
gain of conscious information means loss of unconscious information
defined as information of quantum history. Hence dissipation is direct
measure for consciousness. The question is only about length scales:
in which length scales dissipation occurs. Only in atomic or perhaps
also in longer length scales.
From TGD view point the loss of information in blackholes if it really
occurs (also transformation to information in the interior could be
in question) would mean that blackholes would be extremely conscious
objects. Perhaps the most intelligent hermites of the universe
eating information around us with horrible greediness! Perhaps the
ultimate fate of thinker is to become hermite, black monolite creating
deep horror. Forgetting all about infinite primes and hierarchies of
consciousness and Gods(;-).
In my homepage I have told about my long lasting altered state of
consciousness about 15 years ago or so. One of the great ideas was that
all intelligent systems are fighting and killing for
'flogiston'. 'Flogiston' is of course information! Conscious systems eat
information and transform it to conscious information. I later checked
the meaning of flogiston and learned that it was mysterious
thermodynamical substance postulated in early days of thermodynamics. It
seems that 'flogiston' concept makes sense after all! Perhaps
the thermodynamics as we know it will be replaced with theory
of conscious information and information could be called flogiston
quite well.
[Stephen]
When I found Vaughan Pratt's paper (ratmech.ps) discussing a
duality between time and logic I was convinced that the idea was correct,
but I have been unable to communicate this idea to others. Even Pratt
himself does not understand me. :( He has not worked out the way to
formulate entropy within his notion.
Your idea of the pinary cutoff is wonderful! It goes along way in
explaining why any observer has a "field of perception" that appears to
be "complete" to them. I have long argued that each observer has their
own finite universe but have not been understood. :( Matti, my friend,
you are explaining what I can not. I thank you.
[MP]
You are quite right.
For me understanding of pinary cutoff was pleasant surprise since it is
forced by real to p-adic quantum TGD correspondence and I regarded
the concept as unsatisfactory. It is counterpart of length scale cutoff
of QFT:s and there are unpleasant associations about infinities.
It seems that quantum TGD proper and TGD inspired theory of cs are
now converging to single theory.
[Stephen]
I highly recommend Michael C. Mackey's book Time Arrows. If you can't
get it from the library let me know any I will send you copies of the
relevant parts. His "God Theorem" is very important for your ideas
relating dissipation to consciousness. It proves that an invertible
system U can have subsystems U_i that are not invertible and are thus
dissipative and irreversible. The way that mapping between the Real
valued states and p-adic valued states occurs is indicative. I do not
know how to represent this mathematically....
[MP]
It would be interesting to learn about Mackey's thoughts: my basic
philosophy is of course somewhat different: entire U is invertible in my
approach. In your and Hitoshi's approach situation is different. In any
case, dissipation is for me a direct experimental proof for quantum jumps
between quantum histories concept.
There is also interesting connection with self organization. Self
organization can be understood as iteration. Iteration creates fractal
like fixed points: for instance dissipation without energy feed leads
rapidly to the state in which nothing moves.
The informational time development operator U==U_a, a--> infty indeed acts
as iteration in good approximation on subsystems which do not suffer
quantum jump. N quantum jumps corresponds to U^N in good approximation.
This would mean that dissipation of energy leading to fixed point, limit
cycle etc.. would indeed be iteration basically. I am beginning to look
for more details related to this.
[Stephen]
The irreversibility of quantum jumps as an action of collapsing
the many possibilities down to one actuality is in a fundamental way the
reverse of a dissipation (like the thermodynamic evolution of a system's
phase space) that maps one flow to many. Perhaps "flow" is the wrong
word... The key is that we have dual semigroups of dynamics, one
semigroup representing the evolution of consciousness and the other the
evolution of dissipation. Both involve a "time" but they "flow in
opposite directions".
[MP] I think the best manner to say this is to say that information
of quantum state is transformed to conscious information and destroyed
as unconscious information. But there is paradox involved: entropy
is potential information and it seems to be a matter of taste whether
to speak of entropy or potential information. This is like creativity.
Discoveries are not possible without diverging period when one generates
counter arguments and is totally lost in fog!(;-)
[Stephen]
The unity of the two is realized at the Grundlagen level of the
Totality, which is one. It has no dynamics in itself as seen by the fact
that it has no time associated. Mackey's proof that invertible systems
have no time (he does not say this exactly but it is implied) while
non-invertible systems will have time.
[MP]
This is realized very precisely in TGD. Without the classical
nondeterminism of Kaehler action classical dynamics would be invertible.
There would be no time. There would be no consciousness since in von
Neumann inspired scenario since only quantum entanglement between
cognitive and material spacetime sheets can be reduced by quantum jumps in
this scenario.
[Stephen]
I will try to write up something about this soon. I am currently
thinking about how to best describe how subsets of U^T have non-zero
potentials with respect to each other and how this relates to the two
semigroups discussed above and how your ideas explain this. BTW,
Prigogine has the math of the semigroups already worked out!
Onward to the Unknown,
Stephen
Matti Pitkanen wrote:
>
> Dear Stephen,
>
> Below is qmind message summarizing the recent situation in problem of
> defining measures for information content of conscious experience. There
> is also a new chapter in TGD inspired theory of consciousness.
>
> By the way, quantum jump is jump to a state with vanishing entanglement.
> In earlier posting You proposed that entanglement could perhaps vanish
> only to some accuracy epsilon. I disagreed saying something
> like 'philosophy with accuracy epsilon is not attractive idea'.
> I was wrong.
>
> Common sense indeed suggests that you are correct.
> There are several arguments.
>
> For instance, conscious experiences bind to single experience if there
> is arbitrary but nonvanishing small entanglement present. It is
difficult
> to understand why conscious experiences would become separate
experiences
> precisely when entangelment is zero and integrate to single experience
> for arbitrary small entanglement. Rather, one would expect
> some critical entanglement entropy below which integration
> does not occur.
>
> I found that this is the case!
>
> The point is that real states are mapped to their p-adic counterparts
> and if real entanglement entropy is smaller than the pinary resolution
> (recall pinary cutoff) then real entanglement with entanglement
> entropy below pinary cutoff is mapped to zero p-adic entanglement!
> p-Adic entanglement could be even defined as entanglement with
> the unique pinary cutoff! Pinary cutoff defines the resolution
> of conscious experience also.
>
>
> Best,
>
> MP
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