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December 29, 2019 - February 6, 2020
I suspect that, if we succeed in this enterprise, we will find that the distinction we make between the living and nonliving is an artifact of limitations of our spacetime interface, not an insight into the nature of reality.
We will also find that networks of neurons are among our symbols for error-correcting coders.
a “perceive-decide-act” (PDA) loop (which is described mathematically in the appendix).
For instance, you’re strolling along a sidewalk at dusk, and suddenly jump in fear. You peer around to find a culprit, and relax when you discern a garden hose in the grass. Your jump was triggered by a fitness message with inadequate error correction—it incorrectly said “snake.” Because this message didn’t waste time on error correction, it arrived quickly and you acted promptly to avoid a fitness-reducing bite. After your initial startle, an error-corrected message arrived saying, “No worries, just a hose.” Your needless jump wasted calories and triggered stress-inducing cortisol, so it
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Which line is there—glowing, or not glowing—when you don’t look? The question is of course silly. There is no line when you don’t look. Instead, the line you see is the message you recover when you correct an erasure.
I suspect that superposition, entanglement, and the holographic inflation of three dimensions seen in our visual example is precisely the same as studied in quantum theory.
Spacetime is not an objective reality independent of any observer. It is an interface shaped by natural selection to convey messages about fitness.
Instead, spacetime and objects are simply a coding system for messages about fitness.
In sum, spacetime is not an ancient theater erected long before any stirrings of life. It is a data structure that we create now to track and capture fitness payoffs.
Color, like each of our perceptions, is both window and prison.
My very body is an icon, hiding a complex reality of which I’m ignorant.
When you perceive yourself sitting inside space and enduring through time, you’re actually seeing yourself as an icon inside your own data structure.
Our perceptions are a user interface that evolved to guide our actions and keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Once we grasp this, and free ourselves from the conceptual straitjacket of assuming that we perceive reality as it is, then we can reverse-engineer our interface, understand how it codes information about fitness and guides our actions, and then apply this knowledge to solve practical problems—such as creating chromatures that evoke specific emotions.
Because we forage for fitness. We search the visual field for a message about fitness that may be worth the effort to examine in detail.
Why are we stumped? We can blame that basic tool of the conjurer’s trade: distraction. We have been lured, with potent miscues, to look over here—at the brain (or at the brain together with the body interacting with the environment). We have been misled to believe that the brain, or the embodied brain, somehow serves up the magic of consciousness. We have, in short, been duped.
Physicalism is not the only available monism. If we grant that there are conscious experiences, and that there are conscious agents that enjoy and act on experiences, then we can try to construct a scientific theory of consciousness that posits that conscious agents—not objects in spacetime—are fundamental, and that the world consists entirely of conscious agents.
“I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on . . . reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.” Galileo denied that our perceptions of tastes, odors, and colors are genuine insights into objective tastes, odors, and colors. There are, he claimed, no tastes, odors, or colors in objective reality. These are just features of our perceptions. Galileo got the message, took a giant leap in
What is spacetime? This book has offered you the red pill. Spacetime is your virtual reality, a headset of your own making. The objects you see are your invention. You create them with a glance and destroy them with a blink.
