Consciousness

These are just some brief points that will relate (eventually) to my posts entitled Are we all part of the same entity?

i)  Listed below are all the possible outcomes for tossing 2,3 and 4 coins respectively.

All possible combinations for 2 coins -  HH,HT,TH,TT

All possible combinations for 3 coins -  TTT, TTH, THT, THH, HTT, HTH, HHT, HHH

All possible combinations for 4 coins -  TTTT, TTTH, TTHT, TTHH, THTT, THTH, THHT, THHH, HTTT, HTTH, HTHT, HTHH, HHTT, HHTH, HHHT, HHHH

It’s quite straightforward to see from inspection that the first list contains all combinations that are possible from throwing 2 coins. It’s not too difficult to see this for the other 2 lists either. Also if you look at the patterns you can probably tell how the lists are compiled which allows them to exhaustively cover all possible combinations of throws.

We could if we wished follow this same basic method of compiling lists and allow for more and more coins and all their combinations of throws. The lists would get bigger of course but the principle would be the same.   

Each coin could be regarded as a binary piece of information. The word binary simply means there are two possible states that each bit of information can have. The labelling is arbitrary, but the standard binary notation used to represent the states is 1 and 0. The 1 and 0 is a simple and convenient way to label the two states. They are simply labels so it doesn’t matter what we call them. Flib and flob would do the job just as well. We could if we like regard the 1 as equivalent to H and the 0 equivalent to T.  The only requirement is we need two labels, one to represent each possible state.

If we were throwing dice instead of coins we could compile lists similar to the ones shown above which would cover all possible combinations of throws. Instead of 2 values for each object there would be 6 values. The lists would be bigger but the method of compiling them would be exactly the same. We could imagine that instead of having 6 sided dice we had 7 sided dice. We could still compile the lists covering all the possibilities of throws in exactly the same manner. We could continue going up  to 8, 9, 10 sided dice and so on as high up as we liked. The lists would become correspondingly larger to accommodate the increasing number of possible combinations of throws but the principle of compiling them would remain exactly the same.

Consider a digital LCD screen. Each pixel or picture element can take on a range of values. The range of values is limited by virtue of being represented by binary bits. The more bits used to represent each pixel the more colours are available. If we consider a 16 bit digital screen each pixel can have 4096 different values. If the screen is 1920 pixels across and 1200 pixels down we would have a screen containing 1920 × 1200 = 2304000 pixels in total (about 2.3 million pixels). We could imagine compiling tables similar to described above. If it helps to conceptualize things imagine we have 2.3 million dice each having 4096 sides. It is not possible to visualize this physically of course but it is very easy to conceptualize. It is also very easy to imagine (or at least conceive of) compiling whoppingly huge tables in the manner described above which will accommodate all possible combinations of pixel states for the whole screen.

A small subset of this huge list would contain the pixel combinations corresponding to all of the TV pictures you have ever seen in your life. It would also contain all the TV pictures everyone has ever seen in their life, or will ever see. In fact it contains all possible pictures. It also contains all the text you have ever seen in your life and all possible text that could ever exist, in all possible languages. All this would still only be a small subset of the total possible combinations.

Instead of thinking in terms of pixels and bits of information you could equivalently think of it in terms of physical configurations of matter. All binary bits are stored within physical devices. It is the configuration of matter within these physical devices that store these binary bits of information. Therefore a small subset of these possible configurations of matter will correspond to all possible meaningful pictures and text.

What is special about these configurations of matter, or their corresponding pixel patterns? Asking what is special about the pixel patterns (or configurations of matter) is equivalent to asking what is special about a TV picture of Sarah Palin compared to a random splattering of colour. One appears more meaningful than the other (just) but on what basis? Certainly nothing we can tell from the physical facts alone. They are all on equal footing whether we think in terms of configurations of matter or pixel patterns. What is it that causes a purely quantative difference in physical reality to translate into a qualitative difference in our mental state, ie from gibberish to non-gibberish.   

In the original lists where we considered all possible combinations of coin or dice throws, it would have been highly unreasonable to ask the same question. What could possibly make anything special about any particular combination or subset of combinations relative to the others. Dice and coin combinations could also be viewed as configurations of matter (that's actually what they are) and there is nothing that could make any one of them special, at least not in physical reality. But we are asking exactly the same question concerning the list containing all the possible combinations of pixel patterns. Isn't this equally unreasonable? Yet something does seem to make them special to us. But whatever it is doesn't seem to have any explanation, or conceivable explanation, from considering the physical facts alone. But what else could come into it?

You may think the answer to what gives particular pictures meaning is the degree they mirror reality. But any such appeal to physical reality to provide the benchmark for meaning is unacceptably circular. Reality itself is nothing more than configurations of matter, so the same argument remains fully intact. We have simply pushed the same argument back to reality itself. To suppose reality provides the answer presupposes that the physical configurations of matter in reality are somehow endowed with some special property which is absent in the physical configurations of matter within the TV set. We have not solved the problem so much as simply pushed it back to another set of physical matter configurations.
             To suppose that the brain is somehow able to pick out patterns from a background of randomness is also unacceptable. In order to pick out the patterns the patterns must exist in the first place. But they don't as we have seen. All configurations of matter are neutral. There is nothing about any one configuration that makes it special or unique to any other. What we call patterns is always an interpretation.

ii)     Imagine a snooker table. This snooker table is different from normal however because the usual rules of physics don’t apply to it. The trajectories of the balls are not fixed by any deterministic laws. Neither are the motions of the balls random. Also it is not some combination of the two. It is something completely different. But what else could exist apart from determinism and randomness, or some combination of both? Assuming free will exists, there should, indeed has to be according to neuroscience, some kind of physical activity within the brain that is subject to the aforementioned constraints.

(more to come)

 

A lot more could be said about each of the issues highlighted above, but these are just provisional outlines to raise awareness of certain considerations relevant to particular posts I will be making at some stage in the future.