What I'm doing is saying that the computations and the mathematics are describing the activity of consciousness, as opposed to the activity of something that's not conscious. In other words, what I'm doing is biting the bullet up front and saying fundamental in my ontology are things like observers that have conscious experiences. Because every observer, if you imagine an observer that has no conscious experiences, it's not really clear what we're talking about. An observer with no conscious experiences is nothing. I don't know what that means exactly. You and Leibniz seem to have a lot in common. Probably so, except that he was much smarter. One of the things that I only very recently understood about Leibniz, as I mentioned earlier, is that Leibniz could not imagine a way that mind could arise from non-mind. And I think you think the same thing. That is, you can't imagine a way that mind can arise from non-mind. I can imagine how cognition, intelligence, and things like that could arise. But conscious experiences, what we call qualia, I would be delighted to see the first scientific theory that ever tries to do that. Right now, there's nothing on the table. Well, I mean, so what would, I mean, this question of what can arise from what is a, first of all, you have to know what the thing you're trying to get to is. Like people say, can life arise from non-life? And again, it's a messy business because what do we mean by life? If we mean the specifics of life on Earth with RNA and cell membranes and all this kind of thing, that's one question. If we say the thing we scoop up from the Martian soil and it does something amazing that we've never seen before, is that life, is that not life? You know, it's, I think we have to know. And I think one of the difficulties about what you're talking about is if we, if you say, can conscious experience arise from something other than conscious experience, if we don't know, if we don't have a general description of the target, it's very hard to answer that question. Just like if we say, can life arise from non-life? And we have only one example of life here on Earth. And if you say, can conscious experience arise from something that isn't conscious experience, and you ultimately have only one instance of that, which is what's happening inside you, you don't even know that I have that same conscious experience. So you have, you know, you're trying to explain kind of an N of one thing of how does the thing that you feel internally arise from something that sort of isn't you and so on? How does that arise? And I think that's a, I mean, I'd be very interested to understand how one would, you know, how one would get a positive answer to that. In other words, forget, you know, oh, there isn't a good enough theory and we don't know the electrochemistry and we, you know, we can't see how aggregates of neurons behave and so on. You know, there are obviously issues there, but there's a different question, which is, you know, how do I, what's the signal of success? Right, so one issue here is that as an observer, all I have are my conscious experiences. I actually, the notion of something physical beyond my conscious experiences is actually the leap. Right, I look around. Absolutely, absolutely. Right, the only thing we have is what we, you know, it's the, you know, cogito ergo sum type story. Absolutely, and so we're on the same page on that. And I agree, I don't know that your world of experiences is anywhere similar to mine. I can never know that. But what I do know is that consciousness is what I know firsthand. What I call inanimate matter is an extrapolation. What's directly available to me are experiences, conscious experiences, and what I call an unconscious physical world is an extrapolation that I'm making. What I only have are my conscious experiences. I have nothing else. If you take away my- Let's go back to, I hadn't thought about this before this conversation, but let's go back to the nematodes, okay? Which have precisely defined, you know, neural nets where there really is a way to say nematode number one feels this. And do you believe that if I could accurately measure kind of the electrochemistry of the nematode that I would capture kind of that that's the whole story? Or do you believe that there's something that is kind of beyond the physical that is kind of not capturable by any physical measurement that is something about what the nematode feels? What we call physical is gonna be something inside a four-dimensional spacetime, which is gonna be just what I as a particular observer can observe because I am the kind of observer I am. The reality beyond that four-dimensional spacetime that I happen to observe is infinitely complicated. And I may need to go to that other deeper reality to give you a full- So in that sense, what I can do in terms of a physical thing inside spacetime is probably trivial and probably inadequate. I understand. So, I mean, this is at some level, you know, I could unkindly say it's kind of a Victorian theory, okay? Because it posits that there is what we have physically in our minds, and what we can sort of tell is there, but then there's a spirit world, which is beyond that, that might be, you know, for example, in the Ruliad, for sure, in my view, we see just tiny little slices of the Ruliad, and there's much more there. For the things that, I mean, okay, so one of the questions is, is it enough for doing physics that we sample only that tiny slice of the Ruliad? It might not be. It might be the case that we would sample that slice of the Ruliad, and miracles would keep on happening. Weird things, weird random things would keep on happening that kind of poke in from other parts of the Ruliad that we weren't able to sense, so to speak. And that, in other words, that we are, that it isn't a closed system, that the part of the Ruliad that we are slicing, the slice that we're taking isn't closed enough, and so, you know, we constantly are being exposed to other things, so an analogy. In fluid dynamics, for example, most of the time, it's okay to just think of a fluid as both a velocity field and things like that. Occasionally, you actually, you know, if you're making a hypersonic airplane, you have to care about the fact that the fluid is made of molecules, but that's a rare case. But it could be that there are things about the world, perhaps even your consciousness things about the world, where aspects of the Ruliad poke through, and it isn't self-consistent to just look at the slice we are, we know we can observe. So that's an interesting question of to what extent is the pocket of reducibility, as I would call it, the kind of slice where we can say things about what's gonna happen, to what extent is that closed, and to what extent does it have things feeding into it? By the way, there's an analogy of this in mathematics, which is kind of to what extent can you do mathematics at the level of kind of talking about things like the Pythagorean theorem, and or do you have to, can you talk about the Pythagorean theorem, or every time you mention it, do you have to go back and say, oh, and the definition of real numbers that I'm using is this, and the following axioms, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which is kind of like going down to the level of molecules and talking about the fluid. So, I think it is a non-trivial claim, but a thing that I think we are deriving in, for example, our models of physics, that there is a sort of self-consistent layer that can be talked about merely in terms of general relativity and quantum mechanics and so on, without looking down below at the details of the whole hypergraph and all these atoms of space doing all their complicated things. It is a scientific claim that it is enough to merely look at this kind of continuum level of general relativity and so on. By the way, a thing that we would really love to do is to see things, other things, poking through. I mean, that's what, you know, when people observe molecules, you know, they have water and fluid, but yet they saw that these little grains of pollen were kicked around and brown in motion, and that showed there was something below just this fluid description of water. And we'd love to find the same kind of thing for physical space, and that's one of my big activities right now, is trying to see, you know, is there an effect? Are we going to be lucky? Because molecules, people were pretty lucky. Molecules were big enough that you could actually see them in 1900, so to speak. You know, whether we will be able to see the atoms of space, so to speak, in my lifetime, I don't know. You know, it's a question of, you know, what the scale is and how clever we are and so on. But I think that this whole idea of whether we are in a consistent bubble, so to speak, or whether we have to appeal to things sort of beyond our physics is a reasonable question. I mean, that is, there are things where, you know, I'm hoping that there are observations that we can make with telescopes, or maybe with other kinds of systems, but there are observations that we can make in which the nasty, spiny parts of the Ruliad will kind of poke through our usual continuum view of space. And so, what you're asking, I think, is, in the case of conscious experience, is it enough to merely talk about kind of the laws of physics that we know, or is that a place where there's a poke through from something beyond kind of the laws of physics that we know? I think that's a very important and useful question, and there's also another way of looking at this issue, and that is, if we, we're trying to build a scientific theory and we're trying to find as few assumptions as possible for our scientific theory. We believe in Occam's razor. And so, and we've both agreed that as an observer, all I know are my conscious experiences. So whatever conscious experiences are, they're all I know as an observer. So in the ontology that I'm going to assume in my scientific theory, I have a big choice. I can either put conscious experiences in that ontology as foundational or not. And if I choose not to, then I've given myself the scientific duty to explain where those experiences come from. So I either postulate that they are, I say, upfront, these are part of the ontology, these are the assumptions I make, or I say, no, they're not part of the assumptions, I therefore have the duty to explain consciously. So it's my choice. Now, it's- Well, I would like to, just to stop you for a second there. I mean, it depends on what kind of science you're doing. If you're doing psychology or something, if you're doing a science that is about that, then for sure. But one of the things that happens in science, it's not obvious that it would be possible, but it has proved possible, is that you can separately look at physics, biology, chemistry. They have interfaces, but you can choose to concentrate on one aspect of the world. And an obvious question is, you might make the claim, there is no meaningful science that can be done without entraining consciousness in it. That would be a potential claim. That is not what has been the observation of the last few hundred years of science. The few last few hundred years of science has achieved a lot without solving the problem that you say nobody has solved, and I agree nobody has solved. But, you know, so it's a question of what it is that you think you're going to do in your science. Now, when you talk about Occam's razor, and, you know, I don't know why Occam's razor is true. I mean, it's an interesting criterion. It's in a sense, the Roulade denies Occam's razor, because the Roulade has everything, all these kinds of things going on in it. But at some level, from the point of view of abstract aesthetics, the Roulade is lovely, because it assumes nothing. But you know, from the point of view of, you know, is it saying, oh, the description of what's happening, for example, let's take an Occam's razor argument about what happens in a fluid. The Occam's razor argument would probably be, if the fluid is flowing from here to there, all the molecules inside it must be flowing in exactly that direction. That would be wrong. In other words, so, you know, and in fact, what's true is there's very complicated stuff going on. It just happens that the level of looking at the whole fluid, it can be described by saying the fluid goes from here to there. So I don't think, I mean, I think it would be a mistake to say that there is something kind of, there's any necessity. If there's an Occam's razor that means anything, it means something because of the way our minds work. I mean, one key feature of our minds is that they're very finite. And you know, we take all the stuff going on in the world, and we're trying to make a narrative about what's happening that is simple enough that we can stuff it in our minds and make inferences about it. And for that, Occam's razor is very useful. Occasionally things will poke through and be like, you know, Occam was wrong type thing. But you know, I think it's, I think it's a feature, you know, I think perhaps one could even argue, you know, I've been on sort of the hunt for things that observers like us just take for granted. And I think in some sense, the simplicity of explanation is something that we implicitly take for granted. Let me see if I understand you correctly. In the same way that we observe general relativity because of the kinds of observers we are in the Wolfram model, and in the same way that we see quantum mechanics because of the kinds of observers we are in the Wolfram model, we also, many people, many philosophers, many cognitive scientists, for instance, Don, are willing to say, look, we can move beyond space time and we can find something that can give rise to the physics that we have. And then in part by doing so, they appeal to Occam's razor. But you're saying that also Occam's razor itself may be something that we find appealing because of the kinds of observers we are. Yes. That's interesting. If you enjoyed this TOE clipping, then the full video is linked in the description. You should also sign up for TOEmail, which is again in the description and the pinned comment. 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