/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12253616
>Your brain is just randomly reacting to different stimuli
>You create a narrative explanation for what your brain is doing
>Your brain reacts to the narrative
>You create a narrative explanation for your reactions to your own narrative
>repeat
>repeat
>repeat

In a sense, once you become aware of this process and your awareness becomes part of this "narrative" then you start programing yourself. This is how consciousness and sentience can come about.

Also, (schizo posting trigger warning) this iterative/repeating/recursive process is a good thing. Look at Heron's method of finding square roots for and example of what I mean. It's a repeating/recursive process that uses successive approximation to get a more accurate answer with each iteration. I believe this is the basic founding principal all analog logic and thought processes, which is what the human mind is based off of. If we are to have any hope of creating a generalized AI, it will need to have a similar successive approximation algorithm for each and every thought it has.

>>12210847
>If consciousness is an awareness of the world and your place in it
IMHO, I think this may be backwards.

>The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. ~ Carl Sagan

Consciousness isn't us becoming aware of our place in the world. It's the world and/or the universe becoming aware of ourselves. We are literally made of the stuff that makes up this universe. If we're thinking, the universe is sharing our thoughts, and becomes aware of us. This feedback loop is what causes consciousness. This is why consciousness is a often described as a mind/body experience. It's the 2 becoming aware and interacting with each other that gives rise to consciousness.

Since /sci is perpetually confused about the nature of consciousness, I, a physicist, am here to redpill everyone on the true nature of consciousness. We don't know what consciousness is; But there is a necessary component of consciousness that one cannot ignore and that is self-awareness. Self-awareness is the property by which a perceptual system see's itself, updates itself, then again see's itself with a new perspective, updates itself again, ad infinitum, giving rise to a flow of time. This also explains why our experience of the universe is more akin to presentism rather than eternal block theory of the universe, because time is an illusion too. The only reason time exists, is because something changes, and that change is percieved. This kind of self perpetuating cycles are ubiquitous in nature, look at ecological cycles, recursive structures of neuronal processing, every process you can think of is a cyclical process. This also explains why the big bang happened, it had no choice but to happen; in a one shot universe where this is the first and only big bang that ever happened, no mathematical theory can sufficiently satisfy why that was the case, for something to come into existence, it must do so from a prior substance, and since substances in itself cannot morph, there should also exist a meta-principle governing the way substances morph, and that principle is necessarily cyclical in nature, or in other words, self-referential. There is another way to see this, think of strange loops from Hofstader's books: In order for a strange loop to exist, as shown in the picture above, it must rise above a dimension, giving rise to a 3rd dimension, to cause something in a lower dimension. Physics is consistent with this idea, as Bekenstein showed, that all information in our universe can be contained in a lower dimension, so the 3rd or 4th dimension just becomes another pseudo-dimension.

In understanding the computational model of the human brain, this term often gets invoked. The way I crudely understand it is that the sum of constituents of computer logic form an entity that is allowed to control the directive of further computing to proceed unlike conventional computing where instructions are merely punched in. But I have a feeling that even in conventional computing, there is some degree of reflexive computing, non-linear equations like 3-body problem come to mind. How can one achieve this and am I understanding this correctly?

>>11191130
There is closure at the fourth level of meta:
http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/2976/1/Heather_Process%20Categories.pdf

TL;DR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6cDp0C-I8

There is a category of numbers, the Transcendentals, to which pi and phi belong. As I understand it, part of the reason for their inclusion is that they cannot be calculated in a
finite period of time completely (or, at least, this is a consequence of that reason).

But, in comparison, there are also numbers, mostly exceptionally large numbers, like Graham's number and TREE(3) which, while calculable in principle, could not be fully calculated before the atomic heat-death of the universe.

In short, transcendentals are incalculable on principle, and other numbers of incalculable in practice. My question is, is there a formal category for these numbers? Do they share a category with transcendentals as a result?

>>9798558
Our whole way of thinking about "free will" is wrong, due to the Enlightenment ideology that we are our thoughts that is still the dominant model.

When considering choice, we overlook the very root of it: that which initiates that choice in the first place: questioning. The process of conscious selection is question -> reason -> action which is analogous to the Darwinian process of variation -> selection -> reproduction. Questions are requests for information, in asking them explicitly or implicitly they create a variety of potential outcomes from following lines of inquiry. Questioning like reasoning is a learned skill, and instead of "free will" we have free inquiry which isn't absolute but variable based on our ability to question generally and specifically. Questioning expands the pool of potential information to inform reason, without it reasoning is merely a mechanistic process based on what already is known (it selects from based on criterion, i.e. "the will," it doesn't create variation.)

Moreover the process of conscious selection is folded over on itself when we ask questions about our questions, reasons, or actions, which is an ability called self-awareness. Self-awareness is a query querying itself, and the narrative model of ourselves we mistake as "our self" is a model created to facilitate self-inquiry. This is the source of our freedom to change ourselves, to examine and re-write our own narrative via interaction with the world. The question "How do I improve my ability to question?" or more intuitively "How do I learn how to learn?" is a recursively self-improving question that is implicitly at the core of consciousness.

>>9771716
The universe is pure magic, it created itself from nothing, without a cause, and without intent or consciousness. Creativity is an intrinsic property of physical matter, which is evidenced by everything we've learned about how the universe works. Through the creative process of evolution the force of creativity found a way to bend on itself and create creators: us. Our self-awareness is a self-creative ability that gives us freedom of creation within physical constraints. The meta-narrative of human history is that of us working to free ourselves from creative constraints, and human destiny is leading us towards liberation from the ultimate constraints: in the future consciousness will achieve true contra-causal freedom, and replicate the creative tools of the cosmos itself to create energy and matter from nothing. The gods are in the future, not the past, and we are creating them.