On the "Hard Problem" of Consciousness and Being One with Everything

Human consciousness is a major puzzle for physicists and philosophers. It is not the same as awareness, which is common to all living things and seems to be explainable by comparatively well-known brain mechanisms.  Consciousness includes an element of subjective feelings that so far has defied explanation. Scientists know it exists and think it is generated in the brain, but they can’t figure out how. This is what philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness (awareness is the easy problem). He calls this subjective element conscious experience. He explains it here:

When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.

On the Mind/Body Problem

Most scientists believe that mind, or consciousness, is an epiphenomenon of brain function, so they would state the mind-body problem as, “How does the brain create the intensely personal experience of consciousness?” David Chalmers calls this “the hard problem” of consciousness; it has never been definitively answered.

Readers of this blog should know that this question has no answer because the brain doesn’t create consciousness. Mind creates itself as a logical entity that is atemporal and aspatial, that is, it has no position in space or time. It does have a logical structure in which all possible logical concepts imply or are implied by each other, combining in all possible ways to form other concepts. As I explained here, this logical structure forms a layered hierarchy of logical concepts in which the layers can be seen as occurring at different times. In this view, mind becomes a physical universe in which there are brains that create temporal or physical pictures of mind that are different in each brain. The reason that philosophers find the mind-body problem so difficult is that they don’t know that there are two aspects to mind and the universe: one atemporal, aspatial, and purely logical, and one temporal, spatial, and physical.  (Actually, you can think of the logical universe as physical too, just in a different sense, and I actually did that in an early post, but lately I’ve been using “physical” to mean just the temporal universe.)

Sabine Hossenfelder Argues for Superfluid Dark Matter

A new paper on the arXiv by Hossenfelder and Mistele shows impressive agreement  between the predictions of a superfluid dark matter model and actual measurements on 64 of a set of 65 galaxies. The model falls somewhere between particle dark matter models and modified gravity models. I find that while the model gets the effects right it attributes them to the wrong physics. However, it may be the best that can be done by physicists who are working in the current paradigm and are unaware of the spacetime model that I’ve been covering in this blog. In this post I’ll show where Sabine is right and where she’s wrong.

Physics Q&A #6. What Is Mass?

I spend a lot of time on this blog explaining a physical spacetime model and the underlying metaphysics. In this series of posts, each entry poses a physics question for the spacetime model, along with the answer.

Physics Question #6. What is mass? For an elementary fermion (lepton or quark), mass is the inverse of the precision with which the location of a stationary particle can be known. This makes sense, because mass is defined as a measure of inertia or resistance to acceleration. Resistance to movement and having a known or fixed location are really the same thing. For a composite particle such as a baryon, mass is mostly binding energy (gluons), the masses of the elementary constituents (quarks) contributing very little to the baryon mass. For a massive gauge boson, mass is the inverse of the range of the force carried by the particle.

The masses of the elementary particles are said to be determined by the Higgs field. See this post to learn all about the Higgs and its relation to mass

Plato and Me

When I stated this blog in 2014, my first couple of posts introduced me, a retired electrical engineer, and the subject matter I hoped to cover, which is the connection between physics and consciousness and how it leads to solutions to nature’s greatest puzzles. Since I’m not trained as a philosopher. It has taken me this long to realize that some of the metaphysical concepts I covered in my third post are very close to Plato’s theory of forms or theory of ideas. I find that his approach is different from mine but reaches some of the same conclusions, and it’s enlightening to look at the subject from both viewpoints. That’s what I’ll try to show in this post, but first I have to say that I think it’s pretty exciting to be exploring the same ground that Plato did 2400 years ago, especially since we seem to agree in important ways.

Physics Q&A #5. Why Is Gravity So Weak?

I spend a lot of time on this blog explaining a physical spacetime model and the underlying metaphysics. In this series of posts, each entry poses a physics question for the spacetime model, along with the answer.

Physics Question #5. Why is gravity so weak? Gravity between spacetime points is actually quite strong, but points where elementary fermions are located are gravitationally decoupled from the overall spacetime by the ratio of the particle's mass to the Planck mass—22 orders of magnitude in the case of the electron. This makes gravity a very weak force for matter.

Our spacetime model adopts a harmonic oscillator model for a stationary electron. In this model, the underlying point's creation time is modulated sinusoidally at frequency ω where, from quantum mechanics, ω = mc²/Ñ. Thus, the wave function includes a phase difference between the local time at a particle point and the global time of the universe, which is the local time at every point that does not contain a particle. It is because the particle is out of phase with spacetime as a whole for most of the time that gravity is so weak for particles.

Sabine Hossenfelder: Looking in the Wrong Places

Looking in the Wrong Places is a new Edge essay by prominent theoretician and prolific writer/blogger Sabine Hossenfelder. It’s basically a lament about the lack of progress that’s hampered theoretical physics for a long time, as summarized in the following paragraph.

The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.

Modified Gravity versus Particle Dark Matter

Sabine Hossenfelder is offering a new version of modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND, which she calls Covariant Emergent Gravity, or CEG. She explains it at her blog Backreaction here and in an arXiv paper here. She shows that CEG fits the data on the radial acceleration of stars in galaxies much better than particle dark matter. There’s no doubt that she’s right. The problem is that there’s ample evidence for the existence of dark matter, and no known reason why the acceleration of gravity should suddenly change at some distance from a center of mass.

Why Is There Something Rather THan Nothing?

“Why is there something rather than nothing? It’s a classic puzzle that’s getting a lot of attention now. Sean Carroll has just posted his opinion on the arXiv—he’s decided there’s no answer. Here’s his abstract:

It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.

John Baez Struggles with the Continuum

Mathematician John Baez has a paper on the arXiv called Struggles with the Continuum, which he concludes with this:

We have seen that in every major theory of physics, challenging mathematical questions arise from the assumption that spacetime is a continuum. The continuum threatens us with infinities. Do these infinities threaten our ability to extract predictions from these theories—or even our ability to formulate these theories in a precise way? We can answer these questions, but only with hard work. Is this a sign that we are somehow on the wrong track? Is the continuum as we understand it only an approximation to some deeper model of spacetime? Only time will tell. Nature is providing us with plenty of clues, but it will take patience to read them correctly.

As readers of this blog well know, the assumption that spacetime is a continuum is absolutely wrong. The spacetime model that is the main subject of this blog is a discrete model that avoids all of the struggles that John discusses. I’ve pointed this out to him in an e-mail, but I don’t expect it to do any good.