Reverse engineering our thinking should be done in terms of networks, modules, algorithms
and second-order emergence - meta-algorithms, or groups of modules. Neuronal circuits correlate to
immaterial cognitive modules and these cognitive algorithms, when activated, produce meta-algorithmic
conscious awareness and phenomenal experience, all in all, at least two layers of emergence on top of
physical neurons. I wouldn't be surprised if all that hype about testing for the
"seat" of consciousness could only end up refining our understanding of neural correlates,
not how consciousness originates in the brain because its origin is not there.
The Internet or a cellular network is not generated by your smartphone - only processed by it.
Reality is fundamentally experiential. Nothing is real for us until perceived.
The Conscious Instant Hypothesis denotes that we experience waking reality as a series of perceptual frames.
A series of such conscious instants constitutes a data stream of consciousness.
In a sense, consciousness is really mind-based computing of your experiential branch in this quantum multiverse.
In our information-based world, there are many parallels between
biological evolution and linguistic evolution. It is safe to say: Language development played
the key role in evolution of the human mind. However, consciousness as well as language
remain hard to solve precisely because they are humankind's innermost traits.
Nobody ever said that studying the fascinating but flawed human mind with that very same mind should be easy.
The human mind suffers from a cognitive gap in understanding its own conscious awareness.
John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) was one of the first prominent physicists to propose
that reality might not be wholly physical. In some sense, our cosmos must be a participatory
phenomenon requiring the act of conscious observation and thus consciousness itself.
Wheeler also drew attention to implicit connection between physics and information theory which was
invented in 1948 by mathematician Claude Shannon. Just as physics builds on elementary particles,
the quanta, defined by measurement, so does information theory. Its quantum is the binary unit,
or bit, which is a signal represented by one of two choices YES or NO, + or -, 0 or 1.
With his famous "It from bit" concept, he unites quantum information theory to consciousness and physics.
While Wheeler emphasized bits at his time, it appears that intrinsically quantum mechanical
forms of information, known as 'qubits', are even more fundamental. In recent years, a rising
number of theorists have been exploring whether these curious quanta of information may hold the
answer to combining quantum theory and general relativity into a quantum theory of gravity.
Twisting your mind to see reality from the quantum gravity viewpoint is no easy task.
It might be quite a stretch to see the physical world made up of space-time-mass-energy as a
formless fog of potentiality. Physicists face the same "hard problem" as neuroscientists do -
the problem of bridging objective description and subjective experience.
Physics has encountered consciousness. If we are to reason for the non-dual picture of the world,
then quantum physics is directly linked to consciousness. The human brain is a physical organ
that transmits and interprets electrochemical signals. Its biochemistry is certainly governed
by quantum physical laws and consciousness which is clearly related to the functioning of the brain
must therefore be related to the quantum physical processes going on within the brain and in the
cosmos at large. While quantum theory in itself is too complicated for most people to understand,
the vast majority of scientists and philosophers concur that the quantum mechanical principles,
epitomized in massive parallelism of quantum computers, superior to classical computers, may be
the key to explain human consciousness. The Von Neumann-Wigner Interpretation proposed in 1961,
the first of its kind to be described as consciousness causes collapse of the wave function,
is an interpretive model of quantum mechanics in which consciousness is postulated to be necessary
for the completion of the process of quantum measurement. As quantum theory shows, our entire
universe is deep down non-local. It's one and the same with non-local consciousness. How so?
Research has shown that consciousness is non-local - a scientific way of alluding to
a connection with a higher dimensional order. Matter has also been shown to be non-local
which hints that matter might be an expression of consciousness. In physicalism, consciousness
is assumed to be bounded by four dimensions of the 'Block Universe' but contrary to this notion
consciousness is clearly extradimensional. Our inability to measure something does not negate its existence.
Quantum physics tells us the energy of every speck of mass or a packet of information is a relative
peak in an ocean of energy which is oftentimes referred to as the 'Unified Field', the quantum layer
of pure potentiality, the code layer beneath all dimensions where time and space are information.
Akin to waves and ripples on the surface of primordial and eternal ocean of
vibrant multidimensional consciousness, each of our minds is engaged in elaborate patterning of
interdependent becoming and evolving towards a more complex but fluid cognitive structure.
A little while ago, the idea that our minds create reality would have seemed preposterous to most
westerners but today everyone in the West becomes a bit more susceptible to this bold new, idealistic,
computationalist thinking along with certain QM interpretations, directly pointing to
the fundamental laws of Nature emerging from consciousness. It might be mind-boggling for some
people to consider that a coherent description of reality with all its quantum oddities can arise
from nothing more than first-person subjective experiences. In these new information-based
interpretations, consciousness doesn't just collapse the probabilistic wave function.
Conscious experience IS the collapse of wave function. To be precise, at our human level
which is subject to the same quantum mechanical principles, our conscious experience is a collapse
of a wave of possibilities. Nature computes. There is no good counterargument for Digital Ontology.
Discernible differences lie at the baseline of any phenomenon and interaction. All possible
universes are arguably run on the ultimate mathematical code. The "Book of Nature" is written
in the language of mathematics. All realities are observer-dependent and code-theoretic.
Ultimately, any experiential reality is an observer-centric virtuality.