Dear Wilhelmus de Wilde,
It's hard to read all essays, and I come to you because of a comment you made to Zenil:
You said "in my opinion there is a difference between Intelligence and Consciousness, with our total intelligence we can construct the LHC, but it is our consciousness that asks always WHY, like a child that won't stop asking WHY, the HOW is the intelligence and the Why our consciousness, the intelligence can be constructed by our (Turing)machines, but the consciousness until now we could not reproduce so this is perhaps not a digital "substance", so not reproducible in the digital way (?), like a piece of art, you can copy it but the copy will never be the original."
I have been frustrated by many fqxi conversations over the failure to distinguish between consciousness and intelligence. We seem to clearly agree. Thank you.
I define consciousness as awareness plus volition (free will)
I define intelligence as consciousness plus logic
where by logic I mean the physical logical 'hardware' such as the Turing machine you reference, or the neural connectivity of our brains.
I would invite you to read my essay which is based on the unity of an analog universe that attempts to establish the best correspondence between the model and the whole. It is the sister essay to my previous essay on consciousness.
I agree with a number of statements in your essay, such as: "no separate past, no separate now and no separate future. It is the All in One, the Total Simultaneity." Others, such as Georgina Parry, have developed this or an equivalent perspective in other blogs.
If I understand you correctly, you are positing consciousness in the larger universe, and 'intelligence' in the self-evolved neural computing machinery. This is essentially what I wrote my previous fqxi essay on Fundamental Physics of Consciousness, the sister of my current essay.
To deal with physical reality and consciousness in ten pages is impossible, and there is no chance that our two essays would overlap in every detail, but I think we agree on some key points.
My current essay in this contest is ranked much higher than my previous essay on consciousness, so I hope that you enjoy my essay, and ask if you do to vote for me.
Thank you for writing about consciousness. I am convinced (with Penrose and a few others) that any serious theory of physics must include consciousness.
Edwin Eugene Klingman