Hi Marc,

I will refer to your comment a couple of replies above and to your comment here.

O.k., agreed. We then have to re-define the terms mathematics, structure, relationship to ‘enable’ consciousness, means to be consistent with it. Since consciousness is qualitatively different from non-conscious ‘abstractions’ (non-concious abstractions cannot built for example a Boing...

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Hi Marc,

I will refer to your comment a couple of replies above and to your comment here.

O.k., agreed. We then have to re-define the terms mathematics, structure, relationship to ‘enable’ consciousness, means to be consistent with it. Since consciousness is qualitatively different from non-conscious ‘abstractions’ (non-concious abstractions cannot built for example a Boing 747 and have no Qualia – at least this is the most reasonable induction by observing non-conscious matter), we are talking not anymore about quantities and self-consistency of formal systems, but about different qualities of them. Surely, a certain amount of complexity needed for a ‘thing’ to be conscious is a quantitative statement, but it is surely also a qualitative statement, a statement that make a qualitative difference.

So, in another somewhat ambigous manner, your informational approach states that strong emergence is fundamental to consciousness, since it is another quality different from non-conscious ‘abstractions’. If an ‘abstraction’ can realize its own ‘essence’, namely being an emergent abstraction, then it really gets paradoxical, since the starting premise was that all abstractions are a complete ensemble, existing somewhat in a timeless realm with eternally fixed ‘qualities’. Human recombination of some of them does not change or add something to this eternal realm of abstractions. Hence some ‘strong emergence’ does not fit into your picture. But nonetheless, a structure that is complex enough to become aware that it is a structure, is a qualitative, an analytical insight into fundamental reality.

You wrote

“Yet, for me, the only thing that could possibly be truly fundamental must be unique and non-arbitrary, hence, contain zero information, yet explain everything. It is such a high-level (or you could say low-level) approach to the problem that most would considered it meaningless (or at least, useless)... But from an ultimate/metaphysical perspective, could it be just simple (and crazy) enough to be true?!”

O.k., once more agreed. But now you give a good reason for defining God as being truly fundamental, not in its more traditional definition, but simply as a truth which is at least totally conscious of two truths, namely of itself being THE fundamental truth and that he / she is conscious about this fact – and nontheless being able to explore a realm of itself that this God knows is non-conscious, unconscious so to speak. This God for example can re-define and re-structure some non-conscious realms of himself to become ‘physical’ – without in the first place having to know what these non-conscious parts of himself are in detail. He only knows the results a posteriori by realizing that they are consistent with the observations that they have a consistent dual meaning in reference to his own truth, namely a realm where time is present and things, although being temporal truths, do change according to their temporal relationships. Altough it may seem that such a God has merely discovered such a ‘physical’, self-consistent realm within himself, its free will to examine its ‘non-conscious’ realms may have lead to construct such a realm in the first place instead of discovering it. And additionally such a God may be well aware that he / she has constructed its own yet non-conscious extensions. This is also a kind of bootstrapping facts from nothing. This God may simply imagine something and decide that this imagination should have a permanent reality, he may not even hold this reality permanently in his conscious awareness, but it could well be delegated into some sub-realms of himself (the latter he may or may not have also created in the first place).

The same seems true to me for your approach, since it re-defines things to be consistent with consciousness, without having to figure out in the first place whether or not ‘consciousness’ can at all be put into a sufficiently consistent and complete ‘mathematical’ pattern that unequivocally also contains some signs of Qualia. To be honest, I do not believe that such a mathematical pattern can achieve more than pinpoint to some neuro-physical correlates, not even to all of them, since brains, albeit being similar, have some delicate differences when it comes to certain areas of activities. Similar approaches delegate the problem of consciousness into a sub-realm of mathematics.

Once more I would like to say that the imagination involved in this – and foremost the Qualia of at all being able to imagine something like a God – seems to me to be the main reason for being able to at all create a consistent enough induction scheme that seems to realistically invoke what is truly fundamental. And in some sense you are right with your approach, since it subsumes all of reality under a common principle, the better known things as well as the yet unknown things. Every attempt to state what is truly fundamental must as well subsume some unknowns, since we are not all-knowing beings. But we can simulate that we already know everything, at least in reference to the truly fundamental basis of existence. This is not much different from a God which simulates some things for the sake of them staying permanently in his / her realm of experience or existence.

In summary, I think that your approach, albeit I am not comfortable with it (but others may also be not comfortable with the notion of God), is not totally senseless and I agree that maybe reality is more crazy than we suspect it to be. A reality where crazyness and rationality may well coincide into a perfect whole and we realize that both terms - crazyness as well as rationality - are just limited terms to describe one and the same matter of facts. I am not against crazy ideas, indeed i like them!

Marc, thanks for having replied, so I can make more sense of your motivations to take the approach you did.

Best wishes,

Stefan Weckbach

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