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Zeno & black holes + Does physics truly have anything to say about consciousness? - C C - May 15, 2025
Does physics truly have anything to say about consciousness?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/physics-consciousness/
KEY POINTS: One of the great scientific unknowns here in the 21st century is the physical mechanism behind the observed phenomenon of consciousness. What makes human beings like you and me conscious? Is it something mystical? Is it simply electricity? Is quantum physics at the root of it all? There are a great many scientists and philosophers, from a great variety of backgrounds, who opine on their approach to the puzzle of consciousness. What does physics have to say? (MORE - details)
Black holes, Zeno and the end of reality
https://iai.tv/articles/black-holes-zeno-and-the-end-of-reality-auid-3167?_auid=2020
INTRO: Black holes aren’t just cosmic oddities—they’re cracks in our idea of reality. So argues Johns Hopkins University philosopher William Egginton, whose work explores the connections between Kant, Heisenberg and Borges. He proposes that singularities lurking in Einstein’s equations—the mysterious centers of black holes—are echoes of the notorious paradoxes of the ancient philosopher Zeno. Both the singularities and the paradoxes are what the Argentine poet Borges called “crevices of unreason” in the realities we’ve built, revealing to us, like glitches in the matrix, that our world of space and time is not real. Rather, we have “dreamt the world.” (MORE - details)
RE: Zeno & black holes + Does physics truly have anything to say about consciousness? - Magical Realist - May 15, 2025
Quote:Consciousness is a very difficult puzzle: one that is difficult to even define, much less to solve. But it is just as much a part of our physical reality as anything else we interact with, and any approach that asserts otherwise has a fatal flaw from the outset: it’s already abandoned science.
Sounds like an ambitious tenet for some new reductionistic physicalist manifesto. Of course it's taken more kinds of thinking and inquiry to understand the human being than just mere physics. We have history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, art, literature, religion, evolutionary biology, cultural studies, ethics, linguistics, poetry, philosophy, etc. Why should we expect anything less for the enormously complex question of what our consciousness is and where it comes from? This is why we need the humanities and soft sciences as well as physics to help understand it. Would it really be a shock that this one question is at least as multi-layered and quasi-dimensional as that of our very identity as humans, and that ultimately grappling with it will come to define who we are in the end? Less then a condundrum to be quaintly solved by science than a transcendent singularity or attractor shaping the very nature of our destiny itself.