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How chance, probability affect the path of Big History + Measuring consciousness

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How chance and probability affect the path of Big History
https://aeon.co/essays/how-chance-and-pr...ig-history

EXCERPT: [...] Beginning with Isaac Newton in the 17th century, scientists have discovered that there are unbreakable mathematical laws governing the motions of objects and all transformations of energy. This discovery suggested that beneath the seemingly capricious events of daily life there might be an underlying order, and that it might even be possible to discover fundamental laws of history itself. But the search for these hoped-for laws of history has not been very successful.

Planets orbiting stars and glaciers creeping down mountainsides are the kinds of things in the history of the regimes (or separate domains) of the Cosmos and Earth that do obey the mathematical laws of physics, and their motions can be calculated. At some point in Big History, however, something different appeared, making it seem very unlikely that well-formulated laws of human history, especially mathematical ones, can be discovered, or that they even exist. What changed was the appearance of life, in which each cell or each multicellular organism is an independent agent, competing with other agents – seeking to acquire energy and nourishment, and passing its traits on to its offspring if it is successful.

The appearance of living agents took our planet beyond the realm of the phases for which physicists can discover natural laws – plasmas, gases, liquids and solids – and brought into being matter organised in far more complex ways. This, I would suggest, was also the beginning of the regimes of Big History – Life and Humanity – for which natural laws simply might not exist. If this is correct, and there are no deterministic laws governing the history of living organisms or human beings, is there any other way to make sense out of history? Can we find, for example, regularities or patterns in the unfolding of history?...



The hard problem of consciousness is a distraction from the real one
https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-...e-real-one

EXCERPT: [...] Lord Kelvin put it this way: ‘In physical science the first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it.’ More simply: ‘To measure is to know.’ But what is the ‘quality’ that brain-complexity measures are measuring? This is where new theoretical ideas about consciousness come into play. These start in the late 1990s, when Gerald Edelman (my former mentor at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego) and Giulio Tononi – now at the University of Wisconsin in Madison – argued that conscious experiences were unique in being simultaneously highly ‘informative’ and highly ‘integrated’.

Consciousness is informative in the sense that every experience is different from every other experience you have ever had, or ever could have. Looking past the desk in front of me through the window beyond, I have never before experienced precisely this configuration of coffee cups, computers and clouds – an experience that is even more distinctive when combined with all the other perceptions, emotions and thoughts simultaneously present. Every conscious experience involves a very large reduction of uncertainty – at any time, we have one experience out of vastly many possible experiences – and reduction of uncertainty is what mathematically we mean by ‘information’.

Consciousness is integrated in the sense that every conscious experience appears as a unified scene. We do not experience colours separately from their shapes, nor objects independently of their background. The many different elements of my conscious experience right now – computers and coffee cups, as well as the gentle sounds of Bach and my worries about what to write next – seem tied together in a deep way, as aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness.

It turns out that the maths that captures this co-existence of information and integration maps onto the emerging measures of brain complexity I described above. This is no accident – it is an application of the ‘real problem’ strategy. We’re taking a description of consciousness at the level of subjective experience, and mapping it to objective descriptions of brain mechanisms.

Some researchers take these ideas much further, to grapple with the hard problem itself. Tononi, who pioneered this approach, argues that consciousness simply is integrated information. This is an intriguing and powerful proposal, but it comes at the cost of admitting that consciousness could be present everywhere and in everything, a philosophical view known as panpsychism. The additional mathematical contortions needed also mean that, in practice, integrated information becomes impossible to measure for any real complex system. This is an instructive example of how targeting the hard problem, rather than the real problem, can slow down or even stop experimental progress....
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