An informational theory of the nature of experience

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in quantum information theory. No one is an expert in metaphysical mechanics yet. So the epistemic status of this is purely tentative.

I think it’s time to get some activity going here. I’ve had ideas for things to post in every other subforum for a while now, but have been waiting because I never see any traffic. I guess that only makes me part of the problem, though, so I might as well take the first shot. If things start to pick up, I’ll post them all. But in this thread, I actually want to share an idea I alighted on very recently. Upon initially expounding on it, one of my first thoughts was that this would make much better material for a forum post than a private chat room! So I hope to give it a more concrete portrayal here.

For a little background, while my primary field of study is in practical applications and optimizations of reincarnation, another large portion of my thought is focused on what I’d best call “metaphysical mechanics”: how discarnate existence functions on both the macro-level of direct observation (the “Newtonian” branch), and in terms of more fundamental questions like what consciousness really is and where it comes from (the “theoretical” branch). This thread is firmly in the latter camp, but I have just as much to post about the former. For a long time, I struggled with questions of the latter sort; I had already put down some more fanciful proposals as improbable, but I was left with plenty of conflicting ideas that all felt realistic. After the other day, though, I don’t think I struggle with most of them anymore.

Two questions led me to the same destination in this instance: “how are new individuals generated?”, one I’ve long grappled with, and “how do physics and metaphysics unify at the lowest level of reality?”, which I’ve been alerted to more recently. The answer I arrived at satisfies the latter much more confidently, though. To start with, it’s unambiguous that consciousness is naturally and necessarily particulate; there are no pieces of an individual that can be split off and exist separately. It completely lacks the combinatory forces characteristic of particulate matter. It seems to just be a loose point of space with experience and agency. Well, why couldn’t that be exactly what it is?!

That’s the central concept I landed on: a conscious entity is nothing but a point of space that only differs from every other point in possessing the ontological property of being a “center of reality”, a prime reference point for all other places and things. That fundamental central state, of course, is what we call experience. This can be neatly conceptualized as a single binary bit of information attached to every point in space that codes for “centrality”, with a value of 1 for a center point and 0 for a non-center point. This makes the question of how consciousness is created downright elementary, at least at the infinitesimal level of this model: something simply happens to flip the value of that bit for a single point. It also makes postmortem survival an absolutely inescapable conclusion; being nothing but a point of space with an informational bit flipped, such an entity is as eternal as space itself. And there’s no reason it couldn’t find itself a new vessel.

This line of theory feels very strong for a multitude of reasons, one being just its simplicity and parsimony. In this framework, consciousness exists literally one step removed from ordinary space. It completely skirts any bizarre implications stemming from the postulate of creation ex nihilo, because nothing of the sort is happening; the points that undergo centralization, obviously, already existed. It refines classical Cartesian dualism, whose central flaw is that it doesn’t try very hard to be reductionist, into a much cleaner and more explanatory neutral monism, if one were to locate this on the shop-worn metaphysics alignment spectrum of old. In other words, it comprehensively solves the second of the two questions I sought to explore; how all of reality is unified at the bottom level, and “physics” and “metaphysics” are just categories we came up with to make sense of it on our own scale. It also concretely addresses the issue of quantum mechanics’ pesky “observers” for probably the first time ever: the observer is simply equivalent to the ontological-informational center-point. Quantum theory has shown that reality seems to require the presence of such reference points to maintain a stable state, and this understanding of their nature changes that fact from typically confounding to pretty intuitive.

But there are plenty of ways to critique the theory as written, and many questions it leaves open. It doesn’t really imply anything about how consciousness comes about on a more practical level. We’ve never observed any such center-points that didn’t originate in interaction with a biological organism, so it’s immediately easy to propose that something occurring in the process of forming new biosystems causes a centrality bit flip. But this runs into a prickly problem of scale; the cellular and molecular mechanisms of biology take place on a scale many, MANY orders of magnitude larger than that of information and the very fabric of space. It’s difficult to imagine how those vastly different scales would interface. This can be addressed by proposing that the centrality bit is tied to some kind of actual particle rather than infinitesimal points, but would there not be scientific evidence of such a unique particle, with the technology we have today? And that still leaves the fact that every new organism only causes exactly one point or particle to become centralized completely unexplained. So the potential cause or causes of centralization could really be anything, and given the radical simplicity of the event, there could very well be many different ways it can happen. That might even mean that conscious entities of some sort exist with absolutely no connection to physical biology, and our inability to detect them is a problem roughly adjacent to the Fermi Paradox. Without descending into complete science fiction, though, this reasoning does seem to point toward an order of operations where matter gives rise to consciousness, although at the informational level there are really no such classifications of things. 

That about sums up everything I’ve figured out to this point about all this, which is only a couple days worth of elaboration. For a TL;DR, what we call consciousness is defined by one bit of information determining whether or not a given point in the fabric of space is a center-point of reality, and the mechanism behind the creation of new individuals is nothing more than that bit, by whatever means, flipping from 0 to 1. This tells us how physics and metaphysics are actually not isolated, while making discarnate existence an obvious necessity (put away your anti-materialist pitchforks), and makes the slippery “observer” concept in quantum mechanics much more concrete, actually telling us why they’re so fundamentally necessary.

Now, there’s a completely different direction one could go when combining metaphysics and information theory: dealing with the information that “orbits” an ontological center-point rather than inherently defines it, which consists of all the information that distinguishes us as examples of center-points from those inhabiting animals or any other organism, as well as all the acquired information that is classified as memory. The latter category, at least, can in fact be separated from the entity itself. Maybe that is a topic for a subsequent post, if inspiration happens to strike me regarding how all that works. It’s certainly monumentally important, being the key to understanding the inner workings of what would be defined, from our perspective, as absolute immortality. Or maybe my next post will be on a macroscopic, “Newtonian” element of discarnate mechanics. Or, who am I kidding, it’ll probably be about optimizing your reincarnation skills. I’ll certainly have a lot to say about all of it at some point whenever the forum gets moving.