="Dan Asimov" <dasimov@earthlink.net> [...] There are two striking aspects of the universe that are so difficult to address that physics can't touch them (so far): a) the flow of time, and b) conscious awareness. These two things must be very closely related. But very mysterious.
Maybe I'm just being too densely mechanistic, but I find the popular idea that consciousness is somehow closely related to deep physics puzzlingly unmotivated. Other smart folks (eg Roger Penrose) also assert things along these lines, but I can't begin to follow these arguments because conscious awareness just seems to me a natural consequence of animals evolving the ability to create and manipulate models. Sometimes we just happen to build and manipulate reflective models of ourselves that capture aspects of our own model-processing--but that doesn't seem fundamentally different from many other internal-model driven behaviors--no quantum weirdness required. Perhaps our own consciousness feels mysterious to us because access to our self-models is necessarily vague, murky, incomplete and sketchy--that is, well-adapted to the natural limitations of the jellyware platform we run on. We're self-aware, but through a gloss, darkly. (This is probably a good thing, lest we be vulnerable to pinwheeling recursive nostalgia!) We don't really come with a full introspective debugger that can dump the code that implements our reflexes and instincts for our inspection, analysis, optimization, refactoring or reimplementation. For our augmented and automated descendents it may be a different story. Isn't that outcome of natural evolution wondrous enough, without conjuring ghosts in the machines?