Is it possible that consciousness can effect...

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Mostly philosophers and deranged woo-woo believers in psychic ability.


Is your proposal testable? If so, under what conditions?

It's possible it is.

You know what Fnord, that's an interesting question. It's not as easy as it seems either. I sat here and tried to come up with even a simple equation, but more variables cropped up. I'll have to get back with you on that one.

If its testability is certain, then it is an hypothesis.

If its not testability is not certain, then it remains only a proposition.

From a strict determinist standpoint consiousness is both a pure passthrough entity and an intermediarey cog; ie. anything we do to pacify nature was meant to have happened since the beginning of time so, there's no effect at all essentially other than what actually does happen.

When you want to talk about entropy its a one way term; ie. people like to talk about nature always decreasing order - that effect is there but its incorrect to say that nature always decreases order. Whether its life in terms of the complex nanobot colonies that we or other life on earth are, whether its the repetitive rubric of crystaline structures; you have some things that naturally want to sort into order (particularly some ionic inorganice), but at the other end you have a tendency toward elegance that it brought about by systems being hammered with interfearing variables and factors - if they aren't strong enough to handle those interfering factors they disappear, if they are strong enough or advance enough to handle those factors they remain. Really it seems like nature is both unwinding and creating order at the same time, just that when this is happening it looks quite different to see flimsy order washed away by entropy rather on one side and then strong order built and honed/sharpened by entropy on the other.

Does that at least make some sense to your example?

What if a fire started in nature and then a rainstorm put it out?

Destiny?



Well that does already exist in nature without any form of thought provoking self conversation of whether or not it would consume less fuel and thereby lower the overall rate of entropy of the universe and walk 3 blocks to the corner store, or to hop in your SUV and increase entropy at a faster rate.

Someone was quoted saying out of chaos comes order, but I think it looks something like this in reality:

Chaos<-----(Consciousness)----->Order

*edited for clarity.

If all things are possible with science, then I'd say it could

The problem with the campfire analogy is that you aren't taking the entire system back to its origins. If you are going to look at the entropy of the reaction, and the effort used to suppress it, you also need to look at the energy expenditure required to fix the carbon in the first place.

I'm not sure how to respond to that one because its a term that tends to have a lot of dogmatic buzz with it and a lot of loaded/implied meaning (ie. laziness, helplessness, focus on the negative, etc.).

I'd just say focus on a complete understanding of what determinism actually means, not what it means in reference to pop culture.


Remember when I said that consciousness was a pass-through entity? That's really what I was addressing. I have some recent dnb tunes on cd (then again that's not saying much - I probabably have fourteen plus years worth of it and enough to fill a couple cd books now) and one has this cheesy sample with a stereotypical hippy saying something about 'its not like your playing the instrument but like you're the instrument and the universe is playing you'; kind of a loaded example but I think that demonstrates the thrust of what I'm getting at well - ie. all kinds of things feed into us and take shape within us but, essentially, nothing we ever think or do is created of us in some disconnected manner. Whether its self conversation, whether its ruminating, pondering, creating, destroying, anything that goes on in your mind is part and parcel with what is going on in nature. Truthfully there's no such thing as non-nature; we're an extension of nature and as such freeways and skyscrapers are part of nature as much as national parks - *if* we want to be technical and unwind self-referencial behavior, which in the case of analysing consciousness we kind of need to in order to get a less dirty and emotionally-loaded sense of it.

The way I'd rewrite your chart (two in parallel really):

Input----------------------> Processing ---------------------> Output
Exterior Universe ---------> Us (Consciousness) -------------> Our action

In that sense to talk about us vs. nature, on a practical level makes sense in that yes - we want best outcome for ourselves, call it survival and personal health and happiness bias, but on an absolute level there's no such thing as a place where nature ends and 'we' begin.

Given our current level of technological advancement, you might as well be asking whether your car's fuel economy will be significantly decreased by a grain of sand in the carpet. However, a Type III civilization would have a small effect.

Well in a nutshell, if the universe is indeed truly 100% deterministic, there's no other word but "Destiny" to describe it.

des·ti·ny
noun \ˈdes-tə-nē\
plural des·ti·nies
Definition of DESTINY
1: something to which a person or thing is destined : fortune <wants to control his own destiny>
2: a predetermined course of events often held to be an irresistible power or agency

I don't buy destiny however. It doesn't ring true to me. Patterns do repeat as they have to through duplication at every level. But destiny? I'll let you deterministic universe types ponder that one.

Well, if your reason for discounting determinism is that it doesn't emotionally jive with you, that's pretty much the point where reason stops and belief begins. I wouldn't bother discussing the issue past that point because the basis of debate stops being steadily grounded and starts behaving vaporously.

I have many reasons for thinking determinism isn't correct, I know we've discussed this on a different thread. Non determinism explains why patterns repeat but aren't always the same, ie the distribution of matter in the universe. It's rather clumpy in some areas and thin in others. Everything tends to sort itself out through chaotic bulldozing in a manner of speaking. Heavenly spheres that move like clockwork isn't the answer. Even the best simulations will spit out different results no matter how many times you run them, and all of the outcomes are equally valid.

I probably shouldn't be continuing here but I'll offer that it was never necessarily resolved or debunked in any way.

Well, there is chaos theory and really, what that theory boils down to, complexity beyond any realistic ability for the human mind or even AI, to necessarily calculate the lay of every variable. Really nothing is ever exactly the same aside from that exact time and space where that exact thing happened.

Agreed. Then again I suppose I'm arguing that, with whatever happens, that there's no intelligence or deity pushing it.



If by heavenly spheres you mean stars they were spit out as a product of the cooling of the big bang. Regardless of how mindbogglingly complex, everything reacted with something in a particular point in time to yield an outcome.



I'm not sure what you mean by 'simulations' - a computer program would keep spitting out the same thing, a real world trial and error would not. Then again, the real world trial and error can't because never exactly have the same situation twice - ever. Then again I don't really see that as an argument against determinism, rather an argument for just how 'same' things need to be to come out identical. I've made the analogy in another thread (perhaps in yours even) that if you walk in a Casino, go to the craps table, and throw lucky 7's, while you may be able to throw lucky 7's again you will never be able to throw them precisely the same way again. The way you 'could' in theory keep getting the same result an infinite amount of times is to keep replaying that same moment with the same moments leading up to it. That means: all the same brain chemicals and liquids within you in the same place, same (literal) posture with every atom of your body aligned - to the micron, same barometric pressure, same exact things you noticed walking in, even a slight difference in one person's movement in theory could have set it differently. In that sense the only way to get a perfect situational replica is to play time backward and essentially rewind the whole universe to play back what you saw.

Not if some of the inputs were from a genuine random process, like radioactive decay.

ruveyn

Lol, exactly. The computer would no longer be adding or subtracting manmade theory but rather jagged, non-integer numbers that never fully stay the same.