We’re not neuroscientists around here lol
Fair enough! 😄 One of the things I love about scifi is that we explore questions before science can answer them properly.
I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of physics and consciousness. One question has stayed with me for years: if the laws of physics suggest that information can never truly be destroyed, what does that mean for consciousness, and what happens when we die? I don’t claim to have the answer, but it’s a question I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I’m genuinely interested to hear what others think.
We’re not neuroscientists around here lol
Fair enough! 😄 One of the things I love about scifi is that we explore questions before science can answer them properly.
My interpretation, consciousness is a stream of information. The individual pieces of information on their own are not consciousness. So even if information can't be destroyed, it will no longer be consciousness when the stream stops and the information is scattered. We still use the same water that the dinosaurs were pissing out tens of millions of years ago. But that doesn't mean rivers go on forever, they'll dry up and the water will go somewhere else, reconstituted. It would be a reach to say that the river is eternal then, since it's no longer a river, let alone the same river that it was before.
That’s actually really close to a premise I’ve been exploring. If consciousness is a pattern rather than a substance, then perhaps death isn’t about information disappearing, but about the pattern becoming irretrievable. Whether that’s the end of consciousness or simply the end of our ability to reconstruct it is the part I find most interesting.
What book is this discussing?
well it isnt im just iterested if anmyone has read somehrting I could get ito around this
How is this related to printed science fiction? This reads like stoner thoughts or AI engagement bait.
Not at all I am gen interested in thoughts and thought this community might have some insights perhaps
any books that explore this id love to hear about
Why do you think this is the right place for this discussion?
because readers of scifi often come across ideas and intreresting avenues for thoughts aorund this - perhaps im work? I jiust figured you were all well read and had opinions? discuss
Honestly the formatting isn’t the best but I don’t mind. He gives an example of what he wants, I’m just going to recommend books anyway. This topic is done to death here so I’ll play the bits. Greg Egan- Permutation City Peter Watts- Blindsight Both are scientists and it shows, but Egan gets so involved in the physics there are companion textbooks on his site.
I'll give you two examples off the top of my head that I quite like.
The information has not been destroyed but it is no longer recognisable as what it once was.
Which leads nicely into
"Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It's a wave.
And then it crashes in the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it's one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's supposed to be."
thankyou is that the tv show? I loved it
That's not what information means in this context (that is, the physics of entropy) which is the number of possible states in a system; the name for this comes from the notion that such states are the meaningful data inherent in a physical system, or, basically, what the system can it do and what is in it. For example, a high information system has a lot of possible outcomes, while low information states have few outcomes. For an example of a low information system, think of something binary like a coin-flip. A high information system would be something like your body, which has an massive amount of possible states occurring within it all the time. When people talk about the destruction of information leading to a paradox, you often hear it in the context of black holes, which seem to permanently cause the information that went in to become irretrievable even with perfect knowledge of what went in before the singularity, which should not be possible under classical models of information theory, if we assume that information can't be destroyed (remember that this is, so far, an unproven, if likely, assumption). Now, this is different from the common usage of information, which we often consider to be usable data, numbers, writing, signals, and such. But when you destroy the medium on which this definition of information exists, it is gone for good. Like, if you burn a book, the "information" (here, writing) within it is gone. Same with if you destroy the brain in which a consciousness exists; it is gone. But as the possible states the medium could have produced have not been reduced, that information has not been destroyed, as we could theoretically reconstruct the consciousness if we had perfect knowledge of every single piece of information involved in the brain, even if we had to simulate the entire universe.