(March 10, 2014 at 4:16 pm)Rayaan Wrote: I agree that consciousness is a complex phenomena, but on another level, consciousness is also very simple: It is simply our subjective state of awareness.
Stating something simply does not make that something simple. Particles are vibrations in quantum fields. Simple statement; what it actually means is not.
Quote:Now when you wrote: "... this self-organization can bring about complex phenomena, not that it is ontologically fundamental," that made me think, but what about the self-organization? Don't you think that this "self-organization" is just as complex as consciousness itself? Or do you think that the self-organization becomes more and more complex over time?
In the bit you quoted of me, I was referring to consciousness not being ontologically fundamental just because you state it simply.
Anyway, the self-organization is just an emergent outcome of the interaction of many things. Basically, if you have several class of things which interact, and each member of that class of thing behaves in the same way, some sort of organization appears to be inevitable. We see this in our universe via entropy. The reason why there are complex things is simply a result of statistics: There are inumerably more ways to be disordered than to be ordered. The Big Bang appears to have been a change from a comparitively more ordered state via inflation, and hence more complex arrangements of matter ONLY became possible as the total entropy increased. It's just a statistically necessary thing.
Quote:If you think that the self-organization becomes more complex over time, then I could argue that all the complexity that it produces is already encoded within the self-organizing principle from the very beginning, which refutes the idea that the complexity of our consciousness is merely "emergent."
There's no self-organizing principle, self-organization and complexity are simply necessary given the statistical fact that there are exponential orders of magnitude more ways to be disordered than to be ordered. If you really want to get a look into this, I recommend the theoretical physicist and cosmologist Sean Carroll. He's done numerous talks/lectures on this, namely entropy and how it is the culprit of the arrow of time and the emergence of complexity, videos of which you can find on YouTube by searching his name. He also has a book on it as well.
