Ask A Genius 462 – Religion, the Scientific Framework, Physical Models of the World, and Diminishment (4)
December 3, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: However, you and I have been talking about IC for years now.
IC still proposes a unifying set of principles that account for what goes on; although, those principles do not necessarily mix or are fuzzy at the edges. The principles of existence, under IC, which are the principles that we’re talking about, pertain to things that not only are non-contradictory in terms of existence.
But non-contradiction becomes stronger the more information that you have in the system; a system without information is fuzzy. You have all sorts of things that are dictated more or less by quantum mechanics and that can exist, or cannot exist, or are on the cusp of being existent, to the extent that they do or don’t contradict the rest of the information in the system.
The more information that you have in the system. The more you have to be contradicted. The more things have to come in line with the information in the system. It is a fuzzy system of rules of existences that get tighter and tighter the more information that you have, which means more space, more time, and more matter because these reflect the amount of information in the system
That still doesn’t allow for a creator or a religious point of view. However, if you look at consciousness, and this is probably the second principle of IC, consciousness is a technical principle or attribute of large-scale information sharing in a large self-consistent system.
For a large system to exist, it must have a large degree of self-consistency. That self-consistency requires large-scale sharing of information because you can’t be consistent about what you don’t know, what information you don’t have.
The universe has to consistently keep the rest of its positions as part of self-consistency. As defining it, the universe has to continually define itself. If consciousness is a necessary adjunct of this large-scale sharing of information, then it is largely unavoidable in large-scale information processing systems.
Unless, it is specifically designed against. If specifically designed against, that implies the hand of a creator, because we create worlds. At some point, we will have the technological wherewithal to create simulated worlds with simulated beings if we wanted.
We could create a self-consistent world that has all the self-consistency imposed from the outside and then there is no large-scale information sharing. We build computers. They process information linearly. They do not police themselves, mostly.
Computers aren’t conscious. But the existence of large created systems implies that they are part of a larger world of beings that are conscious. Consciousness, then, may be an unavoidable aspect of existence.
That while still not implying a creator in many instances, or even most instances, does imply the existence of consciousnesses of unlimited extent and power.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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