Ask A Genius 486 – Consciousness and Its Registry, and Register-ers (2)
December 27, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would this imply for the world informationally? How does a registering set of things give an indication of the universe?
Rick Rosner: The world is only full of entities that register and detect things, and exchange information, which gives us a sense of everything being information.
It might not always be the case. Because if you cannot tell what is happening 4o light years away or in a galaxy on an uninhabited planet, what you have is an indeterminate set or an indeterminate picture of what is happening elsewhere, if events occur in the material universe that don’t really affect other events, then it might be an open question as to whether or not those events really happen.
That’s all I have. The big deal is if something, whether conscious or not, registers the event. That applies to a wider framework across space and time. If a series of events happen and there are clues of recognizing something happening, and if all the registrants are wiped out, a megalith lands on a planet that has three aliens left and then wipes out all of the aliens, and then there is no further interaction or registration of the events on the planet, then it is as if that didn’t happen.
Because no unobliterated record of it exists, which leads to the nihilistic idea. If our universe ever collapses back into nothingness, it is as if it never happened, which probably is the case in a cosmological and quantum mechanical sense.
But information is only information when it is registered, when it causes other events to happen. If those events themselves are registered and if you break the chain, then it is as if those events didn’t happen or as if those events are among a multiplicity of events that may have happened.
But you don’t know. It is like putting Schrodinger’s cat back into the box.
Jacoben: If you were to excise part of a brain out, it is as if the event never existed.
Rosner: If somebody’s brain is the only thing that registered events, and if you mess with the brain to obliterate the information of the event, then, yes, the event didn’t happen. All the thoughts that anyone has ever had become probabilities within thoughts that could have happened in someone’s head, once the brain shuts down, rather than being actual thoughts.
Information only exists to the extent that it can be recognized and recorded and the recording or the registering continues to be or at least at some point causing further action.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 