Born to Do Math 181 – General Principles: ‘Consciousness as a consequence of efficient broadband, multi-nodal, self-consistent information processing.’
August 15, 2020
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, we have these general distinctions between fields. We have physics. We have chemistry. We have biology. IC, as we conceive of it, deals with metaphysics and its relationship with physics.
Rick Rosner: Yes, but it’s mostly physics.
Jacobsen: Yes, it’s more spikey than gooey. There’s an armature connected to the ways in which we conceive of physics working.
Rosner: It is the reasons why.
Jacobsen: The reason for a universe structured as it is comes from the form of processing and the structure of the processor. That has a physical manifestation for us, but an informational manifestation. Yet, with those physics, chemistry, and biology, distinctions, we make those distinctions with diagrams, Latin language, equations.
Rosner: Those have emerged from their histories.
Jacobsen: But if there wasn’t a human operator to make those distinctions, those distinctions exist, but they don’t, fundamentally, exist. We conceive them of these distinctions, so they are apprehensible to an intelligent human being.
Rosner: Yes, but you can argue the three fields are distinguished by their internal order, where a living being has a high level of internal order – at least while it is alive and has all these feedback loops and governors, there’s all this stuff happening that sustains life. It is a whole system of stuff working together in a highly ordered way to make living things that behave with complexity, have life. This was always going to be in the history of stuff a field that arises naturally because life is so apparently different.
If you take it down to base levels, it may not be anything but physics, but, in terms of life, to somebody observing the world free of the history of everything: Life will look different from non-life. Physical processes are going to look even more simple than chemical processes because physical processes are at best mechanical, as you understand them mechanical. They are mechanically transformative. Something goes from standing up to falling down. Something goes from hot to cold. Something goes from not broken to broken.
The materials involved in physics when you are doing Galileo-type physics with cannonballs and ramps. You’re not transforming things. Then you get chemistry, or alchemy back then, where you’re trying to or turning stuff into other stuff. It boils down to physics. But nothing boils physics down except physics.
Jacobsen: How much of this is fundamentally an illusion? How much is this stuff simply quantum mechanical fields interacting? I am not taking this as a reductionist argument.
Rosner: A theory of the universe doesn’t have to account for everything, but it kind of should. There is an indication that in the whole increasing order of the universe over time. That increasing order will, often, include what you can call “hyper-order” or “life.” Life is order taken to a crazy degree. Living matter is super organized. I think a decent bonus of a unified theory of stuff would include the hyper-order arising. Maybe, not as a necessary consequence, but as something that is, certainly, part of the set of all things that can happen, the set of all things that are expected to happen. There might be roles for hyper-order in the overall operation of the universe.
So, I would guess that an overall theory of the universe contains multitudes. Quantum mechanics on its own, the way we think of quantum mechanics; you have to really reach to claim that it suggests that life will originate. Maybe, some combination of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics; you could make a stronger argument that those things could be combined to make life originate. It is a bit of a reach, but some kind of an overarching theory incorporating the principles of existence, quantum mechanics, and high-level information processing. All that stuff together; the theory that puts all that together would include consciousness and, as a consequence of efficient broadband, multi-nodal, self-consistent information processing.
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Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, 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 