consciousness, many worlds, anthropic principle, and fermi paradox
Summary: playing around with this idea of, "what if consciousness is a particular path in a time evolving quantum state"
- Consciousness is an extremely lucky event. Each consciousness inhabits a measure-zero component of the quantum wave function
- Conditioned on myself being conscious, that's why other people exist and life and what not all exist.
- But, in my conscious reality, other people are not actually conscious. Their conscious experience lives in their own universe.
- Or... perhaps us being conscious are such entangled states that they're if and only if?
- Perhaps consciousness requires our decisions to be consistent with our conscious self. That's what leads to the "illusion of free will": it feels like we our consciously controlling our decisions, because the world where we make a decision that is consistent with our conscious self is the only world in which our conscious self exists.
- But this seems to be contradictory to modern psychology: oftentimes is our subconscious that makes decisions
- Also to the observation that others also seem to make decisions which are consistent with what they say
- Maybe this means that consciousness is kind of self reinforcing, perhaps via language?
- If our conscious self is in charge of our language (whatever in charge means), and what we do is sort of controlled by language?
- This leads to the uncomfortable consequence that only I am conscious. Like in solipsism
- But it also seems to somewhat recover free will despite deterministic time evolution.
- This is like a strengthening of the anthropic principle/combining with many worlds interpretation: in that I've individualized it
- We each have our own anthropic principle. Our own branch of the universe which only exists due to our consciousness.
- This leads to a potential explanation for the Fermi paradox
- That each of us lives in this measure 0 universe in which our own consciousness exists. The reason that I have intelligent life in my world is just cause it is highly correlated with me being conscious (or even existing). I don't exist without all of life on earth having existed. But, each separate "earth" is independent. And so, in my universe, there is 0% probability that any other intelligence exists.