At the beginning of the 20th century,
a group of young physicists
embarked on a quest
to explain a few strange but seemingly small
anomalies
in our understanding of the universe.
In deriving the new
theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, they ended up changing the
way we comprehend the cosmos.
original research publication: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219 |
Tegmark’s approach is to think of consciousness as a state of matter, like a solid, a liquid or a gas. “I conjecture that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness,” he says.
The new approach to consciousness has come from outside the physics community, principally from neuroscientists such as Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
In 2008, Tononi proposed that a system demonstrating consciousness must have two specific traits. First, the system must be able to store and process large amounts of information. In other words consciousness is essentially a phenomenon of information.
And
second, this information must be integrated in a unified whole so that
it is impossible to divide into independent parts. That reflects the
experience that each instance of consciousness is a unified whole that
cannot be decomposed into separate components.
Tegmark points out that any information stored in a special network
known as a Hopfield neural net automatically has this error-correcting
facility.
(courtesy share:https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/why-physicists-are-saying-consciousness-is-a-state-of-matter-like-a-solid-a-liquid-or-a-gas-5e7ed624986d)
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