Your Consciousness,
Your Body, It’s All Just a Mathematical Code of Particles
You know when
you’re awake, you know you’re alive, you know whether or not you enjoy the
taste of broccoli, but do you know WHY you’re aware of all these things.
Physicist, Max Tegmark does: because the particles that make up your existence
are arranged in such a mathematical way that allows you to be aware of these
things. Plain and simple.
Okay, there’s actually
nothing simple about it, we are talking about a complex pattern that allows
life itself to exist. That’s the subject of Tegmark’s TED Talk: Consciousness
is a Mathematical Pattern. The easy problem of consciousness is how our brain
processes information. Why is the hard part. Why do we know when we’ere driving
a car or playing chess?
From Tegmark’s
perspective, a conscious person is simply food rearranged. And food is just
electrons rearranged in a different way. Our makeup from a bag of carrots as
Tegmark puts it is simply the arrangement of particles. This leads Tegmark and
other physicists to ask why certain arrangements of particles have
consciousness and others don’t. “Consciousness is how information feels when it
is being processed in certain ways.”
Tegmark doesn’t
view the fact that we’re all a pattern of particles in a negative way, but just
the opposite. “You guys are NOT just a bunch of particles. Your brains are the
most beautifully complex space time patterns in our universe. It’s not
particles, but patterns that really matter.”
It’s a pretty interesting
talk, and especially relevant to whether machines will one day have
consciousness. Perhaps in the future science will uncover even more about this
complex mathematical equation that dictates every aspect of life.
Source Max Tegmark
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