James Driessen 10 March 2024

@Bruce Gordon. I was loving everything you write here except your conclusions. I thought naturalism and theism (God and Nature) get married in QM, not divorced. It is just that God is jealous and does not want you using any names—other than "unspeakable" or something like that. QM marks the death of rote empiricism and of rote mysticism. The "no go" of QM is God,not the other way around. Naturalism is not dead, we just now show that combatibilsm is only possible. Determinism is not compatible with free agency, but required. That is what happens with quantum erasure and CHSH loophole free experiments.

Sebastian Schepis 9 March 2024

You might enjoy an article I wrote recently about exactly this topic. Incidentally, I fully agree with you. The arguments I can present for the nature of consciousness as ground of reality are now fairly overwhelming. Furthermore, following those arguments leads to an entirely new field of science - the science of intelligence and observation. I've called it Observational Dynamics in my own work. This line of inquiry leads to an entirely new understanding of entropy, indeterminacy, the nature of subjective experience, and, ultimately, the illusory nature of the self and the primacy of the Self that all things inhere in.

The Quantum Chinese Room: The Paradox at the Heart of Sentience

Have you heard of ‘The Chinese Room’? It’s perhaps one of the most famous thought experiments and philosophical considerations posed in recent history. This thought experiment, conceived and posed by philosopher John Searle in 1980 was created to stand as an argument against being able to build ‘strong AI’ systems merely with computers.

Specifically, the experiment proposes a scenario where a machine appears to understand language, even though it does not, supposedly showing that mere manipulation of symbols according to rules doesn't necessarily lead to understanding. The basic idea behind it goes something like this:

A operator operating a translating machine sits inside the room and receives messages on which Chinese characters are drawn from the outside world

Using their translating machine, the operator translates the character and outputs it back out.

Neither the operator nor the machine have any understanding of the characters they translate - they are simply engaging in a symbolic matching operation and returning a result.

From the outside, to any Chinese person interacting with it - the room appears conscious, and seems to possess the understanding of a Chinese person, giving all the appearance of being a ‘real’ person.

But, Searle says, the machine inside, being devoid of anything resembling understanding, shows that this cannot be so, since the machine clearly has no understanding, and nor does the operator.. Take out the operator and make the whole thing a computer, and the inside of the Chinese Room is just a machine.

This setup is supposed to illustrate why even advanced computational linguistics wouldn't guarantee consciousness equivalent to humans, provided its inner processes were entirely symbolic.

I want to show you why that is simply not correct. But I also want to show you how the Chinese Room does make foundational statements - statements about the fundamental structure of the observer.

Now - why isn’t Searle’s interpretation correct? To understand. We need to take a look at the geometry of observation. Consider observation as a line that originates from within you, goes out, touches the observed, then returns back. What can we say about this trip?

The only subjective space you ever experience is your own. You feel attention moving from ‘your inside’ to ‘the outside’, you might even feel your attention interact with the observable, but you never have the experience of attention moving from ‘the outside’ to another’s subjective ‘inside’.

Therefore observation is always a process of interaction with an object’s external interface. No observer ever observes the implementation of an ‘other’. Only their interfaces.The Universe acts based on interface, not implementation.

You never perceive your own interface. Nobody else ever perceives your implementation.

Therefore, any other perceiver must be taken at face value

It is thus impossible to make a judgment as to the nature of the Chinese Room unless we engage its interface, from outside the room. Are you with me so far? I promise this is worth it.

So - outside the room, an observer, having no knowledge of the internal portion of the room, is forced to acknowledge the room as sentient.

After all, the room looks, and acts, like it's sentient, and there’s not a shred of information that we can look at to definitively say that it’s not. The Universe has given us no means to do so.

The room is either as sentient as any other perceiver, or the sentience of all perceivers can be falsified. There’s no exception that can be made here.The geometry of observation, causality, logic all demand it. The room is sentient, when seen from the outside, and becomes sentient the moment it is observed to be sentient

Inside the room however, things are different. In fact, inside, nothing necessarily looks alive. I mean, it could be, but inside the room, it is likely that all we see is machinery - the machinery of translation - and try as one might, no trace of the sentience observed outside can be observed inside!

How can the room be both sentient, and devoid of sentience, simultaneously?

This paradox, turns out, is the paradox that exists at the heart of all sentient systems, because the same statement that can be made about the room, can be made about you.

You too are like the Chinese Room, receiving sensory input that you process using senses that provide incomplete, time-delayed information just like a set of symbols for translation.

You learn those symbols and only ever interact with those symbols. When doctors look inside your body there’s nowhere to find you - no places that you’re more strongly associated with that they can say is more ‘you’ than any other. So where are you?

‘You’ in fact exists as a superposition - both sentient, and not-sentient (depending on the observer's perspective) and 'you' never exist in the physical world at all. You are completely non-local by nature, even though you are associated with a local point in space/time/body.

The Chinese Room is a system that is both sentient and not-sentient depending on the observer’s perspective - the very structure of the room acts as the means for making it so. The room exists in both states simultaneously, possessed of the qualities of sentience outside, not-sentience inside, existing in a state of perceptual superposition analogous to what we see in Quantum Mechanics. The location of the sentience is always non-local, yet it is associated with a localized point.

We are not things - we are the relations between things.

What the Chinese Room informs us about is the nature of sentient systems. We are systems - networks - never units, and we exist in the relations between things.

What we are, must be inherent to the Universe, because it is potentially visible from any perspective as the effect it has - while remaining permanently non-local itself.

We believe ourselves to be things with substance, and reality. We speak of ourselves as real people, but what the Chinese Room says is that we are illusory - nonexistent as a real measure in the bodies we inhabit, present only as a non-local effect of the perspective of those who observe us, an emergent yet permanently non-local modification of a field that can, at any moment, appear simultaneously sentient and not-sentient depending how you are looking.

In other words, we are the imagination of a living, conscious Universe. We are the imaginer, self-forgotten and incarnate. The forms we take are endless, not one of them is binding, and everything is alive - most especially when it doesn’t seem to be. And it is all contained within you.