To Yuanyuan and Yuyu: Mr NoisyClock's Principle of Consciousness-World Generation

Dad once told Yuanyuan and Yuyu that if you no longer existed, the world would no longer exist. This is not a metaphor and not a consolation. It is an absolute fact. No one has ever experienced, nor could anyone possibly experience, a world without the first-person "I."

Therefore, linguistically, existentially, and in terms of the way we experience the world, the sum of our experience and the objects of our experience, that is, the whole world, intrinsically contains the "I." The world is the world's appearing in me, its appearing in my consciousness. As far as our experience is concerned, the world is exactly nothing more and nothing less than its appearing and unfolding in our consciousness. Therefore, the world is the consciousness-world. The world is the process by which the consciousness-world unfolds itself and expands itself. For our first person, this process is the process of experience and cognition.

Some unnamed people in ancient times said, "To be is to be perceived." This sounds very similar to what Dad is saying, but it is not exactly the same. That statement assumes a perceiving subject (the subjective) and a perceived object (the world). It is a dualistic thought of subject and object. Dad means something else, something like what the unnamed philosopher Heidegger meant: it is not that we perceive some object; perception, or experience and cognition, is the world itself. The world self-generates in a way that conforms to the structure of consciousness, and this process of self-generation is what we call perception, experience, or cognition.

The reason we produce the dualistic thought of world-consciousness and subject-object is that this is the structure of our consciousness. The process by which our consciousness-world is generated is precisely the process of generating an objective world, the process of gradually distinguishing "I" from the "objective world." But as long as we observe our own consciousness and experience, we will recognize a fact with complete clarity and without doubt: any phenomenon or experience we can name, speak about, think, remember, or enter is absolutely part of consciousness. Even its negation is part of the consciousness-world.

We also know, at least to some extent, that this is relative, because we know that in the world of cats and dogs, or in the world of small children, a complete subject-object dualism may not exist.

Therefore, the world is the consciousness-world. It is the self-generation and self-unfolding of the consciousness-world. Why do I add "self"? Because its generation does not take place inside any container. The container that holds it is the process of generation itself, that is, the consciousness-world itself. And this process of generation is also the process of cognition. In this sense, cognition = ontology.

Because the world is the consciousness-world, the world must conform to the structure of consciousness. The world is the self-generation of consciousness. Only a world that conforms to the structure of consciousness can be known, and can exist. Why do we find so many correspondences in the world? This is not accidental. It is because consciousness has only a few basic moves. Those correspondences reflect the internal structure of consciousness. This is why we can know the world through the cognition of self-consciousness, that is, through metacognition.

For example, the structure of consciousness is unborn and undying. There is no deletion of memory in consciousness. Memory is indestructible. We can never say that we have deleted some memory. Note that this is phenomenological, not physical. What does that mean? When we say that we have completely deleted this memory, we have not deleted it, because when we say this, it exists in our consciousness. And if it really has been deleted, assuming there exists some transcendent world beyond our world, we still cannot say that it has been deleted, because we can never know it in any way, and therefore cannot say that it has been deleted.

Likewise, we cannot say that some experience is being generated in our consciousness, because when we say it is being generated, it already exists. Nor can we say that some experience is about to be generated, because when we say this, it is already in our consciousness.

We cannot talk about experience that does not yet exist, nor can we talk about experience that once existed and later does not exist. Therefore, for our consciousness-world, what exists exists forever, and what does not exist does not exist forever. This is "unborn and undying."

The conservation laws and symmetries we summarize in the world are all reflections of this structure of consciousness, because consciousness cannot know a world in which something once existed and later completely ceased to exist. That is simply impossible. When we say, "this thing once existed and later completely disappeared," this thing at least exists in our consciousness. Therefore, in the consciousness-world, it is impossible to generate an experience that is completely annihilated. This is the most fundamental reason why Buddhism speaks of reincarnation and karma, and why physics has conservation laws.

What I am saying may sound like mysticism, but since Kant this has been one of humanity's powerful tools for knowing the world. We no longer simply ask what that "objective" world is like. Instead, we ask: what kind of explanation or theory can possibly hold? Einstein's special and general relativity are paradigms of this approach. The core constraint of special relativity is that causality must hold. Causality is a structure of consciousness; there is no reason why the "objective world" must satisfy causality, if there is such a thing as an "objective world." The core of general relativity is the equivalence principle: if consciousness cannot distinguish two kinds of experience, then the two things are equivalent, as with gravity and acceleration.

It should be clarified that when Dad speaks of the consciousness-world, he means experience as a whole. In Buddhist language, it is born of the convergence of the five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness. It is also, of course, embodied. We can then say more specifically that the laws of the experiential world, or consciousness-world, are related to the structure of the five aggregates. For example, the laws of the "objective world" or "physical world" generated in our experience are constrained by the structure of our sense organs, such as vision and hearing. Conversely, by studying our consciousness and the structure of the thoughts in our minds, we can also infer the structure of the five aggregates.

This is Mr NoisyClock's principle of the consciousness-world.

Mr NoisyClock's Consciousness-World Physics

The human brain is generally understood to be a finite computational system. I think this is something we can basically agree on. Its volume, energy consumption, mass, and number of components are all finite, and it is basically discrete. From a logical point of view, the output of a neuron is probably binary, or perhaps ternary. Even if we disagree about this, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, the bandwidth between neurons and between the lower-level constituents of the brain is finite.

So we have reason to believe that the brain is not stronger than a Turing machine. If the brain were stronger than a Turing machine, we would be very surprised. It is at least meaningful to study physics under the assumption that the computational power of the brain is equivalent to that of a Turing machine.

Now let us consider the physical world. The physical world is first of all the object of consciousness whose physical basis is the brain; in the sense of human cognition, there is no physical phenomenon outside consciousness. We can use different words to describe the relation between consciousness and the physical world, but the substance does not change. One way to put it is that consciousness knows physical phenomena, and the sum of physical phenomena is the physical world. Another way to put it is that the physical world is generated in consciousness. I usually use the language of generation, but effectively, these two are no different: there is no physical phenomenon that affects our cognition but does not appear in consciousness. All physical phenomena, by definition, appear in some consciousness. Therefore we can say that the world is the consciousness-world. This term refers to the same thing as the experiential world or the physical world.

Of course, I am not required to assert that the physical world is an appendage of consciousness. I simply do not discuss that question. Is it possible that there exists some "object" independent of consciousness, and that the world in our consciousness is its projection? Probably. But whether it exists or not has no effect on the structure of how we know the world. Whether we believe physical phenomena are known by consciousness or generated by consciousness, we can state the following claim with confidence:

A physical phenomenon must satisfy the structure by which it can be known/generated by consciousness before it can appear in consciousness. That is, the physical world is not generated arbitrarily. It is generated according to the structure of consciousness; it has been filtered through that structure. Logically speaking, no physical phenomenon can fail to satisfy the structure of cognition and still be known. This sentence is a tautology in logic, but it is substantively important: the physical world must conform to the cognitive structure of consciousness. A physical world that does not conform to the cognitive structure of consciousness cannot be known by us, and therefore effectively does not exist.

Then how do we characterize the cognitive structure of consciousness? Some of it is introspective and belief-like, such as causality. We cannot know a world that violates causality. This is exactly the way Kant and Einstein approached physics: instead of asking what physical phenomena are like, we ask what kind of physical structure is cognitively possible.

Buddhism calls phenomena "dharmas." A dharma is something that conforms to determinacy, a most general form of causality. In this sense, Buddhism treats causality as the essence, and indeed the very body, of the phenomenal world. What kind of phenomenal world is possible? Buddhism's answer is: dharma.

On the other hand, we can treat this question formally. If we assume that the physical basis of consciousness is not stronger than a Turing machine, then we can say: in principle, the physical world must be simulable by a Turing machine. Behind this statement is a principle of indistinguishability: the knowing/generation of physical phenomena in consciousness is the result of computation by the human brain as a Turing machine (whether or not this computation is related to the "thing-in-itself"). Therefore the physical world must be simulable by a Turing machine. Otherwise, we would have to believe that the brain is essentially stronger than a Turing machine, which is very hard for us to accept.

The first consequence of this claim is that the physical world is finite. All of its infinities cannot be trivial infinities, because trivial infinity cannot be simulated by a Turing machine. For example, suppose a physical phenomenon is a line on a two-dimensional plane. For us to know it is equivalent to a Turing machine being able to generate it with finite resources in finite time. It must therefore be compressed from infinite space into finite space, which means it must be describable by an equation with finite parameters.

At the same time, this physical world must also reject infinite-precision measurement. That is, in general you cannot take an exact x and measure its y. Doing so would mean that across the domain of x you have judged no for infinitely many points, and this is still not simulable by a Turing machine. Therefore the form of measurement (that is, purposeful knowing/generation) must be: take x, with error < delta(x); measure y, with error < delta(y). This error is not technical. It comes from the essence of the Turing-machine simulator: when it cannot analytically compress a physical phenomenon, its general method of compression is to quantize the basic dimensions. Of course, this is not a strict proof. What I actually want to say is that the simulator cannot allow trivial infinite-precision measurement, but I cannot produce the precise mathematical form, so I will put it this way for now.

I want to emphasize again that this essay is not trying to give a substantive physics. It is trying to study, through the cognitive structure of consciousness, what kind of physics can possibly be known, and what kind of physical world can possibly exist in consciousness. This is a Kant-Einstein approach.

Of course, some people may object: what if your understanding of consciousness and the brain is completely wrong? What if the brain really is stronger than a Turing machine? What if the material basis of consciousness is not only the brain? These are very good questions, and I would be very happy to discover that I am wrong about them. But the way we ask these questions is precisely the fundamental motive for writing this essay: the structure of the physical world is, at root, about the structure of consciousness. To ask for a physical world stronger than Turing-machine simulation is to ask for a consciousness stronger than Turing-machine simulation.

The Final Localization Hypothesis

When I was writing "Mr NoisyClock's Consciousness-World Physics," I once imagined a final localization hypothesis. The motivation for the problem is this:

In the consciousness-world, there exist both definite and suspected nonlocal phenomena. They are, respectively, quantum entanglement and the supernatural powers described in Buddhism (seeing the past and the future). Either kind of nonlocal phenomenon poses a very serious challenge to our basic belief in causality.

According to "Mr NoisyClock's Consciousness-World Physics," I believe that our basic belief in causality should be preserved, because it is a basic condition for the generation of the consciousness-world. This can be treated as a hypothetical axiom. So when we say that the basic belief in causality should be preserved, what do we mean? We mean that locality can be restored in a more fundamental state space.

Thus we can propose the final localization hypothesis. Its basic idea is this: if the physics of this world (represented as a dynamical equation f on a state space A) is legitimate (that is, it conforms to the basic forms of cognition and to known physical facts), and if it contains nonlocality, then we can find a larger space B on which there exists a dynamical equation f'. Through some mapping, f' gives the same predictions as f for the physics in A, but f' contains no nonlocality. In other words, by lifting the state space, nonlocality can ultimately be eliminated.

A stricter formulation is as follows:

Let (A, f) be a legitimate physical theory, where:

If the dynamics f exhibits nonlocal correlations in the state space A, then there exist:

such that:


P o f' = f o P

and f' is completely local.

Why do I have this conjecture? Imagine a thought experiment. Two-dimensional creatures live on the surface of a sphere in three-dimensional space (that is, in the space as we understand it). The physics of their world is basically the same as ours. Light propagates along the surface of the sphere, so they probably have physics and physical theories much like ours. Let us call their world Java Kingdom, and let us call their physicist Little NoisyClock.

Then we somehow create a microscopic correlation mechanism. This mechanism synchronizes states through light-path communication along strings. In principle, this is possible.

Eventually, Little NoisyClock will be astonished to discover that superluminal correlations exist in their world. He names this phenomenon quantum entanglement. Java Kingdom debates it for several hundred years, and everyone finds it completely incomprehensible.

But from our world, this is the most ordinary thing imaginable: their spacetime sphere A is embedded in our spacetime B, and our physics (NoisyClock physics) projects down to their physics (Little NoisyClock physics). Their action at a distance is, in our world, a perfectly ordinary local action, and it fully conforms to causality.

So what does this suggest? The nonlocal phenomena we observe may very likely be only the result of an incomplete geometry in our cognitive model. We have failed to include certain dimensions that exist but are unknown to us. It may not be that there really exists an irreducible action at a distance.

This is an existence argument. That is, the physics of Java Kingdom can very easily be lifted into the physics of our world, thereby eliminating nonlocality, and this lift is natural. When Little NoisyClock of Java Kingdom develops relativity and discovers that spacetime has curvature, the most natural thought is that the spacetime of Java Kingdom was originally the surface of a sphere embedded in another, more fundamental spacetime.

Now let us return to our own world. What reason do we have to firmly believe that four-dimensional spacetime just happens to be fundamental? None at all. If we generally live on a sphere, then quantum entanglement is not mysterious at all.

Now let us go one step further. If we somehow give Little NoisyClock of Java Kingdom full access to the third dimension, then he can fully see the light propagating through the strings inside the sphere. For the people of Java Kingdom, Little NoisyClock would then have supernatural powers. He could see the past, present, and future beyond the light cone, and in some sense could even "manipulate" certain things. But Little NoisyClock would always say humbly: causality is not false. The people of Java Kingdom would not understand.

But people in our world would understand it perfectly clearly: Little NoisyClock is merely living in four-dimensional spacetime. His so-called supernatural powers are all completely ordinary when seen from this space, and causality is indeed not false.

In our world, Little NoisyClock has a name: the Buddha. I think the clue to new physics lies in humanity's scattered reports of supernatural powers and paranormal phenomena.

The Birth of Self-Consciousness: The Fundamental Condition of the Physical World

I have always had some doubts about physics. What troubles me is that there is no consciousness in physics. Of course, von Neumann once proposed that consciousness is the condition for quantum collapse. That is a very good clue, but it is still not a fundamental meta-physical proposition. At least it is not as beautiful as Einstein's propositions, and at the same time it does not essentially exclude other possibilities. In fact, by its nature, it cannot exclude other possibilities.

I am already very clear that the world must essentially include consciousness. The world may even be essentially conscious: whatever the world is, it must unfold in the form of first-person consciousness.

Physics is a product of our consciousness. So how can we propose a thesis that makes consciousness eloquently become an essential part of the physical world?

Physics is a theory of the physical world. The physical world is, in principle, a set that can be exhausted by enumerating physical events. At least, this is a very difficult understanding to refute. Therefore, no matter how we define the physical world, no matter what philosophical position we hold, no matter what view of reality we hold, we must admit that this event is a physical event:

The birth of self-consciousness.

It is literally a physical event. It clearly has a physical basis and a neuroscientific basis. It has antecedents and consequences. Most importantly, this event must involve first-person subjective consciousness.

That is to say, this event is physical and, at the same time, first-person subjective. It is the moment when a person realizes that I am me. The definition of this event is precisely that a person realizes that I am me. And yet it is entirely physical. Who can prove that it is not physical?

Who can separate this event from first-person subjective consciousness? Without the participation and declaration of first-person subjective consciousness, this event can never become a physical event. And as long as you are reading these words, you are one hundred percent certain that self-consciousness and its birth exist, because that is the you who is reading.

Therefore physics must accept this event as its object. The birth of self-consciousness must be a physical event that cannot essentially be excluded.

This looks like a small step, but it is in fact a giant step. Once we consider the birth of self-consciousness as a physical event, we naturally realize that any experiential event in the physical world must involve self-consciousness.

Because any experiential event in the physical world is the cognitive product of some self-consciousness. We cannot list a single counterexample. Therefore, in the sense of dependent origination, first-person self-consciousness is the fundamental condition of all physical phenomena, or dharmas.

What is dependent origination? It means that dharmas, that is phenomena or the physical, arise through the convergence of causes and conditions. And how should we understand this convergence of causes and conditions? It is as simple as these few lines:

When this exists, that exists; when this arises, that arises.

When this does not exist, that does not exist; when this ceases, that ceases.

This is what is called dependent origination. Dependent origination regards the world as conditions and relations. The convergence of conditions and relations forms dharmas. And all dharmas of the physical world, all dharmas that can possibly become objects of cognition, take the participation of first-person self-consciousness as a condition. Therefore first-person self-consciousness is the fundamental condition of all dharmas, or of the physical.

We can go one step further. Sometimes we suspect that we are not substantive but simulated. So-called simulation is what remains after removing our illusion about the "substantiality" of the world. Compared with our illusion, we think "simulation" is less "real."

Actually, from the perspective of our cognition, we cannot articulate any difference between "simulation" and "reality." We think the world is composed of solid little balls called atoms, and we call this reality. But in the physical world as we know it, atoms have never been solid little balls. Not only are our models of atoms nothing but relations and conditions, such as interaction forces; every physical statement we make about atoms is completely made of relations and conditions. Nothing remains beyond that.

But whether we are inside our illusion of reality, or inside the "simulation" that remains after removing that illusion of reality, we know that relations and conditions are not empty. The stable determinacy that they form through convergence, and that can be known by us, is dharma. Dharma is physical phenomenon.

So what is reality? It is dharma. The reason dharmas can form stable determinacy is that they strictly follow the structure of causality. In the language of Buddhism, cause and effect are not false.

Therefore, when we can speak of this world, the world has already been established. This world must be a world that follows strict causal laws. To say that it follows strict causal laws means that nothing external to causal law can interfere with it.

In this sense, the world that can be known by us, even if it is simulated, must follow strict causal laws. It is therefore not trivial. It therefore has a beginningless, endless, boundless network of causes and conditions. It is therefore generative rather than closed. On the one hand, this gives us an understanding of reality: reality is generativity. On the other hand, it also suggests that there is no final physical theory in a closed sense. Physical theory, like the physical world, is a generative process.

Is the world generative? I think it is. If the world we inhabit were a finally closed world, and if there existed a closed physical theory, then the probability that we have not yet discovered that theory would be zero. According to the anthropic principle, the probability that the world is generative is 100%.