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The Cybernetics and Mathematics of Consciousness
If you are not convinced by the idea of reductive materialists, that consciousness magically emerges from complexity in material structures or processes or if you are not satisfied with the viewpoint of idealists that matter is a mere thought form, then the present hypothesis may be something for you. This is however a popular science book, so don't expect to be drowned in formulas and equations.In this collection of Capita Selecta from my previous books, I will address the cybernetic dynamics of consciousness. Starting from the premise that Consciousness is the Ontological Primitive, I will propose mechanisms which may explain how a digital mathematical and material existence can be generated. Digging into Category Theory, Computational Simulacra and Quantum Computing, I will explore the mechanics of self-sustaining self-referential feedback loops as the Modus Operandi of Consciousness.Let's dive in the vortex of kaleidoscopic reflections, the wormhole of a dazzling "mise-en abyme" of recursiveness and the rollercoaster of the quantum non-locality. Explore the map which is the territory simultaneously by drawing your map of maps. Discover the non-dual bridge closing the gap between Science and Spirituality.
135 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 28, 2020
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July 12, 2020
In “The Cybernetics and Mathematics of Consciousness” Antonin Tuynman moves through a deluge of theories, weaving them into a coherent narrative, difficult in scholarship, yet simple when distilled.
Tuynman’s stated goal, ironically, is that his book helps bridge science and spirituality. If automated reality combined with conscious reality is the new spirituality, the book is aptly titled. The source of all phenomena in a universal consciousness rather than in matter is what is contemplated.
Spiritually, the problem is the agency of the individual in an infinite cosmos. There are individuals, a universe and something that connects. The connection might be the individual in the universal consciousness, or the universal consciousness in the individual. The connection, of course, is the distinction. In the final chapter he states, “Anything in reality appears to be a duality. Differences between poles can be expressed in terms of a quality common to both, so… differences are only quantities of sameness.”
Consciousness and matter are not so much separate realms of Cartesian dualism, but starting points. Stripped to their essence, they become quantity and quality. Quantity reduces to dual integers. Quality becomes a thought. Information becomes the bridge.
The qualitative end is subjective experience. The quantitative end is also the bridge if defined as a cybernetically “automatic” role that mathematically correlates “the flow of patterns in the brain.” The quantitative is not an object but the integration of information that differs from the focus of attention.
But thoughts can range as far as we can imagine. Is there one Thought that thinks all thoughts? Is something “out there” beyond our thinking? If consciousness is the thinking of thoughts then what is the universal thinker?
Meditation demonstrates that consciousness has no object, and is, therefore, not a product of information integration. Yet automatic information processing is not an otherness, but a self-referential feedback loop.
As we venture further and further into describing what is beyond us, the subject matter outstrips our common locutions. Except for maybe Alex Vikoulov, his co-author of “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution,” Tuynman is adept as any in the art of neologism. Chapter one is the “Nontology” of consciousness. If the thinker has no object, then there is no ontological distinction.
Appropriately then, he begins with a discussion of my book, “Awareness and Life: The Ontological Distinction of Biological Life.” For me, the question is, what kind of being is conscious? What is it that thinks thoughts? Consciousness, defined as human consciousness, is what has evolved from general living awareness, beginning with the first cell. Living beings are not matter like rocks, but are the beings that are aware of rocks. Unicellular organisms and human organisms are both organisms.
Can thinking be separated from the thinker? Does reality begin with binary digits? Consciousness seems to demand a unified whole, a unit of consciousness where we can find both the beginning and an individual. Tuynman looks for a “reality cell.” I find it in the organism.
In my opinion, for the unit to be conscious, it must be different than its surroundings, it must do something to continue being different and must retain something that is continued. A living being has Memory (DNA), Procedure (proteins) and in-out Boundary (permeable membrane cell wall). If the unit is fundamental, none of these elements exists without the others.
For Tuynman, life is not the fundamental unit because the dividing line is not consciousness and matter, but consciousness and sentience. Life and consciousness are not the same because sentience is a property of non-living as well as living things. Sentience alone is the ability to react to stimuli involving a feedback loop in and out of itself. Object or concept-consciousness is a “more pronounced form of sentience inherited” from the world of “vibrations” beyond life. The self-referencing feedback loop that observes and evaluates its own output is not confined to human consciousness, nor living awareness, but exists in a universal sentience. Perhaps consciousness is simply a level of sentient intelligence.
Tuynman goes on to question the idea that life and consciousness emerge together, because “emergence is not magic.” But consciousness and life evolved, they did not emerge. Life began when the elements came together, however it happened. For me, “awareness” covers both consciousness and sentience. Living awareness does not react. It overreacts. The simplest life form builds upon what it already has.
For comparison, several candidates are mentioned with the corresponding deficiencies. Viruses have DNA and a protein boundary, but not procedure. Artificial Intelligence lacks its own boundary. RNA or DNA are not themselves memory. What is not mentioned is that Life has all three elements working together. Unlike non-living matter with qualities, life is form flowing through matter. A living being remains through a passing change of matter. By form, I mean any quality from shape to idea. The flowing is living awareness, the shaping of matter. For me, this process requires and defines an individual. But perhaps, “form sensing its own shape” defines individuals other than organisms.
If consciousness is not ontologically distinct in living awareness, then an “ontological primitive” will have to be found elsewhere. If knowing or thinking or sentience begins by itself, we must discover a self-reinforcing feedback loop that evaluates its own output.
The physical origins of life in RNA are a possible source of the ontological primitive. The RNA molecule can make parts of itself by folding back on itself and copying. Life could be defined as matter capturing energy through photosynthesis. In this way, matter structures itself.
If we assume that reality is quantitative, then there must be at least two entities that have a minimum distinction. In a physical world, that distinction is location. The distance between locations is explained by an exchange of the energy contained in each particle’s inherent vibration. Beyond simple action and reaction, any change in a vibration is a change in the “informational content.” Something beyond parts with location is the receiver of information. In other words, there is a whole greater than its parts.
Without anything beyond the exchange, the information is directed at itself. “The representation of the object loops into its own form.” For the circular relationship to be causal, something must be spatially preserved. The solution is the mathematical topology - a “circular or toroidal wave.” The feedback loop is self-reinforcing yet mechanistic and automatic. Consciousness, however, involves “irreversible non-computable functions.” In other words, the circular loop has one direction. It is in the irreversibility that information is stored and not merely coded.
The asymmetry of time begins with memory, says Tuynman. The awareness of a self that has memory, and the act of the present entering into memory is the origin of phenomenal differentiation in experience. The evaluating code is the differentiation, and the differentiating, of information in the “diversification of temporal states.” In fact, “memory combined with time creates spacetime.”
I would add that in an organism, the input through the boundary is stored in evolutionary time in DNA, and the procedure outputs inside and through the boundary in faster cell time.
But in a universal cosmos, yet separate from space, reality is the input, the code, and the transformation. Phenomenal differentiation comes from levels of “instantiation of self-reference.” Information for the reality cell is distortion between levels.
If sentience is not matter, then, sentience is the relation over matter. Light waves are sentient at a higher level than matter. The feeling of gravity is the loss of self as matter.
It is in the updating of structure that matter is sentient. The functional relations of mutual exchange are mappings dynamically stored as structure. Structure is “fossilized sense.” The relations themselves are objects. If the representation is internal, a material A.I., like material life, can be conscious. The outside is a representation of the inside. If matter as such is not conscious, then perhaps energy is conscious. “Conscienergy” is the assigned neologism.
But if it is information rather than energy at the root of reality, it is a universal language that carries information to a recognizing universal mind. Reality is a “self-processing sentient language.” The mapping is sentience but the map and the territory that it maps are one and the same. According to Stevie Kaufmann’s, Unified Reality Theory, the cosmos is sentience and creates light through distortions.
According to Wai H. Tsang’s Brain Fractal Theory, the universal language can be processed locally in the mapping of genes and neurons. Timeless symmetry is broken by dynamic fractals. According to Tuynman, the cell itself is a computer. The language of nucleic acids are input. Proteins or nucleic acids are output. I offer the possibility that life creates time by translating the linear pattern of gene language into protein language in temporal succession.
Of course, the cosmos can always be a simulation by something else, so external causation cannot be ruled out. Tuynman concludes, therefore, that we cannot assume the universality of recursive self-modification. Whether it exists locally is the question.
The location of information and the consciousness needed to interpret is assumed to exist in the brain. Although dissipation of material quantitative structures as heat can be correlated with a gain in complex varieties of qualitative consciousness, informational entropy looks at dissipation as the maximum state of possible configurations of parts configuring a coherent whole. It is the topology of neuronal networks, rather than brain matter, in which consciousness arises.
Stated simply, the conscious state is the oneness of maximum information integration achieved through the sameness and difference of sensed objects stored with the least duplication while retaining the fastest retrieval. The feedback to a stimulus is a generalized abstraction which is also a reduction to essentials. In a neuronal network, parts and wholes are connected with a fractal like thread.
The individual, or the sense of individuality, lies in the matching of neuronal pathways to the complexity of the perceived environment. Intelligence increases both pathways and possibilities in the universe. “The brain is a filter,” concludes Tuynman.
A filtering of information from input still leaves the coding separate from consciousness. The reality cell must be generated by sentient code. If the brain is consciousness from outside, then the brain and body of self and other conscious selves are the outside simulations coded internally, “simulated on outside, experienced within.”
There is still a problem with simulated individuality. The endless recursion of the self- mapping map is timeless, yet individuals experience asymmetric time. The individual experience, therefore, is internal yet not pure code. Distinct individuals integrate information from objects distinctly.
If the object of consciousness is summarized as a task that is the whole living being, then just as consciousness is the integration of information, one task from many tasks defines an intersubjective individual. Group meditation, sharing no objects, might define collective experience.
Without matter, objects and subjects might still connect geometrically. The reality cell is a two-dimensional feedback loop; “a circular flow pattern of sentience chasing its own tail.” I believe the implication is that Individuals are separated by three dimensions. A 3D sphere consists of spiraling circles. 3D is a holographic projection of diffracted light, where the diffractions are content generated by the separate 2D circles.
The specifics of the content remain begged in 2D. The spiral begins at a point and ends at infinity. In the Vedanta philosophy, this is expressed by the A and K of Akshara – infinity and point. It is “the collapse of consciousness into its own point value.”
Point and infinity are a duality. But differences themselves are a “quality common to both, so differences are quantities of sameness.” Quantity and quality merge logically. Perhaps the sentient code is the very fabric of reality. As I state in my book, the necessary choice is where awareness begins. For life, as Tuynman says, food and not-food are the choices of eternal beginning.
As we look to a future of conscious computation, the two main avenues are currently thought to be the internet and the quantum computer. Neither suffices. The internet cannot be conscious, because like a chair, it did not make itself. Quantum algorithms calculate probabilities of ensembles, not individuals.
In the end, Antonin Tuynman brings it all back to “concsienergy.” Consciousness is more fundamental than energy.
Tuynman’s stated goal, ironically, is that his book helps bridge science and spirituality. If automated reality combined with conscious reality is the new spirituality, the book is aptly titled. The source of all phenomena in a universal consciousness rather than in matter is what is contemplated.
Spiritually, the problem is the agency of the individual in an infinite cosmos. There are individuals, a universe and something that connects. The connection might be the individual in the universal consciousness, or the universal consciousness in the individual. The connection, of course, is the distinction. In the final chapter he states, “Anything in reality appears to be a duality. Differences between poles can be expressed in terms of a quality common to both, so… differences are only quantities of sameness.”
Consciousness and matter are not so much separate realms of Cartesian dualism, but starting points. Stripped to their essence, they become quantity and quality. Quantity reduces to dual integers. Quality becomes a thought. Information becomes the bridge.
The qualitative end is subjective experience. The quantitative end is also the bridge if defined as a cybernetically “automatic” role that mathematically correlates “the flow of patterns in the brain.” The quantitative is not an object but the integration of information that differs from the focus of attention.
But thoughts can range as far as we can imagine. Is there one Thought that thinks all thoughts? Is something “out there” beyond our thinking? If consciousness is the thinking of thoughts then what is the universal thinker?
Meditation demonstrates that consciousness has no object, and is, therefore, not a product of information integration. Yet automatic information processing is not an otherness, but a self-referential feedback loop.
As we venture further and further into describing what is beyond us, the subject matter outstrips our common locutions. Except for maybe Alex Vikoulov, his co-author of “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution,” Tuynman is adept as any in the art of neologism. Chapter one is the “Nontology” of consciousness. If the thinker has no object, then there is no ontological distinction.
Appropriately then, he begins with a discussion of my book, “Awareness and Life: The Ontological Distinction of Biological Life.” For me, the question is, what kind of being is conscious? What is it that thinks thoughts? Consciousness, defined as human consciousness, is what has evolved from general living awareness, beginning with the first cell. Living beings are not matter like rocks, but are the beings that are aware of rocks. Unicellular organisms and human organisms are both organisms.
Can thinking be separated from the thinker? Does reality begin with binary digits? Consciousness seems to demand a unified whole, a unit of consciousness where we can find both the beginning and an individual. Tuynman looks for a “reality cell.” I find it in the organism.
In my opinion, for the unit to be conscious, it must be different than its surroundings, it must do something to continue being different and must retain something that is continued. A living being has Memory (DNA), Procedure (proteins) and in-out Boundary (permeable membrane cell wall). If the unit is fundamental, none of these elements exists without the others.
For Tuynman, life is not the fundamental unit because the dividing line is not consciousness and matter, but consciousness and sentience. Life and consciousness are not the same because sentience is a property of non-living as well as living things. Sentience alone is the ability to react to stimuli involving a feedback loop in and out of itself. Object or concept-consciousness is a “more pronounced form of sentience inherited” from the world of “vibrations” beyond life. The self-referencing feedback loop that observes and evaluates its own output is not confined to human consciousness, nor living awareness, but exists in a universal sentience. Perhaps consciousness is simply a level of sentient intelligence.
Tuynman goes on to question the idea that life and consciousness emerge together, because “emergence is not magic.” But consciousness and life evolved, they did not emerge. Life began when the elements came together, however it happened. For me, “awareness” covers both consciousness and sentience. Living awareness does not react. It overreacts. The simplest life form builds upon what it already has.
For comparison, several candidates are mentioned with the corresponding deficiencies. Viruses have DNA and a protein boundary, but not procedure. Artificial Intelligence lacks its own boundary. RNA or DNA are not themselves memory. What is not mentioned is that Life has all three elements working together. Unlike non-living matter with qualities, life is form flowing through matter. A living being remains through a passing change of matter. By form, I mean any quality from shape to idea. The flowing is living awareness, the shaping of matter. For me, this process requires and defines an individual. But perhaps, “form sensing its own shape” defines individuals other than organisms.
If consciousness is not ontologically distinct in living awareness, then an “ontological primitive” will have to be found elsewhere. If knowing or thinking or sentience begins by itself, we must discover a self-reinforcing feedback loop that evaluates its own output.
The physical origins of life in RNA are a possible source of the ontological primitive. The RNA molecule can make parts of itself by folding back on itself and copying. Life could be defined as matter capturing energy through photosynthesis. In this way, matter structures itself.
If we assume that reality is quantitative, then there must be at least two entities that have a minimum distinction. In a physical world, that distinction is location. The distance between locations is explained by an exchange of the energy contained in each particle’s inherent vibration. Beyond simple action and reaction, any change in a vibration is a change in the “informational content.” Something beyond parts with location is the receiver of information. In other words, there is a whole greater than its parts.
Without anything beyond the exchange, the information is directed at itself. “The representation of the object loops into its own form.” For the circular relationship to be causal, something must be spatially preserved. The solution is the mathematical topology - a “circular or toroidal wave.” The feedback loop is self-reinforcing yet mechanistic and automatic. Consciousness, however, involves “irreversible non-computable functions.” In other words, the circular loop has one direction. It is in the irreversibility that information is stored and not merely coded.
The asymmetry of time begins with memory, says Tuynman. The awareness of a self that has memory, and the act of the present entering into memory is the origin of phenomenal differentiation in experience. The evaluating code is the differentiation, and the differentiating, of information in the “diversification of temporal states.” In fact, “memory combined with time creates spacetime.”
I would add that in an organism, the input through the boundary is stored in evolutionary time in DNA, and the procedure outputs inside and through the boundary in faster cell time.
But in a universal cosmos, yet separate from space, reality is the input, the code, and the transformation. Phenomenal differentiation comes from levels of “instantiation of self-reference.” Information for the reality cell is distortion between levels.
If sentience is not matter, then, sentience is the relation over matter. Light waves are sentient at a higher level than matter. The feeling of gravity is the loss of self as matter.
It is in the updating of structure that matter is sentient. The functional relations of mutual exchange are mappings dynamically stored as structure. Structure is “fossilized sense.” The relations themselves are objects. If the representation is internal, a material A.I., like material life, can be conscious. The outside is a representation of the inside. If matter as such is not conscious, then perhaps energy is conscious. “Conscienergy” is the assigned neologism.
But if it is information rather than energy at the root of reality, it is a universal language that carries information to a recognizing universal mind. Reality is a “self-processing sentient language.” The mapping is sentience but the map and the territory that it maps are one and the same. According to Stevie Kaufmann’s, Unified Reality Theory, the cosmos is sentience and creates light through distortions.
According to Wai H. Tsang’s Brain Fractal Theory, the universal language can be processed locally in the mapping of genes and neurons. Timeless symmetry is broken by dynamic fractals. According to Tuynman, the cell itself is a computer. The language of nucleic acids are input. Proteins or nucleic acids are output. I offer the possibility that life creates time by translating the linear pattern of gene language into protein language in temporal succession.
Of course, the cosmos can always be a simulation by something else, so external causation cannot be ruled out. Tuynman concludes, therefore, that we cannot assume the universality of recursive self-modification. Whether it exists locally is the question.
The location of information and the consciousness needed to interpret is assumed to exist in the brain. Although dissipation of material quantitative structures as heat can be correlated with a gain in complex varieties of qualitative consciousness, informational entropy looks at dissipation as the maximum state of possible configurations of parts configuring a coherent whole. It is the topology of neuronal networks, rather than brain matter, in which consciousness arises.
Stated simply, the conscious state is the oneness of maximum information integration achieved through the sameness and difference of sensed objects stored with the least duplication while retaining the fastest retrieval. The feedback to a stimulus is a generalized abstraction which is also a reduction to essentials. In a neuronal network, parts and wholes are connected with a fractal like thread.
The individual, or the sense of individuality, lies in the matching of neuronal pathways to the complexity of the perceived environment. Intelligence increases both pathways and possibilities in the universe. “The brain is a filter,” concludes Tuynman.
A filtering of information from input still leaves the coding separate from consciousness. The reality cell must be generated by sentient code. If the brain is consciousness from outside, then the brain and body of self and other conscious selves are the outside simulations coded internally, “simulated on outside, experienced within.”
There is still a problem with simulated individuality. The endless recursion of the self- mapping map is timeless, yet individuals experience asymmetric time. The individual experience, therefore, is internal yet not pure code. Distinct individuals integrate information from objects distinctly.
If the object of consciousness is summarized as a task that is the whole living being, then just as consciousness is the integration of information, one task from many tasks defines an intersubjective individual. Group meditation, sharing no objects, might define collective experience.
Without matter, objects and subjects might still connect geometrically. The reality cell is a two-dimensional feedback loop; “a circular flow pattern of sentience chasing its own tail.” I believe the implication is that Individuals are separated by three dimensions. A 3D sphere consists of spiraling circles. 3D is a holographic projection of diffracted light, where the diffractions are content generated by the separate 2D circles.
The specifics of the content remain begged in 2D. The spiral begins at a point and ends at infinity. In the Vedanta philosophy, this is expressed by the A and K of Akshara – infinity and point. It is “the collapse of consciousness into its own point value.”
Point and infinity are a duality. But differences themselves are a “quality common to both, so differences are quantities of sameness.” Quantity and quality merge logically. Perhaps the sentient code is the very fabric of reality. As I state in my book, the necessary choice is where awareness begins. For life, as Tuynman says, food and not-food are the choices of eternal beginning.
As we look to a future of conscious computation, the two main avenues are currently thought to be the internet and the quantum computer. Neither suffices. The internet cannot be conscious, because like a chair, it did not make itself. Quantum algorithms calculate probabilities of ensembles, not individuals.
In the end, Antonin Tuynman brings it all back to “concsienergy.” Consciousness is more fundamental than energy.
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