Bernardo Kastrup discusses physicalist, dualist, and idealist philosophical approaches to consciousness and the mind-body problem.

“… multilayer transformers indeed cannot solve certain complicated compositional tasks. Basically, some compositional problems will always be beyond the ability of transformer-based LLMs.”

Evolution by natural selection models organisms competing for resources. My collaborators and I argue that evolution shapes sensory systems to guide adaptive behavior, not to see the truth. Are we caught in a self contradiction? No. Here's why.

“The crux of our hypothesis is that, reasoning backward in time, evolution towards more simplicity and less structure continues all the way. Ultimately, even time and, with it, the physical laws fade away.”

We prove that fitness payoff functions, which guide the evolution of perception, almost surely cannot shape perceptions to mimic true structures of reality. Thus perception is like an adaptive headset. It is not a mirror of the true structure of reality.

@TheDataAP Stephen Wolfram and I talk together here:

@username_is_unq We discuss the difference of our approach from that of Alvin Plantinga in this publication:

“One sees no alternative except to say that [space-time] geometry fails, and pregeometry has to take its place to ferry physics through the final stages of gravitational collapse and on into what happens next.” Gravitation, Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler

“the space-time continuum we seem to inhabit is not fundamental but an approximation of something deeper” “We can’t have heavy reliance on something (space-time) that isn’t actually there, that you can't operationally give a meaning to”

A semester-long graduate course at Harvard, explaining why spacetime is doomed, and what might be beyond spacetime.

No physicalist theory of consciousness can yet explain a single specific conscious experience, e.g., the taste of mint or the smell of garlic. The failure is principled. One cannot boot up consciousness from ingredients in spacetime. Spacetime is doomed.

“If you drill down, space-time isn’t a base layer of reality. There’s something else that’s there as the baseline, of which space-time is an approximation.”

“One cannot know which universe one inhabits even if one were able to access every possible observation at every possible spacetime event.”

“The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity, one that changes its appearance depending on how it is probed. We’ve attempted to connect the proton’s many faces to form the most complete picture yet.”

I agree with Bernardo Kastrup that consciousness is fundamental, and that spacetime and its contents are just a conscious projection of consciousness itself. The spacetime headset is itself a construction of consciousness.

Could there be a scientific theory of everything? If so, what chance do we have of finding it? I discussed this with Hilary Lawson, Priyamvada Natarajan, and Jack Symes at the IAI’s festival, HowTheLightGetsIn.

“Michael Levin addresses consciousness & the mind-body problem”