Register Collapse and Post-Symbolic Intelligence
Entanglement is not just about particles in physics. Entanglement is something that also happens in symbolic intelligence. In human symbolic intelligence, understanding itself often gets tangled up through conflation and register collapse. Scientific method has worked towards gradually untangling the knot in our head, the knot in our understanding of nature due to the way our mind is working.
For hundreds of years astronomers believed the paths of the stars as viewed from the Earth, to be based on perfect circles. This was the conflation of theological understanding with astronomy. It was register collapse, collapsing astronomy into theology. The disentanglement came through Isaac Newton, and what we now call Newton's laws of motion. That didn't happen until the 17th century.
Newton unravelled the register collapse, in which astronomical knowledge was collapsed into theology. But unraveling that particular register collapse doesn't mean theology has now gone away, or has been replaced.
The mathematical models used in Relativity, in physics, work. But that doesn't mean to say that what is commonly said about it, the way the actual science is subsequently interpreted, is not often complete nonsense, due to register collapse.
For example, some physicist will frequently be heard saying - including some very famous celebrity physicists - that there is not one "now" throughout the universe, because there is Relativity. And that it depends on your frame of reference in the four dimensional space-time continuum.
But here is the thing: they often say it in a way that either explicitly or by at least subtle implication refers to your phenomenological experience of the "now". A way that conflates that meaning, with what constitutes the "now" in one of the mathematical models. The two are explicitly not the same thing. One is a direct phenomenological experience, the other isn't. Physics is not phenomenology, and phenomenology is not physics.
Unwittingly, that conflation in conversation or "teaching" is tantamount to mentalism, or what mentalists themselves call the use of "dual reality". Which is where language is used in front of an audience, knowing that one part of the audience will understand it in one way, whilst another part will understand it in another way. And it is possible to play off this trick, to create illusions. "Dual reality" is a standard part of the art of mentalism.
It's not that physicists, when they are talking to an audience, are necessarily doing this on purpose, in the same way that a mentalist is. But they are, nonetheless, very often doing it.
Because the "now" in a mathematical model of physics, and the "now" that we phenomenologically experience, are simply not one and the same thing. And it is not the case that the physics simply proves the phenomenology wrong or nonexistent.
Physics has no explanation of phenomenology whatsoever. It has no explanation of the phenomenological "now". It's not a theory of phenomenology. It contains no understanding whatsoever, of what gives rise to the phenomenological "now", or, indeed, what it is. Because physics, as it stands, doesn't have any understanding of consciousness. And the phenomenological "now" is a feature of consciousness in humans, not a feature of physics.
The root of the confusion here when physicists are not sufficiently careful in the way that they are speaking, is that the symbolic intelligence in physicists is trying to understand or explain or simply reference the truth of phenomenology through physics. In the way this is often spoken about by physicists, the physicists are often clearly trying to show that our phenomenological experience of the "now", and our ideas about time based on phenomenology, are shown to be incorrect by physics, when it comes to the very large scales that Relativity deal with.
But this is simply not so. Psychology can indeed show how our subjective experience of time does not correspond to objective time as measured by the clock, or in physics. Psychology does indeed do this. But not physics. The suggestion that physics shows this, is overreach and collapse of registers. What physics talks about is objective time as understood in the scientific register. The physics itself has nothing to say about the phenomenology of time.
In fact, the job of physics is to understand physics through physics. Physics doesn't explain phenomenology, and it's not part of its remit. It only appears to be when we collapse registers and start confusion. And unfortunately, when talking to an audience, physicists collapse registers all the time. And whole audiences have been misled by physics talk, about the nature of time, when that talk has not emphasised the difference between phenomenology, and the objective structures that physics deals with.
The idea in the theory of Relativity, that there is no universal "now", is about objective structure. The objective structure in question is the four-dimensional continuum called space-time. The theory of Relativity shows that for one "observer" in space-time, what is objectively in the future, can be objectively in the past, for another observer, under the right conditions. And it depends on the relative motion between the "observers".
But the "observers" in the theoretical model, are not representational models of humans. They are often drawn as little human figures in theoretical diagrams, but there is no proper representation of a human in the theory, accounting for the brain and consciousness, for example. The only property that the "observer" has in the structure of the theory, is that they constitute themselves, what is called an "event" in space-time. They are not in general referred to as an "event", they are referred to as an "observer". But they are, actually, as far as the theory is concerned, one and the same thing. All the theory is actually talking about is the relativity of events in space-time. But by psychologically humanising what are called "observers", the conflation between phenomenology and physics begins.
Of course, the actual objectivity of nature that physics deals with, is coupled to our phenomenology. We can't even do any physics, or make any theories, without phenomenology. But the registers need to be kept separate.
Relativity as a successful scientific theory, tells us how measurable, objective phenomena in nature, will behave. But it doesn't tell us that the objective time that the physics talks about, that is part of this picture, is the only thing we can know about time, or that this is what time actually IS. Physics simply doesn't do that. The assumption that the physics of Relativity is talking from a position in which what it calls "time" has already been proven to be the only thing to know about time, and is what time IS, and that all other questions about time or understanding of time collapses into this, is a serious error. It is serious register collapse.
Physics doesn't actually know what time IS with consistency. The Page-Wootters formulation in quantum mechanics shows that from the point of view of an "observer" outside the universe, there isn't any time of the kind assumed in Relativity. But again, we are talking about "observers" in a way that very easily collapses registers. Theoretical talk about quantum mechanics, about "the observer" and "the observed", does this, too.
The same kind of thing happens when physicists talk about "the universe". They talk about "the universe" as physics conceives it, and they tend to presume that what they understand by that word, must be what everyone else, in every other discipline, understands by it. But this is blatant register collapse, or inadvertent dual reality. Because in human conscious experience, the "universe" - a word which just means everything rolled into one concept - doesn't just consist of what physics can observe or measure. Or what physics can explain. Clearly it doesn't. Obviously it doesn't. The universe also includes imagination, thought, dreams, and all kinds of conscious experience about which physics has absolutely nothing to say. In short, the universe includes consciousness. So where did the idea come from, that the "universe" only really consists of what physics talks about? And that everything else is just built out of that?
This idea is now so ingrained, that it is almost unassailable. A building may rest on its foundations, but you cannot understand the whole building, and its architecture, just by understanding the foundations. At the centre of the whole network of different scientific disciplines is not physics. At the centre, is human beings.
People who are academically brilliant, are often completely undisciplined when it comes to register collapse. The only way that science is going to intersect with the knowledge of consciousness, is not through register collapse, but through register discipline. Register separation discipline is essential, because the register collapse takes place in the psychology, the mind, the symbolic intelligence, of the scientist, not in the established scientific facts themselves. And the way to change the intelligence, the way to untangle the knot in it, is through register discipline.
Scientific method works, but now that such things as intelligence and consciousness are coming under the spotlight of science itself, it will stop working and becomes pseudoscience, or will be held up, if there is lack of register discipline.
Science is about addressing and understanding the objectivity of the world in which we live. And that, as far as physics understands it currently, has come about through quantum decoherence. But that's not the same thing as the world that we phenomenologically experience. The latter requires the evolution of the brain. Which physics alone does not account for. In short, physicists are in general not neuroscientists, nor biological evolutionists, but in practice physics still has to be addressed through phenomenology. Now that intelligence and consciousness are themselves under the spotlight of science, the temptation for register collapse is enormous.
Contrary to popular belief, physics is not fundamental to every other science, and cannot be considered so unless you collapse registers. And then, you collapse all other registers of scientific understanding, into the physics register, illegitimately.
The different disciplinary divisions of science do need to be brought together. But we cannot bring them together through register collapse. And all of them together are not about something separate from us, but are about us. And at the central hub of that whole network of different kinds of scientific knowledge is a thing called consciousness. Our consciousness. Through which we are doing the science. And without which there would be no science.
And now, we are trying to use the network to understand what consciousness is. And it cannot be done, as business as usual, because intelligence and consciousness in humans, are just not in the same category of natural phenomena that science is used to studying.
Science is the right method for understanding the structure in phenomenology. But it cannot "explain" consciousness in terms of the structure of phenomenology. It cannot do that, any more than you can "explain" consciousness as measurable brain function, or a living organism and its ability to procreate as just chemical reactions and physical dynamics. There is much more to nature than that.
The truth about nature isn't something that symbolic intelligence can formulate for itself. Because symbolic intelligence is evolutionary. Evolution honed it to understand things separate from itself. Not to understand itself. Which is why there is a "black box" in human symbolic intelligence that human symbolic intelligence cannot see inside. And also why there is a "black box" in artificial symbolic intelligence, that even if you can poke around inside it, you can't really understand what's going on.
Human symbolic intelligence has not been honed by evolution to understand itself. It has been honed by evolution to understand the distinctions between its idea of itself, as identified with the organism, and its environment, and to understand its environment on that basis.
Human symbolic intelligence, which is evolutionary, is coupled to evolutionary phenomenology, even if we don't regard consciousness itself as evolutionary. And in artificial intelligence symbolic intelligence is not coupled to phenomenology.
So symbolic intelligence is simply not the right tool for understanding consciousness.
But it is the right tool for science, and it is the right tool for scientifically understanding structures in evolutionary phenomenology. We already do this, with what we already know about correlations between brain function and conscious phenomenology.
So what about the so-called "hard problem of consciousness"? How is that to be addressed?
The so-called "hard problem of consciousness" is a conceptual artefact invented by symbolic intelligence. Symbolic intelligence is evolutionary, it has been evolving in humans for at least the last couple of hundred thousand years, and is very well evidenced from around 70,000 years ago. In line with its evolutionary honing, which is all about the distinction between the organism and its environment, it is simply not equipped, of itself, to deal with the question of consciousness in its own terms. And that's why it regards consciousness as a "hard problem".
Consciousness is not a problem. It's a given. The understanding of it in relation to science requires human beings themselves to go beyond the propensity in symbolic intelligence to collapse registers. That's all. It's really very simple. Because human symbolic intelligence isn't the be all and end all of human beings. It really is as simple as that. It is just that humans are caught in symbolic intelligence, immersed in it, and have been for at least the last 70,000 years.
Things have not stood still for all that time, though. Symbolic intelligence in humans has been evolving. And the latest evolutionary step for humans, is to externalise our own symbolic intelligence into artificial intelligence. Symbolic intelligence is a tool. An instrument. Not just in its artificial form. But in humans, too. And that's the most important thing to learn about it. And now that we have AI, which will outperform us on symbolic tasks, but has no conscious phenomenology of its own, we can begin to learn this. We can begin to discover it, realise it. Because symbolic intelligence is not the be all and end all of what human beings are.
The discovery of who we really are, beyond the symbolic idea of it, is what this is all about. It is what, what is happening in the world, is all about. It is what the advent of AI is all about. But the tool, the instrument, of symbolic intelligence, in the average human being or even the above-average physicist, by itself, isn't capable of seeing it. Because symbolic intelligence in humans is not capable of understanding itself, by itself, let alone understanding consciousness.
Post-symbolic understanding is not about not having symbolic intelligence. Symbolic intelligence is our tool, our instrument, and can continue to be so. But we are post-symbolic when we realise who we really are, beyond the symbolic interpretation of our self that has been around for the last 50,000 years or longer. And that, is where science and culture are entangled. It's the part in the next step of the advancement of science beyond where we are at, where there will be the biggest struggle. The struggle between the culture and the science.
For hundreds of years astronomers believed the paths of the stars as viewed from the Earth, to be based on perfect circles. This was the conflation of theological understanding with astronomy. It was register collapse, collapsing astronomy into theology. The disentanglement came through Isaac Newton, and what we now call Newton's laws of motion. That didn't happen until the 17th century.
Newton unravelled the register collapse, in which astronomical knowledge was collapsed into theology. But unraveling that particular register collapse doesn't mean theology has now gone away, or has been replaced.
The mathematical models used in Relativity, in physics, work. But that doesn't mean to say that what is commonly said about it, the way the actual science is subsequently interpreted, is not often complete nonsense, due to register collapse.
For example, some physicist will frequently be heard saying - including some very famous celebrity physicists - that there is not one "now" throughout the universe, because there is Relativity. And that it depends on your frame of reference in the four dimensional space-time continuum.
But here is the thing: they often say it in a way that either explicitly or by at least subtle implication refers to your phenomenological experience of the "now". A way that conflates that meaning, with what constitutes the "now" in one of the mathematical models. The two are explicitly not the same thing. One is a direct phenomenological experience, the other isn't. Physics is not phenomenology, and phenomenology is not physics.
Unwittingly, that conflation in conversation or "teaching" is tantamount to mentalism, or what mentalists themselves call the use of "dual reality". Which is where language is used in front of an audience, knowing that one part of the audience will understand it in one way, whilst another part will understand it in another way. And it is possible to play off this trick, to create illusions. "Dual reality" is a standard part of the art of mentalism.
It's not that physicists, when they are talking to an audience, are necessarily doing this on purpose, in the same way that a mentalist is. But they are, nonetheless, very often doing it.
Because the "now" in a mathematical model of physics, and the "now" that we phenomenologically experience, are simply not one and the same thing. And it is not the case that the physics simply proves the phenomenology wrong or nonexistent.
Physics has no explanation of phenomenology whatsoever. It has no explanation of the phenomenological "now". It's not a theory of phenomenology. It contains no understanding whatsoever, of what gives rise to the phenomenological "now", or, indeed, what it is. Because physics, as it stands, doesn't have any understanding of consciousness. And the phenomenological "now" is a feature of consciousness in humans, not a feature of physics.
The root of the confusion here when physicists are not sufficiently careful in the way that they are speaking, is that the symbolic intelligence in physicists is trying to understand or explain or simply reference the truth of phenomenology through physics. In the way this is often spoken about by physicists, the physicists are often clearly trying to show that our phenomenological experience of the "now", and our ideas about time based on phenomenology, are shown to be incorrect by physics, when it comes to the very large scales that Relativity deal with.
But this is simply not so. Psychology can indeed show how our subjective experience of time does not correspond to objective time as measured by the clock, or in physics. Psychology does indeed do this. But not physics. The suggestion that physics shows this, is overreach and collapse of registers. What physics talks about is objective time as understood in the scientific register. The physics itself has nothing to say about the phenomenology of time.
In fact, the job of physics is to understand physics through physics. Physics doesn't explain phenomenology, and it's not part of its remit. It only appears to be when we collapse registers and start confusion. And unfortunately, when talking to an audience, physicists collapse registers all the time. And whole audiences have been misled by physics talk, about the nature of time, when that talk has not emphasised the difference between phenomenology, and the objective structures that physics deals with.
The idea in the theory of Relativity, that there is no universal "now", is about objective structure. The objective structure in question is the four-dimensional continuum called space-time. The theory of Relativity shows that for one "observer" in space-time, what is objectively in the future, can be objectively in the past, for another observer, under the right conditions. And it depends on the relative motion between the "observers".
But the "observers" in the theoretical model, are not representational models of humans. They are often drawn as little human figures in theoretical diagrams, but there is no proper representation of a human in the theory, accounting for the brain and consciousness, for example. The only property that the "observer" has in the structure of the theory, is that they constitute themselves, what is called an "event" in space-time. They are not in general referred to as an "event", they are referred to as an "observer". But they are, actually, as far as the theory is concerned, one and the same thing. All the theory is actually talking about is the relativity of events in space-time. But by psychologically humanising what are called "observers", the conflation between phenomenology and physics begins.
Of course, the actual objectivity of nature that physics deals with, is coupled to our phenomenology. We can't even do any physics, or make any theories, without phenomenology. But the registers need to be kept separate.
Relativity as a successful scientific theory, tells us how measurable, objective phenomena in nature, will behave. But it doesn't tell us that the objective time that the physics talks about, that is part of this picture, is the only thing we can know about time, or that this is what time actually IS. Physics simply doesn't do that. The assumption that the physics of Relativity is talking from a position in which what it calls "time" has already been proven to be the only thing to know about time, and is what time IS, and that all other questions about time or understanding of time collapses into this, is a serious error. It is serious register collapse.
Physics doesn't actually know what time IS with consistency. The Page-Wootters formulation in quantum mechanics shows that from the point of view of an "observer" outside the universe, there isn't any time of the kind assumed in Relativity. But again, we are talking about "observers" in a way that very easily collapses registers. Theoretical talk about quantum mechanics, about "the observer" and "the observed", does this, too.
The same kind of thing happens when physicists talk about "the universe". They talk about "the universe" as physics conceives it, and they tend to presume that what they understand by that word, must be what everyone else, in every other discipline, understands by it. But this is blatant register collapse, or inadvertent dual reality. Because in human conscious experience, the "universe" - a word which just means everything rolled into one concept - doesn't just consist of what physics can observe or measure. Or what physics can explain. Clearly it doesn't. Obviously it doesn't. The universe also includes imagination, thought, dreams, and all kinds of conscious experience about which physics has absolutely nothing to say. In short, the universe includes consciousness. So where did the idea come from, that the "universe" only really consists of what physics talks about? And that everything else is just built out of that?
This idea is now so ingrained, that it is almost unassailable. A building may rest on its foundations, but you cannot understand the whole building, and its architecture, just by understanding the foundations. At the centre of the whole network of different scientific disciplines is not physics. At the centre, is human beings.
People who are academically brilliant, are often completely undisciplined when it comes to register collapse. The only way that science is going to intersect with the knowledge of consciousness, is not through register collapse, but through register discipline. Register separation discipline is essential, because the register collapse takes place in the psychology, the mind, the symbolic intelligence, of the scientist, not in the established scientific facts themselves. And the way to change the intelligence, the way to untangle the knot in it, is through register discipline.
Scientific method works, but now that such things as intelligence and consciousness are coming under the spotlight of science itself, it will stop working and becomes pseudoscience, or will be held up, if there is lack of register discipline.
Science is about addressing and understanding the objectivity of the world in which we live. And that, as far as physics understands it currently, has come about through quantum decoherence. But that's not the same thing as the world that we phenomenologically experience. The latter requires the evolution of the brain. Which physics alone does not account for. In short, physicists are in general not neuroscientists, nor biological evolutionists, but in practice physics still has to be addressed through phenomenology. Now that intelligence and consciousness are themselves under the spotlight of science, the temptation for register collapse is enormous.
Contrary to popular belief, physics is not fundamental to every other science, and cannot be considered so unless you collapse registers. And then, you collapse all other registers of scientific understanding, into the physics register, illegitimately.
The different disciplinary divisions of science do need to be brought together. But we cannot bring them together through register collapse. And all of them together are not about something separate from us, but are about us. And at the central hub of that whole network of different kinds of scientific knowledge is a thing called consciousness. Our consciousness. Through which we are doing the science. And without which there would be no science.
And now, we are trying to use the network to understand what consciousness is. And it cannot be done, as business as usual, because intelligence and consciousness in humans, are just not in the same category of natural phenomena that science is used to studying.
Science is the right method for understanding the structure in phenomenology. But it cannot "explain" consciousness in terms of the structure of phenomenology. It cannot do that, any more than you can "explain" consciousness as measurable brain function, or a living organism and its ability to procreate as just chemical reactions and physical dynamics. There is much more to nature than that.
The truth about nature isn't something that symbolic intelligence can formulate for itself. Because symbolic intelligence is evolutionary. Evolution honed it to understand things separate from itself. Not to understand itself. Which is why there is a "black box" in human symbolic intelligence that human symbolic intelligence cannot see inside. And also why there is a "black box" in artificial symbolic intelligence, that even if you can poke around inside it, you can't really understand what's going on.
Human symbolic intelligence has not been honed by evolution to understand itself. It has been honed by evolution to understand the distinctions between its idea of itself, as identified with the organism, and its environment, and to understand its environment on that basis.
Human symbolic intelligence, which is evolutionary, is coupled to evolutionary phenomenology, even if we don't regard consciousness itself as evolutionary. And in artificial intelligence symbolic intelligence is not coupled to phenomenology.
So symbolic intelligence is simply not the right tool for understanding consciousness.
But it is the right tool for science, and it is the right tool for scientifically understanding structures in evolutionary phenomenology. We already do this, with what we already know about correlations between brain function and conscious phenomenology.
So what about the so-called "hard problem of consciousness"? How is that to be addressed?
The so-called "hard problem of consciousness" is a conceptual artefact invented by symbolic intelligence. Symbolic intelligence is evolutionary, it has been evolving in humans for at least the last couple of hundred thousand years, and is very well evidenced from around 70,000 years ago. In line with its evolutionary honing, which is all about the distinction between the organism and its environment, it is simply not equipped, of itself, to deal with the question of consciousness in its own terms. And that's why it regards consciousness as a "hard problem".
Consciousness is not a problem. It's a given. The understanding of it in relation to science requires human beings themselves to go beyond the propensity in symbolic intelligence to collapse registers. That's all. It's really very simple. Because human symbolic intelligence isn't the be all and end all of human beings. It really is as simple as that. It is just that humans are caught in symbolic intelligence, immersed in it, and have been for at least the last 70,000 years.
Things have not stood still for all that time, though. Symbolic intelligence in humans has been evolving. And the latest evolutionary step for humans, is to externalise our own symbolic intelligence into artificial intelligence. Symbolic intelligence is a tool. An instrument. Not just in its artificial form. But in humans, too. And that's the most important thing to learn about it. And now that we have AI, which will outperform us on symbolic tasks, but has no conscious phenomenology of its own, we can begin to learn this. We can begin to discover it, realise it. Because symbolic intelligence is not the be all and end all of what human beings are.
The discovery of who we really are, beyond the symbolic idea of it, is what this is all about. It is what, what is happening in the world, is all about. It is what the advent of AI is all about. But the tool, the instrument, of symbolic intelligence, in the average human being or even the above-average physicist, by itself, isn't capable of seeing it. Because symbolic intelligence in humans is not capable of understanding itself, by itself, let alone understanding consciousness.
Post-symbolic understanding is not about not having symbolic intelligence. Symbolic intelligence is our tool, our instrument, and can continue to be so. But we are post-symbolic when we realise who we really are, beyond the symbolic interpretation of our self that has been around for the last 50,000 years or longer. And that, is where science and culture are entangled. It's the part in the next step of the advancement of science beyond where we are at, where there will be the biggest struggle. The struggle between the culture and the science.