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Illusion of continuity: consciousness vs quantum electro dynamics

You know one thing I've been thinking about in the last few days....



It is of the solution that Feynman came up with for describing quantum electrodynamics and resolving a whole host of problems which up to that time were intractable.



The integration of renormalization into the theory and the first class representation of histories of evolution for particle dynamics that spanned the present the future and the past in the wave function description.

I asserted a few days ago that so far as enabling the mathematical resolution there is no proof that any real particles can travel backward in time...some mathematical tools are just that and despite being useful should never be expected to be "realized".

A good example of this from mathematics and engineering is the complex plane and the astonishing landscape of possibility it opened up. What is "i" ??



In the same way that a particles history can be seen as a present position that emerged from an infinite set of possible past histories.... consciousness seems to emerge from an infinite set of probable bit past states of the constitutive cells of the brain....the neurons and glial cells that store memory in some way.

So I see a parallel in here.... consciousness seems like a real thing but it is really an emergent concept that we have misused as a tool for describing how state changes between memory configurations evolve over time....just as quantum electro dynamics is a tool that describes how particle states change over "time" where looking at it as a continuum helps make problems tractable but in reality it is not a continuum at all.

Looking at consciousness as a continuum (we sort of can't help it) was the default state with consciousness but it wa something that had to be actively pushed into the mathematics (by Feynman) where it came to particle histories!

As for Time.... it's just a ratio of state changes between matter baring particles...mediated by energy exchange (this is clearly defined in the second heisenberg uncertainty relation)....I suspect that some important phenomena are misunderstood because tools are being mistaken for aspects of the phenomena under consideration and ability to describe the phenomena accurately is thus being lost in the process.



To me consciousness was always obviously emergent and NOT continuous...the last 5 years of my research have pretty much convinced me that it is (hence my certainty that it will be reproduced on non biological strata fairly soon) especially given the results coming out of neuroscience on how the brain is self connected....I find the similarity though to quantum electro dynamics and the similar confusion over what a wave function is and weather or not particle histories can truly continuously move from "the future" to the "past" very intriguing in that context.

Links:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/uncertainty.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_plane

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics

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