Consciousness and the Question of Meaning

Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness
Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

We’ve talked about the Hard Problem of consciousness, and all of the ways it might be resolved. The conclusion that is the most consistent with my experience and knowledge is that consciousness is information changing and interacting with itself in certain ways, and that any time information behaves in these ways, be it in brains, computer chips, or large-scale systems, consciousness is there.

But if this is true, it leads to another question: why does each conscious experience have the character that it does? Why doesn’t chocolate taste blue? Why doesn’t a smooth ball feel like the direction left? Or one that is more easy to wrap our minds around: why does our vision fade to black when things get dark, instead of fading to white?

Religions and spiritual gurus have claimed to know the answers to this question since before history began: conscious qualia are what they are because they tap into a realm of existence beyond the physical where objective, transcendent meaning can be found. Materialists deride this claim, citing all the contradictions between religious and spiritual traditions, and how claims of objective meaning have been used to justify oppression. I am sympathetic to both views, and I think it is important to have waited until after we have talked about all the other topics in the consciousness series before tackling this one, to avoid falling into naive answers.

Let’s consider a question: could black and white have been switched? Could we have evolved such that dark things fade away into whiteness instead of blackness?

If physicalism is true, then whiteness and blackness are patterns in our brains. Intuitively, it seems the answer to the question is yes. It just happened in our evolutionary history that darkness is represented by the color black in our minds, but it could have been white instead. Or any other color, for that matter.

We have some evidence for this. An early psychologist, George Stratton, did a famous experiment where he wore glasses that turned his view upside-down. After a few days, he was able to function as if his vision were normal. When he took the glasses off for the last part of the experiment, he felt like his vision was upside-down again.

This suggests that at least the senses of up and down could have been switched, and if they were, we would not be any different from how we are now. This hints at the possibility that we would not be noticeably different if our sense of up were, for example, switched with the color blue, although it is not proof by any stretch of the imagination.

Alternatively, it may be that swapping around our qualia makes living less efficient, and if it is done too much, might mess up our brains in ways they cannot adjust to. It’s well known that we perceive reality symbolically, with concepts representing other concepts, which are connected to other concepts, in a web that encompasses everything we know and experience.

Much of this is arbitrary, a product of upbringing and culture. But some symbols and their connections seem to come pre-loaded into our brain structure. It might be that the archetypal symbols we inherit genetically are inextricably intertwined with one another and the other functions of our brains that swapping them or changing them too much would leave us non-functional.

The question I am trying to ask is this: are the qualia we experience an arbitrary shake of the evolutionary dice, or did they evolve the way they did because the quale patterns themselves help us to survive and thrive? If the former is true, then existentialism is true: the meaning in life is what we make it. If the latter is true, it opens the door to the possibility that there is meaning outside of us, locked up within the possibility-space of conscious experience, brought into being when it is experienced by conscious creatures like us.

This is all idle speculation. I feel hardly more informed on this subject than the Ancient Greeks who proclaimed everything to be made of water. We do not have the tools yet to investigate this question scientifically, though we may someday. All we have is storytelling and armchair philosophy—both of which I am happy to engage in, writing blog posts and novels and filling them with meaning to the best of my ability. Whether I create that meaning or reveal it, I do not know. But what I do know is that this question will bring me a sense of wonder and mystery to the end of my days.

Hyperspace and Repeating Time – Worldbuilding MoebiusWar

The book I’m writing for National Novel Writing Month this year is a fantastic space opera. And what is a good space opera without faster than light technology?

The Moebiverse uses hyperspace, a fourth dimension of space that exists in addition to the regular 3D universe. This version of hyperspace is curved so that any straight-line trajectory will end up back in the normal universe at another place faster than it takes light to get there through normal space.

Since hyperspace is outside of the universe, it is impossible to run into anything while in hyperspace, unless it is right next to you in hyperspace. This detail was inspired by the Stargate SG-1 episode “Fail Safe,” where they make a hyperspace jump from one side of the Earth to the other. Adding my own twist, you cannot enter hyperspace when the density of material is too high; it can only be done in empty space. This also means that if there is mass where you exit, you will skip like a rock off a pond and exit a few light seconds away.

Faster-Than-Light technology is notorious for being very hard to imagine without allowing time travel, as I’ve explained in this blog post and this video. There is a saying: FTL, relativity, causality; pick two. However, as I explained in this video, there is a loophole. We can choose an objective reference frame, and if this frame is only special when FTL technology is being used, relativity is still preserved in slower-than-light regimes, embedded within a non-relativistic FTL-inclusive space-time-plus.

In the Moebiverse, the objective frame is relative to the Shaper’s Path, a chain of galaxies which move conveyor-style at extremely high speeds through the universe. I do have to think more about this, though, because there are other galactic chains with their own velocities, and I guess an objective cosmic frame through which they move.

Speaking of galactic chains, let’s move on to how time travel does happen in this universe. That’s right, there is time travel, but I didn’t want the characters to just be able to do it whenever and to whenever they want. So I set up the Moebiverse to have repeating history. Every galaxy along the Shaper’s Path is the same galaxy, 400 years apart, and the time it takes to move from one position in the chain to the next is exactly 400 years. So if you can travel between galaxies, it is the same thing as traveling through time.

Of course, traveling to another galaxy is not as easy as traveling to another star. Stars are light years apart, but galaxies are millions of light years apart. If it takes hours to travel to nearby stars through hyperspace, it will take hundreds of thousands of hours to get to the nearest galaxy. That’s thousands of years. So in order to travel through time, you need something else. At this point, I’m still at the “just use a magical artifact” part of the time travel worldbuilding, and haven’t built up much theory around it.

Speaking of magical artifacts, the Moebiverse has djinns (called talias in-universe), objects that go back in time and become their past selves in an infinite loop. For reasons no one knows, these objects grant people magical powers. For instance, the elemental medallions in MoebiusQuest grant the wielder limited control over their respective elements, and in MoebiusWar the evil Spellcaster’s staff allows him to manipulate others’ emotions.

And that’s how the faster-than-light and time travel science works in the Moebiverse. I hope I can finish this book soon; I’ve been under a lot of stress lately and haven’t made the NaNoWriMo word quota at all this past week. Nevertheless, I have pushed on a little further every day and I am determined to continue until the end.

(Last-minute update: I wrote 2200 words yesterday, which is 3x more than my other days this week, so my momentum might make a comeback!)

Building a Teenage Fascist Empire – Worldbuilding MoebiusWar

 As you probably know, I’m writing a book this month, MoebiusWar. It’s like Star Wars, but with different magic and science. The galaxy is being invaded by a powerful totalitarian empire, and the remaining free worlds have banded together into an interplanetary Resistance.

The people of this galaxy have an interesting feature. In the first book, I wanted a believable reason why it was teenagers flying around saving the galaxy, not seasoned professional adults. So I decided they are not humans, but yumans, a species like humans except they stop maturing at around fifteen and stay like that for the rest of their lives. So not only is Tarran an evil fascist empire, it’s a teenage evil fascist empire.

I wanted all the good guys to justifiably be on the same side, which meant I have to make the invading empire clearly and obviously bad. So I took inspiration from totalitarian and authoritarian nations of real life, particularly Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, sprinkling in some colonialism as well.

It began with a superiority complex. The Tarran people believe their culture is the True Culture, their religion the True Religion, and their people the Chosen People. Thus, when they decided to go out and invade the galaxy, they didn’t see it as an invasion, but as a way to spread the Truth and Light^TM that their culture has achieved.

Because of this mentality, they are very blind to the social prejudices that are very obvious to anyone looking in, notably race and religion. While officially everyone of all races is treated equally under the law, in practice anyone without midnight black skin is treated as a second-class citizen. As for religion, everyone is institutionally required to practice Ar’eus, with all other sects and religions either extremely frowned upon or outright banned with harsh persecution.

The Emperor of Tarran, who is known as the Spellcaster, has a magic staff that lets him control the emotions of anyone who hears it stamp on the ground. This includes live broadcasts but not recordings, because that would break the plot. Spellcaster uses this power to give everyone in the empire intense happiness when they serve him, and depression whenever they doubt or question. It’s an aggrandized magical version of a cult of personality, when a confidence-dripping, chest-thumping narcissist steps up into a position of power and says “join with me against those inferior people who don’t belong with us,” and large numbers of people lose their minds and follow them.

And finally, the icing on the dystopian cake, informing on your neighbors. Near the beginning of the story, Spellcaster issues an edict that anyone showing signs of depression be turned in to the police for questioning, the rationale being that under Spellcaster’s spell, only those who harbor traitorous thoughts are susceptible to depression. Ain’t that the stuff of nightmares.

That is our dystopian totalitarian teenage fascist empire. The story so far has been a blast to write, with lots of interesting characters interacting with each other and dealing with the war in their own unique ways. If you want to read MoebiusWar, a link will be posted in an announcement blog post when it is done next month. You can read the first book, MoebiusQuest, here for free. Have a good November!

NaNoWriMo 2020: MoebiusWar

November is here once again, and that means it’s time to write another book! National Novel Writing Month is an event where hundreds of thousands of people around the world commit to writing a 50,000-word book in one month. This year is my fifth.

The story I am writing is MoebiusWar, the sequel to my 2018 novel MoebiusQuest. Yes, I know how cheesy these titles are, and it is on purpose. These are stories my friends and I built when we were teenagers, and writing them brings back a flood of nostalgia for those days. When writing them, I let myself loose, throwing in tons of silly things I would never put in a real book, and not worrying too much about the craftsmanship.

In MoebiusWar, Conner and his friends journey to Shaper’s Next, a version of their galaxy 400 years in the future, to find the galaxy at war. The evil Spellcaster, ruler of the Tarran Empire, has the nearly unlimited ability to manipulate his subjects’ emotions to coerce them into serving his conquest. Meanwhile, the remaining free worlds have banded together in an allied Resistance to stand against his tyranny. With space battles, time travel, and magic, this book follows multiple personal stories on both sides of the war. The theme: how to remain positive and enthusiastic when the universe around you is going to hell, and your own emotions are being magically manipulated against you. Perfect for 2020.

In keeping with the tradition of breaking new ground during NaNoWriMo, this is the first sequel I have ever written. I did begin Mind and Mirrors, the sequel to The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster, [link] but I have lost interest in that story and I doubt I will ever finish it.

When MoebiusWar is finished, I intend to release it online for free. You can read MoebiusQuest right now, if you like. [link] The current version has been edited slightly, though it is still far from publishable.

In other news, I am about halfway through the second draft of my first real adult novel, An Odyssey through the Stars. The first draft was written during NaNoWriMo last year under the title, Earthbound: A Galactic Odyssey. It will need at least one more structural draft after this one, and another draft for line editing after that. Hopefully, within the next few years you will be able to find An Odyssey through the Stars in bookstores near you.

You can see my progress on MoebiusWar and An Odyssey through the Stars in the bars at the top right of this page. Happy NaNoWriMo to any of you who are participating in it, and I hope your week is at least ok.