Consciousness

I have written about one of Max Tegmark’s ideas already - the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis - and in doing so I admitted he sits at the top of my favourite physicists list. That post was about a single claim. This one is about the man, and about the thing I find more interesting than any individual theory of his: the through-line. Tegmark has spent a career moving steadily inward, from measurable cosmology toward the deepest possible questions about what reality is, and the move never feels like a physicist losing the plot and drifting into metaphysics. It feels like someone following the maths until it runs out of floor. ...

When I wrote about Donald Hoffman, I was working through one half of a question I keep saying I have not settled: whether consciousness is fundamental, there from the start as part of the floor of reality, or computational, something that switches on once a physical process organises information in the right way. Hoffman is the most serious case I have found for the fundamental side, and I gave it a fair hearing because I genuinely find it compelling. ...

When I wrote about Yampolskiy’s Personal Universes recently, I left a thread hanging. The question underneath that whole post - the one I said I genuinely had not settled - was whether consciousness is fundamental, there first with the universe as something it experiences, or whether it is computational, something that switches on once a process gets complex enough. I said I had only recently started reading my way into the fundamental side, mostly through Donald Hoffman. This is me pulling on that thread properly. ...

“Are we living in a simulation?” is one of those questions that sounds like late-night dorm-room talk and then turns out to have a serious literature behind it. The honest short answer to “how likely” is that nobody knows, and that the question may not even have a clean numerical answer. But that is not a reason to wave it away. The reasons we cannot confidently put a number on it are themselves interesting, and they tell us something real about the limits of probability, the nature of consciousness, and what counts as science. ...