David Bailey
Member
I bought the "Deep Reality", and initially enthused over it because here were two hard scientists writing about things like NDE's, altered states of consciousness, etc. However, I have really gone off the book - the best I can say about it is that the cost of the Kindle edition was very cheap! I wrote to Alex first, because I thought perhaps he could see something in the book that I couldn't do. Here is what I wrote to Alex:
Qualia are vital. The pilosopher David Chalmers coined the term, because physicalists need to explain how any chunk of physics (and remember, chemistry and biology are conceptually derived from physics) can cause something to experience anything.
David
I was rather hoping you would shed a bit of light on it all before I went public. This book is meant for a lay audience, and yet neither of us can make much progress with it - it obviously isn't for mathematicians because it doesn't contain any actual equations - so who the hell is it meant for?
To be honest, I suspect the book is not meant to be understood.
The point is I suppose, how can any chunk of math explain qualia on its own? We have endlessly chewed over this conceptual gap. Although he talks about a lot of non-physical concepts, there is no reference to qualia.
Geometric algebra is defined here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_algebra
That doesn't tell me much, but I know there are a series of mathematical structures, of which the simplest is probably the group. A group consists of a finite or infinite number of elements that can be combined by 'multiplication' (only analogous to ordinary multiplication) . Every such multiplication is also a member of the group. A good example is the group of all rotations and reflections of a square. These higher mathematical structures generally have more than one operation - e.g. 'multiplication' and 'addition'.
I think it is clear that a GA is simply a more complicated example of that genre. It can't explain how qualia are created!
The book also contains a lot of references to 'correlithms'. GOOGLE doesn't offer much, except for this:
https://datascience.stackexchange.c...thm-objects-used-for-anything-in-the-industry
Qualia are vital. The pilosopher David Chalmers coined the term, because physicalists need to explain how any chunk of physics (and remember, chemistry and biology are conceptually derived from physics) can cause something to experience anything.
David