Max Tegmark has a new paper Consciousness as a State of Matter. The paper is filled with mathematics which I am not going to try to explain or pretend to understand but there are parts of it which are fairly accessible to anyone with a modest understanding of modern science. Here is a good write-up of it without the mathematics. The paper takes the seemingly radical position that we can understand consciousness as another state of physical matter just like solids, liquids, and gases. I have argued in some other posts that consciousness must be material so I will find myself in agreement with the general sentiment even though I disagree with this approach There are, however, some additional aspects of this that Tegmark may be missing that I want to discuss.
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