What makes you an observer?

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12959v1
• Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2025 09:15:13 GMT
• Title: What makes you an observer?
• Authors: Ovidiu Cristinel Stoica,
• Abstract summary: Both empirical and theoretical objective science can only access relations, revealing nothing about the intrinsic nature of the entities "in relation"<n>We typically refer to these entities as "matter", assuming their nature is irrelevant and that relational structures alone explain all phenomena, including consciousness.<n>I demonstrate that if this premise held true, the memories within an observer's brain would bear no correlation to the external world.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Both empirical and theoretical objective science can only access relations, revealing nothing about the intrinsic nature of the entities "in relation". We typically refer to these entities as "matter", assuming their nature is irrelevant and that relational structures alone explain all phenomena, including consciousness. This would imply that consciousness arises not from matter itself but solely from its structural configurations. Consequently, if two worlds possess isomorphic structures and obey identical dynamical laws, isomorphic systems within these worlds should be equally sentient or insentient. I demonstrate that if this premise held true, the memories within an observer's brain would bear no correlation to the external world. Yet since we do acquire knowledge of the external world, structure alone must be insufficient: there exists something beyond relations, the intrinsic essence of the "stuff in relation". This essence imbues the observer's structure with sentience, metaphorically "breathing fire" into it. In turn, the observer confers physical meaning upon the world's structures. Remarkably, this conclusion emerges directly from physics and mathematics. Without acknowledging this intrinsic element, we would be incapable not only of subjective experience but also of acquiring any objective knowledge about the physical world.

Related papers

• A Complexity-Based Theory of Compositionality [53.025566128892066]
  In AI, compositional representations can enable a powerful form of out-of-distribution generalization.<n>Here, we propose a formal definition of compositionality that accounts for and extends our intuitions about compositionality.<n>The definition is conceptually simple, quantitative, grounded in algorithmic information theory, and applicable to any representation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-18T18:37:27Z)
• Qualia and the Formal Structure of Meaning [0.0]
  Empirically, subjective meaning is ubiquitous in conscious experiences. Within the context of the mind-matter relation, we provide a formalization of subjective meaning associated to one's mental representations.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-02T10:05:36Z)
• Binding Dynamics in Rotating Features [72.80071820194273]
  We propose an alternative "cosine binding" mechanism, which explicitly computes the alignment between features and adjusts weights accordingly. This allows us to draw direct connections to self-attention and biological neural processes, and to shed light on the fundamental dynamics for object-centric representations to emerge in Rotating Features.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-08T12:31:08Z)
• Consciousness as a logically consistent and prognostic model of reality [0.0]
  Causal relationships may create fixed points of cyclic inter-predictable properties. Brain might reflect the external world causal relationships in the form of a logically consistent and prognostic model of reality.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-12-10T14:07:20Z)
• Are observers reducible to structures? [0.0]
  Is there a unique correspondence between observables and physical properties? I show that, if observer-like structures from all parametrizations were observers, their memory of the external world would have no correspondence with the facts, it would be no better than random guess. It has implications for structural realism, philosophy of mind, the foundations of quantum and classical physics, and quantum-first approaches.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-07-13T14:48:50Z)
• Intrinsic Physical Concepts Discovery with Object-Centric Predictive Models [86.25460882547581]
  We introduce the PHYsical Concepts Inference NEtwork (PHYCINE), a system that infers physical concepts in different abstract levels without supervision. We show that object representations containing the discovered physical concepts variables could help achieve better performance in causal reasoning tasks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-03-03T11:52:21Z)
• Sources of Richness and Ineffability for Phenomenally Conscious States [57.8137804587998]
  We provide an information theoretic dynamical systems perspective on the richness and ineffability of consciousness. In our framework, the richness of conscious experience corresponds to the amount of information in a conscious state. While our model may not settle all questions relating to the explanatory gap, it makes progress toward a fully physicalist explanation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-02-13T14:41:04Z)
• Compositional Processing Emerges in Neural Networks Solving Math Problems [100.80518350845668]
  Recent progress in artificial neural networks has shown that when large models are trained on enough linguistic data, grammatical structure emerges in their representations. We extend this work to the domain of mathematical reasoning, where it is possible to formulate precise hypotheses about how meanings should be composed. Our work shows that neural networks are not only able to infer something about the structured relationships implicit in their training data, but can also deploy this knowledge to guide the composition of individual meanings into composite wholes.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-05-19T07:24:42Z)
• Observers of quantum systems cannot agree to disagree [55.41644538483948]
  We ask whether agreement between observers can serve as a physical principle that must hold for any theory of the world. We construct examples of (postquantum) no-signaling boxes where observers can agree to disagree.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-02-17T19:00:04Z)
• Undecidability and unpredictability: not limitations, but triumphs of science [0.0]
  It is a widespread belief that results like G"odel's incompleteness theorems represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. I argue that this view is wrong. It originates in a naive form of metaphysics that sees the physical and Platonic worlds as a collection of things with definite properties. I argue to replace this perspective by a worldview in which a structural notion of real patterns', not things' are regarded as fundamental.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-08-22T12:08:06Z)
• Embodied observations from an intrinsic perspective can entail quantum dynamics [0.0]
  How subjective experience relates to physical phenomena remains unclear. Scientists eliminate the "spurious" aspects of their subjective experience to establish an "objective" science. A relational view emerges: every experience has a physical correlate and every physical phenomenon is an experience for "someone"
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-07T17:58:56Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.