Barnden John A
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
Entropy (Basel). 2020 Dec 18;22(12):1433. doi: 10.3390/e22121433.
How, if at all, consciousness can be part of the physical universe remains a baffling problem. This article outlines a new, developing philosophical theory of how it could do so, and offers a preliminary mathematical formulation of a physical grounding for key aspects of the theory. Because the philosophical side has radical elements, so does the physical-theory side. The philosophical side is radical, first, in proposing that the productivity or dynamism in the universe that many believe to be responsible for its systematic regularities is actually itself a physical constituent of the universe, along with more familiar entities. Indeed, it proposes that instances of dynamism can themselves take part in physical interactions with other entities, this interaction then being "meta-dynamism" (a type of meta-causation). Secondly, the theory is radical, and unique, in arguing that consciousness is necessarily partly constituted of meta-dynamic auto-sensitivity, in other words it must react via meta-dynamism to its own dynamism, and also in conjecturing that some specific form of this sensitivity is sufficient for and indeed constitutive of consciousness. The article proposes a way for physical laws to be modified to accommodate meta-dynamism, via the radical step of including elements that explicitly refer to dynamism itself. Additionally, laws become, explicitly, temporally non-local in referring directly to quantity values holding at times prior to a given instant of application of the law. The approach therefore implicitly brings in considerations about what information determines states. Because of the temporal non-locality, and also because of the deep connections between dynamism and time-flow, the approach also implicitly connects to the topic of entropy insofar as this is related to time.
意识究竟如何能够成为物理宇宙的一部分（如果它真的能如此的话），仍然是一个令人困惑的问题。本文概述了一种新的、正在发展的哲学理论，阐述了意识如何能够成为物理宇宙的一部分，并为该理论的关键方面提供了一个初步的物理基础的数学公式。由于哲学层面有激进的元素，物理理论层面也是如此。哲学层面的激进之处在于，首先，它提出宇宙中许多人认为是其系统规律之根源的生产力或动态性，实际上本身就是宇宙的一种物理组成部分，与更常见的实体一样。事实上，它提出动态性的实例本身可以与其他实体进行物理相互作用，这种相互作用进而就是“元动态性”（一种元因果关系）。其次，该理论的激进且独特之处在于，它认为意识必然部分地由元动态自敏感性构成，换句话说，它必须通过元动态性对自身的动态性做出反应，并且还推测这种敏感性的某种特定形式对于意识来说是充分的，甚至构成了意识。本文提出了一种修改物理定律以适应元动态性的方法，即通过包含明确提及动态性本身的元素这一激进步骤。此外，定律在直接提及在给定应用时刻之前的时间点所具有的量值时，明确地在时间上是非局部的。因此，这种方法隐含地引入了关于什么信息决定状态的考虑。由于时间上的非局部性，以及动态性与时间流逝之间的深刻联系，这种方法在与时间相关的熵的主题方面也隐含地建立了联系。
