The dialogue of physicists about the soul
“There is nothing after death.” Man dies and that's it.
- And before death, what does a person have?
- There is a body, for example ...
- Do you have a soul?
- No, there is no soul.
- Who then has a body?
- The body is in itself. There are processes in it that allow one to feel, assess, move in space, and so on.
- Well, is there a mind?
- The mind is rather a property of the body, and not something separate.
- That's nice: let's, for example, consider the property of heat. She is also not alone. But she is. She does not disappear. It moves from one physical body to another.
- For that matter, the body does not disappear after death, but turns into something else.
- You see, even the body does not disappear. And in it is still the mind to the heap. What is the mind turning into?
- Wait a minute ... You have to understand what the mind is. The mind is probably our memory. And memory is information. It is stored in the structure of the brain - in the neural connections in the head. After death, the brain decomposes, turns into simpler chemical elements. Yes, probably, somehow the structure of the brain affects this decomposition. But this is not very similar to reincarnation and the like, is not it?
- Well, at least we found out that the memory does not disappear anywhere. This is already good. Do you really think that mind and memory are one and the same?
- Not the same thing. The mind is how we handle our memories. We do something with this information and generate new information or reproduce the old information - this is how our Mind becomes visible to others.
- So where is that mind? Where are these rules that guide us, "operating with memory," as you say?
- Yes, too, somewhere in the memory. This is part of the memory. Memory is not static, like a file on disk. She breathes constantly, overflows. One part of the memory operates the other. Then they change, perhaps. This whole process is Mind. And after death it breaks, fades away, decomposes.
- Avona, how is it coming out for you: by itself, is everything moving or something? How does one part of the memory start to control the other part? And why does she not resist, if she can control in the same way? Who, in general, chooses the part that should be managed now?
- And I know who: external signals. Here you come to the sea, and you turn on the mode of swimming or sunbathing ...
- But I can come to meditate? Or come, get undressed, get a laptop and program.
- Can you ...
- So, I choose myself, and not external signals?
- Well, you still have plenty of internal signals from the same memory.
“Again, does memory manage memory?”
- Everything is difficult there. Yes, I do not say that everything should be simple. I only insist that any difficult process can stop and disappear. Just disappear.
“I began to hint at the fact that there is a certain“ I ”in us, which probably is not even the mind, but something higher ... But come to the processes: if this complex process is someone like you learned while the process was working, can it, as you say, disappear?
- And how!? Burn your laptop with napalm and that's it. It all fell.
- But it’s quite simple: you play the same laptop according to the diagrams, put the same files from the backup on the disk - and here’s an absolutely identical process for you.
- Well yes. Actually, cloning is about the same. You take all the information from the DNA and create the same creature. Only you can’t put the files in place, because these files are all your memories in your whole life: all pictures, all sounds, all smells, touches, temperature and humidity, etc. You can't reproduce everything exactly, so the exact same person or, there, the sheep will not work. Even identical twins are different.
- And if you absolutely repeat everything - will it work? In the Matrix. The movie "The Matrix" watched?
- If you repeat everything, you will.
- And if your mega-complex process - which is Mind - somewhere in its phase space, will turn a little wrong there? You heard about dynamic chaos: everything is determined, and the minimal noise turns everything up unpredictably? And in our quantum world, noise is generally at the very foundation of being.
- I agree. Then, it means that the structure of the attractor is more important, and not the exact movement along the trajectory.
- So, the files can not be reproduced so accurately?
- Yes, probably.
- There are some of the most important "files", and the rest can be slightly varied, if this does not change the phase portrait qualitatively. Right?
- Well, it is. Now you begin to understand.
- And we understand all this with our mind - right?
- Right.
- And tell me, please, can we describe Euclidean geometry with its own words?
- If we just need to describe it - understand it, like - then we will leave only axioms, and this will be the end.
“You see how great it is: only axioms remain.” And how to describe them?
- In words ... with experimental data ... I don’t know ... Axioms will not describe themselves - no brainer.
- And we have agreed to the point that a complex system is described by itself: you take DNA from it, you take some kind of memory core - and everything is reproduced. What is that supposed to mean? Look: can the phase trajectory draw itself? Why are you laughing?
- Describes ...
- And yet ..?
- Why not something? Point runs and draws a trajectory.
- But what does she draw and on what?
- Well, give her a pen or chalk ...
- See, you need something else. Something that does not enter the system, running along its trajectory. And the dimension of the paper on which draws your pen, should be si-and-flax more than two ...
- Well: there is a person with his mind, and he talks about himself with a pen or voice. One piece of nature tells about itself, using another piece of nature. And all this is observed by someone else - the third piece of nature. Watching each other and find out everything. It is possible and on a flat piece of paper, by the way, to write out all coordinates - no matter how many there are.
- It is truth too. But when the first piece of nature begins to use the second, it changes. This is an advanced system. And again, something external is needed to understand it.
- But you can at least understand approximately. And with good accuracy.
- But there will always be something hidden.
- Yes. But small, insignificant.
- Do you know why people built the Large Hadron Collider?
- Well, yes, just to learn something so small, invisible. I understand what you mean.
- Here's an example for you when a little generates something huge and incomprehensible. And people are looking for in it a new physics. Do you know why? Because modern physics has in some places noticeable holes. And this is your “small and insignificant” contains, generally speaking, such deposits of data that humanity has plans to build several more accelerators, and even bigger than the LHC.
- Listen, I somehow traced our thoughts through the chain back, but I see no problems. Well, let there be something unknown in man, perhaps even unknowable. And we can also say with confidence that in all of us there are all the very elementary particles that collide in the LHC. And the psi functions of my electrons are their tails somewhere in you, for example. That is, the probability of finding a piece of me right inside you is non-zero. And what from this? Here I die, and all this unknowable with all its psi functions will fall under the ground and that's it.
- At a minimum, you can no longer say that at least something from this unknowable cannot simply leave you after the death of your body and go about your business.
- I can not.
- And that's nice. You probably think that this conversation will be over?
- Yeah.
- Do you want to finish it?
- Not.
- Nice. And then I just started ... There’s such a moment: a person, or rather, his mind cannot be considered something more simple than the same LHC, for example. Do you agree?
- Absolutely. Man cognizes nature, which means that he should be able to fit all the knowledge about nature into his memory, into his mind ... Yes, I still believe that the mind and memory is something single. In general, it turns out that the mind must be as complex as all of nature, all physics. Some kind of
self -similarity ... - Here: I wanted to say that the LHC was built by a man, although by the crowd, but you yourself went further. And say: can a person find ALL knowledge about nature?
- Not.
- Why?
- Because Kurt.
- Godel?
- Is he.
- That's it. The mind is identical with nature. The mind cannot formulate such a dictionary to describe itself, that is, to describe nature as a whole. There are always holes in Theory of Everything. Humanity will build colliders bigger and bigger, as long as they have the resources and understanding of the need. The mind cannot formulate a complete dictionary, but it can expand it — that's what's amazing! The mind is outside the dictionary, it turns out. Note: so far, the expansion of Theory has come only from the mind.
- From experiments ...
- But what will they be crazy about, which interprets them? Comprehends and tries to finish the Theory. He completes the theory and gets the need for at least another two or three experimenters to finally close everything. But according to Kurt Godel, he never closes. There will always be a need to check something else, and for this you will need an accelerator ten times larger than the previous one. I do not know exactly how it is with this, but I suspect that first ten times larger, then a hundred, then a thousand, and so on.
- Yes, it's funny.
“And you keep saying that the mind is something that fits in a skull box?” I even say this: it is possible that there will come a time when the Theory of Everything will no longer fit into one head on planet Earth, and to work with one part of it you will need to somehow wipe the other part - as we do on computers. Or you will definitely need whole groups of people to have a sort of collective repository. It already works that way now, but so far, it seems, there are no principal difficulties for someone alone to comprehend everything necessary for the whole group. You can understand, it does not work on all fronts - but this is different. And now, right now, we see how the mind becomes a collective mind, detaches from a particular body, hangs in the air, uses different memory banks.
- Well, it's all conditional. Just some kind of abstraction.
“But you will not find the boundary between this abstraction and reality.”
- And if I find?
- You can try - I will be grateful if you clarify something to me here. Anyway, in this team, a coordinator is always needed, setting the current focus, denoting the current scope of work, a set of tasks, setting priorities - as you wish.
- So what?
- And the fact that a group of people can be assigned such a coordinator. But everyone in the head has a coordinator. Mind, focus of attention, consciousness, “I”, ego - I don’t know what exactly to call it, but it definitely exists.
- You want to say that this is the eternal soul?
- About. We go further by this analogy. I like her. This is not even an analogy, but an example of how a person reproduces the device of himself in the external world. Look: a group of scientists is not so important its composition. The coordinator can create the same group, or even better, from other scientists. Moreover, the coordinator himself can quit - he is also not so important. The group itself will recreate the new: the same, only worse. And if not worse or even better, then they will go in a different direction. All the memory, the whole spirit of the project is hovering somewhere in the air, in the skull boxes, in the documentation, but the coordinator somewhere sends all this and somehow leads. So is the mind, which is not really a memory in reality. It is something intangible, but perceived.
- Well, you bent, of course. Here it is necessary to think. But I still do not see the arguments in favor of the fact that the mind or soul, or even something, can be eternal. The same groups of scientists fall apart (I almost said they decompose), the coordinators go over to other projects, documentation is lost in the archives, if they were, in general ... - and everything, and there is no project spirit.
- Do not tell me. Even in the sad case, much can be raised: documents, eyewitnesses, samples. And revive the project. If anyone else needs it. I also do not see any clear arguments, unfortunately. It is necessary to jump through them. As we found out, the system can be complex and verbose, but the justification of its own axioms always lies outside. We are engaged only in the fact that we consider all the conclusions from these axioms, trying, at least virtually, to imagine what they may be. And you know, it seems that virtually everything seems to be nice. But words and concepts are never enough to articulate. And the mind is eternal from the fact that every child is born with its own mind.
- I would say that a child is born with some kind of basic firmware ...
- But not with the base. You watch the kids and you will see that the mind in them evolves little from the moment of birth. Any kind of motor skills, mechanics develops, the database is filled up - memory, interfaces with the given environment are installed and perfected, and the mind ... It may be only a little changed - this is what life has been given to us. And to change it significantly, it takes many lives. This also becomes clear when you watch the kids. Here, find the infant records of your son and look at his gaze there. Immediately you will understand.
- I'll try.
- years have passed. You have already forgotten that he was exactly the same when you only learned to crawl. So check it out. Look into your eyes carefully. Not for nothing says that the eyes - a mirror of the soul!
- I'll check. It is interesting.
- And before death, what does a person have?
- There is a body, for example ...
- Do you have a soul?
- No, there is no soul.
- Who then has a body?
- The body is in itself. There are processes in it that allow one to feel, assess, move in space, and so on.
- Well, is there a mind?
- The mind is rather a property of the body, and not something separate.
- That's nice: let's, for example, consider the property of heat. She is also not alone. But she is. She does not disappear. It moves from one physical body to another.
- For that matter, the body does not disappear after death, but turns into something else.
- You see, even the body does not disappear. And in it is still the mind to the heap. What is the mind turning into?
- Wait a minute ... You have to understand what the mind is. The mind is probably our memory. And memory is information. It is stored in the structure of the brain - in the neural connections in the head. After death, the brain decomposes, turns into simpler chemical elements. Yes, probably, somehow the structure of the brain affects this decomposition. But this is not very similar to reincarnation and the like, is not it?
- Well, at least we found out that the memory does not disappear anywhere. This is already good. Do you really think that mind and memory are one and the same?
- Not the same thing. The mind is how we handle our memories. We do something with this information and generate new information or reproduce the old information - this is how our Mind becomes visible to others.
- So where is that mind? Where are these rules that guide us, "operating with memory," as you say?
- Yes, too, somewhere in the memory. This is part of the memory. Memory is not static, like a file on disk. She breathes constantly, overflows. One part of the memory operates the other. Then they change, perhaps. This whole process is Mind. And after death it breaks, fades away, decomposes.
- Avona, how is it coming out for you: by itself, is everything moving or something? How does one part of the memory start to control the other part? And why does she not resist, if she can control in the same way? Who, in general, chooses the part that should be managed now?
- And I know who: external signals. Here you come to the sea, and you turn on the mode of swimming or sunbathing ...
- But I can come to meditate? Or come, get undressed, get a laptop and program.
- Can you ...
- So, I choose myself, and not external signals?
- Well, you still have plenty of internal signals from the same memory.
“Again, does memory manage memory?”
- Everything is difficult there. Yes, I do not say that everything should be simple. I only insist that any difficult process can stop and disappear. Just disappear.
“I began to hint at the fact that there is a certain“ I ”in us, which probably is not even the mind, but something higher ... But come to the processes: if this complex process is someone like you learned while the process was working, can it, as you say, disappear?
- And how!? Burn your laptop with napalm and that's it. It all fell.
- But it’s quite simple: you play the same laptop according to the diagrams, put the same files from the backup on the disk - and here’s an absolutely identical process for you.
- Well yes. Actually, cloning is about the same. You take all the information from the DNA and create the same creature. Only you can’t put the files in place, because these files are all your memories in your whole life: all pictures, all sounds, all smells, touches, temperature and humidity, etc. You can't reproduce everything exactly, so the exact same person or, there, the sheep will not work. Even identical twins are different.
- And if you absolutely repeat everything - will it work? In the Matrix. The movie "The Matrix" watched?
- If you repeat everything, you will.
- And if your mega-complex process - which is Mind - somewhere in its phase space, will turn a little wrong there? You heard about dynamic chaos: everything is determined, and the minimal noise turns everything up unpredictably? And in our quantum world, noise is generally at the very foundation of being.
- I agree. Then, it means that the structure of the attractor is more important, and not the exact movement along the trajectory.
- So, the files can not be reproduced so accurately?
- Yes, probably.
- There are some of the most important "files", and the rest can be slightly varied, if this does not change the phase portrait qualitatively. Right?
- Well, it is. Now you begin to understand.
- And we understand all this with our mind - right?
- Right.
- And tell me, please, can we describe Euclidean geometry with its own words?
- If we just need to describe it - understand it, like - then we will leave only axioms, and this will be the end.
“You see how great it is: only axioms remain.” And how to describe them?
- In words ... with experimental data ... I don’t know ... Axioms will not describe themselves - no brainer.
- And we have agreed to the point that a complex system is described by itself: you take DNA from it, you take some kind of memory core - and everything is reproduced. What is that supposed to mean? Look: can the phase trajectory draw itself? Why are you laughing?
- Describes ...
- And yet ..?
- Why not something? Point runs and draws a trajectory.
- But what does she draw and on what?
- Well, give her a pen or chalk ...
- See, you need something else. Something that does not enter the system, running along its trajectory. And the dimension of the paper on which draws your pen, should be si-and-flax more than two ...
- Well: there is a person with his mind, and he talks about himself with a pen or voice. One piece of nature tells about itself, using another piece of nature. And all this is observed by someone else - the third piece of nature. Watching each other and find out everything. It is possible and on a flat piece of paper, by the way, to write out all coordinates - no matter how many there are.
- It is truth too. But when the first piece of nature begins to use the second, it changes. This is an advanced system. And again, something external is needed to understand it.
- But you can at least understand approximately. And with good accuracy.
- But there will always be something hidden.
- Yes. But small, insignificant.
- Do you know why people built the Large Hadron Collider?
- Well, yes, just to learn something so small, invisible. I understand what you mean.
- Here's an example for you when a little generates something huge and incomprehensible. And people are looking for in it a new physics. Do you know why? Because modern physics has in some places noticeable holes. And this is your “small and insignificant” contains, generally speaking, such deposits of data that humanity has plans to build several more accelerators, and even bigger than the LHC.
- Listen, I somehow traced our thoughts through the chain back, but I see no problems. Well, let there be something unknown in man, perhaps even unknowable. And we can also say with confidence that in all of us there are all the very elementary particles that collide in the LHC. And the psi functions of my electrons are their tails somewhere in you, for example. That is, the probability of finding a piece of me right inside you is non-zero. And what from this? Here I die, and all this unknowable with all its psi functions will fall under the ground and that's it.
- At a minimum, you can no longer say that at least something from this unknowable cannot simply leave you after the death of your body and go about your business.
- I can not.
- And that's nice. You probably think that this conversation will be over?
- Yeah.
- Do you want to finish it?
- Not.
- Nice. And then I just started ... There’s such a moment: a person, or rather, his mind cannot be considered something more simple than the same LHC, for example. Do you agree?
- Absolutely. Man cognizes nature, which means that he should be able to fit all the knowledge about nature into his memory, into his mind ... Yes, I still believe that the mind and memory is something single. In general, it turns out that the mind must be as complex as all of nature, all physics. Some kind of
self -similarity ... - Here: I wanted to say that the LHC was built by a man, although by the crowd, but you yourself went further. And say: can a person find ALL knowledge about nature?
- Not.
- Why?
- Because Kurt.
- Godel?
- Is he.
- That's it. The mind is identical with nature. The mind cannot formulate such a dictionary to describe itself, that is, to describe nature as a whole. There are always holes in Theory of Everything. Humanity will build colliders bigger and bigger, as long as they have the resources and understanding of the need. The mind cannot formulate a complete dictionary, but it can expand it — that's what's amazing! The mind is outside the dictionary, it turns out. Note: so far, the expansion of Theory has come only from the mind.
- From experiments ...
- But what will they be crazy about, which interprets them? Comprehends and tries to finish the Theory. He completes the theory and gets the need for at least another two or three experimenters to finally close everything. But according to Kurt Godel, he never closes. There will always be a need to check something else, and for this you will need an accelerator ten times larger than the previous one. I do not know exactly how it is with this, but I suspect that first ten times larger, then a hundred, then a thousand, and so on.
- Yes, it's funny.
“And you keep saying that the mind is something that fits in a skull box?” I even say this: it is possible that there will come a time when the Theory of Everything will no longer fit into one head on planet Earth, and to work with one part of it you will need to somehow wipe the other part - as we do on computers. Or you will definitely need whole groups of people to have a sort of collective repository. It already works that way now, but so far, it seems, there are no principal difficulties for someone alone to comprehend everything necessary for the whole group. You can understand, it does not work on all fronts - but this is different. And now, right now, we see how the mind becomes a collective mind, detaches from a particular body, hangs in the air, uses different memory banks.
- Well, it's all conditional. Just some kind of abstraction.
“But you will not find the boundary between this abstraction and reality.”
- And if I find?
- You can try - I will be grateful if you clarify something to me here. Anyway, in this team, a coordinator is always needed, setting the current focus, denoting the current scope of work, a set of tasks, setting priorities - as you wish.
- So what?
- And the fact that a group of people can be assigned such a coordinator. But everyone in the head has a coordinator. Mind, focus of attention, consciousness, “I”, ego - I don’t know what exactly to call it, but it definitely exists.
- You want to say that this is the eternal soul?
- About. We go further by this analogy. I like her. This is not even an analogy, but an example of how a person reproduces the device of himself in the external world. Look: a group of scientists is not so important its composition. The coordinator can create the same group, or even better, from other scientists. Moreover, the coordinator himself can quit - he is also not so important. The group itself will recreate the new: the same, only worse. And if not worse or even better, then they will go in a different direction. All the memory, the whole spirit of the project is hovering somewhere in the air, in the skull boxes, in the documentation, but the coordinator somewhere sends all this and somehow leads. So is the mind, which is not really a memory in reality. It is something intangible, but perceived.
- Well, you bent, of course. Here it is necessary to think. But I still do not see the arguments in favor of the fact that the mind or soul, or even something, can be eternal. The same groups of scientists fall apart (I almost said they decompose), the coordinators go over to other projects, documentation is lost in the archives, if they were, in general ... - and everything, and there is no project spirit.
- Do not tell me. Even in the sad case, much can be raised: documents, eyewitnesses, samples. And revive the project. If anyone else needs it. I also do not see any clear arguments, unfortunately. It is necessary to jump through them. As we found out, the system can be complex and verbose, but the justification of its own axioms always lies outside. We are engaged only in the fact that we consider all the conclusions from these axioms, trying, at least virtually, to imagine what they may be. And you know, it seems that virtually everything seems to be nice. But words and concepts are never enough to articulate. And the mind is eternal from the fact that every child is born with its own mind.
- I would say that a child is born with some kind of basic firmware ...
- But not with the base. You watch the kids and you will see that the mind in them evolves little from the moment of birth. Any kind of motor skills, mechanics develops, the database is filled up - memory, interfaces with the given environment are installed and perfected, and the mind ... It may be only a little changed - this is what life has been given to us. And to change it significantly, it takes many lives. This also becomes clear when you watch the kids. Here, find the infant records of your son and look at his gaze there. Immediately you will understand.
- I'll try.
- years have passed. You have already forgotten that he was exactly the same when you only learned to crawl. So check it out. Look into your eyes carefully. Not for nothing says that the eyes - a mirror of the soul!
- I'll check. It is interesting.