The New World of Lonnie Mandigo

Inspired by a fascinating conversation with Jim over coffee, I continued to explore the topic of qualia with Gemini. The following paper is the result of our collaboration.

One of the more entertaining aspects of the current conversations around AI is how much it challenges what we've believed, perhaps for centuries, about the nature of thinking. We've discovered that we don't currently possess objective and testable definitions for words like sentience and consciousness.  For reference, here are a couple of current definitions... Sentience - feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought. ( Merriam-Webster ) Consciousness - the state of understanding and realizing something. ( Cambridge Dictionary ) Words like feeling, sensation, perception, thought, and realizing don't add a lot of value and tend to make definitions circular, but if you distill them you end up understanding as a component of each.  "Understanding" is a word worth exploring. Just for reference here are some of Merriam-Webster's definitions of the word " understand "... : to grasp the meaning of : to grasp the reasonableness of ...

 In The Origin Question , I brought up randomness and its role in the structure of different models of the universe. This post is a non-authoritative ponder on the nature of randomness.

In my metaphysics, I've posited two broad classes of components; physical and informational.  I assert that they are here (which may be hasty), but where did they come from?

The pursuit of individual components is fraught with peril in physics.  It's an endless turtles-all-the-way-down problem with no real termination.  I must be able to decompose any component into constituent components and, of course, each of those components must be decomposable as well.  This is an interesting pastime but not always helpful.

In a prior post I proposed a structure where the universe has multiple domains.  I can only cite two domains that are apparent to me; the physical domain and the informational domain.  Components of these domains have state and collections of those components can create systems that modify those states.  It seems clear that these domains interact with each other.  We have an informational system, a mental model, of how we'll get to work in the morning.  This is information that is expressed in the physical domain.  If we hear of an accident that interferes with our plan then we modify that plan to adapt to the circumstance.  This is an example of a physical state impacting an informational system.

The universe appears to multiple domains.  One domain seems to be the physical universe, where a class of entities that we call physical entities interact with each other.  Another seems to be the informational domain, where a different class of entities interact with each other.  Portions of these domains reflect each other and influence each other.  Portions do not.  Systems may include components of both.