Okay, but it seems to me we need a working definition of what consciousness is. In other words, what distinguishes a non-conscious entity from a conscious one?
No one else asked yet, so I will, because I have no idea.
What does the OP even mean, by the label “fundamental nature of reality”?
It’s one of those classic, big and vague kinds of labels that can set any intrigued person off in all sorts of mental directions.
Not meaning to be facetious, but doesn’t the phrase “it is what it is,” answer it in many ways? And I always very much liked the scene in The Deer Hunter, where De Niro’s character explains his frustration with one of his friends’ loose behavior by saying “This is THIS!”
Are we trying to talk about some further extension of Quantum Mechanics? Or perhaps another personal project of my own to discover the most fundamental “Quantum element” of individual human philosophical drive is pertinent?
If we are instead, referring to “reality” in this context as meaning “that which we can reliably perceive, and which, once we do perceive it, stops surprising us,” then we would go in an entirely different direction, than if we allow in suspicions that the act of perceiving itself, is an illusion.
Anyone want to try to nail down what we are trying to talk about here?
Obviously I can’t speak for the OP, but to me it’s knowing physics well enough to where any question that has an answer can be answered. Where anything that will ever be possible, is possible. I don’t think we will ever be able to obtain this, but I do believe if we don’t go extinct in the next million years or so that we will be able to build tools to achieve this.
Do they dream? (Only half joking.)
Even if we managed to fully grok the universe, which is probably possible in the general sense if not the specific, it’s impossible to prove the universe isn’t a simulation or the demonstration of some other kind of artifice. Whether or not the universe is a simulation, and what kind of simulation that might be, would probably qualify as part of the fundamental nature of the universe. Thus it is impossible for us (or anyone or anything) to fully understand the fundamental nature of the universe they’re in with any level of certainty.
In a deeply subtle way what you have just said makes me think ‘building the tools’ is tantamount to ‘building the universe!’ Are we humans beings in the process of actually defining the universe? If so, it seems to imbue us with godlike powers!
Or is it just me? :dubious:
I don’t think computers can dream can they because they would need some kind of algorithm to do that.
Science can only make progress on the basis of past discoveries and the accumulation of knowledge.
Suppose you had gathered together all the most brilliant people in the world in the year 1500. They could not have made much scientific progress beyond the level of knowledge of that time.
Suppose you had gathered together all the most brilliant people in the world in the year 1900. Ditto.
Suppose you gathered together all the most brilliant people in the world in 2017. Same thing.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
—Isaac Newton
The human brain evolved to adapt to our environment on earth. I suspect it’s fundamentally incapable of understanding the true nature of reality. A single microscopic organism inside our body can’t understand the nature of its existence; it just knows how to function in its environment. Our intelligence and levels of awareness trick us into believing that such limitations don’t apply to us. But we’re wrong - they do. We’re nothing more than microbes with a relatively high level of consciousness compared to everything that exists within the sphere of what we know. The Universe, perhaps the Multiverse, is probably infinite and well beyond our ability to understand it and its composite reality.
We can’t know what we can’t know. That would seem to be a bit of a problem. So, like I said above, how would we know?
Possibly true, although neural net programming is very close to non-algorithmic.
(The algorithms are dispersed and decentralized, and cannot actually be written down in conventional “structured” form.)
We, as humans, dream… (So do dogs and cats…) Are our brains algorithmic? I think the technical answer is yes, but it’s stretching the definition.
ETA: Another technical question: if one of the inputs into a system is random – truly random, as, say, a radioactive isotope counter – is the system truly algorithmic? Again, I think the technical answer is yes, but it’s also non-deterministic.
Yes, this is true. No matter how brilliant a person is they can only accomplish as much as is possible based on the knowledge of the time. Isaac Newton, for example, made big strides in our understanding of how gravity and other forces work but he was working from a baseline of relative ignorance. People like him advance our knowledge and others come along later and develop it. I’m not sure that historic geniuses would be the answer because it’s often better to take a fresh approach on problems by minds that have not been so embedded in earlier knowledge.
I think we are only capable of understanding that which our consciousness/intelligence allows us to understand. There may well be things that are true and exist in the universe that we may never be able to comprehend because of our limitations and in a sense, the knowledge we have gained is kind of ‘subjective’ in the sense of being amenable to our perceptions.That is not to say that such phenomena is simply ‘created’ in our minds but that the relationship between such phenomena and our ability to ‘detect’ it is compatible.
What about the role of emotions when dreaming? I would have thought that part of dreaming reflects one’s concerns and feelings about current life issues. Would this be an argument for somehow programming emotions into computers? By doing so would creative processes be realized and novel ideas produced? I guess what I’m really talking about is imagination but can computers be made to imagine? Can we produce algorithms that ask: ‘what if’. 
In a way, that’s already true of relativity and quantum physics. We can’t “understand” these things at a perceptive level, only in a descriptive or metaphorical way – and, of course, mathematically.
There are also some mathematical proofs that are so immense, no one can really comprehend them totally, only piecewise. (But that’s true of anything really big.)
So would it be correct to say that human beings can only use analogies in order to model reality? Even mathematics is a kind of analogy in my view because numbers are an invention of humans and don’t actually exist in the real world. Do they? Maybe I’ve got it wrong! But if this is the case then it would seem we can never know anything about reality, only about the analogies we use in order to describe it. And if you take this a step further, doesn’t this really mean that in trying to describe reality we are really describing ourselves, an inner journey if you will. Sorry to get too philosophical, but I’m just following the logic.
Alas, yeah, I think that’s it. Some parts of reality are too complicated and too big for us to grasp, and so we use analogies…and math is one way of doing that.
Also, some parts of reality are so blazingly counter-intuitive that we can’t really comprehend them at all. Quantum weirdness makes our little minds boggle!
So do you think there will ever be a ‘theory of everything’ then? Perhaps things are just too complicated and unpredictable for our brains to handle.
Everybody is certain Quantum Mechanix won’t lead to an understanding of the fundamental, but I’ve thought for a while now that just means Q M is as limited as the systems of Plato, Aristotle, and Newton.