<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Conference presentation of \u201cProcess Physics, Time and Consciousness: Nature as an internally meaningful, habit-establishing process.\u201d As presented at the Whitehead Psychology Nexus Workshop Conference held in Fontareches, France, March 27-30th, 2015 (with some minor adjustments). For full published paper, see: <a href=\"https:\/\/tinyurl.com\/yc9r6kys\">https:\/\/tinyurl.com\/yc9r6kys<\/a> (date of publication: October 18, 2017).<\/p>\n<p>Abstract:<\/p>\n<p>Process Physics, Time and Consciousness: Nature as an internally meaningful, habit-establishing process.<\/p>\n<p>Author: Jeroen B. J. van Dijk, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.<\/p>\n<p>Ever since Einstein\u2019s arrival at the forefront of science, mainstream physics likes to think of nature as a giant 4-dimensional spacetime continuum in which all of eternity exists all at once \u2013 in one timeless block universe. Accordingly, much to the dismay of more process-minded researchers, the experience of an ongoing present moment is typically branded as illusory.<br \/> Mainstream physics is having a hard time, though, to provide a well-founded defense for this illusoriness of time. This is because physics, as an empirical science, is itself utterly dependent on experience to begin with. Moreover, if nature were indeed purely physical \u2013 as contemporary mainstream physics wants us to believe \u2013 it\u2019s quite difficult to see how it could ever be able to give rise to something so explicitly non-physical like conscious experience. On top of this, the argument of time\u2019s illusoriness becomes even more doubtful in view of the extra-ordinary level of sophistication that would be required for our conscious experience to achieve such an utterly convincing, but \u2013 physically speaking \u2013 pointless illusion.<br \/> It\u2019s because of problems like these that process thought has persistently objected against this \u2018eternalism\u2019 of mainstream physics. Just recently, physicist Lee Smolin even brought up some other major arguments against this timeless picture in his controversial 2013 book \u2018Time Reborn\u2019. And although he passionately argues that physics should take an entirely different direction, he admits that he has no readily available roadmap to success.<br \/> Fortunately, however, over the last 15 years or so, a neo-Whiteheadian, \u2018neurobiologically inspired\u2019 way of doing foundational physics, namely Reg Cahill\u2019s Process Physics, has been making its appearance on the scene. Process Physics aims to model the universe as an initially orderless and uniform process plenum by setting up a stochastic, self-referential modeling of nature. In Process Physics, all self-referential and initially noisy activity patterns are \u201cmutually in-formative\u201d as they are actively making a meaningful difference to (i.e. \u201cin-forming\u201d) each other. Due to this mutual in-formativeness, the stochastic activity patterns will act as \u201cstart-up seeds\u201d that become engaged in self-renewing update iterations. In this way, the system starts to evolve from its initial featurelessness to then \u201cbranch out\u201d to higher and higher levels of complexity \u2013 all this according to the same basic principles as a naturally evolving neural network.<br \/> Because of this \u201cneuromorphic\u201d behaviour, the process system can be thought of as habit-bound with a potential for creative novelty and open-ended evolution. Furthermore, threedimensionality, gravitational and relativistic effects, nonlocality, and classical behaviour are spontaneously emergent within the system. Also, the system\u2019s constantly renewing activity patterns bring along an inherent present moment effect, thereby reintroducing time as the system\u2019s ongoing change. As a final point, subjectivity \u2013 in the form of mutual informativeness \u2013 is a naturally evolving, innate feature, not a coincidental, later-arriving side-effect.<\/p>\n<p>Main references:<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/process-physics-time-and-consciousness-presentation-whitehead-psychology-nexus-2015\">Continue reading \u201cProcess Physics, Time and Consciousness \u2014 Presentation Whitehead Psychology Nexus 2015\u201d | ><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Conference presentation of \u201cProcess Physics, Time and Consciousness: Nature as an internally meaningful, habit-establishing process.\u201d As presented at the Whitehead Psychology Nexus Workshop Conference held in Fontareches, France, March 27-30th, 2015 (with some minor adjustments). For full published paper, see: https:\/\/tinyurl.com\/yc9r6kys (date of publication: October 18, 2017). Abstract: Process Physics, Time and Consciousness: Nature as [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-robotics-ai","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}