Consciousness as Quantum Integration of Digital Signals
Posted: July 30, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: digital, identity, models, philosophy, reconciliation Leave a commentSequel to Modern Self Café v4: Aaronson, Damasio, and Penrose
Write a Dialogue where Aaronson, Whitehead, and Polanyi discuss the hypothesis below.
ChatGPT Prompt (condensed)
Hypothesis:
“Consciousness is the interior experience of any analog quantum system integrating classical digital signals.”
Act I: Framing the Claim
- Michael Polanyi: The hypothesis respects the epistemic humility I value. Consciousness emerges not from algorithms, but from participation. It’s like a scientist indwelling their tools.
- Scott Aaronson: I appreciate the attempt. Quantum systems resist cloning and prediction, which gives them a unique character. But that’s not enough to infer subjective experience.
- Alfred North Whitehead: Yet indeterminacy may be the shadow of something deeper. Each “occasion” of existence integrates many into one. That act—of becoming—is experiential.
Modern Self Café v2: Kant Goethe There
Posted: December 23, 2024 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: models, modernity, philosophy, truth 1 CommentContinued from Modern Self Café: Galileo, Descartes, Mersenne
ChatGPT Prompt
Imagine a similar group set in the time of Kant.
Setting: A cozy salon in Königsberg in the late 18th century. The conversation revolves around the Enlightenment’s intellectual revolution and the transition from Newtonian mechanics and rationalism to Immanuel Kant‘s transcendental idealism. The group includes Kant, Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They discuss how their respective disciplines—philosophy, mathematics, physics, and natural science—are reshaping humanity’s understanding of reality.
Kant: Gentlemen, it strikes me that we are at a crossroads, much like Galileo and Descartes before us. They sought to uncover the laws of nature through reason and observation. But now we must ask: what are the limits of reason itself?
Read the rest of this entry »Modern Self Café: Galileo, Descartes, Mersenne
Posted: December 23, 2024 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: dialogue, models, modernity, philosophy, transformation, truth, values 3 CommentsA spin-off from Higher Self Café.
Write a dialogue with Galileo, Mersenne, and Descartes that helps moderns understand the mental shift they engineered.
ChatGPT Prompt
Setting: A cozy study in Paris in the mid-17th century. Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, and René Descartes are seated around a small table covered with papers, quills, and diagrams. A fire crackles in the hearth. Their conversation revolves around the intellectual shift they helped create—the movement from Aristotelian natural philosophy to the scientific and mathematical worldview that underpins modern science.
Mersenne: Gentlemen, it is humbling to consider the scope of what we are reshaping. The old world thought the cosmos was ruled by purpose and perfection, yet here we are, uncovering truths through measurement, mathematics, and reason.
Read the rest of this entry »Six Ways to Out-Think the Future
Posted: April 30, 2020 Filed under: education | Tags: design, education, models, systems, thinking, truth Leave a commentPre-paying the “Crisis Mode Cost”
To prepare for times of danger, uncertainty, or extraordinary opportunity, we must cultivate these six habits of mind in order to win the future (#WTF) by bridging the gap between Snow’s two cultures.
Mnemonic: CriSys MoDe CoSt
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Radical Centrism 