Re: life=awareness hypothesis/idea

On 31 Jan 2026 at 04:04:17 GMT+1, "Steve Hayes" <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:25:46 +0100, Alain Stalder
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> In a nutshell, I describe an idea regarding the nature of "consciousness"
>> that may(!) be original in its "radicality" and might(!!) lead me to some
>> fundamental new insights and/or even physics in the years to come.
>> 
>> Of course, none of that is certain at all, and on average changes are
>> quite slim, but in my feeling/experience as a physicist it felt to me
>> by far compelling enough to share and thus "stake the claim".
> 
> Here are a couple of things I wrote in my blogs that may or may not
> have a bearing on the subject:
> 
> Consciousness of absurdity and the absurdity of consciousness:
> <https://ondermynende.wordpress.com/2007/03/14/consciousness-of-absurdity-and-the-absurdity-of-consciousness/>
> 
> The minds of robots and the mystery of consciousness
> <https://khanya.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/the-minds-of-robots-and-the-mystery-of-consciousness/>

Thanks a lot for the links, especially the first one...

But let me first quote the core paragraph from my original post:

: The idea is to consider the basic workings of life, namely creating more
: order (reducing entropy locally) while exporting disorder into an open
: environment, as also to be identical to the emergence of an "awareness",
: a degree of "consciousness". The key word is *identical* above, not just
: somehow similar or related, akin maybe to how Feynman interpreted the
: action in something Dirac wrote (maybe in his book on QM?).

I am not able to answer the most fundamental questions with that idea,
nor would I presumably be able to do so if I could grow the idea into
not-yet-falsified science in the years to come, but it would still be,
and in my view likely already is something very interesting and that
might answer quite a few questions. Identifying "life" with a level of
"awareness" and both with a "metabolism" that locally reduces entropy
is something specific enough to make it eventually not just a matter
of perspective or opinion.

Will it explain life, noses, "green", not really I guess, even though
it might emotionally become more obvious, thinking and living (cogito
ergo sum) would automatically, naturally be one and the same. And, I
guess everybody who can read this has an awareness of thinking.

Self-reference is, I guess something that definitely limits any kind
of science with the usual logic at least, "this sentencen has five
words" and "this sentence does not have five words" are both true,
and at the same time are logically exclusive, exactly due to self-
reference. A theory of everything would never include an observer,
in terms of the four elements, it would be just air, but not be what
one senses (earth) or feels (water) or sees (fire), and so on...

I like Alfred Jarry a lot, precursor quite arguably to Dada and also
surrealism, and in also of absurd theater, even though there was, for
example, also something quite absurd already in Shakespeare's
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" with the play within the play where one
of the handymen is playing moonshine...

In his pataphysics* Jarry also postulates to make unique events part
of it, which I like, referencing Aristotle who postulated the opposite,
which is, of course, often very much part of science, of things that
are reproducible...
("Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien", in English
purposely "mistranslated" as "Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll,
Pataphysician" ("correct" would have been "Pataphysicist"))

Anyways, there are also some details coming from the idea, namely
what about sleeping and dreaming? Assuming one would also be alive
then, which already makes quite a few assumption, maybe one would
maybe have a different awareness then, separate from when awake?
And maybe partially shared when remembering a dream?

Also, is thinking a continuum or discrete steps, like the ancient Greeks
viewed the psyche as a buttefly, sitting on flowers and then, quite hard
to predict when, flying on to the next, similar also to Odysseus in the
Odyssey going from island to island? Maybe related to measurement in QM,
and both to "thermodynamics", to the probably not yet understood process
of life which includes local reduction of entropy?

I hope I could at least convey part of why this seems so special to me...

https://www.exactphilosophy.net/

Alain Stalder
1 February 2026