The Mind of God: Rarer Than a Hapax Logomenon

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/19

According to some semi-reputable sources listed here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards nominations, winning one and an Emmy nomination, and was named 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory. He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches sent a cease-and-desist letter. (The commercial dramatized the results of a taste test in which Domino’s sandwiches were preferred over Subway’s sandwiches 2 to 1, but Subway and its lawyers claimed the taste test methodology was biased and flawed.) He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area by Westwood Magazine. Rosner spent some of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris profiled Rosner in the interview series First Person. He came in second (lost) on Jeopardy! and sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person?. (He was drunk.) He has spent 40+ years working on a semi-time-invariant version of Big Bang Theory. Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and two dogs. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions or just give him shit on Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn. He has a crappy little show on PodTV.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The mind of God, informational cosmology, and what if the universe is processing information, but it’s not actually creating anything associated with a mind? It’s not really consciousness-associated, it’s just information processing on a large scale, like information shuttling without any explicit purpose.

Rick Rosner: I doubt that’s the case, though it’s possible. Information is only information within a context. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was an early attempt at trying to figure out how the collapse of the quantum wave function happened, which is how quantum events happened. Bohr, the Copenhagen guy, suggested that maybe events needed to happen in a universe observed by conscious beings for quantum events to occur, for quantum probabilities to collapse into actual events.

I don’t buy that, and I don’t think modern people buy that. I think the universe observes itself, and it’s not that quantum probabilities collapse into quantum events. It’s that you have a bunch of possible moments in possible universes. Each moment has events that have occurred, and the universe is a history of quantum events. Every event is a quantum event in that the universe runs on quantum mechanics.

In every possible moment, there are open quantum events, that is, probabilities, and there are events that have already happened. And in subsequent moments, some open events, some probabilities, have been replaced with events that have happened. You can look at that in terms of the universe defining itself. You could make an argument that nobody is observing, it’s just these moments in the set of all possible moments that appear to string together. Any time you have a self-consistent, self-contained information processing system of sufficient size, it’s likely that it’s conscious. Consciousness is the experience of actuality via massive input and analysis.

We feel that reality is real because we get massive input of information from what we think is reality. And we do a ton of analysis on that information, on that input, to make it make sense. Last night, I said I’d come up with a list of multimodal subroutines that help us understand the world. Last night I said perspective, color. I said I’d work on coming up with more, and then I didn’t, but proprioception is the feeling of where you are and where your limbs are in space. If you’re not getting sensory feedback from your limbs by moving them or by them rubbing up against surfaces, you can lose track of where your limbs are. That’s another system that helps us understand the world.

You can say your sexuality, where we’re kind of slaves to our libido because of our history as creatures that evolved over a billion generations to reproduce sexually. We’re always checking out the world and our imaginations and memories for sexual opportunities and content. The ability to read symbols, numbers, letters, emojis, the ability to use words in general. All this helps us understand and interpret, helps us model and understand the world. We get enough sensory input that we have a pretty good idea of the relevant aspects of our environment, within reason, like being able to detect if we’re next to something highly dangerous. That would be helpful. We don’t have that, but it’s not something that comes up very often. We didn’t evolve that ability. The abilities to perceive the environment that we do have do a pretty good job of protecting us, modeling the environment enough so that we don’t make fatal errors.

All the input and all the analysis means that the world and us in the world feel real. There’s room for discussions about the word “feel” and about what “real” means. In a sloppy sense, that’s what consciousness is. I can’t believe that in most universes the size of ours, that that amount of information processing doesn’t go along with an understanding of the thing that’s doing the information processing, that it’s processing something actual. Now the universe could be processing something entirely fabricated and imaginary, but the universe could understand that it’s fabricated and imaginary. That doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t feel real and actual to it. The experience of consciousness in something that big and that self-consistent. The feeling of consciousness is separate from the utility of consciousness. Those are two different things. They’re related. I don’t know that feeling the actuality of the world via being conscious of it is as important as the efficiency of information processing in consciousness, that consciousness functions to position you in the world.

Like brain science. This is a very fashionable attitude within brain science right now, that your brain exists to position you for every next moment, to put you in the best position to understand what’s going to happen and how to deal with it. Things that you can deal with without them being important or novel enough to impinge on your consciousness, a lot of those things don’t impinge. My standard example is walking, where you could walk down the street or between rooms without focusing on walking. It’s largely not impinging on consciousness until some aspect of your surroundings makes you focus on walking, like a smooth surface becomes stairs or becomes broken sidewalk. When things demand your attention, they enter the conscious arena. We’ve talked about this over and over again. By pushing things into the conscious arena, it gives you the biggest opportunity to come up with angles on what you’re experiencing and come up with the best way to address those things. I don’t know how much more we have to discuss about this.

Jacobsen: What in the structure of a large, real universe necessarily makes it structurally equivalent enough to the human brain to be conscious? There’s the shuttle of information, there’s the structure. I fail to see the leap from not simply the magnitude, but from the analogy of a similar shuttling of information for information processing and the way that you can build up a mind within the universe to the universe having types of operations like that, meaning a consciousness. It seems to me more like a showing of the notion.

Rosner: The entire history of the universe is matter clumping up and releasing energy gained via the clumping. That is, it’s all gravitational energy. When matter comes together, potential energy becomes kinetic energy, which heats up atoms, electrons are knocked to higher energy states and eventually fall back down to lower energy states, releasing photons. If there’s enough pressure, gravitational pressure, plus heat, you get fusion, which releases even more energy. Photons in stars eventually make their way to the surface of the stars, where once they’re emitted, it’s like a trillion to one that they’re absorbed locally. Some huge percentage, 99.999 whatever percent of photons are emitted from the surface of a star. Aren’t captured by local obstacles like planets for the most part. Maybe not a trillion to one, but like a billion to one. It’s likely those photons just keep going to the edge of the universe. Those photons not being intercepted are tacitly registered by the universe as events that happened in the history of the universe. The universe is arranged as if all these events happened. In the universe, I understand, and in a universe that’s not collapsing, that energy eventually, as the photon traverses the universe, that energy is absorbed by the gravitational curvature of the entire universe. This means that that information has been incorporated into the overall structure of the universe. That super high level of organization that the universe has a record of, 10 to the hundredth events that have happened. There are probably, that’s just some small fraction of all the events that have happened, because a ton of events happen inside of stars that leave no particle record, because photons are exchanged across some tiny distance and obliterated.

Where there’s no permanent record of events going on, events happen in stars, but the chaos within a star means those events have no permanent record. All these events happen, 10 to the 150th events in the history of our universe. 10 to the hundredth of those events leave a record that the universe tacitly understands the entire universe is okay with, that is, without contradiction. Anytime you’ve got a system that’s that big, without contradiction, with such a long history. I can’t imagine that that doesn’t rise to the level of the amount of information, self-consistent information, you need for the universe to be functioning as a conscious thing, also with the efficiency of consciousness that allows for everything under consideration to be thrown into a moment-by-moment hopper to dig up the most relevant memories and ideas, I don’t see how that can’t not happen. Am I saying that right? I don’t see how the universe can avoid being conscious.

Jacobsen: I don’t want to get too hard into an argument from personal incredulity. Here’s another argument, which is, hold on, I want to respond to that one first. You have a super efficient system. If you have a super-efficient system processing information, and the human brain is energy-wise very efficient compared to a supercomputer of similar power, at the same time, you can Google online for something called a list of cognitive biases. There’s a long, long list of ways in which the brain fails. The obvious ones are visual illusions or inability to process certain things or gaps in understanding, and all sorts of things. The failures are indicative.

Rosner: When you have a visual illusion when you see somebody lurking momentarily in a doorway, that’s your brain making a best guess based on the information it has. Your brain has decided to have a hair trigger for people lurking in doorways. Sometimes, based on the limited information it has, it’s going to flash a person, make you think momentarily that there’s a person lurking in the doorway, because it’s better to have a lot of false doorway alarms than for somebody to be lurking in the doorway and you miss it. A lot of brain failures are best guesses.

Jacobsen: What about false memories? Rich false memories. Whole events can be fabricated from whole cloth by a skilled person. A lot of these aren’t necessarily functional anyway in terms of a best guess, they’re just failures of mind, even though they might be efficient.

Rosner: Okay, false memories. Your mind has a set of values based on experience that says that trusted people should be trusted, that your brain sets levels of trust and has, based on your history with people you have come to trust, found that it’s productive not to be skeptical of everything they say to you. Maybe this is a system that generally works. It’s a best practice for your brain. And then somebody becomes a trusted person, it’s like you could argue that that’s why we are fairly defenseless against psychopaths because we don’t generally encounter hardcore sociopaths. We’re used to functioning on trust in everyday experiences. And then when somebody comes along who’s learned how to exploit trust, we’re not ready for that because our values have been set on trust, because it’s been rewarding for us over most of our lives. Somebody who’s had the experience of having a sociopathic parent or a sociopathic boyfriend or girlfriend early on will likely be less trusting based on that trust being betrayed. You can imagine value systems being set up in your brain based on your history that mean that you want to trust. People you’ve come to trust, which when they tell you you were molested or some other thing like that, you want to trust them and you conflate and fabricate. I can see that happening.

Jacobsen: More subtle, it can be things like instead of remembering wearing a green shirt one day, it’s a red shirt, a mild false memory. A rich false memory can be an entirely fabricated event that didn’t even happen. Like some politician thinking they got off on a helicopter in some war zone to do an interview or do some diplomatic mission.

Rosner: When you look at the ingredients of memories, they’re usually tied to things, and they go in different associative hoppers, depending on how you are recalling them. Was it Hillary who said she was on a helicopter in a war zone? She’s probably been on a helicopter dozens of times, and she probably took fire or was told that they were taking evasive maneuvers, two, three, four times. Then she put things in the wrong hopper and didn’t press herself. At the time, maybe she didn’t realize that every single thing she said would be picked apart by people hoping they could catch her in an error that they could say was an intentional lie. She says, “Yeah, I was… so she missed… she pulled some stuff up.” She said, “Yeah, I was in a…” and she kind of vaguely remembered it and assigned Bosnia to it. Maybe if somebody had said, “Wait… Are you sure that if you say that, people who aren’t your friend are going to dissect that?” She could have sat back and said, “I know I was warned that we were under fire when I was on a helicopter somewhere. Now that I think about it more, am I sure it was Bosnia at that particular time?” She was just kind of casually recalling something. And messed up some of the details. Was she fabricating a memory? No, she was sloppily remembering something.

Jacobsen: It sounds like it was entirely incorrect in that particular case, but the larger point is that can happen. I can totally agree with the idea of there being an optimization there, but that optimization comes with a huge range of bugs, not features, and those bugs are more traditionally in cognitive science called cognitive biases. It is a massive list. This is significant, not small.

Rosner: When you talk about cognitive bias, I like to go to sex because sex is not our friend. It works for the propagation of the species, but not for individual welfare necessarily. Sex can skew our perceptions and judgments and actions because it’s following an optimization but not necessarily according with everything following the same agenda. Since we’re evolved creatures with limited resources, including computational mental resources, we’re going to make mistakes. What is the overall argument you’re trying to make about how the universe can’t be conscious because we make mistakes in our thinking?

Jacobsen: The failures due to the trend towards optimization and the information processing. The organization there shows up, but then you go to the larger scale structure of looking at efficiencies in the information processing of the universe. Those efficiencies… There’s, as you said at the outset, the open possibility that there could be optimization of information processing by the universe, but not necessarily having a mind. But you can’t necessarily think of any other way it could be, you could have a situation…

Rosner: Maybe there are other ways for existence to be other than the kind of consciousness we know. It seems reasonable to me that consciousness is highly efficient, though not infallible, and it’s likely, and consciousness isn’t magic. It’s simple. We have an idea of what consciousness is, and it’s based on our own experience, and it’s also based on increasing amounts of experience looking at computational systems with which earlier people didn’t have. We have a ton of computational information processing systems of increasing scale and sophistication. We have a pretty good, intuitive… well, I don’t know how… it’s pretty good. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than previous generations, and we can see that consciousness is a moment-to-moment clearinghouse for the things that demand your attention, and this is likely useful to us in surviving.

Or A, because we can see it in our moment-to-moment experience, and B, because it’s expensive and it probably wouldn’t evolve over and over again in different organisms if it didn’t provide some huge survival advantage. That says that consciousness is basic, that it’s a feeling you get from having that clearinghouse built from all this information, all this input plus analysis, and that the universe is likely to be functioning the same way, input plus analysis. Analysis is nothing more than more input than just where the input comes from results in your own brain. It seems likely to me that consciousness is unavoidable unless you somehow design a system that doesn’t have it, that once you have a big enough system, it’s going to be a natural consequence of analytic efficiency. The same way eyes have evolved in creatures over and over again, I guess that consciousness arises over and over again in big information processing systems that have the flexibility to do it.

Jacobsen: Let’s say you have a supercomputer, five years from now, incredibly powerful. It’s built so that it can shuttle information around based on software for processing some aspect of a city. It’s not built to be conscious, but it’s extremely efficient and optimized for what it does.

Rosner: It depends on what it’s doing.

Jacobsen: Right. And the computational power vastly exceeds any single mind. So say in a thought experiment, you can get to a more powerful, highly efficient system without any consciousness. What if the universe is like that relative to the human mind?

Rosner: It would have the structure. Because if you take a powerful computer, that is a computer that can do a quadrillion flops, flipping one to zero a second, or a quadrillion computations a second, adding two one-digit numbers. That’s all you’re doing in the computer, adding numbers. You’ve got a bunch of numbers, they all need to be added together or multiplied together, and they’re flowing into the computer at some huge rate, and then they’re flowing out of the computer, added together. It’s just some huge… not a printout, but an electronic display or some electronic record. That system doesn’t have to be conscious. It’s doing a simple operation super fast. And you could do it, it could be doing these operations in parallel. It could have a bunch of cores, it could have a billion little adding machines all doing the simple operation. None of these adding machines are linked. There’s no quantum entanglement. It’s straight up adding at a super fast rate. That system is not conscious.

But that system, if you looked at, if you made a map of the information in that system, it wouldn’t look like the universe. It would be a teeny little universe, too small to be conscious, with just interactions happening at some fantastic rate, but with no memory of those actions, because the computation part of the universe, it’s not really changing. It’s doing the computation, spitting it out. It’s not adding the result of those computations to some kind of database so that the next time it sees 23 and 72, it doesn’t have to actually do the addition. It can remember, “Oh, I did this before.” It doesn’t have that memory. It’s just every time it sees a pair of numbers, it adds them together based on its algorithm for adding. That system is a teeny little universe that doesn’t have the capacity to be conscious. It’s nothing. And that system, if it’s a billion adding machines not linked to each other, it’s a billion little rudimentary universes that have no memory, that just run this simple algorithm over and over again a quadrillion times a second.

Jacobsen: It would have a simple geometry and you could just look at it and see that there’s no way it’s conscious. The thought experiment does have some merit. It’s a means to easily grasp the idea that you can have a larger complex system optimized to some function that doesn’t necessarily have to be conscious. Your larger argument is that the universe isn’t that simple system. The simplicity of what’s being done in your system will be reflected in the simplicity of the information map of that system. In some ways, the information map of that supercomputer would be richer than a human’s in certain areas. Where the information map of the computer is hyper-specialized some particular function, but having more complicated…

Rosner: A rock is an information map where you’ve got a bunch of atoms, molecules arranged in some kind of regular structure held together and held apart by the van der Waals forces, by the atomic forces between each molecule. You send a shock through the rock, you hit the rock with a hammer, you don’t break it, but the wave of compression goes through the rock. Maybe it makes a clacking noise, or if you hit a piece of metal, same thing, it makes a tinging noise and it vibrates for a while. But the computation going on there is simple and local. You push against one atom, it pushes against its adjacent atoms, and that goes out in a pressure wave and then bounces back and the thing vibrates for a while. There’s no complicated analytics going on. So the information map of the information being transmitted through that rock or that piece of metal is super simple. You could build an information map of how each molecule reacts. They all react the same way because they’re in this lattice, and the model of that would be a couple of particles large. It’d be like a universe with two, three, four particles in it. That would be sufficient to model the experience of every atom in that rock. By looking at the model, a universe that contains four particles can’t be conscious.

Jacobsen: What are we trying to make a point here now? What’s the angle of attack?

Rosner: That a universe that’s been built to a specialized function, which is, when you say specialized in the way we’ve been talking about, it’s a linear function. The input goes in, comes out, having gone through not much manipulation. Turing proved that a Turing machine, which is just a machine that reads tape and changes the state of some of the symbols on the tape based on its rules of operation, can model any computational system. The more complicated the computational rules, the more steps it takes to run the tape through, and the tape can run back and forth. It doesn’t just run straight through, unless it’s a very simple operation. It’s nice to know that a Turing machine can model any computational system, but for complex… You don’t want to use a Turing machine as your model. It’s wildly inefficient. You want some kind of information map. And that information map, the complexity and size of it, is proportional to the amount of recursion, of self-referentiality, of processing, working around via various feedback systems so that the entire conscious arena is more or less aware of everything happening in that arena. That takes a huge amount of self-referentiality that is best expressed in an information map that is three spatial and one temporal dimension large.

And when you have a specialized system, as we’ve been talking about, the model of that is fairly small. Even if the computational power is great… It doesn’t matter. Because computational power, the way you’re defining it, is how many operations can you do a second? Once you have recursion and the outcome of one computation affecting the outcome of another computation, and all that, every computation affects every other computation, then that’s a more intricate spatial structure for its information map.

Jacobsen: But even if you had all those recursions oriented back onto, say, just a simulation of a rock, is that a mind? It’s even more complicated.

Rosner: The rock is simple. If you’re modeling a rock, an informational model of a rock, you can do it with four particles in some kind of arbitrary information space.

Jacobsen: What about just the spatial and movement map of cars in the streets of New York City? It’s not a conscious system. It’s a vast computation. So there’s a lot of information. A lot of recursion.

Rosner: Not really, because every car is an independent operator, except for the rules of traffic lights and everything. But there is no overall system that is turning the movements of those cars into information. Maybe there is a system that looks at the movements of cars within Manhattan at some city office. There’s something that notes the movements of cars, maybe not every single car, but traffic patterns. Again, that model is not complicated enough to be conscious. That model exists to regulate traffic lights, to send public services to, like ambulances and fire trucks can flip red lights to green if they need to get someplace in a hurry. There’s no sophisticated analysis that’s sophisticated enough to be conscious. For information to be information, it needs to be in some kind of structure where what’s happening is relevant, and any structure that we know of for New York traffic is too simple to be conscious by far.

Jacobsen: First, three things that are very important here that actually make a lot of sense. I hope I’m speaking loud enough for audio to pick this up. It doesn’t matter how precise, even if you had a simulated universe that could scale things twice as small as the one we know with the Planck scale. It was precise in that simulation of something like a rock. That is one way that is an input-output machine, not complicated enough, no matter the computational power in that traditional sense.

Rosner: To get to what you’re talking about is the universe that maybe has twice the amount of matter that our universe does. Maybe that’s sufficient to make the Planck constant in that universe half of what it is in ours. It’s that kind of thing.

Jacobsen: The second thing is even if you were to add recursion into the system. So in the New York traffic example, building on the rock example, you had no analytic system in terms of giving relevancy to anything in that system. You’re still not constructing the mind. But you’re getting to a closer approximation of it. Those are two very important levels of distinguishing what you’re getting at. It may seem like something little, but it’s quite big. But then in terms of analytics to make things relevant, what is the sort of geometric informational relay that we’re talking about in the universe that is distinguishing between the rock example and the New York City traffic example to the analytic system of going from recursion and processing to analytics, where in the universe is analytics happening?

Rosner: Like you’re saying, it’s the end of the series. When I think about that stuff, I end up confusing myself. I would think that the analytics is happening in terms of relevance for the information processor, where the information map is what we consider the space and matter that we’re made out of. The analytics, the thought that is happening, is the large-scale dynamics of the universe, the lighting up of galaxies and the pattern that the galaxies are distributed in space, linked by proximity and by filaments. The energy emitted by lit-up galaxies helps, over time, determine the structure of space and the distribution of matter within space. The analytics are the lighting up of galaxies, the collapse of galaxies, the lighting up of galaxies lighting up other galaxies, galaxies running out of energy and falling into darkness. Are there galaxies that manage to stay lit indefinitely?  No, I think that the universe is… I think there’s combinatorial coding in our brains and in the universe. The units of thought are likely different. A neuron in the brain is not the same thing as a galaxy in the universe. Neurons have a much more limited repertoire of what they can do with information than galaxies can, but in both structures, there’s probably combinatorial coding. The combinations of things convey information. Things lighting up at the same time. That’s the most efficient way to transmit and encode information. Things being lit up together, the combination conveys information, rather than each neuron signifying like there’s no one neuron or one set of three neurons close together that if they light up that equals orange, but rather orange is a whole bunch signifying orange in the context of other neurons that are lit up. There’s some flexibility in orange being lit up in reference to a traffic cone might be different from orange being lit up in reference to it being a symbol of the Netherlands or the fruit that’s an orange. But it’s big combinations. Our brain has 10 to the 10th neurons. It might be a few thousand neurons lit up at a time that are in the orange space, and the galaxy… The universe, it’s a ton of galaxies lighting up together that signify, well, not just one thing, not just necessarily orange, but orange in the context of every other thing that’s going on in the universe. It’s all super recursive, all super efficient in terms of conveying and encoding information.

Jacobsen: There’s two things going on there for me. As a preface, one, you’re a super smart person, so it’s more likely that there’s something I’m not seeing to make that final click. Two, I have a history of writing and thinking along the lines of non-theism. So there’s a bias there in my path of thought.

Rosner: What’s your bias toward, theism or non-theism? When we talk about the mind of the universe, we’re not talking about God. We’re not talking about the mind of God. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that there’s no magic being. Consciousness is a simple thing and will arise in the interest of efficiency in sufficiently complex systems. Anyway, go ahead.

Jacobsen: I’m going to think about this more on that third step because what I’m gathering is a distributivity, a distributed form of processing based in combinatorics with an analogy with how the brain is structured, how the universe operates, where there’s no magic, which I could wholeheartedly agree with.

Rosner: So, combinatorics seems like the most efficient way to encode information. Maybe I haven’t thought about it enough and there’s some other…

Jacobsen: What? That was the third thing. I’m going to catch up there. That was the third thing. Where you’re saying you often get to this point and you confuse yourself, but that’s the third factor where you haven’t thought through this enough, so that it’s clear enough for you. Then when you talk about it, it’s clear enough for other people.

Rosner: Combinatorial coding is the most efficient thing I can think of for systems like your brain and maybe even a universe where galaxies light up.

Jacobsen: We will continue this as sort of a round three tomorrow on that one.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.