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The basic question that guides my thinking and motivates the details of my life and work is something like, "How do our individual thoughts, feelings, and actions fit within and contribute to the overall context of the universe?" I'm interested in developing realistic ways of seeing ourselves as part of the big scheme of things, so that each detail of our lives has meaning in terms of the image we hold of ourselves. Most of the more detailed questions I spend my time thinking about are pieces of the effort to investigate this general question.
Here are some of these questions, in no particular order and updated as I think of them:
- How does the feeling we experience as the capacity to make a choice or a decision fit into a reasonable model of the physical universe? Our scientific maps tend to leave out this core element of our experience, and I'm interested in developing ways to better blend these descriptions of reality.
- A related question: How does consciousness fit within our model of the universe? Clearly consciousness emerges naturally from simpler processes in nature. But this is not the same thing as saying that consciousness would emerge in a world described perfectly by the models we use to approximate the simpler processes in nature. For example, to say that consciousness emerges as a pattern of the interactions of electrons and protons may very well be correct. But if while saying that, you have a picture of little hard sphere particles in your mind, then you are giving a very wrong impression about the real situation. Consciousness emerges from the interaction of the real “particles” whose nature and subtleties we are just beginning to understand -- not from the very oversimplified model of the particles we hold in mind. This mistake seems to me to be at the heart of many problems associated with reductionism.
- What is information? With the development of computers and the related physics, it is becoming more apparent that there is a fundamental connection between information and its physical representation (Landauer, etc.). Better understanding this link is important for relating our mental world to the physical world, etc.
- How is it possible for us to formulate models of how things are, that do not match with reality? What's this all about, the sort of division we can make between reality and our wishes or imagination or mental models of the world?
- Why do we experience a direction or arrow to the passage of time? And for that matter, what is time? What drives the processes that we use as measures of the passage of time, and how do they know to move at the same rate even in very different locations in space?
- Is there any way to really understand the notion of the beginning/ending of the universe? Maybe requires thinking outside of time in some way, but I'm not sure even how to make progress in understanding this.
- What makes experiences or accomplishments significant? What "counts" to the universe? Do things have to be permanent in order to really matter, or is there something significant in their transience? I guess to really answer this question requires a better understanding of the nature of time than I have now! :)
- Why does nature differentiate itself into unique individuals who form a sense of themselves as seperate from other things? Why not just have a single consciousness for the whole universe? This fact is part of why I see the universe as experimenting or exploring.
