Consciousness, Physics, and the Future of Intelligence

[Victor Vahidi Motti]

The Ouroboros Challenge: Consciousness, Physics, and the Future of Intelligence

By Paul Werbos 

Weblink: https://altplanetaryfuturesinst.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-ouroboros-challenge-consciousness.html

Best Regards,

Victor

[David Bray, PhD]

As fate would have it, on a different listserv Paul and several folks (including myself) have been discussing this. 

Here's a just-published piece that tackles some of the immediate here-and-now challenges focusing companies, communities, and countries on AI: https://apolitical.co/en/articles/rethinking-ai-success-from-imitating-us-to-helping-us-improve-195

Rethinking AI Success: From Imitating Us to Helping Us Improve

Leaders must focus on whether AI amplifies human skills and decisions, not whether it imitates us.

[snippet below]

Yet what if a computer “fooling us” that it was similar to a human, was in fact the wrong test entirely?

Instead of asking whether Computer A can convince Human C that it is human, we should be asking: How well was individual Human B, or a group of humans, doing at a particular activity before Computer A arrived?

This includes making better decisions. Or, perhaps more realistically in complex environments, making less bad decisions less often.

This reframing changes everything about how we evaluate, deploy, and govern AI systems. A customer service chatbot that perfectly mimics human conversation but frustrates customers and fails to resolve issues is a failure, regardless of how “human” it sounds.

My friend and colleague Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's co-originators, proposed an inversion of the Turing Test in 2018. In what he called “Turing Test 2,” a computer program interacts with both a human and another computer, attempting to distinguish between them.

Cerf's inversion addresses a real security challenge: malicious bots emulating humans to spread inauthentic information, launch phishing attacks, create millions of fake social media accounts, and pollute crowdsourcing systems. In 2017 I witnessed an early precursor of what, now in the 2020s, has become commonplace with bots generating inauthentic human-like behaviors. Yet even this formulation still centers on distinguishing human from machine.

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[Victor Vahidi Motti]

Thank you David for sharing this! Much appreciated.

1. Yes, I greatly enjoyed Paul's thinking and happily amplified and streamlined it. 

I agree that something is missing from the Generating Functional like this

One might question not only the fields being integrated over, but the measure itself, where μ encodes deeper organizational structure beyond the naive product measure. That becomes philosophically very close to his ideas where consciousness, observation, or relational structure are built into the foundations of reality.

2. Related to the above and a possible scalar fifth-force, here is a short simple calculation I just did using OpenAI:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a05c833-7598-83ea-8e53-ffddd4373ba5

3. On a more practical note in the Space Age and Planetary Science Era, this little AGI vision building exercise based on Paul's HST idea might be useful:

https://altplanetaryfuturesinst.blogspot.com/2026/05/a-planetary-agi-linked-to-satellite.html

Best Regards,

Victor

[Linas Vepstas]

Hi Victor, David,

Yes, as a society, using LLMs to make us better is absolutely the right approach for more or less everyone.  There are a lot of people out there who hate LLM's. I remind them -- hey guys, that's like saying "I hate jackhammers" -- it's a tool, it's very good at what it does, learn how to use it.

But for the remaining 0.01% of us, predisposed to asking philosophical questions, the pursuit of "physics and consciousness" is a valid intellectual pursuit.

The problem is that this is a stunningly difficult topic. The problem is this: the ones who want to talk about this are stunningly atrocious in their grasp of physics. And the ones who understand physics are utterly disinterested in talking about consciousness. The gap appears to be unbridgeable.  I've only seen one person cross it: Roger Penrose. That's it. 

Is there any forum in which to even talk about this topic? I splatter emails and social media posts where-ever I go.  I find myself in a hermetically sealed chamber of silence.

I'm not sure what I'm  even complaining about. It's late, the email caught my attention. What can I say? Asking chatgpt about a "fifth force" exposes a barrage of meaningless word salad. This is not the right way to use LLM's to do physics. Writing down the canonical expression for Z, the generating functional, is an entirely reasonable thing to do, but it seems to be missing the point: this functional is a tool that can be used to generate a rich variety of (usually perturbative) expressions. But it's a tool, not a theory. It doesn't "explain" consciousness. And you can't just stick some "new field called Qi" into it and get consciousness, than you could weld a ball-peen hammer to a crescent wrench and call the result a scuba-diving apparatus. 

The standard process of understanding usually proceeds by (1) getting an insight (2) trying to express the insight with words and/or diagrams, (3) finding and equation or two that capture the essence of the insight (4) "articulating" that equation, like an articulated skeleton: explaining "see you can move this and get that, or you can turn that and get this".

If consciousness is like scuba-diving, then what are we breathing, where does it come from and go to, and how do we get more? Understand that, then we can start imagining what kind of apparatus might be needed for scuba-diving.

I was slumming on quora.com -- slumming, because its a social media site where stupid people ask stupid questions which get nice answers from somewhat smarter people.  

I tried my hand at it, and wrote this:

https://www.quora.com/If-the-Universe-experiences-itself-through-consciousness-are-all-beings-fragments-of-one-observer/answer/Linas-Vepstas

For your entertainment, I cut-n-paste in full.

If the Universe experiences itself through consciousness, are all beings fragments of one observer?

Linas Vepstas

PhD in Mathematics and Physics & Computer Science, University of Chicago

Well, that’s the grand mystery of the modern era, isn’t it? There are hot debates as to whether LLM’s are “conscious”, or whether they are “merely” hyper-realistic “photographs” of language, whose verbal responses aka “thought streams” are paths through an ultra-high dimensional weight matrix. We don’t really know what consciousness is.

On the physics side, we have QM - quantum mechanics - where a “wave function” isn’t anywhere — its “everywhere”, as a “probability amplitude”. It can be thought of as a point in a very high dimensional (well, infinite-dimensional in conventional textbooks; aka “Hilbert space”) complex-valued, uhh .. weight-space (aka CP(n) complex projective space) Does that mean it’s “conscious”? Does it matter that LLM’s use real numbers but QM uses complex numbers? Most sober professionals would say “that doesn’t even make sense”. And they’re sort-of right.

So what do we know? Well, we are literally in the universe, a part of the universe, and, in that sense, we “are” the universe that is aware of itself. The self-aware universe is us. Duh. But I cannot read your mind and you cannot read mine, so on planet Earth, we have six or seven billion fragments of the universe that are self-aware. Much more if you start counting animals: Youtube videos make clear that mammals are conscious, and then there’s that Netflix doc “My Octopus Teacher”. OMG. Watch it.

So, somehow, we have all these pieces-parts of the universe that are conscious, and yet deeply separated (“ultrametric” is the technical term) from one another, connected only by language. We are not “all one”. We really seem distinct. Now, some people, the dualists, think that we, the physical us, are like radio receivers from some spiritual, ethereal world. Maybe we are: nothing in science (physics) can prove this wrong.

But dualism is deeply unpopular among most scientists. They prefer to hand-wave about non-equilibrium thermodynamic flows driving ever more complexity — fractal patterns — and (“magic happens here”) above a certain minimal level of complexity, (aka a “second-order phase transition”) consciousness arises. Except no one knows what consciousness “really is”. I mean, I certainly feel conscious, and I have come to suspect most-all living things are, in their way. But what is “it”? Why would I have it, and why might I believe that LLM’s don’t? (Is it as simple/stupid as real vs complex numbers, or is it something else entirely?)

The other problem is time. We live in the “here and now”. The past is frozen, unalterable. Its not even viewable: there is no physical device, no arrangement of atoms that can “look at the past”. We can remember the past. Like police detectives and historians, we can reconstruct facts about it. But that’s all. The past seems to be untouchable, the way mathematics is: its “platonic reality”. Both math and the past seem “to exist”, but just not as a part of “here and now”.

What about the future? Now, the future seems to literally not exist, at all. We get to write it. We seem to have free will. Complex dynamical systems have vast numbers of bifurcation points (aka “high-dimensional chaos”) Are these branch points, is this where free-will happens? But chaotic differential equations are so … classical-mechanical, and we know for sure we are quantum. Sooo …..

So, we seem to be trapped in the “here-and-now”, which is hurtling into the future at the speed of light. The present is freezing into the past like ice-9. This here-and-now has a thickness: its a few femtoseconds thick in chemistry, some seconds or minutes thick in quantum-mechanical vacuum chambers, and billions of light-years thick when observing distant galaxies (those photons arrive “right now”, which our eyes can see. They arrive in “no time at all”: the “null light cone”) (BTW, note that QM only “exists” in the here-and-now; it does not “exist” in the past nor the future. I hear cries of anguish from the audience, but this is effectively what the “transactional interpretation of QM” is saying, and what the “two state-vector formalism” is saying, and what Aharonv and people like that are saying.)

So this is what the universe seems to be: the prison of my consciousness, trapped in my skull, trapped in “right now”, hurtling along into the future. I’m aware of the universe, because I’m into astronomy; I’m aware of you and your consciousness, because, duh, and you are now aware of me because conscious, self-aware-I moved my fingers across the keyboard. So, yes, we seem to be both part of the same self-conscious universe.

Is it a category error to talk about consciousness and QM at the same time? It’s true that cranks do this all the time, but luminaries like Roger Penrose have made compelling arguments linking the two. I’m just trying to recap everything we know about the universe, in the broadest and must reductionist way possible: everything we know is what science knows, plus also we know personally and deeply that we are alive and exist, and that we (our consciousness) is necessarily “in the moment” and that “the moment” is where “physics” happens.

Does this imply that there is some dis-embodied observer looking down at us? Nothing I’ve written seems to suggest that there’s some disinterested, disengaged observer who only looks.. But are we shards of playful souls? Of course we are. We’re mammals, and we love and play, and the point is that we *feel* love and mother’s warmth. This is a deep part of conscious self-existence. It is part of what it is like “to be”. (BTW, I’m an atheist, but I have Christian friend who explained to me that he knows God in the same way that he knows love: it’s just something “you know”. That its just a part of being-ness. God does not talk to me (Well, OK, once, but I was really stoned. And the message was totally stupid, about a certain rock band being “the greatest in the universe.” Uhh. I call b.s.))

Are we shards of God? Yes, I suppose so. (And I say this as an atheist. I mean, duh, yeah, of course we are shards of God. This is again just a part of the fabric of reality, just like consciousness and love.) Given my formal training, I like to think we are “large cardinal axioms” through which the universe is manifesting itself into being as an “outer model”. But why is “here-and-now” three-dimensional, and why does our consciousness hurtle from past into future at the speed of light? No clue.

Is anyone even working on answering these kinds of questions? Well, barely. Hardly. The NSF will never-ever give grant-money for working on this: its just too hard. Too far out there. Them there in the philosophy department, they could work on it, but I don’t think they have the technical chops. The Catholics, Protestants and Islam are just not interested. The Buddhists are, but very few of them are trained physicists/mathematicians. They seem much more interested in the spiritual play. (David Chapman over at Meaningness is fun…) The tidal wave of cranks, freshly armed with the latest LLMs are poised to flood the the airwaves with pseudo-scientific garbage.

But sure, I think it is true that we are all shards of divinity, and we, these shards of divinity, are made of universe-stuff. This we know for sure. Exactly how conscious-aware-we might be manifesting as large cardinal axioms embedded in a general-relativistic swampland, well, that’s a mystery no one knows how to address and seems far, far out of reach.

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[David Bray, PhD]

Given that we know our brains use only 15-20 watts of power - and that a child doesn't require 500,000+ runs before they identify the letter A - shouldn't we be looking for other methods? 

In my professional opinion, Karl Friston's work is the most compelling in this space at the moment. Here was a conversation linking his work (as a neuroscientist) to AI: https://deniseholt.us/verses-ai-research-reveals-real-world-use-cases-for-active-inference-ai/

[Victor Vahidi Motti]

Hi David,

After Linas's recommendation that we should read Roger Penrose I had this clarification from OpenAI on his idea about how human brains does the magic of consciousness:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a071d85-2570-83ea-abad-89c151ddcda9

Best Regards,

Victor

[David Bray, PhD]

I am familiar with Roger's work and was fortunate to have a chance to interact with him. As an evidence-based scientist, I think the empirical evidence that Karl Friston has shown about the human brain is more compelling. 

Caveat: I've had the opportunity to host 5 sit down dinners with Karl, so I'm biased, however I think if you look at Karl's ideas you'll see they may not only converge with some of what Roger proposes - they'll both bring actual *evidence* and further advance the thinking (pun not intended) here: 

https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The%20free-energy%20principle%20A%20unified%20brain%20theory.pdf

[Anton Kolonin @ Gmail]

> shouldn't we be looking for other methods? 

100%. My perspective on that from the yesterday talk (engineering perspective):

https://github.com/aigents/iai/blob/main/docs/2026/tensor_model_psyche_kolonin.pdf  

Full version pre-recorded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSuI2lFmxYo

That's quite in line what Karl Friston and Sergey Shumsky have presented on the same conference yesterday:

https://instigate.academy/db/get?id=9f3d91d8-8943-48bf-b440-cbb8effcd35c-9c473d8e-9011-4bfe-b761-729fd12f383c

(The Statistical Physics of Evolving Complexity International Conference May 12-15, 2026 Yerevan)  

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[Victor Vahidi Motti]

Hi Linas,

Today I saw this Italian book that you might find interesting and related to this topic, he claims that he is developing Nousym, a new theory of reality. Suggesting interconnectedness of minds or consciousness, a unified structure of consciousness.

I am interested in your critical review of his idea and speculative consciousness theory. He has also collaborated with Roger Penrose in this book https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-85480-5 with the strong metaphysical claim, the assumption that: (Conscious) Experience is described by an ontic quantum state, which is pure.

I liked the way the author is using mathematics to formulate an impossibility theorem, i.e. No-cloning theorem and Holevo’s theorem, to note that a classical machine could imitate consciousness behaviorally, but could never literally possess or reproduce my human subjective awareness.

Federico Faggin 

"After thirty-five years of studying consciousness, I am certain that a profound union exists between the world of science and that of spirituality—two worlds often considered incompatible with one another. I hope that this book will make my ideas clearer and more accessible, and that it will help readers better navigate the vast reality in which science and spirituality merge into a single discipline, revealing the richness, beauty, and meaning of the universe we can create together. We are light; we need only open our eyes." After contributing significantly to revolutionizing the physical world around us, Federico Faggin decided to look beyond matter—beyond the visible and the invisible—and to investigate the physics of the ineffable: "The advent of artificial intelligence, combined with materialist and reductionist principles that view human beings as classical machines, fosters a form of scientism that is leading human society down a dangerous path. If we view ourselves as machines, we will sooner or later be surpassed by the machines built by those who might seek to control us... For this reason, a new science that embraces spirituality—and a new spirituality that embraces science—is essential. I have named their union *Nousym*." *Oltre l'invisibile* is a groundbreaking, courageous, and profoundly deep—yet extraordinarily lucid—book that offers a new perspective on things, a fascinating new theory of reality: "We believe that reality is absurd; yet, it is we who are absurd when we attempt to force it into the mold of our preconceived notions. We must liberate ourselves from the flawed assumptions of materialist thought and proceed from alternative hypotheses—ones that align with the astonishing properties of quantum physics. What is needed, therefore, is a new science: one that, rather than ignoring whatever contradicts materialism or sidestepping the questions we have hitherto been unable to answer, instead takes precisely those elements as its starting point. For it is precisely by investigating the 'absurdity' of quantum entanglement, free will, and consciousness—phenomena that physics currently fails to explain—that the answer will ultimately be found."

Best Regards,

Victor 

Where to get a copy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX2WLDPQ

On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 1:14 AM Linas Vepstas <linasv...@gmail.com> wrote: