Consciousness: Preparation to Action

This is a continuation of the post Picasso and his Model: Feelings.

Henri Bergson summarises his view on consciousness exposed in Matter and Memory as follows : 

• The idea that we have disengaged from the facts and confirmed by reasoning is that our body is an instrument of action, and of action only. 
• In no degree, in no sense, under no aspect, does it serve to prepare, far less to explain, a representation. 
• Consider external perception: there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between the so-called perceptive faculties of the brain and the reflex functions of the spinal cord. 
• While the spinal cord trans­forms the excitations received into movements which are more or less necessarily executed, the brain puts them into relation with motor mechanisms which are more or less freely chosen; but that which the brain explains in our perception is action begun, pre­pared or suggested, it is not perception itself. 
• Consider memory. The body retains motor habits capable of acting the past over again; it can resume attitudes in which the past will insert itself; or, again, by the repetition of certain cerebral phenomena, which have pro­longed former perceptions, it can furnish to remembrance a point of attachment with the actual, a means of recovering its lost influ­ence upon present reality: but in no case can the brain store up recollections or images. 
• Thus, neither in perception, nor in memory, nor a fortiori in the higher attainments of mind, does the body contribute directly to representation. 
• By developing this hypoth­esis under its manifold aspects and thus pushing dualism to an extreme, we appeared to divide body and soul by an impassable abyss. In truth, we were indicating the only possible means of bringing them together.
• All the difficulties raised by this problem, either in ordinary dualism, or in materialism and idealism, come from considering, in the phenomena of perception and memory, the physical and the mental as duplicates of one another.

Bergson thus refutes one of the ideas expressed in the post of mental models of the physical world naturally connecting to mathematical models of the physical world.  

But the other idea in the post is in line with Bergson's view of the importance of feelings to guide actions as responses to the world supporting intuition and transforming intellectual deliberation into lived experience. 

Both aspects connect to AI viewed to offer mathematical models of the world while lacking feelings, which is not at all in line with Bergson's view on consciousness or Human Intelligence HI. 

Bergson points to limitations of mathematical models of his time as static and unable to capture the complexity of the world. Today mathematics + computer offers a very rich world of dynamic simulations expanding reality to virtual reality, while human consciousness remains the same.  

Notice that Bergson connects matter to memory instead of body to soul, thus emphasising memory. 

Bergson offers some hope that HI will continue to have a role. 

Euclide vs Big Bang vs Standard Model

• ESA's Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. 
• The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years.
• Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

Big Bang is a cosmological theory stating that the Universe was created from a very hot very dense state of temperature $10^{32}$ Kelvin and size of a pinhead after $10^{-44}$ seconds, and then inflated/expanded into it's presently observable size of 10 billion light-years and average temperature of 3 K. Big Bang was invented by modern physicists in the 1960s searching for a mission after having completed the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, and is today accepted by almost all physicists. 

The previous post recalls that Leonard Susskind as leading theoretical physicists today, has come to the conclusion that the work on the Standard Model has to start over again, and so also the cosmological theory including Big Bang based on the Standard Model. OK?  

The main weakness of Big Bang is that no explanation is even attempted for the existence of a very dense very hot initial state: Creation of a 10 billion light-years Universe from a pinhead lacks physics. Of all Creation Myths in world history, Big Bang must be the most nonsensical.

So we have to start over again. I have been led to a model described in these posts as Neo-Newtonian Cosmology based on viewing gravitational potential $\phi (x,t)$ with $x$ a Euclidean coordinate and $t$ a time coordinate, as primordial role from which mass density $\rho (x,t)$ is "created" by the local action of the Laplacian differential operator $\Delta$:

• $\rho (x,t) = \Delta \phi (x,t)$ for all $x$,         (G1)

assumed to act without time delay for all $t$. Mass of variable sign is thus created locally for each $x$ by differentiation of a fluctuation as an instant local operation acting at each time instant $t$.  

The model is complemented by viewing electric potential $\psi (x,t)$ with $x$ a Euclidean coordinate and $t$ a time coordinate, as primordial from which charge density $\epsilon (x,t)$ is "created" by the local action of the Laplacian differential operator $\Delta$:

• $\epsilon (x,t) = \Delta\psi (x,t)$ for all $x$,         (G1)

assumed to act without time delay for all $t$. Charge of variable sign is thus created locally for each $x$ by differentiation of a fluctuation as an instant local operation acting at each time instant $t$.  

Let us collect basic elements of Neo-Newtonian Cosmology:

1. Mass/matter (ordinary and dark) and charge densities of variable sign are created by the Laplacian acting on fluctuations of zero gravitational and electric potentials. 
2. Attraction/repulsion of mass of same/different sign and charge of different/same sign creates microscale charges of different sign (Hydrogen atoms = proton + electron) and macroscale mass Universa of different sign moving away from each other (dark energy).
3. Kinetic energy in each Universe created by gravitational collapse. 
4. Start from 0 mass. Split into 0 = (+mass) + (-mass). Separate macroscale (+mass) from (-mass).
5. Start from 0 charge. Split 0 =(+charge)+(-charge). Combine microscale (+charge) with (-charge).