Abstract
In this contribution, I suggest that it is sometimes a step forward to reverse our intuition on “what is fundamental”, a move that is somewhat reminiscent of the idea of noncommutative geometry. I argue that some foundational conceptual problems in physics and related fields motivate us to attempt such a reversal of perspective, and to take seriously the idea that an information-theoretic notion of observer (“mind”) could in some sense be more fundamental than our intuitive idea of a physical world (“matter”). I sketch what such an approach could look like, and why it would complement but not contradict the view that the material world is the cause of our experience.
M. P. Müller—Dedicated to Nadine, and all the other fearless stubborn explorers out there.
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Notes
- 1.
I am omitting some mathematical details here to keep the presentation accessible.
- 2.
Here, “moment” does not refer to some externally given time, but to an integer labelling of the subjective states.
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As explained in [14], it would be more natural to formulate this postulate in terms of a Markovian probability measure, one for which the (probability of the) next state only depends on the current state and not on all previous ones. However, finding such a formulation and exploring its properties is mathematically much more challenging; it is currently an open problem.
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Müller, M.P. (2019). Mind Before Matter: Reversing the Arrow of Fundamentality. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) What is Fundamental?. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11301-8_7
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