6. From an email from a physicist friend: “I think a lot of people have the intuition that real neural activity, produced by real chemical reactions from real neurotransmitters, and real electrical activity that you can feel with your hand, somehow has some property that mere computer code can’t have. But one of the overwhelming messages of modern physics has been that everything that exists—particles, fields, atoms, etc, is best thought of in terms of information, and may simply *be* information. The universe may perhaps be best described as a mathematical abstraction. Chemical reactions don’t come from some essential property of atoms but instead from subtle interactions between their valence electron shells. Electrons and protons aren’t well-defined particles, but abstract clouds of probability mass. Even the concept of “particles” is misleading; what seems to actually exist is quantum fields which are the solutions of abstract mathematical equations, and some of whose states are labeled by humans as “1 particle” or “2 particles”. To be a bit metaphorical, we are like tiny ripples on vast abstract mathematical waves, ripples whose patterns and dynamics happen to execute the information processing corresponding to what we call sentience. If you ask me our existence and the substrate we live on is already much weirder and more ephemeral than anything we might upload humans onto.”
6. From an email from a physicist friend: “I think a lot of people have the intuition that real neural activity, produced by real chemical reactions from real neurotransmitters, and real electrical activity that you can feel with your hand, somehow has some property that mere computer code can’t have. But one of the overwhelming messages of modern physics has been that everything that exists—particles, fields, atoms, etc, is best thought of in terms of information, and may simply *be* information. The universe may perhaps be best described as a mathematical abstraction. Chemical reactions don’t come from some essential property of atoms but instead from subtle interactions between their valence electron shells. Electrons and protons aren’t well-defined particles, but abstract clouds of probability mass. Even the concept of “particles” is misleading; what seems to actually exist is quantum fields which are the solutions of abstract mathematical equations, and some of whose states are labeled by humans as “1 particle” or “2 particles”. To be a bit metaphorical, we are like tiny ripples on vast abstract mathematical waves, ripples whose patterns and dynamics happen to execute the information processing corresponding to what we call sentience. If you ask me our existence and the substrate we live on is already much weirder and more ephemeral than anything we might upload humans onto.”