Bob Rambles about Camus, Consciousness and Cause (and Effect)

 Managing real-time applications is one of the greatest of computing challenges, both in coding and in implementation.  The ultimate real-time application would be consciousness (distinguished from "intelligence" which is a series of parlor tricks).  As usual, I am too harsh since the quality of consciousness, and even any resulting wisdom, arises out of the various faculties that comprise those very parlor tricks.  All of my understanding of consciousness is shaped by my understanding of computers and my observation that there is so much of it that I can not observe.

Camus suggests that the resolution of the question of the purpose of life (with that ultimate resolution of suicide) is an ongoing problem of consciousness, with the resolution lying at hand while varying the answers from moment to moment throughout our lives.  The decision not to kill oneself is a matter of policy that might (along with fear and the perception of the finality of nothingness) carry one over a few rough spots - perhaps only to be overridden by an especially fraught or meaningful moment.

Out of my current (dilettante as usual) reading of Camus: I see that he distinguishes between truth and meaning.  As a side note: I once postulated that "meaning is a relationship between ontology and truth".  I now realize that is the ideal rather than what we see in the beliefs of the people around us.  I also subscribe to the idea that there is an identity between Truth and Beauty (as in that moment of consciousness captured in the poem by Emily Dickinson: "I died for beauty".   Regardless, Camus suggests that we spend our lives in the search for meaning.  Certainly that is true for me, with the qualification that for me truth is the higher goal, whatever that means.  In it most fundamental sense it means that I say more than I should say in the service of truth.  It also means that I may die for the truth.

There is a classic computer science exercise where the student is asked to program a robot to brush its teeth.  It is an essay question where one must not leave out any detail in the description of the process.  I will not entangle myself in this tar baby.  Instead, I will propose a similar exercise where the student is asked to layout the basic assumptions associated with the search for meaning in Camus' absurd universe.  As a clue I am going to suggest that a belief in "cause and effect" is a prerequisite if meaning is not to become a totally random construct without any basis in observation, received reality, or established wisdom.  

I am entertaining the idea that quantum entanglement is just another way of saying there is a cause and effect relationship between two entities.  That opens up a whole universe of possible ways for there to be a cause and effect relationship between two entities, a man and a woman for instance.  Now we can approach the discussion of some of the crazier concepts such as autopoiesis and structural coupling as yammered about by Maturana and Varela.  After all, people talk the way birds sing - for the sheer joy of it.