Physics of intention and action
If there is thought that has no causal influence on the world, then it’s not able to be tested as it will leave no trace on the physical world. So let’s assume thought must have a causal influence.
This means it must do work on a system. We also know that thought can result in larger amounts of work being done. We can move a joystick and move a gigantic beam with a crane if we have it hooked up to a machine. Compared to the small voltages and currents we’re dealing with in the brain, we can assume that intention that leads to that movement takes much less power than the movement itself.
So on the one hand we have the intention of an action, on the other hand we have the action itself which can require more energy than the intention. In order for this to work, there needs to be potential energy stored beforehand. For the crane, this energy comes in the form of electricity or gas. The potential energy is either electrical or chemical, pent up long before anyone decided to use it to lift that steel beam.
So the actual physical action takes advantage of potential energy not specifically reserved for the intended purpose. Instead it relies on some device that properly routes that potential energy, transferring it into kinetic energy with some constrained probability distribution. For instance, the internal combustion engine takes an explosion which naturally pushes out in all directions, and by placing it in a cylinder, directs that energy along ~1 degree of freedom. The rods and gears provide constraint in order to route that energy into a specific direction, translating it from one degree of freedom to another… translation, to rotation, translation of the rotation (through gears), transformation. Ultimately this all results from the constraint of probability.
However that constraint of probability takes work as well. The cylinder must be shaped and hardened. Routing a river into large turbines requires a dam which holds back a large weight. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Whether on the cylinder or the dam wall, or in actin and myosin of your muscles. That force must be contained… in other words it must be mostly reflected. It’s also noteworthy that location is very important for this. The dam must be in a specific place relative to the turbine. The piston must be in a specific location and orientation with respect to the cylinder. The degrees of freedom that matter for the dam are: 2.5-3 spatial dimensions. The water needs to be at the specific x/y coordinates of the turbine, and it must be higher than the turbine. The degrees of freedom that matter for the cylinder are: ~3 spatial dimensons, and 2 rotational degrees of freedom. Similarly for our metabolism and storage of chemical potential energy in the form of actin and myosin and calcium gradients.
The causality of moving the steel beam using a crane stretches backwards and then back forwards into time. Without the animals that turned into fossil fuels fixing carbon, the particular path translating energy into the beam wouldn’t have occurred. Without eating to store up chemical energy, the operator couldn’t move the joystick. Starting from the intent, we move from smaller, more recently store energies, to larger, more previously stored energies. The chemical energy from the fuel is constrained to act on the control arm, and translate fine movement from the joystick to small corrections on the control arm… back to smaller, more recently stored energy.
The path of translations of energies to different potential and kinetic forms spans the history of life… even the particular form of the mitochondria responsible for metabolism are involved. Even at the inception of life, information was being stored about how to harness this energy. The energy created the information as well. The chemical energy that comes from digestion also stores information in DNA. Fixing information into DNA takes work. Specific nucleotides must have their probabilities constrained to particular locations. These constraints can be stored and copied and used as templates. Similarly there is information inherent in the design of the internal combustion engine. Work had to be done to learn how to harness and translate energy in that way, and to create and replicate that information. The path spans the history of life, but also human history.
When we consider the way that energy cascades from an intention to an action, we need to consider the entire history of life and humanity, but we can do it in general terms. How much energy is required to translate work to information? How quickly can it happen? How much potential energy can 1 bit of information harness? How much can 1 bit change the probability distribution of a process? Does it make more sense to think of the information processing involved in lifting that steel beam as a set number of bits, or as a channel bandwidth with a certain signal/noise ratio that takes a certain amount of power to maintain, similar to what’s described here?