[HN Gopher] Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
___________________________________________________________________
Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
Author : Anon84
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-07-17 11:48 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (philpapers.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (philpapers.org)
| philip142au wrote:
| Why do people think there is some magical "consciousness" thingy
| other than what we observe, a machine in a wet box
| Comevius wrote:
| We feel that we (and life, consciousness) must be special, but
| it's just thermodynamics.
|
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-life-and-death-spring-fro...
|
| https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.10...
| messe wrote:
| What does the observing?
| athenasword wrote:
| Genuine question: how is conceivable-therefore-possible even a
| real argument here?
| k__ wrote:
| I don't know much about philosophy, but as far as I know
| "conceivabel therefore possible" was an argument Anselm von
| Canterbury used.
| foxhop wrote:
| https://youtu.be/Em3XplqnoF4 | David Lynch explains Transedental
| Meditation (clip from a 1 hour documentary)
|
| All physics and consciousness converge to the universal one. The
| unified field of one.
|
| TM is pretty easy, just come up with some nonsense sounds and
| repeat them over and over, this is a mantra. Eventually switch
| from saying you mantra out loud to saying it in your mind. Don't
| worry if thoughts roll in just keep your conscious on the mantra.
|
| It seems to work for me and I don't typically enjoy meditation.
| It takes practice. Good luck!
|
| Basically science and theoretical physics followed the
| observational science down to a place where they got stuck, the
| good news is throughout history, including today, spiritual
| people have already found and understood this truth.
|
| Everything in our universe is built fundamentally out of the same
| universal field of one: mass, spirit, and consciousness!
|
| Everything (mass and consciousness) is created out of this field,
| and the act of observing it can and does change it!
| messe wrote:
| I'm a David Lynch fan, and a practitioner of meditation, but
| the connections between Transcendental Meditation and Physics
| are pseudoscience.
| foxhop wrote:
| Everything yeilds from one. All creation grows from this
| field that science is finally proving exists. I link to this
| clip because David explains it better than I could, but it's
| not just TM.
| DoomHotel wrote:
| Peter Watts covered the possibility of "zombie" intelligences
| pretty well in his novel _Blindsight_. One thing I took from it
| is that such an intelligence could not possibly behave _exactly_
| like a human being, because a lot of what we do as humans
| involves interaction with other humans where we have a mental
| model of their consciousness being much like our own. Expressing
| sympathy toward another person, for example, would be
| inconceivable without consciousness.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Comments from people who read the paper below this, please.
|
| (nothing wrong with starting the discussion from the title or
| abstract, but it becomes harder to find comments related to the
| article).
| Koshkin wrote:
| The equation (2) on page 8 does look like the ultimate answer to
| life, the universe, and everything.
| linuxhansl wrote:
| It is interesting to me that the only thing in the universe that
| we can observe directly it's also thought to be the least
| understood.
|
| We experience physical phenomena by proxy only - through the
| senses and sensors we built, followed by an interpretation by our
| brain; while we can observe our consciousness by just observing
| ourselves from "within".
|
| I do not mean to question the paper, just pointing out that I
| find this fascinating.
|
| In fact I strongly believe that consciousness is - in the end -
| the result of physical processes.
|
| What I do question is that we understand what we mean by
| "physics". Physics is a model of the world, a model that we
| created based on our understanding how things ought to be, namely
| that all things are separate and that thus we can explain reality
| (and hence consciousness) by analyzing (i.e. dividing) the model
| more and more. Who says that that is a correct representation of
| the world?
| foxhop wrote:
| All things are separate until you dive as deep as we are now
| into physics, dividing things until you reach a universal field
| of 1. Then the model breaks and now we are trying to figure out
| what to do about that. Good news is we were prepared for the
| model to break. Consciousness is relative to the level of
| abstraction, as above so below. Observing the universe affects
| the universe.
|
| Consciousness has sensors all the way down to atoms and yet we
| can have supremely evil people and supremely good and
| everything in between. Nature and nurture, we have philosophy
| to help us now that physics and stuck when everything divides
| down to the same one, we learn that killing your neighbor is
| like killing yourself. Some people kill their neighbor or
| themselves, others grow a community garden.
|
| If you kill you neighbor you also kill your true self, all
| beings are of the the same consciousness, the goal is to
| individuate, to view the universe in new and novel ways, to
| teach others of the things you manage to bring back on your
| journey so that it manifests and propagates in this universe!
| We are not meant to observe we are meant to create!
|
| That said our creations must follow the trinity of love,
| freedom, and truth otherwise the creations quickly devolve into
| implements of oppression to control the literal minds of the
| masses.
| foxes wrote:
| If I understand it, they seem to be advocating for some sort of
| dualism. However consider a cpu, it runs on known physical
| perspectives. But imaging trying to reverse engineer by examining
| what happens inside an operating system/program running on it.
| You can get quite interesting emergent behaviour from a
| relatively simple system (a processor). So just because physics
| seems relatively simple, I don't think that has to mean
| consciousness is easier. I feel its more emergent.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| There is no reason to believe that the CPU is conscious though,
| and if it turned out to be, we can't explain it. In fact, there
| is nothing to suggest other people are conscious other than
| that they're probably the same as you. The only one you can be
| sure is conscious is yourself.
| hsn915 wrote:
| The things that happen when a program execute are all emergent
| behavior, but it's behavior that is well understood and we know
| everything about how it emerges.
|
| It's all just that, a "behavior". Things that move. Signals
| propagate across wires. Pixels light up. All the is well
| understood.
|
| Consciousness is nothing like that.
| foxes wrote:
| Why not?
|
| Series of complicated bio-electrical interactions? Vast
| numbers of connections, neurons firing together?
|
| Even our limited attempts at neural networks are not very
| well understood, and that is just code running on well
| understood computer. A brain is way more connected and
| complicated than something like deep mind, even if you think
| of that stuff like a first order approximation. So if we cant
| easily do that, seems an actual brain with way more
| recurrence and structure is much harder.
|
| I think there are experimental results though, we can look at
| an brain scan and nearly deduce what people are looking at,
| although don't quote me I would have to find the paper. Seems
| pretty physical.
| shawxe wrote:
| Because the web application is only an emergent phenomenon
| once consciousness has already entered the equation.
| Without an observer, the website is nothing more than the
| sum of its parts; only we view it as something else. The
| CPU, machine code, all of the I/O mechanism, eventually
| just create an illuminated image on a screen that is _only_
| its emergent whole when viewed by a conscious observer who
| sees it that way.
|
| Far from having an even remotely non-referential
| understanding of consciousness, we don't even have a non-
| referential understanding of the referent website as it
| exists in our perception--it just comes back to the same
| questions that a lot of physicalists seem to refuse to even
| acknowledge. I know that when I view this screen I see what
| I see as red, and I know that the material of my brain and
| the screen are responsible for that, but that does nothing
| to address what the referent red is in the first place.
|
| How can consciousness be an emergent construct when
| emergent constructs are only identifiable as distinct from
| the sum of their parts by making use of consciousness?
| shawxe wrote:
| To respond to another part of this, it doesn't matter if we
| can look at a brain scan and predict perfectly _exactly_
| what the scanned subject is thinking. That only answers the
| question of "how do thoughts occur" not the question "what
| are thoughts?"
|
| We have no way of even constructing the concept that gets
| around this. "This brain state corresponds to these
| thoughts." Okay, but where/what are the thoughts? In order
| for something to corresponds to the thoughts, they must
| exist in _some_ capacity, right? So long as consciousness
| exists at all, which anyone who experiences it can say with
| certainty that it does. If I drink a beer, I feel a certain
| way. Neurochemically, we understand exactly why this is
| happening. What we don 't understand is how there are "ways
| to feel" in the first place.
|
| Understanding how objects interact with one another doesn't
| answer the question of what those objects are; they just
| are. Understanding the effects of electromagnetic force
| doesn't answer the question of what electromagnetism is; it
| just is. With objects, we can actually break things down
| into a small number of basic components (particles) that
| depending on their organization make all objects. But these
| particles are already a thing with no reason; just an axiom
| we've been able to use to get a mostly logically consistent
| view of objects.
|
| Consciousness, we have been totally unable to break down
| into anything. We can see evidence of it in others, and
| feel it in ourselves, and we can understand how to make it
| seem to go away, and also what seems to bring about certain
| effects in it's space (red, happy, warm, salty, etc.), but
| our understanding is not of those effects--it's only of how
| a certain material arrangement seems to bring them about.
| lbrandy wrote:
| > they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism.
|
| This paper is doing the opposite. It's arguing that other
| papers/ideas advocating dualism are going the wrong way and
| purely physicalist explanations are the best path forward.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Purely _materialist_ explanations, you mean? Platonic
| dualism, as advocated by folks like Max Tegmark, isn 't non-
| physicalist. And it needn't be dualist even -- if the world
| is made of math and the materials emerge by implication.
| bobthechef wrote:
| What does it mean to be "made of math"? This reads like
| gibberish to me. Mathematics deals with formal abstraction.
| Geometry, for example, abstracts the spacial
| characteristics of matter from matter and focuses on them
| solely while ignoring everything else. (This actually
| reminds me of Bertrand Russell's structuralist account of
| physics and how it omits much if not most of reality.)
|
| (Also, Platonism does posit an immaterial realm of the
| forms in which all material things participate. But this
| participation relation is problematic, something Aristotle
| pointed out in the Third Man Argument and something Plato
| himself knew.)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| "Gibberish": Plato, Russell, Penrose and Tegmark?
|
| Made of math is as Aristotle noted: "All is number" --
| Platonic-Pythagoreanism was at the heart of classical
| civilization and the enlightenment.
|
| I can only suppose that there is something about these
| ideas that deeply disturbs or even frightens. But I
| wouldn't dismiss them as gibberish.
| bobthechef wrote:
| The CPU (or rather, the entire computer) isn't magically
| generating out of nothing something new. In a certain sense,
| there is no OS on a computer per se and apart from human
| interpretation. It is what Searle calls the "observer
| relative". This is in opposition to things which have objective
| reality apart from human observation. By analogy, look at text
| on a page. _Per se_ , these are blobs of ink on a page. They
| are text only by convention: the person who arranged these
| blobs was using this convention when arranging these blobs, and
| you need to know the convention to interpret them as text.
|
| Too often, "emergence" is one of those "gap" explanations that
| tries to produce something from nothing. Yes, independent
| things can enter into interactions and relations that result in
| states of affairs that they alone could not have produced.
| That's obvious. You don't get a pile of oranges without a bunch
| of oranges. But a state of affairs of individual objects
| doesn't transcend being a state of affairs of individual
| objects as long as you maintain that they are still individual
| objects.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Chris Langan (IQ of 195)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
|
| "Chris Langan is a fellow of the International Society for
| Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID), a body that actually
| promotes 'Intelligent Design' (ID). His God is the god who
| created the world and his 'proof' is that the universe behaves
| like a mind, therefore this must be the mind of a god.
|
| Langan may be reputedly the most intelligent man in the United
| States"
|
| Source: https://www.quora.com/What-is-God-according-to-Chris-
| Langan-...
| hall0ween wrote:
| IQ has never been linked to intelligence, considered there is
| no agreed upon definition for intelligence.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Yeah maybe, but that's a little like claiming Usain Bolt
| isn't the fastest man in the world because there is no agreed
| definition of "fastest man", because everyone can have their
| own definition of what is means to be the fastest man.
|
| IQ is the best measure we have to compare how fast your brain
| stores and processes information compared to others.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Sure, that could be a reasonable thing to say about IQ.
|
| But "fastest man" is well defined, because _speed_ is well-
| defined.
|
| "being fast at storing and processing information" is a
| candidate for a definition of intelligence, but far from
| the only one.
|
| So no, it's nothing like claiming that Usain Bolt isn't the
| fastest man in the world.
|
| Or maybe it is: Bolt is almost certainly not the fastest
| person over 100 miles, so what kind of speed / intelligence
| are we discussing?
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| IQ tests tend to have a mix of questions to measure:
|
| "verbal comprehension, processing speed, perceptual
| organization, and working memory"
| gliptic wrote:
| High IQ is no barrier to becoming a crackpot, evidently.
| lbrandy wrote:
| Here's my attempt at a tldr.
|
| 1. The laws of physics at the time scales, space scales, and
| energies of the human brain are "known" and we have deep reasons
| to believe that more will not be discovered. He spends a great
| deal of space explaining and arguing that the credence that
| physics is "complete" in this regime should be very, very high.
|
| 2. Given the current laws of physics, there is no place or room
| for non-physicalist explanations of consciousness (or, I suppose,
| for other dualist ideas like a soul) because there is no
| mechanism for them to effect change in the physical world.
|
| 3. Anyone who wants a non-physicalist approach to consciousness
| must either claim they can violate the laws of physics in our
| brains, or cannot affect the physical world.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| How does free will play into this? If the world is run by all
| physical laws, then I had no choice typing this out and
| submitting it, rather then closing the tab right now.
|
| My "decision" isn't real.
|
| If it is an actual conscious choice, that was not calculatable
| by the exact state prior, then consciousness is fundamental.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I recommend reading "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will
| worth wanting" by Daniel Dennett to get a better handle on
| what the term "free will" might actually mean.
| lbrandy wrote:
| It depends what you mean by free will. Non-philosphers almost
| always mean "libertarian" free will when they say that, and
| yes, this same argument also basically outlaws libertarian
| free will as well. There is no physical mechanism by which
| you can alter your brain physics to "choose" things.
|
| Carroll and others have a compatibilist notion of free will
| which is a more subtle concept that I'm not sure I'm
| qualified to actually explain.
| fancydoorknock wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1z-pVZiRjac
| hsn915 wrote:
| You had the choice because all the processes that determine
| your actions happened in your brain, which is a part of you:
| you are not a puppet controlled from outside.
|
| What is your conception of free will? Is it just
| "randomness"?
|
| If your actions are not determined by your thoughts and
| desires .. then they would just be completely random. How is
| that "free" will?
| athenasword wrote:
| My conclusion after a good amount of reading and thinking on
| this:
|
| Free will, defined as autonomous decision-making partially
| influenced/affected by the external environment, does exist.
|
| Now 'autonomous' = determined by the agent, i.e. the decision
| to have pizza today is determined by _something_ in you, not
| fully determined externally, but that _something_ is likely
| not your conscious experience.
|
| In that sense, free will does not exist.
|
| But that does *not* mean that everything you do is
| _predictable_ because P!=NP. Even God, if s /he exists, does
| not yet know what you will do tomorrow, s/he's waiting to
| find out.
|
| So: you are not free, but you are not bound to something
| either.
| gus_massa wrote:
| We are still not sure, but probably your decisions aren't
| real.
| gnzg wrote:
| One possibility is that from an omniscient perspective, free
| will is indeed meaningless. But then again it can be argued
| that everything would be meaningless from an omniscient
| perspective: time, space, matter, energy, freedom, love,
| whatever
|
| That is unless there is some sort of actual absolute meaning
| to the universe, which is a very boring and treacherous line
| of reasoning that i won't entertain here
|
| However he existence of an omniscient entity would completely
| break physics as we know it so any physicalist/rationalist
| approch to understanding the universe can fairly safely rule
| it out
|
| Free will may exist as a result of the unknown factors of
| human consciousness, their actions and consequences and their
| relations to the physicial world.
|
| Personally I find that thought quite pleasant, because it
| means that free will does exist from a human perspective, and
| I happen to posess one of those.
| skohan wrote:
| I remember once upon a time being pretty interested in
| understanding "what is consciousness". The more I have learned
| about neuroscience, the more plausible it seems that what we
| know as subjective experience is just an emergent behavior of
| this super complex lump of jelly in our heads. If you look at
| what the thalamus does, it seems like consciousness might even
| just basically be the function of that brain region.
| Arun2009 wrote:
| One of the things I want to do before I die is to acquire an
| authentic knowledge of classical Indian philosophy (particularly
| the monistic idealistic strands of thought in it) and the modern
| scientific account of reality, and evaluate for myself how their
| claims fare against that of the other.
|
| I don't understand why more Indians and particularly Hindus are
| not doing this. This looks to me like a thrilling intellectual
| and even spiritual adventure, and one of the few things that are
| truly worth doing in life.
| perfmode wrote:
| beautifully said
|
| even better than an authentic knowledge is an authentic
| experience
| foxhop wrote:
| Me too! However why stop at Indian philosophy?
| Arun2009 wrote:
| My aim is evaluate the metaphysical claims of Indian
| philosophy from the perspective of the most holistic account
| of reality that we can acquire in the 21st century. This will
| obviously include studying other streams of knowledge that
| has anything to say about reality.
|
| As to why Indian philosophy - this primarily stems from my
| Indian background. I have always wondered if the claims of
| Indian philosophy can be validated scientifically. For e.g.,
| how might a Nagarjuna or Shankara have argued for their
| claims if they were born in the 21st century?
|
| I suppose I don't have any deeper reasons other than sheer
| inquisitiveness or jijnAsA
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jijnasa) :-)
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _other streams of knowledge_
|
| The Road to Reality by Penrose, perhaps.
| Arun2009 wrote:
| That book has been gathering dust on my shelf for the
| last 10 years :-)
|
| I only recently completed an undergraduate sequence in
| quantum mechanics. I still have general relativity and
| quantum field theory left, which will take some more time
| to do properly. I also don't know how moral it'd be to
| wade into those waters without being on a first name
| basis with Jackson and Goldstein.
|
| Suffice it to say that there's a lot of work to do. But
| time is something that I have!
| skohan wrote:
| This paper reminds me of one of the "wow" moments I had when
| first studying neuroscience: a professor passed on the
| realization that everything in the universe we can observe and
| understand must have a neurobiological representation. Reality as
| we experience it is in fact always represented in brain activity.
| creamytaco wrote:
| Here is another wow moment that follows from the one you
| mentioned: The universe you experience is different than my
| own. We use language and shared culture to consensually
| hallucinate a "shared" universe but no such thing truly exists
| for us. We can perceive objects and describe them in similar
| ways but the fact remains that we can't access the universe
| that the objects truly exist in (if that even exists) since,
| for us, they have no independent existence outside of our
| mental representation. Or shortly, when you die the universe
| dies with you.
| bobthechef wrote:
| > The universe you experience is different than my own.
|
| How would you know this if you've never experienced how I
| experience it?
|
| > We use language and shared culture to consensually
| hallucinate a "shared" universe but no such thing truly
| exists for us.
|
| You seem to suggest that culture is some shared fantasy
| superimposed on reality, but how could it be given your
| solipsism? How could anything be shared?
|
| > We can perceive objects and describe them in similar ways
|
| How would you know? Maybe I mean different things when I
| speak. Maybe my speech isn't speech at all and you're just
| construing it as such? Maybe there is no me?
|
| > but the fact remains that we can't access the universe that
| the objects truly exist in (if that even exists)
|
| How would you know without being able to "access" the
| universe to make that comparison? Are you a gnostic with
| secret knowledge (in which case, you do have access)? You've
| also already assumed a distinction between universe and mind,
| but how could you if all you have are these
| "representations", as you call them? The distinction would
| itself just be a mental "representation".
|
| > since, for us, they have no independent existence outside
| of our mental representation.
|
| If there is no reality to represent, then they aren't mental
| representations, are they.
|
| > Or shortly, when you die the universe dies with you.
|
| The universe you don't know actually exists? But if it
| exists, why should it die with you?
|
| P.S. Less weed, more rigor.
| [deleted]
| srean wrote:
| That's right. Things that we agree on being named the same we
| call 'real'.
|
| Imagine this, say what everyone perceives as the color red I
| perceive it as what everyone else perceives as yellow. But
| since I have been taught the name of the colors by these
| people, I will end up matching the names of the colors
| although I am perceiving something very different.
|
| This needs to be considered in debates on whether animals
| have consciousness, do they have an "I". The dominant popular
| belief is that they aren't. My question is, devoid of a
| common communication language how would you find out. Only
| thing we have is their observable external behavior. If that
| is consistent with the 'consciousness' hypothesis, then
| that's all we can say. In that case we have about as much
| evidence of presence of consciousness that a fellow human
| incapable of communicating with us in language as much as
| another animal say a dolphin. In both the cases its a
| hypothesis that explains externally observable behavior.
|
| Till we find a way to listen into one's internal monologue
| this is pretty much all we can do.
|
| I like Feynman's example of the 'inside of a brick' no one
| has seen that with an unaided human eye. Before other forms
| of sensing the 'inside' came along (X-ray, ultrasound, ...)
| it was just a hypothesis that fit observable experience. No
| one would have actually seen the inside of a brick. When you
| break it open, its no longer the 'inside'. That there is no
| 'inside' and that a new surface is formed by the be the act
| of breaking the brick could have been a plausible alternative
| hypothesis. Existence of an 'inside' is just a simpler
| hypothesis.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| > say what everyone perceives as the color red I perceive
| it as what everyone else perceives as yellow.
|
| This is part of the "knowledge argument":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument
| srean wrote:
| The philosophers Hobbes and Calvin do not disappoint
| https://i.redd.it/h2pt1xw3d9801.jpg
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > Only thing we have is their observable external behavior.
| If that is consistent with the 'consciousness' hypothesis,
| then that's all we can say. In that case we have about as
| much evidence of presence of consciousness that a fellow
| human ...
|
| It's been mind boggling to me for years that this isn't the
| default accepted position. That most intelligent life (ie
| animals) are conscious just like us. Look at what dogs,
| cats, monkeys do. In what possible way can you say they
| aren't conscious but another person you can't speak with
| is? Based on what evidence?
|
| The fact we try and reserve consciousness for humans is the
| most "epi-cycles in support of geocentrism" thing I've ever
| seen in science. It's silly. It's wholly unscientific, in
| fact it's anti-science as it actively avoids the most
| scientific explanation to reach a conclusion that "we're
| special".
|
| Its flawed and a stain on science.
| [deleted]
| sampo wrote:
| In the tv-series Big Bang Theory, there is a moment where
| Sheldon (a theoretical physicist) and Amy (a neuroscientist)
| argue, whose discipline is more important and fundamental.
| Sheldon says that physics studies the fundamental building
| blocks of the universe. And just like your professor, Amy says
| something along the lines that neuroscience studies the
| processes that study the fundamental building blocks of the
| universe.
| skohan wrote:
| I really hate that show, but along those lines I have
| sometimes wondered if when we are studying theoretical
| mathematics, are we actually discovering principals about how
| the universe works, or are we really mapping principals of
| how the brain processes information without realizing it.
| esarbe wrote:
| We're all just the universe wondering about how it can
| perceive itself.
| sdwr wrote:
| Love it, I've had the same thought.
| foxhop wrote:
| I love the map analogy, humans have been making those for a
| long time too. I've always enjoyed maps and mazes and also
| why I took to mathematics at a young age because it does
| seem like once you learn basic algorithms you can feel
| around a problem with numbers and then just get a sense
| because you know the "map" like the back of your hand.
| Teaches the next generation, universal way to communicate
| with other humans at the same level of abstraction, etc.
| srean wrote:
| But is there infinite regress -- does it have a representation
| of itself representing itself.
|
| I find a more prosaic version of this question quite
| interesting too. If you can feel a touch/heat anywhere on or in
| your body its represented in the brain somehow, somewhere. For
| a moment (i) imagine the brain is sensitive to touch (it isn't
| because lack of 'pain' receptors) (ii) that the representation
| of a sensitive part of our body is localized in the brain
| rather than distributed.
|
| What this gives us is a mapping from the entire body (that
| includes the brain) into itself. Now, if there is a fixed point
| of this mapping, that fixed point is aware of itself.
|
| Is the brain insensitive to touch because its not
| biologically/physically possible for a localized region of
| space not to be aware of itself ?
|
| EDIT: Downvote ! That was rather unexpected.
| skohan wrote:
| To respond to your edit, I don't quite understand what you're
| getting at. It's quite well understood how the brain
| represents touch - all the sensory neurons in your skin send
| information to a brain region which maintains a spacial
| representation of your body.
|
| Your brain isn't sensitive to touch because it's inside your
| skull, so that touch information wouldn't do a whole lot for
| you. There's no reason in principal a brain couldn't have
| pressure sensitive neurons inside of itself or on its
| surface.
| srean wrote:
| No. Even you crack the skull open and poke the brain, it
| wont feel a thing even when conscious. The skull, the skin
| will feel, but the brain itself has no pain/tactile
| receptors. Many surgical procedures on the brain are done
| with the patient very much awake.
| skohan wrote:
| Yeah exactly, why would it?
| srean wrote:
| I am just adding to your explanation. The brain is
| insensitive not because it is "inside your skull" but
| because of the lack of pain receptors in the brain.
|
| Our bone marrow is inside our bones. Trust me, it is not
| pleasant to touch.
| skohan wrote:
| Yeah that's exactly what I was saying. It doesn't need
| touch receptors because it's inside your skull.
|
| It makes sense to evolve pain sensitivity in your bones
| because if you are doing something which is causing
| damage inside your bones, you had better have a signal to
| stop. For most of the evolutionary history of humanity,
| if your skull was compromised, you would be dead.
| srean wrote:
| Ah! I understand your point better now. You didn't mean
| skull enclosure to be the direct reason but something
| that influenced the lack of pain sensing nerve endings to
| have a reason to develop there.
| skohan wrote:
| Exactly
| throwanem wrote:
| I mean, the brain isn't sensitive to touch because it doesn't
| contain the kind of mechanoreceptors that our nervous system
| uses to detect that kind of stimulus, which seems like a
| perfectly sufficient explanation here.
| srean wrote:
| Indeed. What I am asking is something different, although I
| did not word it properly -- Is it even possible for the
| brain to be sensitive to touch everywhere, or must a teeny-
| weeny dead-zone exist.
| skohan wrote:
| Why would it need to exist? I feel like you're reaching
| for a philosophical argument here for a question which is
| already adequately resolved by physics and biology.
| srean wrote:
| Nothing to do with philosophy but with existence of fixed
| points. Are you familiar with the mathematical notion of
| a fixed point (think y-combinator) and fixed point
| theorems ?
|
| The _gist_ of it is that if there is a continuous mapping
| from a set to itself with the property that the mapped
| points are closer than the original points there must
| exist a point that maps to itself.
|
| Now if the pain location mapping is smooth and a
| contraction (not implausible because number of cells in
| the brain is smaller than the number of cells in the
| entire body), there would be a neuron in the brain that
| would have been self aware in the sense that its pain
| mapping would have mapped to itself.
|
| Note it is possible to avoid having a fixed point for a
| mapping from a set itself (consider a permutation of
| numbers 1..n so that no number is in its own place).
|
| It is just an intriguing notion -- is a fixed point, self
| aware neuron possible
| skohan wrote:
| I just don't think this is a very interesting thing to
| contemplate, because I don't think any single neuron can
| be "aware" in isolation. Neurons are just information
| processing units and transmission untis. Awareness surely
| has to be a function of the activity of multiple neurons
| communicating with one another.
| throwanem wrote:
| It seems like the question is fundamentally that of
| whether a given system can perfectly model its own state,
| but in this context that entails an implicit assumption
| that the brain's model of body state is perfect, which it
| is anything but.
| skohan wrote:
| I guess I don't really think any system would be able to
| model it's own state 100% accurately. Basically any model
| implies a reduction in information.
|
| I don't see what this has to do with pain perception in
| the brain. I am sure you could find an example in the
| animal kingdom of a creature which has pain receptors in
| its brain if you look hard enough.
| srean wrote:
| Don't get hung up on 'pain perception', my point sits at
| a higher level of abstraction. It has very little to do
| with biology, more to do with topology.
|
| If 'events at point_a' gets consciously interpreted by
| participation of cells one of which, lets call it
| point_b, is singularly dedicated to sensing events at
| point_a, we have a mapping in a mathematical sense from
| point a to point b. We know all such point_bs form a
| strict subset of the body, a part of the central nervous
| system.
|
| If this mapping is continuous in the mathematical sense
| and a contraction, then a fixed point has to exist (a
| location that does its own interpretation). But the fixed
| point seems biologically implausible, that leaves us with
| the alternative that there has to be dead-zones -- places
| where events can happen but cannot be interpreted.
| (Example blind spot in the eye)
|
| The way to avoid dead-zone would be to break continuity,
| or contractive property of the mapping.
|
| > I am sure you could find an example ... of a creature
| which has pain receptors in the brain ...
|
| I think my point would be easier to state for this
| hypothetical creature. If interpretation of pain is done
| by a strict subset of its cells and there is a one to one
| mapping -- at least one location b that interprets pain
| occurring at location a exclusively (presumably that's
| how the creature knows the pain is at 'a'), can this
| creature be free of dead-zones if the mapping is
| continuous and contractive. Can any creature free of
| dead-zones exist under those conditions. You claimed 'why
| not'. I am saying that if the mapping is a continuous
| contraction then either there has to exist dead zones or
| there is at least one self interpreting location.
|
| To give another example of this phenomenon, if you spread
| the map of your city somewhere in your city, there has to
| exist at least one point in the map that sits exactly
| above the point it is representing -- the fixed point.
| The way to avoid this would be to have 'tears' in the
| map, or to have points in your city that are not closer
| on the map than they are in the city (that would be an
| unusual map).
| skohan wrote:
| Yeah sure it does - probably you can conjure a cartoon in
| your mind of a brain modeling a brain modeling a brain all
| the way out to infinity. Maybe you already did when you were
| coming up with this problem.
|
| edit: since the other poster edited their comment, this was
| only responding to the infinite regression question, not
| their bizarre point about touch sensitivity
| XorNot wrote:
| Similar to the idea of the "infinite image". Take a 640x480
| square, and permute every possible combination of pixels.
|
| By definition: that space must contain a sizeable, or even
| complete, portion of all human knowledge that can ever be
| scrolled or exist in that image space.
|
| A lot of noise too, but the complete cure for cancer (if
| possible), FTL (if possible), immortality: what answers
| absolutely cannot be represented as several variations of
| the pixels of a 640x480 image?
| bobthechef wrote:
| I don't see how this is a "wow" moment. It is a straightforward
| consequence of prior materialist commitments, not a discovery
| of empirical science. If everything is "matter in motion", then
| ipso facto all mental activity is matter in motion. The problem
| is that materialism is completely untenable given the way
| materialism understands matter (e.g., the problem of qualia,
| the problem of intentionality, etc). Some materialists realize
| this, but double down and become eliminativists, which is very
| sad.
|
| Also, from what you have said it does not follow that all
| "mental content" is to be "located" in the brain. That you have
| brain correlates is not surprising, if only for the fact that
| without them you would need to wonder what the heck the brain
| is doing. But you will not find, in the materialist account, a
| way in which to account for abstraction in the brain. You
| cannot account for the concept "square" by appealing to the
| alone (as opposed to say the image of a particular square).
| skohan wrote:
| > But you will not find, in the materialist account, a way in
| which to account for abstraction in the brain. You cannot
| account for the concept "square" by appealing to the alone
| (as opposed to say the image of a particular square).
|
| What's wrong with assuming that abstraction is a function of
| neural activity which is facilitated by specific neural
| structures and processes?
| emrah wrote:
| > I don't see how this is a "wow" moment
|
| Questioning, debating and trying to refute someone else's wow
| moment is a wow moment!
| snail44box wrote:
| There's two classes of people in this world. The ones wishing to
| believe in nonsense and the others that prefer logic.
| Consciousness is just a human word that expresses nothing more
| than a fallacy that attracts people that prefer faith. Similar to
| quantum mechanics if one is ever capable of understanding
| superdeterminism. Hilariously the support that exists for the
| former, reflects the state of society and how humanity will
| continue to progress in the wrong direction until nothingness.
| sweetheart wrote:
| Generalizing everyone into either "believes in nonsense" or
| "uses logic" seems like a great way to have a bad time
| interacting with the other several billion members of our
| species.
| vehemenz wrote:
| A few thoughts.
|
| 1. Sean is leaving CalTech at the end of next year. It's not a
| huge surprise, given his interests, that he is pursuing the
| issues in the philosophy of mind that intersect with quantum
| physics. Most work in this area is unadulterated quackery, and he
| is one of the few physicists who understands philosophy well
| enough to not make me cringe.
|
| 2. Most physicists implicitly engage in ontological metaphysics--
| that the world's fundamental construction is of objects, and not
| say, facts (Wittgenstein) or logical structures or relations
| (Carnap). Which I suppose explains why Carroll is interested in
| the mental aspects of ontology.
|
| 3. His conclusion is that the laws of physics explain
| consciousness, but not to the degree of satisfying everyone. We
| need to develop better philosophical models for understanding it,
| rather than positing new (ahem, outlandish) metaphysical theories
| such as panpsychism. Hard to disagree here.
|
| 4. I wonder if Carroll's future work in philosophy will cause him
| to revisit the many-worlds interpretation of QM, which a fair
| share of philosophers believe carries too much metaphysical
| baggage. The idea of many worlds "existing" is a philosophical
| idea; it's not something you learn from studying physics.
| gliptic wrote:
| > 4. I wonder if Carroll's future work in philosophy will cause
| him to revisit the many-worlds interpretation of QM, which a
| fair share of philosophers believe carries too much
| metaphysical baggage. The idea of many worlds "existing" is a
| philosophical idea; it's not something you learn from studying
| physics.
|
| I think he would argue it carries the least metaphysical
| baggage as the worlds exist in the equations we have, unlike
| things posited by other interpretations.
| gpsx wrote:
| In the paper, Carrol goes through great pains to try reject
| people changing the laws of physics because they don't
| understand consciousness. This is exactly how I view people
| taking up the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,
| where the wave function of the entire universe collapses when
| a random person makes an observation. Instead I take
| Schrodinger's equation (and the many worlds interpretation)
| as the rule and what we observe illuminates how _we_ work, or
| more specifically how the brain and consciousness work.
| vehemenz wrote:
| That is exactly what he argues.
|
| But I think it's a tough position, given that relational
| quantum mechanics also works "out of the box" and doesn't
| require ontological realism and a deeply speculative
| metaphysics.
|
| Sean Carroll discusses this with Carlo Rovelli in two
| separate Mindscape episodes.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I don't grasp essential the difference between everettian
| and RQM.
|
| I'm both cases different observers observe different
| results.
|
| IIUC the "worlds" on the many worlds interpretation is just
| a convenient way to talk about the relationship between an
| observer and the possible states it can observe after the
| system and the observer have been entangled. The emergence
| of a world branch is not something that happens at some
| specific moment in time. This is also why branching can be
| viewed as happening at superluminal speeds, because it's
| not a physical phenomenon, just a shortcut for us to use to
| discard states that are no longer accessible to us.
|
| Whether that makes the many worlds interpretation more
| useful or less useful, it's a matter of context. However I
| have the impression that most people who oppose the view
| (e.g. citing how much more baggage it requires etc)
| fundamentally come from the mental trap of thinking that a
| conscious observer had a unique stream of consciousness and
| that anything that deviates from it would be inconceivable
| because "we don't experience it"
| vehemenz wrote:
| What you describe with respect to many worlds sounds more
| like possible worlds semantics. Someone not committed to
| the view might treat it as a formalism with no
| metaphysical baggage, but I don't think that is what the
| endorsors of many worlds believe. Carroll certainly
| believes in a universal wave function and actual many
| worlds. And there is definitely a difference between RQM:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-
| relational/#CompOtheIn...
|
| I am sympathetic to the idea that no one interpretation
| is 100% correct and that we shouldn't be deeply attached
| to any of them. Each may have its usefulness in different
| contexts. Independent of that, some interpretations more
| accurately describe the quantum world than others,
| surely.
| ithkuil wrote:
| This was my interpretation of Carroll's interpretation of
| the may worlds interpretation :-)
|
| I'm an avid listener to mindscape podcast and read of his
| books, so I'm likely "indoctrinated", as I don't really
| know much of these things.
|
| But I had the distinct impression that Carrol believes
| that all there is is the wave function of the universe
| and everything else (including the many worlds) are
| emergent phenomena. In a way many worlds are "real" in
| the same way that "chairs" are real.
| gliptic wrote:
| Interesting, I'll have to listen to that. Sounds pretty
| much like QBism though.
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| I dunno, it's hard to tell. Everett never wavered. It's not
| like everyone bought into MWI in the first place.
|
| As in everyone thought he was crazy until everyone realized he
| wasn't. Why go with general consensus now when general
| consensus was wrong from the start?
|
| Downvotes of course. Y'all do realize that the consensus of
| physics at one point was that the earth was flat right?
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| The essay is good tho. I fall on the camp that feels there's
| some surprises yet but it's definitely not panpsychics
| mykowebhn wrote:
| But facts are only facts if they correspond with that to which
| they refer, oftentimes other objects, so when you include
| facts, ultimately it boils down to external objects.
|
| I think you also failed to include Idealism, that the world's
| fundamental construction is of Reason. For the uninitiated or
| the naive, the notion of Idealism often degenerates in their
| minds to Solipsism, but it is far from that.
| vehemenz wrote:
| > But facts are only facts if they correspond with that to
| which they refer, oftentimes other objects, so when you
| include facts, ultimately it boils down to external objects.
|
| Only if ontological questions are legitimate questions about
| the world and not simply practical decisions about language.
| I, and many others, remain unconvinced.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| What judges whether an ontological question is legitimate
| or not? In order to ask such a question you are implying
| that there is something beyond the ontological questioner
| who can determine these things. What or who is this
| ultimate judge? God? A phantom? A unicorn? When you write
| "I, and many others, remain unconvinced" you are already
| under the assumption that you, and many others, can be this
| judge. And what is it about you, and many others, that can
| make this judgment? REASON!
|
| On one level you bring forth an argument against my points
| about Idealism, but your implicit assumptions in your
| arguments bely your reliance on many of these same points
| that I brought up.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > Aristotle (2002). _Metaphysics_
|
| Right...
| sampo wrote:
| Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to
| believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an
| emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected
| together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a
| higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry.
| That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No
| need to postulate anything supernatural, or anything outside
| current physics and chemistry. Just interactions on the
| biological level.
|
| It seems surprisingly common that people don't accept this
| "boring" explanation, but go to search for explanations outside
| of the known laws of physics.
| tracedddd wrote:
| The implications are uncomfortable both existentially and
| ethically, so people will go to great lengths to search for
| evidence of the contrary.
| mvcalder wrote:
| Or, most people's subjective experience provides constant
| overwhelming evidence of the contrary.
| snarfy wrote:
| As a software guy I think of it as trying to understand the
| execution of a complex web app by examining the machine
| instructions. At that level, how things happen is very apparent
| but why they do is pretty much lost.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Except that the web app has not evolved _naturally_ , i.e. by
| itself, from the machine instructions, like many emergent
| phenomena have.
| smokel wrote:
| I agree that it is amazing that people keep believing in
| obsolete theories, but it may not be all bad. In some areas of
| life, and to some people, very old theories have more
| explaining power than modern day science has. And they are
| often more comforting.
|
| If neural networks explain consciousness (which they may or may
| not do), then there are still some remaining issues to explain.
| For example, how can it be that our universe exists, and why
| are the laws of physics in place? And why are they so
| consistent?
|
| The consciousness problem may be unrelated to these problems
| about the fundamentals of science. It may well be that we can
| understand consciousness as a thing that exists entirely inside
| the laws of physics, but some people are not yet convinced. It
| may even be the case that the consciousness problem and the
| fundamental science problems are intrinsically related. Hence
| the interest in the combination of quantum mechanics and
| consciousness.
|
| One hint that points in this direction is that neural networks
| are a great basis for abstraction and logic. And by some
| coincidence this is exactly what can be used to form theories
| that explain everything we observe.
| hsn915 wrote:
| Would it not surprised you if you learned that the program you
| wrote in C++ and compiled to machine code would produce
| "subjective" feelings in the CPU when executed?
| morpheos137 wrote:
| If the program was coded to produce subjective feeling, no.
| Otherwise, it would suprise me very much. I believe what we
| call consciousness is selected for and is written into the
| structure our brains have. I do not beleive that consciouness
| exists outside of living brains. Maybe I am wrong but so far
| there has not been much evidence. I also do not believe
| consciousness is simply an accident but that it was
| specifically selected for by evolution.
|
| People who have taken psychedelics may disagree but I think
| consciouness is tightly connected with sense of self, the
| ego. An organism that is conscious can have a sense of self.
| An organism with a sense of self may have a greater degree of
| flexible self preservation / flexible self promotion than a
| simple stimulus response network. Because we are conscious we
| focus on what we are feeling about our selves not just on the
| immediate sensory stimulus. Pyschedelics may break down the
| connection / integration of senses with self giving rise to
| the illusion of consciousness outside of the self-brain. But
| I would say this is an illusion.
| foxhop wrote:
| Check out some documentaries on the octopus or the crow.
| You might have to revisit some of these theories.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Are you saying an octopus or a crow is not conscious? I
| am not saying that. To me it is clear that higher animals
| have a sense of self. Whether they can pass the paint dot
| test is another matter.
| avaer wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my CPU had feelings, if
| the CPU was created in a million year evolutionary process in
| which the lack of appropriate subjective feelings would have
| resulted in its death.
| foxhop wrote:
| Sure if it's badly written the CPU could get hot and all the
| side effects of running the code, maybe it's a virus.
|
| if the machine has consciousness of thought and not just
| continuity of data, it would feel pretty bad with it's
| sensors (maybe even some total pain threshold metric) and
| might even cry or complain to a near by sentient being for
| help.
|
| The problem is it may only speak to other beings of the same
| abstraction level, or higher and the listening being has to
| notice, have empathy, and the skillet to fix it.
| mynegation wrote:
| Depends on definition of "feelings". I can define a "feeling"
| of a CPU as its temperature, whether it is rising or going
| down, which does not sound too wild because CPU may react to
| it and decrease its frequency or shut off some cores. How
| about cache usage patterns that are literally coping
| mechanism with the necessity to access main memory?
| vermilingua wrote:
| This solution isn't ignored because it's boring, but because it
| isn't rigorous enough. If consciousness _just_ is an emergent
| property of the function of neural cells, define function,
| define neural cells? What is the lowest level of complexity of
| each that allows consciousness? Why only neural cells, that is
| if it is only neural cells at all?
|
| By the anthropic principle it is a given that consciousness
| arises from the function of neural cells, but that isn't a
| satisfying answer because it doesn't actually answer anything.
| hallgrim wrote:
| What aspect of consciousness does it not explain?
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _This solution isn't ignored because it's boring, but
| because it isn't rigorous enough._
|
| Well, this sounds like what they could say a thousand years
| ago: "the (say) Greeks' definition of what the natural
| luminous celestial body is not rigorous enough, so, let's
| ignore it and continue believing in the sun as a god."
| skohan wrote:
| Idk I tend to think it is rigorous enough, and maybe the fact
| that we don't intuitively believe it's rigorous enough is an
| artifact of an evolved spiritual impulse.
|
| It seems to me consciousness is something we have to have to
| exist the way that we do. In order for the human animal to
| function, we need to understand the past, predict the future,
| understand the motivations of others and come up with stories
| about the world we use to convince others and facilitate
| collaboration. Human society wouldn't be possible without
| consciousness, and I don't see more explanation needed than
| the idea that we evolved this ability for our brains to talk
| to themselves in this certain way through the series of
| selective pressures which lead us to where we are today.
|
| Other animals probably have some version of this at varying
| levels of complexity, and somewhere along the line you could
| probably draw a line and say a slug with 15 neurons probably
| is more of a biological machine, and doesn't have anything
| you could describe as consciousness or subjective experience.
| Maybe you even need a pretty advanced brain with a neocortex
| to allow for subjective experience.
|
| I don't know why some "spooky stuff" is needed, or why some
| reach for consciousness to be a property which arises in
| individual cells. I think it's probably a very complex thing
| which arises from very complex structures consisting of
| millions or billions of neurons.
| gus_massa wrote:
| AlphaStar[1] is an AI program that plays StarCraft against
| humans. The second version, that has a limited vision of
| the map and a limited number of clicks per second, plays
| quite humanlike.
|
| > * In order for the human animal to function, we need to
| understand the past, predict the future,*
|
| AlphaStar can do that (or at least simulate that). It it
| has seen a invisible helicopter, it remembers that. It also
| understand that the opponent has build an airport to make
| the helicopter and invested to research the invisibility
| feature. So other research are probably delayed. Also it
| expect to see more invisible helicopter in the future, so
| it builds detector for invisible units. Does it understand
| the past and the future or only simulates understanding?
|
| > _understand the motivations of others_
|
| If it sees an airport that is researching invisibility, it
| probably guess that the opponent wants to make invisible
| helicopters, and want to use the helicopters to attack it's
| units or buildings.
|
| > _and come up with stories about the world we use to
| convince others and facilitate collaboration. Human society
| wouldn 't be possible without consciousness,_
|
| AFAIK there is no multiplayer version of this AI, but it
| would be interesting to see one. It will be a difficult
| problem to choose how much communication to allow between
| to AI so they can play together, but not as a four-handled
| player. Also, how to interact with a human teammate. But it
| doesn't look impossible.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software)
| skohan wrote:
| I suspect things like this will converge towards AGI, and
| at a certain point, AI is going to be so embedded in our
| lives that whether or not it's truly conscious is going
| to seem like a pedantic distinction.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| There are various degrees of consciousness, awareness and
| abstraction capabilities between humans as well.
|
| The smarter the human, the more conscious and aware they
| are about the surroundings, the higher their ability to
| create and understand abstract concepts etc.
|
| Is this just the product of more numerous neurons? Better
| connected neurons? Higher density neurons in some areas of
| the brain? Is number of neurons correlated with IQ and in
| turn correlated to degree of consciousness and abstraction?
|
| We don't know yet, but it seems better advised to start
| looking at the base biological components first vs "spooky
| stuff"
| roberttod wrote:
| Could you explain why only some of our neurons are part of
| our consciousness? If it's emergent then why does only part
| of our nervous system get to experience the world, or is
| the other part also concious but we are not aware?
|
| There's a lot of tricky questions here that no one can
| really explain. I don't think the answer need be any
| "spookier" than any phenomenon that's unexplained - except
| maybe it's just surprising we've made so little progress at
| all.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _why only some of our neurons are part of our
| consciousness_
|
| Specialization. The same reason a why during ontogenesis
| some cells became neurons in the first place while other
| ones, something else.
| roberttod wrote:
| What is the property that makes those cells not concious?
| As you explain, there is some sort of difference there
| but it's not clear how that works.
| Koshkin wrote:
| In case of neurons, specialization is not so much
| structural as functional, and the function is determined
| by the location inside the brain; it is, then, not a
| single cell that is "conscious" but an entire system
| (plexus) of cells. This is analogous to a single
| transistor vs. the circuit it is part of.
| skohan wrote:
| > What is the property that makes those cells not
| concious?
|
| The only kind of evidence we have that anything is
| conscious is self reporting from other humans. For many
| vertebrates it seems plausible they have some level of
| consciousness based on observed behavior, but we don't
| really know.
|
| I'd say the burden of proof lays squarely on the side of
| proving that anything besides an advanced CNS is involved
| in consciousness. I see no reason anyone should have to
| disprove the existence of consciousness anywhere outside
| of a fairly advanced brain.
| roberttod wrote:
| I agree with most of this.
|
| > I see no reason anyone should have to disprove the
| existence of consciousness anywhere outside of a fairly
| advanced brain.
|
| There's a fairly big moral reason. Unless we can know
| what is concious and what is not, it's only right to be
| on the safe side and treat all organisms as if they are
| concious. How advanced should the CNS be before there's
| an obligation to not cause pain for an organism? (should
| we care about chickens in cages?)
| skohan wrote:
| I guess I would see this differently: it's fairly hard to
| prove a chicken is conscious, but it's fairly easy to
| prove that they can feel pain. I don't think you need
| consciousness to advocate against cruelty to animals.
| roberttod wrote:
| I think "cruelty" implies conciousness. You can't be
| cruel to a calculator.
|
| And I think pain implies conciousness. A calculator can't
| feel pain because it experiences nothing. To feel pain a
| chicken must experience something, it must be concious.
| skohan wrote:
| Which part of an internal combustion engine creates the
| forward motion of a car? Is it the fuel injector? The
| spark plugs? The pistons? Of course it's none of these
| things: the function of an engine is obviously a result
| of all of these parts of a complex system working
| together. It would be silly to claim that internal
| combustion is some intrinsic property of matter which
| exists at some level in the metal of the pistons, and
| maybe also in the doors of the car in a way we don't
| fully understand.
|
| Consciousness is observably a property of the brain.
| Consciousness can be predictably altered or removed by
| interfering with the chemical function at the synapse, or
| by inflicting physical trauma on brain tissue. Honestly I
| don't see what is so difficult to understand here.
| roberttod wrote:
| Consciousness cannot be measured, the only concious being
| we can know for certain is ourself. It's not an
| observable property (or we haven't figured out how to
| observe it). You could remove the wheels from a car and
| observe the engine running and the axels turning but it
| wouldn't go forward.
|
| Do you see the difference to your analogy? Forward
| movement can be measured. And if you removed parts of the
| car you would eventually get down to the bare minimum
| required for forward movement because you could observe
| it. You cannot do this with conciousness.
| skohan wrote:
| Oh I'd say we have plenty of ways to measure and observe
| consciousness. We can measure brain activity during sleep
| and understand with some precision whether someone is
| dreaming or not, which is a state of consciousness. We
| can give someone a psychoactive drug, and ask them
| questions about how their consciousness has been altered.
|
| > Forward movement can be measured. And if you removed
| parts of the car you would eventually get down to the
| bare minimum required for forward movement because you
| could observe it. You cannot do this with consciousness.
|
| What makes you so confident of this? We actually have
| plenty of evidence in this direction with consciousness.
| We can observe that lesions in different parts of the
| brain have very predictable effects on consciousness. We
| can observe that psychedelics like LSD reduce sensory
| inputs to the thalamus, having very predictable effects
| on consciousness. Consciousness is obviously a process
| which responds to physical intervention, so why should we
| jump to the conclusion that it somehow exists outside the
| bounds of the physical world rather than assuming that
| it's just one of many physical phenomena we have yet to
| fully understand?
|
| To give an example, we cannot reliably predict the
| movement of the economy. We can understand some of the
| forces guiding it, we can try to understand it in terms
| of certain metric, and we can take some actions to get
| the results we want, but ultimately we can't point to any
| one thing and say: "this is the economy". It's an
| emergent property of a vastly dynamic interconnected
| system of billions of independent actors, and as a result
| we will probably never be able to fully pin it down. But
| we don't assume that the economy moves as the result of
| some magical force controlled by the gods, we rightly
| know it's just something out of our grasp.
| roberttod wrote:
| Interesting point about observing conciousness changes in
| ourselves - that does indeed give us some insight. Though
| I'm not sure we could use this tool for a lot of the
| answers, it doesn't seem terribly precise (and doesn't
| let us know much about concious states that cannot be
| achieved with human brains).
|
| > why should we jump to the conclusion that it somehow
| exists outside the bounds of the physical world rather
| than assuming that it's just one of many physical
| phenomena we have yet to fully understand?
|
| I don't believe the cause of conciousness is magic or
| supernatural, it'll surely be a physical phenomenon. Just
| not sure if it emerges via some phenomenon that we
| haven't discovered yet.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| It's not difficult to accept that consciousness could be an
| emergent property, but it doesn't provide any insight.
|
| How do we get the abstraction layer of coherent thoughts from
| just a collection of neurons? We have no idea.
|
| Sure your explanation makes sense. But it's a bit like
| explaining the creation process of black holes with the words
| "they're an emergent property of gravity". It doesn't tell us
| anything, and if we want to understand it deeply we can't be
| satisfied with such a simple non-answer.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| I wouldn't call black holes "emergent". They do behave very
| similar to other gravitational objects -- just more
| "extreme".
|
| Another example are atoms: Most of their properties are easy
| to predict from the properties of their constituents and from
| the physical laws: The mass of atom is the sum of the mass of
| the constituents, minus the binding energy, which we can
| easily predict.
|
| But, for example, nucleon mass is emergent. Most of it is
| created dynamically by QCD, and we cannot easily predict it.
| We can, for example, not easily predict how the mass changes
| if we change properties of quarks or gluons. A brute-force
| lattice calculation is required.
|
| Weather is a similar example. We understand the basic rules,
| but weather patterns are only predictable with limited
| success and a lot of forward simulation.
| francasso wrote:
| I don't find it that difficult, in fact yours is just as much
| of a belief as the one of the people you subtly criticize. You
| believe that the standard model and gravity (or whatever
| unknown theory that can have some experimental evidence to
| generalize both) are enough to model the behavior of human
| beings/animal as an "emergent" phenomena, even though there is
| no direct evidence for that. Even worse actually, there is no
| mathematical model.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| There are various models that could possibly be developed to
| accurately account for the emergent complexity we experience.
| Dimensionality of causal sets and Wolfram's recent research
| into causal graphs come to mind.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Emergent phenomena are often hard to predict, like the
| weather. That doesn't actually tell us a whole lot about the
| underlying physics, it seems to me. The halting problem is an
| emergent property of turing machines, and we know
| mathematically that the behavior of a Turing machine cannot
| usually be predicted or mathematically modeled without just
| running it.
|
| The mathematical underpinnings of superconductivity are still
| in flux, but there's still every reason to believe that it's
| an emergent phenomenon from known physics. I don't see any
| obvious reason why consciousness can't be something like
| that.
| francasso wrote:
| I don't think either of those examples is in the same
| category as consciousness, or actually lets stick to
| "modeling of human and animal behavior", because I don't
| know what you mean by consciousness since we all have a
| feeling for what it is but there is no good precise
| definition, or framework in which you could give one.
|
| In both examples you made we do in fact have good
| mathematical descriptions that allow us to describe the
| system and the way it works, and moreover we can
| infer/predict non obvious things about it. Do you know of
| anything similar that can be applied to human/animal
| behavior?
| roywiggins wrote:
| My point is more that, even when you know the underlying
| mechanisms perfectly and with infinite precision, there
| are systems for which you can't make any statistical
| claims about its behavior. Even the Game of Life can
| encode a Turing machine, which makes its medium-term
| evolution impossible to predict ahead of time. That
| doesn't mean there's anything we are missing in our
| understanding of the rules of the Game of Life.
|
| Emergent behavior can be totally opaque, even when we
| have perfect understanding of the elements of the system.
| Just because the behavior is totally inscrutable doesn't
| mean there's anything we are missing about the underlying
| mechanisms. There's no hidden principle of Turing
| machines that would let us predict them reliably either-
| their underlying mechanisms are totally understood, the
| behavior is still essentially unknowable.
|
| Perhaps living systems are like that. It seems quite
| likely, since their underlying mechanisms are actually
| much more complicated than toy models like the Game of
| Life, that they can manifest totally opaque behavior
| without requiring any new physics at all.
| jcims wrote:
| 'Emergent phenomena' is the 'draw the rest of the damn owl' of
| this conversation. It's doing way too much work to be useful.
| It's like saying that life is an emergent phenomena from
| condensed energy.
| Koshkin wrote:
| It is as good as any sensible hypothesis: it allows us to
| focus on a more promising direction of research.
| dandanua wrote:
| This boring explanation is in the framework of classical
| physics. Quantum physics is very different. In QM, physical
| objects don't have definite states until observed. Any
| observation requires an observer. So, we have that states are
| relative to observers. But what is observer? It is our
| consciousness in the first place.
| dominicl wrote:
| Would love to discuss this over drinks. For me it's the
| opposite. It's feels pretty natural to me to imagine that
| intelligence and (perceived) free will are emergent properties.
| But consciousness troubles me, we still can't prove for anyone
| but ourselves that it does in fact exist - while it's existance
| is "apparent" to oneself. Also it does not make logical sense
| to me why such a feature should even develop, why have
| consciousness if you can have intelligence and problem solving
| without it? Loved the discussion between Lex Friedmann and Sam
| Harris on this very topic:
|
| https://youtu.be/4dC_nRYIDZU
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > Also it does not make logical sense to me why such a
| feature should even develop, why have consciousness if you
| can have intelligence and problem solving without it?
|
| Who/what says that you can? Consciousness seems to make most
| sense as a sliding scale than as a sudden switch.
|
| But even if you do argue that it's optional with
| intelligence, the reason it would be present would simply be:
| is the most efficient way to implement it.
| roberttod wrote:
| At what point does it immerge? What is the smallest unit? Is it
| a magic number of neurons, or when they get arranged in a
| certain way?
|
| There's a mystery in these questions, and I think that's well
| accepted. I've heard this "emergent property" explanation
| before but it seems kind of a handwavey way of avoiding
| answering any questions. "It just appears when you have enough
| neurons" is probably true but how?!
| Koshkin wrote:
| The "degree" of consciousness is certainly a function of the
| number of neurons functionally specialized for this
| particular purpose.
| hallgrim wrote:
| I agree. So far I have never heard any good arguments for why
| it should be more than an emergent property.
|
| Any aspect of consciousness that is usually brought up can
| either be attributed to some brain function, or the aspect is a
| wishy washy, hand-wavy property the emergence-skeptic can't
| quite define.
|
| The insight from the study of the minds of brain-damaged people
| alone gives fascinating insight into the interplay of
| mechanical defects and their experiential effects.
| binbag wrote:
| People don't accept it because it doesn't solve the problem.
| The problem is why an experience is had by someone, not why
| there is a mind.
| blamestross wrote:
| "Peter Watts: Conscious Ants and Human Hives"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I
| sdwr wrote:
| The author is edging the gap between hard materialism and
| something more.
|
| Axioms of hard materialism:
|
| - physical events have physical causes
|
| - everything is a physical event
|
| the associated tenets of science support a kind of intellectual
| "clean room", isolating rational thought (stories about things)
| from being contaminated by specks of human
| emotion/desire/serendipity.
|
| Other ontologies (including my lived experience) have different
| core principles.
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