[HN Gopher] Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life's Push Against...
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Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life's Push Against Entropy
Author : RageoftheRobots
Score : 153 points
Date : 2021-10-01 22:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| StuntPope wrote:
| This is very simple: consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the
| brain. It's a universal force. We don't emit consciousness, we
| tap into it and experience it as individuations.
|
| This why AI will never happen in the generalized sense. Because
| as long as we keep thinking we can engineer a mind out of matter,
| we'll keep chasing our tails.
|
| Matter is a by-product of the universal mind. And we all
| experience our lives as singular nodes of that mind.
|
| This has been known for millennia and is the basis for the world
| religions (which are mostly dumbed down co-optings of this).
|
| Also, Bitcoin fixes this.
| slibhb wrote:
| > I just read a wonderful novel, Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo
| Ishiguro, which is a beautiful articulation of all the ways in
| which having systems that give the appearance of being conscious
| can screw with our human psyches and minds.
|
| Boy, that is not at all what I got from Klara and the Sun.
| goatlover wrote:
| Indeed. But also since it's told from Klara's pov, she is
| clearly conscious, and not just appears to be. You can't write
| from first person without that person being conscious. The
| closest I've seen otherwise is Cibola Burn in the It Reaches
| Out chapters, but that's really third person omniscient telling
| the readers what is and is not conscious about the
| protomolecule. Miller yes, the reaching out, no by design.
|
| Anyway, the humans in Klara and the Sun don't even question
| that aspect of AFs. It's more of a biological snobbery and that
| the AFs are short lived like Blade Runner replicants, and
| replaced by newer models.
| [deleted]
| sgt101 wrote:
| Yeah - the consciousness is integrated thing shows a lack of
| experience with both drugs and schizophrenia
| [deleted]
| Strs2FillMyDrms wrote:
| When I was younger, I use to believe (maybe I still do) that all
| lifeform's purpose was to accelerate universe death, by transfer
| from matter to heat in the form of radiation, like we are just an
| extension of the universe's agency/"desire" towards that, and
| everything we do is aimed to that, but never actually thought
| about consciousness.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The universe became conscious enough to ask the question: 'what
| is all this?'
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Navel gazing
| diplodocusaur wrote:
| can you teach a computer to do it?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Yes, in 2 lines of code.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Imagine a sophisticated enough and transparent webcam with an
| infinite resolution and a curved enough lens (or mirror) such
| that it can see its own assembly.
|
| The funny part is every analogy we make is just something in
| this universe, so all we do is move the mysticism to a lowlier
| object.
|
| If we eventually do find out that materials cause
| consciousness, then material will become mystical. Really, we
| cannot win.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The idea to define life as the creation of local negative
| entropy, in a sense pushing disorder out of a local space is not
| new, in fact that's the premise of Schrodingers 1944 book, _What
| is Life?_ , which led him to speculate that human genetic
| information must be stored in something like a crystal, which he
| thought of as a prototypical structure for storing information,
| in a way anticipating the discovery of DNA.[1] (a helix instead
| of a crystal, but in principle not that far off)
|
| I'm not sure I agree though with the connection between life and
| consciousness in the article. I think it's very possible to have
| things that are alive in that entropic-displacing sense that need
| not be conscious or intelligent at all, say fairly trivial, self-
| replicating machines.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
| vcdimension wrote:
| A similar argument was made earlier by William James Sidis in
| his 1920 book "The Animate and the Inanimate" (in which he also
| predicted black holes) :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis#The_Animat...
| thunderbong wrote:
| I found the article very interesting and thought provoking. Some
| points from it -
|
| > We see the world not as it is, but as it's useful for us to do
| so.
|
| > A computer that plays chess is actually playing chess. But a
| computer simulation of a weather system does not generate actual
| weather. Weather is substrate-dependent.
|
| > This is why I tend toward the substrate-dependent view. This
| imperative for self-organization and self-preservation in living
| systems goes all the way down: Every cell within a body maintains
| its own existence just as the body as a whole does. What's more,
| unlike in a computer where you have this sharp distinction
| between hardware and software -- between substrate and what "runs
| on" that substrate -- in life, there isn't such a sharp divide.
| Where does the mind-ware stop and the wetware start? There isn't
| a clear answer. These, for me, are positive reasons to think that
| the substrate matters; a system that instantiates conscious
| experiences might have to be a system that cares about its
| persistence all the way down into its mechanisms, without some
| arbitrary cutoff. No, I can't demonstrate that for certain. But
| it's one interesting way in which living systems are different
| from computers, and it's a way which helps me understand
| consciousness as it's expressed in living systems.
|
| > I think the situation we're much more likely to find ourselves
| in is living in a world where artificial systems can give the
| extremely compelling impression that they are conscious, even
| when they are not. Or where we just have no way of knowing, but
| the systems will strongly try to convince us that they are.
| [deleted]
| paulclinger wrote:
| > Weather is substrate-dependent.
|
| That's true, but it doesn't mean that the simulation doesn't
| have desired effects in the real world. The simulation will not
| make you wet, but it will keep you dry if you use its
| predictions and take your umbrella with you.
|
| If consciousness is related to assessment of predictions and
| their effect on the organism, then those predictions can be
| assessed by living "through" them in the real or simulated
| world and there are significant advantages in doing this in
| simulation.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " Well, it must minimize the uncertainty of the states that it's
| in. I have to actively resist the second law of thermodynamics,
| so I don't dissipate into all kinds of states. "
|
| People often make this rhetorical mistake when speaking about the
| second law. Entropy is increasing full steam ahead, and what
| looks like a small bit of order is revealed to be hiding 'the man
| behind the curtain' i.e. a massive increase in entropy through
| the expulsion of heat, so more things in the universe can enter
| higher entropy states in vibrational modes, rotational modes,
| etc.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Seth's invocation of entropy is nowhere near as egregious as it
| is in the case of those creationists who claim that evolution
| would be a violation of the 2nd. law of thermodynamics, but I
| feel it is, ultimately, an argument that goes nowhere.
|
| His point is that living organisms are, temporarily, islands of
| relative order in a universe that is generally less so, which
| is both a fact and consonant with the 2nd. law. As all living
| organisms, not just conscious ones, share this feature, it is
| hardly a distinguishing feature, let alone an explanation, of
| consciousness.
|
| This has led some people to redefine consciousness to encompass
| all such systems, whether living or not - they all, supposedly,
| have a certain amount of of it, according to the proponents of
| panpsychism and its more quantitative offspring such as
| Integrated Information Theory (IIT).
|
| To me (and I am a materialist in matters of the mind), this
| seems to be an attempt to force consciousness into the woefully
| inadequate explanations we currently have on hand. The sort of
| consciousness we are most interested in, and are most
| challenged by, is the sort of self-aware, language-creating,
| theory-of-mind holding consciousness that is most fully
| developed in our own species (and probably in some of our
| extinct predecessors), not the sort of consciousness that might
| be attributed to a paramecium or a thermostatically controlled
| building. It is not useful to lump together such a diverse
| range of phenomena, and we are only fooling ourselves if we
| claim that anodyne statements about preserving order against a
| chaotic universe are, in any useful sense, an explanation of
| consciousness.
|
| For a much more thorough critique of IIT specifically, see
| Scott Aaronson:
|
| https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Humans define order. Entropy increasing is just like a
| falling water fall. If you zoom in on some region of chaos
| and say look at this pattern (like in cellular automata), you
| have defined that to be meaningful order. Every state in the
| statistical ensemble has equal likelihood of occurring, there
| just happen to be a small subset of interest to human minds.
| simonh wrote:
| This is the big problem with the idea that consciousness is
| just complexity, and that sufficiently complex systems might
| become conscious. Stars, storms, gas giant planets, nebulae,
| etc. The problem is these things are complex yes, but except at
| a very macroscopic level they have no mechanism to maintain a
| consistent state, or to control and reliably change that state.
| They're just heaving masses of particles. Computers and the
| brain are incredibly ordered systems, and are incredibly
| fragile to even the tiniest disruption of that order.
| akyu wrote:
| Is that not what 'actively resist' means?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| yes, the 2nd law applies within closed systems. You can cheat
| in reality (where closed systems don't actually exist) by
| taking energy from outside a bounded territory (say, a human
| body) and using it to resist entropy. He doesn't call it by
| name, but he's referencing autopoiesis (or, continuous self-
| creation) and homeostasis (self-regulation of properties
| through balancing feedback loops). Both of these processes
| consume energy (leading to overall entropy increase), but you
| can nick that energy from the "environment" through food or
| photosynthesis or whatever.
| monkeycantype wrote:
| Which means that ordered systems must create disorder in
| order to maintain their own order, and the place where you
| find the greatest order to disorder is in other actively
| ordered systems. I blame entropy for the existence of evil,
| if there is a sentient omniscient creator, there better be a
| good reason for it, and if the reason turns out to be that
| entropy is the ongoing cost of His omniscient observation of
| every interaction, The tax of Her constant measurement I
| shall be both outraged and secretly satisfied that I was
| right all along.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Entropy is a not instilled by a creator, but a natural
| consequence of math.
|
| If the number of states labelled ordered is substantially
| smaller than the number of states labelled disordered and a
| system moves essentially randomly between states, it is far
| more likely that it will spend most of its time in a
| disordered state.
|
| Entropy is just the universe settling into a state that
| cannot be meaningfully differentiated from most other
| states; there are far more of these than differentiable
| states, and so it's overwhelmingly likely that the universe
| ends up there.
| monkeycantype wrote:
| I do get that. While I understand that some people firmly
| believe in a literal creator, in my case it's an
| anthropomorphisation of all that is unknowable and truly
| fundamental to the existence of our universe, just as the
| green woman with the spiky hat is an anthropomorphisation
| of liberty. The difference being that I stay open to the
| idea that the creator might be conscious because I have
| no way of disproving it, where I'd put put hundred
| dollars down that the green lady is a big chunk of metal
| with a slap of copper and asbestos over the top.
|
| I don't know if other universes with different maths are
| possible. Greg Egan's books take my to the limit of my
| conceptual capacity, but I do think there are limits to
| what it is possible to know from within this universe,
| because everything needs to be built up from axioms from
| this universe. I agree with your explanation, right now
| while I'm sitting here in this universe, but if the
| celestial teapot turns up this afternoon and takes us
| both to perpetual motion machine universe, we might start
| to see things differently
| jtsiskin wrote:
| ...but why assume a system moves essentially randomly
| between states?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 1. Occam's razor
|
| 2. got any other ideas? (remember, we're talking about
| large scale, statistical systems)
| figure8 wrote:
| Ergodicity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity
| systemsignal wrote:
| But life probably wouldn't exist if entropy wasn't
| increasing
|
| Life exists because it increases the entropy in the
| universe
| meowkit wrote:
| > Life exists because it increases the entropy in the
| universe
|
| This is an concise idea I sit on quite often.
|
| Is this a commonly known idea? Among
| scientists/engineers/philosopher types? Would appreciate
| other thoughts.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Yes, we taught this during course 3 thermo @ MIT. The
| mystery is how the hell the universe started at such low
| entropy.
|
| We can predict the final total maximum entropy of the
| visible universe, we are about half way there. Life
| produces entropy, but not as 'efficiently' as exploding
| stars.
| efokschaner wrote:
| This subject is discussed in the pop sci work of PBS
| spacetime https://youtu.be/GcfLZSL7YGw with reference to
| articles and books if you're looking for more
| monkeycantype wrote:
| I think so, I've gone back to university to study
| biology, and I'm encountering two complimentary
| perspectives on what life is, a pragmatic classification
| version that says: ok - of the things that we see which
| ones are alive and which aren't and what are the
| distinguishing characteristics? and a second definitional
| version, blending Schroedinger and Shannon, that says
| life seems to be information propagating itself, but
| we're not going examine you on that in first year
| genomics.
| monkeycantype wrote:
| Yes, in this universe, life as we know it is a salmon of
| order swimming up the waterfall of entropy, every flick
| of it tail powered by its shit fouling the river, because
| life in this universe is spec'd to the constraints of
| this universe. But perhaps we can't find the aliens
| because they have tunnelled out, off to another gentler
| universe where they grow forever in n dimensions of time
| and space pondering the beauty of all the integers.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| This is lovely but why would they leave their home? There
| are very unlikely to find another place equally
| comfortable to the one in which they evolved.
| monkeycantype wrote:
| That's a good question Ted.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Life exists because it increases the entropy in the
| universe
|
| Life causes entropy, but do you literally mean it exists
| because it increases entropy? I don't see the connection,
| only that life causes entropy. Can you explain?
| systemsignal wrote:
| Not a great answer but basically everything that occurs
| in this Universe must increase the overall entropy of the
| universe (second law)
|
| Of course local entropy can decrease, hopefully in a way
| that is beneficial to our little corner of the universe
| :)
|
| Would recommend Schrodingers "what is life" if interested
| further in life/entropy
| codeisawesome wrote:
| > Which means that ordered systems must create disorder in
| order to maintain their own order, and the place where you
| find the greatest order to disorder is in other actively
| ordered systems.
|
| Wow, that also nicely explains how colonisation &
| impoverishment of some human groups is necessary in the
| current framework, so that high HDI can be achieved in
| other human groups (which then explains various historical
| facts).
|
| This makes space exploration and attempts of automated
| resource extraction from celestial objects a noble goal,
| something that can achieve world peace (assuming the
| results are distributed).
| monkeycantype wrote:
| Your comment seems to have been slapped, perhaps on the
| interpretation that you are justifying colonialism, or
| perhaps on the interpretation that you are engaging in
| space billionaire boosterism, but I read you comment very
| differently. That our islands of enlightenment rest on
| pillars of violence, and restumping our civilisation on a
| foundation of justice and sustainability isn't anti-
| enlightenment, it is the enlightenment project, and it's
| taking us hundreds of years not always moving forwards.
| codeisawesome wrote:
| Yes, I'm definitely not supporting colonisation. I'm from
| a country who's prospects were stunted by merciless
| resource extraction. I wish it didn't happen. I'm simply
| saying that, it's the "lowest common denominator" means
| of achieving progress and geo-local maxima by causing
| ethical global minima. Hence, space exploration is a
| noble alternative in comparison - extract your resources
| from dead zones in space and have a human utopia for all
| here on earth.
| myfartsarefoul wrote:
| Does anyone else feel like Quanta is mostly a hype machine? I
| hear about seemingly earth shattering research there and never
| hear about it again.
| akyu wrote:
| No.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| There are millions of discoveries per year because the universe
| has unbounded complexity and detail. Only a small subset of
| discoveries would ever impact someone.
| juliangamble wrote:
| Theory of Mind/Metacognition/Sense of Agency is well defined in
| the literature based on decades of research:
| https://aeon.co/essays/is-there-a-symmetry-between-metacogni...
|
| For the latest in consciousness research - look at:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.12798 Here (p14) they make artificial
| consciousness testable by making mental models of action, and the
| conscious 'thought' is the difference between what the action
| that was expected vs the action that occurred.
| uwagar wrote:
| consciousness is anti-gravity, silent like a reflection with the
| wonder of a sudden rainbow.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| alternative title: Anil Seth rediscovers the Law of Requisite
| Variety.
| amelius wrote:
| > I have to actively resist the second law of thermodynamics, so
| I don't dissipate into all kinds of states.
|
| Breaking physics is not how biology works.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I read recently of a paper that proposed a mechanism for
| information conservation during black hole evaporation. The model
| was that information was preserved within the black hole on some
| layer that was not destroyed, and the information was
| subsequently released as the black hole evaporated.
|
| I am not a physicist but the Hawking model that black holes
| destroy information always struck me as an asymmetry. Apparently
| that asymmetry also motivated some researchers who know more than
| me.
|
| Is there actually evidence for the conservation of information?
| I'm not even sure what information refers to within this context,
| but the writeup on the paper I read used that term.
|
| I have toyed with the idea that the anthropic principle doesn't
| just rely on chance events on really long time scales. If indeed
| information is indestructible, the universe could be in a birth-
| death cycle of refinement, where it orders information in ways to
| increase self-awareness each cycle.
| bglusman wrote:
| You might be interested in Lee Smolin's book which explores
| this very hypothesis, among others and a generally fascinating
| review of how physics got where it is...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_Cosmos
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| When I was a grad student I once attended a lecture by Kip
| Thorne (before he won the Nobel prize but after Interstellar
| came out). He basically implied something that is vaguely
| heretical (and kinda tangential to the above): we should look
| for aliens _inside_ black holes because thats where they
| prefer to be. For one, from their point of view (and this
| situation was sort of enacted in Interstellar) they can
| observe our epic timescales in "real time". This puts the
| phrase "angels dancing on the head of a pin" in a new light,
| where pin could be loosely interpreted to mean "singularity",
| I suppose.
| a9h74j wrote:
| FWIW, I could be mistaken, but I once heard that the spirit
| of that question (angels on the head of the pin) was less
| about realism than countability -- i.e. more like asking
| about the countablility of the Real Numbers in an interval,
| or something of that sort. One way or another I took it as
| a much more generous description.
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| Interesting, do you have a citation? The Wikipedia page
| mentions nothing like that..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_o
| n_t...
| a9h74j wrote:
| 'Countability' is too precise a term for the meaning or
| context. The article as I read it makes the core point I
| wanted to express: a derisive reference to scholarship of
| the time period as obcessed with "angels on pinheads" is
| probably ungenerous.
|
| If you know of JMG one statement of his was roughly this:
| Every school-child (of that time period) used to know
| that an 'eternal being' was outside of time, not a being
| [within time] that would "live forever."
|
| That is, 'eternal' apparently had a precise sense [then]
| which most are now ignorant of. Again, I could be wrong.
|
| It is hard for me to look down on curiousity about "what
| could be outside of time" when it remains a popular
| science question -- i.e., where did the big bang happen?,
| etc
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Based on your nick, I'm guessing that Kip Thorne lecture
| didn't help your grades.
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| He turned me into a new believer so what can I do? At
| least i have someone to blame now
| maceurt wrote:
| Some things are just beyond what Humans will ever understand in
| my opinion. Consciousness is one of those things. A computer that
| is able to understand itself completely would be infinitely
| powerful since its understanding would be recursive over each new
| understanding state.
| dennis_moore wrote:
| Nah, it would be limited by its stack size ;)
| [deleted]
| lngnmn2 wrote:
| This, is, of course, nonsense.
|
| Consciousness implies awareness and perception of the world (and
| not necessarily self-awareness and ability of introspection).
|
| And life is a result of selection what works and fits by trial
| and error.
|
| Cells are mechanisms and aggregates of other mechanisms. The more
| correct word would be a process. Biological processes, which is a
| biochemical processes.
| cratermoon wrote:
| This kind of aligns with the ideas presented in the 1980 book
| _Life beyond Earth : the intelligent Earthling 's guide to life
| in the universe_. A major part of the thesis the authors (Gerald
| Feinberg and Robert Shapiro) present is that "life" can be
| identified not only by the biological processes we are familiar
| with on earth, but by its ability to accumulate energy for
| organized processes.
| sayonaraman wrote:
| I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about
| is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more
| fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human
| (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive
| spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept
| spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of
| neurons communicate and synchronize for particular tasks, or just
| figuring out what exactly are those "tasks", the basic
| computational primitives of adaptation in "lower" animals and
| insects, let alone humans.
|
| While scientific reductionism has its limitations (e.g. trying to
| fully describe the complexity of a single neuron in c.elegans is
| sort of a rabbit hole) you still have to understand at least some
| of the basic mechanisms, the "LEGO blocks" of cognition, before
| talking about such higher level of abstraction, especially when
| it's so ill-defined.
|
| I think Feynman' definition of "cargo cult science" is
| appropriate here, where we are trying to explain our perception
| of reality via superficial "neural correlates", or attaching to
| it these arbitrary "complexity theories", etc., without
| understanding the fundamental driving factors, mechanics and
| constraints of perception, the "why" and "how" first.
| kovek wrote:
| Qualia is the ability to experience for example the color red.
| Or the color blue. An exercise... The universe is interesting,
| it contains some fields, some particles, some quarks, protons,
| electrons, photons. Some places don't have light and others do
| have light. The universe is even more interesting by the fact
| that it also contains experience. For some reason we see
| colors. It is absolutely true. Another thing that we experience
| is thoughts. They are all different allocations/structures of
| attention, but they are undeniable parts of the universe.
| jahnu wrote:
| To be a bit more precise, qualia are not the ability but they
| are the actual experiential event. The sensation, the
| conscious experience of seeing red.
|
| What qualia are made up of are not easy to be accurate about.
| My favourite thought experiment that interrogates this
| question is,
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| That's a transparently poor argument because it assumes
| that Mary's knowledge is complete.
|
| Of course it isn't. We have a very poor understanding of
| brain states. So all we can say is that Mary will learn
| something new _today_. But it 's not reasonable to extend
| this to an assumption that a physicalist explanation of
| qualia is impossible _in principle_ and will become
| available in the future.
|
| As it happens I'm not a physicalist, and I suspect - but
| can't prove - that physicalism won't solve this problem.
|
| But I also don't like poor arguments, and I think the
| Knowledge Argument is not a good one.
|
| The problem is more fundamental. Qualia are definitively
| subjective and the only way to prove that physicalism
| explains them is to somehow make them objective - with some
| kind of qualia-ometer. Or consciousness-ometer. Or
| something similar.
|
| That doesn't mean finding correlates - neural states,
| chemical processes, quantum uncertainty, whatever. It means
| being able to measure experience itself.
|
| Without that you can build simulacra that show all the
| correlates, and possibly behave as if they're conscious.
|
| But all you've done is built a robot. You can't prove it
| actually has experience - including self-awareness - unless
| you can measure experience with objective instrumentation.
|
| This is a nice paradox, because it requires science to
| measure subjectivity itself.
|
| It may or may not be possible. But clearly it's not
| possible now, and is unlikely to become possible any time
| soon.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| I wonder, might the fact that 'observation' has
| measurable effects, e.g. in the double-slit experiment,
| be a vector for inquiry into the question of qualia? I
| don't need to observe the path of a photon in the DSE to
| know whether someone else has observed it if I can see
| the presence or absence of an interference pattern. If we
| get better at formalising what 'observation' means in
| that context, do you think it could be used to arrive at
| a measure of subjectivity?
| sidlls wrote:
| "But all you've done is built a robot. You can't prove it
| actually has experience - including self-awareness -
| unless you can measure experience with objective
| instrumentation."
|
| We build things all the time based on the models of the
| universe we've got. Your argument strikes me as more or
| less saying, "sure, we built that jet engine, but unless
| we can measure what 'being a jet engine' is we've just
| not really built the complete, real thing."
|
| If we build a thing that appears to have "experiences"
| indistinguishably from how humans appear to, then that is
| it. That is, the notion of "experience," as you describe
| it, is more or less meaningless in the context of the
| very physical world we occupy.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| What is thought? What is a thought?
| goatlover wrote:
| How about consciousness is color, sound, taste, smell, tactile
| and other bodily sensations in perception, dreams, memories,
| imagination, hallucinations and other mental states. Pain isn't
| a fuzzy concept. You are well acquainted with what pain feels
| like for you.
| WithinReason wrote:
| My favorite description of consciousness is from Max Tegmark:
|
| "I think that consciousness is the way information feels when
| being processed in certain complex ways."
| namero999 wrote:
| It strikes me as inconsequential since it presupposes that
| which is trying to characterize: feeling.
| civilized wrote:
| I send "AI" to the spam folder in general. No one who is
| actually doing AI calls it AI. It's only called AI in glossy
| consultant brochures with stock images of a man in a business
| suit surfing through a tunnel of glowing blue numbers.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| https://aaai.org
|
| https://www.ijcai.org
|
| It is used by researchers.
| civilized wrote:
| The exceptions that prove the rule. These are the most
| consultant-surfing-glowing-blue-number-flavored
| conferences.
| telmo wrote:
| Everyone calls it AI. It just so happens that it became a
| large field, so people tend to say that they work in Machine
| Learning, or Reinforcement Learning, or Evolutionary
| Computation. The same as in any other field really.
|
| Also: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/artificial-
| intelligence
| systemsignal wrote:
| OpenAI?
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Not researchers, according to the peanut gallery.
|
| I'm quite certain Demis Hassabis uses the term regularly,
| Nature should unpublish him.
| simonh wrote:
| Science is about finding the answers to questions, and
| philosophy is about working out what the right questions are,
| which can be surprisingly tricky. The two progress hand in
| hand. Philosophy isn't just 'bad science'.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Feynman was perhaps a little bit too skeptical of some things.
|
| Everything at one time escaped basic explanation from parts
| (and there always will be, you can't really explain _why_ the
| standard model, or whatever more fundamental system which might
| surpass it)
|
| Consciousness is on the edge of being understood quite a lot
| better as neurobiology is progressing quite quickly.
| willis936 wrote:
| All that it reveals is that our suspicions of ontological
| nihilism were likely correct all along. The universe does not
| give you purpose or reason. You make your own.
| yazanobeidi wrote:
| That is not completely correct. We have inherent biological
| drives from lower level temperature regulation and such to
| nutrition intake and on an even higher level a proclivity
| for social interaction including reproduction. The ways
| these frames can be aligned and satisfied are not infinite.
| So some level of constraints and requirements are pre-
| specified. A person's chosen behaviour must fit within this
| structure and that of others for it to be sustainable.
| neonological wrote:
| Consciousness doesn't really exist universally as a concept.
| It's purely a human thing.
|
| For example music. Music is just a series of sounds patterned
| in a specific way. Not any pattern of sound can be music but a
| pattern of sound following a very specific set of thousands of
| human centric rules that are too complex to formalize
| represents music. A formalization certainly exists but writing
| it down or deducing these rules would result in something
| that's 10000 pages long. These rules are completely arbitrary
| and a product of biological evolution. Music in a sense is just
| a made up category of immense complexity but the key point
| remains the same. The category is made up and completely
| arbitrary.
|
| The same can be said of consciousness. It's just a certain type
| of intelligence that posseses thousands of attributes that are
| too numerous in number to fully write down. Like music, the
| rules defining consciousness are arbitrary. It doesn't
| represent anything fundamental about the universe it's just a
| word very specific to the human experience.
|
| This trying to understand intelligence through the "lens" of
| consciousness is a biased and erroneous venture. It's more an
| exploration of human biology then it is an investigation of a
| foundational universal theory of logic and intelligence.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I agree with this. There are so many philosophical debates out
| there regarding what happens after we die, if animals are
| "conscious", if computers or AI could have "consciousness", but
| in my opinion it's all a big illusion created out of our own
| egos as a rationalization for our existence.
|
| We are biological machines. Sure, we have an awareness of
| ourselves, but so do computers in some contexts; for example
| you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring
| code has an awareness of itself. It's already been proven that
| animals have an awareness of themselves when looking in a
| mirror, such as Dolphins, Chimpanzees, etc. Humans may be a bit
| further along in our cognitive development but there is no
| obvious point where you can say "Humans are conscious" because
| we're all somewhere on a sliding scale of intelligence and
| self-awareness.
| throwdecro wrote:
| > you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or
| monitoring code has an awareness of itself.
|
| Having a representation of itself doesn't mean it has an
| awareness of itself.
| mach1ne wrote:
| Isn't that precisely what it means? You are aware of
| something, thus you can take it and its aspects into
| consideration in your calculations. You have a
| representation of yourself - same thing. Of course your
| representation may not be completely accurate, but what
| perception would be.
| jcims wrote:
| _Vegans entered the chat_
|
| (sorry) This would mean, at a minimum, that every
| biological entity down to single cell organisms are
| conscious. They could be, I don't know.
| andybak wrote:
| > Isn't that precisely what it means?
|
| Maybe or maybe not. This is the nub of the debate. I
| would argue that answering "yes" to this is a partial
| endorsement of pan-psychism. If the ability to experience
| qualia is property of certain algorithms or types of
| information flow then it's a fundemental property of the
| universe.
|
| Thought experiments about p-zombies and mind simulation
| are an interesting litmus test to separate different
| points of view on this.
| kitd wrote:
| You say that as an outsider able to view both code and its
| representation. The code itself only 'sees' its
| representation as itself.
| systemsignal wrote:
| There is actual an obvious point...
|
| Everytime you wake up in the morning.
|
| Some work detecting it as well for medical reasons
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.3006294
| namero999 wrote:
| Yes, it's fuzzy just because there doesn't seem to be a general
| widespread agreement on terminology, even among "experts", so
| that someone uses the word consciousness meaning something
| completely different than someone else. It seems that each time
| one wants to embark in a consciousness discussion, there should
| be a glossary preamble to specify definitions.
|
| Regardless of the breadth of the spectrum of definitions, at
| the very bottom you find phenomenal consciousness. The given,
| undeniable fact that "it feels like something". We don't have a
| plausible avenue, not even in principle, to even start
| addressing this fact of existence, to the point that the most
| rational stance is to assume that it is fundamental in nature.
| chmsky00 wrote:
| You ignore all the dumb ideas that came before Feynman. Falsify
| a theory specifically. Hand waving it away with gatekeeping
| weak.
|
| IMO Biology explains consciousness fine. Reinforcement of
| sensory data given repeat exposure leaves agency memory.
|
| I think "higher abstraction" is such a flimsy term as to be
| meaningless.
|
| Nothing is more or less abstract. It's just the abstract it
| needs to be to "exist". Humans are the abstract they need to be
| to exist on Earth.
|
| This idea there's layers of abstraction and meaning beyond what
| we can know literally is just a neural implant from years of
| having tribal elders dictating we fetishize a small set of bad
| ideas ad naseum, we conjure alternatives in order to escape.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I'm not sure it's fuzzy. Hard to describe with words, sure, but
| not fuzzy. I have a high degree of certainty when someone else
| is talking about their own consciousness and when they're not.
|
| For example, when an optometrist or neurologist talks about
| "sight" they're talking about the biochemical mechanisms that
| allow us to see. When I read Plato say "I see therefor I am" it
| was clear to me he was describing the metaphysical act of
| personal perception. He was describing the "observer" that was
| present in the moment, perceiving the biochemical process, not
| sight itself.
|
| Consciousness is something you likely have. But we (humans)
| don't know what it is. To my knowledge, we don't even know
| where to start looking for it. Consciousness belongs to the
| mystics today, by default, because science can not claim it.
| There isn't something we can hold and point to saying "this,
| this is what the mystics call a soul."
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > Consciousness belongs to the mystics today, by default,
| because science can not claim it.
|
| Science doesn't yet have an answer, but that doesn't grant
| the mystics any credibility. There is no 'by default' when we
| don't know. I'm reminded of a Dawkins quote:
|
| Lecturer: _Scientists answer questions of 'how'. If your
| question is 'why', I refer you to the theologians._
|
| Dawkins: _Why the theologians? Why not the gardeners?_
|
| (Trivia: If I recall correctly, Dawkins didn't actually give
| this response, he thought it up far too late.)
|
| > There isn't something we can hold and point to saying
| "this, this is what the mystics call a soul."
|
| That isn't a game-over, though.
|
| The same goes for information processing, but we're fairly
| confident in what we call a 'computer'.
|
| You can't hold a center-of-gravity, but we're able to reason
| about those pretty clearly.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I think you misunderstood me. In the vacuum of science
| providing an answer, someone will.
|
| > Dawkins: Why the theologians? Why not the gardeners?
|
| I've never heard this. My initial reaction is that "god"
| exists in the unknown. Asking "why go to the mystics for
| mystical stuff" is a tautology. If you go to the gardener
| with a question unanswered by science, and they have an
| answer, they're a mystic (or have made a scientific
| breakthrough).
|
| > You can't hold a center-of-gravity, but we're able to
| reason about those pretty clearly.
|
| Consciousness is not understood. Full stop. We don't know
| what manifests it. We don't know where it comes from. We
| don't know where it goes.
|
| We've scratched the surface of the biological mechanisms
| that give rise to the phenomenon we experience. If you look
| at me and see a biological computer, I think your statement
| holds. But when I look at me, in a mirror, I see a
| biological vessel I occupy; and I don't know what "I" is.
|
| Trying to oversell our understanding of the universe and
| our place in it does a disservice to science and the work
| left to be done.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| In your view, is information a fundamental or emergent
| phenomena in physics?
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