[HN Gopher] What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996)
___________________________________________________________________
What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996)
Author : optimalsolver
Score : 52 points
Date : 2024-12-30 12:18 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (annakaharris.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (annakaharris.com)
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Being a thermostat is fucking exhausting. My wife and I are the
| equivalent of a thermostat for our type 1 diabetic son's blood
| sugar. It's in our face 24/7.
| frxhvcdtgf wrote:
| My son has a dozen or so food allergies. It is exhausting.
|
| Then, I know people with autistic kids. Wow.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| "Health is a crown that the healthy wear, but only the sick
| can see."
|
| This applies to so many things, not just health. You only
| appreciate it when it happens to you, or you get a snapshot
| of someone else's life and it humbles you.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I'm type 1 myself, so I feel for you. People don't realize that
| the hardest part is NOT needles or anything like that, it's the
| constant mental overhead of thinking about and managing your
| blood sugar every moment of every day. Every decision you make
| is informed by it. You make literally hundreds of micro and
| macro decisions related to your diabetes every day.
|
| A CGM and insulin pump have made my life easier.
|
| How old is your son?
| GiorgioG wrote:
| He is 13 and he wears a Tandem X2 w/Dexcom G6 (soon to be
| G7?). It certainly makes life easier, but like you said
| there's constant mental overhead. We have SugarPixels all
| over the house, etc. His pump beeps at him so often he's just
| become accustomed to it and ignores it until he starts
| feeling bad (typically when he's going low). But that also
| means that it limits his ability to do things, he's got only
| a handful of friends that we trust leaving him alone at their
| home because their parents are willing to keep checking on
| him, etc.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Being a caregiver for a kid with t1 is exhausting, so kudos
| to you and your wife.
|
| The mental burden is SO HIGH for both the person with the
| condition and their caregivers. At some point if it feels
| right, it might be worth having him see a therapist or a
| counselor who specializes in chronic diseases. There's a
| very high correlation between depression and type 1
| diabetes (last I read, you're like 300% more likely to
| experience severe depression as a T1D.) Especially once he
| goes into his teenage years, that's a really hard time for
| a lot of us diabetics (and sometimes during the
| "rebellious" phase, a kid will intentionally stop taking
| care of their diabetes).
|
| > His pump beeps at him so often he's just become
| accustomed to it and ignores it
|
| This is a real problem with insulin pumps and CGMs, because
| alarm fatigue is a real thing. It makes me mad that they
| insist on putting in all these alarms you can't configure,
| because eventually you just start ignoring it. For my CGM,
| I use xDrip which gives me much more customization around
| my alarms: I just leave on the ones that are important to
| me.
| cperciva wrote:
| Closed loop. Seriously, my t1d-related mental exhaustion is 90%
| reduced now that I'm using a closed loop. 95% if you don't
| count the "why did androidaps disconnect from my pump and which
| bit do I need to restart to get it working again" headaches.
|
| In a way it's eliminating _too much_ mental effort; while it 's
| useful as a backup, the fact I sometimes completely forget to
| take insulin with meals is not ideal, even if the closed loop
| notices and takes care of it for me (since there's inherently
| more lag when relying on the loop than if I dialed in the
| insulin at meal time).
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Do you still enter carbs, or do you just announce meals? I
| know some people with closed loops just do the latter. If you
| don't mind sharing, what's your time in range?
|
| I have the Omnipod 5 which is decent, but it's "closed loop"
| abilities are extremely conservative and a bit disappointing.
| I've considered going the full way with androidaps, but
| haven't taken the leap yet.
| cperciva wrote:
| Androidaps says I'm 85% within 3.9-10.0 (70-180) in the
| past week. I enter carbs but only to a resolution of 10g;
| and as I mentioned earlier I sometimes forget to enter them
| entirely.
|
| Are you using a Dexcom with your omnipod? My impression is
| that the quality of sensor is the most important factor;
| with a flaky sensor looping algorithms will be more
| conservative since they (reasonably) prioritize avoiding
| lows.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > Androidaps says I'm 85% within 3.9-10.0 (70-180) in the
| past week
|
| Nice!
|
| > I enter carbs but only to a resolution of 10g; and as I
| mentioned earlier I sometimes forget to enter them
| entirely.
|
| I'm pretty bad at accurately entering carbs. I eat out
| enough that I've just gotten to the point where I just
| come up with a rough estimate (which is often wrong).
| Which means I have to adjust later pretty frequently with
| snacks or correction doses. Not ideal, but I got so much
| "carb counting fatigue" over the years.
|
| > Are you using a Dexcom with your omnipod? My impression
| is that the quality of sensor is the most important
| factor; with a flaky sensor looping algorithms will be
| more conservative since they (reasonably) prioritize
| avoiding lows.
|
| Yeah, I'm on the G6 still. I think the quality of my
| readings is pretty good, but the Omnipod 5 algorithm is
| pretty conservative anyway: rather than naturally
| bringing you down from a high, you usually have to
| explicitly give yourself a correction dose. Which I
| suppose makes sense, but I have read that some people
| have had a lot more success with looping in Androidaps vs
| the Omnipod 5's algo.
|
| I also wish you could set the "target" a bit lower in the
| 5. You can't tell it to target below 120: I feel like 100
| or 110 would be more reasonable, but again, it makes
| sense that they prefer being conservative.
| cperciva wrote:
| Ah yes, I have my target set to 100. IIRC the first off
| the shelf closed loops were hardwired to 120 but newer
| ones are configurable.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Let's hope that smart insulin comes to market soon (and is
| affordable)
| smokel wrote:
| I find Thomas Nagel's "what it is like to be" [1] concept
| fascinating. I have spent quite some time trying to imagine what
| it is like to be a _rock_. Mind you, not from the perspective of
| a human ( "A rock will probably experience time very quickly,
| because it erodes, etc. etc"), but from the perspective of the
| rock itself. That is, it has no senses, no memory, no
| capabilities for abstraction, no consciousness.
|
| This ruminating has led me to believe that time and logic are
| human concepts, and are not as universal as is commonly believed.
| With recent insights into neural networks, I wouldn't even be
| surprised if the laws of physics follow from the way our brains
| are wired, instead of the other way around. Perhaps this is
| simply a modern take on idealism or realism, but I can't find a
| strand of philosophy with which I feel at home.
|
| Obviously, there is a bootstrapping problem with trying to reason
| from something that cannot reason. And I am well aware that my
| brain must exist in some form of reality. To conclusively prove
| some apparatus for that is way out of the scope of science.
| Scientifically there is probably very little to learn from this
| anyway, apart from opening one's mind to some alternative
| possibilities. It's a fun exercise, though.
|
| However, the entire discussion about what _consciousness_ is,
| strikes me as less interesting. Is this really more than being
| able to conjure up memories of past experiences?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > However, the entire discussion about what consciousness is,
| strikes me as less interesting. Is this really more than being
| able to conjure up memories of past experiences?
|
| I don't think memory and consciousness are intrinsically
| linked. Memory is something consciousness can be aware of, but
| it's not consciousness itself. Someone can have their ability
| to process and remember memories permanently or temporarily
| damaged, and yet still have a conscious experience. An AI can
| have memory, but not have a conscious experience. (Or at least
| it seems that way - if something like Integrated Information
| Theory is true, then maybe AI does have some sort of first
| person conscious experience. I tend to doubt that, but I could
| be wrong.)
|
| EDIT: although I might be conflating short term and long term
| memory. I wonder if consciousness requires at LEAST some form
| of memory processing, even if it's just the past couple of
| seconds. Perhaps the "Strange Loop" needs at least that to
| arise. I'm not sure.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Yes, consciousness requires some embedding in time
| (duration). It requires a capacity of recursion. Hofstadter's
| stance loop is a temporal process.
|
| There is no atemporal "frozen" state we can call
| consciousness. It is dynamic.
|
| That is what bothers me about the Chalmer's piece. There are
| not three states of a thermostat's "What's it like". He is
| showboating his writting chops and parroting Nagel's dualism.
| vidarh wrote:
| > There is no atemporal "frozen" state we can call
| consciousness. It is dynamic.
|
| That is a huge assumption we just have no way of knowing.
| For starters, we don't know whether we are in an atemporal
| "frozen" state or not.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| It is a highly pragmatic assumption like absolutely
| everything else, even cogito ergo sum. Tell me what is
| not an assumption and then maybe we can talk.
|
| My take: Epistemology is metaphysical bs, and "truth" is
| a convention we agree to within communities of speakers.
| sdwr wrote:
| Thank you for bringing some sense into the conversation.
|
| Panpsychic "everything is alive" is better than "nothing
| else is conscious because I'm not them", but only by one
| degree.
|
| > Where does it hurt?
|
| _Pokes leg, ow_
|
| _Pokes arm, ow_
|
| _Pokes stomach, ow_
|
| > Everywhere!
|
| > I think you sprained your finger
| bglazer wrote:
| What do you mean by dualism?
|
| From the article, emphasis mine: "But we should not be
| looking for a homunculus in physical systems to serve as a
| subject. *The subject is the whole system*, or better, is
| associated with the system in the way that a subject is
| associated with a brain."
|
| Is this dualism because it retains the idea of the subject
| at all? But Chalmers states "the subject is the system",
| and so seems to reject the notion of mind/body duality. I
| haven't read about this in much depth, so I don't have a
| very sophisticated understanding here.
| dmbche wrote:
| I can recommend Being No One, by Thomas Metzinger, for essays.
|
| For sci-fi, have a look at Blindsight, by Peter Watts (for free
| on his website: Https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.html)
| smokel wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendations!
|
| I have read Thomas Metzinger's Ego Tunnel (2009), but as far
| as I understand it, he takes on a naturalist standpoint, and
| assumes that consciousness arises from that.
|
| I prefer to take a radical agnostic point of view, where
| consciousness does not even have meaning outside of those who
| experience it. Implying that "meaning" or "reasoning" make no
| sense universally.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| You just communicated meaning to me. Defining "outside of
| those [plural] who experience it" is the tricky part.
| joloooo wrote:
| Thanks for the recs,
|
| Mindware by Andy Clark is also a great book on these topics.
|
| https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mindware-97801998281.
| ..
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > trying to imagine what it is like to be a rock
|
| That is how I perceive meditation to be. At least, the end goal
| that I have yet to achieve, anyway.
| vidarh wrote:
| That depends very much on the school of meditation. It sounds
| like you're focusing on concentration practice.
|
| Mindfulness practice is toward the other side of the
| spectrum: The goal is _not_ to suppress your own sensations
| or thoughts, but to be mindful of them and observe them in a
| detached manner. The best analogy I 've come across is to sit
| at the side of the river and watch the boats go past, instead
| of jumping on them and racing down. But you're not trying to
| clear the river of boats.
|
| There's overlap, in that the finer control you want to have
| over your ability to be mindful of specific aspects of your
| thoughts, emotions, body etc., the more concentration you
| need to be able to muster to calm yourself enough.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Scientifically, there is _a lot_ to learn. If we understand
| alternate forms of consciousness, we can potentially alter our
| own and open up new avenues of experience.
|
| Your last comment strikes me as strange for someone who seems
| to be well read on the topic. Saying that consciousness is an
| ability to recall memories doesn't really describe what it _is_
| in the natural sense. The memories themselves are composed of
| conscious experiences, so that definition is circular. An
| explanation of what consciousness _is_ would include an
| explanation about why, for example, chocolate tastes the way it
| does, rather than like vanilla, or some other completely
| unknown taste. Until we can explain its character (rather than
| just describe it), we can't explain what it is. It's sort of
| like dark energy: we can describe the phenomenon but we haven't
| fully explained what it is.
| smokel wrote:
| My last comment on consciousness should probably also be
| interpreted from the rock perspective. It does not make
| sense, because I assume that a rock has no consciousness to
| begin with, and no memory to entertain it.
|
| A sister comment suggests that memory and consciousness are
| less intrinsically linked that I tend to believe. It might be
| fruitful to come up with a decision tree on what people
| believe consciousness to be :)
|
| Personally, apart from the rock meditation, I am not as much
| interested in the _definition_ of consciousness, because I
| think it is a trap, based on a categorical mistake. I 'd
| rather get away from the anthropocentric viewpoint. Then
| again, I sometimes doubt that a scientific method will get us
| there.
| vidarh wrote:
| > And I am well aware that my brain must exist in some form of
| reality. T
|
| To mess with your head a bit more:
|
| We know of no other way that we know the flow of time than
| indirectly through memory of the flow of events and sensory
| inputs.
|
| And so while it seems probable that our brains must exist,
| consider that e.g. a simulated mind that is paused, and where
| the _same step_ is executed over and over, with no ability to
| change state, would have no way of telling that apart from the
| same step being executed only once, to move on to the next.
|
| In that case it's not clear that there'd need to be any full
| brain, just whatever consciousness is, in a state that has a
| notion that it has a memory of a past instant.
|
| Put another way: Your consciousness could be just a single
| frame of a movie, hinting at a past and future that might not
| exist.
|
| Forever repeating the same infinitely short instant, and
| nothing else. Maybe the universe is just a large tableau of
| conscious instants statically laid out and never changing or
| interacting with each other. We _wouldn 't know any different_.
|
| Of course that is entirely untestable, and so just a fun
| philosophical question to ponder, mostly as a means to point
| out just how little we can _know_ , and so how willing we need
| to be to accept that what matters isn't what we can know, but
| what is likely to be able to affect our observed world.
|
| E.g. I see myself as a materialist (philosophically speaking)
| not because I believe it is or can be proven, but because it is
| our _observable_ reality. If that materialist reality is shaped
| by our minds and only exists in some abstract form, or we 're
| all in a simulation etc., then that is irrelevant unless/until
| we find a way to pierce the veil and/or those aspects "leaks"
| into our observable reality somehow.
| metaxz wrote:
| This one resonates very well with me:
| https://www.organism.earth/library/document/simulation-consc...
|
| You have to give it a chance. He is first building up an
| argument about why consciousness cannot depend just on the
| physical substrate itself but rather on the "interpretation" of
| this. It is very important to understand this part/argument.
| What follows is something that resonates with you namely how
| our consciousness is now 'tuned' to the current physical laws.
| cubefox wrote:
| 1996
| frxhvcdtgf wrote:
| I find this interesting, and I think dates should always be
| included.
|
| But I have this question- why am I interested in the date? What
| changes in this message when I know the date?
|
| I feel like knowing the date sets up a conflict between "this
| is out of date" vs. "this is before the era of mass garbage
| generation" (more generously described as "with time only the
| classics survive)
| mannykannot wrote:
| There has been much debate since this was written, but not
| much movement towards a consensus.
| cubefox wrote:
| Chalmers also may have changed his view in the past 28 years.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| I wish.
|
| This kind of showboating in 1996 is what allowed him to
| achieve his professional goal---to be the modern voice of
| archaic Cartesian dualism.
|
| There actual is no hard problem. Ask neuroscientist "What
| is the hard problem" and you will get blank stares. They
| just do not know, or like me, do not care. It is a muddy
| residue of Cartesian dualism. Boring.
| cubefox wrote:
| That's not convincing to me. If you say some problem
| "doesn't exist", I need an argument which makes a
| compelling case for that, which presents some kind of
| dissolution.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Title reminds me of Tim Hunkin's BBC series "The Secret Life of
| Machines", which he's put on YouTube. There is, funnily enough,
| an episode on central heating systems:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnQ9zkBzbYc
|
| EDIT: there is of course a bit about thermostats:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnQ9zkBzbYc&t=1137
| justlikereddit wrote:
| This is why no one actually likes philosophers
| johann8384 wrote:
| Wouldn't the thermostat be more closely aligned with a nerve in
| the overall system and the control board be more aligned as the
| brain? The brain can get signals from multiple thermostatats in a
| system to control the temperature.
| upghost wrote:
| Does anyone know of a smart thermostat that actually has this
| function? Every thermostat I've looked for has "heat mode" where
| it decides if it should be blasting heat or not, and "cool mode",
| where it decides it should be blasting the AC or not. I have not
| found the mythical smart thermostat that does the job of "keep
| the temperature around here" +/- a few degrees.
|
| I live in an area where its cold at night and hot during the day
| and I am bad at remembering to change the thermostat from mode to
| mode and haven't found a programmable IOT thermostat I can write
| a script for, recommendations welcome!
| ajoberstar wrote:
| Nest thermostats have a heat and cool mode where you have
| setpoints for each. On older ones there was a limit on how
| close the two could be set.
| ewhanley wrote:
| Ecobee thermostats can run in dual heat/cool mode
| tananan wrote:
| This kind of panpsychistic talk to me ends up feeling more closer
| to a reductive materialism than what I would firstly associate
| Chalmers with ("hey, did you forget you can experience stuff?"),
| which is probably just my ignorance with his work.
|
| Because yes, you acknowledge "experience", but you make it a
| function of a physical state described in such and such a way. In
| the same way that a set of particles at points A, B, C, ..
| correspond to such and such a (e.g. electric) field strength at
| point Z, we now imagine it could correspond also to such and such
| an experience.
|
| It's just barely "experience" on its own terms. and elicits a
| kind of epiphenomenalism and powerlesness. The thermostat*, after
| all, doesn't choose anything nor does it profess to have any
| agency. So agency ought to end up some kind of ephiphenomenal
| "observable" of a system.
|
| But besides being deflationary in this distasteful way, what
| bothers me with pictures like this is that they make use of
| entirely subject-made divisions between objects and their
| environments, and presume that they might correspond to
| experiences because - why not? Why not thing of the bottom and
| upper half of thermostat as corresponding to two fields of
| experience? Or the quarters, sixtheents, and so on until we get
| to individual atoms.
|
| The thermostat doesn't "care" if I think of it as the wax and
| glass separately, or as a single object containing both. But we
| do have a unified field of experience, and it doesn't matter how
| another person "cuts us up" in their mind, whether it is as atoms
| interacting, organs behaving in unison, or just as a "body".
|
| It seems silly to say that between me and Bob having our separate
| experiences, there is an experience corresponding to "me and
| Bob", supposedly free-floating somewhere just by virtue of the
| two of us being cognizable as a physical system.
|
| It turns "experience" and that infamous "qualia" from something
| that's the most direct and obvious to a weird phantom as the
| output of a presumed equation which maps some description of a
| physical state to an "experience".
|
| No wonder you'll find people who'll retort that they don't
| experience things or that their consciousness is illusory - they
| have these weird detached notions of experiences to fight
| against.
|
| * I imagined a thermometer throughout reading this piece, hence
| the mention of wax and such. It doesn't really change the point
| so I'm leaving it.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Each time someone tries to explain in a scientific way what
| they think is consciousness, you see this analysis phase,
| breaking it down in steps to the bare minimum. From a
| scientific point of view, this makes perfect sense.
|
| This leads to two pounts of view - scientific, leading to
| reduction and more philosophic - there's no way to describe it
| since it is _super-natural_.
|
| I lean to the more scientific approach, we are not more and not
| less than the sum of our parts and, each of our parts, at any
| sub-scale, has some resemblance to a thermostat: some object
| that reacts on its environment.
| tananan wrote:
| The whole thing with Chalmer's hard problem is pointing out
| that reduction doesn't get you very far. But here he
| formulates a reductive panpsychist proposal (though only "in
| theory"). What part this piece plays within his broader
| thought - I am not sure.
|
| Nonetheless, it is far from compelling even as a "weak-
| problem" hypothesis and is an abstract angels-on-hairpin
| musing that truly puts experience outside of the bounds of
| investigation. Because, after all, if experience is an empty
| epiphenomenon which exists for any, anyhow-delineated
| physical system out there, where does that get us? We've made
| an assumption we cannot prod scientifically, yet it hides
| behind the scientific veneer of reductivism.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| You might enjoy anything written by Humberto Maturana. There
| are some sharp lines he draws in defining a living system--
| what he refers to as autopoietic (self-building) systems.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Maturana
|
| For Hofstadter consciousness requires some form of recursion
| --what he calls strange loops. Our brains are recursion
| machines "we" can partly control "ourselves".
| mannykannot wrote:
| I feel that there is an alternative way of approaching the
| question: to propose that it is only meaningful to ask what it is
| like to be an X if the X has certain mental abilities, such as
| some sort of self-awareness of itself as a participant in a wider
| world. How would we go about evaluating and choosing between
| these two views, and is there room for there being degrees of
| 'what it is like' and self-awareness? It is almost as if we are
| trying to write the dictionary definition before we know enough
| to complete the job (which is not necessarily a bad thing, unless
| we assume that by making a choice, we have, ipso facto, filled in
| the previously-incomplete knowledge.)
|
| I definitely take issue with Chalmers' opening sentence of his
| final paragraph: "... A final consideration in favor of simple
| systems having experience: if experience is truly a fundamental
| property, it seems natural for it to be widespread." I feel he is
| putting the cart before the horse here - something that seems
| quite common in the philosophy of mind - by first deciding that
| experience is a fundamental property, and then using it to
| justify the assumption that it is widespread. This strikes me as
| almost circular, as it seems one could at least as reasonably
| justify it being fundamental on account of the arguments for it
| being ubiquitous.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| You are so right! Both circular and if you follow through in a
| cartesian mode you end up with an infinite stack of
| "representations" all the way up toward the two neurons that
| "represent" your two grandmothers. Both Richard Rorty
| (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) and Daniel Dennett
| (almost any of his works) did us a big favor by demolishing
| representational dualism---mind vs brain.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It's a dumb click-bait title (riffing on Nagel's "What is it like
| to be a bat?"), but the actual question presented a bit further
| down is:
|
| "Moving down the scale through lizards and fish to slugs, similar
| considerations apply. There does not seem to be much reason to
| suppose that phenomenology should wink out while a reasonably
| complex perceptual psychology persists... As we move along the
| scale from fish and slugs through simple neural networks all the
| way to thermostats, where should consciousness wink out?"
|
| The author seems to have succeeded in answering her own question
| (at least in hand-wavy fashion) at the same time as posing it, as
| well as implicitly defining consciousness. So, yeah, it's not
| like anything to be a thermostat.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Perfect!
| cubefox wrote:
| Surely you agree that not only thermostats are not conscious,
| but also simple neural networks are not. E.g. a single layer
| perceptron. And it's intuitively also not just a matter of
| number of layers or neurons.
|
| By the way: The headline is, I assume, by Annaka Harris, while
| the essay is by David Chalmers.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > Surely you agree that not only thermostats are not
| conscious, but also simple neural networks are not
|
| Sure - there is a difference between merely being cold and
| also being aware of being cold. A piece of ice (or a cold
| thermometer for that matter) can _be_ cold, but to
| _experience_ being cold - to be aware /conscious of it -
| requires some minimal level of cognitive apparatus ("a
| reasonably complex perceptual psychology") to process those
| sensory inputs and contrast them to the differing sensation
| of not being cold and be able to think about it!
|
| There is some evidence, such as "blindsight" (ability to see
| without being aware of it - a loss of visual consciousness)
| that consciousness may not only require the mental apparatus
| to process a sensory input, but may also require specific
| neural pathways (which may be missing, or damaged) to gain
| access to specific internal neural state in the first place.
|
| It's difficult to know exactly where the line is - which
| animals do have a sufficiently complex brain to able to
| introspect on and experience their own state, but clearly
| simple neural nets (e.g. anything without feedback paths)
| don't, and simple animals like insects don't either.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If you believe a thermostat has consciousness, you would also
| logically believe that the cascading subset of (your body -
| n*atoms) would also be conscious. E.g. your arm.
|
| This is one reason the topic is so slippery.
| anfractuosity wrote:
| https://consc.net/notes/lloyd-comments.html has some more info
| crabbone wrote:
| I think that we find the idea of thermostat having experiences
| strange because, subconsciously, we think of experiences only
| being accessible to someone / something that has a "will to live"
| (in the words of Schopenhauer).
|
| I.e. I don't think thermostats want anything. They don't have a
| capacity to care whether they fall apart or not, whether anyone
| is satisfied with their function or not. But, life, even in the
| very simplest form wants something. Experiences to living
| organisms is what makes them more effective at doing what they
| want.
|
| What makes living creatures want something: I have no idea. I
| remember hearing a hypothesis tying this to better preservation
| of energy... but I don't know about that. But, if I had to guess,
| it must be something that's available to micro-organisms, so, it
| has to have some physical / chemical explanation...
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Maybe the property of "wanting" is no more than survivorship
| bias? Since living things survive, they must have a "will" to
| survive. Maybe that will is just a label that humans invented
| to attribute to living things?
| crabbone wrote:
| Well, wouldn't this bias happen a while ago, to the very
| primitive organisms? Because the organisms we see today seem
| to universally want to live. I mean, even if we somehow
| mislabeled some more fundamental property, on the face of it,
| it seems to be pretty consistent. Everything about how these
| organisms are built is indicative of their "will" to remain
| functional and to procreate. Eg. regrowing parts of
| organism's body in order to overcome damage (that would cause
| the organism to cease to exist) seems pretty universal.
| Similarly, trying to move away from hostile environments
| seems to be pretty built-in feature of anything alive.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| This is the book you will want to read once, twice, or three
| times to have a good answer to your question.
|
| Humbert Maturana and Francesco Valera(1979) Autopoiesis and
| Cognition: The Realization of the Living. ISBN 90-277-1015-5.
|
| Not an easy book, but one that answers your question.
|
| Terry Winograd loves this book. I am a neuroscientist and only
| found this gem late in my career. Damn!
| crabbone wrote:
| Thanks! Much appreciated. I do love the subject, although I'm
| not connected to it professionally.
| neogodless wrote:
| Their use of "phenomenal" and "phenomenology" confuses me as a
| layman, but I'll lay out their (likely relevant) definitions and
| hope to use that to better understand what is being proposed.
|
| > phenomenal: Known or derived through the senses rather than
| through the mind.
|
| > phenomenology: A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the
| premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are
| perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of
| anything independent of human consciousness.
|
| So the claim (highlighted especially in paragraph 3) is that,
| outside of humans, things that are _perceived_ may also exist in
| _conscious_ thought (of non-humans).
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Another useful metaphor that doesn't cross the threshold from
| human experience into the "experiencing" that non-living things
| do, would be chemotaxis.
|
| A bacterium finds food with a simple set of states. At it's most
| basic:
|
| - you are experiencing an increasing concentration of food. you
| keep swimming straight ahead.
|
| - you are experiencing a decreasing concentration of food. you
| move in a continuously randomized direction.
|
| this eventually gets them onto a track where they are moving
| towards food.
|
| Extremely simple like a thermostat, yet effective.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotaxis
| robwwilliams wrote:
| No, not like a thermostat. A bacterium is a compact and
| exceedingly complex living system. It has autopietic autonomy
| like we do. The fact the I navigate each morning to the
| refrigerator to get milk for breakfast is not so different from
| a bacterium following a gradient toward its food. Bacteria have
| complex receptors like we do that are their sensorium---a nano-
| brain in the words of one scientist who studies their behavior.
| primes4all wrote:
| And yet, also a thermostat is doing nothing else but
| following a gradient towards a desired state (albeit the
| gradient is discrete and it's moving along the dimension of
| temperature).
| luxuryballs wrote:
| anyone know what font that is? (on mobile) reminds me of like an
| old 70s print
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Chalmers is a dualist living in a Cartesian past. If you like a
| lively treatment of dead scholasticism of the mind-vs-brain
| problem then you can do no better. Ditto Nagel.
|
| In contrast if you want modern post-cartesian scientific thought
| on consciousness then hit Dennett hard for philosophy or Ray W.
| Guillery if you want hard neuroscience (The Brain as a Tool).
| ruthmarx wrote:
| For it to be 'like' to be anything, the anything must have some
| send of self. Without a sense of self, there is just information
| processing.
|
| For that reason, it isn't 'like' anything to be, say, most
| insects, let alone a thermostat.
| mode80 wrote:
| I remember inspecting the thermostat in my parent's house as a
| child. It was a coil of something metalic which I assume expands
| and contracts with temperature and physically pushes electrical
| contacts together to turn on the heat when needed. Knowing how it
| works, it's hard for me to imagine that this feels like anything.
| The whole contraption is just an arrangement of molecules doing
| what molecules do. But then again, so am I.
| ryandvm wrote:
| "What is it like to be a bat (or a thermostat)?" is too abstract
| for anyone to thoughtfully grasp.
|
| Instead try asking yourself "what is it like to be asleep?" or
| "what is it like to be waking up?" or "what is it like to be
| heavily sedated?"
|
| We all experience various gradients of consciousness every day as
| we do things like drift off to sleep or slowly gain consciousness
| in the morning. You don't have to try to imagine the experience
| of another primitive life form when you can just recall what
| there is or isn't to your own conscious experience as you drift
| between states.
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