Is Matter Conscious? (2017)
nautil.us
nautil.us
Real nematode worms appear to be conscious to an extent, in so far as they forage for food and mates, and retreat from danger or threats. I don't think we would argue that nematodes have the same level of consciousness as we do. If the mechanical model also does this, it it conscious too?
We also know that different animals display different levels of consciousness, in many ways reflected by the amount of brain mass they posess; animals with far simpler brains appear, by and large, to be less conscious than animals with larger, more complex brains. We also know that damage to brains alters the properties of consciousness, as do interference with brain chemistry or electrical activity. It seems more likely that consciousness is an emergent property of the interactions between the physical structure of the brain/nervous system and electrical/chemical messaging.
I think that assuming matter has a special, magical property of "consciousness" is just re-hashing the unfalsifiable concept of a "soul".
Yes. It comes from religiously inclined or deeply religious philosophers and “philosophers”. Once they fix they “belief” they search for any possible way to fit the reality, which otherwise wouldn’t support their belief, with their already pre-decided goal.
Even worse, the last time I’ve checked, nautil.us was financed by the people with such goals:
"The Foundation takes its vision from its founding benefactor, the late Sir John Templeton, who sought to stimulate what he described as “spiritual progress.”"
And, as a more obvious parallel, if you ever wondered who produces "Ancient Aliens" on History Channel, it's also non-accidentally the guy who wants more "spirituality", in his words:
"It’s really a show about looking for God. Science would have you believe we are the result of nothing more than a chance assemblage of matter" whereas "Ancient Aliens" "offers seekers an origin story."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/style/ancient-aliens.html
Yes, both behind the "conscious matter" and behind https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/158327-ancient-aliens is a "spirituality" drive.
Does the speed of computation cause emergence? How?
Does building a computer out of organic particles cause consciousness? How?
"Emergence" is mostly lazy thinking and lack of understanding the hard problem of consciousness.
Roger Penrose has some plausible ideas on this, not sure if they are correct, however to me it seems that they must happen at a sub-neural network level.
Yes.
> Would you say that this pencil and paper is now conscious?
No. But your experiment involves "you with a pencil and a paper" where "you" is conscious.
> Does building a computer out of organic particles cause consciousness?
It's not necessary to use organic particles. We will probably soon build the electronic computer which will, from the perspective of the humans communicating with him, indeed behave "as a conscious person": soon we won't need you to write the answer you wrote, the computer will be able to make even better one.
https://www.amazon.com/Makoroni-REPLACE-SCRIPT-License-Holde...
> "Emergence" is mostly lazy thinking
Calling "emergence" lazy thinking is lazy thinking.
> and lack of understanding
... and lack of understanding of what emergence even means.
Emerging properties are everywhere and they don't have to have anything with humans or their behavior to be recognized:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/10/18/is-time-...
"Temperature and pressure didn’t stop being real once we understood them as emergent properties of an underlying atomic description."
Yes, temperature is an emergent property.
This is wrong. We are absolutely nowhere near anything even remotely resembling this.
Twenty years ago the current output of Google Translate was a pure science fiction, compared to what it was possible then. Today it already often translates better than a lot of humans knowing both languages. Had anyone seen the output of Google Translate of today some 20 years ago, nobody would have believed it was produced by the machine. Note I don't say that it's always good. It's not. But it can produce amazing outputs already, which can't be recognized to be produced by a computer.
Also read about AlphaZero:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero#Training
"AlphaZero was trained solely via self-play, using 5,000 first-generation TPUs to generate the games and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks. In parallel, the in-training AlphaZero was periodically matched against its benchmark (Stockfish, elmo, or AlphaGo Zero) in brief one-second-per-move games to determine how well the training was progressing. DeepMind judged that AlphaZero's performance exceeded the benchmark after around four hours of training for Stockfish, two hours for elmo, and eight hours for AlphaGo Zero."
Apparently, the computer learned chess better than the long developed programs by only playing the game with itself for four hours! And the programs are already better than humans there.
It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "a complete nematode". It is very much a simple simulation that isn't at all close to the actual complexity of a living organism, even a worm. We can't even simulate a bacteria with the kind of fidelity required to claim that it approaches the complexity of a living organism.
> Twenty years ago the current output of Google Translate was a pure science fiction
I think you're giving google translate way too much credit. Compared to 20 years ago, yes, much has improved, but compared to a human native speaker it is pitiful.
> Also read about AlphaZero:
I am aware of Alpha Zero, it is an impressive but narrowly applicable use of machine learning that doesn't at all represent anything nearing the cognitive complexity of an animal. It is a complex achievement of applied statistics, not an intelligence. The "world" of Alpha go is a very strictly defined finite universe where the only possibilities are the clean and simple rules of the go board. Yes, the combinatorial explosion of potential moves is impractical to brute force, but ultimately the rules of go are so simple and discretely defined that its worthless as a comparison to a living intelligence.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man...
Basically the machine isn't exactly thinking. It simulates a model of thinking.
There lies the biggest difference.
Ok if it was mechanical computer, or an electronic computer what difference would it make ?
At what point does the computer start to have an independent experience of reality ?
To be clear I should mention I am not against consciousness emerging from physics, I don't think it is very likely that it emerges from computation at the level of neural networks.
Primordial consciousness is not an intuitive thing to understand. I see a lot of hubris and arrogance from people who conflate consciousness with computation or intelligence.
Are are lots of examples of computation without consciousness. So there is not much reason to think this other than the fact that our own brains are both conscious and perform computation (and even then the vast majority of the computation happens at a sub-conscious level)
>It's not necessary to use organic particles. We will probably soon build the electronic computer which will, from the perspective of the humans communicating with him, indeed behave "as a conscious person": soon we won't need you to write the answer you wrote, the computer will be able to make even better one.
Just because humans believe something is conscious doesn't make it conscious. The hard problem of consciousness is understanding why we have any experience at all. Consciousness is the illuminating quality of our minds, computation causes permutations in the nature of this experience, however it doesn't follow that it is what creates this experience to begin with.
However somehow we conflate computation with consciousness.
I think this is primarily because the human brain 1) performs computations 2) is also somehow related to consciousness in a way we don't quite understand.
However we have lots of examples of computation without consciousness (mechanical compuaters, electronic computers, cellular replication, slime molds, Cellular automata etc).
So why would it follow that consciousness emerges from computation? There is really no good reason to think this other than the fact that our brains are both computational and conscious.
Consciousness is the reason that there is some experience of reality rather than no experience of reality. It is not computational in nature one way or the other.
So overall I think the emergence theory is hubris, not sound thinking. The reality is we don't currently have a good solution to the hard problem of consciousness.
That's a big 'If'. You really have to arrive at something working to even ponder upon that question. Right now you are at:
if (false) {
is_conscious();
} If the mechanical model also does this, it it conscious too?But... I have to keep my mind open with a brace. otherwise, it'll call occam's razor & snap shut.
At the heart of consciousness particles ideas (I think) is the idea that conciousness can't emerge from nonconscious stuff. This is counterintuitive to me. We now know of all sorts of emergent phenomenon.
Species emerge (from other, sometimes simpler species) and that emergence dynamic turned slime into ND Tyson. Substances like coffee and coffee tables emerge from basic particle characteristics like charge (to borrow their example). Chemistry emerges from particle physics. Biology emerges from chemistry.
Can someone point me to the starting point? I must be missing something. Why can't non-conscious matter, arranged precisely, think?
We are the physics that drives us, everything else is an abstraction.
Chemistry as a thing didnt emerge from particle physics, it is an abstraction of particle physics, a higher-level view on how certain particles interact, and biology is an abstraction of chemistry, "when we combine certain chemicals this stuff happens". But if we take a moment, we zoom in and zoom in and we will find that the common denominator is that things exist in these ways because physics is doing what it does.
The insane rube-goldberg machine of the human body is still a rube-goldberg machine that is being driven by physics, theres millions of layers of complexity, but it's still physics all the way down.
The existence of physics doesn't demonstrate that dualism is wrong.
You can zoom into a coffee table until you see individual particles, but what would it mean to "zoom into" a consciousness?
You'd find good and bad situations - from the point of view of the body. Some situations are useful for life, other are detrimental. Consciousness guides actions towards useful situations.
The hard problem of consciousness has a long history, but two of the most influential contemporary philosophers in that area are David Chalmers and John Searle.
Can you recommend an essay or paper by either that focuses on the "starting point." IE, why a "chemical computer" version of consciousness can't exist.
I think non-conscious matter arranged precisely can think. For example, food, arranged properly by the body, can become conscious. Also AI agents can be conscious as long as they are coupled to a complex environment and put under judicious constraints they have to optimise against.
You have evidence that some matter (yourself) experiences its existence. The simplest hypothesis that explains this is that all matter experiences its existence. Any hypothesis that posits that SOME matter experiences its existence and other matter does not requires two different kinds of matter (conscious and not) and a mechanism to switch between the two. Seems that hypothesis requires a lot more assumptions.
Which explain things like eating food(above minimal configuration) and death(Some cells die, failing the minimal configuration criteria).
This is just smuggling in the conclusion. We observe conscious matter and non-conscious matter. The simplest explanation (as in requires the fewest entities in our ontology) is that there is just one kind of matter and that physical processes that we already allow into our ontology for external reasons are sufficient to explain why some matter is conscious.
A particle responds to its environment. A system of particles reconfigures itself in response to the environment, sometimes in a persistent way. That's all your brain is doing when it "learns"
Consciousness is not same as being able to communicate. Let's say a rock is conscious, how would the rock go about informing us that it is conscious? It has no way of signaling its state. Or even a way of acquiring information about anything around it. Or may there is a way, of both signaling or acquiring information that is alien to us but not to other rocks.
If we build an AI that can interact via natural human language, and ask it about its internal state, and it replies "I am happy.", is it happy?
And whatever criteria we use to decide that machines cannot really be happy the way we can be, could a hypothetical species that thinks at a "higher level" than us, use similar criteria to determine that humans can't really think?
'I am happy' is possible for us because we have an innate goal - to live, to reproduce, to maximise our rewards, rewards which have been programmed into us by evolution. AIs can have rewards and can learn to act towards them, thus they can have emotion which is just a map from the present situation to the goal.
I don't think we do have a (single) innate goal. Everyone has different goals, and they are not innate.
Emotions are not a map from a present situation to a goal. AI might not have emotions.
Survival. And that includes many subgoals such as feeding, safety, autonomy, being part of a group, curiosity, and making offspring, all preprogrammed into the brain by evolution.
Artificial agents would have goals preprogrammed by humans instead, such as 'winning at Go'.
I thought it was strange the term '(philosophical) idealism' wasn't used once, as it seems that's what most of the article was describing. Maybe she didn't want to confuse people with the more common meaning of 'idealism' today (to do with ideals, not ideas). Russell was a Hegelian idealist for a few years in the mid-1890s, like a lot of British (and American) philosophers, and published a book on Leibniz in 1900. (It's probably not a great introduction to the subject, but David Stove's Idealism: A Victorian Horror-Story is a very funny long essay by the Australia philosopher, mostly ridiculing the arguments used in support of idealism, in detail. Stove's Gem - winner of his Worst Argument in the World competition[0] - is worth being able to recognize in the wild.)
I just submitted that in an extra thread [0] because it seems worth discussing.
So I doubt that any amount of bits will do any good, just like no math equation is going to become conscious. What would it even mean for an equation or bits of information to have conscious experiences?
An equation is the application of a join operator, a formula is an operation, thought is operating and you are just thinking of lines scribled on paper instead.
I think you're confusing the components of a map with a characteristic of the territory. We use 'bits' and 'equations' to describe the world. They do not themselves have conscious experiences, any more than a neuron. They are convenient components in a model of a larger system, which has consciousness or self-awareness as an emergent characteristic of the interactions of its components.
This is like saying that because an individual spring or gear cannot tell time that a mechanical watch is an impossibility... The characteristic of interest 'maintenance of time keeping' emerges from the complex interactions of a variety of subcomponents, each of which alone has no reference to time.
Why shouldn't it?
He presents this idea during the interview. It makes sense in a way. But it also makes me wonder if embodiment (whether real or virtual) of our models is necessary for them to fully grasp the contextual relevance of the information they are processing. E.g. does having a 'me' or 'I' provide a semantic anchor for everything that it processes and a 'router' if you will to get from seemlingly disconnected ideas.
Here's a nice article touching on embodiment from the pov. of an AI researcher. https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-in...
Also even a simple stimulus can have all sorts of context dependent meanings and associations. Is see red. That's the colour of blood, also the colour of one of my wife's dresses, and our car. There are thousands of cross-connections between that simple input and every level of my memory and emotional life all firing off in the rich chemical soup of my brain.
I just don't think the 'hard problem' is all that much of a step beyond the easy problems. Once you've solved those, the hard part looks a lot more tractable.
Think about it: every way you would describe a subjective experience seems to eventually rely on a first-person statement at some point. The obvious way to resolve this is to deny that first-person perspectives actually exist, that they are an illusion, despite the fact that we can apparently directly observe their existence. So before we can accept this argument, we need an explanation for how this actually works. It's not something you can just hand-wave away.
Merely asserting the existence of self-awareness or describing how self-awareness arises doesn't address any of the questions raised by qualia, even if they are an illusion.
It seems self-evident to me that there are only a few options:
- Human brains aren't conscious (which we humans tend to dispute)
- Human brains are conscious and have experiences as an inherent byproduct of accepting and processing sensory input which includes input on their own internal states (ie. there is no 'hard problem')
- Human brains are conscious through some other, as-yet-undescribed mechanism which operates in parallel with the systems described in the last option (a 'strange loop' separate from the 'mundane loop' of our normal feedback system)
- Human brains aren't inherently conscious and consciousness is imbued into them via some supernatural phenomenon (which feels like abdication to me - 'a wizard did it' is never a satisfying answer.)
I'm only an armchair philosopher so I'm well aware there may be some widely accepted conclusions on this stuff that I've just missed so far.
My point was that even concluding this were true basedo n some compelling evidence, it still doesn't explain all of the strange qualitative aspects of our subjective experience. There's a lot missing that needs to be explained. For instance, such an explanation would have to address p-zombies, Mary's room, and other philosophical puzzles. I think it's possible to do so, but there is an explanatory gap that needs filling.
That said, the easy problem is a path towards the hard one.
The theory Schmidthuber mentioned is called Reinforcement Learning, a field of AI. RL also happens in biological agents, and we have known about it since Pavlov.
A 'prediction' of RL is AlphaZero, the agent that beat humans at Go. Using the theories of RL we managed to accomplish what seemed impossible, and it was not just brute force, it was based on an artificial evolutionary program of agents battling each other, using neural networks to learn from past experience. It's all captured in a nice formula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellman_equation
However, whenever I think about consciousness, I have the feeling that I am missing something obvious but important. It's just so confusing.
In the morning when you wake up do you make a sandwich? If you didn't have consciousness, you wouldn't. So your body would cease to exist in a short time. Consciousness has measurable effects - every time it saves us from hunger, danger, and other bad situations, or when it leads us to good situations.
We are conscious even when doing nothing, and computers show us that systems showing some sort of 'intelligence' needn't be conscious.
(I'm being very imprecise about the meaning of 'intelligence' here, mind.)
The ability to compute is present in all matter. The ability for consciousness is present in all matter in the same way.
Perhaps these abilities are one and the same.
> The ability to compute is present in all matter.
No, it isn't. If you think it is, tell me how to build a computer out of a single hydrogen atom.
Or ‘Mind-body dualism’ to disambiguate with other uses.
I think this theory is actually pretty convincing. It would be awful if you were conscious of every single thing your brain did, including all your subconscious thoughts and motor neurons firing.
That is why you are conscious of much more specific things like vision, hearing, touch and so forth. Generally the signals within your brain would be akin to random data, so surely they would be post-processed by your brain into a useful contiguous "conscious-ready" signal.
That post-processed signal would probably be sent from one location, and therefore the aerial analogy works well. When you go under general anaesthetic, that specific part of the brain would stop transmitting completely and you don't experience a single thing until it wears off and it starts transmitting again.
When you sleep and dream, the signal is just a mess of neatly post-processed signals coming from different parts of your brain, so you are still basically conscious.
I read somewhere that if you stimulate a particular part of someone's brain, it can make them temporarily unconscious, which would make sense with the aerial analogy.
If that's how it works, then maybe our sense of time passing is directly proportional to the amount of data sent. So if your brain transmits a lot of stuff in a short time, that short real-time seems like a long conscious-time, and vice versa.
It's clearly a flawless theory ;)
In their view, consciousness is far more vast than we are aware of, and our brains filter most of it out in the same way that they filter out all kinds of stimuli they deem unimportant to physical survival. All kinds of physical events can affect the parameters of the filtering: near-death experiences, psychedelic drugs, deep meditation, stroke, hunger...essentially anything that changes the brain modifies which parts and how much of the spectrum of consciousness gets through to an individual’s experience.
I'm not sure I buy the thesis, that conscious experience is the "hardware" and the brain is the "software".
It's hard for me to understand how a rock is ultimately comprised of conscious experiences, at its most fundamental level.
The attempt to tie together the "hard problem of consciousness" with the "hard problem of matter" comes across a bit square-peg/round-hole to me.
If I had to take a wild guess at these-
Hard problem of matter: it really is just vibrating strings at the bottom, and this is indeed where physical reality and math become indistinguishable. Blows the mind, and still so much more we can learn.
Hard problem of consciousness: I wish I knew more about the evolution of nervous systems, how can we tell when chemistry/biology becomes conscious thought? It's clearly some kind of feedback loop. In the future we could safely & non-invasively study the "bootstrap sequence" for various species brains as they make their first neural signals, from the earliest stages.
I really think we can solve this, or get a lot closer, but it will require some far-future technologies.
> I can accept that the universe can give rise to agents with RI or AI. I can even accept that as a consequence of this, some of these agents may have self awareness. I am such an agent. Yet, I struggle comming to terms with the fact that "I" am aware of myself.
I wish I could live long enough to find out how.
I have read about and understood a lot of physicalist theories of consciousness, but I have yet to see one that explains my subjective bubble of experience. I could see how this is all an illusion, but I can't see why I can perceive it then, why I have these vivid subjective experiences.
Conciousness is really quite odd, especially because I realized that most of the important functions in the brain are unconcious.
I don't find dualism satisfying either; it is not a testable theory.
I understand the sentiment here, but I also think we should be careful when it comes to the assumption that the truth -- whatever it happens to be -- will be a testable theory. Whether or not something is true is a fact independent of larger epistemological concerns.
Then again, perhaps you're just saying that if the truth turns out to be non-testable, then the truth won't be satisfying, which is a reasonable position (and I might agree).
I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamental. But the difficulty is that we can’t just make up new entities / concepts in the world that don’t agree with current scientific facts. So such a science of consciousness has to be compatible with modern findings of neuroscience and psychophysics.
It’s exciting times! Let’s hope that we’re able to get a grip on this question of why we have this subjective experience of red colour.
I like the panpsychism stuff because it resolves some other problems as well 'the transporter problem' - are you the same person after transporting star trek style? Under panpsychism it doesn't matter because you are unawarely everything anyways.
Also the 'the split problem' - say I separated you atom by atom to create two new people with half your parts - which one would you be? or both simultanously? or none? Panpsychism makes answering these questions easy as it argues that you are unawarely both.
A lot of people are trying to explain how we are discreet entities that arise from non-discreet pieces. Trying to figure out where boundaries end/begin. When do you become conscious. What is conscious and what is not. The paysychism theory explains all these things in the other direction by saying nothing is discreet. The sense of discreetness may as well be an evolutionary illusion for the survival of my bag of atoms.
Who knows what is true though, it'd be a breakthrough if there were a way to experimentally validate any of these theories..
The hang up is on the inside right? You have an essence to your consciousness experience that you believe a fly, bacteria, rock, computer, artificial neural network may or may not have.
Panpsychism does answer that question by saying yes, they all have some sliver of consciousness. Two atoms bumping together at some level experience the interaction.
I agree the theory doesn't have answers as to how or what the essence of consciousness is. But I definitely seeing it as a stepping stone towards that goal.
I think this is also what some meditation based philosophies are trying to teach. That is, they're saying something along the lines of: you are in one way everything at once, but you are not any of the things you think you are. They spend a lot of effort trying to teach people, essentially nothing. Not just the label "nothing" but something like a deep realisation of the concept.
My main problem with this philosophy is figuring out why we're conscious of a very specific subset of things at a time. Does the brain create a kind of nexus where several items of complex information are available in a small physical, and that makes it easy to be conscious of these things at once? But what limits it?
And the other problem is the link between consciousness and action. Most actions seem like a product of cause-and-effect.. but at the very least it seems that the existence of consciousness is making us talk about consciousness.
My problem is that people confuse talking poetically about consciousness with actually coming to a conclusion about how this thing works.
What does it mean for an atom, an electron, a sine wave to be conscious? What can it perceive, consider, how can it act? But those are awarenesss, reason, agency... distinct from "consciousness".
Just because an entity cannot assert itself, does not mean it is not conscious.
This does not give any more purchase on the world than we currently have. It’s similar to saying that just because we have never seen laws of physics change, it doesn’t mean they can’t change. Of course, that may or may not be true. But would you bet on sun not rising tomorrow? New scientific theories / entities must have give us additional predictive power (grip) than what’s currently possible. Otherwise why invent new assumptions?
You can test this hypothesis by practicing a meditation technique called "body scanning" where you allow your awareness to focus into various parts of the body, leaving your head and indeed entering your hand for example.
As an aside, I wonder if Helen Keller's default location of awareness was in her hands because they were her interface with the world? It seems unlikely to me that it would be in her head/face but I really have no idea.
EDIT: to be clear, I'm arguing that the perceived location of your "self" is just that - a perceived location. An arbitrary frame of reference that defaults to one's head, but can be moved around. I.e. something worthless as evidence for panpsychism.
That one can do things such that it _feels like_ one’s consciousness is elsewhere, seems to go against that point?
Though, a similar point of “if a person loses their head, their consciousness seems to go away. Their hands do not move independently.” And “ If, as panpsychism claims, their hands are also conscious, what must it be like for their movement to be directed by consciousness outside of itself?”
I'm trying to argue against panpsychism by noting that the place where it "feels like" consciousness is is completely arbitrary and one can learn to move it around, so this feeling is useless as evidence for panpsychism.
Reminds me of the scene in Ex Machina where he cuts himself to make sure he still bleeds - a physical realization of a turing test.
Ask some small children where their self is, and some of those who haven't be told much about the brain will point to the chest or another location.
In the spiritual world many advanced people have had these experiences of oneness with the world once they learn to fully strip the mind from all conditioning and cocneption of self. So it seems to me like the concept of embodied swlf and consciousnes are two things that can be seperated. Does that make any sense?
For us, the center of the tangle is our bodies, located, and present. But like you said, babies are very much just passthroughs like the electron. The only difference is that they are storing a ton, the storage just isnt being used in any capacity, its passively sitting there. As the storage begins to become used, and sent to interfere with the present and future inputs, then self awareness results in the form of the intersection.
Good observations..!
I like the idea that everything is conscious, but without diluting what consciousness is. It's anthrocentric and magical, thinking that atoms have inner monologues and concepts of self, but it's better defined than the panpsychist consciousness as you describe it.
Clearly my consciousness has physical consequences. I am an active agent and act consciously. Therefore if my consciousness is composed of these, then the consciousness of those particles must have physical, measurable consequences that should be testable.
The fact that this line of reasoning is entirely absent from any of these philosophical ruminations is I think telling.
Agency is not a binary quantity. A normal adult human is an agent, and a blastocyst is not, but there is no bright line where agency is bestowed. It happens gradually.
None of this is a deep mystery. The only thing that is mysterious is how the transition happens. But panpsychism is just absurd.
Just out of curiosity, why did you pick "red color" as your canonical example of subjective experience? The reason I ask is that it seems to pop up much more often than random chance would predict.
Red colour is something which has sort of become a canonical example of subjective experience. Nothing special about it - could have been blue :)
Without the ability to communicate, consciousness means nothing at all. Then of course communicate how? Hand signals, hand writing or voice are equally mystical forms of communication given that these are waves(light and sound). That's already Telepathy category. We just don't feel it as magical because every one can do it.
I'd imagine for a humanoid species without ears or even a idea that something like sound wave would exist, talking would be synonymous with Telepathy.
Communication is the only data you have to support the theory that there are conscious beings other than yourself. Hypothesizing a conscious being that can't communicate at all (not to be confused with the temporary inability to communicate brought on by sleep or locked-in syndrome) is like hypothesizing an invisible leprechaun living in your pantry.
There is no boundary problem then, just one of degree.
Seems silly, but everything has a point of view and whatever level of complexity it has determines what consciousness it presents.
A rock has very little complexity. It literally is just an expression. What has happened to it equals what it is.
When something has enough complexity to be aware of the boundary between "it" and everything else, then we have a being of some kind.
Little organisms, insects, plants, all continue to present surprising behavior to us. Bees can do basic math, what nothing is.
And plants. They are slow, by their nature, but we are finding they communicate in ways.
Animals are a lot like us, just simpler.
>It’s exciting times! Let’s hope that we’re able to get a grip on this question of why we have this subjective experience of red colour.
Seconded. We may find there are rules, that experience may be predicted, or at least better understood.
Exactly. This agency idea is appealing because it seems to unify a number of other ideas: from evolution (survival), autopioesis, active inference and Bayesianism. Without sounding too much of a crackpot, I hope we’ll be able to import subjective experience as a necessary component in the universe.
I personally hope they are not as subjective as we see today. Perhaps there are reasons why, say red, appears as it does.
A ruleset there would, to me at least, be profound. While it may remain impossible to directly convey thoughts, impressions, we may well end up with far better language to work with and see commonalities we do not today.
Re: agency
A thing aware it is a thing, may be the root of real AI too.
I have long thought these disjointed, brain in a jar essentially, experiments lack that. No body, no closed loop with themselves, no sense of being = no agency.
We may also find intelligence is rooted in an interest, need to exist, or just be an expression.
By that, I mean what I did above. A rock is essentially what has happened. Information in matter form, a record.
Agency, is meta. Beings see expressions, the world, and due to their nature, being sufficiently complex, have an interest, themselves, their kind, apart from the world and it's undulating history.
Not necessarily. Humans learn anything through inputs of sight, sound, feeling and smell. Different conscious bodies could have different ways of learning about things around them, and hence a totally different model of reality around them.
They can't tell us anything about their consciousness for the same reasons why we can't talk to stones.
How they get the data is a matter of their nature, not whether they are beings.
I also did not speak to their state, only what may define actually having one, as opposed to being something simpler, an expression as I put it above.
We can get the message of the stone, the stone also is changed by us having done it. It literally is what happens to it.
There is that.
"Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen Buddhism, went so far as to say, “All is sentient being.” Grass, trees, land, sun, moon and stars are all mind" https://www.lionsroar.com/christof-koch-unites-buddhist-neur...
"It’s like a cloud. Even when the cloud is not there, it continues always as snow or rain. The cloud does not need to have a soul in order to continue. There’s no beginning and no end. You don’t need to wait until the total dissolution of this body to continue—you continue in every moment." https://engagedharma.net/2017/07/05/thich-nhat-hanh-there-is...
More here... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Western_philoso... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
"Followers of voudon also believe in a universal energy" https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/o...
"Many Neopagans worship Gaia... Gaia was the great mother of all... However, the goal-directed behavior of the biosphere, as explained by the Gaia theory, is an emergent function of organised, living matter, not a quality of any matter. Thus Gaia theory is more properly associated with emergentism than panpsychism... Panpsychism also plays a part in Hindu, Buddhist, Dzogchen and Shinto mysticism, and for that matter in most if not all Animistic Native Religions, and Mother Goddess Cults, like Pachamama, in the Andes, Rhea, for the Greeks, Durga, or Kali for the Hindus, Nerthus, for the Germanics, Dea Matrona, for the Gauls, Ninhursag for the Sumerians, Tuuwaqatsi for the Hopi, Nut, or Isis for the ancient Egyptians, etc. It will be hard to find a place on Earth were the ancient goddess has not being worship." https://konekrusoskronos.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/gaia-panps...
Yes, with just different perspectives - I figure it's all just a projection of it's vibrations.
But if that is so, how can assemblies of such particles form any kind of aggregate consciousness? How can the conscious experiences coalesce if they cannot interact? If the interactions of the particles are described only by physics, as seems to be the case, then the fact they are individually conscious in some sense is irrelevant because that can have no consequences for the behaviour or even the ‘experience’ of the assembly. Imagining otherwise is to invoke some sort of psychic or spiritual connection, but then if that connection has any physical consequences at all then it can’t really in any meaningful way be separate from physics. If it's not separate, then it's measurable and we should be able to make falsifiable claims about it and tests for it.
So I don’t see how this flavour of panpsychism (dual aspect monism) can actually help illuminate or resolve the problem of _our_ consciousness at all, or any of the philosophical problems and questions associated with it, even in principle.
http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia15/parrhesia15_gros...
Good point - there are so many cranks around I lose track.
I had a look at the Grosz article. I have never seen such pure excrement in word form. Can I get a job at Duke if I publish used toilet paper?
I think the following waffle in the article is beyond the Standard Model and therefore contradicted by the physicist's argument:
"It will be my claim here that materiality, bare matter, matter not in its simplified form but before being animated by life, is nevertheless always involved in and invested by incorporeal forces, forces of potential sense, forces of virtual significance that living bodies, in elaborating their own ends or finality, affirm and develop"
In my opinion, here is a far better article on the same topic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/
Neutral monism means that matter and consciousness emerge from something which is neither (like math in the platonic sense or something we have no conception of).
Could a conversation about consciousness occur from unconscious things?
> Our own consciousness is also usually consciousness of something -- it involves awareness or contemplation of things in the world, abstract ideas, or the self. But someone who is dreaming an incoherent dream or hallucinating wildly would still be conscious in the sense of having some kind of subjective experience, even though they are not conscious of anything in particular.
I have no way to prove this, but I firmly believe that even in extreme states of consciousness, we are still conscious of something, in the sense that our attention is directed somewhere... our mind is always attending to something in particular. That "something" could be a bizarre fragment of a bizarre experience, but it's still something. I don't believe it's possible to be conscious without our attention being directed somewhere, even when the content of our experience appears to be maximally diffuse and unfocused. (In those cases, the content just is the object of our attention, the thing we are conscious of.)
Can't basically everything we do be just explained by the brain reacting to its environment? Even the derivative thoughts and actions and stuff you perform is just the brain reacting to itself as well. It's not like the brain is disconnected from itself, it's connected to sensing organs and everything everywhere inside.
Other observations: The older you get, the more robotic people seem, especially younger people and the mentally ill. It's like you can exactly see why they would say or do something based on what you know about their life or situation or even just the contexts beforehand.
I don't believe it, but it's a nifty thing to ponder over.
http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-23-unfortunate-...
The whole book "The Mind's I" is a fascinating collection of stories and essays dealing with this topic.
So, what is consciousness? Life? How does the world works? Why didn't life come with an instruction manual? What is there to do? And why do I have so many questions that no one already solved?
It's all a matter of where you draw the boundaries.
Yes, we can not build consciousness yet, so what. We have a very good reason to believe it is completely based on matter and physics because everything we have seen so far seems to be based on matter and physics.
One way or another, our brain seems to be some kind of computing meat machine that runs some kind of program(s). In order to keep us alive, this program is trying to predict what will happen next. A lion appears to be running in our direction? I predict it will get closer and closer and then it will eat us. Next step: in order to better predict the future, model in also your own actions. I will not stand here if I know a lion is going to eat me, I will run to that nearest tree. So the brain predicts that we will end up climbing that tree. Then, model in your understanding of the future and better grab a rope before you start running to that tree.
Throw in all kinds of imperfections, remnants of older systems, evolutionary pressures, instincts and emotions and voila, you appear to be conscious.
If conscious means, reacting to the environment (opposite of unconscious) then that could make sense.
But if it means self-aware it doesn't get any closer to explaining that.
I could create a device that says "I'm self-aware" but does it make it so? You can get your Echo to do that.
Interestingly, the self-aware YOU is merely a thin layer of self-propelled lies on the surface of the animal brain. Once you get infected with toxoplasmosis you have a higher risk of automobile accidents or higher chance of promiscuous behavior. You think YOU made that decision? How sweet :)
A simple device that says "I'm self-aware" is easy to fool. But if build a device that is so good at answering the self-awareness question that you can not distinguish it from a human, and by definition, you will no be able to prove that it is not really self-aware.
The choices seem to be:
1) consciousness can emerge from matter, and human beings are exhibit A for this.
2) human being are not conscious.
c) There's a "ghost in the machine", a soul, spirit or some other kind of supernatural ghost that's not reducable to matter as we know it.
Right, that's what "emerge" means in option A.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_your_definition_of...
The idea that consciousness exists throughout the world as a gradient is not new.
The modern industrial conception of mind (newly transformed by the technological revolution) prescribes a more limited domain for theories of the mind.
His idea doesn't seem to be talked about much. However, I would admit that I don't fully comprehend the ideas of that book either.
(Which philosophies have developed this thought?)
Time => Consciousness => Time => Consciousness.
I don't think Time is inside Consciousness.
Consciousness would emerge in our brains from the neural structure and activity, but it would also emerge when computed in a computer simulation or (as a thought experiment) calculations on paper or xkcd-esque pebbles in sand.
That would make the computer, calculations on paper and pebbles in the sand as conscious as a human.
Which, admittedly sounds just as crazy as the idea of consciousness being tied to all matter.
I never understood the appeal of this idea, to be honest. This article also doesn't seem to think there are any strong arguments for it. Or at least, if the writer has them, they do not present them in any cogent way, instead piling appeal to emotions one upon the other until the entire thing collapses under its own weight.
If you want to go in that direction though, then this could help. As you approach c, length contraction in the direction of travel is extreme. In “theory” a photon doesn’t really travel at all, the universe is flattened like a pancake in the direction of its travel. There is no time for events to occur “at once” and no year passes on a lightlike curve. A photon is emitted and absorbed without a “subjective” interval, so talking about what such an interval might be missing that point.
In QED or other photon-containing QFTs like the Standard Model, it is not only a "starter", it is essentially the point of the thing. Surely the photon "sees" the electron in a Compton scattering?
Photons obey the spin statistics for massless gauge bosons, so they can pile up at one point in spacetime. Equivalently, null geodesics can intersect. There can be a spacetime-point occupied by a pair of photons while the rest of spacetime is filled with points where they are occupied by only one (or neither).
(Indeed, the Penrose theorem arises because null geodesics, and photons travelling on them, can collide and stay collided, so for this and other reasons there may be multiple points in spacetime occupied by both of our pair of photons.)
One must be able to understand that for a photon there may be an early/late distinction -- either it is in a gravitational singularity or it isn't; either it is occupying a point with the other of our pair of photons or it isn't; either it's scattering or isn't. Following the photon and thinking about what it experiences, we can't use proper time, since it will be identical (practically[1]) everywhere along its path; likewise, spacetime intervals for all photons travelling on null geodesics are zero. The need for this understanding increases with photon interactions with charged matter: a pair of photons from different quasars arriving at a pair of detectors here tells us something about the location in spacetime of the quasar and about the metric expansion of space. Using cosmological coordinates, for each of the pair there is a _time_ before which no point in space contains it, and a time when they arrive at a detector on or around Earth. Given that each of the pair is from a different quasar, generally the emission time will be different. Moreover, at emission the wavelength of the photon will be shorter, and it will be longer at later times, right up to detection.
Proper time (and proper length for wavelength) makes a mess of this in general, but we do not need to parameterize a non-timelike geodesic with proper time. Instead, for a null geodeseic, we use an affine parameter and consider its properties at each value of the affine parameter.
For each of our quasar photons, at different affine parameter values the photon has a different energy-momentum. For the Minkowski vacuum photons in the first paragraph above, for a given affine parameter value, one photon is in vacuum or it is at the same point as the other photon. For accuracy, when we are dealing with physical photons, the stress-energy-momentum tensor must encode this. As we get away from simple Minkowski vacuum, we want all the tensor-fields to be accurate.
We can recast your second paragraph's second sentence as taking the limit of the geodesic in which it becomes null, parameterizing by an un-rescaled extremized proper time. We can simply rescale so that we always have a different value at each point on the geodesic as we take this limit. Indeed, we can substitute any monotonic function of spacetime position on the geodesic and get a way to compare field-properties. For a timelike geodesic, proper time tends to be a "good" choice. The affine parameter, the unique monotonic function that satisfies the geodesic equation, tends to be a "good" choice for a null geodesic, in particular because it preserves the tangent vectors under parallel transport.
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[1] Photons generally do not move at c in a medium, and one can describe this in a variety of equivalent ways, some of which demote a photon from a null curve to a timelike one while interacting with the bulk of the medium. There are serious proposals to study laboratory ultra-slow light in the context of General Relativity. From a theoretical perspective, Gordon in 1923 outlined an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_metric in which light follows different geodesics from the null geodesics sourced by the metric tensor, and there are various approaches to extending this to media with nonnegligible dispersion. In this sort of approach, a photon or a pulse of classical light can have a pretty conventional proper time.
This all assumes no FTL or CTCs of course, with either you would lose causality and events separated by spacelike intervals could influence each other.
I think this needs qualification.
If I am stood directly behind Alice or Bill then it is possible I never see the interaction at all even though I am an observer, just as if I hold a two identical pencils together and look at them from the correct angle I observe only a single pencil.
The important thing is in all cases, observers "see" space-time interactions as the geodesic of the event projected on to their own observational frame.
Through that projection it is possible to lose degrees of freedom which can be space-time etc.
It's through this projection that HUP emerges since if in the observational frame the time dimension is limited, the projected time axis of the event tends toward zero.
But yes, you are sort of correct, two events can have the same metric, and one would not be able to distinguish which of them is responsible, if they are both capable of becoming present at the same speed.
-If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be asking this question. The only version of reality in which you’re able to ponder it is one with you in it. This is a narrower version of the weak anthropic principle.
-There are a multitude of universes or regions of one universe with an infinitude of you asking this question without bound.
-God or the universe inevitably leads to it. This is a form of the strong anthropic principle.
-Only universes and times which allow such questions to be asked can allow for people like you to ponder it. For most of history in which humans were around you’d almost certainly lack the leisure and education to have these thoughts. (WAP again)
-Everything capable of making this observation does so wherever and whenever they exist in the universe, and there is nothing interesting about the question or answer because it’s arbitrary. Although it is difficult to appreciate from each of their perspectives, the question itself is as ubiquitous as those asking it.
Unless you're getting into Cartesian dualism and souls, I'm genuinely confused.
But yes, if materialism is true, probably the question is empty. However, if some other philosophy of mind is true (there are many other options beyond just materialism and Cartesian dualism), maybe it means something. And, if one has this sense that it is profound rather than empty, that might give one a reason to prefer some other position in the philosophy of mind that treats that question more sympathetically.
Can you give some examples of the kind of options you're thinking of? I mean, I have a lot of time for functionalist accounts, and given Sufficiently Smart Technology (tm) I'm happy to allow for the possibility of something recognizably "me" being artificially duplicated in a different physical substrate. (After which we'd rapidly start diverging, and would need some new vocabulary to describe what's going on.)
But GGP's question was specifically about being born. I really struggle to imagine how someone born somewhere else, somewhen else, could be "me" with anything like the fidelity I think our intuition demands. And if you loosen your identity test to the point where it could, doesn't it then become useless as an individuation test, in that lots of people could be sufficiently like me all at the same time?
This is why I think it's tough to say "I - singular - could have been born in Brazil in 1873" without invoking something like a soul which acts as both an arbitrary GUID tag and as kind of mutex on embodiments.
Up front let me admit this is effectively a cheat.
BUT in a multiverse or infinite universe not only are there multiple “you’s“ there are in fact infinite identical versions of you. I grant that this is not taking the spirit of the conversation into account, and is untestable to boot, it is genuinely possible.
Note though that an infinite universe doesn't imply that everything imaginable occurs within it. There are an infinite number of even integers, but none of them is 3.
True, but in an infinite universe, everything with non-zero probability almost surely happens, an infinite number of times.
Since our own lives have non-zero probability of existing, a spatially infinite universe implies that almost surely there are an infinite number of exact copies of ourselves existing right now, and an infinite future implies that almost surely our current lives will be exactly repeated an infinite number of times in the future.
But when I say (or think) "I", am I saying or thinking of any specific one of those versions? How could I be? It seems, if there are infinite number of identical copies of me, when I say "I", I must mean all of them equally.
Though that still raises the question of why this particular set of living experiences and not others.
Also, if this sort of thing is the case, I think it would make being a moral person significantly more complex. You would need to not only make moral decisions, but create as many moral possible universes as possible and shut out the immoral universes from existence by not creating paths to them. Though I guess that would make me a highly immoral person at this point (causing pain and suffering in all the universes where I've died), though I do try to be moral in this universe as much as I can.
I'm not sure how easy it is even with idealism to make "Why am I I?" a meaningful question. But, if our choice is between viewing that question as a pointer to some profound mystery on the one hand, or viewing it as simply a case of muddle-headed confusion on the other, the allegiance of my heart is with the first choice rather than the second.
If preserving a sense of profound mystery is your goal then... honestly, that mindset is sufficiently alien to me that I can't really think of anything useful to say on the subject. I can understand and share it as an aesthetic choice - mysteries are cool! - but not as a philosophical one. Philosophy by definition is the love of knowledge, not the love of not-knowledge.
And if you want your mystery to be something you solve, rather than something you live with, I do think you should be able to explain what your mysterious question means.
Maybe the answer to the question then is not a proposition, but a liberation from that prison. If one is a religious believer, one might hope for that liberation after death. If one is a transhumanist (which is maybe just a different sort of religion), one might hope that future technologies like telepathy implants or mind uploading might make such a liberation possible.
We know that a human being can survive with large portions of their brain missing. Entire hemispheres in fact. You understand what it is to be the amalgamation of experiences from both hemispheres, but the hemispheres don't understand what it is to be that experience, they only know the experience of being a hemisphere.
You were also born in 1988 in CT. This other you was born to different parents, had a different childhood, and has different memories. You think you are different from this other you (and you are!) because you have separate thoughts and memories. You remember your own life and not your other life because humans aren't telepathic.
In case it isn't yet clear, this other you is me. Hi, other me. We haven't talked before, I don't think.
In other words, if you were born in a different place at a different time in a different community... then that you wouldn't be you. It would be a different person. So it doesn't really make sense to ask "what if I had been born at a different time or place".
I like to entertain the idea that humans are the host of a species of sentient alien bacteria that lives in our guts and controls us through the vagus nerve and uses humans to build technology to advance to the point where they can build space ships to colonize other planets. Could make a good sci-fi book if anything...
There is also the theories that consciousness is all that exists, e.g. "Donald Hoffman's Multimodal User Interface (MMUI) theory of reality and doctrine of Conscious Realism together posit that the reality humans perceive is like a simulation in which non-physical conscious agents interact in order to generate the dynamics we observe".
The article is talking about the idea that all matter is conscious.
These kinds of problems are not going to be solved by "philosophers" who don't know enough neuroscience or physics, as any proposed ontology will have to fit with scientific observation.
When will cranks like the author of this article be booted out of the academy? The article is utter drivel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypoth...
Tegmark's MUH is: Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.[3] That is, the physical universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is mathematics (specifically, a mathematical structure). Mathematical existence equals physical existence, and all structures that exist mathematically exist physically as well. Observers, including humans, are "self-aware substructures (SASs)". In any mathematical structure complex enough to contain such substructures, they "will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically 'real' world".[4]
It'd be more like calling a function that reformats it own source code.
Because its life depends on it. Seeing a berry and not distinguishing its colour could be fatal.
> rather than just a bunch of matter moving around
We're all a bunch of matter moving around. But we have perception - which is just a neural net converting images to image representations (and other senses in a similar way), and a value function - which rates the expected future rewards in a situation. Perception + value (emotion) creates what philosophers call qualia. These systems have been created by evolution because they are useful for survival.
> The question is about why the feelings themselves exist.
Again, because we have specific apparatus that computes perception representations and estimates future rewards related to our current situation and action, and because these representations are essential for life to continue.
The key differences between an agent and a non-agent are self replication and learning. We have these qualities while rocks don't. Self replication enables evolution and gives an intrinsic goal, a constraint if you will, to the agent. The constraint is what learning and evolution optimise against.
More fundamentally, it's a process that maintains low entropy (order) of the body inside the environment by actively compensating for perturbations.
Not at all. There is absolutely no reason that the behavior of distinguishing berries should have any felt experience at all from a functional perspective. What we'd like to explain are the feelings themselves. A robot can distinguish berries without feeling a thing.
> Again, because we have specific apparatus that computes perception representations and estimates future rewards related to our current situation and action, and because these representations are essential for life to continue.
This is just sidestepping the actual question. This doesn't explain the nature of felt experience at all. The question is why these feelings exist at all. What about "computation" leads to the complex experience of falling in love or tasting chocolate? And why would it lead to the particular qualities that we actually experience, rather than some other qualities? Even if you believe that qualia exist to causally affect our behavior (a contentious and problematic view, given that we can't measure them), why those specific qualities and not some others that could produce the same behavior? There are so many deep mysteries here that you are simply handwaving by feigning understanding.
Not gonna read that.
No. No, matter is not conscious. Go home nautil.us, you’re drunk.
Why you think it's dumb — maybe even with links to supporting material? Totally different story.
Does all conciousness have matter?
Which brings up many more questions, such as:
What even is the topic?