Ok. Can anyone explain how Consciousness could be a state of Matter in Plain English? Because quantum mechanics voodoo?
So where is the strength of an iron I-beam? You can't cut it up and squeeze "strength juice" out of it. There's no little piece you can look at that says, "hey, I'm Euler's column law!". No individual atom decided, hey, I'm an I-beam now. But if you pile up an enormous number of iron (and other) atoms in the shape of an I-beam it inevitably behaves like a beam (or column) and suddenly "knows" its supposed to have angular momentum and collapse at a certain compression force and such. There's no particular magic to it, it just naturally happens to enormous numbers of iron atoms in a small place.
About the same with stellar formation. There's no "essence of star" and no individual hydrogen atom decided to create a star. Just pile up a certain ridiculous number of hydrogen atoms and good luck not having it turn into a star. And not enough atoms, well no way it'll ignite, at least not naturally. It can kinda smolder at most.
There are other analogies with grains of sand and landslides, water crystals and avalanches, etc.
Any time you pile up a certain number of neurons at a certain complexity you get consciousness. We've run a couple billion experiments for quite a few centuries and every time you do it, aside from physical brain damage, it works.
Now stuff like Jaynes "Origin of the bicameral mind" is a little controversial, but, perhaps, a great big pile of neurons can boot up in a peculiar mode, sort of.
The specific hack of where it came from is only our species was able to add substantial amounts of fish to the diet, and fish oils and proteins seem to allow serious spectacular brain development in a positive feedback cycle until you get consciousness, then you overfish your ocean till all the fish die, then ... we're about to find out what comes after that.
But saying "[when] you pile up a certain number of neurons at a certain complexity you get consciousness" is begging the question. What is consciousness. What is it in the neurons that makes it? What is it about the universe we're in that allows for the phenomenon to emerge from it? This has always been how science has explained it to date: it just emerges from the complexity. But that doesn't explain anything >:|
Here's another fun topic to google. There's an island and a population of predator and their prey. Now graph those populations and you get some interesting oscillators. Where do those waveforms come from? Well, nowhere. Its a system thing there are no waveform particles or whatever.
Edited to add, maybe another way to say it is its not the emergence or "where" or "source" that doesn't exist, but the property itself that doesn't exist. There is no consciousness. There are just certain patterns that are really common among big piles of neurons. Like the big pile of neurons occasionally saying stuff like "I think therefore I am".
There is no consciousness to measure, or you could give it a number. I've got 100 consciousness score, how bout you? This is very much like intelligence. I know it when I see it, but you really kick over an anthill when you claim you can give out an "intelligence number" like an IQ. Coincidentally both seem to be self organizational, again all you need is a big pile of neurons and some time and not only does consciousness pop out, but so does intelligence.
Granted my knowledge of physics is nil compared to that paper's writer, but as far as I know, a "state of matter" doesn't mean "Duh, it's made of matters." It has a (more or less) well-defined meaning. Liquid or plasma is a state of matter. "Having a pleasant smell", "moving on its own", or "with a rounded edge" isn't.
So, you can't just say it's made of matter. You need to justify that "being conscious" is more like the former than the latter.
> We explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids and gases: ...
So it seems clear that the author argues "being conscious" is parallel to "being liquid", but this better have a really solid (no pun intended) justification.
I think it would be nice if we could explain everything we observe in the universe in terms of physical laws and mathematical formulae. But I don't think we're there yet.
And why not a possible divine explanation? Last I checked, we haven't completely ruled it out. It's not a trap. At the very least, materialists should be able to counter divine arguments, not just ignore them.
Dualism is still toast. However I no longer think he's proposing dualism.
It seems to be a multi-disciplinary collection of boundary conditions.
If so then the matter you are made of is concious; it is matter that is in a state of conciousness.
if consciousness is being "aware" of yourself, then at a very, very, very low level, the coffee cup is "aware" of itself because it is a perfect analog computer simulating "a cup of coffee on a desk" - which is what it is.
That's an interesting misspelling of "Gottfried". A universal genius, indeed.
Snowflakes are pretty. The water molecules in the snowflake do not inherent this; they are not themselves pretty as a result of being in the pretty snowflake. (Although you could consider them beautiful for other reasons. From a life-sciences and/or chemistry point of view, water is pretty beautiful)
But then again, I'm an engineer with a passing interest in chemistry, not a quantum physicist, so of course I see everything as systems. To me nothing they talk about makes sense anyway.
P.S. A snowman isn't exactly an emergent property. Now, an avalanche system might be...
EDIT: Why the downvote? Did I not write enough? My point is, simply, that observing consciousness in correlation to matter does not imply that consciousness is caused by matter. The provided link is to the Wikipedia article that explains this basic statistical principle.
"Are you made of matter? Are you concious? If so then the matter you are made of is concious"... implying that if you are both made of matter and conscious then it is the matter that you are made of that makes you conscious. In other words, consciousness is caused by matter.
I don't believe that we have sufficient empirical evidence to determine a causal relationship, only a correlation.
EDIT: I realize I mistakenly jumped to the conclusion that the parent was implying matter caused consciousness when all that was said was that "conscious matter is conscious". I just wanted to further explain what I was thinking. Straw man or not, whether my argument was sound or not, I thought I had a valid point to make to contribute to the conversation and I don't feel that it should have been downvoted.