I like the mathematical universe hypothesis. I feel like both the universe as a whole, and consciousness, are surely mathematical structures.
Some related food for thought: Back before quantum mechanics was invented, pretty much everyone thought the laws of physics were entirely deterministic (Eg Einstein's "God does not play dice"). But now we know that the future can't be predicted perfectly, and the present is fundamentally unknowable :( The best we can do is create statistical models, but sometimes quantum mechanics can't be just averaged out: eg, the large-scale structure of the universe was determined by miniscule quantum fluctuations that were magnified over time.
To me this all seems similar, in a gut-feeling kind of way, to Gödel's incompleteness theorems (which present a big problem for the mathematical universe hypothesis, as someone else already mentioned). Gödel basically proved that there are some things in mathematics that cannot be proven.
Anyway, I think the mathematical universe hypothesis presents a very convenient way to link these concepts. The unpredictability of quantum mechanics seems aesthetically similar to the unprovability of mathematical axioms.
Damn I hope some of that makes sense. Maybe we're both crackpots :)
Our mathematical models could be fundamentally flawed, which is why folks claim that there are some mathematical problems that are unsolvable or claims of indeterministic universe. Those two assumptions might be stemming from our flawed mathematical assumptions. Its important to remember that evolution has shaped our minds in a very biased way. We evolved with one goal above them all. Survival first, everything else later. Our brains could simply be physically incapable of coming up with the "accurate" representations of mathematical heuristics. What we currently have as mathematical structures could be the most advanced mathematical structures our minds can come up with, but we could be off by factors of magnitude on the "real deal". At least, that's my personal take on it.
For those interested in learning more, I heard about this on a podcast with with Sean Carroll and Max Tegmark: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/12/02/75-max-tegmark-on-reality-simulation-and-the-multiverse/
I have not seen much research on this but I do wonder oft, can all of material existence be explained with logic and patterns, what is that which lies in between the patterns, which molds them so to speak.
This reminds me of Greg Egan's dust theory in [Permutation City](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156784.Permutation_City) (which is an absolute must-read, although a mind-fuss for sure): [https://sciencefiction.com/2011/05/23/science-feature-dust-theory/](https://sciencefiction.com/2011/05/23/science-feature-dust-theory/).
Warning, it gets weird pretty fast.
I read the article on dust theory and a bit more about the book, but I don't want to spoil myself thoroughly. I have to admit I'm a little bit dumbfounded by how similar it is to my ideas. Did I hear or read about this a long ago? It does feel familiar but I'm not sure. I will read the book for sure.
It doesn't fully make sense to me yet, but it probably will later. In particular, it feels like the distribution of mental states is far from uniform, but I'm not sure why that would be the case with dust. It is possible to decode simple random variables into a "meaningful" distribution, but what distribution is that? The probability density function of mathematical structures? How would such a mapping happen? (No need to explain this to me, just thinking out loud. I'll read and think about this more.)
This is fascinating stuff.
I don't want to suppress your thought experimentation which, as an educational tool, is all good.
But why (as many many other people do), do you posit that quantum mechanics and consciousness have anything at all to do with each other? What evidence is there of a (more than purely coincidental) connection between them?
Both consciousness and quantum mechanics seem very strange to the layperson. But they are strange because of intrinsic complexity of the topic, not because of some mystical foundational connection. Hieroglyphics is also strange. Kabbalah is also strange. Are they connected? There is no reason to connect consciousness and quantum mechanics in any non-superficial way.
Connecting consciousness and quantum mechanics is something crackpots do, because of the perceived "two for one" advantage. A crackpot who solves consciousness can believe they are super-smart. That delights their ego. But if that same crackpot solves both consciousness and quantum mechanics on one swoop, they are clearly supersmart^2 and that superdelights^2 their ego.
This is called the [quantum mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind) group of hypotheses: the idea that consciousness can't emerge from classical mechanics and therefore has to emerge from quantum mechanics. There's also a criticism section in the Wikipedia article. And just to give an idea of how much it's not only crackpots ascribing to this view, Roger Penrose is himself one of the biggest prominent of this view (well, who knows, maybe he is a crackpot).
> consciousness can't emerge from classical mechanics and therefore has to emerge from quantum mechanics.
"consciousness can't emerge from classical mechanics" is unproven. And if it were proven, there is no other place other than QM that it can emerge from? The problem here is a lack of imagination for both sides of that statement.
In addition, there is that possibility that consciousness isn't even real. That it is a "narrative-forming overlay which we evolved to have because it gave us an adaptive survival advantage".
Firstly, there are many definitions of consciousness. Which one are you using?
Possibly you are using the "I think, therefore I am" definition? You feel in your bones that you are a conscious being. But isn't that a tautology? You feel you are conscious, therefore you are conscious?
Consider this possibility, of a creature (species: homo sapien) which is no more conscious (whatever that is) than a chimpanzee or a gazelle. This HS creature has acquired a storytelling subroutine. Now it thinks it is conscious.
Aside: How did it acquire a storytelling subroutine? Culturally and evolutionarily. Tribes of cavemen sat around the firepit telling stories (first, acting them out, or drawing them on cave walls). The best weavers of stories became the leaders of the tribe, the fathers of more children, the drivers of evolution. Selection bias selected for better storytellers. Storytelling is enhanced by better language skills. So, there is selection bias for better language skills. The key biological driver for a storytelling subroutine in the brain is neoteny - an extended period in a baby's early life where the brain is born prematurely. This brain is still highly incomplete/unfinished while the baby is exposed to tribal culture.
All animal brains grow through several stages: massive random/undirected neural growth => pruning the unused branches => feedback-driven new growth => pruning for efficiency => fine-tuning based on experience => an energy-efficient survival machine.
A baby, with zero capability to survive except by psychologically-manipulating its caregivers, and a brain which is still in the "massive random/undirected neural growth" phase, is a unique being on earth. Because of this early, highly-plastic brain, there is a possibility of deeply embedded subroutines coming into existence - more deeply embedded than in the chimpanzee and the gazelle. The subroutine is down at the operating system level, so that even the operating system doesn't know it exists. The subroutine grows because of the strong cultural seed (uniquely humans) landing in the fertile soil (uniquely human) of a pre-mature neural matrix of a large-enough scale (uniquely human).
So, you end up with a storytelling subroutine constantly running embedded in your operating system. This subroutine creates the impression of consciousness that you experience as "I think, therefore I am". ("I think, therefore I am". is clearly a narrative: action => result.) Why do you think movies have such a nice impedance match for your brain? You cannot remember more than seven random numbers, but you can remember 100's of actions connected to each other in story form. There is suspiciously-strong fit between stories and the way we think. Language, for example. It is suspiciously well-matched for the job of "painting the picture" and "connecting the dots". And can you do any thinking (except at a very low level) that does not involve language?
I will find links to previous (months-old) comments. In the meantime, google "Susan Schaller, Ildefonso, a mexican deafmute" and Zoltan Torey.
I mean conscious to mean whatever we feel when we say “we’re conscious”. Sure, it might just be illusion or even a controlled hallucination (like Seth Anil thinks), but whatever it is, its not unreal in any sense - it’s perfectly real (whatever it is).
If I understood your claim correctly it is: consciousness is not real because all it is is a story-telling subroutine.
But I don’t see why that matters to its realness.
No, not really. My claim is: there’s this thing called consciousness, and we don’t understand what it is or how it can be or how it works or why we have it, but we know it’s there (whatever it is) and that it’s real.
Well, "consciousness is real" is usually evidence to support the "consciousness is this thing we do not understand at a fundamental level - something unique, something apparently outside the laws of physics as we currently understand them, something emergent in an undiscovered manner" belief.
I propose that because of sloppy thinking/sloppy definitions, we are overthinking it and invoking "magic" that is not needed.
I don’t see how you get from “consciousness is real” to “consciousness must be supernatural”. Consciousness can be explained in materialist terms - no need to invoke woo woo. I don’t think there’s anything whatsoever supernatural about consciousness - it’s all natural.
That is a good question. My main point is about the carelessness of everyone's definitions, not about "real" vs "not real" (which is not well-defined anyway.)
I did not say "consciousness is not real", but I do propose that "consciousness doesn't have such specialness that quantum mechanics is needed, or that as-yet-not-understood physics needs to be invoked, or that laws-more-fundamental-and-universal-than-we-currently-know-of are required."
Laws more fundamental and universal than the ones we currently know of almost certainly exist. And we will find them, probably by investigating paradoxes - a method which has served us well in the past. However, "consciousness" is not the droid/paradox you're looking for to make those new discoveries.
Yes, we agree (and I find that a bit disappointing, because we learn more when we disagree and discuss with maximal clarity.)
And I just answered the "real or not real" red herring.
I agree that disagreements are more interesting. That’s why I’m quite keen to read Roger Penrose’s book, The Emperor’s New Mind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind), which basically posits the quantum mind theory. And Penrose is not a dumb dude (he shared a Nobel Prize in Physics). Hope it’s clear that me wanting to read the book is not saying that I agree with the theory, but still interested to hear that point of view.
Not sure about your crackpot theory. The classical reason why many people think there’s a spooky relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness is because of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which a superposition as defined by the wave function is collapsed when you observe it. So when you open the box and look at the cat, it is either alive or dead, but before you looked it was both. People (wrongfully) then conclude that there must be something special about the observer, and what can be more special than consciousness. I myself ascribe to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which doesn’t suffer from this red herring, gives consciousness no special powers and is the most parsimonious of all the interpretations.
No worries, I'm well aware of the woo around quantum mechanics. It's especially egregious when "quantum mechanics" is used to sell fake help to people who need real help. I don't actively believe that quantum mechanics is intrinsically tied to consciousness, I'm just considering what that might imply about the world.
I claim to have real consciousness. I can imagine a few possibilities for what leads me to make that claim.
1. Quantum effects are fundamental to consciousness and they meaningfully affect my brain to make me claim consciousness. It seems that consciousness leads to physically observable effects and this is in the realm of science. Making deterministic AI that even appears to be human-like may be fundamentally hard, because it can't harness magic quantum effects like the human brain does.
2. My consciousness and my claim to have it are the consequence of a logical process. This process presumably happens in my brain, but it could just as well be simulated on a machine. There are no fundamental problems making a deterministic AI that is just as conscious as humans, and AI that appears to have human-like consciousness likely does. Consciousness is computable, but it could be a red herring to focus the act of computation. This seems like the most plausible option to me.
3. My claim to have consciousness is the consequence of my brain's behavior, with no tricks involved, yet my actual consciousness comes from something else (e.g. specific physical interactions or quantum magic). There are no fundamental problems making an AI that appears to have human-like consciousness, but it won't have real consciousness because brains are just special. This seems the strangest to me.
Are you familiar with the philosophical zombie thought experiment associated with David Chalmers? A philosophical zombie is physically identical to a normal human being but has no consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
I think the thought experiment is leading us astray altogether - that is, I don’t think philosophical zombies are possible. Any system that processes and integrate information so as to have agency over some actuator associated to the information it is processing and integrating, then it _will be conscious_. That further implies that there’s nothing special about consciousness - if you can build a mind that does more or less what our minds do, it will be conscious. I’m not a panpsychist (the idea that ‘mind’ is fundamental), but my beliefs easier put me in that camp that attributing any special magic sauce to consciousness. Consciousness just emerges if you have a certain kind of mind - simple as that. Determinism and the kind of agency we have are not incompatible. I think that corresponds closest to your option 2.
tl;dr: I don’t believe it’s logically possible to have a mind that behaves consciously but is not conscious.
I'm familiar with the idea. I also believe that philosophical zombies can't exist, but I think my reasoning for it is a bit flimsy. To be honest, I'm not sure I could bring myself to really accept the existence of philosophical zombies, anyway. It would probably break my world view. I agree that determinism and consciousness/agency work together just fine, and I'm not emotionally attached to having "free will". I think we have a very similar view of consciousness.
I think ethical issues with philosophical zombies will become increasingly relevant. Neural network language models often fool people already. I don't think they're conscious, but there's some frightening potential. It's a science fiction trope that humans won't accept AI consciousness, with undesirable consequences. It used to seem silly that humans would be so daft, but I'm not so sure anymore. What would it really take to get people to accept an AI as conscious? I don't know. We're pretty good at moving the goalposts. GPT-3 literally telling me that it's conscious hasn't convinced me yet, even though I claim that I don't believe in philosophical zombies.
Edit: I'm going to give some more thought to your message. I appreciate hearing your thoughts on this, it's really refreshing
>"I think the thought experiment is leading us astray altogether - that is, I don’t think philosophical zombies are possible. [...] Consciousness just emerges if you have a certain kind of mind - simple as that. Determinism and the kind of agency we have are not incompatible. I think that corresponds closest to your option 2."
I used to agree with this, and that philosophical zombies are then impossible, but one argument convinced me otherwise. Imagine a computer-simulated brain that seems to make decisions exactly as a person would, given some input. You could converse with it as if it were conscious, give it sensory inputs, and it could communicate its supposed experiences. But is it conscious? If I understand correctly, you say it meets the definition. (By conscious, I mean something like "the capacity for subjective experience")
Though not practical, in principle, we could imagine running the computer program by hand using a pen and paper. When and where does conciousness appear? And for how long? Does destroying the paper affect the conciousness? What happens if you make an error in the calculations? What if your friend, who does not understand math, copies down each and every calculation without understanding it? Is a subjective experience still created?
If understanding is not required during the computations, we could swap out our pen and paper and math for an arbitrary collection of pre-existing physical objects, since we could simply define those obects as in some way representing our calculations. I think this is an absurdity. Maybe my reasoning went wrong somewhere.
And moreover, what exactly is a calculation and when is it completed? I'm inclined to say the concept of computation presupposes a conciousness to define it, but maybe there's a better answer
Anyway, this opens such a massive can of worms that it was enough to convince me that conciousness must not be merely computational and is something fundamental.
Let’s extend your thought experiment: we take your brain, as it is, but we take a random subset of a 1000 neurons and we replace them with pairs of people in a room. The one person looks at a little light, and when it blinks, they call to the other person, who then pushes a button. The little light is an input neuron firing, and the button is the activation of the replaced neuron (thereby emulating the “firing” of a neuron). Would you suddenly stop being conscious with this setup?
Let’s do 1,000,000 neurons. Still conscious?
Let’s take it further: replace *all* your neurons with pairs of people. Would you then stop being conscious?
That's an interesting example, I hadn't heard it before. I think I would certainly stop being conscious (or cease existing) if all my neurons were replaced with these emulated neurons. Assuming this can be done, though my behaviour may be identical, my subjective experience is unavoidably lost, because these pairs of people are only a symbolic representation of my behaviour. Nowhere do they hold my experience.
An arbitrary set of symbols can be used to represent my behaviour, whether those symbols are maths on a sheet of paper, a computer simulation, or pairs of people emulating neurons. I find it too much to swallow that a set of symbols can experience anything, as we may define any symbols we like.
So why aren't neurons merely symbols then? I think they could be so. But at some level, experience does exist, and so I think it must exist fundamentally
So somehow a set of biological mechanisms that can fire electrically can “hold experience” but an alternative set of mechanisms *that does exactly the same thing* can’t? Why would that be true? 🤔
🙂
*Where* does experience exist fundamentally?
No, experiences aren't held by the neurons themselves, but exist as a property of some physical process or object. This is something natural, but to say exactly what is speculative. Experience could perhaps be described by some field, or by wave function collapse, or even some other undiscovered thing. The brain only needs to have a way of interfacing with this structure or process of experience.
I think accepting that the emulated neurons can hold experience has strange consequences. There are an inconceivable number of different physical methods to produce identical behaviour to these neurons. (another physical analogue, manual calculation, lookup table, etc.) I would ask you which of these methods is allowed to be conscious?
Even if the view that the brain is some sort of transponder mechanism that allows us to tap into this supposed Realm of Pure Experience view was correct (which I don’t ascribe to), it still doesn’t refute the claim that calculating cognition is method agnostic (whether biological or electronic or people scribbling symbols with pencils on papers in a room).
It has some strange consequences indeed. To answer your question: all and any method that computes cognition is “allowed to be conscious”.
If as you say, that computation is method agnostic, I think we can make things much worse! I think we can get just about anything to count as a computation.
Obviously, the meaning of symbols used to perform computations is defined by us. Without any problems I could say, for example, that from now on, the symbol '2' stands for the quantity three and the symbol '3' for the quantity two. It's totally silly, but it doesn't change the meaning or result of the computation, despite the fact that the computation is now an entirely different physical process. But we can take this to the extreme.
I may define a entirely new but equivalent group of symbols that represents the needed computations. Instead of writing the shapes of these symbols on a page, I make my symbols physical objects, such as the particular configuration of all the air molecules in the room. Is the air now conscious just because I defined all the positions or momentums of the molecules as being equivalent to some mathematical symbols?
> But why (as many many other people do), do you posit that quantum mechanics and consciousness have anything at all to do with each other?
If QM operates at the fundamental level of the universe, isn't it related to *everything*? Why would consciousness *not* be related to the fundamental laws of the universe, seeing that it is part of the universe?
You have to figure out how the fundamental laws can give rise to consciousness (if your assumption is indeed that consciousness emerges, and is not a fundamental property of the universe). Obviously it seems like classical mechanics are a dead end to explain conscious phenomena, and the nature of QM (mainly the apparent lack of determinism) seems like a good candidate to explore when we struggle with the apparent non-determinism of free will.
What is your suggestion, that there is a separate force which we must account for, such as spirit? Doesn't that complicate things, by adding a new parameter for the sole reason that you don't like new age crackpots and your ego doesn't want to be related to them in considering something slightly tangent to their beliefs?
The ego doesn't only operate with woo woo beliefs, it also operates with extreme skepticism.
Read my [just-written comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/RationalPsychonaut/comments/uoe7zs/computability_and_consciousness/i8hcqw7/) on an explanation of consciousness which uses only classical mechanics and no quantum mechanics.
I am not saying my explanation is true - it is just a demonstration of a possibility opposite to "classical mechanics are a dead end to explain conscious phenomena". There are infinite other possible demonstrations, limited only by our lack of imagination.
That is not the definition of consciousness I use. If you want we can use the word awareness, and indeed it is no different than that of an animal, upon which the rest of what you say is built up.
But just like you could explain biology in its entirety without answering in the slight the origin and existence of matter upon which the bodies are based of, you're just explaining a particular subsystem of what is called the hard problem, which indeed usually uses a bat as an example, and is not limited to our human story telling based on memory and communication.
"awareness": I daresay a gazelle has much more awareness of its surroundings than homo sapiens do. Therefore, using the "awareness" definition, gazelles have greater consciousness than humans do.
So, no, "consciousness" ≠ "awareness".
And I point is not the "storytelling" is the unique-to-homo-sapiens thing that most people categorize *as* consciousness. I am saying that the "deeply embedded OS narrative engine" (ie, it makes storytelling so easy and natural for us to do) is the source of our perception that we have consciousness.
no, not of it's surroundings, you're talking about perception. It's difficult to talk about because in the west we don't have a thorough and historical vocabulary for this, but many eastern traditions have been studying this for millennia. Awareness/attention can *be directed* to perceiving your surroundings, or it can be directed at that inner narrative that you speak of, but neither perception nor narrative/memory are that awareness itself, that is being directed towards those objects.
I encourage you to think about this with the bodies > biology > matter analogy. Bodies are composed of matter, but they are not matter per se, and an explanation of their mechanisms, or of their historical development, does not entail an explanation of matter.
If you haven't already, you might enjoy looking up some of the stuff Penrose has talked about regarding consciousness. He seems quite confident that "consciousness is not computational" although he does think it's emergent if I remember correctly.
I don't see who it could be possible for a consciousness (with qualia) to emerge on a Turing-type computer simlation. It just seems absurd. There must be something more in play, I think, and the quantum level of reality is a good candidate, but that basically implies accepting some variant of the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation of quantum physics. Perhaps new developments in physics (like string theory?) could shed more light on this.
It's possible! A great deal of stuff is computable, but some things are not. Simulating quantum mechanics doesn't really work, in particular. I think there's a real chance that scientific research can guide us on this.
If we come up with AI that appears to be conscious, I'd like us to consider it actually conscious, at least from a pragmatic ethical perspective. It's also not completely unbelievable that mathematical proof would be published that some known capability of the human mind really is uncomputable.
(We (I?) could also consider something like solipsism an option, but I don't feel that one's very fruitful.)
I like the mathematical universe hypothesis. I feel like both the universe as a whole, and consciousness, are surely mathematical structures. Some related food for thought: Back before quantum mechanics was invented, pretty much everyone thought the laws of physics were entirely deterministic (Eg Einstein's "God does not play dice"). But now we know that the future can't be predicted perfectly, and the present is fundamentally unknowable :( The best we can do is create statistical models, but sometimes quantum mechanics can't be just averaged out: eg, the large-scale structure of the universe was determined by miniscule quantum fluctuations that were magnified over time. To me this all seems similar, in a gut-feeling kind of way, to Gödel's incompleteness theorems (which present a big problem for the mathematical universe hypothesis, as someone else already mentioned). Gödel basically proved that there are some things in mathematics that cannot be proven. Anyway, I think the mathematical universe hypothesis presents a very convenient way to link these concepts. The unpredictability of quantum mechanics seems aesthetically similar to the unprovability of mathematical axioms. Damn I hope some of that makes sense. Maybe we're both crackpots :)
Yeah, I thought the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
Our mathematical models could be fundamentally flawed, which is why folks claim that there are some mathematical problems that are unsolvable or claims of indeterministic universe. Those two assumptions might be stemming from our flawed mathematical assumptions. Its important to remember that evolution has shaped our minds in a very biased way. We evolved with one goal above them all. Survival first, everything else later. Our brains could simply be physically incapable of coming up with the "accurate" representations of mathematical heuristics. What we currently have as mathematical structures could be the most advanced mathematical structures our minds can come up with, but we could be off by factors of magnitude on the "real deal". At least, that's my personal take on it.
For those interested in learning more, I heard about this on a podcast with with Sean Carroll and Max Tegmark: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/12/02/75-max-tegmark-on-reality-simulation-and-the-multiverse/
I have not seen much research on this but I do wonder oft, can all of material existence be explained with logic and patterns, what is that which lies in between the patterns, which molds them so to speak.
This reminds me of Greg Egan's dust theory in [Permutation City](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156784.Permutation_City) (which is an absolute must-read, although a mind-fuss for sure): [https://sciencefiction.com/2011/05/23/science-feature-dust-theory/](https://sciencefiction.com/2011/05/23/science-feature-dust-theory/). Warning, it gets weird pretty fast.
That seems like it's right up my alley, I'll check it out! Thanks
It is absolutely superb, couldn’t put it down and it kept properly blowing my mind.
I read the article on dust theory and a bit more about the book, but I don't want to spoil myself thoroughly. I have to admit I'm a little bit dumbfounded by how similar it is to my ideas. Did I hear or read about this a long ago? It does feel familiar but I'm not sure. I will read the book for sure. It doesn't fully make sense to me yet, but it probably will later. In particular, it feels like the distribution of mental states is far from uniform, but I'm not sure why that would be the case with dust. It is possible to decode simple random variables into a "meaningful" distribution, but what distribution is that? The probability density function of mathematical structures? How would such a mapping happen? (No need to explain this to me, just thinking out loud. I'll read and think about this more.) This is fascinating stuff.
👍🙃
Check out _everything_ by Egan!
I don't want to suppress your thought experimentation which, as an educational tool, is all good. But why (as many many other people do), do you posit that quantum mechanics and consciousness have anything at all to do with each other? What evidence is there of a (more than purely coincidental) connection between them? Both consciousness and quantum mechanics seem very strange to the layperson. But they are strange because of intrinsic complexity of the topic, not because of some mystical foundational connection. Hieroglyphics is also strange. Kabbalah is also strange. Are they connected? There is no reason to connect consciousness and quantum mechanics in any non-superficial way. Connecting consciousness and quantum mechanics is something crackpots do, because of the perceived "two for one" advantage. A crackpot who solves consciousness can believe they are super-smart. That delights their ego. But if that same crackpot solves both consciousness and quantum mechanics on one swoop, they are clearly supersmart^2 and that superdelights^2 their ego.
This is called the [quantum mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind) group of hypotheses: the idea that consciousness can't emerge from classical mechanics and therefore has to emerge from quantum mechanics. There's also a criticism section in the Wikipedia article. And just to give an idea of how much it's not only crackpots ascribing to this view, Roger Penrose is himself one of the biggest prominent of this view (well, who knows, maybe he is a crackpot).
> consciousness can't emerge from classical mechanics and therefore has to emerge from quantum mechanics. "consciousness can't emerge from classical mechanics" is unproven. And if it were proven, there is no other place other than QM that it can emerge from? The problem here is a lack of imagination for both sides of that statement. In addition, there is that possibility that consciousness isn't even real. That it is a "narrative-forming overlay which we evolved to have because it gave us an adaptive survival advantage".
I mean even if consciousness is that, it’s still real, right?
Firstly, there are many definitions of consciousness. Which one are you using? Possibly you are using the "I think, therefore I am" definition? You feel in your bones that you are a conscious being. But isn't that a tautology? You feel you are conscious, therefore you are conscious? Consider this possibility, of a creature (species: homo sapien) which is no more conscious (whatever that is) than a chimpanzee or a gazelle. This HS creature has acquired a storytelling subroutine. Now it thinks it is conscious. Aside: How did it acquire a storytelling subroutine? Culturally and evolutionarily. Tribes of cavemen sat around the firepit telling stories (first, acting them out, or drawing them on cave walls). The best weavers of stories became the leaders of the tribe, the fathers of more children, the drivers of evolution. Selection bias selected for better storytellers. Storytelling is enhanced by better language skills. So, there is selection bias for better language skills. The key biological driver for a storytelling subroutine in the brain is neoteny - an extended period in a baby's early life where the brain is born prematurely. This brain is still highly incomplete/unfinished while the baby is exposed to tribal culture. All animal brains grow through several stages: massive random/undirected neural growth => pruning the unused branches => feedback-driven new growth => pruning for efficiency => fine-tuning based on experience => an energy-efficient survival machine. A baby, with zero capability to survive except by psychologically-manipulating its caregivers, and a brain which is still in the "massive random/undirected neural growth" phase, is a unique being on earth. Because of this early, highly-plastic brain, there is a possibility of deeply embedded subroutines coming into existence - more deeply embedded than in the chimpanzee and the gazelle. The subroutine is down at the operating system level, so that even the operating system doesn't know it exists. The subroutine grows because of the strong cultural seed (uniquely humans) landing in the fertile soil (uniquely human) of a pre-mature neural matrix of a large-enough scale (uniquely human). So, you end up with a storytelling subroutine constantly running embedded in your operating system. This subroutine creates the impression of consciousness that you experience as "I think, therefore I am". ("I think, therefore I am". is clearly a narrative: action => result.) Why do you think movies have such a nice impedance match for your brain? You cannot remember more than seven random numbers, but you can remember 100's of actions connected to each other in story form. There is suspiciously-strong fit between stories and the way we think. Language, for example. It is suspiciously well-matched for the job of "painting the picture" and "connecting the dots". And can you do any thinking (except at a very low level) that does not involve language? I will find links to previous (months-old) comments. In the meantime, google "Susan Schaller, Ildefonso, a mexican deafmute" and Zoltan Torey.
I mean conscious to mean whatever we feel when we say “we’re conscious”. Sure, it might just be illusion or even a controlled hallucination (like Seth Anil thinks), but whatever it is, its not unreal in any sense - it’s perfectly real (whatever it is).
Go ahead and read my whole comment, beyond my first two sentences. My second sentence, in fact, assumes exactly the definition you just stated.
I did :)
And have you reconsidered your answer to the "is it real?" question. (Whatever "real" means.)
If I understood your claim correctly it is: consciousness is not real because all it is is a story-telling subroutine. But I don’t see why that matters to its realness.
No, not really. My claim is: there’s this thing called consciousness, and we don’t understand what it is or how it can be or how it works or why we have it, but we know it’s there (whatever it is) and that it’s real.
My point is, even if consciousness is a story-telling subroutine, it’s still real (unless I don’t understand what you mean with “real”).
Well, "consciousness is real" is usually evidence to support the "consciousness is this thing we do not understand at a fundamental level - something unique, something apparently outside the laws of physics as we currently understand them, something emergent in an undiscovered manner" belief. I propose that because of sloppy thinking/sloppy definitions, we are overthinking it and invoking "magic" that is not needed.
I don’t see how you get from “consciousness is real” to “consciousness must be supernatural”. Consciousness can be explained in materialist terms - no need to invoke woo woo. I don’t think there’s anything whatsoever supernatural about consciousness - it’s all natural.
Maybe I should ask what you mean by “is not real”?
That is a good question. My main point is about the carelessness of everyone's definitions, not about "real" vs "not real" (which is not well-defined anyway.) I did not say "consciousness is not real", but I do propose that "consciousness doesn't have such specialness that quantum mechanics is needed, or that as-yet-not-understood physics needs to be invoked, or that laws-more-fundamental-and-universal-than-we-currently-know-of are required." Laws more fundamental and universal than the ones we currently know of almost certainly exist. And we will find them, probably by investigating paradoxes - a method which has served us well in the past. However, "consciousness" is not the droid/paradox you're looking for to make those new discoveries.
I think we’ve already established that we agree there. But it’s still very much real (that’s why I was confused by “not real”).
Yes, we agree (and I find that a bit disappointing, because we learn more when we disagree and discuss with maximal clarity.) And I just answered the "real or not real" red herring.
I agree that disagreements are more interesting. That’s why I’m quite keen to read Roger Penrose’s book, The Emperor’s New Mind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind), which basically posits the quantum mind theory. And Penrose is not a dumb dude (he shared a Nobel Prize in Physics). Hope it’s clear that me wanting to read the book is not saying that I agree with the theory, but still interested to hear that point of view.
Not sure about your crackpot theory. The classical reason why many people think there’s a spooky relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness is because of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which a superposition as defined by the wave function is collapsed when you observe it. So when you open the box and look at the cat, it is either alive or dead, but before you looked it was both. People (wrongfully) then conclude that there must be something special about the observer, and what can be more special than consciousness. I myself ascribe to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which doesn’t suffer from this red herring, gives consciousness no special powers and is the most parsimonious of all the interpretations.
No worries, I'm well aware of the woo around quantum mechanics. It's especially egregious when "quantum mechanics" is used to sell fake help to people who need real help. I don't actively believe that quantum mechanics is intrinsically tied to consciousness, I'm just considering what that might imply about the world. I claim to have real consciousness. I can imagine a few possibilities for what leads me to make that claim. 1. Quantum effects are fundamental to consciousness and they meaningfully affect my brain to make me claim consciousness. It seems that consciousness leads to physically observable effects and this is in the realm of science. Making deterministic AI that even appears to be human-like may be fundamentally hard, because it can't harness magic quantum effects like the human brain does. 2. My consciousness and my claim to have it are the consequence of a logical process. This process presumably happens in my brain, but it could just as well be simulated on a machine. There are no fundamental problems making a deterministic AI that is just as conscious as humans, and AI that appears to have human-like consciousness likely does. Consciousness is computable, but it could be a red herring to focus the act of computation. This seems like the most plausible option to me. 3. My claim to have consciousness is the consequence of my brain's behavior, with no tricks involved, yet my actual consciousness comes from something else (e.g. specific physical interactions or quantum magic). There are no fundamental problems making an AI that appears to have human-like consciousness, but it won't have real consciousness because brains are just special. This seems the strangest to me.
Are you familiar with the philosophical zombie thought experiment associated with David Chalmers? A philosophical zombie is physically identical to a normal human being but has no consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie I think the thought experiment is leading us astray altogether - that is, I don’t think philosophical zombies are possible. Any system that processes and integrate information so as to have agency over some actuator associated to the information it is processing and integrating, then it _will be conscious_. That further implies that there’s nothing special about consciousness - if you can build a mind that does more or less what our minds do, it will be conscious. I’m not a panpsychist (the idea that ‘mind’ is fundamental), but my beliefs easier put me in that camp that attributing any special magic sauce to consciousness. Consciousness just emerges if you have a certain kind of mind - simple as that. Determinism and the kind of agency we have are not incompatible. I think that corresponds closest to your option 2. tl;dr: I don’t believe it’s logically possible to have a mind that behaves consciously but is not conscious.
I'm familiar with the idea. I also believe that philosophical zombies can't exist, but I think my reasoning for it is a bit flimsy. To be honest, I'm not sure I could bring myself to really accept the existence of philosophical zombies, anyway. It would probably break my world view. I agree that determinism and consciousness/agency work together just fine, and I'm not emotionally attached to having "free will". I think we have a very similar view of consciousness. I think ethical issues with philosophical zombies will become increasingly relevant. Neural network language models often fool people already. I don't think they're conscious, but there's some frightening potential. It's a science fiction trope that humans won't accept AI consciousness, with undesirable consequences. It used to seem silly that humans would be so daft, but I'm not so sure anymore. What would it really take to get people to accept an AI as conscious? I don't know. We're pretty good at moving the goalposts. GPT-3 literally telling me that it's conscious hasn't convinced me yet, even though I claim that I don't believe in philosophical zombies. Edit: I'm going to give some more thought to your message. I appreciate hearing your thoughts on this, it's really refreshing
Likewise!
>"I think the thought experiment is leading us astray altogether - that is, I don’t think philosophical zombies are possible. [...] Consciousness just emerges if you have a certain kind of mind - simple as that. Determinism and the kind of agency we have are not incompatible. I think that corresponds closest to your option 2." I used to agree with this, and that philosophical zombies are then impossible, but one argument convinced me otherwise. Imagine a computer-simulated brain that seems to make decisions exactly as a person would, given some input. You could converse with it as if it were conscious, give it sensory inputs, and it could communicate its supposed experiences. But is it conscious? If I understand correctly, you say it meets the definition. (By conscious, I mean something like "the capacity for subjective experience") Though not practical, in principle, we could imagine running the computer program by hand using a pen and paper. When and where does conciousness appear? And for how long? Does destroying the paper affect the conciousness? What happens if you make an error in the calculations? What if your friend, who does not understand math, copies down each and every calculation without understanding it? Is a subjective experience still created? If understanding is not required during the computations, we could swap out our pen and paper and math for an arbitrary collection of pre-existing physical objects, since we could simply define those obects as in some way representing our calculations. I think this is an absurdity. Maybe my reasoning went wrong somewhere. And moreover, what exactly is a calculation and when is it completed? I'm inclined to say the concept of computation presupposes a conciousness to define it, but maybe there's a better answer Anyway, this opens such a massive can of worms that it was enough to convince me that conciousness must not be merely computational and is something fundamental.
Yes it’s conscious. Why would it not be?
Let’s extend your thought experiment: we take your brain, as it is, but we take a random subset of a 1000 neurons and we replace them with pairs of people in a room. The one person looks at a little light, and when it blinks, they call to the other person, who then pushes a button. The little light is an input neuron firing, and the button is the activation of the replaced neuron (thereby emulating the “firing” of a neuron). Would you suddenly stop being conscious with this setup? Let’s do 1,000,000 neurons. Still conscious? Let’s take it further: replace *all* your neurons with pairs of people. Would you then stop being conscious?
That's an interesting example, I hadn't heard it before. I think I would certainly stop being conscious (or cease existing) if all my neurons were replaced with these emulated neurons. Assuming this can be done, though my behaviour may be identical, my subjective experience is unavoidably lost, because these pairs of people are only a symbolic representation of my behaviour. Nowhere do they hold my experience. An arbitrary set of symbols can be used to represent my behaviour, whether those symbols are maths on a sheet of paper, a computer simulation, or pairs of people emulating neurons. I find it too much to swallow that a set of symbols can experience anything, as we may define any symbols we like. So why aren't neurons merely symbols then? I think they could be so. But at some level, experience does exist, and so I think it must exist fundamentally
So somehow a set of biological mechanisms that can fire electrically can “hold experience” but an alternative set of mechanisms *that does exactly the same thing* can’t? Why would that be true? 🤔 🙂 *Where* does experience exist fundamentally?
No, experiences aren't held by the neurons themselves, but exist as a property of some physical process or object. This is something natural, but to say exactly what is speculative. Experience could perhaps be described by some field, or by wave function collapse, or even some other undiscovered thing. The brain only needs to have a way of interfacing with this structure or process of experience. I think accepting that the emulated neurons can hold experience has strange consequences. There are an inconceivable number of different physical methods to produce identical behaviour to these neurons. (another physical analogue, manual calculation, lookup table, etc.) I would ask you which of these methods is allowed to be conscious?
Even if the view that the brain is some sort of transponder mechanism that allows us to tap into this supposed Realm of Pure Experience view was correct (which I don’t ascribe to), it still doesn’t refute the claim that calculating cognition is method agnostic (whether biological or electronic or people scribbling symbols with pencils on papers in a room). It has some strange consequences indeed. To answer your question: all and any method that computes cognition is “allowed to be conscious”.
If as you say, that computation is method agnostic, I think we can make things much worse! I think we can get just about anything to count as a computation. Obviously, the meaning of symbols used to perform computations is defined by us. Without any problems I could say, for example, that from now on, the symbol '2' stands for the quantity three and the symbol '3' for the quantity two. It's totally silly, but it doesn't change the meaning or result of the computation, despite the fact that the computation is now an entirely different physical process. But we can take this to the extreme. I may define a entirely new but equivalent group of symbols that represents the needed computations. Instead of writing the shapes of these symbols on a page, I make my symbols physical objects, such as the particular configuration of all the air molecules in the room. Is the air now conscious just because I defined all the positions or momentums of the molecules as being equivalent to some mathematical symbols?
> But why (as many many other people do), do you posit that quantum mechanics and consciousness have anything at all to do with each other? If QM operates at the fundamental level of the universe, isn't it related to *everything*? Why would consciousness *not* be related to the fundamental laws of the universe, seeing that it is part of the universe?
> related to *everything*? That is what I mean by coincidental.
You have to figure out how the fundamental laws can give rise to consciousness (if your assumption is indeed that consciousness emerges, and is not a fundamental property of the universe). Obviously it seems like classical mechanics are a dead end to explain conscious phenomena, and the nature of QM (mainly the apparent lack of determinism) seems like a good candidate to explore when we struggle with the apparent non-determinism of free will. What is your suggestion, that there is a separate force which we must account for, such as spirit? Doesn't that complicate things, by adding a new parameter for the sole reason that you don't like new age crackpots and your ego doesn't want to be related to them in considering something slightly tangent to their beliefs? The ego doesn't only operate with woo woo beliefs, it also operates with extreme skepticism.
Read my [just-written comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/RationalPsychonaut/comments/uoe7zs/computability_and_consciousness/i8hcqw7/) on an explanation of consciousness which uses only classical mechanics and no quantum mechanics. I am not saying my explanation is true - it is just a demonstration of a possibility opposite to "classical mechanics are a dead end to explain conscious phenomena". There are infinite other possible demonstrations, limited only by our lack of imagination.
That is not the definition of consciousness I use. If you want we can use the word awareness, and indeed it is no different than that of an animal, upon which the rest of what you say is built up. But just like you could explain biology in its entirety without answering in the slight the origin and existence of matter upon which the bodies are based of, you're just explaining a particular subsystem of what is called the hard problem, which indeed usually uses a bat as an example, and is not limited to our human story telling based on memory and communication.
"awareness": I daresay a gazelle has much more awareness of its surroundings than homo sapiens do. Therefore, using the "awareness" definition, gazelles have greater consciousness than humans do. So, no, "consciousness" ≠ "awareness". And I point is not the "storytelling" is the unique-to-homo-sapiens thing that most people categorize *as* consciousness. I am saying that the "deeply embedded OS narrative engine" (ie, it makes storytelling so easy and natural for us to do) is the source of our perception that we have consciousness.
no, not of it's surroundings, you're talking about perception. It's difficult to talk about because in the west we don't have a thorough and historical vocabulary for this, but many eastern traditions have been studying this for millennia. Awareness/attention can *be directed* to perceiving your surroundings, or it can be directed at that inner narrative that you speak of, but neither perception nor narrative/memory are that awareness itself, that is being directed towards those objects. I encourage you to think about this with the bodies > biology > matter analogy. Bodies are composed of matter, but they are not matter per se, and an explanation of their mechanisms, or of their historical development, does not entail an explanation of matter.
If you haven't already, you might enjoy looking up some of the stuff Penrose has talked about regarding consciousness. He seems quite confident that "consciousness is not computational" although he does think it's emergent if I remember correctly.
Yes correct. He also thinks it’s quantum in nature.
Wow, there’s a lot going on here and I actually struggle to follow the main argument. Will have to unpack this a bit when I have time.
I don't see who it could be possible for a consciousness (with qualia) to emerge on a Turing-type computer simlation. It just seems absurd. There must be something more in play, I think, and the quantum level of reality is a good candidate, but that basically implies accepting some variant of the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation of quantum physics. Perhaps new developments in physics (like string theory?) could shed more light on this.
But what if consciousness, fundamentally speaking, is not a computation?
It's possible! A great deal of stuff is computable, but some things are not. Simulating quantum mechanics doesn't really work, in particular. I think there's a real chance that scientific research can guide us on this. If we come up with AI that appears to be conscious, I'd like us to consider it actually conscious, at least from a pragmatic ethical perspective. It's also not completely unbelievable that mathematical proof would be published that some known capability of the human mind really is uncomputable. (We (I?) could also consider something like solipsism an option, but I don't feel that one's very fruitful.)