Is Matter Conscious? (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#101

Post by djakjxnanjak » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:43 AM UTC

Can we say that consciousness is a process that occurs when matter is arranged in a particular way? In the same way that you could say a whirlpool is a process that occurs when water is arranged in a particular way. All of the water molecules in the vicinity are participating in the whirlpool, but that doesn’t mean that all water everywhere has “whirlpoolness” all the time.

It doesn’t seem like a divine mystery to me that a brain could have consciousness while a single atom from a brain doesn’t - it just means that consciousness is complicated and requires many parts to be assembled. In the same way that a single atom of silicon isn’t a computer or a single molecule of water isn’t a whirlpool.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#102

Post by paraschopra » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:46 AM UTC

hyperpallium wrote: post #93

trixie_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think panpsychism argues that everything is conscious, at all levels, simultaneously. There are no boundaries. What you experience as a boundary is just the limit of your awareness. Just as you don't consciously beat your heart or heal your wounds. And if you think about it a lot it's tough to really tell where your own boundary brain/body ends and the environment begins. I like the panpsychism stuff because it res…

Like Fourier analysis, every component sine wave is conscious, and every possible superposition of sine waves is also conscious. It's turtles all the way down. 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…

> 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?

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#103

Post by ddingus » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:46 AM UTC

paraschopra wrote: post #84

Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If you propose then that only agents or complex systems are conscious, you are faced with the second problem: the boundary condition. What do you call an agent, and why? I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamenta…

Would one not just infer the universe is conscious?

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.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#104

Post by paraschopra » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:48 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #90

paraschopra wrote: post #84

Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If you propose then that only agents or complex systems are conscious, you are faced with the second problem: the boundary condition. What do you call an agent, and why? I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamenta…

We humans draw this boundary all the time. We do it based on an entity's I/O behavior, and in particular, the complexity of interactions that it is possible to have with it. 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 t…

Curious: why do you say pansychism is absurd?

Red colour is something which has sort of become a canonical example of subjective experience. Nothing special about it - could have been blue :)

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#105

Post by taneq » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:48 AM UTC

avar wrote: post #56

roberttod wrote: post #52

I can only know for sure that I am conscious, I only assume others are conscious because they are built kind of similar to the way I am. Though if we weren't conscious then would we talk about consciousness? What other topics wouldn't we talk about if we weren't conscious? We could still talk about experience because it would be functional, e.g. "I am experiencing pain" could be something I expect to come from an unc…

Yes, but more specifically you seem to be fumbling your way towards a well-known though experiment in philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

P-zombies bug me. For a p-zombie to be functionally identical to a human, it would have to process all of the same inputs as the human, including its looped-back internal inputs regarding its own state. Asserting that it's possible to do so without producing an equivalent inner life to that of a 'real' human is just asserting some kind of supernatural basis for consciousness.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#106

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:50 AM UTC

paraschopra wrote: post #84

Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If you propose then that only agents or complex systems are conscious, you are faced with the second problem: the boundary condition. What do you call an agent, and why? I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamenta…

[deleted]

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#107

Post by paraschopra » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:59 AM UTC

ddingus wrote: post #103

paraschopra wrote: post #84

Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If you propose then that only agents or complex systems are conscious, you are faced with the second problem: the boundary condition. What do you call an agent, and why? I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamenta…

Would one not just infer the universe is conscious? 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 bet…

> When something has enough complexity to be aware of the boundary between "it" and everything else, then we have a being of some kind.

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.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#108

Post by hackinthebochs » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 4:59 AM UTC

tigerlily wrote: post #16

I could have been born at any time, in any place in the universe - or not at all, for that matter. Why do I get to experience the universe in a unique way? What gives rise to this?

The question probably stems from the fact that we tend to identify with our conscious experience more than we do our physical body. So it seems reasonable to imagine this conscious experience separated from one body and placed in another body. But this is a mistake. Your body owns its conscious processes in the same way your body owns its process of digestion. There is no way to identify you separately from the physical stuff that makes up your body (which includes your brain).

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#109

Post by warent » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:11 AM UTC

paraschopra wrote: post #100

trixie_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think panpsychism argues that everything is conscious, at all levels, simultaneously. There are no boundaries. What you experience as a boundary is just the limit of your awareness. Just as you don't consciously beat your heart or heal your wounds. And if you think about it a lot it's tough to really tell where your own boundary brain/body ends and the environment begins. I like the panpsychism stuff because it res…

Like most philosophies, pansychism has multiple flavours. To me, the combination problem is concrete. The physical location of my awareness seems to be inside the head and not my hand, even though both are made of atoms. ‘Everything is conscious’ fails to account for that.

The only reason your awareness seems to be inside of your head is because your head and face is your primary interface with the world, where the core of your senses reside and is, therefore, your default state.

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.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#110

Post by paraschopra » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:14 AM UTC

_Microft wrote: post #14

Jürgen Schmidthuber (an AI researcher for those not familiar with the name) gave an interesting explanation what conciousness is in an AMA that he conducted in 2015 on Reddit. I just submitted that in an extra thread [0] because it seems worth discussing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19241278

That’s a plausible explanation for a necessary condition for subjective experience, but it’s diffult for me to accept it as sufficient. The mechanism - like integrated information theory - could account for the easy problem of consciousness but not the hard problem of consciousness. A scientific theory of consciousness would make new predictions that can be tested. For example, if we take self-encoding to be actually representative of subjective experience, can we find a novel encoding that when triggered in a subject makes them report a sensation that they’ve never experienced before? That’s how new scientific theories that propose new entities like quantum ‘spin’ are tested. New fundamental entities must have new testable predictions otherwise they’re just-so stories.

That said, the easy problem is a path towards the hard one.