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Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

nautil.us

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Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#221

Post by [deleted] »

0-_-0 wrote: post #197
CuriouslyC wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Occam's Razor apply here? 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 req…

> You have evidence that some matter (your PC) can run Windows. The simplest hypothesis that explains this is that all matter can run Windows. Any hypothesis that posits that SOME matter can run Windows and other matter does not requires two different kinds of matter and a mechanism to switch between the two. Seems that hypothesis requires a lot more assumptions.

[deleted]

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#222

Post by visarga »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #203
0-_-0 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have evidence that some matter (your PC) can run Windows. The simplest hypothesis that explains this is that all matter can run Windows. Any hypothesis that posits that SOME matter can run Windows and other matter does not requires two different kinds of matter and a mechanism to switch between the two. Seems that hypothesis requires a lot more assumptions.

So, you'd rather posit some mystical juju that makes matter gain consciousness, that somehow magically only happens to humans, and happens to matter when humans eat it, but yet is totally undetectable?

Not all matter has to fend for itself in the environment. This constraint leads to evolution and consciousness. It's not magical, just self replicating.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#223

Post by visarga »

bjl wrote: post #186
dalbasal wrote: post #179

Enough credible people have publicly considered the idea credible for me to open my mind. 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,…

> Can someone point me to the starting point? I must be missing something. Why can't non-conscious matter, arranged precisely, think? 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.

> Why can't non-conscious matter, arranged precisely, think?

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.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#224

Post by visarga »

daoxid wrote: post #184
dalbasal wrote: post #179

Enough credible people have publicly considered the idea credible for me to open my mind. 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,…

Although I generally agree with you, I think there is a difference between the emergent property of a coffee table and that of consciousness: the particles the coffee table is made of are "just" matter, and so is the coffee table itself. But consciousness seems to be something different than matter (or maybe this is just a false assumption of mine). So while I find it intuitive that a table emerges from a number of p…

> 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.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#225

Post by visarga »

Razengan wrote: post #177

Most questions of this sort remind me of "Can submarines swim?" 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 c…

An AI would have a goal, even if it is simple curiosity, and its happiness is related to the distance from its goal. It would evaluate each situation and action with regard to the goal and decide on actions that lead to it, learning from past mistakes.

'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.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#226

Post by CuriouslyC »

visarga wrote: post #220
CuriouslyC wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Occam's Razor apply here? 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 req…

I'd say an important part of consciousness is learning. Without learning we would not even be able to make sense of what is in front of our eyes. A particle doesn't learn, so it can't be conscious.

What is learning?

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"

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#227

Post by visarga »

daoxid wrote: post #175

Does consciousness produce any measurable effect? For a time I thought consciousness is some kind of by-product of some kinds of computation which doesn't influence the computation itself. But how can I then know that I am conscious? And if I know that I am conscious, then consciousness must have a measurable effect, right? Because the knowledge that you are conscious should be reflected somewhere in your brain. Howe…

> Does consciousness produce any measurable effect?

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.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#228

Post by Madmallard »

Maybe I'm super naive and if so please educate me, but honestly why are we even considered conscious?

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.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#229

Post by visarga »

jcims wrote: post #40
_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

Lex Fridman has a great interview with Jurgen here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FIo6evmweo 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 everythin…

Embodiment is absolutely necessary for consciousness - for physical realisation, learning and natural selection.

Here's a nice article touching on embodiment from the pov. of an AI researcher. https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-in...

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#230

Post by visarga »

paraschopra wrote: post #110
_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…

> A scientific theory of consciousness would make new predictions that can be tested.

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

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