Consciousness and the Laws of Physics • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#41

Post by mvcalder » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

tracedddd wrote: post #20

sampo wrote: post #16

Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry. That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No need to postulate anything supernatural, or any…

The implications are uncomfortable both existentially and ethically, so people will go to great lengths to search for evidence of the contrary.

Or, most people’s subjective experience provides constant overwhelming evidence of the contrary.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#42

Post by gus_massa » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

EMM_386 wrote: post #24

lbrandy wrote: post #6

Here's my attempt at a tldr. 1. The laws of physics at the time scales, space scales, and energies of the human brain are "known" and we have deep reasons to believe that more will not be discovered. He spends a great deal of space explaining and arguing that the credence that physics is "complete" in this regime should be very, very high. 2. Given the current laws of physics, there is no place or room for non-physic…

How does free will play into this? If the world is run by all physical laws, then I had no choice typing this out and submitting it, rather then closing the tab right now. My "decision" isn't real. If it is an actual conscious choice, that was not calculatable by the exact state prior, then consciousness is fundamental.

We are still not sure, but probably your decisions aren't real.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#43

Post by francasso » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

sampo wrote: post #16

Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry. That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No need to postulate anything supernatural, or any…

I don't find it that difficult, in fact yours is just as much of a belief as the one of the people you subtly criticize. You believe that the standard model and gravity (or whatever unknown theory that can have some experimental evidence to generalize both) are enough to model the behavior of human beings/animal as an "emergent" phenomena, even though there is no direct evidence for that. Even worse actually, there is no mathematical model.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#44

Post by vehemenz » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

mykowebhn wrote: post #18

vehemenz wrote: post #14

A few thoughts. 1. Sean is leaving CalTech at the end of next year. It's not a huge surprise, given his interests, that he is pursuing the issues in the philosophy of mind that intersect with quantum physics. Most work in this area is unadulterated quackery, and he is one of the few physicists who understands philosophy well enough to not make me cringe. 2. Most physicists implicitly engage in ontological metaphysics…

But facts are only facts if they correspond with that to which they refer, oftentimes other objects, so when you include facts, ultimately it boils down to external objects. I think you also failed to include Idealism, that the world's fundamental construction is of Reason. For the uninitiated or the naive, the notion of Idealism often degenerates in their minds to Solipsism, but it is far from that.

> But facts are only facts if they correspond with that to which they refer, oftentimes other objects, so when you include facts, ultimately it boils down to external objects.

Only if ontological questions are legitimate questions about the world and not simply practical decisions about language. I, and many others, remain unconvinced.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#45

Post by srean » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

creamytaco wrote: post #19

skohan wrote: post #7

This paper reminds me of one of the "wow" moments I had when first studying neuroscience: a professor passed on the realization that everything in the universe we can observe and understand must have a neurobiological representation. Reality as we experience it is in fact always represented in brain activity.

Here is another wow moment that follows from the one you mentioned: The universe you experience is different than my own. We use language and shared culture to consensually hallucinate a "shared" universe but no such thing truly exists for us. We can perceive objects and describe them in similar ways but the fact remains that we can't access the universe that the objects truly exist in (if that even exists) since, fo…

That's right. Things that we agree on being named the same we call 'real'.

Imagine this, say what everyone perceives as the color red I perceive it as what everyone else perceives as yellow. But since I have been taught the name of the colors by these people, I will end up matching the names of the colors although I am perceiving something very different.

This needs to be considered in debates on whether animals have consciousness, do they have an "I". The dominant popular belief is that they aren't. My question is, devoid of a common communication language how would you find out. Only thing we have is their observable external behavior. If that is consistent with the 'consciousness' hypothesis, then that's all we can say. In that case we have about as much evidence of presence of consciousness that a fellow human incapable of communicating with us in language as much as another animal say a dolphin. In both the cases its a hypothesis that explains externally observable behavior.

Till we find a way to listen into one's internal monologue this is pretty much all we can do.

I like Feynman's example of the 'inside of a brick' no one has seen that with an unaided human eye. Before other forms of sensing the 'inside' came along (X-ray, ultrasound, ...) it was just a hypothesis that fit observable experience. No one would have actually seen the inside of a brick. When you break it open, its no longer the 'inside'. That there is no 'inside' and that a new surface is formed by the be the act of breaking the brick could have been a plausible alternative hypothesis. Existence of an 'inside' is just a simpler hypothesis.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#46

Post by foxhop » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

linuxhansl wrote: post #27

It is interesting to me that the only thing in the universe that we can observe directly it's also thought to be the least understood. We experience physical phenomena by proxy only - through the senses and sensors we built, followed by an interpretation by our brain; while we can observe our consciousness by just observing ourselves from "within". I do not mean to question the paper, just pointing out that I find th…

All things are separate until you dive as deep as we are now into physics, dividing things until you reach a universal field of 1. Then the model breaks and now we are trying to figure out what to do about that. Good news is we were prepared for the model to break. Consciousness is relative to the level of abstraction, as above so below. Observing the universe affects the universe.

Consciousness has sensors all the way down to atoms and yet we can have supremely evil people and supremely good and everything in between. Nature and nurture, we have philosophy to help us now that physics and stuck when everything divides down to the same one, we learn that killing your neighbor is like killing yourself. Some people kill their neighbor or themselves, others grow a community garden.

If you kill you neighbor you also kill your true self, all beings are of the the same consciousness, the goal is to individuate, to view the universe in new and novel ways, to teach others of the things you manage to bring back on your journey so that it manifests and propagates in this universe! We are not meant to observe we are meant to create!

That said our creations must follow the trinity of love, freedom, and truth otherwise the creations quickly devolve into implements of oppression to control the literal minds of the masses.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#47

Post by dandanua » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:27 PM UTC

sampo wrote: post #16

Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry. That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No need to postulate anything supernatural, or any…

This boring explanation is in the framework of classical physics. Quantum physics is very different. In QM, physical objects don't have definite states until observed. Any observation requires an observer. So, we have that states are relative to observers. But what is observer? It is our consciousness in the first place.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#48

Post by snail44box » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

There's two classes of people in this world. The ones wishing to believe in nonsense and the others that prefer logic. Consciousness is just a human word that expresses nothing more than a fallacy that attracts people that prefer faith. Similar to quantum mechanics if one is ever capable of understanding superdeterminism. Hilariously the support that exists for the former, reflects the state of society and how humanity will continue to progress in the wrong direction until nothingness.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#49

Post by srean » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #31

srean wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is there infinite regress -- does it have a representation of itself representing itself. I find a more prosaic version of this question quite interesting too. If you can feel a touch/heat anywhere on or in your body its represented in the brain somehow, somewhere. For a moment (i) imagine the brain is sensitive to touch (it isn't because lack of 'pain' receptors) (ii) that the representation of a sensitive part…

I mean, the brain isn't sensitive to touch because it doesn't contain the kind of mechanoreceptors that our nervous system uses to detect that kind of stimulus, which seems like a perfectly sufficient explanation here.

Indeed. What I am asking is something different, although I did not word it properly -- Is it even possible for the brain to be sensitive to touch everywhere, or must a teeny-weeny dead-zone exist.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#50

Post by dominicl » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

sampo wrote: post #16

Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry. That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No need to postulate anything supernatural, or any…

Would love to discuss this over drinks. For me it's the opposite. It's feels pretty natural to me to imagine that intelligence and (perceived) free will are emergent properties. But consciousness troubles me, we still can't prove for anyone but ourselves that it does in fact exist - while it's existance is "apparent" to oneself. Also it does not make logical sense to me why such a feature should even develop, why have consciousness if you can have intelligence and problem solving without it? Loved the discussion between Lex Friedmann and Sam Harris on this very topic:

https://youtu.be/4dC_nRYIDZU