Consciousness and the Laws of Physics • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#61

Post by avaer » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

hsn915 wrote: post #29

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 it not surprised you if you learned that the program you wrote in C++ and compiled to machine code would produce "subjective" feelings in the CPU when executed?

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my CPU had feelings, if the CPU was created in a million year evolutionary process in which the lack of appropriate subjective feelings would have resulted in its death.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#62

Post by skohan » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

vermilingua wrote: post #37

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 solution isn’t ignored because it’s boring, but because it isn’t rigorous enough. If consciousness just is an emergent property of the function of neural cells, define function, define neural cells? What is the lowest level of complexity of each that allows consciousness? Why only neural cells, that is if it is only neural cells at all? By the anthropic principle it is a given that consciousness arises from the…

Idk I tend to think it is rigorous enough, and maybe the fact that we don't intuitively believe it's rigorous enough is an artifact of an evolved spiritual impulse.

It seems to me consciousness is something we have to have to exist the way that we do. In order for the human animal to function, we need to understand the past, predict the future, understand the motivations of others and come up with stories about the world we use to convince others and facilitate collaboration. Human society wouldn't be possible without consciousness, and I don't see more explanation needed than the idea that we evolved this ability for our brains to talk to themselves in this certain way through the series of selective pressures which lead us to where we are today.

Other animals probably have some version of this at varying levels of complexity, and somewhere along the line you could probably draw a line and say a slug with 15 neurons probably is more of a biological machine, and doesn't have anything you could describe as consciousness or subjective experience. Maybe you even need a pretty advanced brain with a neocortex to allow for subjective experience.

I don't know why some "spooky stuff" is needed, or why some reach for consciousness to be a property which arises in individual cells. I think it's probably a very complex thing which arises from very complex structures consisting of millions or billions of neurons.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#63

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

francasso wrote: post #43

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 i…

Emergent phenomena are often hard to predict, like the weather. That doesn't actually tell us a whole lot about the underlying physics, it seems to me. The halting problem is an emergent property of turing machines, and we know mathematically that the behavior of a Turing machine cannot usually be predicted or mathematically modeled without just running it.

The mathematical underpinnings of superconductivity are still in flux, but there's still every reason to believe that it's an emergent phenomenon from known physics. I don't see any obvious reason why consciousness can't be something like that.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#64

Post by sdwr » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

The author is edging the gap between hard materialism and something more.

Axioms of hard materialism:

- physical events have physical causes

- everything is a physical event

the associated tenets of science support a kind of intellectual "clean room", isolating rational thought (stories about things) from being contaminated by specks of human emotion/desire/serendipity.

Other ontologies (including my lived experience) have different core principles.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#65

Post by skohan » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

srean wrote: post #49

throwanem wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would it need to exist? I feel like you're reaching for a philosophical argument here for a question which is already adequately resolved by physics and biology.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#66

Post by bobthechef » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

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.

I don't see how this is a "wow" moment. It is a straightforward consequence of prior materialist commitments, not a discovery of empirical science. If everything is "matter in motion", then ipso facto all mental activity is matter in motion. The problem is that materialism is completely untenable given the way materialism understands matter (e.g., the problem of qualia, the problem of intentionality, etc). Some materialists realize this, but double down and become eliminativists, which is very sad.

Also, from what you have said it does not follow that all "mental content" is to be "located" in the brain. That you have brain correlates is not surprising, if only for the fact that without them you would need to wonder what the heck the brain is doing. But you will not find, in the materialist account, a way in which to account for abstraction in the brain. You cannot account for the concept "square" by appealing to the alone (as opposed to say the image of a particular square).

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#67

Post by skohan » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

srean wrote: post #53

skohan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To respond to your edit, I don't quite understand what you're getting at. It's quite well understood how the brain represents touch - all the sensory neurons in your skin send information to a brain region which maintains a spacial representation of your body. Your brain isn't sensitive to touch because it's inside your skull, so that touch information wouldn't do a whole lot for you. There's no reason in principal a…

No. Even you crack the skull open and poke the brain, it wont feel a thing even when conscious. The skull, the skin will feel, but the brain itself has no pain/tactile receptors. Many surgical procedures on the brain are done with the patient very much awake.

Yeah exactly, why would it?

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#68

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

dukeofdoom wrote: post #56

hall0ween wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ has never been linked to intelligence, considered there is no agreed upon definition for intelligence.

Yeah maybe, but that's a little like claiming Usain Bolt isn't the fastest man in the world because there is no agreed definition of "fastest man", because everyone can have their own definition of what is means to be the fastest man. IQ is the best measure we have to compare how fast your brain stores and processes information compared to others.

Sure, that could be a reasonable thing to say about IQ.

But "fastest man" is well defined, because speed is well-defined.

"being fast at storing and processing information" is a candidate for a definition of intelligence, but far from the only one.

So no, it's nothing like claiming that Usain Bolt isn't the fastest man in the world.

Or maybe it is: Bolt is almost certainly not the fastest person over 100 miles, so what kind of speed / intelligence are we discussing?

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#69

Post by foxhop » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

hsn915 wrote: post #29

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 it not surprised you if you learned that the program you wrote in C++ and compiled to machine code would produce "subjective" feelings in the CPU when executed?

Sure if it's badly written the CPU could get hot and all the side effects of running the code, maybe it's a virus.

if the machine has consciousness of thought and not just continuity of data, it would feel pretty bad with it's sensors (maybe even some total pain threshold metric) and might even cry or complain to a near by sentient being for help.

The problem is it may only speak to other beings of the same abstraction level, or higher and the listening being has to notice, have empathy, and the skillet to fix it.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#70

Post by mynegation » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

hsn915 wrote: post #29

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 it not surprised you if you learned that the program you wrote in C++ and compiled to machine code would produce "subjective" feelings in the CPU when executed?

Depends on definition of “feelings”. I can define a “feeling” of a CPU as its temperature, whether it is rising or going down, which does not sound too wild because CPU may react to it and decrease its frequency or shut off some cores. How about cache usage patterns that are literally coping mechanism with the necessity to access main memory?