Consciousness and the Laws of Physics • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#91

Post by throwanem » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:12 PM UTC

skohan wrote: post #65

srean wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like the question is fundamentally that of whether a given system can perfectly model its own state, but in this context that entails an implicit assumption that the brain's model of body state is perfect, which it is anything but.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#92

Post by Koshkin » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:12 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…

> This solution isn’t ignored because it’s boring, but because it isn’t rigorous enough.

Well, this sounds like what they could say a thousand years ago: "the (say) Greeks' definition of what the natural luminous celestial body is not rigorous enough, so, let's ignore it and continue believing in the sun as a god."

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#93

Post by messe » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

philip142au wrote: post #21

Why do people think there is some magical "consciousness" thingy other than what we observe, a machine in a wet box

What does the observing?

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#94

Post by bobthechef » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

foxes wrote: post #5

If I understand it, they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. However consider a cpu, it runs on known physical perspectives. But imaging trying to reverse engineer by examining what happens inside an operating system/program running on it. You can get quite interesting emergent behaviour from a relatively simple system (a processor). So just because physics seems relatively simple, I don't think that has…

The CPU (or rather, the entire computer) isn't magically generating out of nothing something new. In a certain sense, there is no OS on a computer per se and apart from human interpretation. It is what Searle calls the "observer relative". This is in opposition to things which have objective reality apart from human observation. By analogy, look at text on a page. Per se, these are blobs of ink on a page. They are text only by convention: the person who arranged these blobs was using this convention when arranging these blobs, and you need to know the convention to interpret them as text.

Too often, "emergence" is one of those "gap" explanations that tries to produce something from nothing. Yes, independent things can enter into interactions and relations that result in states of affairs that they alone could not have produced. That's obvious. You don't get a pile of oranges without a bunch of oranges. But a state of affairs of individual objects doesn't transcend being a state of affairs of individual objects as long as you maintain that they are still individual objects.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#95

Post by gliptic » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

vehemenz wrote: post #58

gliptic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4. I wonder if Carroll's future work in philosophy will cause him to revisit the many-worlds interpretation of QM, which a fair share of philosophers believe carries too much metaphysical baggage. The idea of many worlds "existing" is a philosophical idea; it's not something you learn from studying physics. I think he would argue it carries the least metaphysical baggage as the worlds exist in the equations we have…

That is exactly what he argues. But I think it's a tough position, given that relational quantum mechanics also works "out of the box" and doesn't require ontological realism and a deeply speculative metaphysics. Sean Carroll discusses this with Carlo Rovelli in two separate Mindscape episodes.

Interesting, I'll have to listen to that. Sounds pretty much like QBism though.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#96

Post by Arun2009 » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

foxhop wrote: post #88

Arun2009 wrote: post #40

One of the things I want to do before I die is to acquire an authentic knowledge of classical Indian philosophy (particularly the monistic idealistic strands of thought in it) and the modern scientific account of reality, and evaluate for myself how their claims fare against that of the other. I don't understand why more Indians and particularly Hindus are not doing this. This looks to me like a thrilling intellectua…

Me too! However why stop at Indian philosophy?

My aim is evaluate the metaphysical claims of Indian philosophy from the perspective of the most holistic account of reality that we can acquire in the 21st century. This will obviously include studying other streams of knowledge that has anything to say about reality.

As to why Indian philosophy - this primarily stems from my Indian background. I have always wondered if the claims of Indian philosophy can be validated scientifically. For e.g., how might a Nagarjuna or Shankara have argued for their claims if they were born in the 21st century?

I suppose I don't have any deeper reasons other than sheer inquisitiveness or jijnAsA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jijnasa) :-)

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#97

Post by Koshkin » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:18 PM UTC

roberttod wrote: post #82

skohan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Could you explain why only some of our neurons are part of our consciousness? If it's emergent then why does only part of our nervous system get to experience the world, or is the other part also concious but we are not aware? There's a lot of tricky questions here that no one can really explain. I don't think the answer need be any "spookier" than any phenomenon that's unexplained - except maybe it's just surprising…

> why only some of our neurons are part of our consciousness

Specialization. The same reason a why during ontogenesis some cells became neurons in the first place while other ones, something else.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#98

Post by bobthechef » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:18 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #34

lbrandy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. This paper is doing the opposite. It's arguing that other papers/ideas advocating dualism are going the wrong way and purely physicalist explanations are the best path forward.

Purely materialist explanations, you mean? Platonic dualism, as advocated by folks like Max Tegmark, isn't non-physicalist. And it needn't be dualist even — if the world is made of math and the materials emerge by implication.

What does it mean to be "made of math"? This reads like gibberish to me. Mathematics deals with formal abstraction. Geometry, for example, abstracts the spacial characteristics of matter from matter and focuses on them solely while ignoring everything else. (This actually reminds me of Bertrand Russell's structuralist account of physics and how it omits much if not most of reality.)

(Also, Platonism does posit an immaterial realm of the forms in which all material things participate. But this participation relation is problematic, something Aristotle pointed out in the Third Man Argument and something Plato himself knew.)

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#99

Post by skohan » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

bobthechef wrote: post #66

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 mater…

> 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).

What's wrong with assuming that abstraction is a function of neural activity which is facilitated by specific neural structures and processes?

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#100

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

francasso wrote: post #77

roywiggins wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stil…

I don't think either of those examples is in the same category as consciousness, or actually lets stick to "modeling of human and animal behavior", because I don't know what you mean by consciousness since we all have a feeling for what it is but there is no good precise definition, or framework in which you could give one. In both examples you made we do in fact have good mathematical descriptions that allow us to d…

My point is more that, even when you know the underlying mechanisms perfectly and with infinite precision, there are systems for which you can't make any statistical claims about its behavior. Even the Game of Life can encode a Turing machine, which makes its medium-term evolution impossible to predict ahead of time. That doesn't mean there's anything we are missing in our understanding of the rules of the Game of Life.

Emergent behavior can be totally opaque, even when we have perfect understanding of the elements of the system. Just because the behavior is totally inscrutable doesn't mean there's anything we are missing about the underlying mechanisms. There's no hidden principle of Turing machines that would let us predict them reliably either- their underlying mechanisms are totally understood, the behavior is still essentially unknowable.

Perhaps living systems are like that. It seems quite likely, since their underlying mechanisms are actually much more complicated than toy models like the Game of Life, that they can manifest totally opaque behavior without requiring any new physics at all.