Consciousness and the Laws of Physics • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#101

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:20 PM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #87

srean wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 ... It's been mind boggling to me for years that this isn't the default accepted position. That most intelligent life (ie animals) are conscious just like us. Look at what dogs, ca…

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#102

Post by fighterpilot » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:21 PM UTC

srean wrote: post #45

creamytaco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> say what everyone perceives as the color red I perceive it as what everyone else perceives as yellow.

This is part of the "knowledge argument":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#103

Post by DoomHotel » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

Peter Watts covered the possibility of "zombie" intelligences pretty well in his novel Blindsight. One thing I took from it is that such an intelligence could not possibly behave exactly like a human being, because a lot of what we do as humans involves interaction with other humans where we have a mental model of their consciousness being much like our own. Expressing sympathy toward another person, for example, would be inconceivable without consciousness.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#104

Post by Koshkin » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

roberttod wrote: post #54

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…

At what point does it immerge? What is the smallest unit? Is it a magic number of neurons, or when they get arranged in a certain way? There's a mystery in these questions, and I think that's well accepted. I've heard this "emergent property" explanation before but it seems kind of a handwavey way of avoiding answering any questions. "It just appears when you have enough neurons" is probably true but how?!

The "degree" of consciousness is certainly a function of the number of neurons functionally specialized for this particular purpose.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#105

Post by ithkuil » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:29 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.

I don't grasp essential the difference between everettian and RQM.

I'm both cases different observers observe different results.

IIUC the "worlds" on the many worlds interpretation is just a convenient way to talk about the relationship between an observer and the possible states it can observe after the system and the observer have been entangled. The emergence of a world branch is not something that happens at some specific moment in time. This is also why branching can be viewed as happening at superluminal speeds, because it's not a physical phenomenon, just a shortcut for us to use to discard states that are no longer accessible to us.

Whether that makes the many worlds interpretation more useful or less useful, it's a matter of context. However I have the impression that most people who oppose the view (e.g. citing how much more baggage it requires etc) fundamentally come from the mental trap of thinking that a conscious observer had a unique stream of consciousness and that anything that deviates from it would be inconceivable because "we don't experience it"

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#106

Post by Koshkin » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #89

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…

'Emergent phenomena' is the 'draw the rest of the damn owl' of this conversation. It's doing way too much work to be useful. It's like saying that life is an emergent phenomena from condensed energy.

It is as good as any sensible hypothesis: it allows us to focus on a more promising direction of research.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#107

Post by alpaca128 » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:34 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…

It's not difficult to accept that consciousness could be an emergent property, but it doesn't provide any insight.

How do we get the abstraction layer of coherent thoughts from just a collection of neurons? We have no idea.

Sure your explanation makes sense. But it's a bit like explaining the creation process of black holes with the words "they're an emergent property of gravity". It doesn't tell us anything, and if we want to understand it deeply we can't be satisfied with such a simple non-answer.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#108

Post by Koshkin » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:36 PM UTC

snarfy wrote: post #22

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…

As a software guy I think of it as trying to understand the execution of a complex web app by examining the machine instructions. At that level, how things happen is very apparent but why they do is pretty much lost.

Except that the web app has not evolved naturally, i.e. by itself, from the machine instructions, like many emergent phenomena have.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#109

Post by davrosthedalek » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #107

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…

It's not difficult to accept that consciousness could be an emergent property, but it doesn't provide any insight. How do we get the abstraction layer of coherent thoughts from just a collection of neurons? We have no idea. Sure your explanation makes sense. But it's a bit like explaining the creation process of black holes with the words "they're an emergent property of gravity". It doesn't tell us anything, and if…

I wouldn't call black holes "emergent". They do behave very similar to other gravitational objects -- just more "extreme".

Another example are atoms: Most of their properties are easy to predict from the properties of their constituents and from the physical laws: The mass of atom is the sum of the mass of the constituents, minus the binding energy, which we can easily predict.

But, for example, nucleon mass is emergent. Most of it is created dynamically by QCD, and we cannot easily predict it. We can, for example, not easily predict how the mass changes if we change properties of quarks or gluons. A brute-force lattice calculation is required.

Weather is a similar example. We understand the basic rules, but weather patterns are only predictable with limited success and a lot of forward simulation.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#110

Post by Comevius » Sat, Jul 17, 2021, 3:44 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

We feel that we (and life, consciousness) must be special, but it's just thermodynamics.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-life-and-death-spring-fro...

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.10...