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Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

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Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#31

Post by monkeycantype »

systemsignal wrote: post #17
monkeycantype wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means that ordered systems must create disorder in order to maintain their own order, and the place where you find the greatest order to disorder is in other actively ordered systems. I blame entropy for the existence of evil, if there is a sentient omniscient creator, there better be a good reason for it, and if the reason turns out to be that entropy is the ongoing cost of His omniscient observation of every…

But life probably wouldn’t exist if entropy wasn’t increasing Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe

Yes, in this universe, life as we know it is a salmon of order swimming up the waterfall of entropy, every flick of it tail powered by its shit fouling the river, because life in this universe is spec'd to the constraints of this universe. But perhaps we can't find the aliens because they have tunnelled out, off to another gentler universe where they grow forever in n dimensions of time and space pondering the beauty of all the integers.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#32

Post by efokschaner »

meowkit wrote: post #29
systemsignal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But life probably wouldn’t exist if entropy wasn’t increasing Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe

> Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe This is an concise idea I sit on quite often. Is this a commonly known idea? Among scientists/engineers/philosopher types? Would appreciate other thoughts.

This subject is discussed in the pop sci work of PBS spacetime https://youtu.be/GcfLZSL7YGw with reference to articles and books if you're looking for more

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#33

Post by monkeycantype »

meowkit wrote: post #29
systemsignal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But life probably wouldn’t exist if entropy wasn’t increasing Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe

> Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe This is an concise idea I sit on quite often. Is this a commonly known idea? Among scientists/engineers/philosopher types? Would appreciate other thoughts.

I think so, I've gone back to university to study biology, and I'm encountering two complimentary perspectives on what life is, a pragmatic classification version that says: ok - of the things that we see which ones are alive and which aren't and what are the distinguishing characteristics? and a second definitional version, blending Schroedinger and Shannon, that says life seems to be information propagating itself, but we're not going examine you on that in first year genomics.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#34

Post by codeisawesome »

monkeycantype wrote: post #9
beaconstudios wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, the 2nd law applies within closed systems. You can cheat in reality (where closed systems don't actually exist) by taking energy from outside a bounded territory (say, a human body) and using it to resist entropy. He doesn't call it by name, but he's referencing autopoiesis (or, continuous self-creation) and homeostasis (self-regulation of properties through balancing feedback loops). Both of these processes con…

Which means that ordered systems must create disorder in order to maintain their own order, and the place where you find the greatest order to disorder is in other actively ordered systems. I blame entropy for the existence of evil, if there is a sentient omniscient creator, there better be a good reason for it, and if the reason turns out to be that entropy is the ongoing cost of His omniscient observation of every…

> Which means that ordered systems must create disorder in order to maintain their own order, and the place where you find the greatest order to disorder is in other actively ordered systems.

Wow, that also nicely explains how colonisation & impoverishment of some human groups is necessary in the current framework, so that high HDI can be achieved in other human groups (which then explains various historical facts).

This makes space exploration and attempts of automated resource extraction from celestial objects a noble goal, something that can achieve world peace (assuming the results are distributed).

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#35

Post by willis936 »

colechristensen wrote: post #24
sayonaraman wrote: post #7

I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of neurons communicate and synchroni…

Feynman was perhaps a little bit too skeptical of some things. Everything at one time escaped basic explanation from parts (and there always will be, you can't really explain why the standard model, or whatever more fundamental system which might surpass it) Consciousness is on the edge of being understood quite a lot better as neurobiology is progressing quite quickly.

All that it reveals is that our suspicions of ontological nihilism were likely correct all along. The universe does not give you purpose or reason. You make your own.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#36

Post by jackcosgrove »

I read recently of a paper that proposed a mechanism for information conservation during black hole evaporation. The model was that information was preserved within the black hole on some layer that was not destroyed, and the information was subsequently released as the black hole evaporated.

I am not a physicist but the Hawking model that black holes destroy information always struck me as an asymmetry. Apparently that asymmetry also motivated some researchers who know more than me.

Is there actually evidence for the conservation of information? I'm not even sure what information refers to within this context, but the writeup on the paper I read used that term.

I have toyed with the idea that the anthropic principle doesn't just rely on chance events on really long time scales. If indeed information is indestructible, the universe could be in a birth-death cycle of refinement, where it orders information in ways to increase self-awareness each cycle.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#37

Post by bglusman »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #36

I read recently of a paper that proposed a mechanism for information conservation during black hole evaporation. The model was that information was preserved within the black hole on some layer that was not destroyed, and the information was subsequently released as the black hole evaporated. I am not a physicist but the Hawking model that black holes destroy information always struck me as an asymmetry. Apparently t…

You might be interested in Lee Smolin’s book which explores this very hypothesis, among others and a generally fascinating review of how physics got where it is…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_Cosmos

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#38

Post by gradschoolfail »

bglusman wrote: post #37
jackcosgrove wrote: post #36

I read recently of a paper that proposed a mechanism for information conservation during black hole evaporation. The model was that information was preserved within the black hole on some layer that was not destroyed, and the information was subsequently released as the black hole evaporated. I am not a physicist but the Hawking model that black holes destroy information always struck me as an asymmetry. Apparently t…

You might be interested in Lee Smolin’s book which explores this very hypothesis, among others and a generally fascinating review of how physics got where it is… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_Cosmos

When I was a grad student I once attended a lecture by Kip Thorne (before he won the Nobel prize but after Interstellar came out). He basically implied something that is vaguely heretical (and kinda tangential to the above): we should look for aliens inside black holes because thats where they prefer to be. For one, from their point of view (and this situation was sort of enacted in Interstellar) they can observe our epic timescales in “real time”. This puts the phrase “angels dancing on the head of a pin” in a new light, where pin could be loosely interpreted to mean “singularity”, I suppose.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#39

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

monkeycantype wrote: post #9
beaconstudios wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, the 2nd law applies within closed systems. You can cheat in reality (where closed systems don't actually exist) by taking energy from outside a bounded territory (say, a human body) and using it to resist entropy. He doesn't call it by name, but he's referencing autopoiesis (or, continuous self-creation) and homeostasis (self-regulation of properties through balancing feedback loops). Both of these processes con…

Which means that ordered systems must create disorder in order to maintain their own order, and the place where you find the greatest order to disorder is in other actively ordered systems. I blame entropy for the existence of evil, if there is a sentient omniscient creator, there better be a good reason for it, and if the reason turns out to be that entropy is the ongoing cost of His omniscient observation of every…

Entropy is a not instilled by a creator, but a natural consequence of math.

If the number of states labelled ordered is substantially smaller than the number of states labelled disordered and a system moves essentially randomly between states, it is far more likely that it will spend most of its time in a disordered state.

Entropy is just the universe settling into a state that cannot be meaningfully differentiated from most other states; there are far more of these than differentiable states, and so it's overwhelmingly likely that the universe ends up there.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#40

Post by mannykannot »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #2

“ Well, it must minimize the uncertainty of the states that it’s in. I have to actively resist the second law of thermodynamics, so I don’t dissipate into all kinds of states. “ People often make this rhetorical mistake when speaking about the second law. Entropy is increasing full steam ahead, and what looks like a small bit of order is revealed to be hiding ‘the man behind the curtain’ i.e. a massive increase in en…

Seth's invocation of entropy is nowhere near as egregious as it is in the case of those creationists who claim that evolution would be a violation of the 2nd. law of thermodynamics, but I feel it is, ultimately, an argument that goes nowhere.

His point is that living organisms are, temporarily, islands of relative order in a universe that is generally less so, which is both a fact and consonant with the 2nd. law. As all living organisms, not just conscious ones, share this feature, it is hardly a distinguishing feature, let alone an explanation, of consciousness.

This has led some people to redefine consciousness to encompass all such systems, whether living or not - they all, supposedly, have a certain amount of of it, according to the proponents of panpsychism and its more quantitative offspring such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT).

To me (and I am a materialist in matters of the mind), this seems to be an attempt to force consciousness into the woefully inadequate explanations we currently have on hand. The sort of consciousness we are most interested in, and are most challenged by, is the sort of self-aware, language-creating, theory-of-mind holding consciousness that is most fully developed in our own species (and probably in some of our extinct predecessors), not the sort of consciousness that might be attributed to a paramecium or a thermostatically controlled building. It is not useful to lump together such a diverse range of phenomena, and we are only fooling ourselves if we claim that anodyne statements about preserving order against a chaotic universe are, in any useful sense, an explanation of consciousness.

For a much more thorough critique of IIT specifically, see Scott Aaronson:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

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