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Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

quantamagazine.org

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

#51

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

kovek wrote: post #44
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…

Qualia is the ability to experience for example the color red. Or the color blue. An exercise… The universe is interesting, it contains some fields, some particles, some quarks, protons, electrons, photons. Some places don’t have light and others do have light. The universe is even more interesting by the fact that it also contains experience. For some reason we see colors. It is absolutely true. Another thing that w…

What is thought? What is a thought?

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

#52

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

gradschoolfail wrote: post #38
bglusman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Based on your nick, I’m guessing that Kip Thorne lecture didn’t help your grades.

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

#53

Post by gradschoolfail »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #52
gradschoolfail wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Based on your nick, I’m guessing that Kip Thorne lecture didn’t help your grades.

He turned me into a new believer so what can I do? At least i have someone to blame now

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

#54

Post by gradschoolfail »

a9h74j wrote: post #45
gradschoolfail wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW, I could be mistaken, but I once heard that the spirit of that question (angels on the head of the pin) was less about realism than countability -- i.e. more like asking about the countablility of the Real Numbers in an interval, or something of that sort. One way or another I took it as a much more generous description.

Interesting, do you have a citation? The Wikipedia page mentions nothing like that..

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

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

#55

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

monkeycantype wrote: post #31
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

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…

This is lovely but why would they leave their home? There are very unlikely to find another place equally comfortable to the one in which they evolved.

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

#56

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

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

> Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe

Life causes entropy, but do you literally mean it exists because it increases entropy? I don’t see the connection, only that life causes entropy. Can you explain?

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

#58

Post by telmo »

civilized wrote: post #8
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…

I send "AI" to the spam folder in general. No one who is actually doing AI calls it AI. It's only called AI in glossy consultant brochures with stock images of a man in a business suit surfing through a tunnel of glowing blue numbers.

Everyone calls it AI. It just so happens that it became a large field, so people tend to say that they work in Machine Learning, or Reinforcement Learning, or Evolutionary Computation. The same as in any other field really.

Also: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/artificial-intelligence

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

#59

Post by mach1ne »

throwdecro wrote: post #42
oceanplexian wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. There are so many philosophical debates out there regarding what happens after we die, if animals are "conscious", if computers or AI could have "consciousness", but in my opinion it's all a big illusion created out of our own egos as a rationalization for our existence. We are biological machines. Sure, we have an awareness of ourselves, but so do computers in some contexts; for example you could…

> you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself. Having a representation of itself doesn't mean it has an awareness of itself.

Isn't that precisely what it means? You are aware of something, thus you can take it and its aspects into consideration in your calculations. You have a representation of yourself - same thing. Of course your representation may not be completely accurate, but what perception would be.
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