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What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

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Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#51

Post by hanche »

epgui wrote: post #44
jsuth wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore is exactly what you're looking for. Make sure you get the latest edition. https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Emily-Troscianko-Susan-... She has another book called Conversations on Consciousness that's basically transcribed interviews with prominent figures that's also worth checking out. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254499.Conversations_on_...

I can't say how good this book is, but the author has a PhD in parapsychology. This makes me question how prone they are to magical thinking, and also whether I'd want to read what they have to say about this topic. Yes this comment is an ad hominem, and no I have not read the book... All I have is a skeptical hunch that this might not represent "the state of the art" on the topic.

If you had read anything by Susan Blackmore (I have, but admittedly long ago), I think you’d find that she’s not at all into magical thinking.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#52

Post by hackerlight »

conrod_ wrote: post #13

Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"

"Philosophy of mind" is the discipline you're looking for. They're far off from a preliminary theory let alone a coherent definition of the word consciousness. It is not an easy problem.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#53

Post by Nevermark »

didericis wrote: post #46
l33t233372 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This school of thought strikes me as fundamentally opposed to the whole idea of the scientific method. We try to find out about these black boxes through repeated observation, theorizing, and testing. It seems short sighted to suggest we can’t find out things about consciousness in a similar way.

The scientific method is about paying strict and close attention to what we can observe. The black boxes we can make sense of must have enough datapoints within the observable universe to be understood. We can almost definitely learn a lot more about consciousness related phenomenon than we already know through science, and I don’t know the answer to OP’s question about the current cutting edge of that, but I think i…

We observe everything indirectly.

It is easy (and cognitively useful) to forget that, when the indirection is very reliable.

As far as consciousness, we won’t just have to speculate based on our own consciousness. As artificial minds become highly self-aware (a functional ingredient of consciousness), we will be able to construct very controlled experiments.

There will be endless numbers of experiments we will be able to do once we can edit self-aware entities and both externally query and internally monitor them.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#54

Post by Syntonicles »

conrod_ wrote: post #13

Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"

A prominent figure in the space is David Chalmers, who made it his life's work to characterize and explore theories of consciousness. He's a philosopher in New York (originally Australia) He coined "The Hard Problem" and "The Meta Problem". You should get an overview in his books. They're a bit dated but it's not like there's been substantial progress.

There's a recent book called "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind" which purports to be what you are looking for. She's an author who is married to Sam Harris, a neuroscience PhD and public thinker who focused a lot of consciousness. His ideas permeate her thinking and I found her treatment to be less open minded.

There's a series mirrored on YouTube called "Closer to Truth", where Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews famous physicists, mathematicians, etc. on this and other grand unsolved questions. You can find interviews with most of the analytical thinkers in the consciousness space if you wade through.

The most "mathematically rigorous" theory is Integrated Information Theory by Giulio Tononi. The logical conclusions of his theory are outlandish or eye-opening, depending on your bias. I don't buy it myself but the there might be something in the approach.

The most mathematically gifted individual with a theory is Roger Penrose. His scientific work is absolutely brilliant but his ideas about consciousness are quite frankly ridiculous and unmotivated.

The best, most rigorous theory I know of comes from a Neuroscientist at Princeton named Michael Graziano. He put forth the "Attention Schema Theory". I strongly recommend his book "Rethinking Consciousness" which makes a case for it, and provides an overview of the other approaches and how they relate to his ideas.

I've been very much swayed by Graziano's work, and we have the technology today to test his theory by integrating actively controlled attention mechanisms into machine learning models. If his ideas are correct, that could lead to models organically making similar claims to humans regarding phenomenological states. The theory is agnostic about whether the claims would be substantiated.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#55

Post by orangkiwi »

conrod_ wrote: post #13

Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"

"Conscious" by Annaka Harris sounds like a good overview, although I haven't read it yet so I'm not sure how rigorous it is.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#56

Post by Nevermark »

epgui wrote: post #39
conrod_ wrote: post #13

Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"

You're asking the wrong question by excluding cognition and using a very ill-defined word ("consciousness"). "Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, many of which are what we usually refer to as "cognition". People who like to talk about consciousness have a problem keeping the goalposts in place (and trying to exclude cognition from consciousness, presumably because "cognition" doesn't sound mys…

That view seems pessimistic without any strong argument, other than critiquing people for not yet understanding something we all agree we don’t understand yet.

> Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, […]

A collection of things is a thing.

> The truth is consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, […]

I don’t think that is controversial at all.

We have unraveled the workings of many emergent phenomena. Emergent doesn’t mean incomprehensible.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#57

Post by epgui »

Nevermark wrote: post #56
epgui wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking the wrong question by excluding cognition and using a very ill-defined word ("consciousness"). "Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, many of which are what we usually refer to as "cognition". People who like to talk about consciousness have a problem keeping the goalposts in place (and trying to exclude cognition from consciousness, presumably because "cognition" doesn't sound mys…

That view seems pessimistic without any strong argument, other than critiquing people for not yet understanding something we all agree we don’t understand yet. > Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, […] A collection of things is a thing. > The truth is consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, […] I don’t think that is controversial at all. We have unraveled the workings of many emergent phenome…

It's only a thing if you can define it, but there is no agreed upon definition of what collection of things comprise consciousness. We have all the pieces, and we know we have all the pieces (note: this doesn't mean we don't have a lot more to learn, both can be true). There is little controversy over how it all roughly works together. The only real controversy is semantics: what do we mean when we say "consciousness".

In programmerland, one might say something like "the abstraction you're using is counter-productive", for whatever reason, when looking at some junior hire's code. It's very much the same here: trying to understand consciousness is asking the wrong question. It's like asking "Why is there a God?": it's an unproductive question because it's a question that can't be answered. The abstraction in the question simply doesn't map 1:1 to abstractions in the world in which we live. If we want to understand our world, we'll maximize our odds of success if we focus on studying the abstractions of this world.

I wouldn't describe myself as a pessimist at all, and I'm not sure why you thought my comment was pessimistic... But this opinion of mine (because that's what it is, it's an opinion, not an argument) is a professional opinion. This isn't my field of expertise, but I do have expertise in very adjacent fields.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#58

Post by epgui »

hanche wrote: post #51
epgui wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't say how good this book is, but the author has a PhD in parapsychology. This makes me question how prone they are to magical thinking, and also whether I'd want to read what they have to say about this topic. Yes this comment is an ad hominem, and no I have not read the book... All I have is a skeptical hunch that this might not represent "the state of the art" on the topic.

If you had read anything by Susan Blackmore (I have, but admittedly long ago), I think you’d find that she’s not at all into magical thinking.

That's certainly reassuring to hear!

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#59

Post by evilsetg »

dvt wrote: post #34
kilgnad wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unless we reduce models of consciousness to purely stochastic processes, this is trivially false. And no one seriously reduces consciousness to probabilistic pattern recognition. Most things in this universe have mathematical models that can describe it. We have models for virtually everything. Thus it is reasonable to say such a model also exists for consciousness. To say what you said definitively without even kno…

> Again you don't know what you're talking about. I think that's a bit uncharitable. You're acting like people haven't been grappling with these problems for thousands of years. Searle, for example, makes a pretty good argument why symbol-processing systems will never produce consciousness (you'd have to prove that the Chinese room is conscious, etc.). It's clear, for example, that a toaster doesn't have any consciou…

Can you explain how you know that neither a toaster, your wristwatch nor ChatGPT are conscious? If being conscious means being conscious like a human this would be obvious but maybe the toaster is just conscious like a toaster. Is a bug conscious?

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#60

Post by inphovore »

Consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. The mathematical structure is geometric in some way. The quantum domain acts as a sieve. Constructive and distinctive interference perturbs the quantum substrate, which is the existential universe itself.

Consciousness is thus the universe peering back into itself, and living systems are the biotechnology which animate this phenomena.

The unique properties of this are:

Our “computation” is non-linear. The quantum coherence creates a holographic subjective singularity. These allow the illusion of one perspective among billions of participating neurons.

The more neurons in a cluster, the higher resolution the “pocket of consciousness”. These bubbles compete in the mind for influence. I say this acts much like a hologram.

The sieve of consciousness works through constructive and destructive interference.

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