A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter • Hacker News Board

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#161

Post by bloomingkales » Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 2:39 PM UTC

szvsw wrote: post #133

bloomingkales wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we define adaptation and learning as the ability to concentrate. Our single cell ancestors would have to concentrate and deliberately store the first memory. Otherwise it would have just taken in the world with its sensors but never do anything with it. Adapting and learning means it chose to concentrate on packing the world into retrievable storage. When do we not adapt and learn? When we ignore our inputs a…

> When do we not adapt and learn? When we ignore our inputs and do nothing with it (don’t store it, don’t retrieve it). In the example I mentioned, the program clearly is taking inputs (load), storing them, querying for previous values that satisfy certain conditions (the value at a certain timestamp for each of the last 7 days), running computation (computing a mean), and operationalizing the result (pre-emptively s…

C’mon now, you and I know both know your program is discontinuous. A few null or unknown inputs that you didn’t even consider will break it. You’ll have to keep going in there and adding more if/else statements. Your program couldn’t survive a 100 years without you debugging it.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#162

Post by bloomingkales » Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

giorgioz wrote: post #114

bloomingkales wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trees giving you the very thing you need to live every minute wasn’t enough of a compromise for you? They’ve quite negotiable with us. Gotta watch The Happening again.

To be clear, trees did not "give" us oxygen. Trees evolved from bushes which evolved from algaes, which evolved from some mono-cell life forms which are a common ancestors to us as well. They were shaped by natural selection, it was indeed awesome for them to get out of the water and start consuming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They did not give us oxygen though, there was no high level consciousness of gifting…

It’s not that we’re unscientific, it’s just that we’re putting science aside unless it corroborates things. It’s totally a terrible process, there’s no evidence.

Some people over time cannot put down the fact that there’s just way too many coincidences. If you just pile up what it took for you to be here (let’s include your one in a million chance of out swimming the other sperm along with a perfect planet, possibly perfect parents, list goes on), I think you’d at least agree it’s one miracle after another.

I can sit here and measure the anger on your face based on the metric of how red your face is but I’ll never know why you are angry. You can tell me, but even then, is it true? That’s the issue with science, that measuring and collecting observations won’t reveal the true nature. So it must be put aside, at least to investigate the other possibility.

I don’t see how people aren’t open minded about there being more than a clinical understanding of this experience.

From my other comment:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676...

Is it so hard to believe there is a global frequency?

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#163

Post by whycome » Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

h0l0cube wrote: post #126

crooked-v wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correct term isn't "hallucinate", it's "bullshit". I mean that in the casual sense of "a bullshitter" - every LLM is a moderately knowleable bullshitter that never stops talking (In a literal sense - even the end of responses is just a magic string from the LLM that cues the containing system to stop the LLM, and if not stopped like that it would just keep going after the "end".) The remarkable thing is that we e…

You could probably s/LLM/human/ in your comment. Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs. In between there may be thoughts in there, like 'I've no more to say', or 'Shut your mouth before they figure you out'. The question is, how is it that hum…

There’s something meta about your comment and my reaction. Metaphor. The pachinko metaphor seems so apt it made me pause and probably internalize it in some way. It’s now added to my brains dataset specifically about LLMs. It’s an interesting moment to be hyper aware of in the context that you’re also describing (definition of intelligence). Far out.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#164

Post by torginus » Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 3:19 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #157

teekert wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a scientist, articles like this also annoy me. Because it, right off the bat, assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness. Just because we don't experience those degrees, and animals can't convey what they feel through language, we assume it is "emergent", or "suddenly there". I think we are too caught up in believing that consciousness must be something really special or some magic discontinuity of spaceti…

Add to this that a lot of people presume that peoples experience is the same. E.g. I have aphantasia - I don't picture things in my "inner eye". Through discussions with people about that, a lot of people described own differences from the perceived norm, and it is clear a not insignificant numbers also have other differences, such as not thinking consciously in words. A lot of people then tend to express disbelief,…

I'm curious about aphantasia - if I asked you to draw a floorplan of your home/office etc. would you not be able to do it?

If you could wouldn't that involve you imagining what the building looks like from the inside and how the rooms are connected together?

Or would do it some other way?

(I'm assuming you could do it, since if you couldn't I think that would be a majorly debiliating condition rather than just some amusing fact)

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#165

Post by Xmd5a » Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

mcswell wrote: post #71

skissane wrote: post #61

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinction…

As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word "langu…

Here lies the promised land: the possibility of a precise and concise nomenklatura that assigns each thing a unique name, perfectly matching its unique position in the world, derived from the complete determination of the laws governing what it is and how it interacts with others. The laws of what is shall dictate how things ought to be named. What a motivating carrot—let’s keep following these prescriptions, for surely, in the end, the harmony of their totality will prove they were objective descriptions all along. Above all, let’s not trust our own linguistic ability to distinguish between the subtle nuances hidden within the same word, or at least, let’s distrust the presence of this ability in our fellow speakers. That should be enough to justify our intervention in the name of universality itself.

Imagine this: language is an innate ability that all speakers have mastered, yet none are experts in—unless they are also linguists. And what, according to experts, is the source of such mastery? A rigid set of rules capturing the state of a language (langue) at a given time, in a specific geographical area, social class, etc., from which all valid sentences (syntactically and beyond) can supposedly be derived. Yet this framework never truly explains—or at best relegates to the background—our ability to understand (or recognize that we have not understood) and to correct (or request clarification) when ill-formed sentences are thrown at us like wrenches into a machine. Parsers work this way: they reject errors, bringing communication to an end. They do not ask for clarification, they do not correct their interlocutors, let alone engage in arguments about usage, which, under the effect of rational justification, hardens into "rules."

Giving in to the temptation of an objective description of language as an external reality—especially when aided by formal languages—makes us lose sight of this fundamental origin. In the end, we construct yet another norm, one that obscures our ability to account for normativity itself, starting with out own.

Perhaps this initial concealment is its very origin.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#166

Post by vidarh » Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 3:31 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #164

vidarh wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to this that a lot of people presume that peoples experience is the same. E.g. I have aphantasia - I don't picture things in my "inner eye". Through discussions with people about that, a lot of people described own differences from the perceived norm, and it is clear a not insignificant numbers also have other differences, such as not thinking consciously in words. A lot of people then tend to express disbelief,…

I'm curious about aphantasia - if I asked you to draw a floorplan of your home/office etc. would you not be able to do it? If you could wouldn't that involve you imagining what the building looks like from the inside and how the rooms are connected together? Or would do it some other way? (I'm assuming you could do it, since if you couldn't I think that would be a majorly debiliating condition rather than just some a…

Yes, in fact my ability to draw from memory places I've seen is, if anything, from experience, substantially above average. However, when I draw from memory, my drawings do tend to be more stylized.

I can "imagine" what a building looks like, but I can't see it. Even our language makes this hard to describe, and the reason why I didn't realise that this isn't how other people do it, because most of our language for remember how something looks uses terms that implies we see them, so I just assumed until a few years ago (and I turn 50 this year) that that was just a metaphor to everyone else too.

How do you imagine (there's that word again...) blind people remember places they can't see?

To me, the notion that I'd need to "see" what the building looks like to draw it is bizarre because I know where everything is in relation to each other, and their shapes, so why would I need to see it?

EDIT: increasingly, and in part drive by split-brain experiments, I tend to think that a whole lot of what we see as our conscious decision-making, are instead shallow retroactive attempts by parts of the brain at rationalising decisions largely already taken autonomously into a cohesive self/ego.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#167

Post by kordlessagain » Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #61

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinction…

Wait. If words fail to capture the truth, why do we keep making more words about it?

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#168

Post by szvsw » Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

bloomingkales wrote: post #161

szvsw wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When do we not adapt and learn? When we ignore our inputs and do nothing with it (don’t store it, don’t retrieve it). In the example I mentioned, the program clearly is taking inputs (load), storing them, querying for previous values that satisfy certain conditions (the value at a certain timestamp for each of the last 7 days), running computation (computing a mean), and operationalizing the result (pre-emptively s…

C’mon now, you and I know both know your program is discontinuous. A few null or unknown inputs that you didn’t even consider will break it. You’ll have to keep going in there and adding more if/else statements. Your program couldn’t survive a 100 years without you debugging it.

> your program is discontinuous

Not sure I follow your usage of discontinuous: clearly the load inputs are continuous variables (albeit discretely sampled in time and magnitude, but I don’t see the significance of either of those sampling frequencies, each of which can be chosen to be effectively arbitrarily small). Also don’t understand the relevance of continuity at all since you didn’t reference it in the post I replied to.

> A few null or unknown inputs that you didn’t even consider will break it.

Null handling should be assumed to be a trivial problem here (ie just use the last 7 valid values for the time step of interest), and I’m not sure what “unknown” values would be here, can you give an example? I think it’s safe to assume that the inputs have already been normalized to some meaningful scale as an implementation detail of the load sensors. Even if the telemetry scheme changes because the instrumentation changes or the infrastructure changes, so long as the instrumentation produces values at the same scale and the actuators can still respond to the outputs, the core kernel of sense/compute/actuate can still be left unchanged.

I’m assuming that you are citing the failure to respond to null or unknown conditions as a lack of adaptation capabilities, especially as you are referencing its inability to last 100 years - though good luck finding any piece of software that can last 100 years, especially more robust machine learning algorithms that have to deal with problems like data distribution drift, hardware changes, etc etc - same goes with wetware (besides turtles?). I’m strawmanning you a little bit on the appeal to time though, since I assume your main point was to just emphasize that “it won’t deal with changing conditions/new scenarios well” which I think is somewhat fair. On the other hand, I think it is safe to say that what I described does at least respond to the world and in turn affect it in a kind of cybernetic feedback loop, which includes adapting to the shifting conditions to meet some desired state. So maybe it would be helpful if you could define more precisely what you mean by adaptation? Not trying to be snarky, just trying to genuinely push you to try to make a clear definition of what you mean by adaptation.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#169

Post by Miraltar » Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 3:41 PM UTC

LiquidHelium wrote: post #137

anon291 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of. And this is where these arguments that seek to reduce intelligence to purely mechanistic processes breaks down. For sure, everything the article is saying is true, and indeed, the system could be classified as intelligent, but this is a wholly different question from 'agency' or 'free will'. Even exceptionally dumb people have free…

This is an argument for anecdote so feel free to ignore me but if you meditate for long enough or take certain substances you can experience that the conscious experience we are having doesn't actually control things in the way we think it does - you don't actually think your thoughts, you just observe them, like we don't control the sounds we hear - and same with everything else we do. The "only thing one can be ass…

I feel like what you are describing is like letting go of the wheel while driving. Then the car does its own thing but that doesn't mean you don't have control. It's just that you decided (or sometimes were forced) to let go. I agree that we're never fully in control but I don't think we're simple observers either.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#170

Post by suddenlybananas » Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #109

School-Cotton wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a linguistics layman, but can’t you make an even stronger claim about human language? Apparently there are certain constructs in Swiss German that are not context-free.

From another viewpoint, all human language is only at the finite-state level - a finite state automaton can recognise a language from any level in the Chomsky hierarchy provided you constrain all sentences to a finite maximum length, which of course you can - no human utterance will ever be longer than a googolplex symbols, since there aren’t enough atoms in the observable universe to encode such an utterance Really…

This is why the classical notion of competence and performance in linguistics is important. We describe programming languages as being Turing-complete even if every computer is always in practice finite because, in principle, it could be run on a computer with more memory or whatever. Likwise, it seems that language is bounded by language external facts about memory not intrinsic facts about how language is processed.