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Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

nautil.us

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Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#171

Post by goto11 »

Ste_Evans wrote: post #141
goto11 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not contradicted. That comment is not science, it is just speculation (or philosophy if you wish). It is a grave fallacy to think that just because speculation is performed by a scientist, that speculation is science or "observation". At our current understanding of consciousness we have no way of observing its presence or absence except subjectively. So at this point there is no scientific way of either provin…

Mmmmm, no, the Standard Model is hard science. Even if you assumed that matter was "made of consciousness" you cannot make use of that assumption in explaining consciousness arising from matter in a brain. As only the properties of matter observed in the Standard Model can be appealed to at the energy levels in a brain . According to a professional physicist. Not my argument. Are you saying the Standard Model is not…

> According to a professional physicist.

This is your fallacy right there.

Science is a process and method. If a professional scientist performs philosophy it does not automatically become science due to the persons job title. And vice versa.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#172

Post by posterboy »

goatlover wrote: post #75
posterboy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A calculator processes maybe 64bits, in a machinery that is rather limited, certainly not enough to emulate it's environment, unless a more complex machine operates it.

However, bits, information and software have the same problem as math that was mentioned in the article. And that is that they are abstract and relational, unlike the concrete qualities of experiencing color, pain, a dream, etc. So I doubt that any amount of bits will do any good, just like no math equation is going to become conscious. What would it even mean for an equation or bits of information to have conscious…

That's nonsense. A large part of maths is having the right feel for it, numbers are--paradoxically--qualitative.

An equation is the application of a join operator, a formula is an operation, thought is operating and you are just thinking of lines scribled on paper instead.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#173

Post by simonh »

eanzenberg wrote: post #28
_Microft wrote: post #14

Jürgen Schmidthuber (an AI researcher for those not familiar with the name) gave an interesting explanation what conciousness is in an AMA that he conducted in 2015 on Reddit. I just submitted that in an extra thread [0] because it seems worth discussing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19241278

This is interesting, very interesting take, but it still doesn't explain where _other_ people's consciousness comes from. Through reductive reasoning, it doesn't explain why calculators and any matter shouldn't have consciousness.

Calculators don't contain a representation of themselves, and since he thinks that's fundamental to consciousness, how could they be so?

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#174

Post by posterboy »

Procrastes wrote: post #124
posterboy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bacteria don't have enough memory to represent technology, nor the necessary organization to ... I don't know, as whole they are rather complex and can at least share information like antigen markers to kill us effectively. There are actual sci-books on the matter, you know.

Then we don't have enough memory to understand our technology either. We accomplish that as a superorganism, and by building tools to augment our abilities. Maybe bacteria built us as complex, extraterrestrial spore capsules.

We are nothing but a symbiosis of single celled organisms and then some.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#175

Post by daoxid »

Does consciousness produce any measurable effect? For a time I thought consciousness is some kind of by-product of some kinds of computation which doesn't influence the computation itself. But how can I then know that I am conscious? And if I know that I am conscious, then consciousness must have a measurable effect, right? Because the knowledge that you are conscious should be reflected somewhere in your brain.

However, whenever I think about consciousness, I have the feeling that I am missing something obvious but important. It's just so confusing.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#176

Post by simonh »

taneq wrote: post #97
naasking wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's confusion consciousness for self awareness. That's not the hard problem that needs solving, it's actually one of the easy problems.

I think stating that there's a "hard problem of consciousness," which is not explained by self-awareness, is begging the question. We just kind of assume that there's something inherently special about qualia, raise them on a pedestal, and claim that they are unique to humans. Why assume that 'what it's like to experience the colour red' isn't just the experience of being aware that you're experiencing a red visual i…

Exactly, I just don't see what the problem is. I am not just experiencing this input. I am aware of the fact that I am experiencing this input. Or even I am aware of the fact that I am aware of myself experiencing this stimulus.

Also even a simple stimulus can have all sorts of context dependent meanings and associations. Is see red. That's the colour of blood, also the colour of one of my wife's dresses, and our car. There are thousands of cross-connections between that simple input and every level of my memory and emotional life all firing off in the rich chemical soup of my brain.

I just don't think the 'hard problem' is all that much of a step beyond the easy problems. Once you've solved those, the hard part looks a lot more tractable.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#177

Post by Razengan »

Most questions of this sort remind me of "Can submarines swim?"

If we build an AI that can interact via natural human language, and ask it about its internal state, and it replies "I am happy.", is it happy?

And whatever criteria we use to decide that machines cannot really be happy the way we can be, could a hypothetical species that thinks at a "higher level" than us, use similar criteria to determine that humans can't really think?

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#178

Post by Razengan »

lisper wrote: post #90
paraschopra wrote: post #84

Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If you propose then that only agents or complex systems are conscious, you are faced with the second problem: the boundary condition. What do you call an agent, and why? I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamenta…

We humans draw this boundary all the time. We do it based on an entity's I/O behavior, and in particular, the complexity of interactions that it is possible to have with it. Agency is not a binary quantity. A normal adult human is an agent, and a blastocyst is not, but there is no bright line where agency is bestowed. It happens gradually. None of this is a deep mystery. The only thing that is mysterious is how the t…

Just for fun, what exactly is meant by "agent" and how is a human one?

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#179

Post by dalbasal »

Enough credible people have publicly considered the idea credible for me to open my mind.

But... I have to keep my mind open with a brace. otherwise, it'll call occam's razor & snap shut.

At the heart of consciousness particles ideas (I think) is the idea that conciousness can't emerge from nonconscious stuff. This is counterintuitive to me. We now know of all sorts of emergent phenomenon.

Species emerge (from other, sometimes simpler species) and that emergence dynamic turned slime into ND Tyson. Substances like coffee and coffee tables emerge from basic particle characteristics like charge (to borrow their example). Chemistry emerges from particle physics. Biology emerges from chemistry.

Can someone point me to the starting point? I must be missing something. Why can't non-conscious matter, arranged precisely, think?

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