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A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

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Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#21

Post by heyjamesknight »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #11
mirekrusin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people have problem with simply stating that it is emergent phenomenon and that's it. Similarly to how computer is computer and half sized computer is half of its bigger friend – you can keep halving it until there is no "computer" left in it. Or pencil – you have pencil that you call pencil; what about pencil half size of it? and so on until you hit single atom. You had pencil, now you don't,…

Pencil is just an idea, minds objectively have qualia (measured internally). Edit: you can’t measure “pencilness,” but you can’t help but know whether or not you’re in pain.

You can measure "pencilness" a number of ways depending on how you operationalize the term. It could be a measure of how well it achieves the function of a pencil, how well it matches the collective understanding of the form of a pencil, how closely it materially relates to an existing reference pencil.

These are all proxy measures, but all of science is done by proxy.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#22

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #19
layer8 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emergence has no “into”, IMO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

All of those examples are emergence "into". The snowflake emerges into the mathematical patterns emanating downward. The termite cathedral emerges into the architectural context of the observer. Without emanating structure, there is no "emergence"—just a proliferation of chaos and error.

Not to butt in, but if the emergent phenomena only exists in the mind of the observer, and the mind is a material phenomenon, the where in the observer-snowflake system is there anything not fully decomposable to atoms, particle motion, so on?

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#23

Post by heyjamesknight »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #22
heyjamesknight wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those examples are emergence "into". The snowflake emerges into the mathematical patterns emanating downward. The termite cathedral emerges into the architectural context of the observer. Without emanating structure, there is no "emergence"—just a proliferation of chaos and error.

Not to butt in, but if the emergent phenomena only exists in the mind of the observer, and the mind is a material phenomenon, the where in the observer-snowflake system is there anything not fully decomposable to atoms, particle motion, so on?

The mind is not a material phenomenon, in the same way that a video game is not a computational one.

The emergent experience exists at the level into which it emerges. It's constructed at a lower level of organization, but not decomposable to them in a way that's meaningful without their recomposition—that's what makes the phenomenon emergent. The qualitative experience of a film does not meaningfully break down to the bits in the video stream, the compressed sound waves carrying the dialog, the photons hitting your eyes' rods and cones, or the biochemical signals in your brain.

The mind is not in the brain, but on the brain.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#24

Post by xg15 »

Maybe the definition of what "intelligence" is could be sharpened by having a look at LLMs and "traditional" computer programs and asking what exactly the difference between the two is.

Almost all the traditional criteria of intelligence - reasoning, planning, decisionmaking, memory etc - are exhibited pretty trivially by standard computer programs. Nevertheless no one would think of them as "intelligent" in the sense that humans or animals are.

On the other hand, we now have LLMs, that sent the entire tech world into a multi-year frenzy, precisely because they appear to possess that human-like intelligence.

And that is even though they perform worse than classical programs in some of the "intelligence" measures: For the first time, we have to worry that a computer program is "bad at math". They cannot reflect on past decisions and are physically unable to store long-term memories. And yet, we're much more likely to believe that an LLM is "intelligent" than a classical program.

This makes me think that our formal decisions of "intelligence" (the ones that would also qualify fungal networks, swarms, cells, societies, etc) and what we intuitively look out for, are really two different things.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#25

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #21
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pencil is just an idea, minds objectively have qualia (measured internally). Edit: you can’t measure “pencilness,” but you can’t help but know whether or not you’re in pain.

You can measure "pencilness" a number of ways depending on how you operationalize the term. It could be a measure of how well it achieves the function of a pencil, how well it matches the collective understanding of the form of a pencil, how closely it materially relates to an existing reference pencil. These are all proxy measures, but all of science is done by proxy.

Well sure, but you’re putting “pencilness” onto the collection of heterogeneous matter, same with any other level of analysis. Consciousness isn’t debatable by the thing doing it, it’s an irrepressible fact of existence to the conscious thing. Science needs a falsifiable hypothesis for the “why” of the material->consciousness transition, and constructing such a hypothesis is difficult for a lot of reasons. Saying “it emerges from neuron connections” just doesn’t capture the issue. Why should neuron connections produce this observer thing when we seem to see machines do similar things without it? Is a sufficiently large recurrent neural network conscious by the same process? If not or if so, then why? What precisely produces the phenomenon. Emergence is an observation, not a hypothesis for why that observation occurred. It could just be a trick of the light.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#26

Post by mandmandam »

card_zero wrote: post #18
mandmandam wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is, if you read it. > Which brings us to the most striking idea — that some types of electrical oscillations could mediate an experience of self. > In 2021, Hanson found that similar electrical activity — spontaneous low-frequency oscillations — is evident across many different organisms, from E. coli to humans. She concluded that across a diverse range of creatures, the oscillations may have a shared function:…

Oh that's the key point. I barely noticed it. OK, well, this is very literally about the first steps in how brains evolved. It's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one involving clay crystals "reproducing". But it's steep to say this is about minds, which only works if we accept the various parts of the article that urge us to stop being so egotistical and anthropocentric as to expect that a mind should be capa…

I think you missed more than the key point.

> this is very literally about the first steps in how brains evolved

Well, no; they even highlighted this section:

> “Intelligence, according to some, is a biological function that evolved not with humans or brains but way back in some form to the earliest organisms, a fundamental biological function like respiration.”

It would definitely connect to how brains evolved, but the article and the main idea are a lot broader than that.

> It's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one involving clay crystals "reproducing"

Well no; unless the clay crystals are producing interesting electrical oscillations.

> it's steep to say this is about minds, which only works if we accept the various parts of the article that urge us to stop being so egotistical and anthropocentric as to expect that a mind should be capable of doing something clever.

It's not clever to live for 2,000 years? And, are only clever people worthy of the label of having a mind? ... Because I know an awful lot of people with no interest in doing anything particularly clever.

And yes, your comment is anthropocentric... Definitively so. Whether something has a "mind" depends on the definition used, and if you define that as "what humans call clever", then yeah you're being anthropocentric.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#27

Post by mandmandam »

rzz3 wrote: post #20
mandmandam wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is, if you read it. > Which brings us to the most striking idea — that some types of electrical oscillations could mediate an experience of self. > In 2021, Hanson found that similar electrical activity — spontaneous low-frequency oscillations — is evident across many different organisms, from E. coli to humans. She concluded that across a diverse range of creatures, the oscillations may have a shared function:…

The right way to include all of this context would be to start with the lead and then back it up with the context. I can’t read stuff written like this.

I agree that they buried the lede, but I'll defend the article anyway because the subject matter is still worth the effort imo.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#28

Post by Symmetry »

sctb wrote: post #4
gregwebs wrote: post #2

I don't see the word "consciousness" in the article. I thought that was the thing to figure out to understand the emergence of the mind.

My general understanding is that "mind" is an objective concept; people have minds that cognize and think and learn and so on. Some minds are apparently more capable of those things than others. When speaking about intelligence, it makes sense to associate that with the mind. Consciousness, on the other hand, is (even) less well-defined and is usually considered to be subjective. Being subjective, it tends to resist…

There's a whole scientific study of consciousness that actually comes out of behaviorism. The thought is, if I have a conscious experience I can then exhibit the behavior of talking about it. From this developed a whole paradigm of investigation including stuff like the research of subliminal images.

Stanislas Dehaene's book Consciousness and the Brain does a great job of describing this, though it's 10 years old now.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#29

Post by card_zero »

mandmandam wrote: post #26
card_zero wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh that's the key point. I barely noticed it. OK, well, this is very literally about the first steps in how brains evolved. It's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one involving clay crystals "reproducing". But it's steep to say this is about minds, which only works if we accept the various parts of the article that urge us to stop being so egotistical and anthropocentric as to expect that a mind should be capa…

I think you missed more than the key point. > this is very literally about the first steps in how brains evolved Well, no; they even highlighted this section: > “Intelligence, according to some, is a biological function that evolved not with humans or brains but way back in some form to the earliest organisms, a fundamental biological function like respiration.” It would definitely connect to how brains evolved, but…

Sure, we disagree on that, anthropocentrism, which is why you think the part you say they highlighted is significant. I think it's hot air.

(I meant very loosely akin, because it's another example of some complex phenomenon emerging from matter.)

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#30

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #23
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to butt in, but if the emergent phenomena only exists in the mind of the observer, and the mind is a material phenomenon, the where in the observer-snowflake system is there anything not fully decomposable to atoms, particle motion, so on?

The mind is not a material phenomenon, in the same way that a video game is not a computational one. The emergent experience exists at the level into which it emerges. It's constructed at a lower level of organization, but not decomposable to them in a way that's meaningful without their recomposition—that's what makes the phenomenon emergent. The qualitative experience of a film does not meaningfully break down to t…

But we have to classify it as an “appears to” rather than an “is,” don’t we? It’s perfectly fine to do categorize out emergent phenomena that have practical utility, eg its useful to see the snowflake over its constituent parts, or the film over the bits, but what underlies the choice to see it as a film rather than an improbably corrupted png? When talking about the mind, then, why is it we choose to see the mind at all, and how does this constitute more than a convenient framing device, ie how can it explain qualia?
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