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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

#31
post #4
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…

mind = container of values

consciousness = meta-attention

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#32

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,…

Because that's the same as giving up and saying "we don't understand." What is mind emerging into ? When a video game experience emerges from the combination of processing, display, sound, and controller input, it emerges into a level of organization that a mind can participate in. It emerges into a system of organization emanating downward from the mind experiencing it. It can't just "emerge" into existence on its o…

I agree with GP. Consciousness isn't so hard to explain if you don't enshroud it with mysticism.

Consciousness is the emergent, graduated phenomenon of an information processing system when that information processing system has achieved significant complexity to model itself with relation to the various systemic inputs.

It's not binary, it's a gradient. I have more developed consciousness than my dog, which has more developed consciousness than a rat, and then a fish, then an insect, etc.

Somewhat disturbingly it also goes the other way, AIs may achieve a more profound conscious experience than humans - same for aliens. What does it mean for inferior forms of consciousness that have always placed themselves on a pedestal in relation to the rest of the animal kingdom simply because they have the most developed consciousness?

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#33
post #24

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 sens…

I wouldn't say that's true at all for traditional computer programs. They're doing explicitly what they are designed to do, there is no adaptation/learning.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#34
post #24

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 sens…

intelligence is a property of the species and the property of the individual, even unintelligent individuals (except for very pronounced extremes) still have the species property of intelligence.

The species property of intelligence encompasses stupidity.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#35
I've been thinking as well that from some perspective a human being isn't actually a single life but rather itself a multitude of separate tiny-life forms that cooperate to survive (the cells). The voice in our head is the emerging consciouness that act as a captain, it's useful for the captain to think of itself as one being. Now this said, I feel the article is jumping a bit too much on the Animism hippie bandwagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism

Of course, there is some intelligence in any life form behaviour, but if you want to say that a tomato plant is intelligent than you need to use another word or set of words for more advanced life forms. Putting in the same bag a tomato plant and a dolphin clearly makes the word intelligence so vague it loses almost every practical meaning.

To clarify also the part where it talks about earth being an organism. I've thought of this as well, the whole universe could be a life form, each planet and star in it a cell in its body. It's a possibility. Or maybe even our whole universe is just a cell in someone's body.

It's possible, but I fear there is little science in the people of that article and just old fashion Animism and protect "the mother earth" natural spiritual thinking that has existed for thousands of years. Those people see the world as if they are druids in a fantasy novel. I see myself more as a wizard. We might have different opinions. I will take them seriously when they can LITERALLY speak with animals daily in useful manners and tell vines to move. Until then is just (a) Fantasy. I can summon electricity and fireballs (with technology), if they want to say they are druids they better step up their enchantments. Telling "sit" to a dog and then writing long articles on how dogs are so intelligent doesn't cut it for me.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#36
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's the same as giving up and saying "we don't understand." What is mind emerging into ? When a video game experience emerges from the combination of processing, display, sound, and controller input, it emerges into a level of organization that a mind can participate in. It emerges into a system of organization emanating downward from the mind experiencing it. It can't just "emerge" into existence on its o…

I agree with GP. Consciousness isn't so hard to explain if you don't enshroud it with mysticism. Consciousness is the emergent, graduated phenomenon of an information processing system when that information processing system has achieved significant complexity to model itself with relation to the various systemic inputs. It's not binary, it's a gradient. I have more developed consciousness than my dog, which has more…

Welp, that does it. Pack it up, Cognitive Scientists: we've solved the hard problem of consciousness right here on HN.

What you're describing is what's been proposed by Giulio Tonini as "Integrated Information Theory" (IIT) [1]. I quite like the framework and the math behind it is beautiful. Unfortunately, it hasn't been supported well empirically.

Re: AI, IIT actually gives basis for AI not being conscious. Not to mention that all conscious systems we can currently observe are dynamic/continuous, not discrete. The difference there is qualitative—there's no reason to assume that because a dynamic system is conscious that a discrete system approximating it is conscious too.

[1: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44]

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#37

Can we retitle this as there is nothing new here besides long musings

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:…

Is there any reason why we should associate oscillations with any such thing though? Lots of systems oscillate. It could well be that oscillations are a common emergent property of many systems, including consciousness, rather than consciousness being emergent from oscillations.

It seems to me that a key characteristic of consciousness is it's informational character. It is representational of a cognitive state, it's interpretive, introspective. It seems to me that for any system to be conscious it must at a minimum be generating and interpreting representational structures. I'm sure that's nowhere even close to being a sufficient criterion, but I don't see how it can't be a necessary one.

I think that's key to subjectivity, because different systems can have radically different ways to represent and interpret even the same phenomenon they have representations of. The details of the representational structure, and it's network of associations with other representational structures in the system, are intrinsically tied to details of the system processing and interpreting the representation.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because our entire perception system functions as a mediation between the teleological affordances an object presents at a given level of organization/analysis and how those affordances relate to our motivational system's current objective and directed action. The emergence only "is" at a certain level of analysis and its emergence at that level is dependent entirely on the perception of an observer.

If a car is hurtling towards you, you don't perceive its handle. But if you're trying to go somewhere, you have to open the door. "Threat", "vehicle", or "handle" aren't just convenient framing device, but an accurate depiction of the object within your perceptual/motivation systems based on the current level of organization and analysis you're participating in.

We choose to see the mind because we are minds. Consciousness is. There is something which it is like to be. Denying our emergent experience of it, or reducing it to a "convenient framing device" tosses out the most fundamental empirical experience we have: to exist.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#39
post #24

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 sens…

I wouldn't say that's true at all for traditional computer programs. They're doing explicitly what they are designed to do, there is no adaptation/learning.

Code vs. data.

The code needed create, train, and perform inference on a Transformer is quite short. How short depends on how you count the `import` statements in https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py and https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/sample.py etc.

Spreadsheets performing linear regression etc., — Do they learn? Sure!

If you accept that Transformers adapt and learn then you must accept that a spreadsheet also does, because someone implemented GPT-2 in Excel: https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need

Do polymorphic computer viruses adapt? Border Gateway Protocol? Exponential backoff? Autocomplete? And that's aside from any algorithmic search results or "social" feeds, which are nothing but that.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#40

Can we retitle this as there is nothing new here besides long musings

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:…

Is this not the same thing as IIT?
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