Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 57 posts

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#41

Post by thriftwy »

ozy wrote: post #33

I don't get how very intelligent people can hold such views. Where does the dance go, when the dancers go off stage? The dancers are not the dance, but create the dance. There is some kind of duality there. Similar for the brain. What it does creates the mind/consciousness. Should that feel like something? Why not? How does the brain decide on next actions? By simulating/predicting futures and "feeling" which is desi…

> It is unknown

Well, make it known then for starters, if you want to make the question a little bit softer.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#42

Post by runeks »

thriftwy wrote: post #39
runeks wrote: post #37

Consciousness is a bit like the speed of light: it's defined, not measured. It's not possible to measure the speed of light because we've made this constant the basis of all other measurements. Consciousness is a lot like that: unmeasurable, and the basis of all experience. In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property, which defines the framework. For physics this is the speed of light, for life forms…

> unmeasurable Says who? > basis of all experience Your consciousness is only base of your own experience. For other people your consciousness is only hypothesis to be studied. > In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property I would like to study consciousness outside of frameworks where it is unquestionable - just as we can do it in e.g. classical mechanics with speed of light.

Admittedly -- and perhaps obviously -- I'm not a physicist. But as far as I can see, once we've defined length and time in terms of the speed of light, the speed of light is constant, by definition. The speed of light can never change after this, because it would be observed as all lengths/units of time changing.

Consciousness can't change either, because a change in consciousness changes everything that is experienced, so how can you know whether everything or consciousness changed? There's no difference.

Some terms can only be defined in terms of themselves. What's a meter? It's term used to describe a length of measurement equivalent to one meter. What's consciousness? It's a term used by certain life forms to describe what life is.

How can we study something that's always there, and when it isn't there we're not there either? Everyone "experiences" the absence of consciousness in deep sleep, and there's simply nothing there.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#43

Post by zepto »

d--b wrote: post #32

There is a long history of pushing the location of human consciousness further and further with technological advances. First it was god, then it was somewhere in the ether, then it was electromagnetic waves, now quantum mechanics. People just can't stand the idea that conscious thoughts are made of matter.

People also just can't stand the idea that matter is made of consciousness.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#44

Post by ozy »

thriftwy wrote: post #41
ozy wrote: post #33

I don't get how very intelligent people can hold such views. Where does the dance go, when the dancers go off stage? The dancers are not the dance, but create the dance. There is some kind of duality there. Similar for the brain. What it does creates the mind/consciousness. Should that feel like something? Why not? How does the brain decide on next actions? By simulating/predicting futures and "feeling" which is desi…

> It is unknown Well, make it known then for starters, if you want to make the question a little bit softer.

But that is the rub, isn't it. How some mind (or system) experiences something is the very definition of subjective. How to measure that objectively?

Imagine somebody makes a mind out of machine learning. Passes the turing test and more. It reports to "feel", ie to have qualia. Is it parroting what it hears/reads from humans? Or does it actually have a feeling when you show it an image of a sunset? At what breakpoint do you place your debugger and inspect if it is so?

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#45

Post by euyyn »

runeks wrote: post #42
thriftwy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unmeasurable Says who? > basis of all experience Your consciousness is only base of your own experience. For other people your consciousness is only hypothesis to be studied. > In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property I would like to study consciousness outside of frameworks where it is unquestionable - just as we can do it in e.g. classical mechanics with speed of light.

Admittedly -- and perhaps obviously -- I'm not a physicist. But as far as I can see, once we've defined length and time in terms of the speed of light, the speed of light is constant, by definition. The speed of light can never change after this, because it would be observed as all lengths/units of time changing. Consciousness can't change either, because a change in consciousness changes everything that is experienc…

But we also use the speed of light to define other units after we found out, by experiment, that it was indeed constant.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#46

Post by euyyn »

> why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular Hilbert space factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space, say)

I'm surprised this is even considered by an MIT Physics professor. Conscious observers like us do perceive "Fourier space" in colors and pitch. Am I missing something?

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#47

Post by thriftwy »

ozy wrote: post #44
thriftwy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is unknown Well, make it known then for starters, if you want to make the question a little bit softer.

But that is the rub, isn't it. How some mind (or system) experiences something is the very definition of subjective. How to measure that objectively? Imagine somebody makes a mind out of machine learning. Passes the turing test and more. It reports to "feel", ie to have qualia. Is it parroting what it hears/reads from humans? Or does it actually have a feeling when you show it an image of a sunset? At what breakpoint…

A lot of things which we considered subjective were later found to be measurable. I think we should never stop to find an angle from which we can tackle the consciousness problem.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#48

Post by thriftwy »

runeks wrote: post #42
thriftwy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unmeasurable Says who? > basis of all experience Your consciousness is only base of your own experience. For other people your consciousness is only hypothesis to be studied. > In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property I would like to study consciousness outside of frameworks where it is unquestionable - just as we can do it in e.g. classical mechanics with speed of light.

Admittedly -- and perhaps obviously -- I'm not a physicist. But as far as I can see, once we've defined length and time in terms of the speed of light, the speed of light is constant, by definition. The speed of light can never change after this, because it would be observed as all lengths/units of time changing. Consciousness can't change either, because a change in consciousness changes everything that is experienc…

You're asking "how can we study" all the time.

But if there was a clear answer to that question, it won't be science.

Science is figuring out how to study things that we could not study previously.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#49

Post by xapata »

Insanity wrote: post #36
xapata wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood Searle's "Chinese Room" argument to advocate dualism -- that there's something more to being intelligent than just behavior. Searle says the more is consciousness, but I don't see the distinction between that version of the concept and a soul or "ghost" in the machine.

Searle is actually an advocate for Biological Naturalism, the chinese room was an argument against computationalism (that the brain works like a computer). Though he admittedly does think the brain is a 'biological computer', and they have their differences.

That's how Searle views himself, but one critique of his work is that he can't distinguish his "naturalism" from dualism. It seems so obvious to him that the Chinese Room isn't conscious, but if it can replicate everything a conscious person would do, it might indeed replicate the phenomena of consciousness. How would we know, after all, since those phenomena are not readily observable.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#50

Post by cool_shit »

It is tempting to be lazy and criticize this work because it contains a few instances of the phrase "quantum consciousness".

This paper has one purpose: To get people thinking of the brain and information-carrying systems from a physical perspective rather than solely a computer-science or information-theoretic perspective, or even worse -- a biological perspective. Physicists were largely responsible for computer science and information theory, and they will be largely responsible for breakthroughs in biology and machine-learning as interdisciplinary laboratories continue to grow.

Physics is the most sophisticated area of applied mathematics that currently exists. Whatever consciousness is, it will be understood through physics -- because, presumably, that's what it is.

That said, it is interesting to see a consolidated paper touching on common motifs. The brain exhibits many characteristics of any other state of matter; for example, it has phase transitions.

One thing I disliked about this paper is the conclusion is draws from its examples with the gold ring and the pond. They go on to say that information is not persistent in a pond; for example if you write your name on the surface, the energy will be propagated away and the surface will return to a higher entropy state fairly quickly. This is true, but one cannot say that the brain is different solely because of this. The brain is constantly under "external" influence. It is constantly being supplied with fresh nutrients; neurons are constantly being supplied with tugs from their neighbors. If you were to remove all incoming nutrients, the brain would surely collapse as an information processor, too (e.g. death of the organism).

I would go so far as to say that a conscious system requires constant input, and does not necessarily do anything in the absence of any input. This assertion is in direct contradiction to the heuristics ("principles") established in the paper. For example, computers, bacteria, and brains are all computing systems which require constant input.

Post reply on HN