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Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

nautil.us

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Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#41

Post by _Microft »

jcims wrote: post #40
_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

Lex Fridman has a great interview with Jurgen here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FIo6evmweo He presents this idea during the interview. It makes sense in a way. But it also makes me wonder if embodiment (whether real or virtual) of our models is necessary for them to fully grasp the contextual relevance of the information they are processing. E.g. does having a 'me' or 'I' provide a semantic anchor for everythin…

Thanks!

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#42

Post by [deleted] »

dustfinger wrote: post #38

I recall as a child once that I literally thought the following: > I can accept that the universe can give rise to agents with RI or AI. I can even accept that as a consequence of this, some of these agents may have self awareness. I am such an agent. Yet, I struggle comming to terms with the fact that "I" am aware of myself. I wish I could live long enough to find out how.

[deleted]

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#43

Post by IdiocyInAction »

dustfinger wrote: post #38

I recall as a child once that I literally thought the following: > I can accept that the universe can give rise to agents with RI or AI. I can even accept that as a consequence of this, some of these agents may have self awareness. I am such an agent. Yet, I struggle comming to terms with the fact that "I" am aware of myself. I wish I could live long enough to find out how.

Yeah. I think a lot of people have that issue.

I have read about and understood a lot of physicalist theories of consciousness, but I have yet to see one that explains my subjective bubble of experience. I could see how this is all an illusion, but I can't see why I can perceive it then, why I have these vivid subjective experiences.

Conciousness is really quite odd, especially because I realized that most of the important functions in the brain are unconcious.

I don't find dualism satisfying either; it is not a testable theory.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#44

Post by wppick »

justinpombrio wrote: post #31
tigerlily wrote: post #16

I could have been born at any time, in any place in the universe - or not at all, for that matter. Why do I get to experience the universe in a unique way? What gives rise to this?

You're wondering why you weren't also born at a different time and place? You were. You were also born in 1988 in CT. This other you was born to different parents, had a different childhood, and has different memories. You think you are different from this other you (and you are!) because you have separate thoughts and memories. You remember your own life and not your other life because humans aren't telepathic. In c…

>There but for the grace of God go I

I like to entertain the idea that humans are the host of a species of sentient alien bacteria that lives in our guts and controls us through the vagus nerve and uses humans to build technology to advance to the point where they can build space ships to colonize other planets. Could make a good sci-fi book if anything...

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#45

Post by gotocake »

phkahler wrote: post #35
TaupeRanger wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No and no. Math equations are abstract concepts within the mind. This question is about how the mind exists in the first place . Nothing here even remotely implies that math equations are conscious.

Does the Mandelbrot set exist? We have a mathematical description of it. It's easy to write software to create pictures "of it". Mandelbrot himself wrote software to create an image of it based on his definition - prior to knowing what it looked like. Indeed, he was surprised at the complexity of what he saw. Did that set of points exist prior to a human stumbling on its definition? Does it exist independent of someo…

This is effectively Max Tegemark’s TOE, the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypoth...

Tegmark's MUH is: Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.[3] That is, the physical universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is mathematics (specifically, a mathematical structure). Mathematical existence equals physical existence, and all structures that exist mathematically exist physically as well. Observers, including humans, are "self-aware substructures (SASs)". In any mathematical structure complex enough to contain such substructures, they "will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically 'real' world".[4]

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#46

Post by naasking »

_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

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.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#47

Post by cobbzilla »

> And a radical change it truly is. Philosophers and neuroscientists often assume that consciousness is like software, whereas the brain is like hardware. This suggestion turns this completely around. When we look at what physics tells us about the brain, we actually just find software—purely a set of relations—all the way down. And consciousness is in fact more like hardware, because of its distinctly qualitative, non-structural properties. For this reason, conscious experiences are just the kind of things that physical structure could be the structure of.

I'm not sure I buy the thesis, that conscious experience is the "hardware" and the brain is the "software".

It's hard for me to understand how a rock is ultimately comprised of conscious experiences, at its most fundamental level.

The attempt to tie together the "hard problem of consciousness" with the "hard problem of matter" comes across a bit square-peg/round-hole to me.

If I had to take a wild guess at these-

Hard problem of matter: it really is just vibrating strings at the bottom, and this is indeed where physical reality and math become indistinguishable. Blows the mind, and still so much more we can learn.

Hard problem of consciousness: I wish I knew more about the evolution of nervous systems, how can we tell when chemistry/biology becomes conscious thought? It's clearly some kind of feedback loop. In the future we could safely & non-invasively study the "bootstrap sequence" for various species brains as they make their first neural signals, from the earliest stages.

I really think we can solve this, or get a lot closer, but it will require some far-future technologies.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#49

Post by state_less »

dustfinger wrote: post #38

I recall as a child once that I literally thought the following: > I can accept that the universe can give rise to agents with RI or AI. I can even accept that as a consequence of this, some of these agents may have self awareness. I am such an agent. Yet, I struggle comming to terms with the fact that "I" am aware of myself. I wish I could live long enough to find out how.

Over time, our picture of the universe become more clear with more understanding. If you think about the direction we are heading, you might imagine the picture becomes so clear, that the act itself enters into the picture of the universe and you find yourself staring into a mirror.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#50

Post by mrec »

skissane wrote: post #36
mrec wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this mean? What's the "I" that's somehow separate from your specific physical instantiation? Unless you're getting into Cartesian dualism and souls, I'm genuinely confused.

I remember one day as a teenager, sitting in class bored at high school, I was suddenly struck by the question–"why am I I, and not somebody else?" It felt so profound, so immense. But yes, if materialism is true, probably the question is empty. However, if some other philosophy of mind is true (there are many other options beyond just materialism and Cartesian dualism), maybe it means something. And, if one has this…

> there are many other options beyond just materialism and Cartesian dualism

Can you give some examples of the kind of options you're thinking of? I mean, I have a lot of time for functionalist accounts, and given Sufficiently Smart Technology (tm) I'm happy to allow for the possibility of something recognizably "me" being artificially duplicated in a different physical substrate. (After which we'd rapidly start diverging, and would need some new vocabulary to describe what's going on.)

But GGP's question was specifically about being born. I really struggle to imagine how someone born somewhere else, somewhen else, could be "me" with anything like the fidelity I think our intuition demands. And if you loosen your identity test to the point where it could, doesn't it then become useless as an individuation test, in that lots of people could be sufficiently like me all at the same time?

This is why I think it's tough to say "I - singular - could have been born in Brazil in 1873" without invoking something like a soul which acts as both an arbitrary GUID tag and as kind of mutex on embodiments.

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