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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

#41

Post by wat10000 »

Symmetry wrote: post #28
sctb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Trouble is that you can also exhibit the behavior of talking about it just by being exposed to the idea, even if you don't have the experience. If you were never exposed to the idea and you started talking about it, then I'd be convinced you had the experience, but nobody is actually like that. The fact that the idea exists at all proves to me that at least one human somewhere had conscious experience, and I know there's at least one more (me), but that's it.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#42

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #38
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hurt…

I completely agree with you, I’m just being more reductive when I say it’s a practical categorization rather than essential reality. Certainly it’s also reasonable to say there’s no essential reality, just subjective levels of analysis, so everything is practical categorization. The issue is that we’ve gotten nowhere in explaining why we seem to exist.

A video game is relatively easy, at least seemingly, to reduce down to its underlying principles. The content dissolves the more closely I look at the game. The issue here isn’t whether the game still exists (it does, in the place I’m no longer looking), the issue is in seeing why the game arises from its component parts, and not something else. Easy-ish for the game, it follows directly from what we know about physics and such, but hard for the mind. Why do neurons together produce pain that exists, rather than pain as a purpose-driven internal signal to help organize the escape from a predator? Emergence doesn't tell us why one or the other, just that whatever it is must emerge from constituent parts.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#43

Post by [deleted] »

giorgioz wrote: post #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…

[deleted]

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#45

Post by Symmetry »

wat10000 wrote: post #41
Symmetry wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Trouble is that you can also exhibit the behavior of talking about it just by being exposed to the idea, even if you don't have the experience. If you were never exposed to the idea and you started talking about it, then I'd be convinced you had the experience, but nobody is actually like that. The fact that the idea exists at all proves to me that at least one human somewhere had conscious experience, and I know the…

I was evidently unclear. I mean, if an image of a parakeet is flashed up on a screen for 100ms and you can say "I saw a parakeet" you were conscious of the image. If the image is flashed for 50 ms and you can't you weren't conscious of the image. In this paradigm being conscious is being conscious of particular things.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#46

Post by wat10000 »

Symmetry wrote: post #45
wat10000 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trouble is that you can also exhibit the behavior of talking about it just by being exposed to the idea, even if you don't have the experience. If you were never exposed to the idea and you started talking about it, then I'd be convinced you had the experience, but nobody is actually like that. The fact that the idea exists at all proves to me that at least one human somewhere had conscious experience, and I know the…

I was evidently unclear. I mean, if an image of a parakeet is flashed up on a screen for 100ms and you can say "I saw a parakeet" you were conscious of the image. If the image is flashed for 50 ms and you can't you weren't conscious of the image. In this paradigm being conscious is being conscious of particular things.

That seems like a fairly simple machine could be conscious, which is not usually how the word is used. Typically consciousness means that there is some ill-defined entity that has a subjective experience, what the philosophers call qualia.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#47

Post by Nevermark »

andoando wrote: post #33
xg15 wrote: 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.

A structured program analyzing data as a graph, and optimizing access, is interacting with phenomenon, updating its working knowledge of the phenomenon, and can produce results that are very non-intuitive.

Likewise, any symbolic mathematical system that accumulates theorems that speed up future work as it solves current tasks, seems like a high intelligence type of activity.

Deep learning is “just” structured arithmetic.

I think different kinds of intelligence can look quite different, and they will all be “structured” or “tropic” at their implementation levels.

—

Stepping away from the means, I see at least four “intelligence” dimensions:

1. Span: The span of novel situations for which it can create successful responses.

2. Efficiency: The efficiency of problem solving.

I.e. When vast lookup tables, exhaustive combination searches, and indiscriminate logging of past experience can be matched instead by more efficient Boolean logic, arithmetic, pattern recognition and logging, we consider the latter more intelligent.

3. Abstraction: The degree to which solving previous different novel situations improves the success or efficiency in solving new problems. I.e. generalizable, composable learning.

4. Social education: Ability to communicate and absorb learned information from other entities.

Plants, and I expect all surviving life forms, are very high in intelligence types 1 and 2.

Adaptive nervous systems and especially brains excel at 3.

Many animals, but most profoundly humans (whose languages for communicating are themselves actively adapted for compounding effects), excel at 4.

Today’s humans are effectively more intelligent than 10,000 year ago humans, not because of 1-3, but because of 4. Learning as a child to read/write, do arithmetic, understand zero and negative numbers, and countless other information processing activities and patterns, from others, profoundly impacts our intellectual abilities.

Deep learning, as with the human species, non-trivially spans, and continues to improve, on all 4 types of intelligence.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#48

Post by wat10000 »

ryandvm wrote: post #32
heyjamesknight wrote: post #12

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…

It's a nice idea but there's no evidence for it. Not only is there no evidence, but nobody has any idea what such evidence would even look like. We can't even conceptualize an experiment that would support or refute this theory.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#49

Post by amanaplanacanal »

The interesting thing about mind (as far as I'm concerned) isn't intelligence, but consciousness.

Intelligence isn't well defined. According to our current understanding of physics, everything is cause and effect, which throws free will out the window, so what do we even mean by intelligence? Is it just when chains of cause and effect become so complex we can't understand them any more? And if so, why does consciousness even exist at all?

The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying.

I guess the other option is to divorce consciousness from physical master entirely, but then we have kind of opened ourselves up to almost any kind of woo.

It really is a hard problem.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#50

Post by messe »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #49

The interesting thing about mind (as far as I'm concerned) isn't intelligence, but consciousness. Intelligence isn't well defined. According to our current understanding of physics, everything is cause and effect, which throws free will out the window, so what do we even mean by intelligence? Is it just when chains of cause and effect become so complex we can't understand them any more? And if so, why does consciousn…

> The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying.

Integrated Information Theory seems interesting, at least, but far from flawless. Like panpsychism though, I don't think it's falsifiable.

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