Now, regarding this article. I don't know enough math or physics (he has a PHD from Caltech) to be able to judge it on those terms. I also don't know enough philosophy or neurology to be able to pick apart his definition of consciousness. On the other hand, like most of us, I've thought and read about what consciousness might be, and this article expands my thinking space.
What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
81–90 of 103 posts
Re: What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and a tangible consensus amongst those who are not blind as to whether an object can be called blue or not. >The latter is missing from the problem of consciousness, which makes it a far more difficult and fascinating problem. You are talking about whether some topic can be observed. The example you cite is observation through sight. A blind person cannot observe color. Observation is the key to gathering evidence.…
Whenever I encounter someone trying to tell me that consciousness is ill-defined or not a real thing that actually exists (which happens surprisingly often), I feel like I’m taking crazy pills - or perhaps that philosophical zombies walk among us. Not only am I 100% sure that (my) consciousness exists, it’s literally the only thing I can be 100% sure exists.
Re: What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and a tangible consensus amongst those who are not blind as to whether an object can be called blue or not. >The latter is missing from the problem of consciousness, which makes it a far more difficult and fascinating problem. You are talking about whether some topic can be observed. The example you cite is observation through sight. A blind person cannot observe color. Observation is the key to gathering evidence.…
Whenever I encounter someone trying to tell me that consciousness is ill-defined or not a real thing that actually exists (which happens surprisingly often), I feel like I’m taking crazy pills - or perhaps that philosophical zombies walk among us. Not only am I 100% sure that (my) consciousness exists, it’s literally the only thing I can be 100% sure exists.
> I feel like I’m taking crazy pills - or perhaps that philosophical zombies walk among us.
Basically the above is an insult. Essentially you're calling me and anyone with a differing opinion then you "crazy" or a walking philosophical zombie. Literally you're just trying to get around a technicality by indirectly labeling me. Might as well just say "Reading your post I feel like I'm taking crazy pills."
Feel free to debate my points but nobody feels good when they're labeled as crazy.
Re: What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
#84YOU GO, Stephen :D
Re: What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
#85Careful. "Consciousness" may just be a language issue. It seems like a profound concept but it's really just a word with a very vague and complex definition. If someone tried to formalize "consciousness" it would be a technical book about 1000 pages long or something and all we're doing is debating about what goes in the book. It's very similar to the question what is "life?" I mean we understand that biology is just…
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Re: What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the language part you said. I find worrying that Wolfram is not talking enough about it.
It’s because it’s probably not possible to define within the standard “toolset”. Look at for example the thoughts of the definition of energy by R. Feynman. You might think us physicists for sure can define energy. After all it’s one of the basis of physics. But it turns out it’s not possible without circular arguments
I doubt consciousness is such a thing though. Asking "what is Consciousness?" is like asking "What does it mean to be American?" Being American is purely a made up phenomenon and my argument is that although it is may not seem this way, the word consciousness is largely the same thing, just a complex category.
Re: What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
#87Careful. "Consciousness" may just be a language issue. It seems like a profound concept but it's really just a word with a very vague and complex definition. If someone tried to formalize "consciousness" it would be a technical book about 1000 pages long or something and all we're doing is debating about what goes in the book. It's very similar to the question what is "life?" I mean we understand that biology is just…
That's precisely the problem - we can't yet formalize the concept we understand as "consciousness", and so any attempts to find a physical/mathematical definition are almost doomed to fail, as they can't really guarantee they are defining the actual concept we have in our minds when we say "consciousness".
Does it make sense to attempt to find a mathematical definition of "American." No because being American is largely a made up concept. It's a complex category no doubt but it is not fundamental to the structure of the universe.
I'm saying "Consciousness" is the same thing. It's an ingrained concept we feel is fundamental, but if you think about it, it's really just a made up word.
Re: What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
#88Careful. "Consciousness" may just be a language issue. It seems like a profound concept but it's really just a word with a very vague and complex definition. If someone tried to formalize "consciousness" it would be a technical book about 1000 pages long or something and all we're doing is debating about what goes in the book. It's very similar to the question what is "life?" I mean we understand that biology is just…
> debating what "life" is as a general concept outside of biology is not a profound issue I'm not sure this is true. I think I disagree with much of your neat frame-setting here. For example, some of my favourite recent podcasts from complexity science involve clever folks like Sara Imari Walker discussing "life" as what emerges from a dense information well.[1] These questions are not just simple inventories. But ye…
This is still a language thing. Nothing new is uncovered here. All Walker did is imbue complexity onto a vocabulary word. No new information was introduced. The profoundness is an illusion.
Re: What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
#89No explanation of consciousness cuts it if it does not address how first person perspective comes about. No computation results in first person perspective.
How much are you willing to bet that consciousness is not a computation? What else could it be? If we don't live in a world organized by physics and causality, then it would extremely unlikely life could even emerge altogether. The fact that the world is ultimately predictable makes it more likely we emerge, not less.
Do you define computation so broadly as to be "anything matter and energy does"?
You can look at avatars (human faces on website chat bots) that try to add natural human-like movements, and their eyes move around in different directions governed by a random number generator; the result is that they don't look at all human, human eyes do move around a lot but not at random. Humans look at specific things in the environment, and that comes from having an awareness of the environment - people look at faces, windows, shadows, moving things, clocks, art, and not empty space, walls, nowhere, nothing. Even looking away "at nothing" and thinking has a distinctive look to it.
All of this is based on the idea that a human exists in a specific location, and the looking around is about getting information of what might be dangerous/advantageous to the human. I don't really see that you can abstract such a thing away from the meat body and do the same computation in an orbital computer with no inputs and outputs whatsoever, or on pencils and paper spread over thousands of square miles and thousands of years, and say it's the same thing. It's a bit like saying that a human can draw a stick figure or a horse, but a computer can use no ink and that counts as a drawing of everything, a universal drawing, without limits, gasp! Human style consciousness is part of our limits - our limited excent in time, space, amount of energy we can expend, mortality and risks of harm. Take all that away, you don't get a universal consciousness, you get a blank slate. Abstract of any matter and energy and specific situations, what is there to computer? And in a specific situation, a tired human sits like hot wood burns, it just happens. When you sit, is it computational sitting? When you open the irrigation valves on your field and the water flows down the grooves instead of over the surface, is that computation? When you trigger a stored memory release and the neuronal signals flow down the worn grooves of learned patterns, is that somehow different? If so, why, just because they're smaller or there's more of them? You can't grow plants with simulated water, why assume you can think simulated signal flow patterns?
> "What else could it be?"
A Buddhist monk walks up to a hot dog vendor and says "Make me one with everything". All our words and descriptions of things as discrete, seperate, entities with clear edges, are wrong (but useful). There is only one whole universe, no parts to it. You are what you eat, there's no place in your intestines where molecules change from being food and start being your body, it's a continuum. A sound is a pressure wave in the air, but you can't separate "the sound" from the moving speaker, the moving electric currents in the amplifier, the moving air molecules, the moving eardum, the moving ear canal innards, the moving electric currents in the brain, it's all one continuous system. It's not the case that "sound" is what the air does and those other bits are irrelevant, it's just convenient to talk and build things that way. There isn't really any sound at all, Vitamin D doesn't come from sunlight, the energy in sunlight affects vitamin D precursors in your skin. There is no separation between the light energy affecting your retinas and the consequent electric patterns in your visual cortex anymore than the sound is a separate thing.
In this model (wrong, but useful), there is no separate consciousness and no creatures which can be conscious. If there is any consciousness, it's the whole universe which has it in the sense "we are the universe experiencing itself", and your head is one (X,Y,Z,t) coordinate and the computer is another coordinate, and they are different by virtue of being different parts of the universe. Whether you can imbue the computer with the consciousness of a person stops being such an important question - you can clearly organise bits of the universe into responding like consciousness because you can have children and they wind new matter up into thinking, but that only says that "matter thinks", it doesn't say "matter /does/ thinking as a thing which can be separated from that matter". What else could it be? It could be nothing; some bits of matter exhibit complex behaviours and there's no more to it than that. Cameras aren't "seeing", why think eyes are "seeing"? Instead of discussing whether we can make cameras that see, why not discuss whether retinas interacting with photons are doing any more than cameras are, and seeing is an big fuzzy concept blob memory pattern and not a physical phenomenon that exists separate from matter?
You can talk about being "right handed", what does it mean to make a computation done in a computer with no hands "left handed" or "right handed"? It makes no sense to take that idea away from a creature with two hands in an environment where they use the hands to do things and have to deal with the limitations of having only two hands and no tentacles/tractor beams/prehensile tails/elephant noses/etc. Does it make any more sense to take "thinking" away from brains?
Re: What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
#90Because high levels of intelligence and auto-drive can fully operate complexly enough to seem "conscious".
I would start a research stating exactly what would constitute a "conscious human", maybe we could find not every human on the planet is actually conscious.
Maybe most people are just looping into some psychological / environmental / sociological context, just like scripts running happily in loop, but not stepping outside its own code, at least not intentionally.
The hypoteshis of humans being complex algorithms, beside the tabu chit-chat, implies the possibility of hacking minds just we can hack programs, looking for their bugs, triggering exploits to fully manage humans into a different setup, in order to make them work towards a different goal from what they were originally intended (having being pre-programmed by the society and/or parents).