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Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

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Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#91

Post by StuntPope »

This is very simple: consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. It's a universal force. We don't emit consciousness, we tap into it and experience it as individuations.

This why AI will never happen in the generalized sense. Because as long as we keep thinking we can engineer a mind out of matter, we'll keep chasing our tails.

Matter is a by-product of the universal mind. And we all experience our lives as singular nodes of that mind.

This has been known for millennia and is the basis for the world religions (which are mostly dumbed down co-optings of this).

Also, Bitcoin fixes this.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#92

Post by systemsignal »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #56
systemsignal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But life probably wouldn’t exist if entropy wasn’t increasing Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe

> Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe Life causes entropy, but do you literally mean it exists because it increases entropy? I don’t see the connection, only that life causes entropy. Can you explain?

Not a great answer but basically everything that occurs in this Universe must increase the overall entropy of the universe (second law)

Of course local entropy can decrease, hopefully in a way that is beneficial to our little corner of the universe :)

Would recommend Schrodingers “what is life” if interested further in life/entropy

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#93

Post by Strs2FillMyDrms »

When I was younger, I use to believe (maybe I still do) that all lifeform's purpose was to accelerate universe death, by transfer from matter to heat in the form of radiation, like we are just an extension of the universe's agency/"desire" towards that, and everything we do is aimed to that, but never actually thought about consciousness.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#95

Post by r3trohack3r »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #89
r3trohack3r wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure it’s fuzzy. Hard to describe with words, sure, but not fuzzy. I have a high degree of certainty when someone else is talking about their own consciousness and when they’re not. For example, when an optometrist or neurologist talks about “sight” they’re talking about the biochemical mechanisms that allow us to see. When I read Plato say “I see therefor I am” it was clear to me he was describing the metaph…

> Consciousness belongs to the mystics today, by default, because science can not claim it. Science doesn't yet have an answer, but that doesn't grant the mystics any credibility. There is no 'by default' when we don't know. I'm reminded of a Dawkins quote: Lecturer: Scientists answer questions of 'how'. If your question is 'why', I refer you to the theologians. Dawkins: Why the theologians? Why not the gardeners? (T…

I think you misunderstood me. In the vacuum of science providing an answer, someone will.

> Dawkins: Why the theologians? Why not the gardeners?

I’ve never heard this. My initial reaction is that “god” exists in the unknown. Asking “why go to the mystics for mystical stuff” is a tautology. If you go to the gardener with a question unanswered by science, and they have an answer, they’re a mystic (or have made a scientific breakthrough).

> You can't hold a center-of-gravity, but we're able to reason about those pretty clearly.

Consciousness is not understood. Full stop. We don’t know what manifests it. We don’t know where it comes from. We don’t know where it goes.

We’ve scratched the surface of the biological mechanisms that give rise to the phenomenon we experience. If you look at me and see a biological computer, I think your statement holds. But when I look at me, in a mirror, I see a biological vessel I occupy; and I don’t know what “I” is.

Trying to oversell our understanding of the universe and our place in it does a disservice to science and the work left to be done.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#96

Post by neonological »

sayonaraman wrote: post #7

I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of neurons communicate and synchroni…

Consciousness doesn't really exist universally as a concept. It's purely a human thing.

For example music. Music is just a series of sounds patterned in a specific way. Not any pattern of sound can be music but a pattern of sound following a very specific set of thousands of human centric rules that are too complex to formalize represents music. A formalization certainly exists but writing it down or deducing these rules would result in something that's 10000 pages long. These rules are completely arbitrary and a product of biological evolution. Music in a sense is just a made up category of immense complexity but the key point remains the same. The category is made up and completely arbitrary.

The same can be said of consciousness. It's just a certain type of intelligence that posseses thousands of attributes that are too numerous in number to fully write down. Like music, the rules defining consciousness are arbitrary. It doesn't represent anything fundamental about the universe it's just a word very specific to the human experience.

This trying to understand intelligence through the "lens" of consciousness is a biased and erroneous venture. It's more an exploration of human biology then it is an investigation of a foundational universal theory of logic and intelligence.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#97

Post by cratermoon »

This kind of aligns with the ideas presented in the 1980 book Life beyond Earth : the intelligent Earthling's guide to life in the universe. A major part of the thesis the authors (Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro) present is that "life" can be identified not only by the biological processes we are familiar with on earth, but by its ability to accumulate energy for organized processes.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#98

Post by simorley »

simonh wrote: post #66
sayonaraman wrote: post #7

I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of neurons communicate and synchroni…

Science is about finding the answers to questions, and philosophy is about working out what the right questions are, which can be surprisingly tricky. The two progress hand in hand. Philosophy isn't just 'bad science'.

No. Science is about empiricism - scientific method, experiments, etc. Philosophy is an overarching field encompassing all pursuit/love of knowledge. It's why another term for science is natural philosophy. It's why people who attain the highest level of education get a doctorate of philosophy ( PhD ).

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#99

Post by visarga »

simonh wrote: post #65
mensetmanusman wrote: post #2

“ Well, it must minimize the uncertainty of the states that it’s in. I have to actively resist the second law of thermodynamics, so I don’t dissipate into all kinds of states. “ People often make this rhetorical mistake when speaking about the second law. Entropy is increasing full steam ahead, and what looks like a small bit of order is revealed to be hiding ‘the man behind the curtain’ i.e. a massive increase in en…

This is the big problem with the idea that consciousness is just complexity, and that sufficiently complex systems might become conscious. Stars, storms, gas giant planets, nebulae, etc. The problem is these things are complex yes, but except at a very macroscopic level they have no mechanism to maintain a consistent state, or to control and reliably change that state. They're just heaving masses of particles. Comput…

So self reproduction is not enough, and complexity is not enough. But when you put them together... you get evolution and humans.

Re: Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

#100

Post by visarga »

StuntPope wrote: post #91

This is very simple: consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. It's a universal force. We don't emit consciousness, we tap into it and experience it as individuations. This why AI will never happen in the generalized sense. Because as long as we keep thinking we can engineer a mind out of matter, we'll keep chasing our tails. Matter is a by-product of the universal mind. And we all experience our lives as s…

You just rediscovered dualism, consciousness is the new spirit, immaterial and beyond scientific investigation. Dualism is a dead end, it took a lot of time for people to understand that.

Why not come to the concrete level and realise that without consciousness you would not get something to eat and quickly die. So it has to do with life. We're complex self-replicators in an environment with scarce resources. We rely on consciousness to continue to exist. It feels like something to be you because you got a lot to win or lose, you're in a game of life and need to choose your actions.

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