KipIngram

I've been perusing this paper the last couple of days: http://inspirehep.net/record/871519/files/arXiv%3A0809.2904.pdf The author seems to be taking issue with the whole notion of regarding the quanta of quantum fields as "particles." It's all a bit over my head, though, so I thought I'd see if that take on the paper is essentially correct. I'm also interested in comments on the paper in general. Does it seem to hold together, be pointing in a reasonable direction, and so on. I think he's saying that "particle like behavior" is a consequence of system wave functions becoming entangled with the environment's wave function (decoherence). And that because of that it really doesn't make sense to talk about the "particles" as though they're "there" before that decoherence occurs. But I could be way off in the weeds. Thanks!

Oh, sure - I agree. I was just describing my own difficulties embracing the theory. When I relate that bit to others I leave it to them to decide if their own credulity can handle it. But are you in fact saying that we could find the plot of any physically realistic work of fiction somewhere in the multiverse, being lived out by real people? That my "objection" is in fact describing a technically correct facet of MWI, but just isn't an objection? I thought maybe I was overlooking something and that a correct assessment wouldn't lead there. Oh, that part about energy and probability is interesting - that seems to imply that each residual universe has less energy than the original. After all the time that has passed that would seem to imply that the universe has infinitesimal energy. But then again you just mentioned the "zero energy" hypothesis... so those two sort of go together. Thanks for those - at first I missed the earlier parts of your answer because the quote block had them off the top of my screen. Interesting stuff. Update, shortly later: Ok, Strange - I'm chasing down zero energy hypothesis links and it looks like this is what I'm reading for the next day or two; I'm rather hooked already. I'd never run into this one before.

Wow - this brings up some interesting situations. Let me throw out a couple of scenarios (moderators please let me know if either or both of these should be in a new thread). 1) What if A and B are in separate space vehicles, in orbit (so they're both strictly inertial), but moving in different directions (opposite, or orthogonal), but still pass by each other twice per orbit. Assume they can photograph each other's clock as mentioned above. Either seems free to claim the role of "stationary." Now, it seems clear to me that no actual time dilation will occur - they're both in entirely parallel situations, so I assume their clocks will agree every time they meet. But both of them would expect the other's clock to be running slower. 2) I'm really getting into deep waters for me, but I did some reading about space time topology recently, and it seemed like they were saying that the universe could be closed like the surface of a sphere. So if you kept going long enough you'd "go around" the universe. So if that's true, we could use it in the two-twin situation. A and B match clocks, and A takes off and circuits the universe. I guess when she gets home she'll be younger? That avoids the need for a turn-around. There's also the more precisely parallel version of that where they both take off in opposite directions. Really looking forward to replies on these - fascinating!

Dcallagh, all of our intuitions about things like this are based on our life experiences on Earth, where the relative velocities involved are never significant compared to the speed of light. The rules don't "change" when velocity is significant compared to c - it's just that when v is negligible the rules can be simplified, and it's those simplified rules that we've built our intuitions around. When you "visit a new environment" for the first time you have to build new intuitions; we do that all the time and this is no different. When Einstein formulated special relativity, he dealt with experimental observations that showed c to be a constant no matter what by building that into his theory at ground zero - he assumed it from the outset. He then worked through the math to discover what that assumption implied for all of the usual kinematic relationships that we deal with every day, and time dilation was one of the results (along with Lorentz contraction). You can spin up a similar "paradox" using distance. If I'm standing here holding a yardstick, and you travel by in the direction the yardstick is pointing at half the speed of light, and you are also holding a yardstick parallel to mine, I will see that your yardstick is shorter, and you will see that my yardstick is shorter. So that seems confusing too. But all of these things have to do with the fact that simultaneous events for me are not simultaneous for you. What turns out to be the same for everyone, regardless of relative velocities, is length^2 - c*(time interval)^2.

Power is voltage times current. So you can write the power flow into a capacitor as (capacitor voltage) * (current into capacitor). An infinite permittivity capacitor would have zero voltage, so the power flow into it would always be zero. So you would never get any energy stored. Another way of seeing this is to write capacitor energy in terms of charge: E = Q^2/2*C. For any non-infinite charge your energy is zero. This hypothetical capacitor would behave exactly like a short circuit. But I agree with the above assertions that it's not physically possible anyway.

I don't see how the potential energy could undergo a step change, so that really just says we're taking infinity as the reference point for potential energy, right? So everywhere closer to the planet potential energy would be negative? If that's the case then we really just say that escape velocity is that velocity which gives the object a total energy (kinetic plus potential) of zero (keeping swansont's point about transverse velocity in mind). Also, regarding "no longer attracted to the earth," that's imprecise. No matter how far away the object is it's always attracted to the earth with a non-zero force. But escape velocity means that it will also always have a non-zero velocity, and that velocity will always be enough to keep the object from reversing directions. No matter how far away it gets, if you stopped its motion and then watched it would (very slowly at first) fall back to the earth.

Afternoon, folks. So, I've never been a fan of the Many Worlds Interpretation, and I've used several arguments against it over the years. But I'm not a "master physicist" by any means, and also I just haven't put the time specifically into that theory. So I do have some concern about whether I'm being fair or not. I'd like to list a couple of the arguments I've put forth in the past and let people here comment. ----- I have a feeling the first one is simple, and I don't even know if it's a "real" problem (probably not, or MWI would never have appeared in the first place). Every time the universe splits, we get a new copy of the universe. That's a lot of mass energy. Where does that come from and what does this have to say about conservation of energy? It seems very... uneconomical. ----- This one I have used more. My understanding of MWI says that as a result of all of these branching superpositions, anything that doesn't violate the laws of physics (anything that has a non-zero probability all the way back through all of its branches), exists or has existed in some one of the universes. And this has been going on since the beginning of time, so we've had a lot of time to build up universes. So, for example, we'd have a universe that includes a port town that we'll call "S." In this port town their are two prominent families, the H's (who are connected strongly with the town hospital) and the B's, who are prominent in the police force and the patriarch of which owns a pub. A major criminal figure (D) lives in this town. And so on. For those of you who didn't click to it, I've just described the general plot of The Days of Our Lives (S=Salem, H=Horton, B=Brady, D=DiMera). But substitute your favorite - Many Worlds seems to imply they're all "out there" provided no laws of physics are broken. That strains my credulity past the breaking point. ----- So those are my two items - please have at it. Thanks, Kip

Well, on the assumption that quantum actions are random. Experimental ensembles that we set up in labs do look like they are, but I don't know that that implies all individual quantum actions are under all circumstances). You and I have differing notions of free will. What you call "free will" I call "freedom" (being free of coercion by others). What I call free will is actually originating a course of action, with no prior cause, as a completely uninfluenced choice. Now, forgive me if I've misunderstood you, but what I read in your words is a model of free will that in fact is still deterministic. As in, people make the choices they make because they's where the laws of physics lead, based on past history. If that is so, then you invalidate all moral judgment - it still makes sense to "restrain dangerous humans" from doing harm, but it makes no sense to judge them as "evil" or malicious. They had no choice. It equally makes no sense to laud people for their good behavior - they didn't really have a choice. It also thoroughly undermines the whole notion of trying to "better oneself." You're going to be what you're going to be, and that's just that. It sounds an awful lot like the fate argument to me. Am I taking your meaning correctly?

Oh, I don't think that's true. I exchanged emails with him very recently, and he seemed fully enthusiastic. Several papers in the pipeline, and a book due out later this year. He certainly gave the impression of still being engaged with the agenda. Hey, I was reading around online about free will this afternoon, and a thought experiment occurred to me. I'd be very interested in your opinions on it. Let me see if I can do a decent job laying it out here. The idea has only been cooking for a few minutes, so please bear with me. ------- In response to claims that free will is manifested through quantum uncertainty, many opponents of the idea note that while quantum uncertainty does represent a theoretical absence of complete determinism in the universe, it is not the case that quantum events are in any way critical to the salient operation of our brain. In that sense, they say, our personal actions are, in fact, completely determined by the laws of physics. So, I propose an experiment. We arrange a quantum experiment. It could be anything, but ideally is something with two equally probable outcomes. It's agreed in advance that if the outcome of the experiment is "positive," I will sit down in a red chair that's in the room. On the other hand, if the outcome is "negative," I will sit down in a blue chair, also in the room. Now we run the experiment, and I sit down in either the red or blue chair, as prescribed. End of experiment. ------- Now, I don't think I'll go so far as to claim that the quantum event determined my action directly - clearly we used an instrument to render the quantum event in some macroscopic way, and that determined my action. I think the point of interest here is that we fully accept that the quantum result absolutely could have been either positive or negative - both were entirely real possibilities and it was mere chance that produced a specific outcome. And therefore "me sitting in the red chair" and "me sitting in the blue chair" were also two entirely possible courses of action: neither was ruled out in advance by determinism. This makes the question of whether there is any such "quantum amplifier" mechanism in our brains pretty important. As far as I know we have neither clearly identified such a mechanism nor decisively ruled out the existence of one. So that's a pretty big open question, and extremely important in terms of the possibility I've been entertaining in this discussion. If consciousness does exist as a fundamental thing, then quantum uncertainty is the ONLY mechanism I see for it to produce any effect in the physical world. And an "amplifier" within our brains would be a firm requirement: no amplifier, no free will. So, comments? I guess Many Worlds (which I've never been able to find palatable) would say I did both (red char and blue chair). But I guess it would also say that I walked out of the room without sitting down, tripped and fell and knocked myself out before getting to either chair, and so on and so on and so on, right?

No, no freaking out here. I just look at transistors and see gadgets that are fully specified by Maxwell's equations and aspects of semiconductor physics - there is no room there for new developments to arise that makes us realize transistors are aware. And I made my points about patterns earlier. I think we'll continue to make strides in how to build such patterns that are capable of more and more sophisticated behavior (like better recognition of patterns in images and other sorts of data, and so on). Proper interconnection patterns have proven extremely useful in computing, and I think further progress will be made there. But as I noted earlier, within the computer the bits of those patterns are just voltages, and voltages aren't aware either. I think the scientific method is an amazing and powerful technique. We've done great things with it and will continue to. But I don't think it's ever appropriate to take on such certainty that we have all the answers in our hands. Just before the "difficulties" that led to quantum theory arose, physicists felt certain that classical physics would explain everything. The whole clockwork universe and all. That turned out to be wrong - extremely wrong. Until we actually have a theory of some effect that has stood up to a reasonably thorough battery of testing there's no way to make any confident conclusion about how that effect works. Basically, your denying the existence of something you can't observe the non-existence of. Not just noting that its existence is unproven, but ruling the possibility out altogether. I don't find that rational at all. We don't know what we don't know. Look, if someone has a breakthrough next year and publishes a thorough and convincing explanation of how awareness and "experiences" (pain, love, hate, joy, etc.) pop nicely out of mainstream physical theory, that will be great. You'll get no further argument from me. But that explanation is entirely missing currently, and to me that means that any explanation that doesn't conflict with our body of experimental data is a valid candidate. Hoffman is a step ahead - he's actually put a theory on the table with math behind it. The process of expanding that (or trying to) to match up with experimental results is just getting started, but at least it's proposed an underway. The emergence guys haven't come up with anything similarly "ready for prime time" yet.

I'm totally open to all of the things the three of you just said - I just look and see no shred of progress toward an explanation. We may as well be saying that a non-magnetic material really is magnetic - we just haven't been able to show it yet. I'm just waiting for someone to show me the science. Even the AI industry has turned away from this; a few decades ago that industry was all about the notion of sentient computers, but these days they're much more focused on sophisticated algorithms that use probability to distill something useful from huge amounts of real-world data. I absolutely get it, Eise, that every statement of this sort about transistors has a parallel statement about nerve cells - that's pretty much the whole point. There is no hint whatsoever of really workable theory re: how a computer structure can cause awareness to emerge, and there's no such theory re: how neural structure can either. I would say that applies to any system that operates purely in terms of structures of deterministic mechanisms. It seems to me that the word "emergence" is tossed around in this arena in a way that makes it more or less synonymous with "magic." Meanwhile, Hoffman's notion violates no currently extant physical theory, and he seems to have chosen the right path to follow for me to consider it a "serious" theory (specifically, the agenda is to show that the mathematical structures involved can lead to predictions that match experimental observations across the board). That makes the theory a contender. It may fall flat on its face before it's all said and done, but I'm willing to watch while the attempt is made. If that agenda succeeds, we'll have a theory that is simpler in its fundamental premises than the traditional paradigm. And that's what we're supposed to be all about, right? Simplest theory that fits the facts wins? Just as a side observation, the reluctance everyone seems to have about the idea that consciousness could simply be a fundamental feature of reality seems quite similar to Einstein's stubborn resistance to quantum theory. Yes - a rigorous program is required; New Age magic evangelizing doesn't cut it. But Hoffman seems to be attempting that sort of rigor. Why does this notion disturb people so much? Compare it to, say, the idea that spacetime is a quantum foam. Everyone seems quite content with that one to say "Well, maybe and maybe not - let's work it out and see if it gives us a simpler, more concise picture of reality." But when the word "consciousness" enters the discussion, everyone seems to literally freak out and mount the most fanatic opposition they possibly can. What's the difference?

Yes, excellent point. That's my main reason for thinking that there's something completely fundamental that we just don't have factored into our mainstream theories. And I also don't see how a "pattern" can feel aware, either. I don't really care how arranging the transistors (or nerve cells, viewed as mechanisms only) into some special pattern can suddenly make awareness "arise." You could write that pattern down as pencil marks in a book - the book wouldn't then be aware. Adding a person tasked with using some set of rules to erase marks and re-write them in a modified way wouldn't result in awareness either. That's exactly what a CPU does in a computer - it erases and rewrites storage per a set of rules. Each transistor is still a transistor, and each "mark" is just a voltage. No matter how complex the overall arrangement is - there's just nothing there that can explain this. Our theories are missing a piece.

I disagree completely. Absolutely completely. The point is that we feel it at all. A transistor can't feel that. Our laws of physics provide no mechanism whatsoever to explain how we do feel it. You're really stretching hard to deny something that is self-evidently obvious to every human being on the planet: "I am." That said, I think the earlier discussion on how overcoming the need for sleep would be an evolutionary advantage - no periods of unaware vulnerability - was good. It raises the question of whether sleep is REALLY a biological need at all. It could be an underlying need of consciousness itself, which would then be reflected in some fashion in our perceptions. I'm completely convinced my pets are aware of themselves in the same way I'm talking about - just with less powerful reasoning abilities. No one "told" them they were aware - they can't communicate in that fashion. Awareness is innate.

I'm not sure of that - I think the bulk of that effect has to do with perception, which definitely does run through brain circuitry. I don't have any real experience with drugs (certainly nothing in the "mind altering" category like LSD or mescaline), but nothing I've ever had fundamentally altered my sense of self-awareness. But like I said - never had the stuff that's most thoroughly in that category. I had hydrocodone for pain once when I had a tooth extracted - I was a very relaxed "me," but still me.

Hi Rasher. I haven't been able to do that (imagine I'm a machine), because I can't get at how that covers all the things I feel. It's easy enough to imagine that for a lot of things - I'm an engineer and automated control systems, feedback, image processing, etc. etc. is easy for me to grok. It's just that one little bit - my "awareness" - that I see no way to "machinify." So maybe I have tried to wrap my head around that approach and found it lacking in that one way; hence my digging into the area. Someone in another thread mentioned that I should consider the insights of the GEB book with respect to this - the idea that it's possible for something to be "true" regarding a logical system without it being "provably true." That did make me think - I had previously felt that unless science could prove consciousness arises from from complexity in some very strong way, then "science had failed." But the GEB connection casts a different light on that. I'm not sure exactly what I think of that yet - I have to ponder on it. But it was an interesting observation for sure. I have not read that particular book, but I will certainly put it on my reading list. Thanks very much, and nice to meet you! Kip

Here is the most concise expression of Hoffman's theory that seems to delve into the mathematics in some detail: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577/full StringJunky: I think it's important to note that Hoffman doesn't deny the physical processes you're referring to. Rather, he interprets them as perceptions of corresponding interactions between conscious agents, rather than being reality themselves. Every one of these things you've mentioned he would accept as an item on the list of things that his theory has to show as able to arise from such an interaction of agents. We've perceived these things - therefore they must be producible by his theory. If it could be shown that even one of them could not be generated in such a way, he would declare that a failure of the theory as far as I can tell. So this way of looking at things in no way involves "ignoring experimental evidence." His theory is in its infancy, so all of that work isn't done yet. But the link above gives a feel for the mathematical rigor he hopes to achieve in laying out those results. Taking the observed perceptions as fundamentally real leaves us with the need to then explain how our awareness / consciousness arises from that underlying reality. This is where there seems to be no real progress. So I view these two approaches as follows: Conventional Reality is essentially physical / material. This is a presumption of the theory, and carries with it certain properties of entities taken as "givens" (e.g., charge). The nature / cause of these "givens" doesn't have to be explained by the theory. Physical law describes the cause-and-effect interactions amongst these fundamentally real physical/material entities. We have done a fantastic job over the last few centuries of discovering and codifying these laws. Conscious awareness must be explained using similar laws, and be shown to arises from similar cause-and-effect laws. We have made essentially no progress on this front, in spite of decades of effort. Hoffman Reality is essentially comprised of fundamental units that we call one-bit conscious agents. Agents receive perceptions of the world; based on those perceptions they take probabilistic actions that affect the world. This ability to perceive, decide, and act is taken as a "given". The "how" of this process doesn't have to be explained by the theory. One-bit agents can combine to form more complex, structured conscious agents. These structures can result in any sort of "processing" within the perceive/decide/act paradigm that can be expressed in the mathematical structures used to represent a collection of one-bit agents - this can give rise to more sophisticated perceptions and more intelligent actions. All entities that we perceive in reality (particles, fields, rocks, plants, bacteria, humans, etc.) arise from the action of such complex agents. Little progress has been been made in defining the agent structures that would give us our experimental perceptions, but the theory is very new. Conscious awareness no longer requires an explanation - it is a given characteristic of conscious agents, the fundamental units of reality. In my opinion these two proposals have a very similar structure. Givens are assumed, and all observables must then be explained. I see one paradigm that has been with us for decades / centuries, and yet has failed to provide a thoroughly convincing explanation for some things we observe (conscious awareness). I see a second paradigm that delivers that item automatically, as a given. So far it has not expressly provided an explanation for all of our other observables, but it's brand new and I see a lot of potential for it to do so. So - very old theory that has "tried and failed" (so far), vs. very new theory that seems to show great potential but has work to be done. I can't help leaning toward the latter. Now, the risk here is that we'll find ourselves in a situation similar to Ptolemy's ideas about celestial dynamics. He just kept adding circles - with enough circles you eventually can mimic more or less any perceived motion. Get more accurate measurements - no problem, add some circles. I have a sense that Hoffman's Markovian kernels provide enough flexibility to wind up modeling anything - a big consideration will be how kludgy we have to make the agents to get the right experimental results. It may turn out to be very natural and simple - we may see how application of something like universal Darwinism will lead in a very satisfying way to exactly what we observe in the world. If so, great - I'll really be a fan then. On the other hand, we may find we have to very carefully construct an arbitrary-seeming, highly complex structure of agents, with no good reason to see why that particular structure should have appeared in the world. If that's the outcome, I'll be disappointed and doubtful. You just get an "Ahhhh!!!" sense from the ideas of Kepler and Copernicus that you definitely do not get from Ptolemy's work. We need that same sort of "Ahhhh!" from this theory in order for it to be compelling.

This article resonates with me, re: my impression of emergence so far: http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/

I just feel it can be "felt," the same as self-awareness. I don't consider it quite as strongly defensible as self-awareness, but in the same category nonetheless. The alternative to free will is determinism, and the notion that the whole of history has been determined by some set of initial condition a wholly unacceptable stretch. To make that kind of argument you have to bring in the law of large numbers somehow. Like if you open a valve on an air tank in a totally evacuated room, I'm prepared to predict that after a long time has passed the air will be in a completely uniform distribution around the room. The reason for that, of course, is that so *many* of the possible distributions of gas molecules describe a completely uniform distribution; you really got a random distribution chosen from the set of all possible distributions, but you can show that random selection gives you a uniform distribution with overwhelming odds (as opposed to the air just being in half the room, or any other sort of non-uniformity). So determinism (with no free will) assumes that everything we do is somehow "pre-programmed" in the dynamics of the universe. Now we can do thought experiments around this. You and I can make an agreement, for instance, that I will look at some stock market index tomorrow afternoon, and if it's above a certain number I will have chicken for dinner, and if it's below that number I'll have steak. Obviously, determinism requires that I'm either going to have a particular one. We can repeat that experiment as many times as we desire, on consecutive days, with any set of option controls we wish. Determinism says that all of that - including our planning, was already pre-programmed to happen. If you really start thinking about that sort of thing you'll see that every extra repetition you add to that implies a more and more remarkable amount of pre-programming. It just doesn't hold together. Yes - anything that happens you can label as "just what was going to happen anyway" after the fact. So again we face something unfalsifiable. Granted the universe isn't actually deterministic. We do have that quantum randomness, whatever you decide to make of it. Maybe it is just random. But if it's just random, then you're in the same pickle - everything "in the large" is pre-programmed. And if there is no free will, then there is TRULY no point in self-awareness, so that argument from earlier that evolution had no reason to favor organisms with awareness. But free will more or less demands awareness; if you have free will you have to have an agent to exercise it. The idea that consciousness is fundamental, has awareness, and exercises free will via the pallet of available quantum outcomes somewhere within the organism just checks all the boxes. It explains why I feel self-awareness, why I feel like I have free will, and how this is compatible with our experimental outcomes (i.e., we see a place in our physics where determinism isn't total). It certainly feels more intellectually economical than presuming that everything from Mozart's music to street crime was painted in the initial conditions of the universe. I don't really know about trees - like I said earlier, there's some work going on in the area of plant consciousness. I don't have an opinion on that and consider it far, far from proven. And I don't know that I think free will causes consciousness - more that it is an aspect of consciousness. Hoffman's idea is that the fundamental unit of reality is the one-bit conscious agent. In that theory, all life forms (and all non-life forms, for that matter) are more or less complex organizations of those one-bit agents. That provides a very natural explanation for your plants leaning toward the light, bacteria traveling up a nutrient gradient to "happier feeding grounds," and so on. All of those things would be conscious acts - based on a conscious agent's ability to access information about the world through perceptions and exercise some amount of free will by controlling quantum outcomes within it's realm of influence (its "body"). Plants, and even more obviously bacteria, would be much less complex structured agents than a human being, and so have much less ability to display "intelligence." But it's the same phenomenon top to bottom. One explanation for all of these things. I don't feel quite prepared to try to lay it out, but I assume in Hoffman's view even inorganic things like rocks and so on are amalgams of conscious agents. But they'd be far more simplistic in their structure, and the pallet of actions available to them much more limited. So their behavior (rigidity, for example) is similarly limited. I don't know. We seem perfectly ready to accept things like charge as just "built in givens" of reality - why not consciousness? Especially if these guys prove able to show a very reasonable structure that lets all of our experimental predictions fit into the scheme, along with deftly explaining the behavior of living things as well? It doesn't feel that unreasonable to me. Some people might feel consciousness seems more "mystical" than charge, but honestly, since I can readily feel and believe in my own consciousness, it's got to exist somehow. Before I even found out about Hoffman and his theories I'd been doing a lot of reading in quantum information theory, and I was already on this track of thinking that information may be at the bottom of everything. I didn't have any clear-cut way of saying it, but it looks like Hoffman is trying to suss that out, and is doing so with math and rigor. I haven't seen him go into the math in any of his videos, but I highly recommend you chase down some of his papers and give them a read. The most rigorous one I've seen so far may not be published yet - I had a chance to pre-read some of them. But they ought to be out soon.

Ok, I'm reading that link on emergence. I have to say it leaves me uncomfortable - the notion that you can't necessarily predict the property of the whole from the property of the parts: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts.(Anderson 1972) I think my feeling is very aptly captured by the first part of the next quote: "Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic." Exactly. That's starting to sound like "we don't really have to explain unexplainable things - we'll just call them emergent and leave it at that." Of course, I'm not sure how different that is from Hoffman taking consciousness as a given. That's sort of like saying "we don't have to explain unexplainable things - we'll just call them fundamental and leave it at that." So I'm once again left imagining that we'll wind up with two camps, arguing over what they want to call fundamental. I suppose we'd be told at that point to use Occam's Razor and go with the one that has the fewest "givens." Ten oz, I agree re: AI. I studied AI lightly back in the early 1980s. At the time the idea that we'd eventually have "thinking machines" was popular and was a focus of the field. Then a few years ago I took an online Stanford course on AI, taught by the Google self-driving car guy. Very, very different focus - I found myself thinking that a better name for the course would have been "Advanced Probabilistic Algorithms." Don't get me wrong - it was a great course and I think I learned some neat things. But it was in no way about making machines think. It was about making machines effectively deal with very large amounts of somewhat fuzzy data. I think the change of focus is very appropriate - I think they went from something that was never going to happen to something they actually achieve. In other words, from something that wasn't going to benefit the world to something that will. The Wikipedia article on emergence mentioned that we can't study the properties of hydrogen and oxygen and predict the properties of water. But I'd think, that with enough analytical power, we could predict the chemical reaction that would occur between hydrogen and oxygen, and then study the resulting molecular structure and predict the properties of water using that. In showing the emergence of consciousness from matter, we need the equivalent of the chemical reaction, and the equivalent of the water molecule. I don't think anyone has even begun to put forward a really plausible proposal on that front. I think we may be coming up against a limitation of science here. Science studies cause and effect, when you get right down to it, and tries to give rules for what effect will arise from a particular cause. But consciousness involves free will - by definition something, somewhere in the chain, has to happen with no perceptible cause. There's only one place to look in science for an un-caused effect, and that's quantum theory. We see a particular outcome, and we shrug and say it was random. Yes, when we create ensembles of identical quantum systems we then observe a statistical pattern in the results. But each individual one of those is entirely unpredictable. Science has nothing to say about its "cause." I'm quite convinced that free will is real, so I've decided that consciousness must be hidden inside quantum uncertainty. I can't see any other way for it to work. I know people say free will is also an illusion, but I think that's quite a stretch - they must really, really want to believe that they have no free will. I presume they feel as in control of their actions as I do my own. And it's funny, because many people that make that claim then do not live by it. If we don't have free will then we can't laud or condemn others for their actions. Murderers? Rapists? Racists? Without free will, they did not have a choice. So sure, we can still take action to remove criminals from society, but we should do so with a "loving heart" so to speak. On the other hand, I believe in free will so I can hold people responsible for their actions.

Well, plants have responses like that too. There's some work out there investigating whether plants are conscious. Some florists use red light on a leaf to cause the plants to flower at the time of day they want - the plants detect red light at dawn and it triggers the process. The amazing thing is that I read a claim that shining the red light on ONE LEAF is enough to trigger the plant's full response. That implies something akin to a nervous system. Now, does that mean I think that a rock can feel anger, or whatever? No, not so much. But that doesn't mean that some bit of the same "conscious energy" isn't in the rock. It's just not structured and organized in a way that leads to the higher-order things. If Hoffman is right and consciousness is indeed what's fundamental, then everything would involve at least "one bit" conscious agents. That would be the building block of everything there is. The key thing will be to see whether Hoffmann and his follow-on peeps can show that a mathematical structure of those things could lead to perceptions that match experimental results across the board. I have a sneaky feeling they will be able to, but I think it is likely to wind up being an untestable proposal. Over in another thread someone told me to think about emergent consciousness with Godel's theorem (or more generally the GEB book) in mind. Basically implying that emergent consciousness may be "true" but "unprovable." So you'll have both sides arguing for their interpretation and neither side able to prove it. Sounds like it's going to be loads of fun for all.

Wow Dave - that's a marvelous post. Lots of food for thought. I didn't mean to imply that pain etc. are things that are "special." All I really meant was that I have not been able to see a way for a computer, built using the technology of today's computers and thus just a 100% deterministic collection of transistors, could experience such things. We can program them to use those words and report those words when they are in certain states (temperature sensor > T1 --> "ouch, that burns."). But I wouldn't believe the computer was actually *feeling* the sensation that I call burning. I just cannot imagine a computer, any computer, that I would feel like I'd "killed" if I took a sledgehammer to it. That's the way a lot of humans felt in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica - the Cylons were "toaster," and those humans felt no remorse whatsoever about destroying them. The show was deliberately designed to make us the viewer see the Cylons differently, or at least wonder about the issue. And of course they weren't purely based on our current computer technology - it was overtly stated that at some point the Cylons had started "playing with human DNA." The question for me is not whether it will ever be possible for us to build conscious, feeling creations. Clearly that's done all the time - every time a man and a woman have a baby. So it's not out of reason at all to think we might someday figure out how to build some non-biological machine that operates in the same way. But just as I can't see how a regular computer made of transistors could experience "awareness," I can't really see how a mechanism built of atoms can do so either. I am very interested in reading more about emergence and so on. That was really the reason I made this post in the first place - to solicit links and pointers to new things to study. But as of today, with my current state of knowledge, I lean toward believing that "awareness" comes from some other layer of reality that "interfaces" the physical universe using these mechanisms we call bodies. So if we figure out how to build non-biological devices that are "aware," I'll suspect that awareness comes from the same source. Some instances of awareness wind up in human beings. Some instances wind up in dogs, cats, etc. So in that futuristic scenario, some instances will wind up in these devices we've built. How that happens is a fascinating thing, but I don't know that it will ever be brought into a properly scientific perspective. Or, maybe I'll read something new about emergence and decide that's a more plausible explanation. Sitting here today I really can't say, but I'm interested in chasing down every lead. I'm not entirely ignorant of emergence today, but so far I still see "what emerges" as behaviors. Patterns in the deterministic output. I haven't yet seen how it can lead to "something" being aware. But thank you to everyone who's sending me links and so forth - I very much appreciate them.

I don't think we can *prove* others are self aware (cats included) - any measurable behavior could be that of an automaton. And I can't prove to you that I'm self aware - the thing I'm talking about isn't my ability to solve problems with intelligence (I can demonstrate that to you). I'm referring to things like feeling pain, happiness, and so on. The "sensation that I am." *I* can observe that in myself, and I can't produce an acceptable way for a mechanism to achieve that. I actually feel like that is the most directly observable of the things I can perceive - it doesn't arrive at my senses via light or sound waves, or get processed through my sense organs in any other way. It's innately internal. That said, I am 100% convinced that my family's dog is self-aware. I can't prove it, so it's "not science" I guess, but I'm a believer. I'm anxious to see where Donald Hoffman goes with his conscious realism theory. He takes consciousness as a given - an axiomatic property in the same way conventional theories take charge (for example), so the theory offers no explanation for how it happens. What he is burdened with demonstrating with good math and science rigor is that such a structure of conscious agents would yield perceptions that match our experimental operations - all of them. A big uphill climb ahead of the guy, but he seems to be intent on taking it head-on rather than trying to dodge it somehow. I look forward to following it. You know, I thought of something else in reference to one of the comments above that consciousness doesn't seem to be an evolution-driven thing. Not necessarily related, but consider sleep. The need to sleep is NOT an advantage. You're vulnerable when you're asleep. An organism that overcame a biological requirement to sleep would have a distinct advantage. Except possibly it can be viewed as energy conserving, so maybe I need to think about that. But if the need to sleep somehow arises at the (fundamental) level of conscious agents, then the biological things we see that imply the organism must sleep would just be a reflection of that lower level reality.

Yes, my response to "consciousness is an illusion," (or even better, "self awareness is an illusion") has always been to ask "What, exactly, is it that is experiencing the illusion????" Seriously, Dave, my big problem in this area is that I have never been able to perceive any "bridge" whatsoever from fundamental physics (Maxwell's equations, the equations governing behavior inside a transistor, etc.) that seems to offer the least bit of hint as to how it is we're "aware." As far as self-aware future computers goes, I just don't see it - at least not using today's computer technologies where the whole computer is essentially one big finite state machine. Each individual transistor is just a piece of material in an electrical state, and has no "knowledge" whatsoever of the state of other transistors. Each bit of data in the representation of the state is just that: one bit of data. I don't see where self-awareness gets a toehold. Something is going on that we are not even close to understanding. I have no idea whether it will turn out to be something we can study scientifically or not, but it's certainly good to see people try.

Oh, you're giving me too much credit. I'd design the computer to be redundant from the get-go; the damage would either leave enough redundant circuitry intact for the thing to still work, or it wouldn't. And I imagine a design (one that I did, at least) would pay a heavy efficiency price for that robustness - it would be bigger, heavier and so on than a design without redundancy. I read your reply as an argument against consciousness having biological origins - you're pointing out why it doesn't bring evolutionary advantages. Did I read that right, or did I miss your point entirely?

I took him to mean the force felt by the person shooting the gun (the force of the gun recoiling against the person's hand) vs. the force of the bullet striking the target. The recoil force would act over the entire time the bullet was accelerating down the barrel, and if that time was larger than the time taken for the bullet to stop in the block then he has it right - the recoil force would be lower. (Recoil force)*(muzzle acceleration time) = Impulse = (striking force)*(deceleration time) At least that what I read it to mean.