The mechanism of self-awareness

[StringJunky]

If you study emergence, you'll be following a more scientific path but the picture is not yet complete. I don't think awareness is a single function that you can isolate but a functional continuum between all the parts of the brain and its sensory receptors i.e. it emerges from them

Edited April 1, 2017 by StringJunky

[Ten oz]

 

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.

Which bring me back to what I mentioned in my initial post; does something have to be alive to be aware? Does something have to be mortal to be alive? A computer can't die so there is not use for a cumputer to feel as they it were dying. You are projecting human attributes and by doing so implying only humans and perhaps domesticated animals like dogs and cats who adequately mimic our behavior are self aware. I don't feel that is accurate. All mamals feel pain. It is messurable. Chop a rats leg off and its pulse will accelerate, it will scream, twitch, and brain activity will race. Everything a human does when feeling pain. We all know that biological the sensors that transmit pain are nerves. Animals have nerves. They experience pain. It is provable.

 

I am my body. If I do not take care of my body it directly impacts my brain and vice verse. My brain is link to ever part of my body via my nervous system. My brain has entire functions that serve no other purpose than to allow me to see, hear, breath, and etc. The same isn't true for a computer. The screen and keyboard on my laptop are not vital to the CPU. I can use other hardware and software with my laptops processor. I cannot use another body with my brain. Because my body and brain are one it makes sense for there to be a nervous system. Why would a computer need such? If a CPU became self aware which parts would be vital? Probably none would be. First step of a self aware computer might be to replicate itself over and over which would render the need for any specific phyical place moot along with the need to care about any physical place. AI wouldn't/won't need to experience the emotions and feelings we humans experience because AI will have a completely differentway of interacting with reality.

 

AI won't need a sexual partner to reproduce. So feelings like attraction, lust, love, rejection, heartbreak, and etc won't need to exist or evolve. AI won't need to breath so it wouldn't ever need to develop a fear or sensation of suffocation. AI simply put wouldn't be human. No feling or emotion I experience is applicable. So how would we know AI was aware? We could ask it but for all we know AI may have no use for communicating with humans and ignore our questions.

[KipIngram]

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.

[Ten oz]

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.

Plants like people need their bodies so it makes sense for a plant to have a centeral system. We have all put celery in with a little dye and watch the water move. Plants like humans are also maybe of of cells. A rock isn't. A rock doesn't need sunlight, water, air, or etc. To our knowledge a rock does nothing. Solid state devices used to for processing don't have cells or need light, water, or air but the do serve a purpose which we can messure and require the movement of electrons. So there is big difference between a what the solid state devices are and can be vs what a rock is.

 

Ultimately I don't think we are close to known the answer regarding lifew. To our knowledge life was only created on earth once. We only have one example to work with. Assuming there is other life in the universe and we eventually come across it I think that will be a big step forward. AI, the way we are attempting to design it, won't work in my opinion. I don't believe life is purpose built for anything we understand. It happens it isn't planned. meanwhile its processes exist out of necessity. That might be separate from awareness though. We might be able to design awareness.

[KipIngram]

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.

[StringJunky]

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."

I did say the knowledge is incomplete, not being able to figure out what's happening between some steps, and that's why it can look like magic. Just because we don't yet understand something means that we should invoke magic. In science, one needs to be comfortable with ignorance until more is known, rather than making wild-assed guesses about states and phenomena that don't exist. You've read the Wiki article, as a primer, keep looking into emergence because that's where your investigations will be most fruitful; this is not the realm of woo and science fiction.

Edited April 2, 2017 by StringJunky

[Dave Moore]

I can't see free will as a choice. I choose determinism.

 

But really, all ten dollar words aside (well, expensive for someone like me), why on Earth would probabilistic outcomes not be deterministic (not kidding around now)?

Taken from a point of view where a stage play were imagined (determinism), each percept, if subject to expectation, would always produce a satisfactory outcome that proves a probabilistic universe.

Am I wrong?

Determinism would, like a script, reveal itself to the mind one percept at a time. You would always, like watching a movie the second time, know what "probabilistic" events were going to occur ahead of time. That's how determinism works.

The movie isn't changing its script just because an unknown (to the characters) outcome is ahead. The movie would always play the same, regardless of how many times you might watch it.

See, I don't know why people don't get this. It's really quite simple. Or do they call it super determinism?

Nor do I find the concept of free will to be sensible. Free will can't be proven, but it sure can be desired.

[Ten oz]

@Kiplingram, life on earth is all related. It sprang up from a single type of lifeform. Life on earth doesn't have nurmerous origins. So we (life on earth) have things in common. Free will may very well by the source of human consciousness but does that mean it must be the source for cousciousness period? The notion of choice is a human construction. Why would it apply to AI? It can be true for us (you and I) and totally irrelevant for other types of cousciousness perhaps. Do trees make choices, do insects, do cats, do dogs, do machines? I don't believe consciousness is choice or free will. I think consciousness is knowing the existence of self. Realizing there is such a thing as me, myself , and I. A slave, captive, prisoner, or etc my not be able to choose but they can still know self.

[KipIngram]

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.

[KipIngram]

This article resonates with me, re: my impression of emergence so far:

 

http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/

[Dave Moore]

The Buddhists haven't any clear stand on determinism or free will, but I sense that they see the question much as I do, where one can ask, "What is reality?"------------ Is it an analysis or an experience? In other words, the feeling one has choice is no different from free will as experienced.

My analysis causes me to examine my reality and conclude it makes more sense as predestined. Yet, 99% of my reality finds me submerged in that reality, aware (without equivocation) during that time that I do have free will. Oddly.

I find this to be a reasonable answer to the question, if unorthodox. We are so accustomed to the truth of things only emerging after analysis and yet, the sense of free will pervades thought and action so thoroughly that the answer isn't so clear. I know this may seem to make no sense, but it may be a very elegant answer after all.

I've conjectured that infants learn free will, having discovered that their actions appear to follow desires and fears, but at first, they likely experience life as a sort of object that they, the witness, at first observe without a great amount of involvement.

Very soon, they make a connection with that body, in a sense "move into it", as if sliding from the passenger side to the driver's seat. They soon learn how to manipulate, absorb blame, apply it too, take credit, give credit, and all of those things we call free will.

Yet, they also retain a knowledge of determinism, the later understanding of forgiveness and charity, either as expected to be applied to themselves or another person or especially an animal.

Edited April 2, 2017 by Dave Moore

[StringJunky]

This article resonates with me, re: my impression of emergence so far:

 

http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/

Emergence is a process for which all the sequential details are not yet known and, as yet, can't be predicted. The more steps you know about a process the less like magic it seems; it's only ignorance that makes it look that way.

[Dave Moore]

What is the process called that is assumed to actually BE emergent? Super Emergent?

[Ten oz]

@Kiplngram how much free will does someone with motor neurone disease have when they can't speak or move? How much free will does someone with epilepsy have? People who are afflicited with conditions that confine them without choice are still aware. Determinism is a philosophy that deals with actions, morality, external events, and what's really responsible for what happens. That is much bigger and interconnected concept that attempts to answer questionsabout everthing and not just individual awareness. Awerness exists be it free will or determinism. Awarness exists whether there is a god or isn't a god. Awareness exists whether life is a dream or not. Awareness is a single window and the whole universe incarnate.

 

A plant leaning towards light can be a conscious act or just a biological process. Some Humans with brain injuries, who are brain dead, still breathe, their hearts still beat, and etc. Think about the famous case of Terri Schiavo. She was brain dead. She was in a persistent vegatative state. She wasn't aware. She was alive but had no consciousness. She had biological processes happening but no awareness. Eventually doctors removed her feeding tube and she passed 13 days later.

 

I am not trying to answer the big questions. Whether all humans have this or that. I think the big questions are several steps beyond where we are in terms of knowledge. My comments are confined to attempting to tie down the mechanism of self awareness. I don't believe self awareness and life or humanity are synonymous. Not all living things are aware and not all things which are aware are human. So the bigger questions about detrminism vs free will become rather self indulgent in my opinion but they make many assumptions and they are narrowly considered through human perspectives. We don't need to understand how gravity effects time to observe the passage of time. Accurate calanders were made to record the passage of time on earth by humans long before humans knew what gravity was. Long before humans knew what the sun, moon, and stars were. We don't need to know everthing to know something.

[StringJunky]

What is the process called that is assumed to actually BE emergent? Super Emergent?

Through biochemical processes. Any biological process, of which 'mind' is, is ultimately chemical in origin.

[Dave Moore]

I see. But calling consciousness a biological process means that you have already decided that you have the answer to the question of what is emergent by saying nothing is. Am I reading this correctly?

[KipIngram]

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.

[Rasher Null]

This is a great thread and I've read it all, and found new insights and paths to follow - so thanks Kip et al!

But you asked this in the OP-

I'd be ever so happy if someone can bring me something new to ponder.

 

 

1) Have you tried believing that you are a machine (to put it rather bluntly)? Is it scary? Impossible? Depressing? Insightful?

 

2) Have you read Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe" ? I'm nearly through a second reading I suspect I will need a few more to absorb it all - but there are some very interesting sections on reality and consciousness.

[KipIngram]

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

[StringJunky]

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

Think of any drug that affects your thinking or state of mind: it pretty much demonstrates that we are wet machines. If our minds were distinct from our bodies then that which is 'I' should be unaffected.

[KipIngram]

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.

[StringJunky]

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.

Yeah, well, LSD is definitely mind-altering and it was on that that made me realise there is no distinct 'I'. You've been drunk, no doubt, and probably lost your self-awareness then at some point. yet functioned without it for a time.

[StringJunky]

After some more pondering, one cannot know when one is not self-aware except after the fact and one is told. Put another way: You will always feel self-aware even when punctuated by episodes of its absence. It's like when you go to sleep, you are not conscious of being asleep; you fall asleep, you wake up. The memory of you closing your eyes is followed by you opening them the next morning; the intervening period is a blank, excluding dreams.

[KipIngram]

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.

[cladking]

Thanks for the thread. It gave me a new idea for an hypothesis. Or, perhaps, it's more a new perspective. Perhaps it's communication, language, that gives rise to consciousness. This is not only internal communication but also intraspecies and interspecies communication. Certainly it appears that natural languages are based on the wiring of the brain itself so this same form of communication may well apply in the individual.

 

Humans no longer use a natural language because it was metaphysical in nature and collapsed due to its complexity.

 

I'll put some thought into this.