Is Matter Conscious?

http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious

by dnetesn • 9 years ago

32 100 9 years ago

nautil.us

buhrmi• 9 years ago

lutusp4• 9 years ago

a. You're conscious.

b. You're composed of matter.

c. Therefore some matter is conscious.

d. What's true for some matter might be true for all matter --- or not. That's the "hard problem" of consciousness.

visarga16• 9 years ago

Yes, but many people still think there is magic fairy dust sprinkled into our brains that make them special. It's hard to comprehend that we are not magical, just the same matter as in all the physical world.

A failure of vision or imagination on their part. They don't realize that the universe, plain and physical as it is, is capable of consciousness and thus "sacred". For them the world is just dust. I believe the world is plenty mysterious and special without imaginary friends in the sky.

bitL4• 9 years ago

For all we know, our brain can be just an interface to something else we don't know yet. Like when nobody knew what radioactivity was, miners thought some monsters resided deep inside Earth, illuminating caves and mines in green, and anybody that got nearby died soon afterwards. Quantum theory spawned a lot of scientism at the beginning of 20th Century, attributing consciousness properties down to atomic level, and this seems to be the case with each new generation, falling into the same though a bit more refined scientistic trap.

Just for fun:

If we play with the idea of Platonic Theory of Forms as a super-set of what we can perceive with our sens-es(-ors), under assumption philosophy/math is above reality, we can simply be plugged into some kind of a virtual machine with some API of sorts (of course undocumented) that is called by our brains when we think. Those who figured out some rare API calls on their own or by a secret tradition we call magicians, conjurers, gurus, Neo etc. Maybe words/thoughts could invoke some of those API functions, hence magic Harry-Potter-esque words and generally prayers in many religions. Similarly, what we call angels could be simply API services with highly intelligent behavior, preferably operating outside time, providing verifiable and expected outcome. Demons then are some intelligent services gone completely wrong, messing up with the rest of intelligent services that depend upon them, playing eternal asynchronous byzantine generals (by e.g. trying to upgrade all services to Windows 10 or flat interfaces with telemetry /s).

I think I should write a dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi "Services and Daemons" about this ;-)

abiox8• 9 years ago

this seems like a potential composition fallacy.

pixie_• 9 years ago

It's great taking the time to read a large insightful article, and then coming to the comments to see an insightful post like this.

cool_shit• 9 years ago

I can't stand articles like this -- they bait you into reading poetry at the promise of science. So many words, so few ideas that are actually substantive. Consciousness speculation articles are a dime a dozen today, this is part of the noise. Even worse when they ramble on for what seems pages of periodic content.

lutusp4• 9 years ago

One can argue that such contentless articles only reveal to us what we don't know (a "known unknown"). It might be true that we can't know this particular thing, but that's still an open question.

But I agree that there are too many such articles, with too little original content.

oldmancoyote2• 9 years ago

I think this subject is too deep for some people to understand. Rather than find fault with themselves, they find fault with the subject.

abiox8• 9 years ago

or perhaps there's no real depth to speak of, leaving little but mystical obscurantism. depends on what you mean by "this subject".

catshirt8• 9 years ago

I'm reminded of people talking about tripping. we don't really have the vocabulary or knowledge to talk about certain things and they end up sounding wishywashy.

but I don't think it means we can't try, or hypothesize...

M_Grey3• 9 years ago

It reminds me of Hamilton Morris talking to this guy who's been taking huge doses of PCP for years. He gets absolutely lit, and then does "art", which is highly meaningful to him, but... pretty much just to him. Some people never really learn the difference between the feeling of profound understanding that can occur while dreaming or high, with profound understanding.

KennyCason2• 9 years ago

I think that's the point. At this point the understanding of the nature of consciousness and reality are still just speculation. It shows either a fundamental limit of human reasoning (which I think is well known), and/or that we still have a lot learning/researching to do.

But statements like "The possibility that consciousness is the real concrete stuff of reality", or none-the-less quite fun to unpack and discuss. Even if unintelligible due to aforementioned limits of human reasoning. :)

I think if you find yourself always looking at the world 100% through rigorous logic/methodologies, and don't allow your mind to wonder and explore new possibilities, then I think it's safe to say that human reasoning will absolutely remain bounded.

(also, the comments section was fun to read as well)

kartan• 9 years ago

Yet mathematics is a language with distinct limitations. It can only describe abstract structures and relations.

I have a hard time getting this point. Mathematics began as something concrete. In fact, abstract mathematics is one huge accomplishment of the human mind.

In general, I find all the article hard to read. Maybe I lack the expertise to fully grasp what is this about. But it looks like there is no attempt to explain the ideas in clear terms.

I will suggest that if you want to know more about consciousness Daniel Dennett is a better read.

Pica_soO2• 9 years ago

Welcome back to the 70s marxist discussion groups, where all sentences are just rumbling empty cargo-trains of abstraction, promising huge trainloads full of future deep meaning - going nowhere. Good we discussed this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgDnA0in1t0

M_Grey3• 9 years ago

It's painful, but it's "the hot topic", and nobody likes to be told that in the absence of new information, an absence of noise would be nice so we can focus on the things for which there is new information. The problem is that people, especially in the realm of pop-sci, get "favorite topics". They don't really understand much, but it's their "expert topic" and they love it. When the reality of science, which is slow progress via a sawtooth graph, hits they don't bail, they tend to just... want more.

As a result you get a lot of "What does it look like from the perspective of a photon?" or "What does the inside of a black hole look like?" The real lack of knowledge is boring, and there are enough such excitable people to keep some magazines (on and offline) profitable. I think it's also important to remember that most people, even technical people, who aren't into physics simply don't understand the topics in question well enough that the headline in question, 'Is Matter Conscious' doesn't turn them off immediately. The difference there, between largely uncritical (if intellectual) wide-eyed curiosity, and science is pretty stark.

The truth is though, that it's a matter of interest, and most people (whatever they claim) aren't really interested in physics, they just like "the cool stuff".

visarga16• 9 years ago

No matter how precisely we could specify the mechanisms underlying, for example, the perception and recognition of tomatoes, we could still ask: Why is this process accompanied by the subjective experience of red, or any experience at all? Why couldn’t we have just the physical process, but no consciousness?

The difference comes from context. It is one thing to have a feedforward network that detects tomatoes, another to have a reinforcement learning agent that optimizes for survival in nature.

The RL agent has a value function that assigns a predicted future reward to the current state and actions available. The value network, together with the sense data, is "what it feels like" for the agent to see the tomatoes. Maybe it knows that red tomatoes are good, or that red fruit are ripe, and they can give it a reward signal by reducing hunger. That makes perceiving red an experience colored by emotion. Maybe agents that didn't see red tomatoes as good, had less chance of survival and died off.

Also, the RL agent is not a simple feedforward net, but a loop: perception->judgement->action->effect in environment, and rewards. It is a dynamic process, evolving from moment to moment. In that continuous perception-action-effect loop, there is space for the inner world and all its complexities.

SomeStupidPoint5• 9 years ago

Why?

All of those could be feedback/computation systems without any experience.

Your answer only argues for why the system would have certain computational features, not a subjective aspect.

visarga16• 9 years ago

My answer explains why there would be an emotion attached to a perception. The subjective aspect is a result of the network being an agent, that has to fend for itself in the greater environment. The stake of the RL game is survival itself. Each new state it finds itself in opens some possible future paths and closes other paths. Some actions lead to rewards, other to losses. I think subjectivity lays in this space of values, options and actions. That places is where "it feels like something" to see red.

And if you're still unconvinced, remember what we are: a collection of cells, a protein based dynamical system that has computing and learning abilities. Why would it feel like something to be a protein-based computer?

powera• 9 years ago

Another article that basically says "quantum and consciousness are both poorly understood; maybe they're related" in thousands and thousands of words.

markbnj• 9 years ago

This reminds me of Ursula K. LeGuin's "A Wizard of Earthsea," in which all things had a name, and knowing a thing's name granted power over it. At the same time it also seems weirdly suggestive of The Matrix.

jat8503• 9 years ago

Holy wow. I just finished reading the first of the Kingkiller Chronicle books, The Name of the Wind. I did not realize this central theme was so similar (and/or derivative). My exposure to sci-fi and fantasy is more deep than broad, a lot from the same authors instead of several from many. I think I must be somewhat blinded to how common this probably is.

bitexploder3• 9 years ago

I have read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy fiction. A lot. Very few stories surprise me regarding the broad strokes or philosophical system / theme as it relates to magic and world building. I always enjoy when an author teases a new perspective on a known theme or system. Sanderson is great at taking a "known" system and bounding it tightly and thus making it a great story telling device.

I always enjoy an author with a deep understanding of a subject like game theory and they weave it into the magic and story giving a view into something new. So "everything is derivative". And nothing is :)

kneel4• 9 years ago

This subject has been beaten to death by a lot of smart people.

I think it's well understood how consciousness works, (on a higher order level) the answer is just boring and somewhat demeaning to many who believe that they're something bigger than a sack of nerves.

catshirt8• 9 years ago

"I think it's well understood how consciousness works"

care to expand on this at all? it completely contradicts most everything I've heard.

saying consciousness is just a neural reaction could be right but it's by no means an understanding.

bitL4• 9 years ago

We don't even have a proper explanation of how neurons themselves work; there are some processes we have no idea how they are possible (vast amount of ions passing through membranes) as well as some local protein computations that go against perceptron simplification operating on simple analog electricity.

Koshkin3• 9 years ago

"To death", probably not; unconscious - sure :)

"Sack of nerves" - well, that's demeaning indeed.

oldmancoyote2• 9 years ago

For a while it was common for folks to speculate that consciousness was self-organizing behavior of a chaotic assemblage of electro-chemical relations within the brain. The problem with that has been that self-organizing behavior adds nothing new. It merely reorganizes existing behavior/properties. This article proposes the existence of the fundamental "thing" that is organized in consciousness, that thing that is the primitive element possessing the property of awareness.

Seems good to me. In fact, it seems necessarily true.

visarga16• 9 years ago

self-organizing behavior of a chaotic assemblage of electro-chemical relations within the brain

That seems about right to me. Add that the organism itself is part of a complex environment, with all its sensations and reward signals, and that the organism has to adapt in order to survive/exist in the first place. With these constraints, the self-organizing behavior leads to consciousness.

lend0006• 9 years ago

There's no reason to believe so.

Advancements in CS, AI, biology, and general models of intelligence are slowly bringing us to the point where consciousness is no longer a mystery to the enlightened. One of my favorite researchers in general AI is Professor Schmidhuber, who has pioneered some of the (currently) more practical areas of machine learning, too: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/

Even when we create self-aware machines that can demonstrate generalized intelligence, I think most people will struggle to come to terms with what consciousness is (or more so, what it isn't). My spin on it: consciousness isn't real; it's a necessary perceived byproduct of 'everything else.'

I believe Schmidhuber said it more elegantly, describing consciousness as a result of data compression.

SomeStupidPoint5• 9 years ago

Nothing about our understanding of intelligence or self-awareness explains why we're not philosophical zombies.

Your explanation only addresses the form of perception, not why there's perception at all. It doesn't even address it, just implicitly assumes there must be such!

Your comment isn't even wrong: it fails to address the topic at all.

abiox8• 9 years ago

Nothing about our understanding of intelligence or self-awareness explains why we're not philosophical zombies.

perhaps we really are zombies.

why there's perception at all

why do atoms interact at all? why do fields interact at all?

perhaps "there's perception" because fields and matter can interact.

lend0006• 9 years ago

Your comment isn't even wrong: it fails to address the topic at all.

It always surprises me when people make seemingly innocuous discussions political. The pros and cons of a pseudo-anonymous Internet. Regardless, I'm not sure what point you're talking about or how this article is not the perfect place to discuss consciousness.

Nothing about our understanding of intelligence or self-awareness explains why we're not philosophical zombies.

As I posted on another comment, I think this could also be phrased conversely (that a philosophical zombie makes no sense), depending on your definition of a zombie.

Your explanation only addresses the form of perception, not why there's perception at all.

Not sure what you mean here, but it sounds like you're still viewing consciousness as something 'greater' than what is necessary to process signals and generate outputs. And then calling it perception.

hacker_95• 9 years ago

It's not like this viewpoint isn't known, it's just not accepted because it makes no sense. Consciousness really is unexplainable by what we know of the physical world, it's constancy is just odd. When were talking about the most advanced organ in the history of the universe, is it really a leap to consider that new physics would be involved?

abiox8• 9 years ago

"Consciousness really is unexplainable by what we know of the physical world"

maybe. or perhaps it simply has a mystical privilege. there do seem to be a fair number of terms and concepts (like 'qualia') that hold sway over some people's discussion, but themselves seem questionable.

visarga16• 9 years ago

Consciousness really is unexplainable by what we know of the physical world, it's constancy is just odd.

Consciousness is just you adapting to the world. You need consciousness in order to live in the world, with all its complexity and dangers. The brain has nothing magical about it, it is made of the same kind of atoms as anything else. What is happening is just perception, judgement and action in a loop, each supported by neural networks. Every moment, a full perception-judgement-action loop plays itself. It generates a stream of experience and emotion (which is just the value or reward intuited in certain situations and actions). This internal stream of perceptions and judgements is consciousness.

s_gourichon• 9 years ago

Anyone interested in consciousness (even out of personal curiosity) is likely to love all the work of Kevin O'Regan. http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/ Interesting, sound, scientific.

For example his book "Why Red Doesn't Sound Like a Bell: Explaining the Feel of Consciousness (2011)". Author makes it available to download on https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/869531/OReganWhyRedDraft...

KennyCason2• 9 years ago

I think the title may mislead some and result in their dissatisfaction. This article (and comments) are more addressing the unknown nature of consciousness and matter. Specifically, how they seem to be circularly related. I.e. Our consciousness seems to have originated from our physical configuration, yet also the only way we perceive/understand the physical reality is through our consciousness/mind.

It also concludes with the fun statement "The possibility that consciousness is the real concrete stuff of reality". Which is quite a fun statement to truly unpack and understand, of which, I will not attempt to do now. :)

visarga16• 9 years ago

The article is referring to "idealism", the belief that world is primarily ideal (ideal = "of the same kind with ideas" = mental), not physical. It says that the world we perceive is just an internal state inside the fundamental substratum which is consciousness itself. It was in vogue in India 1000 years ago in the time of Abhinavagupta and appeared in many other places, even in Europe. Look for idealistic monism in the wiki.

Animats• 9 years ago

This seems to be the old homunculus argument in another form.[1]

As knowledge of how brains work increases, this will probably become a non-issue. A big question for millenia was "what is life?" This question continued through the discovery of bacteria, and later, DNA. As the lower level mechanisms of biology were understood, it stopped being a question. Bacteria are alive, and are reasonably well understood. The components of bacteria are not quite alive, but are also understood. (There's still some argument over whether viruses are alive, but that's now just an argument over the definition.) "What is life" is now a "go look it up" question, not a mystery.

"What is consciousness" will probably go the same way in time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

Razengan3• 9 years ago

"What is life" is now a "go look it up" question, not a mystery.

Is Earth – the planet itself – alive?

"What is consciousness" will probably go the same way in time.

But what about free will?

abiox8• 9 years ago

Is Earth – the planet itself – alive?

not according to the definition i just looked up. depending on what you mean, the earth is 'simply' a ball of mud hurtling through space, or it's something more akin to a label for the complex emergent system composed of many individual instances of LivingObject.

But what about free will?

how are we defining "free will"?

sametmax2• 9 years ago

I'm a bit dumb. If it's not a mystery anymore, can you tell me in a sentence what life is, in a way everybody scientifically agree ?

Koshkin3• 9 years ago

Obviously, the word 'life' has multiple meanings; at the most fundamental - and I'd say, the least interesting - level it is the now pretty well-understood mode of collective behavior as well as the variety of processes and mechanisms that have naturally evolved to ensure the perpetual existence of a mass of large molecules of a certain kind (viz. proteins).

Razengan3• 9 years ago

Suppose we build some robots with AI and send them to space, and they land on some planet.

Those robots can mine raw materials and build other robots like themselves.

They can learn, and teach, and improve their designs and invent new things.

Fast forward a few hundred years. The planet now hosts a civilization of robots, with their own culture, planning their own excursions into space.

To someone searching for Life™ and Intelligence™ in the cosmos, what would make our robot civilization fail to be qualified as such?

visarga16• 9 years ago

An external observer should realize that robots are self replicators (like people) that fend for themselves in the environment (like people, again), by a complex process of adaptation to external situations, moment by moment (yep, like us).

ppod2• 9 years ago

I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind's I[^]"). It's surprising to see academic philosophers still using arguments like the "redness problem" described in this article. How can anyone with any knowledge of visual neuroscience or artificial neural networks be confused by a generative system producing a novel state?

And perhaps more controversially, I'm always a bit taken aback by the constant blase assertion that consciousness is a mystery. Is it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and its own neural states, its train of reasoning should frequently include itself, its focus will drift forward and backwards in time... this is just how a system like this would work. If the system communicates about its state then its language should have referents to these internal states, referents like "experience", and "feels like", and "I understand". Is that surprising? Wouldn't it be surprising if it wasn't like that?

I think that Tononi's approach is a good approximation, but it can't be a full solution because the word 'consciousness' is too anthropocentric. One criticism of IIT showed that a seemingly uninteresting complex artificial system could have a very high IIT complexity quotient. The problem is that the things we use to define the term 'consciousness' are things that can be approximated to varying degrees by chimps or dolphins or generative adversarial networks or antfarms or thermometers. But behind our use of the word 'consciousness' there is still almost always a very slightly disguised dualism that uses it as a substitute for the word 'soul'.

[^]edited

rexpop• 9 years ago

It's "The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul" by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

"The Mind's Eye" is by Oliver Sacks (who has almost definitely read Hofstadter/Dennett)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2081.The_Mind_s_I

visarga16• 9 years ago

Bravo. Might I add that Tononi's IIT theory is just a technical detail of implementation, insufficient by itself. Consciousness is in fact the reinforcement learning system connected to the world by the perception system. The state + value of the RL agent represents consciousness.

dgreensp• 9 years ago

This is actually one of the better presentations of this idea, and it gave me a better handle on it.

Here's one way to look at it. If you accept the claim, "My conscious experiences exist, non-physically," which seems true, you can reason to some interesting places from there. For example, it would be pretty weird if you were the only "conscious" person in the world, surrounded by zombies who only appear to have an inner life, so we can say that all brains have consciousness. Then, you can keep delicately applying Occam's razor to say that what we call consciousness could be just one manifestation of a more basic phenomenon, which fills a metaphysical explanatory void.

Even if we don't accept the claim, and we say consciousness doesn't really exist and we are merely projecting its existence, we could still discover new phenomena that seem just as real to us as the illusion of consciousness, despite not being clearly connected to physical laws. Maybe pretending that it's possible to have a "direct experience" of something can reveal that everyday consciousness is just one kind of direct experiencing.

arc_of_descent• 9 years ago

I've been hooked onto UG for more than a month now. Articles like this would have piqued my interest earlier. Now they just bore me. I'm going back to learning CL.

Is Matter Conscious?

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