Electrons May Well Be Conscious

http://nautil.us//blog/electrons-may-very-well-be-conscious

by lxm • 6 years ago

232 383 6 years ago

nautil.us

caymanjim• 6 years ago

No.

klyrs3• 6 years ago

You're so certain -- but can you prove it?

DougN7• 6 years ago

Electrons might prefer Michael Jackson music and grapes in the summer. Not being able to disprove it is a looong way from it being true.

enoreyes2• 6 years ago

The mind-body problem is an interesting philosophical debate. It would be funny if our ancestors had been on to something the whole time with the various forms of panpsychism that have occurred throughout history. We tend to overestimate our own ingenuity and heavily discount the intelligence and natural intuition of the past. Not saying this is a credible theory, just an interesting reoccurring idea throughout human history.

undershirt• 6 years ago

My favorite approach[1] to the mind–body problem is a recent one, placing the interaction between the mind and body at actual primacy. Neither the perceived nor the perceiver can exist without the process of perceiving. However absurd, the things related can be seen as derivative of the relationship itself.

Resonates with zen, as famously espoused by Alan Watts[2]: “How does the thing put a process into action. Obviously it can’t. But we always insist that there is this subject called the knower. And without a knower there can’t be knowing. Well that’s just a grammatical rule, it isn’t the rule of nature. In nature there’s just knowing.” Also said[3]: “The grammatical illusion is that all verbs have to have subjects.”

[1] https://www.magic-flight.com/pub/uvsm_1/imc_01.htm

[2] https://www.alanwatts.org/1-1-2-not-what-should-be-pt-2

[3] https://www.alanwatts.org/1-1-11-limits-of-language-pt-1/

blacksqr• 6 years ago

Spoiler: if you redefine "conscious" to whatever an electron is.

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 6 years ago

More like, consciousness is a matter of degree, rather than a binary yes/no.

Analemma_2• 6 years ago

Even materialists agree that consciousness is a matter of degree; panpsychists don't have a monopoly on that position. Humans are more conscious than mammals who are more conscious than fish who are more conscious than insects. But the materialist position is that any non-zero degree of consciousness requires a substrate capable of computation, and so you bottom out to zero long before you get to electrons.

notaphilosopher2• 6 years ago

I think I read that somewhere on the side of a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap in the shower. Although, every permutation of writing that could ever be written by a million monkeys at typewriters is on the side of a Dr. Bronner's too. Even this comment. #meta

Entities with too much consciousness can't handle their own consciousness and either go Warhol, invent the atom bomb, or make a startup selling silicone girlfriends because their bulging brains get in the way of their more fundamental drives.

Mental onany isn't as good as reality.

robbiep• 6 years ago

Worth looking at - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

nine_k• 6 years ago

Electrons may as well be <insert anything> as long as we cannot observe it. This is not interesting because the Occam's razor shaves it off instantly.

A much more tantalizing hypothesis (also unverifiable by construction) would be to assume presence of a metaphysical being which alters the probabilities of quantum processes ever so slightly as to have a macroscopic effect, but is careful enough to never do it for processes under direct experimental observation.

One can invent a number of such undetectable constructs, it's a good entertainment, and does show the limits of the scientific method. Practical applications of these are nil, though.

Animats• 6 years ago

Back in the 1980s, I had an exam question in Michael Genesereth's AI class at Stanford, "Does a rock have intensions". I answered "no". I forget whether that was considered correct.

This was back when AI had more philosophy and less number-crunching. And didn't do much. "Common sense" and "intension" came up a lot back then, but "consciousness", not so much. There hasn't been enough progress on common sense and intension since then. Common sense is being able to predict the consequences of actions, actual or potential, with enough accuracy to get something done without damage. That's a concrete problem, and one that current AI systems do not do well.

We don't know enough yet to address the "consciousness" issue.

pcmaffey• 6 years ago

Rocks definitely have intensions. [1]

But whether or not rocks have intentions, I think the correct answer is "we don't know."

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

enoreyes2• 6 years ago

obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/505/

abellerose8• 6 years ago

I theorize nothing is truly conscious. Everything reacts from a cause & effect "chain of forces" exerted upon everything in the Universe. I'm curious what we will learn when we can modify the human brain to be exactly the same as it was a year ago for an individual that volunteers to be such a test subject. Would all his/her memories be reverted back to that very day? Or would the experiment result in a failure because our concept of how we react to everything compared to other things in the universe is flawed.

rdruxn• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

adrianmonk• 6 years ago

Although there are popular theories of the mind which include both free will and consciousness, the two aren't the same thing.

There is no reason why, in principle, you can't have a deterministic thought process and a consciousness that observes and experiences these thoughts from the outside.

There's also no reason why you couldn't have a deterministic form of consciousness that is a part of a deterministic thought process.

abellerose8• 6 years ago

I think the two are simply illusions. Humans think of as free will and similar to thinking of having a consciousness in reality is just illusions at play. We can assume consciousness is similar to an outside external force that ends up with causing an outcome. Similar as a domino being interacting with another domino and resulting in a cause & effect outcome. I don't think humans are responsible at all for anything of their own doing. Some things are in fact impossible and even with how hard we desire them.

My previous comment is suggesting that it would be interesting to learn if somehow the processing of thinking isn't happening purely in the brain. Such as if we could revert all neurons back to a previous state of time before external forces changed everything up. I like to theorize about the universe having some state that's stored somewhere outside of what's physically observable.

rantwasp3• 6 years ago

i don’t believe this is doable. you would have to observe the state and after that rebuild the state precisely. that’s a pipe dream.

we like to believe we are in state A and transition to state B, but the brain (and our body) is one massive parallel biological computation which for all intents and purposes is irreversible.

abellerose8• 6 years ago

Yes, we would have to send the same signals for a significant interval of time like it was a year ago and to the brain of the subject. Also having all the outside the body external forces aligning similar to the past and for the experiment to be successful for answering the question. It's a pipe dream but theoretically possible.

axguscbklp8• 6 years ago

I think that you might be using the term "consciousness" in a different way from how the article uses it. Do you not have subjective experience?

seemslegit2• 6 years ago

I theorize nothing is truly tomato. There are just atoms, the space between them and forces that act on them.

abellerose8• 6 years ago

That's actually a rewarding thought to think about.

gmuslera• 6 years ago

Is that statement falsifiable?

yalogin• 6 years ago

This feels a lot closer to Hindu philosophy actually. May be someone more knowledgeable can correct me or add more.

imvetri• 6 years ago

You are right.

foxes• 6 years ago

I agree that conciousness of people is not "special", but why the need to add in an extra meta physical quantity of "conciousness". I agree it is probably a spectrum, but I think it is more just an emergent quantity.

People are just relatively high up on the scale so its different to imagine what other types of conciousness would be. Yes it is difficult to say what exactly is going on in a human brain, but I believe when you think it is entirely just a physical process, some very complicated electro-chemical interactions.

fallingfrog• 6 years ago

No, but neither are we.

axguscbklp8• 6 years ago

You don't have subjective experience?

pontus7• 6 years ago

Honestly, as weird as it might sound, to me it's even weirder to claim that consciousness somehow is just a manifestation of effect that we are already familiar with.

Saying things like "Consciousness is emergent" or "Consciousness is just a side effect of information processing" seems to miss the point. I'm definitely comfortable saying that consciousness is correlated with complexity and information processing, but claiming that it is fully explainable in some mechanistic way sounds suspect to me.

It would sort of be like saying that since large electric charges have only been observed in nuclei with proportionally large mass, then somehow charge is just a manifestation of mass. When we go further it turns out that charge is fundamentally distinct from mass, in fact so distinct that we have to add an entirely new attribute to fundamental particles. The same story goes with spin. Once you have spin and electric charge you get magnetic moments. Ultimately the reason why a magnet is magnetic is because all of these subatomic particles conspire in just the right way to have a macroscopic effect. Of course, not all materials have the property of being magnetic even though they all are made from protons and electrons, but some materials are.

To me, trying to say that consciousness is just something emergent is like saying that electric charge is emergent from mass. I would not be surprised if some type of proto consciousness would be needed in order to understand how macroscopic objects like human brains are self aware, have sensations, etc.

Madmallard4• 6 years ago

I see absolutely no evidence or suggestion that consciousness is anything else other than the summation of changes that happened in our brain in combination with the input devices we naturally have. You have decades worth of changes that occurred to get you to the point now and it's very clear and easy to see how much _less_ conscious you were when you were younger.

pontus7• 6 years ago

I agree that consciousness is correlated with this, but having a lot of experiences over years does not explain to me why I feel things.

Similarly I can definitely see how there would be a mechanistic explanation for intelligence (basically just build a machine that acts intelligently, perhaps even claiming that it's conscious), but there's a distinction between appearing conscious and actually feeling something.

ars• 6 years ago

A sleepwalker is not conscious, yet you can converse with them, ask them questions, get answers, you can tell them to do things.

In every external way they appear conscious, yet they are not. They are not aware of their own existence.

So consciousness is clearly more complicated than just "summation of changes that happened in our brain", there is something extra there, that we don't understand.

Retric7• 6 years ago

Consciousness seems like it should be special, but that’s not evidence that it is. Consider, after a lifetime of subjective experiences from exercise etc, a cardiac surgeon can still know far more about your heart than you do. Nobody is arguing some mysterious force is pumping blood through their bodies, but the feeling of blood pumping through your veins somehow feels primal not simple plumbing.

You can intellectually extend that to everyone else about our bodies, so why not consciousness?

pontus7• 6 years ago

Understanding how a brain works may only require a mechanistic model, but consciousness is different.

Consider the following thought experiment: suppose that we had a complete understanding of how neurons work (as well as the brain more broadly). I think this is totally reasonable. Then suppose that we created artificial neurons that acted identically to biological neurons. If we replaced the neurons of a brain with these manufactured neurons, I would imagine that the resulting brain would still be conscious. Now imagine taking some of these neurons and removing their interior structure instead routing the inputs / outputs to a machine somewhere else where the correct computation takes place in order to determine the output from the neuron. From the rest of the brain's perspective nothing has changed so presumably it's still conscious.

Now take this to the extreme: replace all of these neurons with empty shells and route the computation to a billion people in the world to perform on pen and paper. Is it still conscious? If so, what if you removed the brain altogether and just performed the computations directly on paper, is the paper conscious?

The paper would definiy still be intelligent, it would possibly come up with interesting inventions, claim that it was sad or happy etc, but would it actually be sad?

goatlover8• 6 years ago

Because unlike everything else in the body, we don’t know what sort of material explanation would possibly work. Instead assertions are made that subjectivity is identical to certain kinds of brain activity. What is needed as an explanation for how brain activity is conscious. How does neural activity result in the feeling of pain or experience of seeing a color?

perl4ever2• 6 years ago

Of course there is no evidence available to you that anything is special about my consciousness. And vice versa.

Are you a solipsist or not? If you don't believe in the consciousness of other beings, I can hardly argue with that on rational grounds, but you can't disbelieve in your own consciousness.

braft3• 6 years ago

"a cardiac surgeon can still know far more about your heart than you do"

You're conflating the knowledge surgeons have with the subjective experience of a pounding heart. Surgeons study the heart qua plumbing, not as object of awareness related to primal feelings. Noting that physical changes in the brain cause changes in consciousness does not explain subjective experience.

badrabbit3• 6 years ago

That's traditionally called a soul.

sitkack2• 6 years ago

Big corporations have a mind, but they aren't conscious in the way we are conscious. Lot more minds exist in the world than consciousness.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

this is actually one of the problems I have with the theory that everything is conscious. The electron, like the company, is actually an abstraction and part of a model. We don't even really know if an electron is 'a thing in itself'. Maybe everything is just strings or quarks, or some other smaller particle or just the manifestation of some field (sorry I'm not a physicist in case I'm butchering the analogy).

Even every individual human could be said to be some sort of zoo of 'conciousnesses'. Panspychism posits that consciousness is essentially smeered across the universe like a sort of paste, and if consciousness applies down the ladder I don't see why it doesn't apply upwards.

hackinthebochs6• 6 years ago

Saying things like "Consciousness is emergent" or "Consciousness is just a side effect of information processing" seems to miss the point.

On the contrary, I feel like those who think we need some fundamental consciousness property is missing the point. We expect to find some objective third-person property that is the substrate of consciousness because a phenomenon that seems so unlike every other property should have a fundamental basis. But the mistake is expecting to analyze consciousness in the same way we can analyze other objective properties of physics.

The only things we know to be conscious are complex macro-scale objects with highly complex and rare internal organizations. In fact, the only things we truly know to be conscious are ourselves. It seems to be fundamentally subjective; it is not something to be directly witnessed as a third-person observer. So our investigation should start there. What we want is a theory for deriving organizational subjectivity from a non-subjective substrate. What might this look like? A system with subjectivity will need to recognize the external from the internal. It needs an egocentric mode of representation with the ability to represent itself and its dispositions and intentional stances, as well as states to represent the external world. My intuition tells me such a system has a non-zero "inner life", i.e. there is something it is like to be it. But I see no reason to think "fundamental" subjectivity, whatever that is, could do any explanatory work here. The causal and representative power is in the organization.

edna314• 6 years ago

It’s even worse: How can you be sure that you can separate the internal from the external? Both seem to have to be present in order to make sense of anything.

jbotz• 6 years ago

Indeed. I think IIT is a good theory... of something, just not exactly consciousness. Maybe a precondition to consciousness or something like that. But the thing that we think of as our consciousness is to me best explained by the "global workspace" theory, which says consciousness is the process of the various specialized parts of the mind, which are constantly working separately and in parallel, communicating their state to each other. It's like a boardroom for the society of mind, where at any point one subsystem has the podium (although there is lots of chatter and crosstalk as well). For most of us a part of the language subsystem (Gazzaniga's "interpreter") is also giving a running commentary (the internal monolog) of the information it's receiving from the other parts (with a lot of its own interpretation thrown in)... but this is not an essential feature of consciousness! We have a tendency to identify our consciousness with this commentary, but that is obviously incorrect. I think that the communication in this global workspace occurs in its own "language", a language internal to organic brains, capable of abstracting and reducing to its barest essence information from any of its components.

This view of consciousness is phenomenologically best aligned with most of the (admittedly limited) objective information we have about human conscious experience, and is consistent with the experience of various altered states of consciousness such as meditation or the use of entheogenic substances. It explains how consciousness is only a small part of what happens in our mind and why the nature of the subconscious (which is most of what actually happens in the brain) seems to be so hard to nail down. It also means that any being with a "mind" that has numerous independent and parallel processes that need to be coordinated has some measure of conscious experience, even invertebrates, and probably even living things whose information processing uses an entirely different infrastructure, such as plants. However, I can't see any way that this definition of consciousness could apply to an electron.

Edit: I think that the global workspace theory of consciousness can probably be mathematically described by IIT, but not just any integration of information results in something that deserves to be called consciouness. The information that's being integrated should be combination of perceptions (feedback from the environment) with some kind of memories of previous states, resulting in new memories and predictions, and the integration should happen through independent pre-processing of this information by relatively independent subsystems. This is still general enough to apply to nearly everything living, but I think it puts conscious experience at a higher level than merely integrating information.

visarga7• 6 years ago

What we want is a theory for deriving organizational subjectivity from a non subjective substrate. What might this look like?

I think the Reinforcement Learning framework is useful here. An agent exists inside an environment, it has some rewards, it is capable of sensing and acting, and its goal is to maximise its rewards over time. This implies learning, exploration, planning and the ability to model itself and the world. Of course it is possible for many agents to share the same environment and have different bodies, rewards and needs.

I think sensing, learning and evolution are good filters for judging if something could be conscious.

dleslie• 6 years ago

Worth considering, I believe, is that many people do not have an inner voice.

For those of us who have conversations with ourselves, who can explore our consciousness throug dialog, it is easy to assume that all humans can do this.

Many cannot.

Many have no internal voice.

I find many folks are asking "where does my internal voice come from," and yet many conscious individuals lack it. "I think, therefor I am" has a different meaning when that question cannot be asked through internal monologue.

For myself, the concept that consciousness is an emergent and mechanical outcome became easier to accept after considering consciousness without monologue.

knzhou2• 6 years ago

Saying things like "Consciousness is emergent" or "Consciousness is just a side effect of information processing" seems to miss the point.

It sounds suspect to me too, but the reason the idea is appealing is that it's worked fantastically for hundreds of similar phenomena. To vastly oversimplify thousands of years of philosophy, for most of human history the default position has been that every idea had to be reified into some metaphysical essence.

What is the essence that makes a dog a dog? That makes bread nourishing but rocks not? That makes rocks solid? That makes fire hot? That makes falling objects seek Earth? Again and again, we've found simple physical explanations for these puzzles, that once were regarded as just as inexplicable as consciousness. Indeed, consciousness is now the last essence that survives, and that's why some bet it'll go the same way as all the rest. "But this one is different", indeed, and every single time so far that argument has been wrong.

pontus7• 6 years ago

My background is in theoretical physics, so I absolutely subscribe to this perspective. In understanding my own consciousness, however, I find it a lot harder to see how such an explanation could work.

The only other problem that I feel may require a similarly "out-there" explanation would be the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Why is it that a macroscopic object, made entirely of electrons, protons, etc. when interacting with an electron means that a measurement occurs, but somehow when a single electron interacts with that same electron we can just use the Schrödinger equation? The existence of some type of cutoff between macroscopic and microscopic seems to me to suffer from inevitable inconsistencies. More likely, I would think, is that something like the many worlds interpretation is correct.

Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if something similar will happen when we understand consciousness more deeply. Simply saying that it's an emergent property is sort of cheating and discounting how different the sense of experience is from anything else that we have seen in nature.

agumonkey2• 6 years ago

Anybody have a really bad negative feeling toward the deconstruction of science ? There was an obvious degree of existential improvement for a while, but then dissecting everything at this points .. kinda hurts my soul. I somehow wants to keep some magic unexplained phenomena to stare at without any theory, just feeling.

nvrspyx• 6 years ago

As much as I'd like to believe that consciousness is unique, I don't think we have to look that far to show otherwise. There's an abundance of mental disorders that affect consciousness. Take for example something as (relatively) mundane as ADHD. Anyone with it that has a reasonable amount of insight will tell you that they are almost entirely driven by attention, which is the crux of ADHD.

I'd argue that "consciousness" is the illusion that's created from attention, which you're ultimately a slave to. While I don't have empirical evidence, considering how difficult it would be, I believe that attention is the heart of what we consider consciousness. What your attention focuses on is built on nature and nurture. Your attention is grabbed by what you're "interested" in and what you deem is important. It guides your thoughts, your perception, your internal representations, your attitude, your decisions, etc.

The illusion is that you have control over your attention. Again, anyone with ADHD and insight will conclude that you don't. If your mind will is a computer, then attention is the cursor that guides interactions with it. However, we're not in "control" of it since basically what we know of as the self is the mouse cursor of the mind. I don't think we move the mouse; I think that's the illusion.

Me typing this is simply a product of my attention and it leading me to the conclusion that I should type this because this topic and the representations I've constructed internally are significant to me as a result of my education, life experiences, genetics, etc.

At least, that's my opinion. I definitely don't want to come off as an authority on consciousness. I don't think anyone is (yet). Despite my view, I do believe we can uncover the mystery of consciousness from mere perseverance, even if consciousness is emergent.

---

Someone has already proposed a thought experiment, but I propose an alternative. Imagine all humans (and living creatures in general) as cells and neurons of an even greater being. What if what we understand as the universe is actually just the composition of a larger mind? As cells, would we comprehend or know that? Or would we assume we're independent beings? The infrastructure we build, the roads connecting clumps of societies, the internet connecting all humans together, etc.

Who is to say that we're not simply building more complicated versions of what we would consider synapses between neurons, nervous systems, circulatory systems, etc? Perhaps the progression of humanity, and the universe at large, is actually just a small organ during the gestation or development phase of a much larger being and we are completely unaware?

One notion that comes to mind is fractals. We see it everywhere in nature. What if consciousness does emerge from complexity and what we consider reality is just a single resolution of a much more complex and larger fractal?

SideburnsOfDoom2• 6 years ago

but claiming that it is fully explainable in some mechanistic way sounds suspect to me.

What's the alternative? If it's not "fully explainable in some mechanistic way" then you need a mystical component to the explanation?

That is itself suspect, exceedingly suspect, to many people.

TheOtherHobbes2• 6 years ago

The alternative is that current metaphors are wrong and new metaphors are needed.

qwerty4561272• 6 years ago

I absolutely agree, to the point of considering almost any materialistic (as well as theological) debate about consciousnesses pointless.

Just for fun, however: what if consciousness actually is just a manifestation of mass? (I've in fact heard a hypotheses it's a manifestation of gravity) Just trying to imagine consciousness of a mountain exceeding that of my own by orders of magnitude is an interesting experience. I imply that a consciousnesses of a different order does not necessarily has a function of acting or communicating in a way we could consider conscious.

vl3• 6 years ago

The answer, of course, is that there is no consciousness: if you try to precisely define what consciousness is, you’ll end up with increasingly absurd “you know when you see it” kinds of definitions. Objectively there is no any “special” consciousness, it’s just information processing systems, simple or complex.

coldtea3• 6 years ago

The answer, of course, is that there is no consciousness: if you try to precisely define what consciousness is, you’ll end up with increasingly absurd “you know when you see it” kinds of definition

There's nothing absurd about “you know when you see it”. Those are just things we don't have (or can't have, or don't yet have) good definitions for, but do exist.

"Family resemblance" [1] classes of things are often like that.

"What is a game", is a classical example. Any definition you can give can be violated, including "having a goal", or "not having real impact" etc. And yet we know a game when we see one. And there's lots of other such distinctions.

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

visarga7• 6 years ago

Let me try an easy definition: consciousness is that which makes you get out of bed in the morning and get something to eat. Life is a series of experiences and choices and something needs to make those choices in such a way as to continue life.

If it weren't for consciousness your body would not survive, or grow to adult size, or reproduce. Of course, 'get something to eat' sounds simpler than it is in reality - you would need to be able to see, walk, grasp, understand the environment and objects at your disposal, shop, cook, earn money, be a functioning member of society - the whole bag.

GoblinSlayer• 6 years ago

You're not even wrong, it's logically impossible to derive temperature from velocity either because temperature is defined as a fundamental attribute of matter. You can only quantitatively connect them, and such connection is seen as explanation in mechanistic way.

comboy• 6 years ago

For anyone interested in this kind of ponderings I strongly recommend Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.

It may be the best book I've ever read.

dTal3• 6 years ago

Is consciousness is not emergent from something - not "fully explainable in some mechanistic way" - what type of explanation for it would satisfy you? If you're not willing to brook the idea of breaking it into smaller components, then you've abdicated understanding it all - it's just an ineffable feature of the universe we'll have to live with, some shadow of the spirit world that has zero effect on any physics calculation. That seems weird to me, and lazy to boot.

pontus7• 6 years ago

I don't know, that's the problem :)

Btw, I would imagine that our experience of consciousness is emergent from something else, but the question is what that something else is. Is it nothing more than mass, charge etc. or is it something else?

rixed• 6 years ago

The difference is that charge, spin etc have their own effects/manifestations, whereas consciousness does not cause anything.

jdmichal• 6 years ago

I'm personally a fan of attention schema theory. It's based on the idea that consciousness emerges from an advancing capability to create models of both the external and internal world. For me, it scratches a couple itches. First, it's not an all-or-nothing evolutionary gamble, but develops in steps and each step has advantages. Second, it seems pretty well rooted in neuroscience and psychology, rather than relying on handwaves like "all matter has consciousness".

Here's a couple articles from Michael Graziano, the founder (discoverer? namer?):

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-rea...

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons...

ajuc3• 6 years ago

We all know what a forest is. But there is no "particle of forestness".

Most of the words we use don't need laws of physics and particles exclusive for them. What makes you think consciousness is more like electromagnetism than it is like a forest?

In my opinion consciousness is just an abstraction, like a football match or a forest. We have a word for these common configurations of matter, but it doesn't mean that they are fundamentally, qualitatively different from the rest of the universe.

Show me an elementary particle of forest then I can admit that consciousness needs one too :)

visarga7• 6 years ago

Consciousness is not just an abstraction, requires self replication/evolution and ability to create models of self and environment - both being extraordinary feats.

A perceptive self replicator existing inside a multi-agent environment that affords both cooperation and competition, and who's existence depends on its ability to adapt and act well - this configuration is what creates consciousness in my opinion.

There is no particle or fundamental quality of consciousness, but it is what self replication under limited resources leads to.

codeulike• 6 years ago

Saying consciousness is emergent is definitely weird, but the problem is, so are all the other possible explanations. If you're trying to avoid supernatural explanations then emergence is the best of a baffling bad bunch IMHO.

(Then I would back this up a bit with "once you start investigating it, a lot of aspects of consciousness are quite different to what people would intuitively expect" and that makes it all a bit more feasible. E.g. saccades and the fovea are fascinating and counterintuitive, what else are we getting wrong?)

vikramkr• 6 years ago

Is it though? Until we have more information, all these explanations are equally unsubstantiated. If you're speculating without the data and I sight needed to actually understand it, then the proposal isn't any better because it feels less supernatural. The actual explanation will probably seem really weird and supernatural to us now since we dont have the data and experiments to understand it. Today, quantum tunneling is still weird, still hard to wrap your mind around, but it's a phenomenon that we understand well enough to work with. We try to avoid it when making a CPU, try to make it happen when we use a scanning tunneling microscope. But 250 years ago trying to explain how a scanning tunneling microscope that just appeared into the world would have seemed impossible without invoking some supernatural sounding explanation. We have consciousness, we dont know where it came from yet, maybe there's a consciousness field we'll find when we figure out how to unite gravity and quantum mechanics, maybe theres an emergent property we'll understand once we can map a brain's functions and do some data science on it, maybe there's some explanation that we cant even imagine yet, but until there's data none are less supernatural than the others

visarga7• 6 years ago

If you're trying to avoid supernatural explanations then emergence is the best of a baffling bad bunch IMHO.

Emergence is a general word, too general. I think what we need here is just self-replication. Self replication leads to competition, which given enough time leads to the evolution of perception and ultimately reasoning.

gen2203• 6 years ago

Only responding to a tiny piece of your very good comment.

In the Maier/Rechtin book on system design, they spend a few pages talking about the word “Emergent”, and how “weak” it is. They says that we use the word to denote things that are almost certainly explainable, but for which we do not yet understand the mechanism of its behavior.

They use (iirc) the example of a black box system that produces a whistle noise at seemingly random moments, which observers interpret as “emergent” when reality reveals itself on closer inspection. Their point is essentially that the description “emergent” is a cop-out, and that so far nothing we’ve described as “emergent” has actually turned out to be inexplicable.

I often hear smart people saying things like “consciousness is just an emergent feature of our brains”, in a way that seems to imply “that’s that”, when in fact it’s not an explanation but rather an admission of ignorance. Admitting ignorance is fine, but ignorance is not an explanation.

I personally don’t think we’ll understand the mechanisms that underpin consciousness within our lifetimes, but I certainly don’t think consciousness is inexplicable.

mannykannot9• 6 years ago

"Emergence" can certainly be abused in this way, but it is nevertheless a real, useful and important concept.

Take Darwin's theory of evolution, for example. Evolution is an emergent theory in that a purely reductivist approach to biology will not find a particle or field of evolution. This does not mean either that biology is inexplicable by physics, or that evolution is pseudo-science.

bufferoverflow2• 6 years ago

That sounds a lot like Deepak Chopra's pseudoscientific woo.

sitkack2• 6 years ago

Deepak studies a specific branch called, Ching Cha Ching, which enables him to make lots of money.

faeyanpiraat2• 6 years ago

Worth watching a Deepak / Sam Harris interview, they tend to turn into - painful, but - great comedy.

mathgenius8• 6 years ago

Chopra annoys me too, but he is actually a good dude (IMO): the stuff he talks about is based on Vedanta, which is an old eastern tradition. And he tries to connect this with modern science. I say go for it.

I'd much rather put people like Oprah Winfrey or Tony Robbins on a woo-shitlist. But not Chopra.

bufferoverflow2• 6 years ago

No, he is not a good dude. He spreads pseudoscientific garbage. I don't care if it's based on some old tradition.

notaphilosopher2• 6 years ago

May the Schwartz be with you.

And place the midichlorian detector on the Qi pad, wouldja?

zozbot2345• 6 years ago

Since identical particles[0] are inherent in QM, I don't think you could even define what one "electron" is or what it might mean for it to be conscious. But conciousness (or rather, proto-qualia, which are the part of "conciousness" that really seems to demand some physical explanation) could subsist in more complex systems, probably involving a high-dimensional internal description as a result of some sort of stable quantum entanglement.

(Indeed, the fact that the sort of basic subjective experience we're familiar with seems to empirically exist as part of intelligent life is a rather compelling argument for non-trivial quantum computation of some sort being quite feasible in the real world.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles

ffhhj3• 6 years ago

Consciouness is the observation of own states, nothing fancy about it. We humans have powerful machines to observe ourselves, our environment, and to "observe" their future states thru prediction. Observing our observability in a recursive way is what give us a feeling of "consciousness". Even some paradoxes, like Zeno's and Supertasks are simple observer's problems.

zozbot2345• 6 years ago

The notion that we can "observe our own states" does not stand up to genuinely deep insight about our phenomenology. Experienced practitioners in insight meditation have been able to shatter this illusion, and realize that we can only ever observe memories of some apparent "self" - that no real "self" observation of our observability 'in a recursive way' is going on (thus, pithily: "no self"). But of course, they're still conscious!

ffhhj3• 6 years ago

we can only ever observe memories of some apparent "self"

To make a "self" we observe too many ideas, these experienced practitioners in insight meditation are simply removing those mental models and observing the simplest states. They are saving a memory of that, so when they stop meditating and go back to observing their "self" they remember they were conscious in a basic observation mode. That's all.

nabla9• 6 years ago

This is called explanation by definition. You can explain anything by first creating a definition you can explain, then just saying this is it.

Your explanation seems to assign non-physical magical properties to 'own state' observation. Why is 'own state' different?

ffhhj3• 6 years ago

Your explanation seems to assign non-physical magical properties to 'own state' observation

What magical properties are you talking about? You would need to study electronics and programming to understand what "observation", "states" and "recursion" means, all of those are real concepts.

markhahn• 6 years ago

panpsychism is the flying spaghetti monster.

with added pretense.

yters2• 6 years ago

We avoid all the woo and counter intuitiveness is we just take the common sense substance dualism postion we had since childhood. So what if a 'soul' is outside our current scientific paradigm? If we ignored all ideas outside the current paradigm, we would still be substance dualists.

badrabbit3• 6 years ago

I would be very amused if modern science discovered souls (your "operating system") and the spiritual realm exist. Much like dragons/monsters were discovered (but renamed Dinosaurs). I already believe this so I am biased, but I do firmly believe that modern humans overestimate not only what they know but what they are capable of knowing and undetstanding. I think the realm of reality you interact with originated from elsewhere.

This and some of the topics I am learning about in quantum mechanics (like virtual particles) remind me of this:

"By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible." -- Hebrews 11:3 NIV

Just sharing an opinion and an observation.

joycian2• 6 years ago

A virtual particle is only a virtual particle because we as humans implicitly have the particle view as fundamental. There's nothing special about a fluctuation in a quantum field being not long lived enough or not stable enough for us to recognize it as "a real particle".

So your quotation is right, but you need to go one level deeper.

badrabbit3• 6 years ago

Interesting and thank you. I have much to learn about quantum physics, but it is very fascinating.

keithnz3• 6 years ago

A while back I read 'Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind' ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41571759-conscious ) which attempts to promote panpsychism. It does a pretty good job at exploring the curious nature of consciousness, but panpsychism I think is just at the level of 'woo'. It makes the case that because we are having trouble with fully understanding what consciousness is, we must fully engage in exploring ideas like panpsychism. While I generally support coming up with all kinds of ideas and exploring them, the proponents of this idea seem a little too convinced it's a real thing based on zero evidence, they promote quite a bit through seemingly scientific "speak" but use words like "may" "might" "possible" etc to exploit the basic fact that we simply don't know yet and want to present it as a credible possibility.

Xenograph2• 6 years ago

You just shot down the book/idea (panpsychism) without providing a single constructive reason. Instead, you applied a derogatory label ('woo'), and attacked the proponents instead of the idea itself, saying: "the proponents of this idea seem a little too convinced...".

keithnz3• 6 years ago

I thought I made it pretty clear they propose a whole bunch of possibilities in the gaps of our current understanding. The problem is the proponents make out these possibilities are much more probable than any evidence suggests. The reason it is woo, is because they start reasoning about things based on no evidence and present it as "knowledge". Like most woo, if you accept the axioms without evidence, then you can create a world of knowledge that seems logically coherent based on those axioms. That's sort of the nature of woo. It's not attacking the proponents, it's just my observations of the situation.

ozzmotik• 6 years ago

oh i am definitely going to have to finish reading this as I am certainly an avid fan of the concept of consciousness itself being the substrate of reality. that being said, i don't necessarily viewing it through a panpsychist lens is entirely accurate as that perspective more or less tends to assume consciousness as some base aspect of material reality, and as such a base unit, but my own personal spiritual experiences and development in that regard have shown me that it is rather the other way around, that consciousness is the core metaphor, the non deterministic field of probability that constitutes reality, and more emergent and highly complex life forms also gained with their development a more strict set of deterministic rules to follow (instincts, genetics and such), and as such it would be more apt to suggest that material reality through the "objective" lens we (seek to) perceive it through is just the net output of running that core algorithm of iterate over time

propagating some aspect of your essence, ideally in a stochastic system that allows for novelty to form, as really the pursuit of novelty is the only underlying force that, to me, can explain the wondered emergent forms that reality is known to take. not to mention the amazing correspondences between micro and macro scale experiences despite appearing to (which is likely in all reality illusory) be two separate connected-but-not-directly-related constructs.

in any case i just always feel compelled to ramble when it comes to consciousness and the nature of reality. i should probably read the rest of the article now. sorry if my delivery or communication was not quite clear, that's a known pain point and something I have been attempting to address ever since back around 1991 when I, having caught the big dumb, evidently never got the memo on reasonable social interaction lol

sixQuarks2• 6 years ago

I've been trying to formulate thoughts I have on consciousness that make sense in my head, but I haven't been able to communicate it effectively.

Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body? Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness? How does "my" consciousness know to come back into "my" brain whenever I lose it (through sleep or injury, etc).

The answer that I lean toward is that there is no such thing as you or me. There is only one consciousness and it is merely being filtered through each living (or perhaps nonliving) being in containerized modules.

So, to "me", it feels like I'm experiencing my own consciousness but in reality everyone is the same "me". You are me, I am you, etc, we are simply filtering consciousness through different atomic arrangements.

For example, let's say you read about a criminal who does a terrible thing and you can't imagine yourself ever doing that. But in reality, it is the same "you", only that your consciousness has been filtered through a different arragement of atoms that has caused that "module" to act that way. It is the same YOU who committed that crime, all it took was a different filtering device to make you act that way.

Anyway, that's kind of what I'm thinking. I'm sure it's not an original thought, but I don't know what kind of philosophy this is called other than "one consciosness".

xwdv• 6 years ago

That means when we die we just slip into someone else and never really even know it because we have all their memories and experiences up to that point in time. Perhaps this process even happens all the time as we lose consciousness and regain it. Our bodies are merely antennas for tuning into the vast universal consciousness. Madness.

The takeaway from this for me is to be kind to any living thing as it could be you.

KingFelix• 6 years ago

So now build out an experiment, see if you can play around with this filter device and see if you can find something clever. Step 2, invent something crazy, or start a cult. Good Luck!

TheSpiceIsLife• 6 years ago

If I recall correctly, you might like to search around for the term ever-present witness.

Don't have time to elaborate right now sorry.

isaachier• 6 years ago

Sounds like monopsychism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsychism).

hackinthebochs6• 6 years ago

But what work is this notion of a universal consciousness doing for you? Why not just get rid of it and say that we are all just independent processes with psychological continuity that entails our experience of individuality?

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

You might enjoy this[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

kfrzcode2• 6 years ago

I love to share the text: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

lnanek22• 6 years ago

Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness? How does "my" consciousness know to come back into "my" brain whenever I lose it (through sleep or injury, etc).

Why doesn't the fire in your car's engine suddenly appear in the engine of a car down the street?

prvnsmpth• 6 years ago

Pretty much this. Your "consciousness" is nothing but neural activity in your own brain. By definition, it cannot appear anywhere else but your brain.

sixQuarks2• 6 years ago

This is why I say I'm not able to communicate my thought very well. Your statement is simply the obvious, this is not what I'm trying to get at.

It's more like... why did my consciousness decide to attach itself specifically to "my" body, and only my body? Is it REALLY only attached to my body? Each of us are simply a collection of atoms - as Carl Sagan says, we are the universe trying to understand itself.

I have consciousness AND I'm just merely made up of atoms, while every other person is also merely made up of atoms. Does that mean my consciousness could have randomly ended up inside any other "being"? And would that consciousness be the "same" me, just in a different body? OR would "my" consciousness be affected and come out differently if it were filtered by a different being? This is kind of what I'm trying to get at.

Someone else on this thread said something along the lines of they think of consciousness as a field that permeates everything. This is along the lines of what I'm thining. Consciousness is the same, we are all the same consciousness, simply filtered in different modules.

booleandilemma• 6 years ago

Consciousness is a physical phenomenon. You can't wake up in another body in the same way you can't just wake up in someone else's house.

stan_rogers• 6 years ago

I did that many, many times. That's why I don't drink anymore.

faeyanpiraat2• 6 years ago

I’ve got a quite scary thought about this: what if we are not only not the same consciousness after we fade away by daily sleep, etc.., but we are constantly fading away in short cycles, like every “tick” (planck time?) happening in the physical simulation of this world?

How would you be able to tell the difference?

throwanem• 6 years ago

Why would it matter?

PeterisP2• 6 years ago

This seems related to the concept of Last Thursdayism - if the world was created last thursday, how would you be able to tell the difference?

You have some memories of earlier times than last thursday, but there's literally nothing that prevents them from being indistinguishably fake; your consciousness could be existing in a simulation that started five seconds ago, and there's no way to disprove that.

But the reasonable answer to that is if it's not possible to tell the difference, then we define that to be the same consciousness; so that the answer to the question "if we are not only not the same consciousness after we fade away by daily sleep, etc.., but we are constantly fading away in short cycles" is "it's the same consciousness, period" by definition.

root_axis• 6 years ago

Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body? Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness?

Maybe you do, but there wouldn't be any way to tell because the brain only has memories of itself, you couldn't remember the swap even if it occurred. Our apparent reality does not rule out solipsism.

square_usual• 6 years ago

You might be interested in the Hindu/Buddhist philosophy of Advaita Vedanta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta

kfrzcode2• 6 years ago

Have you read this short story by Andy Weir? [0]

To me, it's like life is a conglomeration of matter built in such a fashion that it can act as an antenna, or a lens, attenuating and focusing consciousness such that it can be experienced.

[0] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html)?

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body? Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness? How does "my" consciousness know to come back into "my" brain whenever I lose it (through sleep or injury, etc).

Maybe it's not attached to the brain, but rather produced/created by your brain?

The answer that I lean toward is that there is no such thing as you or me.

I agree that there is no self. But that is different from consciousness.

joeyjojo• 6 years ago

This resonates with me as I have a similar thoughts on consciousness. The way I try to express my thoughts on this is to imagine that consciousness is a fabric that permeates the entire universe, but there exist these kind of extremely dense pockets of consciousness (ie, within us and our brains) where the fabric is tightly bound. Every kind of system that exists within the universe naturally lends itself to being conscious. The more complex the system the greater the density of consciousness it yields. Perhaps we cannot perceive consciousness in most (simpler) systems because it is minuscule compared to the density of consciousness within our brains, although we do tend to get these spooky kinds of insights and intuitions into the higher-order consciousness that emerges from many brains combined, such as collective consciousness, gaia, mass hysteria, etc.

zozbot2345• 6 years ago

Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body?

Because conciousness (or rather, subjective perception) is a physical phenomenon after all - it's causally linked to the universe in a way that means it can't just "jump" brains absent some kind of telepathy.

Identity is not really mysterious from a "hard problem of conciousness" POV; it's simply one phenomenology (one 'quale') among many, and experienced meditators can even turn it on and off at will. It's really only proto-perception and perhaps proto-cognition that probably needs to be explained.

simonh4• 6 years ago

Hang on, if there is only one shared consciousness, you would expect that you would be able to wake up in another person's body. It seems to like that would be an inevitable consequence of that proposition. The fact that this never happens demonstrates, to me, that we do have a persistent discrete individual identity.

libertine4• 6 years ago

Because your body is the record of your experience and existence.

That's why a lot of people think a human brain would never be able to be uploaded to a computer, and if you could do it, you'd not be yourself - you'd be something else.

You are the sum of your experiences, a build up of scars, traumas, and so on.

So according to this theory, you'd only wake up on someones else body if that person had the same sum of experiences you had, yet that's impossible because only you are you - not even twins would experience this. Maybe that's why we value this experience so much: it's so unique and so intimate to ourselves, that we hold on to it dearly.

You then have hints of collective (un)consciousness. Jung explored this concept with archetypes.

OnACoffeeBreak• 6 years ago

You are never the same you from one moment to next, and the mind adapts to deal with this change. So I would think the mind would adapt when downloaded into a new body. Certainly, your point stands, in that the mind downloaded into a new body would not be the same you, but I would argue that it might be enough of you to maintain the sense of you.

qwerty4561272• 6 years ago

So according to this theory, you'd only wake up on someones else body if that person had the same sum of experiences you had

I know that's impossible for many reasons, but which body would you wake up in if somebody would make an exact subatomic-perfect duplicate of your body. Wouldn't the copy become just a twin having identical memories and believing he's you? Wouldn't you still only see the world from the point where you've been rather than where your copy has emerged?

mathgenius8• 6 years ago

Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness?

I've thought about this too, and my conclusion is that there's no way to know. Maybe we wake up as someone else everyday, with all the emotional/psychological baggage that entails.

xornox• 6 years ago

Because we do not know what consciousness is, it is not reasonable discuss if electrons have or have not something we do not understand at all.

pacala• 6 years ago

Humans are unique in evolving recursive language. Consciousness is a recursive agent: observe me observing the world, several layers deep. Likely the exact same mutation / brain structure backs both mechanisms.

Neither electrons, nor the Universe, are recursive agents. Maybe some of the Devil's apprentices playing with reinforcement learning AI will inadvertently create a non-human consciousness, but other than that, humans are special.

stevebmark• 6 years ago

I suggest you stop supporting nautil.us. Look at the bafflingly low quality of this article. Is it coincidence that nautilus articles like these frontpage once a weekend? Is it an organic submission? Or something else? This is like a throwaway class paper (which, given how nautilus sources, may very well be).

sdhrnrhbrt2• 6 years ago

The idea is very important, though. How the article explains it is another thing.

nefitty2• 6 years ago

I have questions about their agenda. They were exclusively funded, initially, by the John Templeton Foundation.

Whatever one’s personal feelings about Richard Dawkins, this bit he said in The God Delusion is apropos, regarding how he feels the Templeton Foundation doles out rewards, “usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion".

rantwasp3• 6 years ago

for a definition of conscious yes. the problem is that we don’t really understand what consciousness is and we tend to anthropomorphize everything.

what if consciousness is the synchronicity of the observations of the outside world with the predictions of our brains?

no more, no less, with and added layer of hierarchies and recursion.

kendallpark• 6 years ago

There are a lot of different philosophical positions with regard to the mind-body problem, but very few attempts at a testable scientific theory about how consciousness works. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is such an attempt.

Nature Opinion article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

knzhou2• 6 years ago

Note that IIT has been criticized [0] for being extremely gameable: it is trivial to build simple circuits that do absolutely nothing, but have more "consciousness" than all humans who have ever lived.

0: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

GregarianChild• 6 years ago

Scott's article devastated IIT. Lot's of people stopped looking at IIT after it appeared. Here is a related question: has IIT ever lead to an interesting neurobiological insight? Has IIT suggested an interesting research hypothesis that has been proven or disproven? In other words: is IIT an interesting scientific methodology? Short answer: no.

peter_vukovic• 6 years ago

From a logical standpoint, questioning whether Consciousness "exists" is ludicrous. Consciousness is the foundation of our capability to observe the world around us and make conclusions about it. Protons, electrons, atoms, molecules and other phenomena do not exist outside of our Consciousness and we cannot prove absolutely anything about the world that is not a part of our Consciousness. Therefore, if something is to be questioned, it is our strange desire to prove the existence of the only thing we are directly experiencing all the time - Consciousness. It's like a computer program becoming aware of itself and trying to find that awareness in the source code. It's not there.

gitgud• 6 years ago

There's the Mechanical Universe theory and then there's the Everything is Conscious theory.

It's interesting to see the steps taken to arrive at that.

- A person has thoughts, yes

- A chip has thoughts, yes

- A dog has thoughts, yes

- A mouse has thoughts, yes

- A fly has thoughts, yes

- A microbe has thoughts, maybe

- A virus has thoughts, maybe not

- An atom has thoughts, maybe not

- An electron has thoughts, maybe not

It's a blurry line between life and matter, and perhaps consciousness goes down to that level too.

I'm still a "Mechanical Universe" guy though

tachyonbeam• 6 years ago

I would argue that intelligence is a tool that life has evolved to become more adaptable to its environment. Intelligence exists at many scales, and consciousness is an emergent property of high intelligence. At some point, as your model of the world becomes sophisticated enough, you have to have a model of yourself, so you become self-aware. Self-awareness evolved because it made for smarter, more effective animals.

Unicellular organisms do information processing and react to their environment. You could say they they're intelligent in that sense, they can actually have very complex behavior. However, they're not self-aware, they don't have a model of the world that incorporates a model of themselves. Neurons involved in multicellular organisms as an effective way to quickly send signals across, making multicellular creatures more adaptable to their environment. These neurons started to organize in more complex circuits that could do increasingly sophisticated information processing because that was good for survival, and so on and so on, until you get self-awareness.

ChrisCinelli• 6 years ago

I read once of the NDE of a person that is very well documented. I think it was Pam Reynolds. http://www.neardth.com/pam-reynolds-near-death-experience.ph...

It is hard to explain if you do not want to consider that our counsciuness may trascend our mortal existence.

Zigurd2• 6 years ago

Getting you to consider that seems to be the purpose of the publication in which the article appears.

DesiLurker2• 6 years ago

I personally like roger penrose's theory (hypothesis?) of orchestrated objective reduction of consciousness (Orch-OR). He stipulates that in evolution of the quantum state of a system the collapse of wave function IS a form of proto-consciousness. Essentially the he is saying that WF collapse is how a system becomes 'aware' of the choice and consciousness emerges from there onwards. A Brain of sufficient/right complexity is a connectionist structure that is responsible for perceiving and/or translating it.

What he's missing is the agent responsible for incorporating in the human/animal brain but some interesting candidates have come forwards like microtubules in neurons. But it is all highly speculative, though, there have been some advances in proving that biology is not too wet-warm-noisy for quantum state to persist without decoehrence for instance.. photosynthesis.

mathgenius8• 6 years ago

Penrose's stuff is very interesting, and I always enjoy hearing him talk about it. But for me it is a soup with too many ingredients. Better to look at the ingredients separately, for example, the idea of microtubules maintaining coherent quantum information. That already is very interesting, and would make a good meal.

DesiLurker2• 6 years ago

its a few days late so i dont know whether anybody will read it but my thoughts exactly.

there should be a significant more research dollars spent on this as there is so much unknown there. just that fact that we still dont know how general anesthesia works and how we regain consciousness back in itself is quite fascinating. IMO in all this philosophical debate about nature of consciousness we often overlook the basic starting points in front of our eyes what mechanishm are necessary to sustain it. we need serious research on this otherwise it will be dominated by psuedo science BS like deepak chopra.

sdhrnrhbrt2• 6 years ago

If we consider a large group of people as a whole, can we say that this group has its own consciousness? For example Congress is a bunch of old dudes with their own consciousnesses, but as a whole it makes decisions by voting and other complex internal interactions between these individual consciousnesses. For an outsider, this organization behaves like a conscious being.

Another way to look at this idea is that consciousness is when we impose a boundary condition on a "medium" made of conscious "particles". I'd even compare humans with a liquid. When it flows freely, it obeys some general fluid laws and its behavior is rather uninteresting. It's when you confine a part of this liquid into some boundaries, the captured liquid starts to demonstrate some interesting effects. Same with humans. When they act freely and barely interact with each other, they form a uniform mess, but once we impose various boundaries, such as countries, companies or various forms of organizations, humans captured in those boundaries are forced to interact with each other more often and those interactions are governed by various laws, and at that moment these fictional entities start to look like conscious beings.

dmix• 6 years ago

David Bohm's Implicate vs Explicate Order seems to be a root question here (as indicated in the article)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_explicate_order

toohotatopic• 6 years ago

Two things that don't fit:

1) Even if electrons have consciousness, why should it be linked to our consciousness?

2) Why is decision making the essence of consciousness?

The Schroedinger equation is just a model, not reality. There doesn't even have to be an undecided state in reality. But even if the universe is conscious and decides in every moment, that doesn't explain our consciousness. If everything is conscious, in an ever increasing density why don't we have several consciousnesses in our head? Why is our stomach not conscious?

And even if we are not free to make decisions, we could still be conscious in the same way that we watch sporting events without intervening. Actually I would argue that we never decide. We always 'choose' the most preferred option that deterministically depends on our state of mind. And yet, we are conscious.

Joeri• 6 years ago

We do have several consciousnesses in our head, which end up acting as a collective and then the left brain interpreter post-rationalizes the behavior as if a single mind is at work. That’s why we act against our own decisions so often.

You can see this demonstrated with people with split brain syndrome, where the brain halves are unable to directly communicate and you can trick them out by confronting the speaking left brain with conflicting actions by the right brain. The left brain will invent an explanation on the spot.

https://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/split_brain.htm

elliekelly• 6 years ago

Do people with split brain syndrome have an internal “stream of consciousness”? Or two? I’m not sure what the right word/phrase would be but I’m talking about our internal monologue or narration.

SAI_Peregrinus3• 6 years ago

Another example would be simple dreaming. The "you" experiencing the dream is indistinguishable from a conscious being (normal you) at least to itself. It has thoughts, feelings, sensations, and experiences. There can also be other people in your dream, and you can sometimes converse with them. Yet (unless you're dreaming you can read minds) your dream self can't tell what these other dream-people are thinking, even though they're all part of your mind. And they can be indistinguishable to you from conscious beings.

mathgenius8• 6 years ago

The Schroedinger equation is just a model, not reality.

Maybe.

Why is our stomach not conscious?

When I am hungry it certainly seems like my stomach is conscious. Indeed, they have found neurons in the digestive tract.

JeremyNT• 6 years ago

A fun speculation about similar things is found in the Neal Stephenson novel "Anathem," where consciousness is a manifestation of the many-worlds interpretation of QM.

The notion in the novel is that most "forks" are imperceptible, but forks in a brain result in outsized impacts on the physical world due to the tight interconnectivity of its neurons / circuitry (i.e. the normally minuscule difference in electron spin could cause an entirely different neural pathway to be followed, resulting in the conscious entity taking different actions and thus greatly impacting the world in tangible ways). It is the susceptibility to this cascading effect that somehow results in "consciousness."

It's probably baloney, but it's a fun read with some interesting things to consider :)

mirimir• 6 years ago

Once you take this path, you can make up anything that you like. There's no way to test it. Except, I suppose, based on how you feel about it, how well societies work whose members believe it, and so on.

TheUndead96• 6 years ago

I agree with this. There are similar arguments that you cannot prove reality is real. Sure, but how does that help us solve the energy crisis or world hunger? It is philosophical musical chairs. Aristotle and Plato investigated how to live a better life.

seemslegit2• 6 years ago

No they may not well be.

IIT is pure sophistry - some years ago Scott Aaronson showed that using their definition of potential for consciousness electronic devices employing certain kinds of algebraic error-correction codes have it - meant as a reductio-ad-absurdum of IIT, apparently its promoters have decided to try and own the absurdity.

In other news - nautil.us is an utter garbage chute of an outlet, the new-science-journalism equivalent of British tabloids and I fully expect them to publish a psuedoscientific apologia for astrology or an evolutionary theory supporting the existence of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster - post-Darwinnian cryptozoology anyone ?

eru• 6 years ago

Scott Aaronson wrote about this before https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

The title 'Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander)' tell you what he thinks of the theory.

Some more discussion also at https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/7avunr/inte...

codesnik• 6 years ago

that article (which imho is totally devoid of any substance) still reminded me about other thought experiment by Feynman: What if there's just one electron in the universe, traveling back and force in time, becoming positron when changing time direction, consuming energy when turning forward and releasing when turning back? He was quick to reject this idea, because in this case there would be exactly the same amount of electrons and positrons in the universe, and it doesn't seem to be the case, but I just love the elegance of the conjecture.

nefitty2• 6 years ago

There’s something fishy about Nautilus. One of their main contributors is the John Templeton Foundation:

“The work supported by the John Templeton Foundation crosses disciplinary, religious, and geographical boundaries. Our grantees produce field-leading scholarship across the sciences, theology, and philosophy. From probing gravitational waves to updating the modern evolutionary synthesis, they have contributed to major discoveries in the basic sciences. Other grantees have opened critical new topics to scientific investigation, including prayer, gratitude, immortality, and imagination.”

An initial reaction from someone online, https://ksj.mit.edu/archive/does-science-magazine-nautilus-h...

In 2013, Amos Zeeberg, the digital editor of Nautilus said this in an interview: “The Templeton Foundation provided all of the money for our launch and for the initial operation of the magazine. We hope they’ll fund us further, and we also are getting revenue from advertising and potentially other foundations.”

axguscbklp8• 6 years ago

Discussions of consciousness tend to frustrate me a bit. So many otherwise smart people, for some reason, simply do not understand the hard problem of consciousness. They'll say things like "well, consciousness is just a given pattern of physical stuff" but they do not realize what to me is an obvious objection - to say that consciousness is equivalent to a given pattern of physical stuff does not explain why that pattern of physical stuff is not simply present without any consciousness associated with it. I can imagine a being that is physically identical to a human in every way, but is not conscious - there is no reason to think that intelligent behavior requires consciousness. So what is the difference between such a being and a conscious human, if the two are physically identical?

KKPMW• 6 years ago

Agreed. And I think it's even harder than that. When it comes to studying or thinking about consciousness - there is no way tor me to prove that any other person in the room is conscious except for myself. Given this, how can we even begin to talk about "AI consciousness" or in this case electrons being conscious.

tetris11• 6 years ago

Forgive me if im being dense, but if that human replica still responds to stimulus in some way, and has basic wants and needs, then surely it is still conscious, just lower down on our human scale?

axguscbklp8• 6 years ago

You can build a computer that responds to stimulus - we do it all the time - but that doesn't mean that it necessarily is conscious (that is, has subjective experience). If I build a computer that responds to stimulus, that doesn't necessarily mean (to paraphrase Thomas Nagel) that there is something that it is like to be that computer.

sandgiant• 6 years ago

You may be able to imagine a body physically identical to yourself not having a consciousness, but you cannot deduce from that, that this is something that can actually happen in our Universe. It may just as well be true that any exact physical copy of a body containing a consciousness is also conscious. In fact, the latter seems like a simpler assumption than the former.

My own take is that we, as biased humans, put too much value on consciousness. I have not seen any evidence that consciousness is nothing more than a convenient way to organize a complex pattern of elementary particles for self preservation. In that sense the discussion of consciousness is an interesting exercise in analogies, and while it may very well put us on a track to better understand everything from quantum mechanics to the mind, it still, to me, has a very anthropic vibe to it.

axguscbklp8• 6 years ago

You may be able to imagine a body physically identical to yourself not having a consciousness, but you cannot deduce from that, that this is something that can actually happen in our Universe.

Agreed, but doesn't that just further throw us back to the mystery of consciousness as something that transcends the physical? Why would a given arrangement of physical stuff necessarily give rise to subjective experience?

It may just as well be true that any exact physical copy of a body containing a consciousness is also conscious. In fact, the latter seems like a simpler assumption than the former.

Maybe, but that assumption brings us no closer to understanding consciousness, since consciousness is so radically qualitatively different from physical stuff.

What does "a convenient way to organize a complex pattern of elementary particles for self preservation" have to do with subjective experience, qualia, etc.?

Luc3• 6 years ago

So what is the difference between such a being and a conscious human, if the two are physically identical?

One can imagine any number of fantastical creatures. A being identical to a conscious being is also conscious, there is no problem there.

axguscbklp8• 6 years ago

I'm saying: imagine a being that is identical to a conscious being in every single physical way, but only in physical ways. Why would such a being necessarily be conscious?

oliveshell2• 6 years ago

You’re aware, I assume, that you’re describing David Chalmers’ “philosophical zombie” thought experiment.

The “Hard Problem of Consciousness”— a term coined by Chalmers— is not universally agreed to actually be such a hard problem.

For anyone who wants to dig deeper into this philosophical discussion, Sean Carroll (who does not himself believe the problem to be so “hard”) has a very thorough and civil discussion with Chalmers about this on an episode of his fantastic podcast, Mindscape:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/12/03/epis...

axguscbklp8• 6 years ago

Yes, I am aware that I am describing what is sometimes called a philosophical zombie.

The "hard problem" is certainly not universally agreed to be hard, but so far I have not encountered any rejections of it that struck me as valid in the least bit. I'll check out your link, though.

joycian2• 6 years ago

I can imagine a being that is physically identical to a human in every way, but is not conscious

I can't, and I think that's the central point. This means you're claiming the big c is not a physics process. But I suspect that the next sentence is a more accurate representation of your argument:

there is no reason to think that intelligent behavior requires consciousness

To which I would say, what if consciousness is just a side effect of data integration. What if it's just what if "feels like" to be a system that has memory, external and internal data integration? Nothing magical about that.

So what is the difference between such a being and a conscious human, if the two are physically identical?

Again, you're tacitly assuming that consciousness is not physical, thus assuming your earlier conclusion.

stupidcar• 6 years ago

No, we understand this objection, we just don't think it's valid.

Your thought experiment postulates a pattern of matter that is identical to conscious matter but lacking consciousness. But the fact that you can imagine this does not mean it possible or even meaningful. You give no proof that such a distinction can exist.

"Consciousness" is a label humans apply to a pattern of matter that behaves in certain ways, in the same way "liquid" is a label we apply to a pattern of matter that behaves in certain ways. It makes no more sense to imagine a being that displays conscious behaviour but lacks consciousness than it is to imagine matter that acts identically to liquid but is somehow not a liquid.

In your example, if there is no observable difference between the supposedly conscious and non-conscious beings, then there is, scientifically speaking, no difference at all. They are both conscious, in that they both exhibit the behaviours that we call "consciousness".

If you hypothesise that there is a difference, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it, via measurement — again, your imagination does not count — at which point we can use scientific enquiry to find out exactly how this difference arises. However, since the difference is measurable, it is part of the pattern of matter, and so the outcome of this process will simply be a more refined definition of consciousness.

gjulianm2• 6 years ago

For all you know, everyone except you is a philosophical zombie. Consciousness is subjective and you can only make observations about your own experience. Consciousness is an unsolvable problem because of that.

hackinthebochs6• 6 years ago

I can imagine a being that is physically identical to a human in every way, but is not conscious - there is no reason to think that intelligent behavior requires consciousness.

I experience consciousness as having explanatory power for why I have conversations about the ineffability of consciousness. But if I can posit a being physically identical to myself but without consciousness, then, since the causal explanations for the duplicate's behavior are identical to my own, that means this being as well as myself have beliefs and say the things we do about consciousness, that are not caused by consciousness! My own beliefs about consciousness, supposedly incorrigible because they are directly caused or informed by consciousness, are necessarily not caused or informed by genuine consciousness, only some computational or informational imposter. But that means any reason I have to believe I am conscious, the zombie also has. It follows that either I am also a zombie or zombies are incoherent.

mathgenius8• 6 years ago

My favourite book by Greg Egan is "Permutation City." It is a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument for exactly this: if you can simulate brains then where is the consciousness in all of this? Egan's book takes this idea to it's logical extremes. Very cool and mind-blowing when I first read it two decades ago.

gnulinux3• 6 years ago

Your objection is far from being obvious. One objection to your objection is that your thought experiment is incoherent in the first place. Consciousness does not have be a property of a being in a separate ontology than material reality. In other words, consciousness is not something associated with conscious physical systems in a different reality, rather it is a property of these physical systems because of their particular function. So, it doesn't make sense to talk about something that behaves exactly like a human, but is not conscious. Something that is physically-indistinguishable from a human will also be "consciousnessly"-indistinguishable from a human.

oneiftwo• 6 years ago

that all matter has some associated mind or consciousness, and vice versa. Where there is mind there is matter and where there is matter there is mind.

That doesn't make sense. We know that humans (and probably most if not all conscious animals, in fact sleep may be a prerequisite for consciousness) spend about a third of their lives unconscious. This assertion doesn't hold, unless you want to tell me that all these rocks are just asleep.

scotty794• 6 years ago

Out of all the crazy theories about electron my favorite is single electron universe. That all the electrons and positrons are actually single particle that that goes back and forth in time, and positron are exactly the same as electrons just going in the opposite direction in time.

It neatly explains what and why is antimatter and why all particles of given kind are exactly the same. Although it's a hard sell because it predicts that all of the matter-antimatter symmetry breaking is not intrinsic or even spontaneous.

Also it make hard to wrap your head around how antimatter could form any macroscopic objects while going back in time. Or how it can behave exactly like matter while going back in time.

stared• 6 years ago

Closely related, especially given the context of consciousness, one of my favorite stories: "The Egg" (http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html, or if you prefer read by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI).

buckminstrix• 6 years ago

Really profound content from a great channel. Another channel with related insightful content is "The School of Life" https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog

Panpsychism needs a new name. That word sounds quite alien. But the concept is familiar to humans in their "raw" state.

Young children sometimes befriend rocks, elder people sometimes talk to their plants, and some tribes and pre-modern cultures widely believed there was life inside everything. It's a little disappointing the "Wikipedia" article on it does not mention: Australian aborigines, Amazon tribes, Hindus and more.

Ruphin• 6 years ago

My favorite version of this story is told throughout Logic's "Everybody" album. I highly recommend it.

mercer2• 6 years ago

Possibly interesting fact: the writer of The Egg also wrote The Martian. Haven't read the book, but the film was great and much funnier than I expected.

chaoticmass• 6 years ago

This is similar to my favorite silly theory about dogs. There is only one dog. Every dog you meet is the same dog. Whenever the dog dies, it is re-incarnated as another dog somewhere and somewhen.

scotty794• 6 years ago

What if you see two dogs meeting each other? ;-)

simonh4• 6 years ago

It seems to me that our consciousness is most likely an emergent property of neuronal activity. The thing with emergent properties is it's extremely hard to draw a line where the system that exhibits the property transitions from not exhibiting that property to exhibiting it.

Consider a cyclone, a mass of air rotating around a zone of low pressure in the atmosphere. Clearly this is an emergent property of air, or any gas really. But if you statistically analyse any mass of gas you will be able to find volumes where there are regions of lower pressure than the average and the particles nearby will have a (possibly tiny) net angular momentum around that low pressure region. Any volume of gas will have these, but are they cyclones? How long does such a state have to persist to count? How much angular momentum must be present? Must it be on the surface of the earth to count? What about near another similar surface?

You can do this with any emergent property, right down to the electrons orbiting a nucleus, does that make them cyclones? The thing is whether you say yes or not, it doesn't really matter because it's not a useful level of analysis if you want to understand the behaviour or nature of cyclones in global weather forecasting. It's a context error.

Take the idea that an electron's state is not random but chosen, per the article. Well to make a choice implies considering reasons or following a pattern of behaviour. However we can see experimentally that the states of electrons do strictly follow random statistical distributions. So you can argue that their 'nature' is to 'choose' a random state, but at this point youre jamming a useless and explanation-free definition on the term 'choose'.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm basically a materialist. I believe that my decisions as a free agent are determined by my mental, psychological and essentially neuronal state. I believe this is necessary for me to be considered to have free will, because for _me_ to have free will my decisions must come form me, and I am my state. If my memories, instincts, experiences, knowledge and values don't influence or even determine my decisions, then those decisions don't come from _me_ in any meaningful sense. I don't care if that means my decisions are in principle deterministic, that's fine, it just means I'm a consistent being.

So yes my behaviour comes from my state and you could argue that the behaviour of an electron comes from it's state, or the behaviour of a gas comes from it's state. All that means is that I'm made out of matter, but it's simply a useless level of analysis when considering consciousness, for exactly the same reasons that studying quantum mechanics and atomic motions isn't practically useful when looking at many other emergent properties of matter.

This article is like analysing an engine, reducing down the behaviour of the matter an engine is comprised of down to the fundamental particles the engine is composed of, then extrapolating that up to say that because Jupiter is made of those particles it must therefore be an engine. If you're going to say electrons are conscious, you have to also say they are cyclones, and engines, and economies, and thunder storms, and planets, and whatever else because if you take this mode of analysis as legitimate you can, without crossing any objectively clear boundary, reduce all emergent properties of matter down to the fundamental particles.

classified• 6 years ago

So what if they are? Will they talk back if I send them to the anode?

Seb-C• 6 years ago

This is very much interesting and exciting, but all I see in this article is arguments from authorities. I fail to see any facts or demonstratable proofs.

How is that theory different than any other religious belief?

CKN23-ARIN• 6 years ago

I suspect the experience of being an electron is something like this:

"Wheeeeee!"

chewbacha• 6 years ago

I’m a little skeptical of this theory. Mostly, because it sounds exactly like animism [0]. The consciousness discussed here sounds a lot like the “soul” that religions asserts exists. But this is the problem with science that is almost entirely theoretical built in a concept that is entirely subjective: what is consciousness?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism

avsteele• 6 years ago

I would think that a set of particles that are literally indistinguishable from one another could not meet any definition of 'mind'.

There is no difference between an electron that's flown around the universe and one that was just created in a particle collider. If that doesn't negate the possibility of 'subjective experience' I am not sure what would.

jasonlfunk• 6 years ago

They are only indistinguishable in all the ways that we know how to look. There may be a way to differing them that we haven’t discovered yet.

sgt• 6 years ago

Next year, you'll have protesters chained up outside of the CERN particle accelerators. Don't smash our particle friends!

lidHanteyk• 6 years ago

Nobody's mentioned the Conway-Specker-Kocken Free Will Theorem!? It lines up perfectly with the idea of "quantum choice" discussed in the article: Free will is when particles choose to reply to quantum measurements with non-predetermined values.

From this perspective, electrons are a little conscious, while humans are a lot conscious (because we have lots of electrons in our brain), but we don't have to define consciousness beyond the ability to be forced to make choices.

willis936• 6 years ago

All of the quantum choice theories seem to be based around an incorrect answer to the measurement problem. They can be forgiven, as many of the smartest scientists in the past 100 years have fought hard for their own interpretation. I suggest watching this episode of spacetime (and a few before/after if you have time).

https://youtu.be/CT7SiRiqK-Q

joncrane• 6 years ago

When I used to commute via mass transit, my train load of people would all rush down the platform, into a plaza, and down only one escalator. You had people who would rush forward, people who would take a steady pace, and people who would hang back. I often times looked at the flow of people and it seemed to me it was extremely similar to a flow of particles.

danharaj• 6 years ago

At a high enough density, crowds act like fluids. At a high enough speed, so does a person.

visarga7• 6 years ago

Consciousness cannot apply to electrons, they have no life (no need to protect from cold, get food, learn), no senses, limited internal state and no evolutionary mechanism to speak of.

In order to be conscious a system must be able to adapt itself to its environment to maximise goals, the main goal being self reproduction. Also requires an evolutionary mechanism in order for complex agents to appear. Consciousness is the inner loop of evolution, they both optimise for reproduction.

This absurd idea of conscious electrons is the natural result of armchair philosophising about consciousness. Tononi et. al had a nice idea about integrated information, but it is an unfinished idea. For what purpose is this integrated information? How does learning occur? It says nothing. I'd rather look up recent DL and reinforcement learning papers for inspiration about consciousness.

mannykannot9• 6 years ago

At the very least, this seems to me to be a way to avoid the difficult and interesting issues of, and relating to, consciousness. I am not interested in debating whether it is possible to come up with some definition of the word "consciousness" such that one can say that even electrons have it; I am interested in how conscious, self-aware, theory-of-mind-holding minds work.

Nevermark3• 6 years ago

"some DILLUTION of the word "consciousness"

Fixed that for you and ... agree on all counts.

I feel like while we can't explain consciousness yet, it isn't hard to make well supported conjectures about what it needs.

First, what I experience and call "consciousness" involves an awareness of a dynamical thing, me, for my environment (a gravitationally organized semi-2D place), myself externally (i.e. controllable hands and feet), my own internal responses to the environment (sensory perception, reinforcements, patterns), and the fact that this awareness on my part seems to be encoded with information that is used by my dynamical response generating apparatus.

I.e. Self-reflection does not seem to be segregated from other forms of information used to generate my responses: My awareness of self is not just in a spectator role, since it influences action.

The fact that self-awareness is not segregated from responses creates a wonderful side benefit: I can share my self-reflection by communicating to others about it.

If you took away any part of what I just described, I don't think I would continue operating in a way I understand as "consciousness" and my behaviors would certainly be very different. I don't think other's would describe me as "conscious" either.

And none of these seemingly necessary complicated and recursive pre-conditions for consciousness shout out as reasons to include individual electrons as co-conscious in any way.

Question: Assuming an electron has consciousness, what experiment would you attempt to falsify that?

I am anti-electron on this issue. :)

klyrs3• 6 years ago

Question: Assuming an electron has consciousness, what experiment would you attempt to falsify that?

This is the question that the article ends on -- the philosophers are entertaining the notion and looking for a testable hypothesis.

We're talking about a 1-qubit Turing test, essentially. I'm not about to take a position yay or nay, (I'm a mathematician, goddammit).

For an apparatus, we could capture individual electrons in a ring of magnetic bottles. Perform tests on individuals in the chambers, advance them in a "shift register" fashion, and repeat. Do any individuals show behavior that differentiates them? A clear signal of individuality would be a real shocker.

One thing we use for macroscopic beings is a "mirror test" -- can an electron recognize itself in a mirror? Again, sounds absurd, but the general question is considered an acceptable proof of consciousness.

mathgenius8• 6 years ago

The thing is, science is full of things without definition. There is no definition for energy. All we have is a bunch of book-keeping. Everytime we couldn't balance the books (ie. conserve energy) we just added another column to the accounting. But what is energy?

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_04.html

gnulinux3• 6 years ago

It is relevant to remember Kuhn's philosophy of science. Science is often thought as an institution that converges to truth. Kuhn, however, argues this is not true just like an organism gets away with evolving "good enough" features to ensure its survival, science merely evolves into "good enough" state that explains phenomenon of interest. Therefore, it is not necessary for science to converge into something that's close or even relevant to what is actually "true". Read: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/#DeveScie

sebringj2• 6 years ago

Intuitively we would think if an animal can move, meaning it has locomotion, it is NOT because it is intrinsic to all matter (i.e rocks), rather it is because there is some bio-mechanical reason for it. Scientist could figure out how things moved and the underlying cellular processes to obtain energy in order to do it. A proponent of this article then might say that all matter is in constant motion. Then we are not talking about the same things. We are talking about directed motion to obtain food or some goal for survival. Atoms are not alive so they don't need to survive and do not have goal-oriented motion. But then those same proponents would list off how electrons move according to laws that behave similar to living creatures etc. so its some intrinsic thing. You can't win with those people. They will always have a response framed in some narrow definition that does not have any basis for what we are thinking of what locomotion means. That's a long metaphor.

sebringj2• 6 years ago

I thought of one more but it's less wordy and children can understand it. If you take a lego, with enough of them in a particular arrangement...you can create a wheel of sorts so it rolls. Legos don't roll unto themselves but are necessary parts to create the wheel-like behavior. Legos are boxy so they can't roll by themselves obviously and yet they can roll when put together in a certain way. This concept relates to nature in that atoms are building blocks to create properties of things in a particular arrangement. It's easier to understand because we have no magic bias surrounding legos or sense of purpose or importance in coming to that conclusion.

tylerjwilk00• 6 years ago

If we consider our brains conscious, and the foundational building blocks of that consciousness are electro/chemical reactions, it seems plausible that there is an innate property of consciousness to the underlying matter of those processes.

im3w1l3• 6 years ago

I have taken multiple university courses in theoretical physics, in artificial intelligence and in neuroscience, including on the topic of consciousness.

I can directly observe my own consciousness and I can tell that without a doubt it can not be explained by current physics and "complexity". It is completely different in kind.

If you believe that consciousness could arise just from complexity and information processing, then you are frankly mistaken. Whether you lack a consciousness or just the introspective ability to perceive it... or I suppose a knowledge of physics.

Now beyond saying "there is something going on", things quickly become much more difficult. Pan-psychism is a worthwhile avenue to pursue. If there is some phenomenon going on at a macrolevel, then we do expect it to be made up things going on at a microlevel. Some kind of consciousness or proto-consciousness. But am somewhat pessimistic. We don't really know what we are even looking for, so how can we expect to find it?

The attempts to connect wave-function collapse with consciousness are unconvincing to me. It seems basically like tying together two things we don't understand with each other based on... not a lot.

nsilvestri2• 6 years ago

Until sufficient evidence is provided supporting one way or the other, we do not know whether our current understanding of physics is sufficient for understanding consciousness. You are claiming that it can't, so you now have a burden of proof which you, at the moment, cannot fulfill, and therefore your claim is unjustified.

im3w1l3• 6 years ago

You are trying to impose an impossible burden on me, and I have no choice but to reject it. I realize that from your point of view, the claim that "I can just feel it" is unsatisfactory, but that really is the essence of it all.

If your are sincerely curious meditation and/or drugs may be a path.

mercer2• 6 years ago

I have taken multiple university courses in theoretical physics, in artificial intelligence and in neuroscience, including on the topic of consciousness.
...I can tell that without a doubt...
If you believe...then you are frankly mistaken...

I find it very amusing that you present taking 'multiple university courses' as some kind of argument or credential in favor of the following unshaken belief ("without a doubt"). Did any of your courses teach you to doubt things and especially to question things that you are certain about that clearly a lot of other smart people are not?

im3w1l3• 6 years ago

I'm presenting it solely to demonstrate that I'm not a crank or a schizo. The reason for my firm belief is that just as I can look up and see that the sky is blue, look down to see that the grass is green, just as plainly and immediately can I look inwards and see that I'm conscious.

Other smart people believing in emergence is easily explained: They can not see what I see.

mathgenius8• 6 years ago

The attempts to connect wave-function collapse with consciousness are unconvincing to me. It seems basically like tying together two things we don't understand with each other based on... not a lot.

This objection seems a bit superficial to me. I think there are plenty of connections. The idea of measurement & observer is baked into quantum physics, hello? But there is a taboo in physics on discussing this stuff.

It's nice to see some brave philosophers try to promote panpsychism. I wonder if the physicists will ever become more tolerant of things like this aswell.

bobsh• 6 years ago

Christopher Alexander arrived at a similar conclusion, in his later works, albeit from a radically different direction.

jpfdez• 6 years ago

Maturana and Varela 1987.consciousness like a pilot flying blind in conditions of very poor visibility relying only on the instrumentation in the cockpit where any environmental inputs are mere blips on the radar screen

odyssey7• 6 years ago

Something that concerns me for conscious particles is that some of them could be suffering endlessly somewhere in the universe, but I think this is probably rare.

The ability to hold a conscious particle in its seat while keeping it uncomfortable implies some sort of system trapping it in place.

Life could be such a roller coaster, where good and bad stimuli are always being presented to the particles, and there isn't much hope for getting off the ride as long as the lap bar is down. The sensation of discomfort might in fact be the feeling of a conscious particle straining against its chains, trying to escape the body that has trapped it.

aetherspawn2• 6 years ago

We can not yet measure consciousness. We can not say for certain, as an example, whether a brain or AI that we design experiences it’s own consciousness or not. And yet, they are made as all the same particles as you and I.

We can say that consciousness is something to do with the links in our brain, but how many times can I slice a brain before it is not conscious? Does a brain sliced down into single neurons not experience the world as a billion separate individuals? If I were to reconstruct the brain from its individual parts, would those individuals feel as though they had died as their consciousnesses merged?

I’m willing to still accept the traditional view that consciousness is a special sauce. That when we reproduce, it’s something that we can fork, but it is not common in the universe.

And I think that the true litmus test to the nature of consciousness is to effectively kill someone by freezing them (so that they are actually dead in the sense there is zero electrical activity) and then successfully bring them back to a conscious state. Then you will have paused a consciousness, and yet it did not leave. I do not think it’s possible. I think something like that ruins the special sauce and the resulting experiment may be able to survive (breath, react at a motor level), but effectively does not live a conscious life.

pc86• 6 years ago

I think something like that ruins the special sauce and the resulting experiment may be able to survive (breath, react at a motor level), but effectively does not live a conscious life.

But if we have no way to measure consciousness (and arguably, we can't, if it's truly a "special sauce"), you can't prove whether or not this reanimated creature is simply a mechanically moving shell of what was, a la every zombie movie, or the same person, or something in between.

aetherspawn2• 6 years ago

Yes, I sat at night thinking about this for a long time after writing that post.

jodrellblank• 6 years ago

Quantum chance is better framed as quantum choice—choice, not chance, at every level of nature.

But why? All the choice we're familiar with relates to predator/prey interactions, sexual selection, finding food, avoiding danger, protecting the next generation, and so on. What possible reason could electrons have for preferring one outcome of an interaction to another?

Say "highly rudimentary" and you can ignore everything else?

ecoled_ame• 6 years ago

check out Orch OR theory developed by Roger Penrose and an anesthesiologist from Arizona. Basically they think microtubule proteins create electron resonances that can reach a threshold time to produce consciousness that wouldn’t be available to most electrons outside the system. I’ve been researching this topic during quarantine so i’m happy to answer any questions or supply some cool facts.

marcAKAmarc• 6 years ago

After reading all the comments to this article, I get the weird feeling that some people, though obviously intelligent and convincing in their argument, obtain no consciousness. Further more, for the life of me, I can't decide if that supports or detracts from the idea of panpsychism. Making the argument "consciousness is not special - it simply emerges from data processing" feels so dead, but is really saying that everything is alive to a certain degree. On the other hand, saying "There is something special about consciousness that needs to be explained" almost supports the idea that consciousness is exclusive to certain entities and not others, and therefore needs explaining. That feels so backwards to me for some reason, and I can't put a finger on it.

mlatu• 6 years ago

So, there is only this one electron, standing in for every electron we can observe, this electron may well be conscious, so what if there are molecular structures (our brain) that "enjoy to feel conscious"? Perhaps there is only ever just this one consciousness and we all are (read: everything is) part of it?

pontifier• 6 years ago

I came up with a similar theory a few years ago. It's based on the idea of a Gaussian surface for information. The surface could be drawn around a rock or a person. In both cases, information passes into the surface from the environment (photons, vibrations, forces, motion, etc), is "processed" by the matter inside the surface, and emitted by the object after processing.

Things start to get weird when you play around with different time scales, and where to draw the surfaces. You might see a tree differently when you see it shifting and changing over longer time scales. It's also strange to think about drawing this type of a surface over different regions such as a classroom, non-contiguous regions such as every member of a family, or even conceptual regions such as mathematical functions, a scientific theory, or program source code.

Electrons May Well Be Conscious

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