Brains are not required to think or solve problems – simple cells can do it

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brains-are-not-required-when-it-comes-to-thinking-and-solving-problems-simple-cells-can-do-it/

by anjel • 2 years ago

426 396 2 years ago

scientificamerican.com

yamrzou• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/SxCaF

inglor_cz• 2 years ago

Michael Levin is a rare example of a scientist who really thinks outside the box and goes wherever few have gone before.

teekert6• 2 years ago

I've been listening a lot to Sean Caroll's mindscape podcast [0]. In it they have this notion of complex-to-intelligent systems. Their loose definition is that such systems can hold an internal state that represents the world around them. A sort of model to interact with and to extrapolate future events from (time travel!). In this light consciousness also makes more sense to me, although consciousness feels more like a by-product, our (human) ability to hold an internal model of the world in our minds and interact with it, is pretty advanced. One can imagine, somehow in the feedback loops (I think, that she thinks, that I think, that she thinks, ...), something like consciousness (awareness [a model?] of the self in the world?) evolved.

Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated events.

I'm just a cocktail philosopher, but aren't we all.

[0] https://podverse.fm/podcast/e42yV38oN

bcherny• 2 years ago

This is one of Hofstadter’s big ideas that he explored in his main work: GEB, Mind’s I, and I am a Strange Loop. The latter is a good intro to his work.

jebarker3• 2 years ago

I'm also a cocktail philosopher, but isn't consciousness different to just having a model of the world and self within it? Consciousness is the lived experience. The world model and feeling of self appear in consciousness. I think a complex system could plausibly be conscious without having a belief of a self within it. Not sure if consciousness is possible without any world model though.

My impressions about this were strongly influenced by Sam Harris's Waking Up book and app.

teekert6• 2 years ago

I agree that "consciousness is different to just having a model of the world and self within it" indeed. I'm just saying it feels like that modelling ability (which has clear and major evolutionary advantages) is a step towards consciousness, indeed something in the now (as we experience it). A (near) real-time model perhaps that constantly projects and adjusts. I guess this still doesn't require consciousness, but maybe consciousness results from this? Does it require a sense of "now" and identity relative to the world model?

I feel like the matrix is about the eject me btw.

Thanx, I'm looking for Harris' books right now.

tsimionescu7• 2 years ago

One possibility at least is that "the experience" is not something that really happens. That is, it's possible that we don't actually "feel" anything, and our impression that we are is just the story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves. Just like our world model has ideas like "the rock wants to fall down", it's possible that our self-model does too.

We already know that our self-model can be entirely wrong about our feelings. People with paralyzed or even missing limbs often believe that they just don't want to move that limb at first. So, they think they are having one experience, but they are wrong about their own internal experience: in fact, they are not moving that limb because they can't. And there are many other similar examples of people being wrong about their own intenal experiences, typically but not exclusively because of some illness.

So, it's possible that our internal experiences are in fact only a model in which one part of our brain interprets the actions of other parts of our brain, often retroactively.

Note: I'm not claiming this is the truth or silly things like "if you believe in science you have to believe this". It's just another cocktail philosopher's story of what consciousness might be. Other stories are just as plausible, and just as consistent with the little we do know in this area.

moffkalast5• 2 years ago

A sort of model to interact with and to extrapolate future events from

Something something LLMs can only predict the next word.

I hate to spin up this trendy debate again, but it's always funny to me to see the dissonance when talking about the exact same things in biological and mathematical cases.

zer00eyz2• 2 years ago

predict

This the right term to use here.

Something something

If human brains have a model, then is language the transport layer on top of that? Is trying to get to intelligence via language no better than trying to get to "google" by modeling its TCP/IP traffic?

crowbahr• 2 years ago

LLMs don't even come close to the complexity of the human mind though. They're a pastiche of human language, a fuzzy jpeg of the Internet.

The human mind is _so much more_ than a prediction machine, and incredibly complex... All that's before you get into the way the endocrine system interacts with your mind.

A single neuron has an average of 250000 connections in some parts of the brain. The speed at which neuronal signals travel varies neuron to neuron from 2.5m/s to 200m/s.

Human minds are more than just prediction. The anterior lateral prefrontal cortex has the sole responsibility of prediction (not that nothing else does, just that the ALPC seems solely dedicated to that task) and is extremely good at it. Prediction can influence all sorts of mental processes such as most all forms of perception... But it is _not_ the same as _being_ all forms of perception. If something unpredictable enough happens in front of you: you'll still see it.

Sure there are limits to that: when focused on a task the predictive parts of sight tend to filter out visual data that doesn't match the signal you're looking for (see: basketball players passing the ball and a moon walking man in an ape suit) but if every basketball player turned into Spaghetti-os and started screaming you'd still hear the sounds and see the O's.

So sure: LLMs do a good job at basic prediction but they're nowhere near the complexity of the human mind, of which prediction is only a small piece.

(And let's not even get into efficiency... A brain runs on 20W of power)

antegamisou• 2 years ago

Man why do all people working the most menial tech jobs have such an obsession suggesting some shitty "research" fad in CS as a solution centuries-old complex problems in all other science fields? It's cringe, reeks ignorance and the comparisons are flat out wrong most of the time.

It's especially worse when low-quality popular science journalism promotes this notion, like this Quanta article about the human vision system working just like transformers do.

rolisz• 2 years ago

Joscha Bach also talks about this a lot. He calls the consciousness the monkey with a stick controlling the elephant. For a starting point, listen to his Lex Fridman interviews.

indigochill• 2 years ago

Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated events.

I'm not even a cocktail biologist, but my understanding is cells effectively operate via a web of complex chemical reactions, so the notion of a cell holding primitive models might be analogous to the way a CPU executes an assembly instruction: not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired it's (nearly - barring solar radiation, I suppose, which incidentally also goes for cells) inevitable that it will react to a stimulus in a predefined way (even though the way cells react to stimuli is far more advanced than a CPU).

In a similar way, "anticipating events" could involve an analogue to computer memory: the processes that have run so far have lead to certain state being saved to memory that will now influence how the system reacts to stimuli in a way that's different from how it reacted before (e.g. sum a value with the value stored in a register).

samus• 2 years ago

CPUs are anticipating all the time how the future will evolve. They have caches (to be specific, expiration strategies), branch predictors, and speculative execution. Albeit for a very different purpose: to enhance processing speed, not to react to external events.

DougBTX• 2 years ago

not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired

What if it is wired to think?

aaaaaaaaaajioad2• 2 years ago

not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ― Edsger W. Dijkstra

If we are talking about which kind of complex systems (our brain, a cell, a computer, an LLM, a beehive, etc.) think and how we should note that there is nothing magical[0] in our brain that makes our thinking special and so other blobs of atoms that are not our brain can likely do things analogous to what our brain does.

This to say that explaining in reductionist terms how supposedly something thinks is not a proof that it is not really thinking. Otherwise a sufficiently intelligent alien could prove that you are not really thinking (just a bunch of ions dancing)

[0] and if there is something magical then we do understand how it works and where else it is magicing stuff.

chronofar7• 2 years ago

not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired it's (nearly - barring solar radiation, I suppose, which incidentally also goes for cells) inevitable that it will react to a stimulus in a predefined way (even though the way cells react to stimuli is far more advanced than a CPU)

I think these are likely different only by way of their level of complexity. We simply substitute a word like "think" when the reactions to stimuli are far too complex and numerous for us to track fully. But ultimately said "thinking" is made up to many, many cells following those same stimulus/reaction patterns.

asplake• 2 years ago

That web of complex reactions is sufficient. See Anticipatory Systems (Rosen) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticipatory_Systems

dahart• 2 years ago

not because it “thinks” but because the way it’s wired it’s inevitable that it will react to a human stimulus in a predefined way

This CPU analogy of yours doesn’t comport very well with the article we’re commenting on, which detailed some specific experiments that show cells are not reacting in a predefined way that is due to their ‘wiring’, contrary to previous and maybe incomplete understanding of how cells work. I don’t know if the RAM analogy helps since the surprise is that non-brain cells do have memory and do cooperate with other non-brain cells to solve certain problems, and these collections of non-brain cells can apparently remember solutions to problems over time. So yes, memory can help with anticipating events, but that really supports the idea that cells are dynamic and doing some non-trivial processing vs the possibly outdated notion that they’re hard-wired and deterministic.

lkadjal3• 2 years ago

In this light consciousness also makes more sense to me, although consciousness feels more like a by-product, our (human) ability to hold an internal model of the world in our minds and interact with it, is pretty advanced.

You can generate all kind of sentences like this all day you want in your consciousness. That does not make it any true.

There is zero evidence for existence of physical matter/materialism.

The only thing we know for sure that exists is consciousness.

And you suggest the complete opposite with zero evidence.

FeepingCreature• 2 years ago

There is also zero "evidence", by this extremely restrictive standard of "evidence", for existence of any consciousness aside one's own. This rhetorical strategy thus has a weakness: who or what exactly are you trying to convince?

tambourine_man2• 2 years ago

You may want to read on Descartes critiques from last century. Not even your own consciousness is a given.

FrustratedMonky11• 2 years ago

As another cocktail philosopher.

I think everyone should ponder this, when thinking about how they think, like as if they are the one thinking at all.

"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

mensetmanusman7• 2 years ago

Just tried will willing ... success!

mewpmewp29• 2 years ago

But still - why is consciousness required? Because a model of the World could be held even without it, in my view.

E.g., I wouldn't think GPT-4 is conscious, but I'm pretty sure there's a representation of abstract World and relationships within it following the neurons and weights. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to do much of it, that it is.

Also I think model of the World is just that - which can be represented as relationships between neurons, symbolising that model of the World.

And I think you can have a complex and a perfect set of neurons and their connections to represent everything in the most efficient manner for that size of parameters (neurons and connections together). There probably is the perfect configuration, but it couldn't even be achieved using training or evolutionary methods.

And none of it requires consciousness in my view.

mensetmanusman7• 2 years ago

It's true, p-zombies make more sense to physics, yet here we are.

Avicebron• 2 years ago

I highly recommend reading "Blindsight" by Watts it touches on that.

kaashif• 2 years ago

Is there any way you could have a being like a human, who when asked would say they're not conscious? Is a definition of consciousness allowing that possible?

I'm not talking about whether they are or aren't, but surely all intelligent beings would say and think they're conscious?

Retric7• 2 years ago

Having a purely representative model of the world is less useful than having a sandbox for modeling choices and outcomes. Do I need to duck before entering that doorway?

That introspective analysis is consciousness. Humans have just improved the same mechanism allowing for more abstract analysis.

jvanderbot3• 2 years ago

I think most of our world model is actually a human model. Our social relationships are more important than we give credit for.

So there's an arms race. The more brains you have the more you can model your tribe to know how to help or succeed. AND the bigger everyone's brain is the harder they are to model simply.

In this model consciousness is the "self model" or "self-consciousness" that allows you to model others opinion of yourself by having such an opinion yourself. And adjust their opinion by providing a narrative about yourself which you first have to craft, .... nd on and on with higher levels of abstractions.

glenstein3• 2 years ago

I think some problems are simple enough that they can be dealt with "blindly", but some problems turned out to be tricky in special ways that evolution was more able to solve via consciousness than blind information processing. And from there, we find ourselves, with that new capability in hand, able to repurpose consciousness to newer and newer things. Then retrospectively it can look like consciousness wasn't "needed" for certain problems.

So I think even if you want to make the sense that consciousness solves a lot of problems it doesn't need to, it may have been a "real" solution to a "real" problem at some point in our history. And from that point on, it was no longer important whether it was the best solution.

I do think it's fair to say that lots of remarkably complex informational problems are solved in a p-zombie way, which is to say, with every outward appearance of intelligence (slime molds solving mazes, collective behaviors of ants). So I do think evolution or nature writ large "agrees" with you that consciousness isn't strictly necessary.

Symmetry• 2 years ago

With a human brain you're got

1) A huge stream on sensory data only some of which gets promoted to conscious awareness.

2) Some of that raw data and other conscious outputs are persisted into working, short, and long term memory.

3) And your consciousness works recursively using (2) as well as (1) as inputs.

All the stuff in GPT that gets called "memory" in machine learning seems much more like (1) and it lacks any ability to persist data outside its context window so we're still missing something.

tired_star_nrg• 2 years ago

There’s a really neat book (fiction) that touches on this concept. It’s called Blindsight by Peter Watts.

mannykannot8• 2 years ago

Personally, I doubt that self-awareness can be achieved without some form of consciousness, and I feel that self-awareness is a key component of higher intelligence.

If intelligence and/or consciousness arise as emergent properties in the right sort of complex system, they will disappear from view in a low-level analysis of the causal processes occurring in that system.

coryfklein2• 2 years ago

But still - why is consciousness required?

Did someone say it is? Parent explicitly called it out as a by-product.

tesdinger• 2 years ago

Of course consciousness is required for intelligence - you need to model yourself as part of the world to have a complete model.

harha_• 2 years ago

You can say that. You can say a lot of things to explain consciousness in a materialistic sense, as in how it could've emerged. But I cannot fathom how material interacting with other material and forces gives arise to subjective experience. It simply makes no sense to me. If I create a copy of my brain, it would be conscious, but with its own unique subjective experience. This makes sense so far, but what exactly is this subjective experience and how can "mere" mechanical matter create such an entity.

So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual substance of subjective experience.

visarga2• 2 years ago

It only makes sense if

- you can represent complex state in a distributed way, so each neuron only encodes a small part of a larger signal

- the system has a working model of the environment, including our value judgements for all states, which are basically our emotions

Such a system can have experience because it has a latent space to encode experience in. It feels like something to be an agent because of the external environment and internal models of the environment, which include imagination and emotions. And this feeling is essential in choosing our actions, so there is a feedback loop action-to-emotion, then emotion-to-action. Our feelings are causal.

engineer_22• 2 years ago

Frankly, your non-understanding is not unique. We're all rowing the same boat :)

sixo• 2 years ago

I mean. You could write program with a "mind" object that recieves a bunch of data through various sensory "experience". From the perspective of the "mind", the data is "subjective", and the mind is "implemented" in exactly a way that it can represent itself as an entity "I".

I don't think the biological reality is conceptually any more complicated, except that the mind and data are complex in exactly a way that completely hides the abstraction, roughly by being very good at ignoring meaningless artifacts of abstraction.

The hard part isn't imagining such a subjectivity, but imagining that I am that.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 2 years ago

If we wrote software to do this, but we were so incompetent that we couldn't fill in the model with correct data, we might just say "who gives a fuck, fill that with random garbage and we'll fix it in a later version". And then we never do.

Your subjective experience is that incompetent model. Your model doesn't know how to correctly judge human character, so you misread people and always wonder why they say one thing but another is true, and it doesn't click that they're lying the whole time. You can't keep track of time because the internal clock just isn't implemented, so the who day seems to drag on, or maybe fly by too quickly.

It's all just really shitty software. Layers upon layers. And because humans believe this to be some mystical thing, rather than trying to fix it from the inside, they assume that it's awesome, necessary, and why would anyone want to fix it?

No small fraction of it is simply because our memory is faulty. The only time you ever remember anything is the first time you remember it, every memory access of that is really you remembering the last time you remembered it. Each access is lossier than the last, and confabulation is guaranteed. This seems to be true even moments after the event.

If it was anyone other than evolution who wrote your code, you could sue them for criminal negligence.

And that's before we even get to the part where you find out you're not even you. Inside your skull is another being, an intelligent one, with desires and goals. But you can't see, hear, or feel this being. It's invisible. The "you" that I'm talking to, exists because this being once upon a time needed to simulate the other humans around him, so he could anticipate them well enough to not be out-competed. He has a pretty good idea what they'd say if he asked them questions, how they'd respond to threats and challenges, what sets them off (so he can avoid fights). And, by mistake or design, he used this simulator to simulate himself (maybe to bootstrap it? if the simulation's output matches his known answers, it's working correctly?).

You're the simulation. When the judge asks the psycho teenager why he put the cat in the microwave and he says "I dunno" he's telling the truth. He does not know why. When your girlfriend cheats on you, and she's crying hysterically and can't tell you why she did it, she's not just lying (either to hurt you or to spare feelings)... she doesn't know. It was that other being in their skulls doing these things. They're just the simulations.

Now, you've either been poking around in your own head, seeing little glimpses of what I'm talking about, making you wonder if I'm not on to something, or you're incapable of that. I've met both kinds of people. If you're the former, you're wondering just how much of it I understand, because some of the glimpses paint a slightly different picture from what I describe. That's because our minds weren't built the same way. No two are alike, not in a special snowflake way, but instead like no two shacks in shantytown have the same kind of leaky cardboard roofs. And, if you're the latter...

postmodest2• 2 years ago

Have you ever been under anesthesia like propofol?

I feel like most of what we call "consciousness" is converting short term memory into selected long-term memory, facilitated by language. Because then you're under, you can even be "interactive" but you're not conscious of it because your short term memory has been disabled.

As to "human intelligence", honestly, I think that human languages that let us convert our "consciousness" into a shared hallucination is the key evolutionary advantage. Human intelligence comprises a hive mind in a sense, that our experience of the world is hugely affected by the shared social experience where language transfers memory from person to person.

ambrozk2• 2 years ago

So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual substance of subjective experience.

This problem just goes away if you assume that there is no dividing line between the "experience" of you and the "experience" of any other computational system. Actually try to think, what does a computer "experience"? An atom? What does it feel like to be a standing desk?

andoando4• 2 years ago

What makes sense to me is that consciousness is not an emergent property but a core of all things, with the additional property that is replicative/additive. That is smaller consciousness's can form larger consciousness's.

As to what it is, or why it exists at all, I don't think there will ever be answer to that. It just is.

Its definitely a strange thought, but it seems more likely to me than neurons or whatever other brain matter somehow produce consciousness out of thin air as soon as they some level of composition.

Pure materialism also seems very ill defined to me. The physical world is after all only observable/detectable/can be studied upon, through conscious experience. At best we can say what is real is what is universally agreed upon by all observing conscious agents. If hypothetically there were only two of us, and I said "There is no ball in front of us" and you said "There is", then what is the meaning of physical true/reality?

You can say lets use a detector. But then again, if I experienced the detector as saying false and you said its true, what do we do?

It seems unavoidable that reality is a part of conscious experience, and not the other way around.

wouldbecouldbe2• 2 years ago

We have a deep-founded believe that the atom is the core of reality.

And everything emerges from there.

This materialism stems from René Descartes and his fellow philosophers.

And in the West it's often subconsciously combined it with evolutional theory. consciousness developed because it was useful somehow. However that's a very big leap to make.

Both theories have good arguments going for them but are very theoretical and need a lot more proof. Yet they form the basis for pretty much all Western thought

From a scientific perspective we have no idea how to create new consciousness or what it is.

From a human's experience it's more the other way around, reality is an emerging property of consciousness.

At the same time we also learned that matter & time is not as solid as we thought a few centuries ago.

tracerbulletx• 2 years ago

In the brain there is an emergent reflection of a material reality happening where the brain is creating a fully constructed model of the world with its own independent existence, our day to day experience is a dream that's cohering to sense input. Whether or not that is what consciousness or our apparent point of view lives I don't know because I don't see how to logically prove it either way, but experimentally it seems like it does because our experiences align, and because you can alter people's state of consciousness through chemical and physical means.

wrycoder2• 2 years ago

The particular podcast didn’t come across with that link. Can you provide the title or number? I’d like to listen to it! I reviewed a fair amount the podcast list, but didn’t find a match to your description.

teekert6• 2 years ago

The title of the podcast series is: "Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas".

beambot2• 2 years ago

A thermostat is a system that can hold an internal state (nominally, temperature) that represents the world around them. You can also build a thermostat with a switch and a bimetallic strip with differing rates of thermal expansion -- a device that is clearly not intelligent. I'm not sure I can subscribe to this definition...

jampekka6• 2 years ago

In lectures I thermostats as an example of an intelligent system that matches most attempts at defining intelligence. And I have no qualms saying they are intelligent. Intelligence is a very vague and very context dependent thing that can be at most used to compare some things in some scenarios.

amelius• 2 years ago

Didn't Nest have a >$1B valuation at some point? /s

cbozeman• 2 years ago

I'm not sure I can subscribe to this definition...

Is this because it is a completely man-made system and not one that evolved slowly over time through natural processes?

teekert6• 2 years ago

My thermostat may not be intelligent but it is certainly smart... At least it says so on the box.

Anyway, the strip does contain the state of the world around it: the temperature is modeled by how much the bimetal is bent. I think indeed it is a minimal example of a complex system, one that at first glance defies explanation, it seems to have purpose (keep temp stable), until you understand the inside.

Anyway, "Is a virus alive?", "Are these specimens the same species?", ... Us humans like our boxes, but at the edges they almost always go wrong.

heckraiser2• 2 years ago

A thermostat is certainly intelligent.

The definition of intelligent I give is “to mitigate uncertainty.” If it does not mitigate uncertainty, it is not intelligent.

It is merely of constrained intelligence. Perhaps your expectations are too broad.

If the thermostat reacts appropriately to environmental changes then it is performing its role intelligently.

someemptyspace• 2 years ago

It's not just the internal state but the prediction that makes it intelligent.

Your brain is taking in a lot of information at the edges of your awareness, light, sounds, touch, etc. are all getting absorbed and transmitted to your brain. As that information is transmitted along your neurons it's getting summarized, then merged with other summarized information and summarized again. The brain is getting summaries of summaries, and developing a unified categorizing of the global state across all it's inputs.

Then the brain takes that summary and makes a prediction about the future state. The summarization is energy-efficient. By categorizing all that data into a global state you make decision making possible. "When my boss seems stressed all week, then calls a bunch of people one-by-one into his office on Friday afternoon, I know lay-offs are coming. I better polish up my resume." From "stress/anxiety/unease" in the environment to "danger is coming I need to fight/flight".

Your brain is taking that summary/categorization and figuring out what it needs to do next. If "X" happens then I should do "Y" to "stay-safe/get-food/find-a-mate". The brain is very good at capturing and summarizing data, and making a prediction because that process is much more efficient than doing otherwise. Instead of foraging everywhere for food and hoping I just bump into something that will provide sustenance, I know if X, Y, and Z happen then food will be "here", and I can get lots of it.

You can apply this same model to all actions the brain directs. It also helps make sense of why maladaptive behaviors develop. Sometimes the summary is incorrect, or was formed based on past information that no longer applies, and it may need to be unlearned.

Etheryte• 2 years ago

Not everyone is a philosopher with a cocktail, but surely we're all cocktail philosophers.

bookofjoe• 2 years ago

What we call consciousness may have same relationship to what creates it as Plato's cave shadows to what generates them.

stcredzero2• 2 years ago

Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated events.

I've occasionally run into science podcasts, going back almost a decade, where some researcher talks about the computational power of cell membranes, and how the synapses evolved from these mechanisms. Amoebas and paramecia navigate their environments, sense, and react through their cell membranes. Apparently, synapses evolved from these mechanisms.

The upshot of this for AI, is that the neural network model may be drastically incomplete, with far more computation actually happening inside actual individual neurons.

PeterisP4• 2 years ago

Nobody is attempting to have one-to-one correspondence between neurons and artificial "neurons", the fact that a single biological does much more doesn't imply some limitation or incompleteness (as long as the same computations can be implemented simply by having more of them, and as far as we understand, that seems to be the case) - the choice is primary because due to how our hardware parallelization works, we'd prefer to implement the exact same behavior with 1000 structurally identical simple "neurons" rather than have a single more complex "emulated neuron" that requires more complicated logic that can't be straightforwardly reduced to massive matrix multiplication.

bugbuddy• 2 years ago

This finding gives more supporting evidence to professor Chemero’s Radical Embodied Cognition. This is a very interesting interview he gave that covered a lot of his ideas: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vxT1RQICM_8

Narciss3• 2 years ago

"All intelligence is really collective intelligence, because every cognitive system is made of some kind of parts" - that's exactly the basis for the popularity theory of consciousness, which deduces that not only humans are conscious (and plants and other animals, etc), but also the global human society can have a sort of consciousness.

https://consciousness.social

Kinrany• 2 years ago

This seems to confuse intelligence with consciousness?

Narciss3• 2 years ago

I meant to say that they have the same root - you can think of consciousness as (collective) intelligence put to use in a particular domain: the self, or the "what it is like to be". If certain basic units of the collective intelligence contribute to that sense of self, you can get consciousness. consciousness.social aims to provide a living example of that.

distortionfield• 2 years ago

I find it really interesting how many times this distinction has been made (from each side to the other and vice versa) in just this thread.

moffkalast5• 2 years ago

Makes sense, we're all just the proverbial neurons of the brain that is our entire society/planet. Yeah, this is really big brain time.

Then a collection of societies would be another level of meta-intelligence above that, it's all fractal.

Narciss3• 2 years ago

Exactly - multizoa theory describes the global human society as an organism made of many animals (multi zoa means many animals)/

And then multizoa organisms can evolve once they reproduce, via processes like establishing colonies on other planets. Who knows what kind of multizoa consciousness, i.e. sense of social self these human societies would come to evolve given enough evolution via the process of multizoa natural selection?

In that sense, consciousness.social is like the glimmer of a proto-consciousness for multizoa organisms. The first sparks of a multizoa-level sense of self, that could evolve down multizoa generations into something as complex as human consciousness, but at the multizoa level.

Brain numbing stuff.

Sparkyte• 2 years ago

Brains are for complex tasks linked by a series of simple problems handled by simple cells. It is a network.

rini17• 2 years ago

Maybe that's the Great Filter? All sentient beings must get rid of their brains and associated baggage to progress further.

ivan_gammel• 2 years ago

I have a little problem understanding why this article is dated by February 1, 2024. Is it an UX bug and they show the date of the print issue, did it come from the future or my clock are off by a week?

gigglesupstairs• 2 years ago

Yeah it’s likely the magazine issue date. Bad UX but not a bug.

evrimoztamur8• 2 years ago

I am still struggling with my central question (I read this to be the 'hard question') of why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none. Does anybody have some cursory reading about this subject?

bowsamic17• 2 years ago

I'm also stuck on the same thing. Why am I me and not someone or something else? I feel like most are just going to laugh at this question as completely obvious, but for me it's almost a deep sense of angst and awe. It used to keep me up at night.

evrimoztamur8• 2 years ago

I suppose I am at the beginning of asking this question out loud, and it has brought on some interesting discussions with my friends and family.

Although nobody has a clear answer on this subject (globally it seems, not only in the local one I'm exploring), the variety of answers and debates it has led to has been very exciting. On the other hand, I am a bit disappointed that none has been able to bring anything more insightful than I could find via exploring the possibilities by digging around on Wikipedia.

In fact, one question that I had been wondering, which is, at what point does an analogous conscious experience appear in terms of the quantum to human scale of complexity, has been asked already in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F by Thomas Nagel. I still wonder what it is like to be a planarian, or a fly on the wall of a board meeting (audio fidelity must suck).

medstrom• 2 years ago

I know this won't feel satisfactory, but there's nobody else and nothing else that you could be. Not even in principle. Your consciousness is an unique product of your brain's labor. Think of it not from the perspective of your consciousness (as if it could up and change bodies), but of your body. What other consciousness could "this body" have? No other than you.

phito• 2 years ago

It's also the question I always end up getting stuck on !

foldr6• 2 years ago

It's a fascinating question, and I've long thought that it's the simplest one-sentence argument against physicalism. It's a fact that I am who I am (in the non-tautologous sense you allude to), but a complete physical description of the universe would presumably not include this fact.

rodrigosetti• 2 years ago

Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I never really understood why.

My hunch is that this is related to the question of why we are experiencing this particular moment in time and not another one in the past or in the future, is related. If you believe in the many words interpretation of quantum mechanics, one can also say why I’m experiencing this particular branch.

cnity4• 2 years ago

I sometimes wonder if we are all basically the same conscious, threading through all of the "antennae" of life one after another. But I find this idea painful because it is tantamount to an immense cosmic loneliness.

zer0tonin2• 2 years ago

Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I never really understood why.

They've made a good book to help people get the concept. It's called "the gateless gate" and it's a series of seemingly non-sensical stories, that you're supposed to think about and try to see the meaning behind it.

If you want to give the exercise a try, it's on wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gateless_Gate

stonewhite• 2 years ago

VS Ramachandran has an interesting talk about mirror neurons, which is a subset of motor neurons. They activate when you perceive anybody else doing something as opposed to only activating during your actions. This is fundamentally a built-in empathy/group learning mechanism, but it also has some other interesting implications too.

For example, when somebody touches someones hand in your view, your mirror neurons activate just like you yourself have been touched. Then your nerve endings in your hand send a signal to cancel the effect, but sometimes you still get a tingling from the neural confusion depending on the strength of the signal (e.g. watching someone getting kicked in the balls or russian daredevils walking on top of highrises). But, if there is no nerve endings there, there is nothing to cancel the signal, so you do experience another persons feeling of being touched as your own. Therefore, the only thing that separates our consciousness is literally our skin and our nerve endings on it.

igleria• 2 years ago

I don't have an answer to offer, but anecdotal memories of reading somewhere that brains could be a sort of antenna for consciousness. Then a subsequent comment explaining how if that were the case we would fall unconscious in a faraday cage.

so, back to square one...

evrimoztamur8• 2 years ago

I wouldn't take the leap into the Faraday cage so easily, that would imply that consciousness is measurable in the electromagnetic field. I don't think that's true, otherwise we would have measured it already. I don't know where to go next on this reasoning, it seems like we don't have the tools to measure in which field we are communicating.

suoduandao33• 2 years ago

That line of reasoning seems pretty silly given that consciousness is supposed to be much more subtle than electromagnetic fluctuations and omnipresent, but it reminds me of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition where the most difficult practices are only done deep in mountain caves where no light can reach the practitioner. I wouldn't be at all surprised if minimizing cosmic background radiation was a factor in sufficiently subtle inner inquiry.

One of my ancient aliens theories is that the Pyramids are artificial mountain caves.

naasking14• 2 years ago

Brain antennae + consciousness is more complex than just brain consciousness. In the former, we still have to answer "so... what is consciousness then? where is it? how does it couple to the brain? can it be blocked?" In the latter, it's just "consciousness is a property of a brain", and we are only left with the question of how the brain produces it. The antenna theory is just multiplying entities unnecessarily.

jahnu• 2 years ago

https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Dennett-WhereAmI.pdf

naasking14• 2 years ago

Dennett is always worth a read!

bsza10• 2 years ago

Experiments done on corpus callosotomy patients [0] give us some very interesting insights on how consciousness works. IMO, these experiments strongly point towards consciousness being mostly, if not entirely, an illusion created by the brain.

[0] https://youtu.be/ZMLzP1VCANo

Invictus0• 2 years ago

Consciousness is not even really a well defined concept, so for something that's already nebulously defined to be an illusion doesn't make sense.

evrimoztamur8• 2 years ago

I knew about similar split brain experiments, and although I agree to the illusory component of consciousness, these nonetheless do not answer my original question on the observing component of it. Thank you for sharing!

devnullbrain• 2 years ago

If I stand up too quickly or hold my breath, it's consciousness that I start to lose, not my consciousness's control of my body. It seems to me that implies consciousness comes from the brain.

mensetmanusman7• 2 years ago

An illusion for who? ;)

eternauta3k• 2 years ago

Maybe your consciousness does sometimes occupy other bodies. Of course you don't remember it, because memory and working memory are tied to brains. When consciousness is in another body, it feels that it is another person with his memories and context and none of yours.

Another way of saying this is that there's no need to postulate separate consciousness for separate people, one is enough.

Arjuna1445• 2 years ago

I know this is a disliked point of view, but for me the yogic point of view really gave me a mental picture in which this all makes perfect sense and which is quite consistent in itself (even though there is an unexplained axiom which is: "Intelligent-Awareness just is")

I feel that is what was termed the dreadful g-o-d word by many cultures but if we can understand this under that light, the readings of the second ever yogi that came to the west called Paramhansa Yogananda are highly recommended. His Autobiography of a Yogi was Steve Jobs favorite book and he made everyone that attended his funeral to get a copy of it. Not that that means a whole lot, as he was by far not an embodiment of love, but I feel he had the capacity to see the brilliance in this undestanding.

mensetmanusman7• 2 years ago

Don't worry, this has been the central question of humanity forever. It's also likely unanswerable by the scientific method.

Arjuna1445• 2 years ago

I feel that if one does not have the patience to wait, one may just go and selfexperiment. It is not, that Consciousness is in a lab somewhere where only some scientists have access, no it is right here! It is so much in our faces that we do not explore it ourselves, but rather wait for some "authorities" to explore that for us.

No! We can explore it by calming our mind and our senses with well established methods which are known for thousands of years (the ancient tradition of yoga for example, an do not think twisting and bending, no this goes MUCH further!!)

And then, when the senses are turned of (by practice or "outside help" e.g. think tank) and the mind is silenced, then we start to explore what lies beneath!!

They say: "When all the movements in the mind have ceased to exist, the knower dwells in his real nature" (or something along the lines, in the Yoga Sutras, roughly 1500 to 2000 years old )

suoduandao33• 2 years ago

I quite like Penrose-Hameroff's theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU

My best summary of it: consciousness is primal, every bit of matter has perspective, every interaction has experience, the body you're 'occupying' is having a particularly complex and long-lived experience.

As for your question of why this one, well, someone's got to be having this one. As for why not another, there's no saying 'you' won't have another 'after' this experience ends, but if 'you' had them in a perfectly undifferentiated way that'd be a different experience again, and as stated, someone's got to be having this one.

Arjuna1445• 2 years ago

This!! It all comes together. What the mystics have figured out through deepest self-introspection and meditation comes so close to our modern understanding derived by physics, biology and neuroscience. It is fascinating to see how these understandings converge.

Vox_Leone• 2 years ago

The question you raise is fascinating. I ask the same questions when I think about the many-worlds interpretation in QM.

As for the research in focus in this thread, It seems that we are facing another Great Humiliation[0], with the potential to affect the course of development in so many other areas.

It will be interesting to see what developments this research will inspire in the cultural/anthropological field: so were the tree-huggers right all along? So is there really a harmony and connection between all the "children of Gaia"? :)

[0]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/copernicus-...

naasking14• 2 years ago

why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none.

Are you sure this is a well-formed question? To be clear, this isn't what the hard problem of consciousness is about, although perhaps that's what you meant by "none".

chronofar7• 2 years ago

Materialism, which by my reading has the most evidence going for it, solves these particular questions rather easily. Your experience as an observer is the result of your brain. It's not another one or none b/c those aren't your particular brains.

This doesn't solve the "hard" problem, it's still quite mysterious how exactly and at what point neuronal mappings become sentient, but it does leave you without having to wonder the particular questions you asked there.

wry_discontent3• 2 years ago

This seems like a common way that to me completely side steps the actual question. Sure, your brain powers intelligence, but nothing we have nothing on how it could create awareness, which seems qualitatively different.

exitb• 2 years ago

If you assume that the observer can "occupy" a body, rather than be a body, you have to conclude that the memories are part of the body, not the observer. You assume that you occupy the "correct" body, because your present experience matches your memories, but that'd be true even if you moved to occupy another body. Moreover, how do you know that there isn't more than one observer in your body? Or maybe there's just one observer sharing all the bodies?

evrimoztamur8• 2 years ago

To answer your last to questions: I don’t know! And those formulations are simply, in my opinion, rhetorical variations of the hard questions too. One observer many bodies or many observers one body are equally valid possibilities, as far as I can tell, and I am not referring to split personality disorders or a collective external memory for that matter. It’s genuinely one of the most fascinating questions out there for me right now!

zackmorris3• 2 years ago

The only "scientific" explanation that makes sense to me is that consciousness spans time and space, where each focal point of attention is an aspect of a central whole, like a lifetime within a fractal of lifetimes stemming from when source (God) consciousness fractured itself to experience every viewpoint within the universe to avoid an eternity alone. It created what we experience as the shared (objective) reality from the original singularity that came into existence from the number line via the long tail of the quantum probability distribution. The concept of something from nothing is maybe the foundation of consciousness itself, since science may never be able to explain the subjective experience of conscious awareness or how it came to be.

As a thought experiment, imagine we could emulate the corpus callosum between brain hemispheres through a computer chip, and had the medical technology to split someone in half. There have been cases where people have lost a brain hemisphere before birth or due to an accident but continued leading relatively normal lives, so we know that such a division is plausible.

Before separation, we'd experience being an individual.

At the moment of separation, our consciousness would anchor to one of the hemispheres we'll call "A". We'd see our other half "B" pull away and look back at us in curiosity as it continues experiencing its own consciousness. The other half B is still our consciousness, but anchored to a different point in spacetime. The halves would begin accruing their own memories independently, but act like the original individual for quite some time or even a lifetime.

At the moment of reunification, we'd see B approaching and then experience a download where our memories suddenly contain more than they did a moment ago. We might even experience "hearing" the other half as another person until the merging is complete. But afterwards we'd still be the same individual we always were, just with new narratives running in the code of our mental model, built from the memories acquired while separated. This experience is identical for the other half, except seen from its own context.

Warning (spoilers): This is analogous to a Vulcan mind meld, although it's unclear from Star Trek whether minds maintain their individuality or become a single consciousness. Because Spock's consciousness existed separately within McCoy until he was reincarnated, I tend to think that the show took the society of mind approach where our thoughts maybe come from a collection of simpler agents, meaning that Spock's anchor transferred to McCoy when they separated, so both their anchors shared one mind for a time, and Spock would have been in McCoy while he was asleep and his partial (a term borrowed from Eon by Greg Bear) B died in the warp chamber.

But I think the hemisphere splitting thought experiment is more useful because it sheds insight on reincarnation and the multiverse. It also helps us step up to 4D/5D and consider what it subjectively feels like to straddle realities as we shift laterally through spacetime rather than waiting for events to unfold in forward (linear) time. Insight and downloads might come from our consciousness constantly splitting and reuniting from other timelines as it explores possible future outcomes in the quantum probability distribution.

That might shed light on how the inner mind seemingly affects outer reality by overcoming the odds to survive via affecting probability itself (the principle of manifestation). In other words, it's likely that there is always an anchor, since quantum reality can't exist without an observer (consciousness), so an individual sees unlikely events whose odds of happening are so remote that science can only call them coincidences (synchronicities).

That would mean that our souls always continue, even if our physical bodies die, by straddling another reality where a body for us still exists. We may experience an infinite, continuous, individual timeline spanning countless lifetimes over billions of years, interspersed with long periods of nonexistence that we have no way to remember. And each time we die, the people around us can no longer be with us, since our anchor is no longer in their reality.

And it's unclear whether our soul can reincarnate in simpler life forms or if our complexity keeps evolving as our soul ascends. Dreams and psychedelic accounts seem to lean towards the idea of a lizard brain, where consciousness can exist unfiltered. So that it may be that we are allowed to "choose" our next incarnation during unconscious periods and "opt in" to a 3D experience like here on Earth to experience the novelty of suffering.

The main takeaway is that since those around us are aspects of ourselves, then egocentric narcisism is a refusal to see the big picture. If we act to enrich ourselves by exploiting others, we karmically doom ourselves to more suffering in our next life. Our old A becomes the resource-hoarding enemy of our new B. Making a deal with the devil may feel good, but it's like being the top inmate in a prison, starving the soul of real connection. So the meek and pious spiral out towards peace/connection/heaven while the rich and powerful spiral in towards their own violence/loneliness/hell.

I haven't read this, but I think it leans more towards the objective side, where multiple consciousnessness would occupy a single mind, more like schizophrenia than a fractal split from a single source consciousness:

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

And of course all of this could be completely wrong. But it's all derived from first principles and a collection of insights from the spiritual community that seem to keep resonating and expanding in this post-pandemic era entering the New Age. We may not know until we meet aliens who have performed these experiments. But it provides a useful framework to explore the idea of consciousness existing in higher dimensions and even visiting us through the paranormal/supernatural (magical) experiences we all have as conscious aware beings.

Another benefit is that consciousness affecting probablity means that time travel is not possible, since any repeat scenario is a copy of the original and subject to random outcomes. The same events can never be replayed exactly the same way twice. Many vocal people in the scientific community have arrived at the conclusion that free will doesn't exist, which self-evidently defies our subjective experience, but they're basing that on the fallacy that time travel is possible.

The impossibility of time travel is maybe the best (albiet weak) explanation we have for consciousness and free will. It's how our timeless nature steps down from 4D/5D to experience a timeline, similarly to how a photon doesn't experience time since it's moving at the speed of light. There may only be one photon in the whole universe, creating a 4D holographic "crystal" encoding everything here. The mutable state of our consciousness is kind of like the in-between times when pure functional programming blocks to wait for new input, with the deterministic portion running unconsciously. An android would have mutable state, while a robot would mostly run hardcoded logic.

Which is why I don't subscribe to the idea that humans are just AIs running in complex robots, or that this is a simulation. Although if we substitute the word dream instead, then it all begins to make sense again. There's no matrix or holodeck that created the simulation, it's more like source consciousness projects the simulation to give us something to do. And of course there's no way to prove any of this, it's just a descriptive model that may lead to deeper insights.

evrimoztamur8• 2 years ago

Thank you for your thoughtful comment, I found myself nodding along until the very end. I subscribe, so far, to the idea that we might simply be fragments of a fundamental consciousness, but it still remains a bit frightening to me (despite its lack of effect on my way of living) that we may never find the ‘root’ of it all.

I also agree to the connection between the karmic ‘field’ and our consciousness, and I sometimes feel like I am simply guiding an observing vector across all possibilities, collapsing the wave functions along time. Other commenters in the thread have done a better job articulating that aspect than me, however!

cobber2005• 2 years ago

I like the idea of ‘individuation’[0] where individual things (rocks, living bodies, minds, societies) come into being from their preindividual environment. As I understand this idea, it is just that a mind individuates within a body, and that mind comes to call itself ‘I’. So it’s not that we existed before a mind individuated, but rather we come to find ourself recognizing ourself as ‘I’ after individuating.

[0] https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-indi...

dspillett• 2 years ago

My reading (caveat: not a biologist, other sort of scientist, nor philosopher) is that a brain is required to translate the environment and its collection of problems into something (or some things) that its simpler structures can “solve” (where “solve” could just mean “act usefully in response to” and that act/response could be to ignore), and then to translate any responses but out to that more complex environment.

Cells can solve problems in their limited context, though that context can be less limited than you might first think (consider single celled life can have relatively complex interactions). Groups of cells can solve more complex problems, by working directly together or by some acting as support structures while others do the solving. Complex bodies and brains build up in parts from there over time.

mobiuscog• 2 years ago

So brains are required for multi-modality, but not actual 'intelligence' ?

(Herein everyone screams at my misuse of terms and tells me I'm wrong - which at least should help explain things)

agumonkey2• 2 years ago

Interesting to see Levin's zeitgeist spreading (even though considering the amount of podcast and discussions he made explains that too).

I don't know what the biological/medical field thought about single cell and tissue level intelligence before but I found this gap in the usual medical thinking (usually things are either genetic or biochemical/hormonal) quite mind blowing.

Hopefully this results in new opportunities for finer medical therapies.

feverzsj• 2 years ago

I remember some TED guy talked about consciousness being basic substance around us, and the brain just concentrates them to make it significant.

Daniel_sk• 2 years ago

That's the theory of Panpsychism.

bdhcuidbebe• 2 years ago

There’s so much nonsense on the TED stage. They even allowed Graham Hancock.

guappa• 2 years ago

I think they created a brand and now you can just pay, get up on stage and say whatever you want.

zilti• 2 years ago

and it's even worse with TEDx

nottorp• 2 years ago

How is that new? Maybe if you've never heard about evolution :)

All living beings have some kind of nervous system that has the control. Some have it concentrated somewhere - we call that a 'brain'. Simpler organisms have it everywhere in their body.

ovi256• 2 years ago

He's literally investigating the nuances and limits of what you describe in your second paragraph. Yes, the outline you described is obvious.

apienx• 2 years ago

“Indeed, the very act of living is by default a cognitive state, Lyon says. Every cell needs to be constantly evaluating its surroundings, making decisions about what to let in and what to keep out and planning its next steps. Cognition didn't arrive later in evolution. It's what made life possible.“

Yes. Cognition isn’t just about solving differential equations and the like. It also refers to the most basic functions/processes such as perception and evaluation.

DrStormyDaniels• 2 years ago

Is perception and evaluation a basic function? By analogy with cellular life, maybe. But I think this abstraction hides more than it reveals.

max_• 2 years ago

I have a question. Doesn't the complexity of the problems it can possibly solve vary from cell to brain.

Or is it like a turing machine where a simple abstraction can solve any possible "computable" problem?

teekert6• 2 years ago

I guess a ("simple") molecular biological mechanism can be Turing complete, but if it's as slow as a mechanical ticker tape, the mechanism will be too slow to respond to any inputs in a relevant time frame. The speed of the response is important in an evolutionary context.

zer00eyz2• 2 years ago

SLime molds!!!!

Slime molds can get very large as a single cell, visible to the naked eye weighing in at several pounds large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxogastria

It says 44 pounds.... that's pretty chunky for a "cell"

iandanforth• 2 years ago

There are a couple traps to be aware of with this article.

1. "Bioelectricity"

This is a generic term which doesn't capture the nuance of charge gradients and chemical gradients in cells. While you can directly apply charges to interact with gradient based biological systems, this is a brute force method. Cells have chemically selective walls. So while applying an external electrical voltage can act in a similar manner as causing a neuron to fire, it is far less precise than the calcium and sodium channel mediated depolarization which implements normal firing. Said another way 'bioelectricity' is not simple.

2. Replacement

This one is a bit more subtle. If you find that you can affect a system by one means that is not the same thing as saying the means is the cause. Take the example of using RNA to transfer memory from one Aplysia to another. Immediately after transfer the recipient does not have the memory. It takes time for the introduced RNA to affect sensory cells so that they become more sensitive to stimulation. This is in contrast to a trained animal that has already undergone synaptic remodeling. If you have the appropriate synapses but were somehow able to remove all the relevant RNA in an instant, the animal would continue to 'remember' its training. Synapses are sufficient.

In reality there are multiple systems that work together over multiple timescales to produce the behaviors we observe. Some of those systems can have their contributions mimicked by other interventions. Because of this complexity you can never say 'it's really about X', the best you can say is 'X plays a major role' or 'X contributes Y percent to this observed phenomenon'.

generalizations2• 2 years ago

In reality there are multiple systems that work together over multiple timescales to produce the behaviors we observe. Some of those systems can have their contributions mimicked by other interventions. Because of this complexity you can never say 'it's really about X', the best you can say is 'X plays a major role' or 'X contributes Y percent to this observed phenomenon'.

You can say the same thing about computer systems - as long as you don't understand the underlying logic. If you don't understand that the chemistry of transistors doesn't matter as much as the C code, you can say exactly the same critique about how a thinkpad works: "So while applying an external electrical voltage can act in a similar manner as causing a neuron to fire, it is far less precise than the calcium and sodium channel mediated depolarization which implements normal firing. Said another way 'bioelectricity' is not simple....In reality there are multiple systems that work together over multiple timescales to produce the behaviors we observe. Some of those systems can have their contributions mimicked by other interventions."

Once you do understand the logic - the 'why' of von neumann machines and Javascript and transistors, it's clear that your claim isn't true and there is an underlying logic. The trouble is, until we positively identify that logic, we can't know if it exists or not and we're stuck debating the bioequivalent of the fundamental computational significance of the clock cycle speed of a CPU.

AlienRobot3• 2 years ago

I have a very rudimentary understanding of how electricity and electronic circuitry and transistor work, but it does make me wonder:

We use programming languages like C to create complex branching algorithms that are turned a linear machine code tape. Programmers generally can not understand assembly even if they understand the branching code that is turned into assembly. Even if assembly had variables, just the fact that if/else's and function calls are turned into jumps is enough to make the code too complicated to understand. It might be possible to disassemble back to C by resolving the jumps into something that is easier to understand.

Imagine if brains worked the same way. That there is actually a naturally-forming high level "brain language" that is turned by a "brain compiler" function into a low-level "brain assembly," but when we look at it all we see is the assembly. That what the brain is actually doing is relatively simple, but because we can only observe the output of the compiler function it appears to be insanely complex to reverse-engineer.

Then again, I don't have the faintest idea of how brains work either.

arrosenberg2• 2 years ago

I guess technically true, but the cell channels are vastly more complex and much harder to measure. Chemical gradients can pass electric currents, but they can also trigger other chemical cascades and cause physical changes in the cell that may not be reflected when a charge is applied. Logic is also fairly consistent across computer systems, where biological systems can function differently from person to person, and even within the same person at different points in time. There are so many more variables with the living system.

andsoitis• 2 years ago

there is an underlying logic. The trouble is, until we positively identify that logic, we can't know if it exists or not

First you exclaim there is an underlying logic, then in the next sentence you say we don’t know whether it exists, which completely contradicts your claim.

daveguy2• 2 years ago

Said another way 'bioelectricity' is not simple.
If you have the appropriate synapses but were somehow able to remove all the relevant RNA in an instant, the animal would continue to 'remember' its training. Synapses are sufficient.

I'm not sure these two statements are compatible. The first is definitely true, and rna does function on a slower timescale. We can't be 100% confident that some of the complexity we don't understand in the first statement wouldn't have an impact in the second scenario, can we?

eurekin• 2 years ago

Where one can learn about that in more details?

nickpsecurity2• 2 years ago

I also want to know how much of this was replicated by independent, skeptical sources looking for alternative explanations. One thing I see in “science” reporting is that one or a few people make wild claims, it hits the news, and people believe their word on faith with no replication. There’s also many statements about what we know where the claims made should have citations, too. Yet, people who have never run experiments like that are nodding along saying, “Of course it’s true.”

Or was all this replicated? What strengths and weaknesses did they hypothesize in these studies? What did they prove or disprove? What’s the next steps? And can we already implement any of those in simulators?

(Note: I think agents poking and prodding the world can definitely be implemented in simulators. Even primitive, game engines should be able to model some of that.)

dekhn• 2 years ago

I am not sure I would call RNA transferring regulatory programs "memory". This looks more like epigenetic transfer than what we would call memory (IE, factual recall). My training was before the more recent work with Aplysia, but "RNA memory transfer in planaria" was presented as an example of "how to make big claims with irreproducible experiments" in grad school.

I appreciate that epigenetics is a well-established field at this point but I worry people conflate its effects with other phenomena.

RaftPeople4• 2 years ago

I tend to agree that the word "memory" makes me think of a higher level (more abstract) type of action than a simple reactive switch, I'm not sure where the line is or if there really needs to be one or not.

Having said that, are you familiar with the purkinje cell from a rabbit that they trained to respond to timed patterns of input in isolation?

Timed pattern=input 1, delay X, input 2, delay Y, then input 3.

Definitely more than a simple on/off switch type training, but does that rise to the level of "memory"?

RaftPeople4• 2 years ago

This is in contrast to a trained animal that has already undergone synaptic remodeling. If you have the appropriate synapses but were somehow able to remove all the relevant RNA in an instant, the animal would continue to 'remember' its training. Synapses are sufficient.

Not if you removed the DNA. Epigenetic changes to the DNA are what maintain the synapse at it's "learned" state. Here's a link:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402...

In addition, research has shown neurons communicating via mRNA (surrounded by a lipid).

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00492-w

https://www.inverse.com/article/40113-arc-protein-ancient-mo...

Lots of interesting stuff in this arena.

RaftPeople4• 2 years ago

Additional note: I forgot that synapses are also maintained by local RNA (local=at/near the synapse), so removing the RNA would definitely cause the synapse to revert back to a different state and not retained it's "learned" state.

kfrzcode• 2 years ago

Makes me think about Michael Levin et. al, working on understanding bioelectromechanics.... Fascinating stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG6GIzNM0aM

Arjuna1445• 2 years ago

This is just incredible! I follow Michael Leavin since quite a while now and I am sure that he will earn a Nobel Price for this outstanding research! All the other things that he adresses in his Presentations and also Interviews are just mindblowing!(the one with Lex Fridman is quite in depth, but I prefer others even more)

This really has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of intelligence, mind and medicine. He may just tell cells to grow a new heart without modifying genes. He want to have what he calls an 'anatomical compiler' which translates our "designs" to electro-magnetic cell stimuli so that they will build this.

For me this is really pointing into a worldview that is much more in line with view that the ancient mystics from all cultures throughout all the ages have been pointing towards: Intelligence is something fundamental to existance, like space and time (maybe even more fundamental). It is all a play of intelligence, it is phenomenal and it can be tapped into. This is amazing!!!

saurabhpandit26• 2 years ago

Micheal levin is just incredible, he appears on lot of podcasts on Youtube. His work on collective intelligence of cells, xenobots and regeneration is just mind boggling.

naasking14• 2 years ago

Brains are not required to solve problems, yes, but they are required to think. That's one of their defining characteristics. It's not a thought without something like a brain, at best it's a pre-programmed/pre-trained behavioural response.

dimal3• 2 years ago

That’s misunderstanding what they’re saying. If you watch some of Michael Levin’s talks on YouTube, he specifically uses William James’ definition of intelligence (Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it) and has experimentally shown this capability at cellular scales. He shows how it cannot be pre-programmed behavior. There seems to be goal directed behavior.

naasking14• 2 years ago

(Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it) and has experimentally shown this capability at cellular scales.

Supposing I accept that, what does this have to do with thought, which is the claim that I was specifically responding to? Does Levin or James also show that this can only be done by having thoughts?

Edit: for instance, as opposed to having some non-thinking process like gradient descent, or more plausibly, some kind of hill climbing.

svieira6• 2 years ago

Which is one of the arguments the ancient Greeks (Aristotle in particular) used to argue that God must exist. Things are clearly ordered to ends (have goal-directed behavior). Others came to the conclusion that all things that are are part of one enormous goal-directed-entity, but that conclusion involves a bootstrapping problem on the part of that entity (which is composed of parts) and so I don't hold with it.

Arjuna1445• 2 years ago

"... but they are required to think"

Let me humbly suggest to you to not make such (Truth) statements! I dont know of any hard evidence that supports this. I know this is what most people believe, but the focus is on believe.

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

Next stage in AI?

According to Bongard, that's because these AIs are, in a sense, too heady. “If you play with these AIs, you can start to see where the cracks are. And they tend to be around things like common sense and cause and effect, which points toward why you need a body. If you have a body, you can learn about cause and effect because you can cause effects. But these AI systems can't learn about the world by poking at it.”

swayvil• 2 years ago

Complexity, tho dazzling and impressive, is apparently a small trick. Consider the simple algorithms that generate fractals, alife and random numbers.

Problem-solving intelligence appears to be similar in that we consider it impressive and special, but, in the big scheme, is actually rather trivial and common.

Speaking as a person who has spent literally decades enthusiastically chewing upon software design riddles, it makes me feel a bit insectile.

I mean, the termites in my walls probably feel what I feel, and they're just playing with mud and spit.

deadbabe• 2 years ago

Water can solve a maze!

FrustratedMonky11• 2 years ago

This is pretty similar to concept in "Children of Time" Adrian Tchaikovsky.

I've always thought the concept in the book of 'DNA' memory storage, was SCI-FI. Cool concept, but really far out. So this is pretty exciting that this Sci-Fi concept could happen.

What if we could drink something to give us the memories of someone else. And this would be way to drink a 'degree', and learn a ton fast.

"Glanzman was able to transfer a memory of an electric shock from one sea slug to another by extracting RNA from the brains of shocked slugs and injecting it into the brains of new slugs. The recipients then “remembered” to recoil from the touch that preceded the shock. If RNA can be a medium of memory storage, any cell might have the ability, not just neurons."

rootusrootus• 2 years ago

That explains so much about HN.

aubanel• 2 years ago

"Brains are not required to think or solve problems" is a perfect intro to a Leetcode job interview, for a candidate that already grokked 300 of these problems.

zubairq• 2 years ago

Makes sense that brains are not required to solve problems. I am not brainy but seem to be able to brute force my way to solve some complex problems by sheer force of will

maxglute• 2 years ago

Feels like Peter Watt's Blindsight, conciousness not needed for advanced problem solving, and may actually hinder.

AlienRobot3• 2 years ago

Interesting. What if the brain is leaving a "footprint" on the cells of the nervous system, and it's possible to recover the brain by making a mold of this footprint?

schwarzrules• 2 years ago

This is reassuring. I never thought I'd be able to think or solve problems, but this gives me hope!

febed• 2 years ago

Michael Levin is seeking answers to seemingly basic biology questions. I’m a layperson but how come mainstream biologists didn’t pursue this line of thinking as far as he has?

efitz• 2 years ago

This is great news given the relative scarcity of brains among humans.

nmstoker• 2 years ago

This is a little like the 60s experiment teaching what I believe were nematodes to arch their backs in response to a light shone by the researchers.

Those nematodes were ground up and fed to new untrained nematodes which then acquired the back arching response.

Can't find the original paper but it was covered in the 1984 book The Science in Science Fiction.

Brains are not required to think or solve problems – simple cells can do it

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