What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996)

by optimalsolver • 2 years ago

72 80 2 years ago

GiorgioG2• 2 years ago

Being a thermostat is fucking exhausting. My wife and I are the equivalent of a thermostat for our type 1 diabetic son's blood sugar. It's in our face 24/7.

frxhvcdtgf2• 2 years ago

My son has a dozen or so food allergies. It is exhausting.

Then, I know people with autistic kids. Wow.

thebruce87m• 2 years ago

“Health is a crown that the healthy wear, but only the sick can see.”

This applies to so many things, not just health. You only appreciate it when it happens to you, or you get a snapshot of someone else’s life and it humbles you.

Trasmatta5• 2 years ago

I'm type 1 myself, so I feel for you. People don't realize that the hardest part is NOT needles or anything like that, it's the constant mental overhead of thinking about and managing your blood sugar every moment of every day. Every decision you make is informed by it. You make literally hundreds of micro and macro decisions related to your diabetes every day.

A CGM and insulin pump have made my life easier.

How old is your son?

GiorgioG2• 2 years ago

He is 13 and he wears a Tandem X2 w/Dexcom G6 (soon to be G7?). It certainly makes life easier, but like you said there's constant mental overhead. We have SugarPixels all over the house, etc. His pump beeps at him so often he's just become accustomed to it and ignores it until he starts feeling bad (typically when he's going low). But that also means that it limits his ability to do things, he's got only a handful of friends that we trust leaving him alone at their home because their parents are willing to keep checking on him, etc.

cperciva3• 2 years ago

Closed loop. Seriously, my t1d-related mental exhaustion is 90% reduced now that I'm using a closed loop. 95% if you don't count the "why did androidaps disconnect from my pump and which bit do I need to restart to get it working again" headaches.

In a way it's eliminating too much mental effort; while it's useful as a backup, the fact I sometimes completely forget to take insulin with meals is not ideal, even if the closed loop notices and takes care of it for me (since there's inherently more lag when relying on the loop than if I dialed in the insulin at meal time).

Trasmatta5• 2 years ago

Do you still enter carbs, or do you just announce meals? I know some people with closed loops just do the latter. If you don't mind sharing, what's your time in range?

I have the Omnipod 5 which is decent, but it's "closed loop" abilities are extremely conservative and a bit disappointing. I've considered going the full way with androidaps, but haven't taken the leap yet.

kouru225• 2 years ago

Let’s hope that smart insulin comes to market soon (and is affordable)

smokel4• 2 years ago

I find Thomas Nagel's "what it is like to be" [1] concept fascinating. I have spent quite some time trying to imagine what it is like to be a rock. Mind you, not from the perspective of a human ("A rock will probably experience time very quickly, because it erodes, etc. etc"), but from the perspective of the rock itself. That is, it has no senses, no memory, no capabilities for abstraction, no consciousness.

This ruminating has led me to believe that time and logic are human concepts, and are not as universal as is commonly believed. With recent insights into neural networks, I wouldn't even be surprised if the laws of physics follow from the way our brains are wired, instead of the other way around. Perhaps this is simply a modern take on idealism or realism, but I can't find a strand of philosophy with which I feel at home.

Obviously, there is a bootstrapping problem with trying to reason from something that cannot reason. And I am well aware that my brain must exist in some form of reality. To conclusively prove some apparatus for that is way out of the scope of science. Scientifically there is probably very little to learn from this anyway, apart from opening one's mind to some alternative possibilities. It's a fun exercise, though.

However, the entire discussion about what consciousness is, strikes me as less interesting. Is this really more than being able to conjure up memories of past experiences?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

Trasmatta5• 2 years ago

However, the entire discussion about what consciousness is, strikes me as less interesting. Is this really more than being able to conjure up memories of past experiences?

I don't think memory and consciousness are intrinsically linked. Memory is something consciousness can be aware of, but it's not consciousness itself. Someone can have their ability to process and remember memories permanently or temporarily damaged, and yet still have a conscious experience. An AI can have memory, but not have a conscious experience. (Or at least it seems that way - if something like Integrated Information Theory is true, then maybe AI does have some sort of first person conscious experience. I tend to doubt that, but I could be wrong.)

EDIT: although I might be conflating short term and long term memory. I wonder if consciousness requires at LEAST some form of memory processing, even if it's just the past couple of seconds. Perhaps the "Strange Loop" needs at least that to arise. I'm not sure.

robwwilliams12• 2 years ago

Yes, consciousness requires some embedding in time (duration). It requires a capacity of recursion. Hofstadter’s stance loop is a temporal process.

There is no atemporal “frozen” state we can call consciousness. It is dynamic.

That is what bothers me about the Chalmer’s piece. There are not three states of a thermostat’s “What’s it like”. He is showboating his writting chops and parroting Nagel’s dualism.

dmbche• 2 years ago

I can recommend Being No One, by Thomas Metzinger, for essays.

For sci-fi, have a look at Blindsight, by Peter Watts (for free on his website: Https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.html)

smokel4• 2 years ago

Thanks for the recommendations!

I have read Thomas Metzinger's Ego Tunnel (2009), but as far as I understand it, he takes on a naturalist standpoint, and assumes that consciousness arises from that.

I prefer to take a radical agnostic point of view, where consciousness does not even have meaning outside of those who experience it. Implying that "meaning" or "reasoning" make no sense universally.

joloooo• 2 years ago

Thanks for the recs,

Mindware by Andy Clark is also a great book on these topics.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mindware-97801998281...

stronglikedan• 2 years ago

trying to imagine what it is like to be a rock

That is how I perceive meditation to be. At least, the end goal that I have yet to achieve, anyway.

vidarh4• 2 years ago

That depends very much on the school of meditation. It sounds like you're focusing on concentration practice.

Mindfulness practice is toward the other side of the spectrum: The goal is not to suppress your own sensations or thoughts, but to be mindful of them and observe them in a detached manner. The best analogy I've come across is to sit at the side of the river and watch the boats go past, instead of jumping on them and racing down. But you're not trying to clear the river of boats.

There's overlap, in that the finer control you want to have over your ability to be mindful of specific aspects of your thoughts, emotions, body etc., the more concentration you need to be able to muster to calm yourself enough.

TaupeRanger• 2 years ago

Scientifically, there is a lot to learn. If we understand alternate forms of consciousness, we can potentially alter our own and open up new avenues of experience.

Your last comment strikes me as strange for someone who seems to be well read on the topic. Saying that consciousness is an ability to recall memories doesn’t really describe what it is in the natural sense. The memories themselves are composed of conscious experiences, so that definition is circular. An explanation of what consciousness is would include an explanation about why, for example, chocolate tastes the way it does, rather than like vanilla, or some other completely unknown taste. Until we can explain its character (rather than just describe it), we can’t explain what it is. It’s sort of like dark energy: we can describe the phenomenon but we haven’t fully explained what it is.

smokel4• 2 years ago

My last comment on consciousness should probably also be interpreted from the rock perspective. It does not make sense, because I assume that a rock has no consciousness to begin with, and no memory to entertain it.

A sister comment suggests that memory and consciousness are less intrinsically linked that I tend to believe. It might be fruitful to come up with a decision tree on what people believe consciousness to be :)

Personally, apart from the rock meditation, I am not as much interested in the definition of consciousness, because I think it is a trap, based on a categorical mistake. I'd rather get away from the anthropocentric viewpoint. Then again, I sometimes doubt that a scientific method will get us there.

vidarh4• 2 years ago

And I am well aware that my brain must exist in some form of reality. T

To mess with your head a bit more:

We know of no other way that we know the flow of time than indirectly through memory of the flow of events and sensory inputs.

And so while it seems probable that our brains must exist, consider that e.g. a simulated mind that is paused, and where the same step is executed over and over, with no ability to change state, would have no way of telling that apart from the same step being executed only once, to move on to the next.

In that case it's not clear that there'd need to be any full brain, just whatever consciousness is, in a state that has a notion that it has a memory of a past instant.

Put another way: Your consciousness could be just a single frame of a movie, hinting at a past and future that might not exist.

Forever repeating the same infinitely short instant, and nothing else. Maybe the universe is just a large tableau of conscious instants statically laid out and never changing or interacting with each other. We wouldn't know any different.

Of course that is entirely untestable, and so just a fun philosophical question to ponder, mostly as a means to point out just how little we can know, and so how willing we need to be to accept that what matters isn't what we can know, but what is likely to be able to affect our observed world.

E.g. I see myself as a materialist (philosophically speaking) not because I believe it is or can be proven, but because it is our observable reality. If that materialist reality is shaped by our minds and only exists in some abstract form, or we're all in a simulation etc., then that is irrelevant unless/until we find a way to pierce the veil and/or those aspects "leaks" into our observable reality somehow.

metaxz• 2 years ago

This one resonates very well with me: https://www.organism.earth/library/document/simulation-consc...

You have to give it a chance. He is first building up an argument about why consciousness cannot depend just on the physical substrate itself but rather on the "interpretation" of this. It is very important to understand this part/argument. What follows is something that resonates with you namely how our consciousness is now 'tuned' to the current physical laws.

metalman• 2 years ago

what of a stones gestation and its long existance as a geological stratum then some event!, and a fracuring of its colective existance as stone, and aquiring an identity as rock, not mear sand or gravel, short of the exalted state of bieng a bolder, a rock

in a very real sense, we share this

cubefox5• 2 years ago

1996

frxhvcdtgf2• 2 years ago

I find this interesting, and I think dates should always be included.

But I have this question- why am I interested in the date? What changes in this message when I know the date?

I feel like knowing the date sets up a conflict between "this is out of date" vs. "this is before the era of mass garbage generation" (more generously described as "with time only the classics survive)

mannykannot2• 2 years ago

There has been much debate since this was written, but not much movement towards a consensus.

cubefox5• 2 years ago

Chalmers also may have changed his view in the past 28 years.

HPsquared• 2 years ago

Title reminds me of Tim Hunkin's BBC series "The Secret Life of Machines", which he's put on YouTube. There is, funnily enough, an episode on central heating systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnQ9zkBzbYc

EDIT: there is of course a bit about thermostats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnQ9zkBzbYc&t=1137

justlikereddit• 2 years ago

This is why no one actually likes philosophers

johann8384• 2 years ago

Wouldn't the thermostat be more closely aligned with a nerve in the overall system and the control board be more aligned as the brain? The brain can get signals from multiple thermostatats in a system to control the temperature.

upghost• 2 years ago

Does anyone know of a smart thermostat that actually has this function? Every thermostat I've looked for has "heat mode" where it decides if it should be blasting heat or not, and "cool mode", where it decides it should be blasting the AC or not. I have not found the mythical smart thermostat that does the job of "keep the temperature around here" +/- a few degrees.

I live in an area where its cold at night and hot during the day and I am bad at remembering to change the thermostat from mode to mode and haven't found a programmable IOT thermostat I can write a script for, recommendations welcome!

ajoberstar• 2 years ago

Nest thermostats have a heat and cool mode where you have setpoints for each. On older ones there was a limit on how close the two could be set.

ewhanley• 2 years ago

Ecobee thermostats can run in dual heat/cool mode

toast0• 2 years ago

Echoing the other responses, Nest and Ecobee both have this feature, and I think it may have been on the Sensi as well, but I only had a furnace then. Some basic thermostats can do this too.

rcxdude2• 2 years ago

It tends to be tricky to do this without wasting a lot of power, most thermostat auto modes have a pretty wide spread of maximum and minimum temperature because otherwise you run the risk of oscillating between using energy to heat and using energy to remove the heat you've just added. It can be done care and tuning, but the average home HVAC setup is not designed or installed with care.

tananan2• 2 years ago

This kind of panpsychistic talk to me ends up feeling more closer to a reductive materialism than what I would firstly associate Chalmers with ("hey, did you forget you can experience stuff?"), which is probably just my ignorance with his work.

Because yes, you acknowledge "experience", but you make it a function of a physical state described in such and such a way. In the same way that a set of particles at points A, B, C, .. correspond to such and such a (e.g. electric) field strength at point Z, we now imagine it could correspond also to such and such an experience.

It's just barely "experience" on its own terms. and elicits a kind of epiphenomenalism and powerlesness. The thermostat*, after all, doesn't choose anything nor does it profess to have any agency. So agency ought to end up some kind of ephiphenomenal "observable" of a system.

But besides being deflationary in this distasteful way, what bothers me with pictures like this is that they make use of entirely subject-made divisions between objects and their environments, and presume that they might correspond to experiences because - why not? Why not thing of the bottom and upper half of thermostat as corresponding to two fields of experience? Or the quarters, sixtheents, and so on until we get to individual atoms.

The thermostat doesn't "care" if I think of it as the wax and glass separately, or as a single object containing both. But we do have a unified field of experience, and it doesn't matter how another person "cuts us up" in their mind, whether it is as atoms interacting, organs behaving in unison, or just as a "body".

It seems silly to say that between me and Bob having our separate experiences, there is an experience corresponding to "me and Bob", supposedly free-floating somewhere just by virtue of the two of us being cognizable as a physical system.

It turns "experience" and that infamous "qualia" from something that's the most direct and obvious to a weird phantom as the output of a presumed equation which maps some description of a physical state to an "experience".

No wonder you'll find people who'll retort that they don't experience things or that their consciousness is illusory - they have these weird detached notions of experiences to fight against.

* I imagined a thermometer throughout reading this piece, hence the mention of wax and such. It doesn't really change the point so I'm leaving it.

nuancebydefault3• 2 years ago

Each time someone tries to explain in a scientific way what they think is consciousness, you see this analysis phase, breaking it down in steps to the bare minimum. From a scientific point of view, this makes perfect sense.

This leads to two pounts of view - scientific, leading to reduction and more philosophic - there's no way to describe it since it is _super-natural_.

I lean to the more scientific approach, we are not more and not less than the sum of our parts and, each of our parts, at any sub-scale, has some resemblance to a thermostat: some object that reacts on its environment.

tananan2• 2 years ago

The whole thing with Chalmer's hard problem is pointing out that reduction doesn't get you very far. But here he formulates a reductive panpsychist proposal (though only "in theory"). What part this piece plays within his broader thought - I am not sure.

Nonetheless, it is far from compelling even as a "weak-problem" hypothesis and is an abstract angels-on-hairpin musing that truly puts experience outside of the bounds of investigation. Because, after all, if experience is an empty epiphenomenon which exists for any, anyhow-delineated physical system out there, where does that get us? We've made an assumption we cannot prod scientifically, yet it hides behind the scientific veneer of reductivism.

robwwilliams12• 2 years ago

You might enjoy anything written by Humberto Maturana. There are some sharp lines he draws in defining a living system—what he refers to as autopoietic (self-building) systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Maturana

For Hofstadter consciousness requires some form of recursion—what he calls strange loops. Our brains are recursion machines “we” can partly control “ourselves”.

mannykannot2• 2 years ago

I feel that there is an alternative way of approaching the question: to propose that it is only meaningful to ask what it is like to be an X if the X has certain mental abilities, such as some sort of self-awareness of itself as a participant in a wider world. How would we go about evaluating and choosing between these two views, and is there room for there being degrees of 'what it is like' and self-awareness? It is almost as if we are trying to write the dictionary definition before we know enough to complete the job (which is not necessarily a bad thing, unless we assume that by making a choice, we have, ipso facto, filled in the previously-incomplete knowledge.)

I definitely take issue with Chalmers' opening sentence of his final paragraph: "… A final consideration in favor of simple systems having experience: if experience is truly a fundamental property, it seems natural for it to be widespread." I feel he is putting the cart before the horse here - something that seems quite common in the philosophy of mind - by first deciding that experience is a fundamental property, and then using it to justify the assumption that it is widespread. This strikes me as almost circular, as it seems one could at least as reasonably justify it being fundamental on account of the arguments for it being ubiquitous.

robwwilliams12• 2 years ago

You are so right! Both circular and if you follow through in a cartesian mode you end up with an infinite stack of “representations” all the way up toward the two neurons that “represent” your two grandmothers. Both Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) and Daniel Dennett (almost any of his works) did us a big favor by demolishing representational dualism—-mind vs brain.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 2 years ago

It's a dumb click-bait title (riffing on Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?"), but the actual question presented a bit further down is:

"Moving down the scale through lizards and fish to slugs, similar considerations apply. There does not seem to be much reason to suppose that phenomenology should wink out while a reasonably complex perceptual psychology persists… As we move along the scale from fish and slugs through simple neural networks all the way to thermostats, where should consciousness wink out?"

The author seems to have succeeded in answering her own question (at least in hand-wavy fashion) at the same time as posing it, as well as implicitly defining consciousness. So, yeah, it's not like anything to be a thermostat.

robwwilliams12• 2 years ago

Perfect!

cubefox5• 2 years ago

Surely you agree that not only thermostats are not conscious, but also simple neural networks are not. E.g. a single layer perceptron. And it's intuitively also not just a matter of number of layers or neurons.

By the way: The headline is, I assume, by Annaka Harris, while the essay is by David Chalmers.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 2 years ago

Surely you agree that not only thermostats are not conscious, but also simple neural networks are not

Sure - there is a difference between merely being cold and also being aware of being cold. A piece of ice (or a cold thermometer for that matter) can be cold, but to experience being cold - to be aware/conscious of it - requires some minimal level of cognitive apparatus ("a reasonably complex perceptual psychology") to process those sensory inputs and contrast them to the differing sensation of not being cold and be able to think about it!

There is some evidence, such as "blindsight" (ability to see without being aware of it - a loss of visual consciousness) that consciousness may not only require the mental apparatus to process a sensory input, but may also require specific neural pathways (which may be missing, or damaged) to gain access to specific internal neural state in the first place.

It's difficult to know exactly where the line is - which animals do have a sufficiently complex brain to able to introspect on and experience their own state, but clearly simple neural nets (e.g. anything without feedback paths) don't, and simple animals like insects don't either.

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

If you believe a thermostat has consciousness, you would also logically believe that the cascading subset of (your body - n*atoms) would also be conscious. E.g. your arm.

This is one reason the topic is so slippery.

jamieplex2• 2 years ago

And if a thermostat is conscious, then so would an alarm clock be...

anfractuosity• 2 years ago

https://consc.net/notes/lloyd-comments.html has some more info

crabbone3• 2 years ago

I think that we find the idea of thermostat having experiences strange because, subconsciously, we think of experiences only being accessible to someone / something that has a "will to live" (in the words of Schopenhauer).

I.e. I don't think thermostats want anything. They don't have a capacity to care whether they fall apart or not, whether anyone is satisfied with their function or not. But, life, even in the very simplest form wants something. Experiences to living organisms is what makes them more effective at doing what they want.

What makes living creatures want something: I have no idea. I remember hearing a hypothesis tying this to better preservation of energy... but I don't know about that. But, if I had to guess, it must be something that's available to micro-organisms, so, it has to have some physical / chemical explanation...

nuancebydefault3• 2 years ago

Maybe the property of "wanting" is no more than survivorship bias? Since living things survive, they must have a "will" to survive. Maybe that will is just a label that humans invented to attribute to living things?

crabbone3• 2 years ago

Well, wouldn't this bias happen a while ago, to the very primitive organisms? Because the organisms we see today seem to universally want to live. I mean, even if we somehow mislabeled some more fundamental property, on the face of it, it seems to be pretty consistent. Everything about how these organisms are built is indicative of their "will" to remain functional and to procreate. Eg. regrowing parts of organism's body in order to overcome damage (that would cause the organism to cease to exist) seems pretty universal. Similarly, trying to move away from hostile environments seems to be pretty built-in feature of anything alive.

robwwilliams12• 2 years ago

This is the book you will want to read once, twice, or three times to have a good answer to your question.

Humbert Maturana and Francesco Valera(1979) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. ISBN 90-277-1015-5.

Not an easy book, but one that answers your question.

Terry Winograd loves this book. I am a neuroscientist and only found this gem late in my career. Damn!

crabbone3• 2 years ago

Thanks! Much appreciated. I do love the subject, although I'm not connected to it professionally.

neogodless• 2 years ago

Their use of "phenomenal" and "phenomenology" confuses me as a layman, but I'll lay out their (likely relevant) definitions and hope to use that to better understand what is being proposed.

phenomenal: Known or derived through the senses rather than through the mind.
phenomenology: A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness.

So the claim (highlighted especially in paragraph 3) is that, outside of humans, things that are perceived may also exist in conscious thought (of non-humans).

isoprophlex• 2 years ago

Another useful metaphor that doesn't cross the threshold from human experience into the "experiencing" that non-living things do, would be chemotaxis.

A bacterium finds food with a simple set of states. At it's most basic:

- you are experiencing an increasing concentration of food. you keep swimming straight ahead.

- you are experiencing a decreasing concentration of food. you move in a continuously randomized direction.

this eventually gets them onto a track where they are moving towards food.

Extremely simple like a thermostat, yet effective.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotaxis

robwwilliams12• 2 years ago

No, not like a thermostat. A bacterium is a compact and exceedingly complex living system. It has autopietic autonomy like we do. The fact the I navigate each morning to the refrigerator to get milk for breakfast is not so different from a bacterium following a gradient toward its food. Bacteria have complex receptors like we do that are their sensorium—-a nano-brain in the words of one scientist who studies their behavior.

primes4all• 2 years ago

And yet, also a thermostat is doing nothing else but following a gradient towards a desired state (albeit the gradient is discrete and it's moving along the dimension of temperature).

luxuryballs• 2 years ago

anyone know what font that is? (on mobile) reminds me of like an old 70s print

robwwilliams12• 2 years ago

Chalmers is a dualist living in a Cartesian past. If you like a lively treatment of dead scholasticism of the mind-vs-brain problem then you can do no better. Ditto Nagel.

In contrast if you want modern post-cartesian scientific thought on consciousness then hit Dennett hard for philosophy or Ray W. Guillery if you want hard neuroscience (The Brain as a Tool).

ruthmarx• 2 years ago

For it to be 'like' to be anything, the anything must have some send of self. Without a sense of self, there is just information processing.

For that reason, it isn't 'like' anything to be, say, most insects, let alone a thermostat.

rcxdude2• 2 years ago

The trouble there is that people can experience altered states of consciousness where they are still aware, but lose that sense of self. It's hard to call that state unconscious, but it's also without self-awareness.

mode80• 2 years ago

I remember inspecting the thermostat in my parent’s house as a child. It was a coil of something metalic which I assume expands and contracts with temperature and physically pushes electrical contacts together to turn on the heat when needed. Knowing how it works, it’s hard for me to imagine that this feels like anything. The whole contraption is just an arrangement of molecules doing what molecules do. But then again, so am I.

ryandvm• 2 years ago

"What is it like to be a bat (or a thermostat)?" is too abstract for anyone to thoughtfully grasp.

Instead try asking yourself "what is it like to be asleep?" or "what is it like to be waking up?" or "what is it like to be heavily sedated?"

We all experience various gradients of consciousness every day as we do things like drift off to sleep or slowly gain consciousness in the morning. You don't have to try to imagine the experience of another primitive life form when you can just recall what there is or isn't to your own conscious experience as you drift between states.

What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996)

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