A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

https://www.noemamag.com/a-radical-new-proposal-for-how-mind-emerges-from-matter/

by Hooke • 1 year ago

209 198 1 year ago

gregwebs• 1 year ago

I don't see the word "consciousness" in the article. I thought that was the thing to figure out to understand the emergence of the mind.

sctb• 1 year ago

My general understanding is that "mind" is an objective concept; people have minds that cognize and think and learn and so on. Some minds are apparently more capable of those things than others. When speaking about intelligence, it makes sense to associate that with the mind.

Consciousness, on the other hand, is (even) less well-defined and is usually considered to be subjective. Being subjective, it tends to resist all of the usual objective approaches of description and analysis. Hard problem and all that.

Aardwolf• 1 year ago

The mind concept here then could apply to computers as well since after all those can also be configured to learn things and behave in certain intelligent ways

mirekrusin• 1 year ago

I don't understand why people have problem with simply stating that it is emergent phenomenon and that's it.

Similarly to how computer is computer and half sized computer is half of its bigger friend – you can keep halving it until there is no "computer" left in it.

Or pencil – you have pencil that you call pencil; what about pencil half size of it? and so on until you hit single atom. You had pencil, now you don't, where on this line there was pencil and then there wasn't?

Symmetry2• 1 year ago

There's a whole scientific study of consciousness that actually comes out of behaviorism. The thought is, if I have a conscious experience I can then exhibit the behavior of talking about it. From this developed a whole paradigm of investigation including stuff like the research of subliminal images.

Stanislas Dehaene's book Consciousness and the Brain does a great job of describing this, though it's 10 years old now.

baddash• 1 year ago

mind = container of values

consciousness = meta-attention

card_zero3• 1 year ago

I read it all, for a certain value of "read". It's very long, and heavy on examples and fascinating facts, but skimps on getting to the point. I enjoyed the line about plant biologists suffering from brain envy. The article gets better from about halfway through as skeptical views begin to be introduced, but eventually it lets go of that and turns back into lot of hand-wavy awe about mycorrhizal networks, and I missed what the "new proposal" is. If it's only saying that intelligence is an emergent property of connections, and could therefore emerge in swarms or societies, we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his sentient ant nests.

SubiculumCode• 1 year ago

'Get to the point' is my primary response to the article..

hikarudo• 1 year ago

we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his sentient ant nests.

A similar idea is present in Herbert Simon's 'The sciences of the artificial', where he describes a sentient city.

kayo_20211030• 1 year ago

The whole proposal can be distilled to Connections => Mind. We've been struggling with the causal effect, even the definition, of what the `=>` means in humans. Seems a long shot that the study of, and breathy coverage, of plant signals will illuminate much. Maybe it will, but I'm not holding my breath.

ripped_britches2• 1 year ago

Can we retitle this as there is nothing new here besides long musings

mandmandam5• 1 year ago

There is, if you read it.

Which brings us to the most striking idea — that some types of electrical oscillations could mediate an experience of self.
In 2021, Hanson found that similar electrical activity — spontaneous low-frequency oscillations — is evident across many different organisms, from E. coli to humans. She concluded that across a diverse range of creatures, the oscillations may have a shared function: constructing a single organismal whole from many parts.

That's fascinating stuff which deserves the title (and the long context). 2021 is pretty damn new as far as theories of mind go.

unsupp0rted• 1 year ago

This would be a mechanism for how in sci fi they scan a nebula and say "signs of intelligence" or something like that. "Our scanners have picked up the telltale oscillations".

card_zero3• 1 year ago

Oh that's the key point. I barely noticed it. OK, well, this is very literally about the first steps in how brains evolved. It's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one involving clay crystals "reproducing". But it's steep to say this is about minds, which only works if we accept the various parts of the article that urge us to stop being so egotistical and anthropocentric as to expect that a mind should be capable of doing something clever.

rzz3• 1 year ago

The right way to include all of this context would be to start with the lead and then back it up with the context. I can’t read stuff written like this.

simonh• 1 year ago

Is there any reason why we should associate oscillations with any such thing though? Lots of systems oscillate. It could well be that oscillations are a common emergent property of many systems, including consciousness, rather than consciousness being emergent from oscillations.

It seems to me that a key characteristic of consciousness is it's informational character. It is representational of a cognitive state, it's interpretive, introspective. It seems to me that for any system to be conscious it must at a minimum be generating and interpreting representational structures. I'm sure that's nowhere even close to being a sufficient criterion, but I don't see how it can't be a necessary one.

I think that's key to subjectivity, because different systems can have radically different ways to represent and interpret even the same phenomenon they have representations of. The details of the representational structure, and it's network of associations with other representational structures in the system, are intrinsically tied to details of the system processing and interpreting the representation.

ripped_britches2• 1 year ago

Is this not the same thing as IIT?

someothherguyy• 1 year ago

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7934974/

Hanson, Alison. "Spontaneous electrical low-frequency oscillations: a possible role in Hydra and all living systems." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376.1820 (2021): 20190763.

Discussion of some of it here with M. Levin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZPhqwrSC24

bloomingkales8• 1 year ago

If I were to say this is just a coincidence, how would you respond?

If it’s not:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676...

If everything is pulsing with electricity and they are syncing to something global …

From the paper:

Examples of biological systems that have been modeled using PCOs include cardiac pacemakers [2], crickets that chirp in unison [3], and rhythmic flashing of fireflies [4]

xg15• 1 year ago

Maybe the definition of what "intelligence" is could be sharpened by having a look at LLMs and "traditional" computer programs and asking what exactly the difference between the two is.

Almost all the traditional criteria of intelligence - reasoning, planning, decisionmaking, memory etc - are exhibited pretty trivially by standard computer programs. Nevertheless no one would think of them as "intelligent" in the sense that humans or animals are.

On the other hand, we now have LLMs, that sent the entire tech world into a multi-year frenzy, precisely because they appear to possess that human-like intelligence.

And that is even though they perform worse than classical programs in some of the "intelligence" measures: For the first time, we have to worry that a computer program is "bad at math". They cannot reflect on past decisions and are physically unable to store long-term memories. And yet, we're much more likely to believe that an LLM is "intelligent" than a classical program.

This makes me think that our formal decisions of "intelligence" (the ones that would also qualify fungal networks, swarms, cells, societies, etc) and what we intuitively look out for, are really two different things.

andoando4• 1 year ago

I wouldn't say that's true at all for traditional computer programs. They're doing explicitly what they are designed to do, there is no adaptation/learning.

ben_w3• 1 year ago

Code vs. data.

The code needed create, train, and perform inference on a Transformer is quite short. How short depends on how you count the `import` statements in https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py and https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/sample.py etc.

Spreadsheets performing linear regression etc., — Do they learn? Sure!

If you accept that Transformers adapt and learn then you must accept that a spreadsheet also does, because someone implemented GPT-2 in Excel: https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need

Do polymorphic computer viruses adapt? Border Gateway Protocol? Exponential backoff? Autocomplete? And that's aside from any algorithmic search results or "social" feeds, which are nothing but that.

Nevermark• 1 year ago

A structured program analyzing data as a graph, and optimizing access, is interacting with phenomenon, updating its working knowledge of the phenomenon, and can produce results that are very non-intuitive.

Likewise, any symbolic mathematical system that accumulates theorems that speed up future work as it solves current tasks, seems like a high intelligence type of activity.

Deep learning is “just” structured arithmetic.

I think different kinds of intelligence can look quite different, and they will all be “structured” or “tropic” at their implementation levels.

—

Stepping away from the means, I see at least four “intelligence” dimensions:

1. Span: The span of novel situations for which it can create successful responses.

2. Efficiency: The efficiency of problem solving.

I.e. When vast lookup tables, exhaustive combination searches, and indiscriminate logging of past experience can be matched instead by more efficient Boolean logic, arithmetic, pattern recognition and logging, we consider the latter more intelligent.

3. Abstraction: The degree to which solving previous different novel situations improves the success or efficiency in solving new problems. I.e. generalizable, composable learning.

4. Social education: Ability to communicate and absorb learned information from other entities.

Plants, and I expect all surviving life forms, are very high in intelligence types 1 and 2.

Adaptive nervous systems and especially brains excel at 3.

Many animals, but most profoundly humans (whose languages for communicating are themselves actively adapted for compounding effects), excel at 4.

Today’s humans are effectively more intelligent than 10,000 year ago humans, not because of 1-3, but because of 4. Learning as a child to read/write, do arithmetic, understand zero and negative numbers, and countless other information processing activities and patterns, from others, profoundly impacts our intellectual abilities.

Deep learning, as with the human species, non-trivially spans, and continues to improve, on all 4 types of intelligence.

szvsw4• 1 year ago

How do you define adaptation and learning? What about say, an autoscaler which is programmed to just track the the load for every hour over the last week, and use the average of the last 7 days at 8am to pre-emptively auto-scale? Is that learning and adapting?

Alternatively, neural networks are also just doing explicitly what they are designed to do… sure there is a larger computational graph with lots of operations, but it’s all deterministic… backprop is not really much different on a procedural level than the simple fitting algorithm that I outlined above, in as much as it is just a specific well-defined algorithm or sequence of steps designed to compute some parameters from data.

empath752• 1 year ago

You can construct a "computer" that learns and adapts with some matchboxes and buttons.

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

I wouldn't say that's more "intelligent" than, I don't know, a workplace scheduling system.

bryanrasmussen• 1 year ago

intelligence is a property of the species and the property of the individual, even unintelligent individuals (except for very pronounced extremes) still have the species property of intelligence.

The species property of intelligence encompasses stupidity.

thelamest• 1 year ago

This makes me think that our formal [definitions] of "intelligence" […] and what we intuitively look out for, are really two different things.

Just two? You can name so many more terms in this concept cloud, e.g.: personhood, moral agency, consciousness, self-awareness, processing power, wit, autonomy, feeling-and-experiencing capacity, and so on… We don’t seem to agree on what’s separate from what, and yes, it would be useful.

energy1232• 1 year ago

But the discussion is not about intelligence, human or otherwise.

naasking5• 1 year ago

The article mentions intelligence a lot actually. It's also conjecture that consciousness and intelligence are unrelated. Qualia could be functional, and emerge naturally from the development of ever more sophisticated intelligence.

raindeer2• 1 year ago

The difference between traditional software and LLMs is the generality of their intelligence, and there are formal definitions of general intelligence such as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI

AIXI is a definition of the optimal agent and is hence uncomputable but LLMs are approximations which are approaching AIXI. I recommend Fridman's interview with Hutter.

AndrewKemendo• 1 year ago

The only proof of intelligence that humans accept are where they are utterly dominated by the more intelligent “thing.”

In my experience it comes down to speed of processing and response

Nobody views trees as intelligent because despite having extremely complex interdependencies with their ecology, including fungus and all kinds of other organisms, they don’t move quickly or appear to respond to input (even though they do, just slowly).

Meanwhile the mantis shrimp because of it speed, superhuman vision and flexibility is considered extremely intelligent.

The only thing that humans will accept as more intelligent than them is (something) that they cannot control and can dominate them.

This is why AI is “the things we haven’t done yet” - once a technology is pervasive and integrated it is “just computing.”

bloomingkales8• 1 year ago

Nobody views trees as intelligent

Because we take freely from trees. They must be stupid or something because they give things freely. It's kind of why many employers view labor as stupid. They give their labor for very little. Humans dabble in arrogance.

empath752• 1 year ago

We need to break the concept of "intelligence" down into more well defined components, probably.

giorgioz2• 1 year ago

I've been thinking as well that from some perspective a human being isn't actually a single life but rather itself a multitude of separate tiny-life forms that cooperate to survive (the cells). The voice in our head is the emerging consciouness that act as a captain, it's useful for the captain to think of itself as one being. Now this said, I feel the article is jumping a bit too much on the Animism hippie bandwagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism

Of course, there is some intelligence in any life form behaviour, but if you want to say that a tomato plant is intelligent than you need to use another word or set of words for more advanced life forms. Putting in the same bag a tomato plant and a dolphin clearly makes the word intelligence so vague it loses almost every practical meaning.

To clarify also the part where it talks about earth being an organism. I've thought of this as well, the whole universe could be a life form, each planet and star in it a cell in its body. It's a possibility. Or maybe even our whole universe is just a cell in someone's body.

It's possible, but I fear there is little science in the people of that article and just old fashion Animism and protect "the mother earth" natural spiritual thinking that has existed for thousands of years. Those people see the world as if they are druids in a fantasy novel. I see myself more as a wizard. We might have different opinions. I will take them seriously when they can LITERALLY speak with animals daily in useful manners and tell vines to move. Until then is just (a) Fantasy. I can summon electricity and fireballs (with technology), if they want to say they are druids they better step up their enchantments. Telling "sit" to a dog and then writing long articles on how dogs are so intelligent doesn't cut it for me.

truculent• 1 year ago

While it shares some similarities with animism, it’s a fundamentally materialist viewpoint, which puts it at odds with animism. Materialism is so rooted within our culture that I think it can be hard to fully grok alternative viewpoints.

dimal• 1 year ago

The term I’ve seen used the most is “basal cognition”. It’s used to describe agentic problem solving behavior seen at lower scales and in different problem spaces where we normally have trouble imagining intelligence. Michael Levin’s paper, “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”[0] is a good, readable explanation of the concept. He does a ton of YouTube talks explaining it as well.[1] Very watchable, and pretty mind-blowing. It’s not wishy washy animism. He and his lab are doing rigorous experiments and finding some very unusual things.

[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/ar...

[1] https://youtu.be/StqX-LH0IN8?si=NhwMdWxBLZrghUom

bloomingkales8• 1 year ago

Trees giving you the very thing you need to live every minute wasn’t enough of a compromise for you? They’ve quite negotiable with us.

Gotta watch The Happening again.

giorgioz2• 1 year ago

To be clear, trees did not "give" us oxygen. Trees evolved from bushes which evolved from algaes, which evolved from some mono-cell life forms which are a common ancestors to us as well. They were shaped by natural selection, it was indeed awesome for them to get out of the water and start consuming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They did not give us oxygen though, there was no high level consciousness of gifting life to others as your sentence is implying. This said, trees are awesome and we should definitely not cut them or burn them for no reason or pure sadism. We should though also consider them as a parte of the environment where live. If we need them and there is plenty and there aren't other constraints we can use them to build things. Having too much carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere is a constraint very important to value. We don't want to literally destroy our home. I can keep this thoughts rationally in my brain without having to come up with metaphors where the giant rock we happened to be on is a "mother" nurturing us. The earth is not our "mother", we evolved here because simply all other rocks did not have the right conditions to sustain life. The universe is mostly a harsh and cold place, we should save/improve/increase the places that can be home. I feel though the people that start to lean into Animism are just not very scientific, they mean well, but they won't learn all the technology tools that could help me preserve our home planet more effectively.

Ending on a positive note, many scientists both love nature and are rationally scientific (rather than romantic). All the awesome work being done with using LLM to speak with whales and recognize better dogs emotions and pain levels is very inspiring.

timewizard2• 1 year ago

You perceive one voice and give it a position of authority.

What if it isn't?

What if it's many voices and they compete for control?

phito• 1 year ago

This is 100% my experience. There are different captains, but since they share the same memory, there's an illusion that they are one. When you look into who is in the driver seat now at different times, it is clear that there are multiple drivers. Which one is driving now depends on the context and state of my brain.

Jordan_Pelt• 1 year ago

I'm probably a crackpot, but I'm convinced it's the other way around--matter emerges from mind. The only refutation I'm familiar with is Samuel Johnson kicking a rock, which I don't find very persuasive.

amanaplanacanal• 1 year ago

The interesting thing about mind (as far as I'm concerned) isn't intelligence, but consciousness.

Intelligence isn't well defined. According to our current understanding of physics, everything is cause and effect, which throws free will out the window, so what do we even mean by intelligence? Is it just when chains of cause and effect become so complex we can't understand them any more? And if so, why does consciousness even exist at all?

The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying.

I guess the other option is to divorce consciousness from physical master entirely, but then we have kind of opened ourselves up to almost any kind of woo.

It really is a hard problem.

messe• 1 year ago

The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying.

Integrated Information Theory seems interesting, at least, but far from flawless. Like panpsychism though, I don't think it's falsifiable.

skissane9• 1 year ago

Integrated Information Theory

To me, it seems like a bit of a trick - take a philosophical question, propose an answer, stuff some mathematics into the answer, maybe even a few minor empirical predictions, make people think those added bits make the answer more likely to be correct and more respectable than competing answers which don’t do that - I don’t think that actually works though

Like panpsychism though, I don't think it's falsifiable.

Well, I don’t think any theory in this area is falsifiable. Either you give up demanding falsifiability or embrace agnosticism (we don’t know and we maybe never will)

Maybe give up on falsifiability, since presenting it as an absolute must-have is self-defeating (the idea that falsifiability is a must-have is itself unfalsifiable)

skissane9• 1 year ago

According to our current understanding of physics, everything is cause and effect,

We don’t know whether the apparent indeterminism of QM ultimately reduces to determinism or not. It depends on which interpretation of QM you prefer, and none of them has any strong empirical support

which throws free will out the window,

As well as assuming deterministic QM, you also assume incompatibilism. Reject incompatibilism and you can still have free will even if physical reality turns out to be 100% deterministic

so what do we even mean by intelligence?

People disagree greatly as to what “intelligence” means, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone suggest that the issue turns on free will. Usually people present “definition of intelligence” and “does free will exist?” as questions having a significant degree of orthogonality

Is it just when chains of cause and effect become so complex we can't understand them any more?

Mediaeval philosophers commonly viewed intelligence or intellect as a power, the power to engage in conceptual thought. A “power” is a casual concept - it is the possibility of causing something - but possibility, not necessity. It is orthogonal to the question of free will, so long as our position on free will enables us to meaningfully speak of “things we could have done but never actually did”, “thoughts we could have thought but never actually thought”…

It was our dog’s birthday the other day. She’s a smart dog, but she’s never going to understand the concept of a birthday… she enjoyed some special treats but she’ll never understand why she got them on that occasion. She has intelligence, but not the specifically conceptual sort of intelligence mediaeval philosophers were talking about. And free will doesn’t enter into that

And if so, why does consciousness even exist at all?

I think intelligence and consciousness are distinct issues. Consciousness is having subjective experiences; intelligence is having thought processes of a certain kind. One entity might have consciousness without intelligence, another might have intelligence without consciousness.

The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying.

I don’t think the competitors to panpsychism are necessarily inconsistent. Of course, if you reject panpsychism, you need a non-trivial criterion to decide what is conscious - and people will ask you to justify that criterion - and maybe all you can say is that it is axiomatic - and I get why proposing axioms can feel unsatisfying, but it isn’t strictly speaking inconsistent, assuming your axioms are consistent with each other. By the Münchausen trilemma, every quest for justification must end in either infinite regress, circularity, or axioms - and if axioms feel unsatisfying, infinite regress and circularity are just as unsatisfying - so maybe we are just doomed to feel unsatisfied.

I guess the other option is to divorce consciousness from physical master entirely, but then we have kind of opened ourselves up to almost any kind of woo.

I don’t know what you mean by “divorce… entirely”-do dualists (of whatever kind) do that? Do idealists? From my own idealist viewpoint, I reject the claim that idealism necessarily entails “almost any kind of woo”, and I think the thought that it does relies on misunderstanding or misrepresenting idealism, or else confusing certain versions of it which maybe do do that with other versions which don’t

red75prime3• 1 year ago

I'm happy with "Consciousness is a platonic form of self-reflective information processing thanks to all simplifications this processing has to do to reflect the messy physical processes underlying the information processing."

skissane9• 1 year ago

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinctions between different idealisms, such as realist vs anti-realist and micro-idealism vs macro-idealism…

Add to that the typical journalistic fault of forcing one to read through paragraph after paragraph of narrative before actually explaining what the thesis they are presenting is. I’d much prefer to read a journal article where they state their central thesis upfront

protocolture• 1 year ago

I bailed 10 words in and came to the comments to see if the article was worth reading. Thanks for confirming its a skip.

felizuno• 1 year ago

So many adjectives... and "radical" in the title is a doozy considering this article is essentially a stoner summary of LeDoux's "Deep History of Ourselves" with the science replaced with thesaurus suggestions.

rramadass• 1 year ago

The gp is wrong. They are just being supercilious with a word salad of their own which is best ignored.

The article is pretty good making you rethink all your preexisting concepts of Mind/Intelligence based on what we know from Biology today. It is not an article on various theories of Mind but on how scientific research (conveyed through pointers from various researchers) is advancing rapidly on so many fronts that we are forced to confront our very fundamental beliefs.

Absolutely worth reading at least a couple of times.

metalmangler• 1 year ago

I held out a bit longer, and then skimmed, but started to become offended by the whole ,thing, but couldnt be bothered to be that annoyed by so many different things. That said I am very much into bieng outside in the company of many animals, working with them, and just bieng in wild environments, but language fails, when it comes to describing how species interact, and in the end, we cant describe our own mental proceseses in a clear, intellible by all, way. There is yet to be a genius of the mind, where the definition of genius is,:an idea that once explained, everyone else goes "of course" My main issue is that these sort of philisophical projects, reek, of money and hidden agenda's, and shade very quickly into, policy decisions, and quasi religious beurocratic powers.

mcswell• 1 year ago

As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word "language" loosely, almost anything (DNA codons, for example) can be considered to be a language. But few if any other animals can get past the finite state level--and perhaps none gets even that far.

And an article or book that uses the word "communicate" is even more annoying, since "communicate" seems to mean virtually anything.

End of my rant...

ggm• 1 year ago

This. it nicely encapsulates why AI aficionados use words like "hallucinate" which become secret clues to belief around the G part of AGI. If it's just a coding mistake, how can the machine be "alive" but if I can re-purpose "hallucinate" as a term of art, I can also make you, dear reader, embue the AI with more and more traits of meaning which go to "it's alive"

It's language Jim, but more as Chomsky said. or maybe Chimpsky.

I 100% agree with your rant. This time fly likes your arrow.

umanwizard• 1 year ago

I’m a linguistics layman, but can’t you make an even stronger claim about human language? Apparently there are certain constructs in Swiss German that are not context-free.

scotty792• 1 year ago

It's philosophy. It doesn't concern itself with facts or knowledge.

teekert2• 1 year ago

As a scientist, articles like this also annoy me. Because it, right off the bat, assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness. Just because we don't experience those degrees, and animals can't convey what they feel through language, we assume it is "emergent", or "suddenly there". I think we are too caught up in believing that consciousness must be something really special or some magic discontinuity of spacetime.

I don't believe it is. Somewhere inside our brain there is some perception of self related to the outside world. So we can project self into the future using information from the now and make better choices and survive better ("Information is that which allows you [who is in possession of that information] to make predictions with accuracy better than chance"- Chris Adami). Why do we need all these difficult words?

I bet animals also have some image of self inside there somewhere, and make decisions based on simulated scenarios. Perhaps to a lesser degree, perhaps because of a lack of language they experience it in a different way? Not being able to label any of the steps in the process... Who knows?

Perhaps when we get to simulate a whole brain we can get some idea. But then there is the ethics. We do attribute great value to organisms that have this image of self.

gizajob• 1 year ago

Yes, it's such a waffle. Instead of the unnecessary title "A Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter" – a more appropriate one would be "On plant intelligence (and possible consciousness)" given the entirety of the article is devoted to plant intelligence. We don't have anything radical, nor is it very deeply related to the mind/matter problem. If an author can't get something simple like that correct, then they don't deserve our time. Shame one has to get paragraphs deep into the article to find out we have a spiel about plants, not about mind.

Xmd5a• 1 year ago

Here lies the promised land: the possibility of a precise and concise nomenklatura that assigns each thing a unique name, perfectly matching its unique position in the world, derived from the complete determination of the laws governing what it is and how it interacts with others. The laws of what is shall dictate how things ought to be named. What a motivating carrot—let’s keep following these prescriptions, for surely, in the end, the harmony of their totality will prove they were objective descriptions all along. Above all, let’s not trust our own linguistic ability to distinguish between the subtle nuances hidden within the same word, or at least, let’s distrust the presence of this ability in our fellow speakers. That should be enough to justify our intervention in the name of universality itself.

Imagine this: language is an innate ability that all speakers have mastered, yet none are experts in—unless they are also linguists. And what, according to experts, is the source of such mastery? A rigid set of rules capturing the state of a language (langue) at a given time, in a specific geographical area, social class, etc., from which all valid sentences (syntactically and beyond) can supposedly be derived. Yet this framework never truly explains—or at best relegates to the background—our ability to understand (or recognize that we have not understood) and to correct (or request clarification) when ill-formed sentences are thrown at us like wrenches into a machine. Parsers work this way: they reject errors, bringing communication to an end. They do not ask for clarification, they do not correct their interlocutors, let alone engage in arguments about usage, which, under the effect of rational justification, hardens into "rules."

Giving in to the temptation of an objective description of language as an external reality—especially when aided by formal languages—makes us lose sight of this fundamental origin. In the end, we construct yet another norm, one that obscures our ability to account for normativity itself, starting with out own.

Perhaps this initial concealment is its very origin.

globnomulous• 1 year ago

Is there a philosopher or philosophical school that identifies intelligence as a being's capacity to deploy a capability towards some end with intention? If so, what is this called? Or who is associated with it?

Edit: I'd expect this thinker/school also to argue that the being needs to be able to experience its intention as an intention (as opposed to a dumb, inarticulate urge); in other words, intelligence would require an agent to be aware of itself as an intelligent agent.

Edit 2: I strongly recommend Peter Watts' Blindsight to anybody who's on the market for sci fi that deals with these issues.

jcgl• 1 year ago

This is _not_ about defining intelligence. But it's about supposing intentionality as a tool for explaining the behavior of a thing.

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

FrustratedMonky• 1 year ago

Agree. This last couple years of AI has been a wellspring of people/articles re-inventing philosophy, like all these subjects haven't been debated and studied for a few hundred years. At least acknowledge them, even if we aren't going to try and build on what has come before.

dsjoerg• 1 year ago

Yes.

The article is really about conceptual framing — how clinging to outdated or vague definitions prevents progress in understanding biological and cognitive processes.

People keep forcing everything into the vague, overloaded concept of "intelligence" instead of just using the right terms for the phenomena they’re studying. If we simply describe behaviors in terms of adaptation, computation, or decision-making, the whole debate evaporates

https://chatgpt.com/share/67c07325-3140-8007-8177-c56a89b257...

kordlessagain• 1 year ago

Wait. If words fail to capture the truth, why do we keep making more words about it?

NoGravitas3• 1 year ago

So, I think you' are wrong about this: the article is discussing a change in perspective that would largely make the classic debates in philosophy of mind irrelevant in the same way that heliocentrism made classic debates within the geocentric paradigm (about epicycles, and such) irrelevant. Highly worthwhile, if insufficiently in-depth.

photonthug• 1 year ago

It seems like this might be missing or just talking past parents point. Sure, new paradigms might always make old lines of research irrelevant. But otoh, something like idealism vs materialism vs dualism can’t just be dismissed because the categories are exhaustive! So new paradigms might shed light on it but can’t just cancel out the question. So yes, to parents point some stuff is fundamental, and if you’re not acquainted with the fundamentals then it’s hard to discuss the deep issues coherently. It’s possible I guess that a plant biologist or a journalist or a ML engineer for that matter is going to crack the problem wide open with new lines of inquiry that are completely ignorant about historical debates in theory of mind, but in that case it will still probably take someone else to explain what /how that actually happened.

SilasX• 1 year ago

I agree in spirit, that it's possible for a field to be so lost that a new paradigm fundamentally obviates it and frees you from having to recapitulate the entire thicket. But still, a minimal test for whether you've actually obviated them would be whether you can double back and show how the new paradigm resolves/makes them look naive and confused. And so I'd expect an author to do that for at least one such school of thought as part of their exposition.

lubujackson• 1 year ago

Just read an interesting sci-fi novel grappling with this question very directly - Blindsight by Peter Watts, if anyone is interested.

red75prime3• 1 year ago

The problem with sci-fi and this matter is that the author can portray anything that suits his/her ideas. Can Rorschach exist as described? Who knows.

Apocryphon2• 1 year ago

Watts also believes in the Ganzfeld effect, as per Starfish, yeah so his beliefs in the mind should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.

marcus_holmes2• 1 year ago

I found it fascinating how this discussion dovetails with the discussion around free will.

In both cases, defining the actual thing under discussion is hard. If you can accurately predict a decision in advance, is that "free will"? If an organism reacts to a stimulus in an appropriate manner, is that "intelligence"?

In both cases, we're complex chemical organisms doing all of this with complex chemistry. If we rule out souls and spirits and similar, then it's just chemistry.

If we're following a predefined set of chemical rules in response to a set of stimuli, then how is that "free willed" or "intelligent"? The arbitrary line between tropism and intelligence seems very arbitrary.

But on the other had, we are made of meat. We experience free will and intelligence. We think, and make decisions, seemingly unrestricted by the method we use to do that. We are clearly intelligent, and clearly make decisions that we are apparently free to make.

anon2913• 1 year ago

One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of. And this is where these arguments that seek to reduce intelligence to purely mechanistic processes breaks down. For sure, everything the article is saying is true, and indeed, the system could be classified as intelligent, but this is a wholly different question from 'agency' or 'free will'. Even exceptionally dumb people have free will, and exceptionally intelligent computers (ChatGPT, DeepSeek, et al) have no free agency.

koakuma-chan5• 1 year ago

Even exceptionally dumb people have free will

“Free will” does not exist because the world is deterministic. In other words, if you have made a decision, you couldn’t have made any other decision, so there wasn’t any choice in the first place. A persons IQ has nothing to do with this.

infinitifall• 1 year ago

You haven't defined this property you call "agency". How then can you definitely determine whether you posses it or that someone else doesn't? The only thing I can be assured of is my own existence.

LiquidHelium2• 1 year ago

This is an argument for anecdote so feel free to ignore me but if you meditate for long enough or take certain substances you can experience that the conscious experience we are having doesn't actually control things in the way we think it does - you don't actually think your thoughts, you just observe them, like we don't control the sounds we hear - and same with everything else we do. The "only thing one can be assured of" is the experience, not the control of the experience.

This is completely contradicted by the fact I could talk about that experience, which does imply some control from the observer to the physical world. Which makes the whole thing paradoxical. The only way I can square it is with my religious beliefs.

NoGravitas3• 1 year ago

One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of.

Can one? One of the most disturbing short stories I've ever read is "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death" by Alice Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree). It is the first-person narrative of an unusually self-aware member of a non-technological intelligent species trying to make a life different from "the plan", the species' instincts, in the face of an oncoming slow-motion multigenerational catastrophe. His efforts end up, all for contextually rational and agentive reasons, reiterating his species instinctual lifecycle.

My takeaway from that, from other readings, and from self reflection, is that we are puppets that may or may not become aware of our strings; but if we cut them, we die.

ivan_gammel• 1 year ago

Intelligence is the ability of a system to make observations and adjust itself based on them (like our brain is changing while learning or our environment is changing with technological progress). It’s definitely not binary state. If we put the internal complexity of the system on one axis and external complexity (what can be observed and meaningfully processed) on another axis, there’s a circle on the plane representing what humans perceive as being intelligent. It intersects with a few other species so we do think now that they are intelligent. Everything else outside that circle is either too primitive or too complex for us, so we do not see e.g. plants as intelligent, but we also may not recognize aliens as intelligent because their existence is too complex for us to even notice it. Humans unlocked evolutionary path not based on DNA, so we evolve much quicker now through science and culture. Our circle is thus expanding and we start realizing how more primitive systems think and create new intelligent systems.

tweaqslug• 1 year ago

The article went straight from mind to intelligence before the first paragraph; admitting defeat before making a move. Intelligence is still riding the wave of an evolutionary hype cycle. Mind, on the other hand, is some supremely useful stuff.

scotty792• 1 year ago

New proposal for how digestion emerges from the stomach.

_1tem2• 1 year ago

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Take any definition of consciousness or intelligence that is not based on biological components. For example "reacts to stimuli, exhibits anger". You can apply that definition to other entities like the United States. Does the United States react to stimuli (i.e. invasion) and exhibit anger? Yes (e.g. Pearl Harbor). Therefore the United States is conscious?

If a person argues that an LLM is conscious or intelligent based on how it responds, is the United States conscious or intelligent?

FeepingCreature• 1 year ago

I think the US is conscious.

koakuma-chan5• 1 year ago

Therefore the United States is conscious?

Assuming the United States react to stimuli and exhibit anger, and assuming that the definition of being conscious is reacting to stimuli and exhibiting anger, yes, the United States are conscious.

svantana• 1 year ago

This is one of the themes of the classic 1979 book "Godel, Escher, Bach".

cjfd• 1 year ago

One part of consciousness is the 'stream of consciousness'. I.e., a single-threaded, if you will, sequence of observations and/or language that is extracted from all the parallel processing that is happening in the brain. The US does not have that. If there were one single news broadcast that all people were listening to all the time and were basing their action on, one might start considering that the US is conscious.

Also, considering who the current president is, the US is quite the opposite of intelligent.

timewizard2• 1 year ago

If I break a bone. It heals itself. Are my bones intelligent?

Joker_vD• 1 year ago

"reacts to stimuli, exhibits anger".

Nitroglycerin comes to mind.

skissane9• 1 year ago

There's a great philosophy paper making this argument: Schwitzgebel, Eric. “If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, vol. 172, no. 7, 2015, pp. 1697–721. https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...

Discussed previously on HN:

July 2015 (210 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847

Feb 2021 (78 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217834

Dec 2023 (1 comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38814769

naasking5• 1 year ago

There's a great philosophy paper making this argument: Schwitzgebel, Eric. “If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious.”

Maybe, but this strikes me as a borderline category error, like saying, "If databases can order results, then they are probably sorting algorithms". The argument makes assumptions that consciousness is transitive or "sticky" in some sense, where if a property applies to a part of the system it must also apply to some aggregate of those parts.

nilslindemann• 1 year ago

Mind emerges from matter? I thought it was the other way around.

ilaksh2• 1 year ago

Reminds me of concepts like a Metasystem Transition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasystem_transition or Global Brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain

ilaksh2• 1 year ago

Maybe the increased status management, self pattern persistence, or general problem solving abilities of intelligence comes from processes that integrate data from multiple colony members and use the integration, broadcast and storage of information over a series of immediate steps and long time frames to synthesize concepts and plans at a higher level than individuals can manage.

But the intelligent work is in the connections, exchange, and integration of information.

I think that security for human groups should be thought of in this context. Many strong communication links or maybe a holistic network are required for preventing sub-colonies from becoming "other".

causality0• 1 year ago

And they believe that if we can bring ourselves to dramatically reconsider what we think we know about it, we will end up with a much better concept of how to restabilize the balance between human and nonhuman life amid an ecological omnicrisis that threatens to permanently alter the trajectory of every living thing on Earth.

Do we really have to resort to total bullshit claims like this in order to make people care about this subject? Knowing what is and is not intelligent has fuck-all to do with not destroying the environment we as a species rely on for survival. The people and forces at work care not one whit. You could prove that chickens can write symphonies and it would make no difference.

carlosjobim• 1 year ago

What is the god damned problem with writers today?

From a snarl of roots that grip dry, shallow soil, the knobbly trunk of an ancient olive tree twisted into a surprisingly lush crown of dense, silvery-green leaves. Far above, the retrofuturistic pattern of a geodesic dome framed the blue sky outside. Dan Ryan considered the tree: “It’s probably close to 1,800 years old.”

Why do articles always have to start this way? These writers are writing the blandest and most boring clichés imaginable and everybody hates it, yet they keep doing it. Is it so fucking important for their egos to be perceived as some kind of antiquated stereotypical writer that they have to continue to humiliate themselves and their readers with this, just to impress who?

No wonder everybody is watching short form stuff on TikTok, that gets to the point.

No wonder people are listening to three hour podcasts, where the people who are being interviewed can talk uninterrupted, instead of having their quotes salted and peppered between some musings from the writer.

Where are the writers that make articles for normally intelligent people to read, that aren't filled with fluff, but aren't filled with equations either? Are these all making YouTube videos now?

keernan2• 1 year ago

Meet the Electrome. It Can Turn You Into an Assassin. In “We Are Electric,” Sally Adee explores the body’s capacity for electricity; the results can be shocking.

NYT 2023 https://archive.ph/DpMMr

whymeogod2• 1 year ago

Makes me wonder what it would be like to be a bat

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

keernan2• 1 year ago

When I finished reading this article, several of its resource articles, and the HN comments, I returned to my HN feed, and a few HN posts down, I come across: DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures. What an interesting intersection.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185769

standardly• 1 year ago

Someone hasn't read Julian Jaynes...

A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

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