Why Some Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is a State of Matter (2014)
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But in physics, we use experimentation and observation of the physical world. Put a brain (or a human) on a table, do some experiments, and write about the results. If you find that atoms and molecules in the brain do strange things that they don't do when part of a brain, document, publish, and theorize.
And if you don't do any experiments, and instead probe the depths of your mind, that's not physics.
(sorry to sound so condescending, but it's frustrating for the word "physics" to be co-opted in the service of bunk science)
No. Absolutely not. All you have to do is choose which outcome you'd like to predict from the theory, and so you choose the ones that are consistent with observation.
Without interacting with the universe, it's probabilistic. The problem being that a lot of things in the universe interact with each other as a matter of course. A particle bumping into another particle breaks the probabilistic state that you're talking about – regardless of whether that particle ends up in the view of a conscious observer.
2. The view of science you are parroting is naive and mistaken. Theorizing and experiment are both necessary and inform and constrict each other.
The paper is extremely difficult to read and extremely long, very few people will have the time or comprehensive knowledge required to read it completely. This is a fault of the paper, not the readers.
2. Theorizing is great, ideas are free, but that is because their value is very low without proof.
The atomic clocks/airplane experiment is a good example a test that came way later.
But it's also the case that just because a physicist is trying to tackle consciousness -- a much harder problem than anything physicists have taken on this far -- doesn't make him a quack. To dismiss it out of hand is foolish; IIT is a thing and this paper certainly fits within that framework, though I don't know enough to judge it beyond that without careful study. But from your post, neither do you.
In the science fictional world of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, the characters discover that neurons are able to store so much data because they exist in different quantum states; that much of what happens in the brain is unobservable by conventional means.
..of course that's fiction, but we find crazy stuff in nature all the time like the species of Snapper Shrimp that able to generate crazy hot super heated cavitation bubbles.
We don't have any working models on how consciousness works (or even what it really is), so anything at this stage is worth documenting. As science developers, we may find ways to test these hypothesis in the future.
The "physicist" who has this big idea is actually a cosmologist and the first few sentences of his wiki page indicate he is a fairly fruity one. Cosmology itself has gone off in embarrassing directions, and is vastly too large in comparison to its actual importance to the human race. I'm not sure anything has actually been figured out by a professional Cosmologist, though they use cool math sometimes. The actual cosmological results we have come from people doing actual science; astronomers, radio engineers, nuclear physicists, stat mech guys. Mind you, if cosmology could actually figure things out, I'd be all for it, but it seems they mostly do "gee whiz" think pieces which feature some differential geometry and noodle theory. And, apparently, untestable mystical whoop-dee-do about consciousness.
I'm gonna get off my high horse in a minute, but this sort of "celebritization" of science is obnoxious. People used to hang on the words of Fermi and Einstein, and considered their weird speculations to be interesting because those men proved their scientific acuity in other domains; actually increasing human understanding of nature. Now a days we canonize guys like this to do the "gee whiz" think pieces that people enjoy reading articles about ... and they are not of the caliber to justify anyone paying attention to their weird ideas. They're speculative types: science fiction authors who know some impressive math. They don't deserve the appellation of "scientist" let alone "physicist" as they do not study nature in a scientific manner. While Peter Woit has done some admirable work exposing the impostures of the noodle theorists, we really need someone to cleanse the temple of science of such people in general.
How do you decide which telescope to build if you haven't decided, without such telescope, what exactly it's supposed to be looking at?
It's also worth noting that theoretical inquiries can be incredibly helpful. You know, like all of Einstein's work. After all, he was a mathematician just playing with numbers and then trusting their results – something most "real scientists" were too skeptical to do because the results didn't look like what they expected.
Of course, it didn't help that a lot of Einstein's (and other theoretical scientists) ideas were, at the time, untestable mystical whoop-dee-do, either.
Other parts of some of them are still unconfirmed, and a subset of those are still well beyond our foreseeable capability of testing. Black holes are one notable prediction that we have virtually no way to confirm.
What's your point? I'm not saying Einstein got things wrong, I'm saying that immediately dismissing science which is not immediately testable is risky. Especially as more and more of the low hanging fruit is picked – cutting edge scientific ideas are going to be more and more difficult to test.
Compare the Cavendish experiment to the Michelson-Morley experiment to the Large Hadron to... Creating a black hole?
Seems to be a steep increase in difficulty. It should be expected.
I think the answer for now is "no," but that's precisely the question he is attempting to answer: "is consciousness something that can be modeled in such a way that we can answer whether or not it is [x]?"
Not: "is consciousness [x]?"
In fact, nobody in the physics community spoke of black holes at all until the 1960s when they began converting agricultural colleges into warehouses for people who speculate on untestable things.
You apparently don't understand the difference between "you know, like all of Einstein's work" and nonsense like this. Virtually all of Einstein's work was based on experiment (he won the Nobel for explaining the photoelectric effect), and all of it was/is testable both in principle and in practice. The sort of wanking in this paper simply isn't science in any sense of the word. It isn't even testable in principle. It is no more science than a ghost story or a damp t-shirt with an equation on it.
You are 100% wrong. Several Nobel prizes have been awarded for seminal results in cosmology, like observation of the cosmic microwave background and the discovery of accelerated metric expansion.
I'm not sure what the other thing you're referring to is, but I used to go to some of Joe Taylor's seminars: he was an astronomer, not a cosmologist. Cosmologists are people who publish papers that can't be tested by people like Penzias, Wilson and Taylor.
Once again you are wrong. Mather, Smoot, Perlmutter, and Riess are all cosmologists. Their Nobel prizes were awarded for results in cosmology.
Your idiosyncratic redefinition of the word "cosmology" is completely at odds with how the word is used in the physics community.
Scott Aaronson has fairly convincing arguments against IIT http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
"In a more serious effect, the patient may have two different consciousnesses, one on each side of the brain."
To respond to your comment, it seems that brain damage, psychoactive drugs, and transcranial magnetic stimulation are all evidence that, even if a "consciousness" can't be split in two (contradicted by your reference), parts of it can be removed or altered by altering matter, so it's still most likely a simple physical process.
In other words, one of the properties of the subjective experience of consciousness is that of a unified whole.
In the experiments you link, the two consciousnesses are not aware of each other, and presumably(?) don't experience the other, thus they are two separate, individual consciousnesses, each experiencing themselves as an indivisible whole.
In other words, these brains host two separate consciousnesses, just like our two skulls host two separate consciousnesses (in two brains). Whatever wiring links up aspects of the brain that gives the perception of unified conscious has been sundered.
Maybe ignoring the question is right. Maybe philosophers have nothing useful to say about it. But if that's your view, then don't talk about that question.
That makes me think of "Action, Or the Fungibility of Computation" (1998) [0] wherein Toffoli argues that what the physical quantity known as "action" amounts to is computational spacetime density.
[0] PDF link in the upper right corner of http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.2410Lot of complicated mathematical notation in the actual paper; will put this on my table and attempt to not get lost reading it on my flight tomorrow.
I also highly suggest reading Bostrom's "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" The mathematics he lays out isn't that complex and he makes a good case for the hypothesis that we are either in a simulation, will eventually be able to create a simulation of our work or we'll go extinct.
It does not really sound like nonsense. Sounds like some form of information theory.
But that's not all he does, and there's nothing that prevents smart people from having silly ideas.
I also have issues with his approach to the many-worlds interpretation. Not sure what his current position on that matter is, but one of his talks I saw speculated about identifying the 'branches' of the wavefunction with distant locations of an inflationary multiverse.
This sounded like nonsense to me: One of the major points of that interpretation is making the wave function universal (the title of Everett's dissertation actually was "The Theory of the Universal Wave function").
that's why i think when we develop algorithms that will relieve our reliance on probability we will begin to see behaviours so inextricable from our notions of consciousness we will acknowledge these actions as being concious
1. Information: It has to have a large repertoire of accessible states, i.e., the ability to store a large amount of information.
2. Integration: This information must be integrated into a unified whole, i.e., it must be impossible to decompose the system into nearly independent parts, because otherwise these parts would subjectively feel like two separate conscious entities.
1) is reasonable, although it doesn't say much about how much memory is required. 2) is clearly bogus - we know that biological brains don't work that way. They have at least a hundred or so subunits handling different functions. Some are very specific, such as face recognition. Tononi says that in his paper: "different parts of the cerebral cortex are specialized for different functions, yet a vast network of connections allows these parts to interact profusely." So he admits it's not one big component; it's a network of components with explicit, limited connectivity.
Where Tonini is coming from is the concept of "qualia".[2] This is a philosophical concept, roughly "The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc." Toroni hypothesizes that qualia can be (are?) represented as points in a space of 2^n dimensions. He writes "Each axis is labeled with the probability p for that state, going from 0 to 1, so that a repertoire (i.e.,a probability distribution on the possible states of the complex) corresponds to a point in Q (Fig. 5)." This is similar to the internal state of an artificial neural network.
The physics paper conjectures that if only we had some materials (?) called "computronium" and "perceptronium", we could get work done in qualia space, through a process where energy is removed from the system in a way vaguely similar to simulated annealing. There's a lot of math and discussion around the idea that some randomness has to be applied to make the thing go; not enough, and it stalls out; too much, and it's just noise. There's a suggestion that certain forms of noise will make it work better. All this sound vaguely similar to the way the random initialization of ANNs matters a lot, and recent work has made ANNs better by choosing the random initial conditions in certain ways. Neither paper mentions what's going on in the ANN world, yet they seem to be approaching some of the same concepts. I'm not an ANN expert; someone in that field may have a better idea of whether the concepts are related.
All this is from the "consciousness is special and magic" crowd. Both authors assume that is the case, and try to reason from there. That's closer to theology than physics.
[1] http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full.pdf+html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
But the brain entire is not consciousness (it's probably in the prefrontal cortex). Some parts of the brain, such as heartbeat, object tracking, etc, are obviously not integrated into consciousness.
It's not one big component, but it at least has to integrate all the components of consciousness (again, not all the brain functions), or else we wouldn't have the apparent sensation that "I" am an indivisible whole. By "I", I mean my consciousness, my will and personality, not my body, which is obviously made up of parts, including the brain and its parts.
It might be an illusion, but that doesn't mean that that illusion is not worthy of study, since it is probably the main thing that defines the human experience.
So only mammals are conscious? Sucks to not be an Eagle I guess! Beware zombie Dinosaurs!
Sometimes I have distinctly non integrated experiences, like when I speak and the sentences flow from me containing grammatically correct concepts in logical order, and I didn't have anything to do with it, but there it is an argument that "I" made.
That said, there are serious flaws in this write-up, including many simplifying and already debunked presumptions about unified consciousness.
You could see it that way. You could see anything anyway you like. The objection is that seeing things this way causes confusion, not understanding.
(1) me, I, that which is of the thing that I really am.
(2) sighs you really are a glutton for punishment, you're checking these footnotes a little bit toooooo seriously! See (1)
(3) See (1)
(edited to reformat!)