Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Where does the dance go, when the dancers go off stage? The dancers are not the dance, but create the dance. There is some kind of duality there.
Similar for the brain. What it does creates the mind/consciousness. Should that feel like something? Why not?
How does the brain decide on next actions? By simulating/predicting futures and "feeling" which is desired, and acting towards that future. Why would that not feel like something?
The "hard question of consciousness" is not an answer. It is a philosophical device without backing. It is unknown if qualia is actually hard, maybe most learning systems have it. What we do know: it is hard to have intuitions about it ...
Well, make it known then for starters, if you want to make the question a little bit softer.
Imagine somebody makes a mind out of machine learning. Passes the turing test and more. It reports to "feel", ie to have qualia. Is it parroting what it hears/reads from humans? Or does it actually have a feeling when you show it an image of a sunset? At what breakpoint do you place your debugger and inspect if it is so?
This paper has one purpose: To get people thinking of the brain and information-carrying systems from a physical perspective rather than solely a computer-science or information-theoretic perspective, or even worse -- a biological perspective. Physicists were largely responsible for computer science and information theory, and they will be largely responsible for breakthroughs in biology and machine-learning as interdisciplinary laboratories continue to grow.
Physics is the most sophisticated area of applied mathematics that currently exists. Whatever consciousness is, it will be understood through physics -- because, presumably, that's what it is.
That said, it is interesting to see a consolidated paper touching on common motifs. The brain exhibits many characteristics of any other state of matter; for example, it has phase transitions.
One thing I disliked about this paper is the conclusion is draws from its examples with the gold ring and the pond. They go on to say that information is not persistent in a pond; for example if you write your name on the surface, the energy will be propagated away and the surface will return to a higher entropy state fairly quickly. This is true, but one cannot say that the brain is different solely because of this. The brain is constantly under "external" influence. It is constantly being supplied with fresh nutrients; neurons are constantly being supplied with tugs from their neighbors. If you were to remove all incoming nutrients, the brain would surely collapse as an information processor, too (e.g. death of the organism).
I would go so far as to say that a conscious system requires constant input, and does not necessarily do anything in the absence of any input. This assertion is in direct contradiction to the heuristics ("principles") established in the paper. For example, computers, bacteria, and brains are all computing systems which require constant input.
This part stood out to me in their idea of how philosophy views consciousness
> A traditional answer to this problem is dualism — that living entities differ from inanimate ones because they contain some non-physical element such as an “anima” or “soul”.
I believe this makes it sound like philosophers are actively looking for the soul, or another explanation of consciousness that lies outside of 'physics'.
This might be true for some philosophers, but there are other philosophies to adhere to. More contemporary would be the works of Daniel Dennett or John Searle.
Cartesian Dualism is surely something not a lot of philosophers would get behind anymore.
I just can't understand the search for a metaphysical soul, as it is not an actual search, it's just faith, hope, it's not a reasonable answer or an attempt at one, and I guess a lot of philosophers and poets use the words "soul" and "spirit" with what I said earlier in mind.
In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property, which defines the framework. For physics this is the speed of light, for life forms it's consciousness.
Says who?
> basis of all experience
Your consciousness is only base of your own experience. For other people your consciousness is only hypothesis to be studied.
> In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property
I would like to study consciousness outside of frameworks where it is unquestionable - just as we can do it in e.g. classical mechanics with speed of light.
Consciousness can't change either, because a change in consciousness changes everything that is experienced, so how can you know whether everything or consciousness changed? There's no difference.
Some terms can only be defined in terms of themselves. What's a meter? It's term used to describe a length of measurement equivalent to one meter. What's consciousness? It's a term used by certain life forms to describe what life is.
How can we study something that's always there, and when it isn't there we're not there either? Everyone "experiences" the absence of consciousness in deep sleep, and there's simply nothing there.
The speed of light was measured constant by the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, whose apparatus didn't have any built-in assumption about c (nor had anything to do with h).
One metre is defined to be the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 seconds. Therefore, c = 299 792 458 metres per second. The second is defined in terms of the frequency of electromagnetic radiation emitted during a transition between two specific states in a caesium atom. In other words, it's a unit of time as measured on a kind of atomic clock, which by convention is constant.
It's an open question whether a second on a pendulum clock is the same as one measured on an atomic clock for all time, as that depends on G.
But if there was a clear answer to that question, it won't be science.
Science is figuring out how to study things that we could not study previously.
I am able to control my actions during and the outcomes of the situations I dream about, and fully recall them after waking.
>>> Tegmark’s career is a rather unusual story, mixing reputable science with an increasingly strong taste for grandiose nonsense. In this book he indulges his inner crank, describing in detail an utterly empty vision of the “ultimate nature of reality.”
Unless it can be proven (and he doesn't, at all, prove his case) then there is no reason to not describe it as such.
(Grandiose is the exception - that's a stylistic judgement and quite apt here, irrespective of its truth value)
A more neutral warning is that Tegmark has moved from conventional science towards untestable speculation. That and the fact that he has cultivated funding sources more aligned with the occult than with science has left many of his peers seemingly resentful.
I'm surprised this is even considered by an MIT Physics professor. Conscious observers like us do perceive "Fourier space" in colors and pitch. Am I missing something?
Because the description focuses on how we perceive the world; not on who is this we that perceives.
The mystery of consciousness in the observer, not in what it observes.
Could you explain this?
The observer isn't a mystery, I agree. But the original comment seems spot on: if you are describing consciousness as a state of matter, then you're saying something like, "matter inherits a different set of qualities when it's in a consciousness state (as opposed to a solid or liquid state)." If the state change leads to a change of quality, then you're once again proclaiming consciousness as an object with observable qualities rather than a the observer without quality. This is fine if we're talking about an observable consciousness, but then who is that observer?
I agree with the original comment that this paper is nonsense. I'm surprised how many papers are spent discussing consciousness this way. In biological terms, fine. In physical terms, impossible.
These questions are very interesting and very hard, and dismissing honest attempts to grapple with them rigorously, wrong as they may turn out to be, seems rash to me.
I'm not intending to say anything particularly deep. If we could exhaustively list the features of a "conscious observer", every feature except for qualia (the qualitative experience) could be cashed out as some kind of information processing (e.g. knowledge of one's own mental states). And so when it comes to explaining consciousness, the difficulty isn't the observer part, but the qualitative experience part.
>In biological terms, fine. In physical terms, impossible.
But if biology is just physics, then it should be possible in principle. We should encourage people to bring their particular expertise to the problem instead of taking our own conceptions so seriously to the point of actively discouraging ideas that don't fit. I'm happy Tegmark seems immune to charges of being a crackpot.
Can we make a conscious machine? Why not? Maybe we can by simulating a brain exactly. But can we then figure out what in our model makes the sim-brain conscious? Can we turn it on and off?
Most of our insights into how human mind works actually describe how a philosophic zombie will work. But I am not one and I would like to know what am I.
"Instead of starting with the hard problem of why an arrangement of particles can feel conscious, we will start with the hard fact that some arrangement of particles (such as your brain) do feel conscious while others (such as your pillow) do not, and ask what properties of the particle arrangement make the difference."
Is that not investigating what makes something conscious (i.e. an observer)?
EDIT: after a bit of reading, this is not intended for non-scientists. The introduction is interesting, but otherwise your time might be better spent reading critiques of this paper instead if you're a newbee like I am. Here's one such critique: http://blog.jessriedel.com/2014/05/13/comments-on-tegmarks-c...
There are two issues when it comes to consciousness: the experience and the experiencer. If we conceive of these two concepts as ultimately one in the same problem, then there is no issue with focusing on kinds of processing rather than observers as its ultimately addressing the same issue from a different angle.
If you conceive of these two concepts as separate issues, then your target should be the experience rather than the experiencer. If you consider all the features that make up an experiencer (sans qualitative experience), then these features can be cashed out in terms of information processing. The mystery isn't here, but in the qualitative experience.
>Most of our insights into how human mind works actually describe how a philosophic zombie will work.
Only as far as our descriptions of a brain are "local" in the sense that they don't consider global properties of such an information processing system. That is, we can have a description of a system that makes accurate predictions without making any high level statements about its processing. We can conceivably describe the workings of a biological creature without ever (explicitly) mentioning molecules, proteins, cells, DNA, action potentials, etc. Yet if we concluded from this that biological zombies were conceivable (physical systems that behaved exactly like biological organisms just without cells, proteins, etc), we'd be mistaken. But this is the same kind of leap that we make when take the p-zombie argument seriously.
What is it that is difficult to explain? We don't (currently) know of any phenomenon that is like (for example) what a sound sounds like to us.
Tegmark doesn't focus on the how; he spends the paper building an argument about what properties an observer must have.
It's very easy to call something you don't understand, or reject a priori, nonsense. But at least try to grapple with the argument and a make criticism with substance.
Maybe there's tl;dr somewhere?
But the only active thing we can do in Hacker News is leave a comment and this article tickles with me enough to want to leave a comment.
I guess the best comment I can leave here is one that avoids the ignorant-about-own-ignorance pitfall of false expertise and just leave a meta-comment about the comments.