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Comment by iujjkfjdkkdkf | Hacker News Reader

Pour water into a maze (or create a potential difference across a conductor) and you'll see that as new current flows in, it doesnt explore every pathway but takes the correct path through.

This intelligent behavior arises from the simple compulsions things to reach equal potential.

The slime mold experiments are cool because they connect simple compulsions with emergent intelligent behavior in an organism. I have wondered if it's the same for us, if conciousness is really just the sum of all our simple compulsions, arising from basic rules - like is water "conscious" of wanting to seek it's own level, ions conscious of wanting to react, etc, and together that makes up what human conciousness is?

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This article says that they've found that the slime mold's memories are stored in tubes that form intricate networks inside the cell. It's interesting because neurons have lots of microtubules and there have been some recent research showing that they may be more than just structural components of the neuron:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3979999/

Could there be a relationship between these slime mold memories and memories in more complex organisms?

I recall Roger Penrose catching flack for his microtubules theory of consciousness - looks like I missed his Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory:

http://www.consciousentities.com/penrose.htm

https://medium.com/awake-alive-mind/roger-penrose-on-the-bra...

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

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106451...

Structure is the memory

I don't understand the point about the water, why wouldn't it cover uniformly the entire maze? Assuming the maze is level with the ground.

Edit: thanks for the clarification all, I didn't realize it was an entrance exit maze, I was thinking of one sealed on a ll sides where the water can't get out.

I think if a maze has an entrance and and exit, and there's some surface tension at the leading edge, when you pour water into the entrance, it'll fill the maze like a breadth first search. as soon as the water can flow freely at the exit it'll drain because there's less resistance at the exit.

pour a little water on a counter and you'll get a round area with little walls at the edge, if it's not clean it'll kinda break down where it's dirty (surface tension doesn't hold up) once it hits the edge of the counter, the surface tension pushes all the water over the edge. if it's a perfectly flat clean surface it'll make a perfect circle till it hits the edge.

so the water won't fill every nook and cranny of the maze, it'll start a new circle at every decision point, till one of those circles goes over the edge.

It would to an extent. The idea is that the maze has an exit, and once the water made it to the exit, it would spill out. The steady spilling out of water would create a current of flowing water all the way back to the water's source, following the "solved" path of the maze. The water didn't intelligently solve the maze, though, but rather the solution emerged out of the simple but massively parallel interactions between collisions of atoms (i.e "weak forces") and gravity.

I would leave gravity out of this.

Surface tension will keep it from spreading beyond a certain point unless the exit is the longest path of the entire maze.

I think OP was talking about a maze with an exit where the water can drain out, not a maze sealed all around the edges.

It would be a fun experiment to test this with and with an open exit drain at the end of the maze.

Ah OK makes sense now, I was assuming like a kids toy maze where it's covered on all sides. An entrance and exit maze makes a lot more sense.

The universe is moving towards maximizing entropy. We (life) are just an artifact on that path. In some ways you could argue that we are 'compelled' by the same thing the water is.

It could be that every atom is conscious. But my guess is that it requires some kind of a larger physical construction for consciousness to appear. It would still mean that our consciousness is a collection of simple compulsions. I just think atoms are too small to contain that behavior on their own.

people sure do go to great lengths to explain away/around the concept of God

They’ve been saying that for centuries. But it did serve us well so far.

I am god.

The Deep History of Ourselves is a book that goes from single cell to consciousnesses. Here is a review:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02475-x

From Bacteria to Back and Back follows a similar path and was a worthwhile read for a layman like myself. It emphasizes the evolutionary fitness of ideas as well as biological evolution. https://www.nature.com/articles/542030a

> and together that makes up what human conciousness is?

If you believe consciousness is completely materialistic, then maybe it is like that.

I personally think that to be conscious means to be aware of being aware.

You could say it’s a circular definition (or recursive), and it is, but it’s the only way to define something by itself instead of as reference to something else.

consciousness is dissimilar to awareness, in my limited understanding it is about feelings (experience) in itself and not about being aware of being aware about feelings.

That is highly controversial. The most popular theories of consciousness are that they are related to certain thoughts about thoughts, i.e. higher order awareness rather than first-order access.

The qualia realist views that you are describing are likely more popular in philosophy classrooms than in CogSci or neuroscience programs.

Two Dimensions of Consciousness: Arousal and Awareness Consciousness is a multifaceted concept that has two dimensions: arousal, or wakefulness (i.e., level of consciousness), and awareness (i.e., content of consciousness).

Source: http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/EncConsc_coma_2009.pdf

I believe it's panpsychism to believe so. I definitely do.

If dogs have consciousness, then there is no line between dogs and humans.

If mice have consciousness, then there is no line between mice and dogs.

If bugs have consciousness, then there is no line between bugs and mice.

etc.

Until you get to, say, a rock rolling down a hill to find the low-energy spot, or an electron... Does that have consciousness? Most people would say no, but I would say then, where does "no line" become "line"?

This is a fairly solid proof of panpsychism imo.

edit:

You can go up the chain as well, from the complex (human beings) to the very-complex: groups of friends, to companies, which are collections of human beings, to the global economy, which is a collection of collections of human beings. I think that's as far up as it goes, but it is interesting to think about.

The buhddists put in the legwork ages ago: the line is if the organism has a chemical stress response to stimuli.

Like could an motivated human torture it and could it try and escape the situation.

But that's assuming the organism/thing can move. easy counter-example: a paralyzed human being.

How is that a counter-example? A paralyzed human can still exhibit a chemical or physical response to an external stressor or stimulus in general, such as body temperature, sweating, neural activity, etc.

Exactly, this is the core concept of homeostasis. Organism in equilibrium? Passive. Stimuli toy with the balance? Compensatory behaviour to restore equilibrium. Humans work just the same, the only difference is the complex brains that allow complex compensatory behaviours.

Well it wouldn't tell us much about consciousness per se, because what you're describing is an explanation of behavior, not the first-person experiential thing we call consciousness. Although I think there must at least be a correlation between the two. After all, when you put your hand on a burning stove, something somewhere goes "out of equilibrium", causing the reaction AND the accompanying experience of pain. It's just that we don't really understand why or how the latter accompanies the former.

Your notion seems to belong to an existing school of thought on consciousness. I forget its technical name, but the idea is that the thing we perceive as consciousness is just a side affect, an artifact of the process, an effect not the cause, a shadow. That we perceive it to be "the decider" is an illusion. Per this school it is inconsequential except that, like any illusion, it can affect our brain's decisions.

Artificial Life folks would say that consciousness is an emergent property of sufficient complexity.

I think the term you're looking for is epiphenomenalism.

Wait, um, can you explain this more or tell me what to search for to learn more about this?

I googled “simple compulsions” already

Emergence [1] is what I thought of at first.

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

Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztOk-v8epAg

(I'm a complete numpty here, so need very basic explanations!)

You call it equal potential, like it is some obvious thing, but what if that is intelligence?

I think it's something interesting to consider. I'd describe it more as computation than as intelligence, but I also do keep in mind that there is no single universally-agreed-upon definition of intelligence, so the goalposts can shift.

For an example, consider the AI effect [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

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