Electrons May Well Be Conscious | Hacker News Reader

Electrons May Well Be Conscious

nautil.us

At what point do we consider Nautilus a tabloid? They hire writers to generate pseudo-science content, or promote graduate student poorly researched writing.

GPT + GAN = the future of news

So, like any major news outlet?

Quantum choice is not pseudo-science; the poorly-researched writer here is you, not the article's author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_contextuality

This article is flagged. How did you come across the HN post to comment on it so recently?

I use https://hckrnews.com/ to browse HN. I can easily see flagged and dead articles.

I know I'm not the person you're asking, but I opened the link when I saw it on the front page at the time (a couple of days ago apparently), and I only just now got around to looking at it. It seems to still let me comment. Are you not supposed to be able to comment on flagged articles?

As much as I philosophically love the idea of panpsychism, you can't take this hypothesis seriously without some kind of test of consciousness. Then your test needs to cater towards not just obviously conscious entities (cats, dogs, humans), but also things we typically consider inanimate (electrons, rocks, boulders). Then you need to define the scale in a way that explains why a cat, despite being significantly smaller than a boulder, is also significantly more conscious.

Realistically I believe consciousness is an emergent behavior. It might involve really complicated science we haven't nailed down yet, and is likely a result of environmental stimuli reinforcing it as a survivability trait in what was once unconscious, life-like material (e.g. viruses) over a very long period of time and through a lot of trial-and-error.

We've had experimental evidence for decades that particles can be forced to make quantum choices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experime...

Yes, but those experiments have nothing to do with consciousness

This entire piece somehow assumes that "modern physics" is investigating consciousness. What a stupid article.

Hot take: Fundamental forces are actually particle preferences.

Since elementary particles are inherently indiscernible for fundamental reasons, it's really only systems in mixed quantum states that could be endowed with consciousness, not so much the particles themselves. This matters because it gives a direct path for gradually more complex concious experiences to arise, via entanglement of multiple, simpler systems.

Consciousness can't be measured with any scientific instrument, so there's no valid argument that electrons are conscious.

If electrons can think, this revitalizes the EE student's great hope: that they could be taught to read and obey schematics!

Yeah but are they religious? You can see them praying.

Why are people so preoccupied with the extremely useless word "consciousness"

Because it's not useless since we're all conscious, and it presents an interesting puzzle, since it doesn't easily fit with a physicist understanding of the world.

Speak for yourself.

"Conscious" is an undefined term. Whether something or someone is conscious is a matter of personal preference, therefore moot, by the definition.

Unless you are an EMT, and need a release signed.

It is well defined in philosophy of mind. So I'm not speaking for myself.

We could equally well say that it is defined completely differently for each group using it. For those of us not listening specifically to one of those groups, it is undefined, because we have no way to choose among indefinitely many.

Even within, it is typically much more slippery than they prefer to admit.

I work on the assumption consciousness and free will don't actually exist. Things are a lot simpler that way.

So you don't experience pain, have dreams, visualize or inner dialog? You don't have color, smell, taste sensations? It's kind of silly to deny your own experiences.

Well, I split the subjective experience of consciousness (which I do experience, although I deny that experience means that consciousness truly exists) from that of free well.

I think we're subjectively conscious (the inner movie) but that doesn't equate to any sort "mind" or "free will". Somewhere between determinism and compatibilism, if that helps.

I think it's very dangerous to say "I experience consciousness, therefore it's scientifically valid".

I'm not sure what you mean by whether consciousness "really exists". Clearly you have a subjective experience... How is that not consciousness?

Or are you saying that consciousness is an emergent property of matter arranged in certain ways (i.e. your brain) and has no existence separate from that?

Completely agree free will is a separate argument, and that it doesn't exist.

"clearly" I have subjective experience? prove it.

consciousness is an emergent property of matter arranged in certain ways.

That's like proving to a solipsist that other minds exist. You know that you have subjective experiences by virtue of having them yourself. And you even admit consciousness is something by saying that it emerges.

Good point. I can't prove it, I am assuming you have it given I have it.

I agree consciousness is an emergent property of matter, although I didn't always think that way. Panpsychism appears attractive at first glance (it makes it fundamental, and that is after all our lived experience). But that only seems to move the problem of what it actually is somewhere else, to some mysterious "mind stuff".

> But that only seems to move the problem of what it actually is somewhere else, to some mysterious "mind stuff".

That's true, but a rejoinder would be that anything fundamental is going to be mysterious. Why do fields, particles or quantum mechanics exist?

Consciousness might be an emergent property from matter, but it's difficult to give a reductive account of that. The alternative is strong emergentism, which is just as mysterious as panpsychism. Why would something entirely new not logically entailed by the prior physics emerge at some point in the universe's history?

Great point, it could indeed be fundamental and entirely mysterious. But before we've established that I think it's more interesting to go looking for other explanations.

But not to deny your experiences.

A sample size of one is mostly meaningless in science.

Philosophy isn't science. But we can ask whether consciousness can someday be explained by science, and what that might look like. David Chalmers proposed a science of consciousness that allows for a non-physical property that comes with rich information processing. A new kind of law that specifies the existence of conscious states any time there is such information in the universe. Panpsychism would be another approach.

I'm not claiming either are correct. I'm just pointing out that consciousness is very hard to fit into a scientific framework. If it emerges, what does that entail? Certainly more than merely making that statement.

Physicists generally study the things which can be objectively verified by experiment. One of the first things they want to know about any new theory is, "how can we design the experiment to confirm or deny it".

The problem of conscious does not seem to be there yet -- there are no non-thought experiments that one can perform to check for consciousness status. There has been some attempts, but they often end up with the silly results -- for example, one definition defined DVD players as conscious [0].

[0] https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

Yeah, Electron are conscious and they feel hurt when scientists bang electrons against hard metal surface.

Like any parent will tell you, 'hurt' is simply a signal for 'avoid'. As language decoheres at accelerated speed, we can safely say that electrons are hurt by the electromagnetic field generated by other electrons.

Lots of legal and moral significance.

So has religion, but we got over it

I like your spin on this, if a bit quirky and strange.

Is “consciousness” as a pursuit useless only because we don’t know what it means? Or just a pointless endeavor?

consciousness is a philosophical term, something that belongs to the world of ideas, and our brain is designed to generate ideas regardless of reality. What i find misguided is the various attempts to find a physically measurable quantity of "consciousness", which is like saying we ll find a measurable quantity of "justice". Consciousness has been attributed to the soul, to gods, to some hypothetical physical property, to quantum fluctuations, to nanotubules etc. Unless one has a good definition of consciousness, it can be all of these things or none of them. Until then, it's just a word

They are preoccupied with advancing their particular definition of the word. In this case, the concepts of panpsychism, I guess.

Your comment was the only useful one in this entire discussion. It is shameful that folks here claim to be scientific and yet cannot read a single WP article.

It's a serious shame that this was flagged.

Everything, even salt has some small amount of consciousness. That's why I refuse to eat salt.

(X) Doubt.

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