Electrons May Well Be Conscious (nautil.us)

I've never understood this line of reasoning. If consciousness, in the sense of subjective experience ("qualia"), is an illusion, that what is being fooled? It seems to just push the question one level deeper without providing any insight.

Do you have any thoughts on how this impacts the way you see the world? Personally I find it something I'm almost keeping 'off to one side', and am aware of, but in the 'heat of the moment' I still feel like I'm an independent agent. Maybe it speaks to the self-deception at the core of every human.

Sam Harris (while being a figure I can take or leave) raised what seems a good point; that our penal systems should be therefore 100% geared around rehabilitation, not punishment.

Do you think there are other ways we can map this onto daily life?

I try and never be too certain of anything, given the veritable ocean of cognitive biases we have to fight against.. but this is a trait I developed before discovering the argument of determinism vs non-determinism.

It seems most people want to make consciousness out to be more complicated in some way.

My take on it, is that my consciousness is not the one I was born with, or the one I had a few years ago -- instead, it just thinks it is that same one, but the only link to previous versions is just memories.

I have a brain, you have a brain, billions of others do, it seems like there is a reasonable amount of symmetry, but "I" look out of my eyes and not anyone else's. Replacing you with an AI is much more feasible from my perspective than replacing me with a program.

To the fullest extent that you are capable of being sad. There is no even remotely plausible alternative to this physicalist argument.

I would argue that you aren't nearly as conscious as you think you are. That's the conclusion I've come to after many hours and years on the meditation cushion cultivating awareness of my own cognition. Any thought, choice, or action that you make doesn't actually happen in your conscious brain. You just become aware of it after it's happened. That's all there is.

Emotion is an especially odd angle as we can so easily manipulate it with chemicals. Why would that be relevant to consciousness?

Yes, absolutely consciousness would exist in all of those scenarios — but you couldn’t claim that any one “thing” such as the paper itself, would “be” conscious. The notion of a separate self is still fundamentally an abstraction placed on top of billions of neurons interlinked with a musculoskeletal system, through which quadrillions of new atoms are constantly cycling through. On a long enough scale you only have the psychological “gestalt“ of a human.

Even the sensation of “self” is still ultimately just another internal cognitive model, because ultimately everything else we perceive is also just an internal model of reality.

In your example, that internal “self” model would continue to exist within the abstract computationally-mediated consciousness-generating process.

Each conscious process exists in its own fully separate ontological space—because it is inherently subjective.

Step 1: point out that any number of wacky scenarios can be isomorphic to a human brain - a person in a room transcribing symbols, an unlikely cloud of dust in space

Step 2: Note that the fantastically implausible scenario you've constructed is fantastically implausible. Redirect the implausibility into the thing you want to claim is impossible.

Step 3: Wave hands, make argument about consciousness/AI

I don't think that this is practically possible though. Even a single brain cell is fantastically complicated and attempts to simply model neuronal behaviour from gross chemical simulations have failed. We can't even reliable model the behaviour of a single neuron yet. That's biological systems for you they are insanely complex with mind bendingly subtle feedback loops and cross-talk effects between seemingly unrelated systems that produce the macroscopic behaviour. That doesn't change the basic principle though, yes I think we're physical systems.

So if all people in the world try to create consciousness by calculating on paper their would have to carefully watch their timing in each step.

What do you get if a lot of people synchronize their actions? Like in synchronized swimming? dancing? a concert? maybe some primitive form of consciousness?

/edit: Try combine this synchronization with a feedback loop, ie. the swimmers or piano player not following previously determined steps of a sequence but determining the next step based on the input from other systems around them and their own output.

One might argue that it would be sad, the way a human is sad, but lack the ability to immediately experience it in real time, while we can.

It’s the same situation as people playing a game of poker or go fish. The cards in their hands might be identical, but the game is what gives those cards meaning.

For one example he considers information processing to be consciousnes, then asks about random patterns in cosmic dust that by chance encode another steps in a conscious process every 3 million years. Is that a conscious thing? What if it is?

It goes very abstract very fast, and I disagree with some conclusions, but I still recommend it.

> is the paper conscious?

Not paper, but the person implemented in such a way - yes. You don't say "my proteins are conscious", you say "I am conscious". The substrate only needs to ensure the process works correctly and the inputs and outputs are matched.

In your example it's like virtualization in IT - you can run a game on the computer, or run a virtual machine on the computer and run the game on that virtual machine. The game is running either way, it even runs on these same transistors, but it's a different process.

Besides, I think consciousness is very handweavy, and if I had to bet I would bet: - consciousness isn't a thing, it's just a bad abstraction (70%) - consciousness is emergent in a fully physical universe (25%) - consciousness is fundamental, and part of the laws of universe (5%)

As in Searle's "Chinese Room" (and also, though to rather different effect, in Jackson's "Mary the Neuroscientist"), you have proposed a wildly infeasible thought experiment, and then decided dismiss your rational conclusions about the outcome because... because it does not accord with your intuitions about normal situations? because it is infeasible? This simply is not the way to get to the truth of any matter.

We can design synthetic chemical painkillers that work, suggesting at for this we actually know what’s going on. You can actually look up how these neurotransmitters etc work.

If you somehow want to suggest something else is going on you really need to support that argument extensively.

I think that the closest we have to an explanation for something capable of thinking are CPUs and we're just not sure what the right software is to create independent thought.

This might imply that traits like universal computation are necessary (but not sufficient) for thought.

Who is it, that is trying to establish a definitive answer to something unanswerable?

A computer, birds nest, a gun, a space ship: such things aren't self organized, therefore not conscious.

A cluster of cells, a planet, a star system, a galaxy, they are self organized therefore, permeated by consciousness.

This is an existential and observational query, not about industrial optimizations (ie. what works). What works is killing us!

But to move the discussion forward, I think one obvious property of qualia is that it is representational. That is to say, it is structurally related to the thing being indicated such that it can inform about the thing. For example, the red quale tells you something about red substances in the context of the space of possible colors, the external world full of beneficial and harmful substances, and the bearer of the quale with drives, dispositions, preferred states, etc. This complex millieu of properties, states, dispositions, etc, all serve to inform the properties of a quale. Its representational power is one that gives the bearer certain competencies in the actual world, e.g. pain gives one the competency to avoid damaging states. But this representational power must be intrinsic to the structure that constitutes a quale. If this were not the case, then its power to confer competency would be contextual. Pain would only confer competency in the right environment (like a reflex that has meaning only in the right environment, e.g. the grasping reflex of an infant). But this isn't the case with qualia; the experience of pain is intrinsically representative and provides its bearer with competence universally. The same can be said for emotions and our senses. This suggests to me that some kind of recurrent structure is a necessary condition for a quale: to simultaneously be the producer and the consumer of a representative state, and consume in such a way that necessarily confers competent behavior. But this discussion sounds like a different level of description of coordination between different subsystems. Information from different subsystems bear on this central coordinator, and this information confers competent behavior on downstream subsystems, i.e. contextually relevant causal powers. I see the beginnings of the details required for mechanistic qualia in theories like GWT and others based on principled analysis of brain networks.

However, we can also view physics itself as something inherently informational, given that all the base particles in the standard model can ultimately be boiled down to scalar values. Would it be possible to say that those values are ultimately derived from the inherently mathematical properties which result in this reality “existing”? What does it mean for something to exist on the basis of its inherent mathematical identity?

If both consciousness and reality are purely mathematical phenomenon (maybe consciousness is more derived through the computation-generating properties of life), why would one such phenomenon be any less expected than the other? Isn’t it impossible for a non-mathematically-derived (informational) consciousness to exist at all in such a universe?

The way I understand it is that particles are fuzzy, but if they interact with sharper things they get less fuzzy themselves. Naturally large amounts of interacting particles (macroscopic objects) are way sharper than single isolated particles. So measurement is just theoretical concept that relates to system physically getting immensely less fuzzy to a point we can safely assume for the sake of easier calculations that it's not fuzzy at all. You can still describe such sharp system with Schrödinger equation, it still works even after measurement, but you don't do that since there are easier ways like Newtons mechanics. There's no artificial cutoff. There are just many orders of magnitude difference of how sharp things become through interaction.

You can see that experimental scientists managed to make pretty large systems to display quantum superposition if they are properly isolated from interaction with way larger systems that could knock them out of superposition.

As for consciousness my opinion is that it's just some specific algorithm that has some evolutionary utility for some animals. It's fairly good for modelling self, environment and the future. It's not in any way pinnacle of development. It's gradual like human has more consciousness than dog, and dog more than a hamster, but not to the point of absurd, that single electron or even single neuron has some amount of consciousness. Just the same as you shouldn't think that single electron or even neuron has some intrinsic ability to perform sorting or image recognition. You need hardware, and yes, more powerful hardware yields stronger results, but you still need to have at least rudimentary versions of correct algorithm running on that hardware before you can actually say it does the thing.

People get hung up on this semantic concept of 'measurement' when that's not what it's about at all. It's not "if you measure a property of a particle then you change that property", it's "if you interact with a property of a particle then you change it, and that it's impossible to measure without interacting".

The electron doesn't care whether you're conscious and certainly not whether you're writing anything down. Its momentum or whatever is still going to change regardless.

Alternatively, there's the obligatory xkcd (https://xkcd.com/877/), but I feel it kind of misses the point a little.

C.S. Lewis for one, this is from "The Abolition of Man":

> But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.

Proposing new mechanisms is all fine and well, But mixing in mysticism, and you lose respect from all of science.

With “consciousness” in particular having good definition became important since there are a lot of discussions about “is AI conscious?” which might in the future dictate policy decisions.

It's more like chairs, beds, phones, cars and people. Consciousness is emergent from the environment. We learn to interpret visual stimulus by seeing, we learn to interpret sound by hearing, we learn how to relate to the world by being in the world and having consequences to our actions. Our brains grow on the rich sensations they receive from the body, world and the other people. Looking for the mystery of consciousness inside the brain is a mistake, we should look at the whole game instead. The brain is just doing the learning and acting part, but the game is much more.

Evolution is natural selection (a well-understood mechanism) applied over time. The divergence of species, families, and genuses "emerges" over time, but I think we're agreeing that this is a different use of the word.

To be clear, I'm not saying that words like "emergence" have no use, I'm just recommending that we be careful using them, lest we devolve to being satisfied by increasingly hand-wavy ideas.

In situations where we're aware of our own ignorance, we should own up to the ignorance directly, instead of describing the systems as having "emergent" (i.e. tautological) properties.

I'm genuinely asking. My understanding is that we also accept those axioms.

However, from what I recall, they don't present the ideas in the book as facts or established theories like your critique seems to imply. They make it very clear that this is uncharted territory and that there is a lot of science to be done. In fact I think one of the main purposes of the book was to convince the reader that there is in fact tangible research to be done in the subject, and questions worth asking.

A large proportion of the book is indeed spent convincing the reader that panpsychism is a worthy theory, yes. And despite their lack of empirical data (which has proven hard to collect in this area), they make logically sound arguments that the theory is at least worth further consideration.

This is how many scientific theories start, as hypotheses that seem logically sound but lack specific empirical evidence. These hypotheses then guide how we design our experiments. The book argues that panpsychism is a worthy hypothesis, and it does not do so by referencing any woo or pseudoscience.

We have absolutely no idea how consciousness is produced from electrical and chemical signalling between a large ball of fats.

We know that it is (because we perceive our own), but we can't map from one thing to another.

If consciousness is merely neural activity in a brain, then why can't we simulate really simple brains?

Some back it by the change of personality after major trauma.

Moving a mind to another body is most definitely quite a trauma (maybe the ultimate trauma?), which begs to ask the question:

What's the point of moving your mind to another body, if you'll cease to exist as you are? If you lose, like you said, the "sense of you".

Maybe you'd be the same in a fraction of an instance in time?

Maybe you'd never be the same because the process of duplication is an experience within itself enough to develop a different self?

Who knows :D