"They might even unravel the greatest mystery of them all: consciousness."
Don't get me wrong. Brains are interesting. Consciousness is a real puzzler. But... the mass of the known universe is estimated to be about 10^53 kg. In all that mass, there might be a few other mysteries here and there. Believing that the "greatest mystery" is between our two ears feels a tad bit egoistical.
Indeed, this is the next Copernican revolution which can't come soon enough. So many things make much more sense the moment we swap primacy of matter with primacy of consciousness.
The distinction is largely moot unless we discover a way to pierce the veil.
The strongest argument for modern materialism (in the philosophical sense of the term) is that it doesn't matter if it is true unless we discover a way to observe or interact with something beyond - as long as all we observe is a materialist representation of the world, we have no other meaningful choice than to act as if it is true, because we can but guess at what else might exist and the options are infinite.
I would tend to agree with what you say here, with some clarifications.
The first one is that I think it's a matter of _models_. What I mean is that digging under the surface of materialism, what we'll find is pure physics, and currently physics is based on incomplete models or models based on unreachable or non-interactive constructs. Many-universes, 26 dimensions, dark energy, collapse of wave function... Placeholder ideas to make the math work. So, idealism is preaching that there could be the possibility that our current holes in knowledge and understanding might be filled with mind stuff rather than matter stuff. Sure, it might require us to flip the causality relationship between the two, but I don't see that as a fundamentally different way of guessing at what else might exist, and just as materialism has descriptive and predictive power based on abstract, unreachable constructs, so can an idealist worldview.
With regards of having to act as if materialism must be true, I would agree but it depends on at which scale we operate. Meaning, I doubt there could be any other functioning paradigm to go about our daily life and to progress practical science. But for things such as "why is there stuff instead of not" or even more tricky questions such as "what's the meaning", I'd look elsewhere.
> The distinction is largely moot unless we discover a way to pierce the veil.
Buddhists might tell you we've already discovered a way to pierce the veil ("enlightenment").
Recently I saw a video of Shinzen Young [0] describing his experience of this, and it sounds a lot like this observation of something beyond.
Regardless of whether it's really seeing the nature of reality or just a trick of the brain, I find it fascinating that so many people (throughout history) have very similar [1] experiences and it's given me a lot of motivation to meditate more...
I am quite sure the formal definition of sound is something we are all familiar with in here. I would argue that the point of the question is whether there could be sound without the conscious experience of sound. When a tree falls there is definitely displacement of air. Displacement of air though has no intrinsic quality of 'sound-ness'. Such quality can only be experienced by consciousness.
If you’re redefining the question as “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does anyone hear it?” that is much easier to answer but also much less interesting.
Quite the opposite, actually. What compelled me to tune into this thread was the fact that I've felt the question was being redefined as "if a tree falls, does it displace air or creates any sort of physical effect which we might call sound?" which I find, as I'm sure you do too, easy and uninteresting. I think the question is meant to trigger reasoning on a much more deeper level than that, namely what it is to have a conscious experience and how we should go about defining what is real from that perspective.
The redefined question only has an obvious answer if you reject any possibility of a simulated or non-physical reality.
If our reality is simulated, or if the idealists are right, then physics might well have temporal and spatial anomalities dependent on observability.
Ironically I've just elsewhere on this thread argued that materialism makes sense as long as we can not observe anything to violate it, and as such idealism is largely pointless. I should perhaps have added a qualification that this is true in terms of practical application.
That is, we have every reason to assume that the laws of nature are universal, but if they are 'just' universal within the constraints of what we can observe, then while we can continue to act as if they are universal, we may have no way of determining if they are.
As such I do think the question has no practical bearing. Yet we can not dismiss the possibility that what we observe as reality takes shortcuts when we're 'not looking'
I definitely do not reject the idea of a non-physical reality. I find myself closer to idealism than materialism, although the needle just started to move in that direction.
Yes, you were actually replying to me above. We do already observe plenty of things that violate our current understanding, quantum entanglement being the first that comes to mind, but we definitely do not lack paradoxes as of now. Sure, as I stated earlier, they might just be knowledge holes which we might fill once our experiments become more sophisticated, but then I can't help but sensing faith.
Even if the universe is simulated, it’s likely that a tree falling in the woods does have some minuscule causal link with humans that would require the simulation to simulate not just the tree falling but also all resulting effects according to the physical laws.
It doesn't matter if there is a causal link unless such a simulation aims to be perfect.
If the simulation only aims to be convincing, it can take all kinds of shortcuts.
In the latter case it only matters if it is directly or indirectly observed. A simulation might choose to resolve that lazily in the case of indirect observations, in which case it'd only need to determine the proximity of entities deemed to be observers.
We have plenty of cases of that in games already, where events only take place if a player entity is present.
The distinction is one cognitive level up the scale of awareness. You can be aware of your body, sensation, and what happens around you. And then you can be aware of your awareness, meta-cognition and reasoning. The same difference that there is between thinking and thinking about thinking (i.e., self-reflection).
You couldn't have illustrated my point nicer. Yes it makes a sound. There will be vibrations in the air pressure propagating from the impact. If there are birds around they might take a flight. The ground vibrations will create ripples in the nearby pond which might distract a dragonfly enough that a frog swallows it whole. I understand that I'm taking a Zen koan in the most literal sense, but this the best way I can illuminate the ludicrousness of it. We are not the centre of the everything. Things happen without us. Believing otherwise is as I wrote egoistical, self-centered.
There is an unremarkable planet orbiting a regular star a thousand and two light year away from us. On that planet there is a somewhat deer-like species descendant from a prey animal. They are masters of mathematics, philosophy and technology. Their cognition is so advanced that they would only politely smile at the notion that "human consciousness" is the greatest mystery of all. One of them between two ritual playfights took a dust bath on the meadow. It was thinking about the atmosphere of gas giants, when he come up with a question. There is not even a point in trying to explain to humans what the question was. We don't have the capacity to comprehend it. That question was the greatest mystery of all. Pity that they all went extinct before coming to terms with their own inability to find their answer.
We can only measure greatness, or the known universe, through the lens of our consciousness, so it seems acceptable to refer back to the nature of the lens as the primary mystery of our experience.
Some people believe that it is possible to transcend consciousness and improve the lens through which we observe and interpret the world, but I'd say this theory only strengthens your argument.
Yes but many things are a mystery beyond consciousness (thanks due to being conscious and able to reason) Like for instance whats beyond the universe? What dimensions are there? Is there a why to its [the universe] coming into being? Is there a what to it? And so on.
Are you agreeing, disagreeing or making another point?
> On the other hand, a single pound of neurons is more powerful than a warehouse of nano-scale-minituarized silicon
Define 'powerful'
> Consciousness is certainly a top candidate no ?
We literally have no access to
99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the rest of the universe[1], so we can't say. Also we are only aware of what we're aware of, they might be greater mysteries under our noses which we've nor realised, or perhaps are literally unable to comprehend.
Is there even a measure of greatness that is not anthropocentric?
"Greatness" is a compound measure of impact if solved, intractability of the problem, and average tangibility of problem (how much experience a random cross-section of humans would have with the subject of the problem). Consciousness definitely scores high on all three of the criteria.
I don't think so. Why do we have conscious experience, rather than nothing? Why are the 'lights on'?
This is a profound question. I don't think it's unreasonable to say it's up there with Why is there something rather than nothing? In a very real sense, nothing matters except consciousness, after all.
We are conscious because it is critical for moving in our environment. You'll noticed that sleeping and anethstetized patients don't do that very well. The brain is for moving. Abstraction and self-consciousness presumably have similar explanations in terms of survival advantages.
Notice you did not explain why there needs to be subjective experience. Why do I see the color red? Why am I not some elaborate clockwork that I supposedly am, without inner sensation. I could have none and just describe one to you, but I assure you I actually have one. (Or you are a sollipsist, which is fine)
I find that people either understand this immediately or they don't.
> We are conscious because it is critical for moving in our environment.
Why? It's clear that intelligence is advantageous, but why consciousness? You've noted that consciousness arises from normal brain activity, similar to how our intelligence does. How? Why? Much of what happens in the brain is unconscious, so why should there be consciousness at all?
(As an aside, someone who is asleep is not unconscious in the sense that matters here. If they are dreaming, they are experiencing, i.e. having conscious experiences divorced from the physical world.)
Does consciousness arise because of our general intelligence, and our sense of self (both of which make obvious evolutionary sense)? If so, could computers be conscious? Could they suffer? Where's the threshold? Is there any way we could know? Does Rice's theorem apply here?
These aren't easy questions. It's an interesting time for philosophy of mind. They aren't solved problems. Anyone who thinks they are, needs to do some reading. For a starting point, the work of David Chalmers is one of the usual recommendations.
I see no reason why consciousness cannot be nothing more than a fully self-contained illusion instantiated by physical brains operating in a physical universe, an emergent consequence of sufficient complexity of processing.
Our consciousness seems profound and inexplicable to us, but that’s only because we’re completely blocked from introspection of the runtime environment. We’re aware of almost nothing of what the brain is doing, including the process in which new thoughts are queued up into our consciousness.
I don't see that this is a sustainable account of consciousness.
If you write off consciousness as illusory, don't you have to write off suffering as illusory?
The screams of the suffering aren't merely status reports from sophisticated replication-machines having detected the occurrence of something untoward. Suffering is real, because consciousness is real. If you make the move of dismissing consciousness as an illusion, I don't see any way out from concluding that suffering is inconsequential; the equivalent of a red LED on a computer. This is plainly absurd.
A better account of consciousness would be to explain how it arises from physical processes. Saying there's nothing of interest to explain, doesn't seem like a proper answer. (This is David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness [0])
> we’re completely blocked from introspection of the runtime environment
We aren't. We have various avenues of introspection into consciousness, from neuroscience to psychology to meditation. Do you think greater introspection abilities would cause consciousness to dissolve away?
> We’re aware of almost nothing of what the brain is doing, including the process in which new thoughts are queued up into our consciousness.
So what? The question isn't How does the brain form new thoughts?, the question is Why is there consciousness?
The question of how thoughts arise is what Chalmers calls an 'easy problem of consciousness', a question about detail rather than about the fundamental question of why and how there is consciousness at all. [0] (Chalmers was of course being flippant in his choice of words, he didn't really mean that the entire field of neuroscience is 'easy'.)
> If you write off consciousness as illusory, don't you have to write off suffering as illusory?
Just because it’s illusory doesn’t mean you can or should write it off. Illusion is not a synonym for unimportant, so please do not put those words in my mouth. I certainly don't "write off" the suffering of living beings in any way.
We are entitled to care, and in fact justified in caring, about these illusions.
> Saying there's nothing of interest to explain
I didn't say that. You are again putting words in my mouth. This isn’t a healthy form of discourse.
> We have various avenues of introspection into consciousness
Externally, sure. But if it’s external then it doesn’t qualify as introspection from my understanding of the word. I don’t like semantic disagreements so I apologise for not being clearer.
> Do you think greater introspection abilities would cause consciousness to dissolve away?
Taking your question as charitably as possible, the answer is yes, I think that is likely. I believe that if we had greater powers of introspection, the illusion would be shattered. Our lack of introspection seems essential for the illusion to work, at least it seems to me.
Similarly and alternatively: I could imagine a hypothetical future where we create an artificial intelligence that does everything a human brain does, including an equally effective illusion of consciousness, but be unable to validate the instantiation of the illusion.
> the question is Why is there consciousness.
I don’t agree: that formulation of words can’t be answered without begging the question. A better question is “why do humans seem to agree that we have this sensation of self awareness?”
This whole subject reminds me of the famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke — ” Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
GP is potentially not wrong. There's a theory called attention schema wherein consciousness emerges from an advancing capability to create models of both the external and internal world. One level of that is obviously physical modeling and planning.
Those other processes don't require awareness of the environment.
Yes, I know Chalmers, Dennett and Searle. I got the idea that the brain is for moving from Eric Kandel by the way. No, there's a lot of work to do but I think I've answered the why: It benefits animals to be aware of their
environments to navigate them. All you're seeing is a map of what's going on. It's like a UI in the words of Donald Hoffman. Plants can do it without all this, but not as well.
And yet most living things manage to move in their environmenta without needing consciousness.
We can argue whether dogs or fish are conscious, maybe even insects, but I doubt you would argue that jellyfish and plant roots are consciou, or that our intestines and hearts and white blood cells, mitochondria and other organelles are conscious - and yet all of these move and interact with their environments very happily.
Forgive what might be a bit of a nitpick: there's really no question whether dogs are conscious. Like us, they have brains, show every sign of being capable of joy and suffering, and respond to anaesthetics. You'd have to do a lot of acrobatics to make a case for dogs not being conscious.
We all know this, it's why we answer the question of Is it acceptable to torture dogs? with No, of course not.
Someone who believes dogs lack consciousness would presumably answer not with Yes, but with What do you mean, 'torture' a dog? You can no more torture a dog than you can torture a glass of water!
From what I've read, Descartes and his disciples held exactly that view (I don't have an ironclad source for this). They mistreated dogs awfully, saying that the dog might appear to be suffering, but that it wasn't truly capable of suffering on account of it not being a human.
Well, given that we don't have a complete 'technical' definition of consciousness, I don't think it's unfair to say that it can still be argued whether dogs have consciousness in the same sense that humans do, even though no one would argue that it's OK to torture a dog.
For example, even some of the simplest animals show recognizable signs of suffering when hurt (writhing, certain stress hormones, avoidance, etc.). Even plants show some signs of stress when hurt, and avoidance of the area where that happened.
Should we conclude from that plants and all animals are conscious in the same sense that we are? If they are not, how should we interpret these signs? Is there a spectrum of consciousness? Or are there 2 separate properties, 1 related to certain complex analyses of stimuli that is essentially the same at least in all animals, from nematodes to humans, and 2 that is specific to humans, that has to do with constructing an entire mental world that is a model of the external world, or with something else entirely?
The only evidence that we have that humans have the sensation of consciousness is our own experience and the assumption that we're not special. Dogs might share with us this sensation of consciousness, or a less crisp sensation, or none at all. We have no way of knowing.
Personally I think it's appropriate to behave as though they have the sensation of consciousness even as we concede the gap in our knowledge. And even if we didn't go that far, quite frankly I think the distress caused to humans by the appearance of distress caused to dogs is sufficient reason to not torture dogs.
On the other hand, if I'm asked about factory farming of cows and chickens, the question I ask myself is "would I prefer if this chicken had a short, uneventful and (by human standards) meaningless life or if it never existed in the first place" and I'm unconvinced that either option can be confidently declared preferable.
What if consciousness is a spectrum? What if consciousness is the logical end-game starting with the ability to selectively attend to and respond to stimuli? That's attention schema theory. And in such a theory, dogs are pretty far along the spectrum, because they (probably) have the ability to model others' internal states. After that, it's just a question of the complexity of the modeling.
Sure, that's a possibility. It is basically a truism that we can quantify the "consciousness" of a system to some extent, where we can say rocks have none, single cells (or even cell mechanisms) have the most basic kind, and more complex organisms have increasing amounts of this.
Humans obviously have more of this semi-quantifiable "consciousness" described above than plants or fish, and it is likely that we have the most out of all living organisms we know; but identifying this quantifiable property with our subjective experience of consciousness is nothing more than conjecture, though. The OP's conjecture that consciousness is just our ability to model others' behavior reflected back towards ourselves is similarly just a conjecture. We are still entirely missing any tools, even at a theoretical level, that would help bring our subjective experience of consciousness into the realm of the externally observable, so we can only speculate for now.
Perhaps in time AI research will change course again and try to return to such questions, instead of trying to become better at differential diagnosis, rote translation etc. (extremely useful goals, mind you, but scientifically uninteresting).
A universe without consciousness to observe it isn't terribly interesting.
Furthermore - consciousness is strange enough that is an entirely defensible philosophical position to believe it's the building block of everything else.
I would suggest to look into the work of Bernardo Kastrup for a rational argumentation of such topic. A comp-sci PhD, worked at CERN, turned idealist, a second PhD in philosophy, a very lucid and proficient writer.
It's literally half of post-Enlightenment western philosophy. Kant, Berkeley, Schopenhauer; artistically Borges; in the sciences Brouwer and Schrödinger; etc.
Quoting Ernest Becker from his The Denial of Death:
"In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of words, sounds and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper."
"It is natural for a man to strive to be a hero, it goes deeply in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, and yet the society gets chills when someone admits the honesty of it."
In academia if you have not convinced yourself that the problem you are working on is "the most" important problem to be worked on, how else would you go on working on it each single day and night with low salary while your counterparts live luxuriously in industry? I think its just a (un)conscious strategy but I can only speak for myself.
That 10^53 kg mass, is just an an irregular foam of particles and energy floating in space time. Galaxies, stars, atoms, chemicals exist only insofar as your consciousness names them. Literally everything you can think of owes its existence to your consciousness. I’d say that makes it pretty special.
NNs, other than being vaguely inspired by it, have nothing to do with the brain or neurons. AI as it stands today also has essentially completely abandoned any idea it may have once had of understanding any aspect of the human brain or cognition, unfortunately.
Instead, NNs and AI are entirely focused on the external world and trying to model it for strictly practical purposes (trying to predict aspects of it, in general).
Figuring out patterns in the way neurons communicate with each other seems pretty sensible. Maybe it can help us figure out what algorithm the brain is actually running.
Isn't this an answered question? Consciousness is the sensation we get when we point our ability to predict others actions back on itself. The inverse of putting our-self in someone else's shoes. This was scientifically confirmed by both the decision delay experiments, as well as brain imagery that showed the same circuitry activate whether you ask someone why they did something; or why someone else did something.
That is not to say all the secrets of the brain have been understood or uncovered, but this seems to be searching for a more feel-good answer to a question that has largely been answered.
To playfully tease, this is exactly what a Flatlander might say. But while you describe the behavior of consciousness, the article describes its other aspects: its shapes, how neurons collaboratively make it and how it is unmade. This not searching for a more feel-good answer, it is a search for deeper understanding which is what science is all about anyway.
I accept the rebut. There maybe a deeper understanding to consciousness that is not obvious from our perspective. Still, calling this the 'greatest mystery of them all' feels disingenuous, as there may not be a mystery.
Generally we are asking for more information than a definition when we ask “what is something?” Humans knew that “the stars” were those little points of light in the night sky long before we knew much about their composition or evolution.
The evidence suggests we don't feel anything at all, its more accurate to say we rationalize ourselves with feelings and intentions than it is to say we have feeling and intentions.
I've never actually tried to explain that before, having done so i understand why we are appearing so desperate to find another answer.
The experiments you mention are woefully inadequate compared to the complexity of the problem.
Especially, the decision delay results have not been reproduced once the decision presented was no longer random. In fact, the best explanation of the original experiment seems to be that, when presented with a random decision, we act when the noise of our brain activity has a large enough random spike.
Either way, even the ways we are collecting information about brain activity are still far from certain to be correct. Drawing grand conclusions about consciousness when we barely understand language is at best reductionist.
I didn't understand the article at all, but it did make think about about how many dimensions are required for humans to understand how objects in life relate to each other.
I counted: a point, a line, a plane, a solid, a solid at a point in time, a solid that might exist in some possible future, and a solid at a point in time that might have existed if our past had been different.
That's all I could come up with (and I'm not even sure if the last one is a dimension).
It's probably a coincidence (there's nothing crankier than numerology), but it did make me happy that it adds up to seven.
> I counted: a point, a line, a plane, a solid, a solid at a point in time, a solid that might exist in some possible future, and a solid at a point in time that might have existed if our past had been different.
A solid in some parallel universe.
A solid in some fictitious parallel universe.
A solid in some non-cannon fictitious universe.
A solid thinking of another solid in some parallel universe derived by combining one of more non-cannon offshoots of a particular fictitious universe combined with our own but also exploring and deconstructing revisionist history themes.
All of that, but also the main character is revising her schema to be in fifth normal from.
That's kind of arbitrary, but I'm sure it regularly happens on fanfictiction.net
Just because picturing geometry in more than three dimensions is hard, doesn't mean we can't grapple with dimensionality or abstraction. We're pretty good at it.
In the sense being used by the original article, those are not dimensions. That is a very scify type of dimension, which has no known real-world referent. The original list goes wrong at "a solid that might exist in some possible future"; that is not a dimension. That is simply a solid with a time value in the future, which is the same four dimensions as the preceding example.
A dimension is an additional necessary number to characterize a system. Beyond the location inside a point (0 numbers required), a line (1 number required), a plane (2 numbers required), and a full 3D space (3 numbers required), examples of real world entities that require more than three dimensions are:
A RGBA color value, which is four-dimensional.
The location and orientation of a rigid object; 6 dimensional. Three for the location, three additional for the rotation.
The location, velocity, orientation, and spin rate of a rigid object: 12 dimensional. In addition to the previous six, three new ones needed for the translational vector and three new ones needed for each spin axis rate.
Any arbitrary multiple of three: Any RGB image, where each pixel is three dimensions each, one for R, G, and B. Images get to be high-dimensional spaces very quickly.
High numbers of dimensions are hard to visualize, but they are completely bereft of any "woo woo" value or any of the sort of mystery one might be inclined to ponder on illegal substances. Bog-standard examples of such things are encountered on a daily basis; the state of the display you are reading this on is characterized by a several-million-component vector. That's how "boring" and "normal" such things are. If you've got any of the woowoo in your concept of "dimension", you don't understand dimensionality.
The bad news is that this may take away the vague fuzzy fun of pondering the meaningless concept; the good news is that this opens you to much more concrete and real, and still quite mysterious, fun of pondering real high dimensionality spaces, which is a much richer and more interesting space that has enough stuff to explore for the rest of your life, were you so inclined. The "woo woo" scify concept is exhausted in five minutes, or perhaps a drug-fueled trip. It may feel fun for a moment but it doesn't go anywhere.
> That is simply a solid with a time value in
> the future, which is the same four dimensions
> as the preceding example.
My train of thought (not to say it's original) is: You can't move a solid without another (a fifth) dimension (ie: time). You can't move the trail of solids that exist in time without a second dimension of time (the sixth, if we're counting all the way up from a 1D point). If you have two sequences of events that are slightly different (side by side, ignoring that a "side" is a 4D side, I guess), that "timeline" which differs from the original is a "possible universe".
My numbering was off. 4th is time. 5th adds the direction going between one universe and a variation of it, both at the same point on the time axis. I also notice in my example I start with zero dimensions. All in all, a reminder that I should exercise more self-restraint and not comment on Physics articles :D
The problem here is that you've got a subset/superset relationship reversed. "Dimension" is simply the need to add a number to fully describe a system, as I gave in the several examples. It is true that if there was some system of parallel universes that a number identifying the universe could be necessary to fully identify the location of an object. (Depending on the nature of the multiple universes, it could even require more than one.) But "identifying which universe something is in" is not the definition of "the fifth dimension". It is simply a particular instance/subset of the general concept of dimension, which happens to also be currently meaningless and without referent. But even so, it manages to screw people up and provide significant cognitive interference for the real concept of dimensionality, which is, as I said, much less "woo woo", which may be sort of disappointing, but also a much richer concept that provides much more to explore, because it actually has content to it.
You can also see the confusion in the miscounting of dimensions, because they are not being thought of as simply numbers that identify a place/thing, but some sort of ordered list of "concepts", where "things that don't exist yet" are somehow in another "dimension". But as I said, you don't need another "dimension" for that; it's just a time coordinate, which we already have, in the future. This is the sort of thing that drives me to post this point.
It's a surprisingly popular viewpoint. There's a YouTube video that does this sort of thing, which got very popular, and I don't even want to link to, because it's a steaming pile of garbage, leaving viewers who watch it feeling like they understand better when in fact they understand far worse. It's not necessarily in the top ten list of "ideas that will prevent you from understanding the world better" or anything, but it's certainly on that list.
> But "identifying which universe something is in"
> is not the definition of "the fifth dimension".
Is there a difference?
Lets say we have a bunch of film strips, laid one on top of another, only each frame represents an entire 3D universe, and each layer of a new film strip, at the same point from the start, becomes less similar* as you move from layer to layer. To identify where something is, you would refer to the delta (ie: of the number of layers). That was what I was getting at.
*Hand-waving to ignore that in real life, each frame probably spawns multiple children, but only has one parent.
It is a dimension, in your hypothetical example with no known real-world correspondance. It is not the fifth dimension.
"The" fifth dimension is a scifi concept, not a real one. Perfectly normal, mundane reality contains numerous instances of much higher dimensionality. Which of the subcolors of the pixels on your screen is "the" fifth dimension?
Dimensionality isn't "about" parallel universes. It is a very tiny, and really quite useless, instance of the concept, which is full of useful and interesting members that actually, you know, exist.
> "The" fifth dimension is a scifi concept,
> not a real one.
I'm confused now. How Is it possible for a dimension to "not be real" when a dimension is just a way to relate multiple points together? Unless you run out of points, can't you describe their relation using as many dimensions as you need?
Maybe our communication is breaking down over the term "parallel universe". I don't mean it as a sci-fi thing, I mean it as a Schrödinger's cat thing.
Without possible universes, we can't explain our intuition that an event can have multiple outcomes. Why should one of them happen, and not the others? With possible universes, there's no problem, because they all happen. How would one describe the relation of where they happen without a dimension higher than time?
I don't mean a parallel universe as some fantastical place that we could "visit" etc.
Yeah but when you imagine a point, you're not really imagining a true point. You most likely think of it as a tiny sphere. Even if you are imagining a true point in a mathematical sense, you can't imagine the point without imaging what is around the point. So it has to have a location in x and y at least. You could even say the z dimension is there since when imagining this point, you are imaging it in your mind's eye as an observer would. We are completely trapped in our viewpoint of the world of it being at the least in three dimensions probably even four because of time.
I think a point, in the sense I was thinking about, maps to a boolean: it either exists, or does not exist. It's not even a line which can have a distance, so there's nothing else for itself to relate to.
Perhaps I am missing something, but the use of dimensionality in this article seems a bit overblown. The article says that a digraph meant to represent a rat brain formed 8-cliques in response to some input data. You could represent this 8-clique as a 7D structure ... but not necessarily. I am a bit worried that a layperson will read the article and think that the human brain is literally 7D in some actual way
I struggled to find the meat in this article and a quick google of the terms involved only really brings back the same article, which is almost 3 years old now.
On top of that the story is a cookie cutter rewrite of every upcoming ML/math technique which are always poised to provide some amazing insight into the human mind.
A more honest title would be "algebraic topologists think algebraic topology is great, academics who have employed algebraic topologists want it to be great but don't really understand it".
Edit: for anyone looking for the actual meat this appears to be it:
Objective Morphological Classification of Neocortical Pyramidal Cells (2019)
tldr: researchers build computational models of mice's brains then study the models through methods of algebraic topology e.g. looking at artificial neural cliques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_clique) up-closed i.e. at a level of detail unobtainable with an actual slice of brain tissue, and measuring their dimensionalities
First of all, the Blue Brain Project (equivalent of the US Human Brain Project) has been widely criticised within the neuroscience community for its failures to invest the funding appropriately [0,1] as well as failing to produce their exaggerated claims of "brain on a computer", even 3 years after this article was published.
Secondly, it is insanely hard to even map in all the connections between neurons with their thousands of synapses. Imagine one neuron connects to another 1000 neurons and a cubic millimeter of mouse cortex contains about 9×10^4 neurons. Even 1mm3 of cortex hasn't been mapped yet for a rodent (mouse/rat) brain. Mapping the whole rodent brain will easily take another decade [2].
Thirdly, even when you have mapped the complete brain, inferring states of consiousness from it is a far fetched hypothesis and most neuroscients don't even dare to go there because it is so absurd to talk about it from incomplete simulation models.
Given the complexity of wiring of neurons and the sheer amount of specific nature of this wiring, building simulation models assumes that the connections between neurons are totally random which is an age old view which computational neuroscientists are now starting to accept (except the BBP, for now). Contrary to the BBP simulation models, this [3] model actually pays attention to the observed wiring from past experiments and is the closest to anything "realistic" but of course with several caveats.
> these transient structures, which appear and disappear like sandcastles on a beach
That's a good metaphor for building up elaborate programming concepts in your brain then someone bothers you and it slips away. So you have to sit quietly and build it back up (quicker this time).
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[ 175 ms ] story [ 4583 ms ] threadDon't get me wrong. Brains are interesting. Consciousness is a real puzzler. But... the mass of the known universe is estimated to be about 10^53 kg. In all that mass, there might be a few other mysteries here and there. Believing that the "greatest mystery" is between our two ears feels a tad bit egoistical.
Similar thing here. A mystery is a concept which can only occur within human consciousness.
The strongest argument for modern materialism (in the philosophical sense of the term) is that it doesn't matter if it is true unless we discover a way to observe or interact with something beyond - as long as all we observe is a materialist representation of the world, we have no other meaningful choice than to act as if it is true, because we can but guess at what else might exist and the options are infinite.
The first one is that I think it's a matter of _models_. What I mean is that digging under the surface of materialism, what we'll find is pure physics, and currently physics is based on incomplete models or models based on unreachable or non-interactive constructs. Many-universes, 26 dimensions, dark energy, collapse of wave function... Placeholder ideas to make the math work. So, idealism is preaching that there could be the possibility that our current holes in knowledge and understanding might be filled with mind stuff rather than matter stuff. Sure, it might require us to flip the causality relationship between the two, but I don't see that as a fundamentally different way of guessing at what else might exist, and just as materialism has descriptive and predictive power based on abstract, unreachable constructs, so can an idealist worldview.
With regards of having to act as if materialism must be true, I would agree but it depends on at which scale we operate. Meaning, I doubt there could be any other functioning paradigm to go about our daily life and to progress practical science. But for things such as "why is there stuff instead of not" or even more tricky questions such as "what's the meaning", I'd look elsewhere.
Buddhists might tell you we've already discovered a way to pierce the veil ("enlightenment").
Recently I saw a video of Shinzen Young [0] describing his experience of this, and it sounds a lot like this observation of something beyond.
Regardless of whether it's really seeing the nature of reality or just a trick of the brain, I find it fascinating that so many people (throughout history) have very similar [1] experiences and it's given me a lot of motivation to meditate more...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPnLDtHLymo
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-does-i...
"In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid"
"In human physiology and psychology, sound is the reception of such waves and their perception by the brain"
I guess it depends on your definition.
If our reality is simulated, or if the idealists are right, then physics might well have temporal and spatial anomalities dependent on observability.
Ironically I've just elsewhere on this thread argued that materialism makes sense as long as we can not observe anything to violate it, and as such idealism is largely pointless. I should perhaps have added a qualification that this is true in terms of practical application.
That is, we have every reason to assume that the laws of nature are universal, but if they are 'just' universal within the constraints of what we can observe, then while we can continue to act as if they are universal, we may have no way of determining if they are.
As such I do think the question has no practical bearing. Yet we can not dismiss the possibility that what we observe as reality takes shortcuts when we're 'not looking'
Yes, you were actually replying to me above. We do already observe plenty of things that violate our current understanding, quantum entanglement being the first that comes to mind, but we definitely do not lack paradoxes as of now. Sure, as I stated earlier, they might just be knowledge holes which we might fill once our experiments become more sophisticated, but then I can't help but sensing faith.
If the simulation only aims to be convincing, it can take all kinds of shortcuts.
In the latter case it only matters if it is directly or indirectly observed. A simulation might choose to resolve that lazily in the case of indirect observations, in which case it'd only need to determine the proximity of entities deemed to be observers.
We have plenty of cases of that in games already, where events only take place if a player entity is present.
There is an unremarkable planet orbiting a regular star a thousand and two light year away from us. On that planet there is a somewhat deer-like species descendant from a prey animal. They are masters of mathematics, philosophy and technology. Their cognition is so advanced that they would only politely smile at the notion that "human consciousness" is the greatest mystery of all. One of them between two ritual playfights took a dust bath on the meadow. It was thinking about the atmosphere of gas giants, when he come up with a question. There is not even a point in trying to explain to humans what the question was. We don't have the capacity to comprehend it. That question was the greatest mystery of all. Pity that they all went extinct before coming to terms with their own inability to find their answer.
But
A large portion of that mass is in a too high or too low temperature state to support any complexity (I am not a physicist!)
On the other hand, a single pound of neurons is more powerful than a warehouse of nano-scale-minituarized silicon.
Consciousness itself may or may not be a purely emergent property of this complexity.
We already have fairly robust (and simple!) rules for most physical, chemical and biological behaviour.
Other than the creation and ending of he universe, Consciousness is certainly a top candidate no ?
Are you agreeing, disagreeing or making another point?
> On the other hand, a single pound of neurons is more powerful than a warehouse of nano-scale-minituarized silicon
Define 'powerful'
> Consciousness is certainly a top candidate no ?
We literally have no access to
99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the rest of the universe[1], so we can't say. Also we are only aware of what we're aware of, they might be greater mysteries under our noses which we've nor realised, or perhaps are literally unable to comprehend.
[1] quite possibly hyperbolic
"Greatness" is a compound measure of impact if solved, intractability of the problem, and average tangibility of problem (how much experience a random cross-section of humans would have with the subject of the problem). Consciousness definitely scores high on all three of the criteria.
This is a profound question. I don't think it's unreasonable to say it's up there with Why is there something rather than nothing? In a very real sense, nothing matters except consciousness, after all.
I find that people either understand this immediately or they don't.
Why? It's clear that intelligence is advantageous, but why consciousness? You've noted that consciousness arises from normal brain activity, similar to how our intelligence does. How? Why? Much of what happens in the brain is unconscious, so why should there be consciousness at all?
(As an aside, someone who is asleep is not unconscious in the sense that matters here. If they are dreaming, they are experiencing, i.e. having conscious experiences divorced from the physical world.)
Does consciousness arise because of our general intelligence, and our sense of self (both of which make obvious evolutionary sense)? If so, could computers be conscious? Could they suffer? Where's the threshold? Is there any way we could know? Does Rice's theorem apply here?
These aren't easy questions. It's an interesting time for philosophy of mind. They aren't solved problems. Anyone who thinks they are, needs to do some reading. For a starting point, the work of David Chalmers is one of the usual recommendations.
Our consciousness seems profound and inexplicable to us, but that’s only because we’re completely blocked from introspection of the runtime environment. We’re aware of almost nothing of what the brain is doing, including the process in which new thoughts are queued up into our consciousness.
If you write off consciousness as illusory, don't you have to write off suffering as illusory?
The screams of the suffering aren't merely status reports from sophisticated replication-machines having detected the occurrence of something untoward. Suffering is real, because consciousness is real. If you make the move of dismissing consciousness as an illusion, I don't see any way out from concluding that suffering is inconsequential; the equivalent of a red LED on a computer. This is plainly absurd.
A better account of consciousness would be to explain how it arises from physical processes. Saying there's nothing of interest to explain, doesn't seem like a proper answer. (This is David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness [0])
> we’re completely blocked from introspection of the runtime environment
We aren't. We have various avenues of introspection into consciousness, from neuroscience to psychology to meditation. Do you think greater introspection abilities would cause consciousness to dissolve away?
> We’re aware of almost nothing of what the brain is doing, including the process in which new thoughts are queued up into our consciousness.
So what? The question isn't How does the brain form new thoughts?, the question is Why is there consciousness?
The question of how thoughts arise is what Chalmers calls an 'easy problem of consciousness', a question about detail rather than about the fundamental question of why and how there is consciousness at all. [0] (Chalmers was of course being flippant in his choice of words, he didn't really mean that the entire field of neuroscience is 'easy'.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Just because it’s illusory doesn’t mean you can or should write it off. Illusion is not a synonym for unimportant, so please do not put those words in my mouth. I certainly don't "write off" the suffering of living beings in any way.
We are entitled to care, and in fact justified in caring, about these illusions.
> Saying there's nothing of interest to explain
I didn't say that. You are again putting words in my mouth. This isn’t a healthy form of discourse.
> We have various avenues of introspection into consciousness
Externally, sure. But if it’s external then it doesn’t qualify as introspection from my understanding of the word. I don’t like semantic disagreements so I apologise for not being clearer.
> Do you think greater introspection abilities would cause consciousness to dissolve away?
Taking your question as charitably as possible, the answer is yes, I think that is likely. I believe that if we had greater powers of introspection, the illusion would be shattered. Our lack of introspection seems essential for the illusion to work, at least it seems to me.
Similarly and alternatively: I could imagine a hypothetical future where we create an artificial intelligence that does everything a human brain does, including an equally effective illusion of consciousness, but be unable to validate the instantiation of the illusion.
> the question is Why is there consciousness.
I don’t agree: that formulation of words can’t be answered without begging the question. A better question is “why do humans seem to agree that we have this sensation of self awareness?”
This whole subject reminds me of the famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke — ” Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-rea...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons...
Yes, I know Chalmers, Dennett and Searle. I got the idea that the brain is for moving from Eric Kandel by the way. No, there's a lot of work to do but I think I've answered the why: It benefits animals to be aware of their environments to navigate them. All you're seeing is a map of what's going on. It's like a UI in the words of Donald Hoffman. Plants can do it without all this, but not as well.
Regarding sense of self: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/27/eaay8301
If you say no, it undermines your rationale for consciousness.
Also, "why" isn't really part of the hard problem. The real problem is how.
> Also, "why" isn't really part of the hard problem. The real problem is how.
I agree, which is why that wasn't part of my claims.
We can argue whether dogs or fish are conscious, maybe even insects, but I doubt you would argue that jellyfish and plant roots are consciou, or that our intestines and hearts and white blood cells, mitochondria and other organelles are conscious - and yet all of these move and interact with their environments very happily.
We all know this, it's why we answer the question of Is it acceptable to torture dogs? with No, of course not.
Someone who believes dogs lack consciousness would presumably answer not with Yes, but with What do you mean, 'torture' a dog? You can no more torture a dog than you can torture a glass of water!
From what I've read, Descartes and his disciples held exactly that view (I don't have an ironclad source for this). They mistreated dogs awfully, saying that the dog might appear to be suffering, but that it wasn't truly capable of suffering on account of it not being a human.
For example, even some of the simplest animals show recognizable signs of suffering when hurt (writhing, certain stress hormones, avoidance, etc.). Even plants show some signs of stress when hurt, and avoidance of the area where that happened.
Should we conclude from that plants and all animals are conscious in the same sense that we are? If they are not, how should we interpret these signs? Is there a spectrum of consciousness? Or are there 2 separate properties, 1 related to certain complex analyses of stimuli that is essentially the same at least in all animals, from nematodes to humans, and 2 that is specific to humans, that has to do with constructing an entire mental world that is a model of the external world, or with something else entirely?
Personally I think it's appropriate to behave as though they have the sensation of consciousness even as we concede the gap in our knowledge. And even if we didn't go that far, quite frankly I think the distress caused to humans by the appearance of distress caused to dogs is sufficient reason to not torture dogs.
On the other hand, if I'm asked about factory farming of cows and chickens, the question I ask myself is "would I prefer if this chicken had a short, uneventful and (by human standards) meaningless life or if it never existed in the first place" and I'm unconvinced that either option can be confidently declared preferable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-rea...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons...
Humans obviously have more of this semi-quantifiable "consciousness" described above than plants or fish, and it is likely that we have the most out of all living organisms we know; but identifying this quantifiable property with our subjective experience of consciousness is nothing more than conjecture, though. The OP's conjecture that consciousness is just our ability to model others' behavior reflected back towards ourselves is similarly just a conjecture. We are still entirely missing any tools, even at a theoretical level, that would help bring our subjective experience of consciousness into the realm of the externally observable, so we can only speculate for now.
Perhaps in time AI research will change course again and try to return to such questions, instead of trying to become better at differential diagnosis, rote translation etc. (extremely useful goals, mind you, but scientifically uninteresting).
A universe without consciousness to observe it isn't terribly interesting.
Furthermore - consciousness is strange enough that is an entirely defensible philosophical position to believe it's the building block of everything else.
Could we have a link please?
It's literally half of post-Enlightenment western philosophy. Kant, Berkeley, Schopenhauer; artistically Borges; in the sciences Brouwer and Schrödinger; etc.
I might have been tempted to veer off into a discussion about panpsychism (because it's so fascinating) but this is a much stronger example.
"In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self-esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of words, sounds and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper."
"It is natural for a man to strive to be a hero, it goes deeply in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, and yet the society gets chills when someone admits the honesty of it."
In academia if you have not convinced yourself that the problem you are working on is "the most" important problem to be worked on, how else would you go on working on it each single day and night with low salary while your counterparts live luxuriously in industry? I think its just a (un)conscious strategy but I can only speak for myself.
Instead, NNs and AI are entirely focused on the external world and trying to model it for strictly practical purposes (trying to predict aspects of it, in general).
Isn't this an answered question? Consciousness is the sensation we get when we point our ability to predict others actions back on itself. The inverse of putting our-self in someone else's shoes. This was scientifically confirmed by both the decision delay experiments, as well as brain imagery that showed the same circuitry activate whether you ask someone why they did something; or why someone else did something.
That is not to say all the secrets of the brain have been understood or uncovered, but this seems to be searching for a more feel-good answer to a question that has largely been answered.
I've never actually tried to explain that before, having done so i understand why we are appearing so desperate to find another answer.
Especially, the decision delay results have not been reproduced once the decision presented was no longer random. In fact, the best explanation of the original experiment seems to be that, when presented with a random decision, we act when the noise of our brain activity has a large enough random spike.
Either way, even the ways we are collecting information about brain activity are still far from certain to be correct. Drawing grand conclusions about consciousness when we barely understand language is at best reductionist.
I counted: a point, a line, a plane, a solid, a solid at a point in time, a solid that might exist in some possible future, and a solid at a point in time that might have existed if our past had been different.
That's all I could come up with (and I'm not even sure if the last one is a dimension).
It's probably a coincidence (there's nothing crankier than numerology), but it did make me happy that it adds up to seven.
A solid in some parallel universe.
A solid in some fictitious parallel universe.
A solid in some non-cannon fictitious universe.
A solid thinking of another solid in some parallel universe derived by combining one of more non-cannon offshoots of a particular fictitious universe combined with our own but also exploring and deconstructing revisionist history themes.
All of that, but also the main character is revising her schema to be in fifth normal from.
That's kind of arbitrary, but I'm sure it regularly happens on fanfictiction.net
Just because picturing geometry in more than three dimensions is hard, doesn't mean we can't grapple with dimensionality or abstraction. We're pretty good at it.
A dimension is an additional necessary number to characterize a system. Beyond the location inside a point (0 numbers required), a line (1 number required), a plane (2 numbers required), and a full 3D space (3 numbers required), examples of real world entities that require more than three dimensions are:
A RGBA color value, which is four-dimensional.
The location and orientation of a rigid object; 6 dimensional. Three for the location, three additional for the rotation.
The location, velocity, orientation, and spin rate of a rigid object: 12 dimensional. In addition to the previous six, three new ones needed for the translational vector and three new ones needed for each spin axis rate.
Any arbitrary multiple of three: Any RGB image, where each pixel is three dimensions each, one for R, G, and B. Images get to be high-dimensional spaces very quickly.
High numbers of dimensions are hard to visualize, but they are completely bereft of any "woo woo" value or any of the sort of mystery one might be inclined to ponder on illegal substances. Bog-standard examples of such things are encountered on a daily basis; the state of the display you are reading this on is characterized by a several-million-component vector. That's how "boring" and "normal" such things are. If you've got any of the woowoo in your concept of "dimension", you don't understand dimensionality.
The bad news is that this may take away the vague fuzzy fun of pondering the meaningless concept; the good news is that this opens you to much more concrete and real, and still quite mysterious, fun of pondering real high dimensionality spaces, which is a much richer and more interesting space that has enough stuff to explore for the rest of your life, were you so inclined. The "woo woo" scify concept is exhausted in five minutes, or perhaps a drug-fueled trip. It may feel fun for a moment but it doesn't go anywhere.
You can also see the confusion in the miscounting of dimensions, because they are not being thought of as simply numbers that identify a place/thing, but some sort of ordered list of "concepts", where "things that don't exist yet" are somehow in another "dimension". But as I said, you don't need another "dimension" for that; it's just a time coordinate, which we already have, in the future. This is the sort of thing that drives me to post this point.
It's a surprisingly popular viewpoint. There's a YouTube video that does this sort of thing, which got very popular, and I don't even want to link to, because it's a steaming pile of garbage, leaving viewers who watch it feeling like they understand better when in fact they understand far worse. It's not necessarily in the top ten list of "ideas that will prevent you from understanding the world better" or anything, but it's certainly on that list.
Lets say we have a bunch of film strips, laid one on top of another, only each frame represents an entire 3D universe, and each layer of a new film strip, at the same point from the start, becomes less similar* as you move from layer to layer. To identify where something is, you would refer to the delta (ie: of the number of layers). That was what I was getting at.
*Hand-waving to ignore that in real life, each frame probably spawns multiple children, but only has one parent.
"The" fifth dimension is a scifi concept, not a real one. Perfectly normal, mundane reality contains numerous instances of much higher dimensionality. Which of the subcolors of the pixels on your screen is "the" fifth dimension?
Dimensionality isn't "about" parallel universes. It is a very tiny, and really quite useless, instance of the concept, which is full of useful and interesting members that actually, you know, exist.
Maybe our communication is breaking down over the term "parallel universe". I don't mean it as a sci-fi thing, I mean it as a Schrödinger's cat thing.
Without possible universes, we can't explain our intuition that an event can have multiple outcomes. Why should one of them happen, and not the others? With possible universes, there's no problem, because they all happen. How would one describe the relation of where they happen without a dimension higher than time?
I don't mean a parallel universe as some fantastical place that we could "visit" etc.
"In an alternate dimension... thousands of different dimensions..."
On top of that the story is a cookie cutter rewrite of every upcoming ML/math technique which are always poised to provide some amazing insight into the human mind.
A more honest title would be "algebraic topologists think algebraic topology is great, academics who have employed algebraic topologists want it to be great but don't really understand it".
Edit: for anyone looking for the actual meat this appears to be it:
Objective Morphological Classification of Neocortical Pyramidal Cells (2019)
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/29/4/1719/5304727
Here are the stuff the project published so far: https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/blue-brain/pu...
First of all, the Blue Brain Project (equivalent of the US Human Brain Project) has been widely criticised within the neuroscience community for its failures to invest the funding appropriately [0,1] as well as failing to produce their exaggerated claims of "brain on a computer", even 3 years after this article was published.
Secondly, it is insanely hard to even map in all the connections between neurons with their thousands of synapses. Imagine one neuron connects to another 1000 neurons and a cubic millimeter of mouse cortex contains about 9×10^4 neurons. Even 1mm3 of cortex hasn't been mapped yet for a rodent (mouse/rat) brain. Mapping the whole rodent brain will easily take another decade [2].
Thirdly, even when you have mapped the complete brain, inferring states of consiousness from it is a far fetched hypothesis and most neuroscients don't even dare to go there because it is so absurd to talk about it from incomplete simulation models.
Given the complexity of wiring of neurons and the sheer amount of specific nature of this wiring, building simulation models assumes that the connections between neurons are totally random which is an age old view which computational neuroscientists are now starting to accept (except the BBP, for now). Contrary to the BBP simulation models, this [3] model actually pays attention to the observed wiring from past experiments and is the closest to anything "realistic" but of course with several caveats.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-bra...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/ten-year...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31055238/
[3] https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
That's a good metaphor for building up elaborate programming concepts in your brain then someone bothers you and it slips away. So you have to sit quietly and build it back up (quicker this time).