I think it is a very important question that may actually impact our survival in the planet beyond the other questions that are more to satisfy our own curiosity.
So I am not sure if you think the question is already solved or is it not actually a problem.
I disagree. Questions like how the human brain works and how we can think abstractly, and how/why humans are so much more intelligent than other animals. There isn't really anything philosophical about it.
I have no idea what the heck the author is talking about with that point. The question is either too simple, in that you can just itemize all the ways we are different (just so happens that "consciousness" - #5 - would be a pretty big bullet point, though we can just generalize and say our DNA makes us human), or nonsensical. Case in point:
>how/why humans are so much more intelligent than other animals
Because we have three times more neurons than the closest competition. Why do we have so many neurons? Because there was a selective pressure acting upon our ancestors.
Furthermore, WE ARE ANIMALS. We have certain special traits unique to us, but every species has something special about it.
I get 1.7 to 2 times as many neurons as elephants, a little more for whales, and they don't seem even half as intelligent. Homo floresiensis had a brain considered small for a chimpanzee and was capable of making tools and lighting fires and very likely language. Meanwhile neanderthals had even bigger brains than us. The number of neurons alone isn't responsible for intelligence.
Even if it was, that doesn't explain how intelligence works or what the hell the brain is actually doing.
Still remember that when the question is formulated as "what makes us humans" it gets the theological note to it implying that we are special, "divinely better" or whatever. And that we're not. We're just one specific attempt of all evolutionary attempts that happened through the billions of years.
No, we are not "the chosen ones." We have the brains able to figure out more than other animals, but it was not predestined. And we are not the only ones "at the top of the evolution" either. Every animal you see is "at the top of the evolution" for its branch.
I know it's hard to believe for those who grew up in protestant environment with the false belief that "God gave us the Earth to use it as we will."
Humans certainly are "at the top of evolution". Though it depends greatly how you define "top of evolution". I mean in terms that we might go on to populate entire galaxies and survive long, long after the Earth has burned to a crisp and every other species is long dead. Or maybe you could define it in terms that we are capable of far, far more than any other animal.
If you define it as "merely manages to survive and reproduce in the present" then yes, everything alive is at "the top of evolution", since that is actually part of the definition of "alive".
Anyways I'm not sure it matters. How I came to exist doesn't change any of my goals. I'm still the same person whether I was put here by God or by random chance or by an evolutionary process.
> we might go on to populate entire galaxies and survive long
At the moment, we "might" only in Sci-Fi movies. The reality is completely different. Better look at how we really handle global warming or control nuclear weapons. Civilization we know is much more fragile that those who believe to be "chosen by deity" are able to recognize.
No country is stupid enough to use nuclear weapons, and it wouldn't make humans extinct in any case. And global warming couldn't even get as far as destroying civilization.
We only have to make it 30 or 40 more years anyways.
Wait, what? Last I heard, another 50 years of global warming and we're the source of a full-blown mass extinction, one that will probably include us. So you're saying all we have to do is survive long enough... to die out?
Full-blown mass extinction? How? As I understand it it's mainly coastal regions slowly flooding and weather changing. That's not collapsing civilization.
I'm saying we have 30-40 years until super-human AI. Though short of that there are still many other advances in technology we could make in that time that would change things completely.
> Full-blown mass extinction? How? As I understand it it's mainly coastal regions slowly flooding and weather changing. That's not collapsing civilization.
Mass extinction of large sums of the life on this planet. We might technically survive, but the ecosystem that supports us is dying, and quickly, and we're the ones killing it.
>I'm saying we have 30-40 years until super-human AI.
Ah, ok. Well, if that prediction turns out correct, then you should liquidate your bank accounts, because then it's 30-40 years until we all die screaming.
I'd say bacteria and viruses (if you define those as living) have us beat by almost any metric.
>How I came to exist doesn't change any of my goals.
As a side note, it probably should. If you're certain of life after death and the existence of God, it should probably color your experience in a way that's different than if you take the material view of: most likely no God, and one life to live.
I know what you're saying, but that isn't the question. The question is "what makes us human" or some similar ridiculousness.
//
Having said that, come on. There is a correlation between brain size (i.e. number of neurons) and intelligence. It may not be 1:1 or linear (though how do you know the Neanderthals were not more more intelligent, or we aren't twice as intelligent as elephants?) but there is most certainly a strong strong correlation.
this only applies as long as humans are the only intelligent, abstract-thinking creaturse around- what happens when we encounter others, alien or artificial or otherwise?
>how/why humans are so much more intelligent than other animals
We're not dramatically smarter than other animals. The more biologists look, the more it turns out that some level of intelligence and some level of consciousness evolves in loads and loads of carnivores and omnivores.
What we apes managed to evolve that was special was hands and culture. Hands gave us much more general power to manipulate the physical world (compare to a dog, which can achieve the intelligence of a small human child but will never be able to put Legos together). Culture let us pass down adaptations by learning instead of evolving.
Animals have a surprising degree of intelligence, I don't deny that. But it's nothing compared to a human. There is no abstract reasoning. They aren't limited simply because of a lack of hands.
This idea that science and philosophy are separate things needs to be killed. Philosophy isn't limited to navel-gazing about imaginary things. The scientific method is something that was determined through the application of philosophy throughout the ages. It's the application of logic and the reasoning around how best to determine robust results - this was achieved through 'applied' philosophy. Science and the scientific method relies deeply on philosophy - science could be described as being the business end of philosophy.
And the highest qualification you can get in science is a PhD - a doctorate of philosophy.
In order to observe something you have to bounce photons off of it, which changes its behavior...little over-simplified, but I believe that's the gist.
From what I understand, there are two phenomena at play, often mixed together. The observer might interfere when it tries to measure (the observer effect, which is true to any system), but there's also an inherent uncertainty on the way waves are measured (the uncertainty principle).
The observer effect is well-understood, there's nothing magical about it. For example, a multimeter acts a (very small) resistor, affecting the circuit it's measuring. Sometimes the error you introduce can be ignored, but get unmanageable when you try to measure really small systems, where things are more easily disturbed.
The uncertainty principle, on the other hand, is something else. There's a video that I think explains the uncertainty principle well, with a practical example (it's explaining why there's a limit to how many pulses you can send down a fiber optic and still be able to measure on the other side): http://youtu.be/0OOmSyaoAt0?t=7m28s
Yes, this really is just a special case of one of the questions: "What is consciousness?" When we become entangled with a quantum system, why does our consciousness follow one path (apparently) and not another? If we can understand consciousness, then this is probably easy.
Quantum states simply aren't the medium of the interaction for our consciousness. Our brains work on electrical and chemical signals, ginormous orders of magnitude bigger levels than quantum ones.
This is still an open question, and a really good one.
The predictive power of quantum theory is amazing; it gives excellent numerical predictions as to the outcome of experiments. But as to how we interpret that, especially the question of what a measurement is, is not at all addressed by the theory, and remains a point of intense discussion and study.
I think #6, the question about sleep and dreams, is especially interesting.
On another NPR broadcast, I heard a researcher talk about how our bodies make up for sleep we lose. It's not like owing a debt to the bank and paying it back all at once, he said. If we go days without sleep and then crash, we won't quite cognitively recover from the lost sleeping time - even if we sleep for many more hours than usual.
One biological explanation, he said, is that the need to make up for many hours of lost sleeping time has not been a significant factor in evolution; modern humans are the first species that intentionally deprives itself of sleep for long periods of time.
I thought it was fascinating to think about the concept of humans evolving to go longer periods without sleep and to cognitively recover by "cashing in" on rest, so to speak.
I'm sorry that I can't remember the author's name to provide more concrete details; if anyone else also heard the talk, please share a link if possible.
In my dreams, I may "express" fantasies, like flying, or jumping ridiculous heights, or falling from such heights without hurting myself like a super cat/ninja hybrid, or giving enthralling musical performances. I never express repressed desires though. Like, if a girl has rejected me in real life, she usually does the same in the dreams. If in real life I wouldn't dare touch, say, her butt, I'm just as restrained in my dreams.
One reason it might be one of the 10 most important questions in science is that dreaming helps solve problems. When you sleep on a problem the mind magically presents an answer to the problem the next day. Aside from it's metaphorical implication that it's important to dream big, dreaming could literally help answer the other 9 questions.
I find it intriguing HN readers don't consider it important, actually.
>I find it intriguing HN readers don't consider it important, actually.
Understanding dreams (and consciousness) is really tied to understanding the human brain. I would consider that, in general, to be one of the questions of science, not dreaming specifically.
After all, is the phenomenon of dreams that much more interesting than, say, the phenomenon of memories and recollection, or emotional experience, or learning, or anything else brain-related?
It's not clear to me how one can make themselves dream.
You can stimulate memories and recollection, induce emotional experience, and can initiate learning with known ways that work, even if the understanding of how they work isn't fully developed.
Still the argument "they have their ships therefore they don't need our Earth" is more than shaky. I concur with Hawking: we can definitely imagine aliens who wouldn't blink an eye before they won't care for life of humans, the same way we eat other animals or simply destroy them as the side effect of doing something for us more important.
Almost. Wanderlust. The ebb and flow of disaster and recovery. A pond overflows, a forest burns, a volcano erupts, a comet hits Earth. We always send out the scouting parties and come back. There is no immediate economic logic, just the 1 billion old instinct to check out the next habitat. By Tyma's cold logic, there is no point in tourism, yet we spend 10% of our global resources for an utterly useless activity. Why?
Any life form that can (a) divorce its intelligence from its physical substrate, and (b) forge a sustainable energy relationship with one or more stars, has the capacity to be very, very long-lived. I think if there exist aliens that we are capable of finding, they will be in the form of slow-moving, slow-spreading "Space Ents", beings who are perfectly content to send SYN/ACK messages with 500,000 year ping times. Play out natural selection in the ginormous sandbox that is Universe, and I think that's the only inevitable outcome (barring FTL).
I would replace a couple of the anthropocentric ones with:
1) What is the nature of time, and how/why does our consciousness perceive it as such?
2) What's inside a black hole?
I also have a philosophical question that maybe has already been explored:
Are the laws of logic always true in every possible universe? Could there exist a universe where p|^p is not always true? One where the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter is not equal to pi? I guess these things would be impossible to imagine, but is logic just a description of reality, or is reality an implementation of logical axioms?
1) We perceive time as such because the future determines the past but not vice-versa (H(t|t-1)>0 and H(t-1|t)=0 in terms of entropy) -- thus our brain can at a given moment contain relatively complete information about past moments, but necessarily limited information about future moments. I think relativity gives a pretty good picture of the nature of time; it is a partial order. Quantum mechanics treats time very differently though, so there is almost certainly more to say. I think this is a good question to be asking.
2) There's something inside a block hole?
It's funny that you should use those two examples in your last question. The first one is true or false depending on the logic you use, and the second is physically false.
The first statement -- that (p or not p) is always true -- is true in Boolean logic but not always true in Constructive logic; in fact this is what separates these two forms of logic. My very rough understanding is that boolean logic best describes situations in which propositions like p are taken to mean "p is true", whereas in constructive logic p is taken to mean "p is provable".
The second statement -- that the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter is equal to pi -- is false under general relativity. In fact, if you were to measure the circumference and diameter of a big circle around the sun, their ratio would be a little off due to the sun's gravity (I forget in which direction).
You ask whether the laws of logic are true in every possible universe. It depends entirely on what you mean by every possible universe. To really consider one possible universe, though (say the one where everything is made of cheese), we have to be able to reason about it. So if the laws of logic are not true in it (maybe the cheese is also not cheese), we can't really consider it to begin with. So yes, the laws of logic are true in every possible universe, though for a rather boring reason.
Hmm. I've never read about constructive logic, it looks pretty interesting. Thanks for bringing it up, I'll look into it.
Maybe those two examples I gave are bad. But in general, I guess that the question itself (of whether or not logic holds true in all universes) sounds like it is fundamentally unanswerable by using our logical system. Since the fundamentals are axioms, and presupposing an axiom to be false would always be contradictory, we could never prove such a universe to exist.
What even is logic? The more I think about it, the less fundamental it seems, and the more it seems like just an aspect of our brains. It's like they are just descriptions of the internal consistency in how our brains are wired. What does it even mean for something to be true or false? Reality is just reality, and any "sense" we make of it is just a state of equilibrium in our brains.
Is a mathematical statement in our minds (like 1+1=2) true because of the nature of reality, or true because the structure and rules of arithmetic that we've created happen to trigger some pleasurable sense of consistency in our minds? And perhaps the whole derivation of mathematics is just a discovery of how our brains perceive "correctness".
Well, I'm rambling, I guess it's an unknowable thing, because we're always operating in the bias of our own minds.
Why you perceive time the way you do is easy enough. At any "point" in time your brain (or any physical system for that matter) is influenced by the points before it. Play around with cellular automata and it kind of gives you a sense of how time can be viewed as a dimension similar to space.
>Are the laws of logic always true in every possible universe? Could there exist a universe where p|^p is not always true? One where the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter is not equal to pi? I guess these things would be impossible to imagine, but is logic just a description of reality, or is reality an implementation of logical axioms?
The laws of logic are true in all possible universes (according to logic.) Can you imagine a universe where 1+1=3? Where someone has one object, and puts it next to another object and suddenly he has three objects? It just makes no sense. The "laws" of logic are not laws in the sense that things like physical laws are laws.
The question of time is deeper than this. Why is it that your brain or for that matter any physical system is dependent on it's previous configurations? Why is it that there is such a thing as previous? The mathematical descriptions of reality we have devised are symmetrical in time...
I can imagine a universe where alternate number like systems are more appropriate as heuristics for day to day living. Why should every universe be easily described through isomorphisms to the infinite cyclic group? Why could a universe not be more easily understood (compressed) within the minds of it's inhabitants with systems which are non-abelian groups? Perhaps you could say that there can exist no universes where intelligent beings can exist which contain aspects which are compressible using such systems. But you would have to prove it.
I think the arrow of time question is very interesting, I would love to see and understand an answer to this before I die.
My way about time is:
Past and future is like reflections from current moment. Both are changed at will and alter everything at whim. Everything is altered so you don't have so much "Déjà vu", your perception of solidity is altered.
In a moment you have sister, in a moment you don't, but your whole past/future and recollections about that is altered and you have no way of preserving previous state.
Without alterations you would go mad realizing that everything is at the same time.
There must be sensible explanation of what I am trying to day, but I yet to find one.
Might be like looking at busy bazaar from every possible angle at the same time in same viewpoint, or focus down to small opening at one viewpoint how bread is sitting on shelf.
I would love to see high efficiency[0] photo-voltaic cells in all sorts of consumer electronic devices. Imagine solar cells embedded in Gorilla glass on the back of your phone, camera, laptop etc. :)
76 comments
[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadSo I am not sure if you think the question is already solved or is it not actually a problem.
The contributions like "engineering problem at best" make me sure that we can't expect much.
Actual top10 problems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems
(they require knowing more than a little bit of science to even understand the question)
>how/why humans are so much more intelligent than other animals
Because we have three times more neurons than the closest competition. Why do we have so many neurons? Because there was a selective pressure acting upon our ancestors.
Furthermore, WE ARE ANIMALS. We have certain special traits unique to us, but every species has something special about it.
Even if it was, that doesn't explain how intelligence works or what the hell the brain is actually doing.
I know it's hard to believe for those who grew up in protestant environment with the false belief that "God gave us the Earth to use it as we will."
If you define it as "merely manages to survive and reproduce in the present" then yes, everything alive is at "the top of evolution", since that is actually part of the definition of "alive".
Anyways I'm not sure it matters. How I came to exist doesn't change any of my goals. I'm still the same person whether I was put here by God or by random chance or by an evolutionary process.
At the moment, we "might" only in Sci-Fi movies. The reality is completely different. Better look at how we really handle global warming or control nuclear weapons. Civilization we know is much more fragile that those who believe to be "chosen by deity" are able to recognize.
We only have to make it 30 or 40 more years anyways.
I'm saying we have 30-40 years until super-human AI. Though short of that there are still many other advances in technology we could make in that time that would change things completely.
Mass extinction of large sums of the life on this planet. We might technically survive, but the ecosystem that supports us is dying, and quickly, and we're the ones killing it.
>I'm saying we have 30-40 years until super-human AI.
Ah, ok. Well, if that prediction turns out correct, then you should liquidate your bank accounts, because then it's 30-40 years until we all die screaming.
(Translation: futurist pls go.)
I'd say bacteria and viruses (if you define those as living) have us beat by almost any metric.
>How I came to exist doesn't change any of my goals.
As a side note, it probably should. If you're certain of life after death and the existence of God, it should probably color your experience in a way that's different than if you take the material view of: most likely no God, and one life to live.
Are you for real? We are animals, through and through.
//
Having said that, come on. There is a correlation between brain size (i.e. number of neurons) and intelligence. It may not be 1:1 or linear (though how do you know the Neanderthals were not more more intelligent, or we aren't twice as intelligent as elephants?) but there is most certainly a strong strong correlation.
I was under the impression that Lamarckian evolution was mostly disproven?
We're not dramatically smarter than other animals. The more biologists look, the more it turns out that some level of intelligence and some level of consciousness evolves in loads and loads of carnivores and omnivores.
What we apes managed to evolve that was special was hands and culture. Hands gave us much more general power to manipulate the physical world (compare to a dog, which can achieve the intelligence of a small human child but will never be able to put Legos together). Culture let us pass down adaptations by learning instead of evolving.
We're not actually that special.
And the highest qualification you can get in science is a PhD - a doctorate of philosophy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science
The observer effect is well-understood, there's nothing magical about it. For example, a multimeter acts a (very small) resistor, affecting the circuit it's measuring. Sometimes the error you introduce can be ignored, but get unmanageable when you try to measure really small systems, where things are more easily disturbed.
The uncertainty principle, on the other hand, is something else. There's a video that I think explains the uncertainty principle well, with a practical example (it's explaining why there's a limit to how many pulses you can send down a fiber optic and still be able to measure on the other side): http://youtu.be/0OOmSyaoAt0?t=7m28s
Position and momentum are Fourier transforms of each other, and therefore their waveforms cannot both be confined to small range at the same time.
It is loosely analogous to the concept that a rectangle of area 1 can never have both side lengths less than 1.
The predictive power of quantum theory is amazing; it gives excellent numerical predictions as to the outcome of experiments. But as to how we interpret that, especially the question of what a measurement is, is not at all addressed by the theory, and remains a point of intense discussion and study.
On another NPR broadcast, I heard a researcher talk about how our bodies make up for sleep we lose. It's not like owing a debt to the bank and paying it back all at once, he said. If we go days without sleep and then crash, we won't quite cognitively recover from the lost sleeping time - even if we sleep for many more hours than usual.
One biological explanation, he said, is that the need to make up for many hours of lost sleeping time has not been a significant factor in evolution; modern humans are the first species that intentionally deprives itself of sleep for long periods of time.
I thought it was fascinating to think about the concept of humans evolving to go longer periods without sleep and to cognitively recover by "cashing in" on rest, so to speak.
I'm sorry that I can't remember the author's name to provide more concrete details; if anyone else also heard the talk, please share a link if possible.
>modern humans are the first species that intentionally deprives itself of sleep for long periods of time.
Is that correct? It feels wrong. Plenty of species will endure all kinds of stresses when it comes to survival.
From the article: >Was Freud right about his theory that dreams are some sort of expression of repressed desires?
This one is easy. No. Dogs dream.
I find it intriguing HN readers don't consider it important, actually.
Understanding dreams (and consciousness) is really tied to understanding the human brain. I would consider that, in general, to be one of the questions of science, not dreaming specifically.
After all, is the phenomenon of dreams that much more interesting than, say, the phenomenon of memories and recollection, or emotional experience, or learning, or anything else brain-related?
You can stimulate memories and recollection, induce emotional experience, and can initiate learning with known ways that work, even if the understanding of how they work isn't fully developed.
Are there known ways to stimulate a dream?
With regards to this question, I highly recommend http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2013/04/why-well-never-meet-ali...
He makes a compelling argument.
True we would not be important, but at least we would know we are not alone.
1) What is the nature of time, and how/why does our consciousness perceive it as such?
2) What's inside a black hole?
I also have a philosophical question that maybe has already been explored:
Are the laws of logic always true in every possible universe? Could there exist a universe where p|^p is not always true? One where the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter is not equal to pi? I guess these things would be impossible to imagine, but is logic just a description of reality, or is reality an implementation of logical axioms?
You don't need a different universe for that. You just have to be in Indiana.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
2) There's something inside a block hole?
It's funny that you should use those two examples in your last question. The first one is true or false depending on the logic you use, and the second is physically false.
The first statement -- that (p or not p) is always true -- is true in Boolean logic but not always true in Constructive logic; in fact this is what separates these two forms of logic. My very rough understanding is that boolean logic best describes situations in which propositions like p are taken to mean "p is true", whereas in constructive logic p is taken to mean "p is provable".
The second statement -- that the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter is equal to pi -- is false under general relativity. In fact, if you were to measure the circumference and diameter of a big circle around the sun, their ratio would be a little off due to the sun's gravity (I forget in which direction).
You ask whether the laws of logic are true in every possible universe. It depends entirely on what you mean by every possible universe. To really consider one possible universe, though (say the one where everything is made of cheese), we have to be able to reason about it. So if the laws of logic are not true in it (maybe the cheese is also not cheese), we can't really consider it to begin with. So yes, the laws of logic are true in every possible universe, though for a rather boring reason.
Maybe those two examples I gave are bad. But in general, I guess that the question itself (of whether or not logic holds true in all universes) sounds like it is fundamentally unanswerable by using our logical system. Since the fundamentals are axioms, and presupposing an axiom to be false would always be contradictory, we could never prove such a universe to exist.
What even is logic? The more I think about it, the less fundamental it seems, and the more it seems like just an aspect of our brains. It's like they are just descriptions of the internal consistency in how our brains are wired. What does it even mean for something to be true or false? Reality is just reality, and any "sense" we make of it is just a state of equilibrium in our brains.
Is a mathematical statement in our minds (like 1+1=2) true because of the nature of reality, or true because the structure and rules of arithmetic that we've created happen to trigger some pleasurable sense of consistency in our minds? And perhaps the whole derivation of mathematics is just a discovery of how our brains perceive "correctness".
Well, I'm rambling, I guess it's an unknowable thing, because we're always operating in the bias of our own minds.
>Are the laws of logic always true in every possible universe? Could there exist a universe where p|^p is not always true? One where the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter is not equal to pi? I guess these things would be impossible to imagine, but is logic just a description of reality, or is reality an implementation of logical axioms?
The laws of logic are true in all possible universes (according to logic.) Can you imagine a universe where 1+1=3? Where someone has one object, and puts it next to another object and suddenly he has three objects? It just makes no sense. The "laws" of logic are not laws in the sense that things like physical laws are laws.
I can imagine a universe where alternate number like systems are more appropriate as heuristics for day to day living. Why should every universe be easily described through isomorphisms to the infinite cyclic group? Why could a universe not be more easily understood (compressed) within the minds of it's inhabitants with systems which are non-abelian groups? Perhaps you could say that there can exist no universes where intelligent beings can exist which contain aspects which are compressible using such systems. But you would have to prove it.
I think the arrow of time question is very interesting, I would love to see and understand an answer to this before I die.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/fok/causal_universes/
Also this is somewhat relevant too: http://lesswrong.com/lw/qp/timeless_physics/
In a moment you have sister, in a moment you don't, but your whole past/future and recollections about that is altered and you have no way of preserving previous state.
Without alterations you would go mad realizing that everything is at the same time.
There must be sensible explanation of what I am trying to day, but I yet to find one.
Might be like looking at busy bazaar from every possible angle at the same time in same viewpoint, or focus down to small opening at one viewpoint how bread is sitting on shelf.
I would love to see high efficiency[0] photo-voltaic cells in all sorts of consumer electronic devices. Imagine solar cells embedded in Gorilla glass on the back of your phone, camera, laptop etc. :)
[0] http://sharp-world.com/corporate/news/130614.html