Slashdot Mirror
Do Particles Have Consciousness? (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Quartz:
Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it's the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter. This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the "panpsychist" view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose...
"Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume," says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. "Arthur Eddington" -- the English scientist who experimentally confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity in the early 20th century -- "argued there's a gap in our picture of the universe. We know what matter does but not what it is. We can put consciousness into this gap"...
An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious. This, says Goff, isn't the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it's more like seeing it as a "cosmic mess." Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles. Goff believes quantum entanglement -- the finding that certain particles behave as a single unified system even when they're separated by such immense distances there can't be a causal signal between them -- suggests the universe functions as a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts. Such theories sound incredible, and perhaps they are. But then again, so is every other possible theory that explains consciousness.
"Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume," says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. "Arthur Eddington" -- the English scientist who experimentally confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity in the early 20th century -- "argued there's a gap in our picture of the universe. We know what matter does but not what it is. We can put consciousness into this gap"...
An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious. This, says Goff, isn't the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it's more like seeing it as a "cosmic mess." Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles. Goff believes quantum entanglement -- the finding that certain particles behave as a single unified system even when they're separated by such immense distances there can't be a causal signal between them -- suggests the universe functions as a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts. Such theories sound incredible, and perhaps they are. But then again, so is every other possible theory that explains consciousness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Seriously, are we out of real scientific problems to study?
Is consciousness a binary thing (either you have it or you don't), or is consciousness a spectrum of varying levels of consciousness?
Everything, animate or inanimate, will grow as big as it can until it runs out of material or until it explodes. Is gravity the "conscious" force?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Seriously - uh we don't understand consciousness so it must be in particles. No probably not. Someday we will understand it and we won't think it's the universe or particles but an emergent property of complex systems not some semi-religious drivel relegating us to handwaving about "things beyond our understanding".
So many weasel phrases. "increasingly being taken seriously by credible" . Nope. It's a fringe view, and for good reason. Pure speculation, a kind of god of the gaps, no mechanism proposed, no explanatory or predictive power.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
If so they must consciously have a really warped sense of reality. Arguably even more warped than the click bait nonsense they hyperbolically describe.
So if the idea is that complex consciousness (animals, humans) derive from the consciousness of the mass of aggregated simple particles, I would think that an understanding of biological processes related to childhood development, adulthood, and then aging would seem to deny that theory. Our consciousness does not change enough over time such that it would reflect our aggregated mass and changes in the individual particles we have over our lives as our cells die-off and are replaced.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That means they have feelings too. Don't be a bigot towards particles, respect their rights.
This idea is not the naive fantasy it appears. The relevant paper(s) are deep and thoughtful. As objective thinkers we want to proceed from a full awareness of the issue. After reading a paper on this, I consider it credible.
Seriously, the description should have stopped half way into the third sentence. Slashdot has joined the healing crystals and woo crowd, bye bye remaining credibility.
"Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it's the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter. This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail"
Total bokum, consciousness is an emergent property of physical processes in the brain. As in a sufficiently powerful computer can create simulated entities moving about within it. No need to invoke some non corporal essence to explain the behavior of such entities.
and it's not a falsifiable theory. That makes it religion, not science. Leave it to the kooks.
The nature of consciousness is a very interesting problem to study. The question in the headline is not asked seriously, but for a purpose in the larger discussion.
Pay attention to what the scientists involved in the discussion are talking about (and ignore the philosophers... they need to learn some more math and quantum mechanics). Is the universe deterministic? How many independent decision makers can co-exist simultaneously? In physics, we understand the bounds of these questions, but can't answer them yet. The concept of particles as independent actors is an extension of allowing multiple interacting consciousnesses to an absurd limit. It's presented by physicists as a mathematically impossible situation, to demonstrate that there will be some limit or law on what can be conscious. Having one consciousness in the universe is appealing to the way physicists think.
When we understand life, we'll understand consciousness. It's not unique to humans, and can be understood as an evolution of the reactionary response to stimuli to stay alive.
Hello, credible philosophers. Please note that The Force, from Star Wars, is a fictional device meant to play a role in entertaining the audience. It's not actually a thing.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
SO IT MUST BE GOD / MAGIC
Consciousness is and effect ot voluntary memory storage and retrieval otside of reflex programming. Any high order animal - squirrel, snake, cat, bird, etc has consciousness, lower order animals like worms, amoebas do not have consciences.
Atoms can't have consciousness, and the article sounds like written by sjw who redefine terms on a whim how they see fit.
Orson Scott Card actually dug into this a bit in the later part of the Ender's series with the philotic twining and aiuas as the fundamental core of the universe, that particles essentially willed themselves into existence in an increasingly hierarchical way, and that they could be called into existence by others. Base matter was a certain kind of aiua possessed of a will that could bond and bind energy into a material form, while consciousness was an aiua that could govern and rule over other aiuas. That theory always seemed to resonate a bit well as a universal kind of spirituality intertwined with physics. In any case, it made for great reading.
"...the "panpsychist" view is increasingly being taken seriously by soon to be considered less-credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.."
From the article:
"Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an âoeunimaginably simpleâ form of consciousness, says Goff. These particles then come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humansâ(TM) subjective experiences."
Logically the larger the object, the "more" consciousness it has. A 200t pile of sand would be "more conscious" than a person or a dog?
Essentially, they can't explain how consciousness arises from physics, so they claim all the constituent parts 'have consciousness'. Just admit you don't know something and then try to figure it out; handwavy intellectual caulking slobbed into whatever gaps exist in your understanding don't make it smooth: it simply shows you're lazy.
It seems a pretty long, awkward, and torturous way to just desperately try to avoid actually calling it animism and religion.
-Styopa
... is Dolly Particles and she has a theme park and big tits and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Lmao at all the experts in this thread who are convinced that all questions are either answered or answerable by their false god science. There are questions larger than science that can never be answered by it.
It was midichlorians after all!
I believe this was settled already last year, when it was decided that we were almost certainly living in a simulation of a universe. Sheesh.
We have a hard time admitting intelligent design and refuse to believe that particle A was specifically intended to be next to particle B and so forth to make you the functioning individual you are now.
Just because we haven't yet figured out things like consciousness, doesn't mean you should allow yourself to say "fuck it" and fall back on the ages-old flaw in the human brain that looks for simple one-line 'explanations' for complex concepts, and in essence say "god did it" -- and that, in essence, is what this is. It's a cop-out, and I find it to be intellectually reprehensible. Anyone who calls themselves a 'scientist' but espouses opinions like this, under the auspices of them being a 'scientist', is reprehensible, and should be censured.
In the past several years I have often said "people are getting dumber, not smarter", and things like this are part of that: rejecting science, logic, and reason, and reverting to what I'll call in this case 'caveman logic'. I'm not totally clear to me whether it's just here in the U.S. or whether it's a global phenomenon, but it seems as though people are rejecting science, logic, reason, and real truth, en masse, and I find the trend to be very disturbing.
As we delve deeper into complex issues like how the human brain produces the phenomenon we call 'consciousness', and deeper into how the underlying fabric of our physical Universe works, we will without a doubt uncover the processes and mechanisms by which all the above, and many more things work; we humans are clever, inquisitive, and posess the potential to be capable of so much more than we are at this moment in time, but we cannot allow ourselves, as a species, to backslide. I feel we are at a crossroads in our development as a species; we must choose carefully and wisely, or we might find ourselves living in another Dark Age.
First, the materialist view demands that whatever consciousness is, it must merely emerge from matter. For various reasons, this materialist position runs into brick walls and is a dead end. This is Descartes’ point: if you are faced with consciousness and matter, and are wondering which one might be the illusory one, you are going to have to pick matter as the illusory one. All the materialist positions run into this simple fact, that if you just close your eyes and wonder what is truly real, all you can say is that you are existing, you have a sence of existing, and that experience would not be present without your consciousness - - meanwhile, what arises in your awareness, lights and souds, you cannot know if they are real or a dream or the matrix or whatever - - every night we wake from dreams which we had no idea at the time were merely dreams, as they felt real whist you were dreaming (and sometimes you notice and have a lucid dream) so who is to say what you will decide about this life, should you wake up to a higher level after you leave this body? Nobody knows, but the problem remains, a consistent world with physical laws is no guarantee that this world of matter is the true reality, and after all, mathematics is extremely rigorous and consistent and yet all in the mind, so the mind can generate extremely complex and rigorous phenomena yet 100% mind-stuff - - meanwhile, you are always certain of consciousness - - even at night dreaming, you have proof of consciousness - - so consciousness would win, if you had to pick one. So what to do? We cannot pick materialist beliefs. The answer is that consciousness and matter are both real, forever. Trying to explain one in terns of the other always causes problems.
Sorry. I really have enough of this. As somebody who worked for 10 years in Quantum Science (experimental), I already know that when the word consciousness appears in a physics context, 5 lines later there will a reference to entanglement.
Let me express that *obviously* most physicists are unhappy with Quantum Mechanics and Kopenhagen Interpretation not being emergent from a known appropriately local theory of the universe, but this frustration should not lead to shit like this.
Let me state my view on this:
* Entanglement does not allow to transmit information fast than light
* In the meantime, we understand the observer/measurement problem much better than let's say 30 years ago. It is acceptable for people being educate before 1981-1990 in quantum mechanics not to have knowledge about dephasing by a coupled bath, but this doesn't make it good science to push everything which we don't understand to consciousness
* We can calculate decoherence rates of quantum states for given coupling strengths and temperatures. These rates are, in aqueous solution quite high, which clearly expresses that information processing in the brain will not happen by quantum processes which can not be described by reaction rates of molecules/ions.
* Assuming that particles have consciousness is not a scientific theory, since it is not falsifiable. (All the particles in your experiment *wanted* to fly that way today, and the day before and the day before, but maybe they change their mind)
* Experiments like mind-matter unification project and other tests of esoteric theories going in this direction never showed any result beyond what could be expected.
The last quote should really be: "Shut Up, Wesley!".
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...
Before being too dismissive of ideas such as these, can you explain authoritatively why one glob of carbon and nitrogen and hydrogen atoms is just inert goo and another is a living, self organizing cell that attempts to further its own interests by interacting with itâ(TM)s environment.
Why should some particular group of atoms care whether or not it feeds, is being damaged or if replicates? And why is another group of atoms just a dead group of atoms.
You can observe in great detail the characteristics of life, but can you describe what it actually is and why it even exists?
Stop being so credulous.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
You shouldn't anthropomorphize the universe; she hates it when you do that.
Stormy Daniels!!!!
Delenn: "Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station, and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. And as we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective."
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
For awhile I tried voting on the firehose, but I found myself getting both far dumber and far more angry.
Dumber because of all of the fucking stupid shit submitted, and angry because the "editors" of the site posted that shit even if it got well downvoted to make sure there was shit to post angrily about to drive ad revenue.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
So fringe views aren't allowed on Slashdot, especially on a weekend? Get over yourself
Science increasingly views consciousness as an emergent property of a group of neurons as a response to external stimuli. Much like emergent behaviors of ants, or any large group of thing interacting with each other.
I don't know where the ignorant writer got this silly idea that science has no good idea about consciousness, but the first thing to realize is not to heed the words of scientists like Eddington who lived] over a century ago, he barely knew DNA existed. He definitely did not know about the pathways and structures and biochemistry the brain discovered only within the last 40 years. I wouldn't even trust any scientists speculation before 1990. Scientists simply did not know enough.
Just read any modern neuroscience textbook of the last 10 years...which say consciousness is mostly located at the frontal lobes, with a few ganglia in the sides and back to preprocessor visual and auditory info. Remove the frontal lobes or disrupt the synaptic connections bw neurons and consciousness is gone.
Particles have emergent properties but consciousness is not one of them. How do we know? Because they have to behave nonlinearly, like switches - one response below a threshold, and a very different response above a threshold. That's how neurons works, like switches, in response to each other. Particles don't have that behavior, they have locally smooth behavior in interactions with other particles.
If you want the answer, just ask a particle.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Do we? Or have we found a way to analyze our brains with something other than our brains?
Is this the Star Wars theory on the meaning o life?
Neither do humans. If they did, they wouldn't always be blaming everything else for the bad choices they make. The whole universe is on autopilot. I see nothing odd about that. We have beer. What else does anyone need? I think these "philosophers" need to have a few themselves, and lay off the acid. (Actually, to tell you the truth, the combination isn't so bad. You can do some serious philosophizing then)
If you expand the definition of Consciousness to absurd lengths (anything that interacts with anything else), then any conclusions you draw will be meaningless.
Rupert Sheldrake has a theory of morphic resonance. He used rats who's task was to learn to escape from a specially constructed tank of water by swimming to one of two gangways that led out of the water. Successive generations of rats leaned how to escape the water in far less time than the first generation of rats. His theory is that the knowledge of how to escape the tank was somehow carried from generation to generation. https://www.sheldrake.org/abou...
For 21 years I've been espousing this theory. Ever since I read "The Living Energy Universe", by Drs. Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek in 1999. Almost everyone of my skeptic friends and associates told me I was crazy, as did all of my religionista friends. I just told them "In 20 to 30 years, science is going to validate me." That time is now upon us!
Promote freedom; fight fascism.
No desire to know, incredulity in the questions being asked.. now THAT'S anti-science.
So, inanimate objects are conscious...
I knew all my tools were plotting against me!
~~~~
This sounds like a curiously interesting train of thought. So how about the proponents carry it further to get testable predictions?
is that murder, with the eggheads as accomplices?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
this story has negative value.
... that arises when people desperate for an explanation do not have even nearly enough data to form one. Hence boundless speculation ensues that has no value as an actual explanation. Look for example also to religion and the average ridiculous urban myth.
The sane thing is to accept that we have no clue what consciousness is. Also, incidentally, we have no clue what intelligence is, we can only somewhat describe its effects. This is harder to see, but a dive into the relevant research makes it amply clear. Learn to live with it. This state (that we have no clue) may someday change or it may not. However filling the void with bullshit is not going to be helpful at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
..we ARE particles.. and we have consciousness... so yes.
The assertion means nothing unless consciousness is defined in an objectively testable manner. If it is, then you can test to see whether it's true or not.
People making assertions about "consciousness" generally handwave and say "you know what I mean", whereas actually you only "sort of" know what they mean, and if you're going to make this kind of assertion, details are significant.
It's worth noting that this is from a philosophy professor addressing the "hard problem of consciousness" which is usually equivalent to "having an internal point of view". This is not a workable definition, as there's no way of testing. This is like the question of "How do you decide whether a robot is conscious?" or "Are there philosophical zombies?". You need an operational definition to convert those from meaningless noise to meaningful. I can create definitions consistent with common usage that will answer those questions either yes or no (i.e., for each question I could come up with two definitions, one of which would have a yes answer and the other a no answer).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
We can't teach religion in schools, intelligent design failed to bypass that, so lets come up with another explanation of "god" so we can push that on everyone.
All these articles and discussions have a feeling of attempts to explain how electromagnetic waves propagate. We do not know so there must be Luminiferous Aether!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
4wdloop
This is the idea in some of Philip Pullman's books; that dust (some kind of new particle), which permeates the universe, is somehow responsible for conciousness. The books are fantasy aimed at kids, but are a fun read.
As for panpsychist, an interesting idea ... can we please have some theories that make predictions that we can test.
So particles have "small amount of consciousness" and by putting them together you get more organized forms?
The same way multiple noise generators would produce a coherent music?
And rules of entropy?
This is so wrong on some many levels.
4wdloop
... They have a psychology. Adeledicnander, nothing more.
Do Particles Have Consciousness?
NO.
Hell, there are people walking around who don't even have consciousness.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
http://consc.net/papers/ideali...
We don't fundamentally understand particles and we don't fundamentally understand consciencenous so they must be the same thing.
So many weasel phrases. "increasingly being taken seriously by credible" . Nope. It's a fringe view, and for good reason. Pure speculation, a kind of god of the gaps, no mechanism proposed, no explanatory or predictive power.
You're really hurting a lot of particles' feelings.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
May be this kid is the one to restore balance to bullshit in the universe?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Is Betteridge's law always right?
We'll have the answers for you at 11.
Play Command HQ online
My penis: It has
Alfred North Whitehead proposed panpsychism in *Process and Reality* (1927-8). He was no fool. In addition to being one of the greatest mathematicians, he also had a better grasp on quantum physics, relativity, and philosophy than most today with Ph.D.s in those subjects.
and weep.
Where did your god or whatever come from, and why can't that same reanoning be used for the big bang... or for you bein a Boltzmann brain that just popped into existence a picosecond ago?
Yeah, the human mind is not (yet) able to deal with this.
Consciousness seems like no great shakes. Most of our best thinking is done unconsciously. For the most part our consciousness is left playing catch up.
Particles *can* help us figure out how we might have free will. In other words, how could it be that our actions are determined or unpredictable. Some will argue that humans are too large scale for quantum uncertainty to have any effect. Any electrical engineer will tell you, however, that if you amplify a signal enough, you also amplify noise, and the human brain is a very powerful amplifier of tiny signals. It is said that the eye can detect a single photon, that the nose can detect a handful of molecules. How finely balanced are the signals in our brains when we cannot decide between two choices, both equally good? But in the end, we *do* decide.
Such decisions, if they are truly free and unpredictable, cannot be consciously motivated. By their nature they cannot be motivated at all.
Play Command HQ online
Since everything is conscious now, I cannot differentiate by this anymore. Whatever, I will just switch to unsympathetic conglomerates.
That's because it is easily-dismissible bunkum.
We don't know what consciousness is with any certainty at all, other than many animals seem to exhibit what most of us would agree upon as calling "consciousness."
It's at least wildly premature (and very likely completely absurd) to decide that it is now a component of the inanimate.
The thinking here — and I'm being very generous with the term — is so muddy as to be utterly opaque and pointless.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
.... *independent* will.
Other definitions are silly, because if you decide, free from *everything*, then what would be the basis of your decisions?
Independent/free from the influence of other individuals.
Which humans are rather not, due to bein social animals with empathy. (Well, at least before the rise of sociopaths...)
But even if we are swarm entities, there would be an individual mind on a higher ... swarm ... level. That one would have independent/free will.
I posted a story about the Teletubbies here but it got rejected. It's funny because it was also posted at another site like /. and got posted.
The responses here to this article not surprisingly run the gamut from hokum and bunk to contemplative science and philosophy. This is to be expected because this is a speculative subject for which there is no patent answer, so one can assess or react to it in any number of legitimate and respectable ways, from doctrinaire belief to dismissive skepticism. There are however a few points worth considering before adopting too strong of an opinion either way.
1) The world has always been full of charlatans and phony philosophers promulgating ridiculous beliefs meant to beguile and defraud the intellectually weak and unwary, purveyors of fud (fear-uncertainty-doubt), self-serving false prophets who seek power or recognition through the intimidation of retarded ideas. Any sensible person who is not cognizant of that reality of history and human nature risks succumbing to the worst nightmares that mankind has ever produced. Thus, kudos to the skeptics who keep us honest and prevent intellectual derailments.
2) However, the universe is also full of rich wonders awaiting our discovery. We only know what we know today because of the efforts and insights of scientists and philosophers before us, and we in turn are the intellectual stepping stones to the generations that follow. Unanswered questions seek their solutions, and we, the stewards of finding and preserving new knowledge, must not become complacent with what we already know, but must seek the new knowledge that awaits around the corner of the next experiment or observation. Thus, kudos to those dreamers and believers with the enthusiasm to seek the answers to the next question.
Consider the evolution of discovery in human society up until this point. Flip a wall switch and we can see at night without first gathering wood and rubbing two sticks together. Would that not have seemed like magic to a neolithic citizen? We can talk to each other around the world in real time, audio, video, and data. Even Marconi and Morse, who could have understood the technologies perfectly well, would probably have marveled where we have come since their innovations, yet for much of history prior to them, such technologies would have been magic, the work of god or the devil. People in the times of Cleopatra, Constantine, and Charlemagne might have explained flying machines and human flight as the work of divine endowment, yet we hop planes as easily as a chariot, and even the Montgolfier and Wright brothers would have marveled at the pictures that come to use from Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto. Our science was the magic and mysticism of prior generations. There is a vast universe of unknown knowledge that awaits discovery, so we must keep open eyes and minds not to overlook what to future generations might seem so obvious.
Even when an idea, a postulate, a hypothesis, a theory proves to be wrong, just a fantasy, it may often light the way to real discovery. We debase the alchemists of prior times because they are perceived as being on a fool’s quest to transform base metals. Yet in their times, they did not know that gold could not be made by simple mixing and stirring of common items. We only know that because they discovered and proved that for us smug people from the future. While they never found the philosopher’s stone and the secret of transformation, they discovered the properties of materials and chemistry. Our modern chemical sciences and technologies were not born in an intellectual big bang at the end of the 18th century. They are the formalization of vast chemical and metallurgical knowledge gained by empiricism and limited scientific experimentation garnered over millenia before.
Copernicus was not successful because of a metaphysical epiphany, but because, trying to first work the numbers from the church doctrine point of view, he could not account for the motion of the planets. he was brave enough to buck society and take a fresh look. How many meritorious grants from promising post docs have been buried because t
I just decided to post on Slashdot...an act of free will apparently. But, if I've got free will then so do the particles... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem; see also videos of Conway's lectures on this.
Bonus points for completely ignoring the entire concept of free will vs. deterministic process. It's rarely presented as such a clean cut (by which I mean, utterly ignorant) argument.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Do sand grains have beach? Do stars have galaxy? Do letters have dictionary?
Supernova explodes, blowing gas and dust across the galaxy. A chunk of it starts swirling, eventually forming the solar system and earth. Let earth spin for a few billion years and life as we know it starts. Let life run for a few billion years and consciousness as we know it, forms.
So there's some property of the universe that tends towards life and consciousness, given certain conditions. How basic and pervasive are these properties? What is the nature of them? I guess that's the question. The universe organized into us. Why and how? What does it imply? How does the inanimate organize into life and consciousness?
"I'm going to build my own theme park ... with blackjack and hookers." -Bender
p.s. You had me at big tits. No need to add stuff.
There is no reason to look for consciousness at quantum level. Consciousness is related to agents acting in the environment, with a goal. It is a macro level process, not a low level one. To have consciousness means to observe the state of the environment and the internal body state, then select an action that maximises expected rewards, then observe if the action actually was beneficial - if it was, the agent should do more of that, if not, less. Repeat this for each and every moment. That's consciousness - predicting expected return (emotion) related to current state, useful in selecting beneficial actions. Not some kind of panpsychism hocus-pocus.
I knew Roger Penrose's name had to be nearby, somehow. And there it is.
Science, like most games has rules. If you want to do "science", you need to follow the rules. If you don't follow the rules you are doing something else.
The main rule of "science" is that you make a prediction that can be "tested", eg, shown to be false by an experiment.
Examples:
1) General relativity predicts that all objects fall at the same rate. This can be "tested" by very carefully measuring the rate at which different things fall. This has been done with accuracy around 1e-14, and the theory has so far not been disproven.
2) There were some predictions that the mass of the universe would be exactly enough to close it. Measurements of the mass density of the universe have shown that this theory is not true. It wasn't a stupid theory, is just happens not to be correct.
OK, how does this apply to the "consciousness of particles"? What measurement would prove that particles do NOT have consciousness?
Without that, it is something like philosophy or religion - which are fine things, but its not *SCIENCE*.
There are 4 ways in object deals with world around it. 1: Dose nothing beyond the basic laws of physics, IE put the object into hot water, it heats up. IE a rock. This is commonly referred as a none life forms. 2: I object which given the correct source's and elements, and energy source, make's copy's of it self. This can be crystal, etc but those sorts of object don't have a natural selection path, by which information can be be stored, modified and played back like DNA has. The object with a natural selection path, we tend to call life. 3: Life come's in 3 general sub groups 3-A None reactive forms. Given the correct environment, it will make of copy's of it self. It has no way moving beyond where the environment takes it. IE: If the wind takes the object to a good place it will do well. or if the wind take's to a bad place it will be destroyed. 3-B Reactive forms. Reactive forms have the ability to move by there own means. if it's too hot, they can move to cooler place, PH is wrong, move to a better place, etc. 3-C Predictive forms. IE: humans. Predictive forms of life, have a Predictive modeling machine's which makes predictions about what is going to happens in the so call future. This allows the life form to predict a winter is coming, so better fly south or store extra food for winter. Or I'm driving a car. I see a brick wall in font of me, I better stop or else I will crash into it. So consciousness is simple a Predictive modeling machine's, synchronized to the environment via a range of sensors, mostly sight, as touch is reactive only it has very limited value for the predictive modeling machine. IE: Try diving a car at 100km/60 miles hour, just using touch and see how well your Predictive modeling works! So that's all consciousness is. A Predictive modeling machine, synchronized to the environment via a range of sensors. All of the levels I have talked about, exist in the most complex forms of life, at the same time.
Something is not a theory, unless it makes testable predictions.
So, what are those testable predictions in this case?
<crickets />
Thought so.
I hate to drop such a strange post without providing any of the details to what is a long story but when I was in high school my car indisputably on one day showed to me that it has some kind of consciousness. It's something I have never forgot.
Meh, just remember: there is no spoon.
A great thought experiment. Considering how small the average human is, or how large the universe is we are just a spec... a particle. :)
[($)]
and, as always, based on misunderstood principles of Quantum Mechanics. Duh ...
there /is/ a midlde-out variant rather than the top-down/bottom-up approaches, basically it says that the universe comes from the various consciousnesses wishing to communicate and share a time together.
"Do trees dream"? and "What if every atom is actually a little solar system, with tiny people living on the electrons"?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The following book was written by a trained mathematician/ philosopher who spent a lifetime on the study of the foundation of consciousness. Website dedicated to the author:- http://www.franklinmerrell-wol... Book:- Experience and Philosophy - ISBN 0-7914-1963-0
Here is a simple experiment about consciousness: every night, sleep turns your body into a huge bunch of non conscious particles. How does that fit with panconsciousness?
You're well aware of John Horton Conway's Strong Free Will Theorem. In fact, your post would seem to indicate either some familiarity with it or good cause to become so. If you are familiar with it, then you're familiar with the arguments for and against the Theorem and that it's generally now accepted that the Theorem per-se is mathematically solid even if nobody quite understands what it means.
Worth a read if you are interested in this topic. The strange link between the human mind and quantum psychics
with literally whatever happens to be the latest fad. Is this progress?
This its not a theory. Theories are supported by reproducible, publicly observable experimental evidence. This is barely an hypothesis. It's more like wild assed speculation. How is this idea experimentally testable? Positing an intelligence to fill in the gaps in our knowledge smacks of the old God of the Gaps fallacy.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
maybe they should read somebody like Daniel Dennett... for starters
I like to ride my unicorn on the freeway. It poops rainbows.
Spore Drive
I've been trying to discuss this notion for a long time but it's hard to even get scientists and intellectuals to acknowledge that consciousness exists fundamentally and not as something you can produce (simulate perfectly) with for example an algorithm. Part of the resistance appears to come from beyond told there is something beyond their domain and they can't master the universe with numbers alone.
Consciousness is hard. All of science looks at things like particles and maps them to representations or in this case mathematics. It doesn't really answer questions like what would it be like to be a particle. We have consciousness and we're made of particles, nothing more than the properties that make up the rest of the universe.
We therefore have to assume that consciousness is an intrinsic property that can potentially exist anywhere. That doesn't mean it's useful. Consciousness without the mega-computer of the brain attached would likely not hold much meaning. I've always assumed that consciousness is small but the human body puts it under the microscope and then reverses the direction, although I might be wrong.
There is a duality to consciousness. For example why aren't I also you and why doesn't it extend do you body? Because of that I don't think it's right to automatically say that the universe is conscious as a whole or one big consciousness. It's more like that at least we know that among physical matter and energy the potential for consciousness to arise exists.
The duality is a problem because on one level we're independent and on the other we're attached to the universe. Our consciousness is definitively separate.
conscious particles value their privacy and thus poke out your eyes whilst reading this ... or not.
For anyone interested in reading more about this subject, Philosophy Now devoted issue 121 to panpsychism.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/121/The_Case_For_Panpsychism
It's not necessarily about consciousness, but about awarenss or raw experience. We presume that when a cat recoils from water, the cat is somehow "aware" and responding based on an "experience" it dislikes. But nothing about the material scientific analysis of the cat as a bundle of particles obeying natural laws requires this. The materialist account, assuming it's correct, is complete and satisfactory without the need for anything like awareness. So where does it come from?
One option is to say that it "emerges." This is highly vague, and basically an attempt to save the argument. The problem here is that we strongly want to get awareness back in there somehow, so we propose "emergent properties" as a half-baked explanation, while forgetting all about the fact that it's an utterly useless appendage. We only stick it in there because we all know a priori there is such a thing as awareness; we just didn't build it into our model of the world, even though it's obviously, permanently in our face.
This philosophical development is an attempt to rethink the problem by building "awareness" into the fundamental nature of things..
That is all.
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
"An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious. This, says Goff, isn't the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it's more like seeing it as a "cosmic mess." Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles."
I find it fascinating that Babylon 5 addressed this subject a couple of decades ago.
Delenn "We believe that the universe itself is conscious in a way we can never truly understand."
https://youtu.be/pzag71pOG1s
It never ceases to amaze me how much faith it takes to believe stuff like that.
I expect better than this trash on /.
I think it may have been Rupert Sheldrake that postulated a collective consciousness many many years ago.
He noticed that back in the 50's and 60's a great deal of time and effort was expended in getting new compounds to form crystals from which properties could be induced. He was curious why compounds previously thought to be difficult were now routine for undergrads. The techniques were the same so why was it now "easy"? He postulated the existence of a collective consciousness that permeates everything and facilitated learning. He was respected enough that no one laughed in his face. But they did suggest experiments.
One experiment was the creation of three identical mazes. They were shipped to various labs around the world. The first maze was run and the rats times logged. After a short interval of a few days the second maze was run at a different location and of course with naive rats. The times were shorter by a statistically significant amount. The third maze was run a few days later and again the maze was run in a statistically shorter time than even the second maze. It was as if somehow the rats tapped into a store of previous knowledge.
Needless to say the results were disturbing to the scientists and I think they pretty much left it there.
In my essay I postulate that I (as a conscious being) am a fractal image of the universe as a whole.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Is Helium more conscious than Hydrogen?
The universe is everything and anything in it. We are part of the universe. We are conscious and self aware therefore the universe is conscious. This doesn't mean individual particles have consciousness but no one can deny the universe does have consciousness.
There is a new paper in the journal Measurement that describes what entanglement is. It is not consciousness. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
Complex systems that are nonetheless stable or meta-stable (often fairly stable with occasional changes) tend to generate their own constraints on the state and processes and interaction of their constituent parts, and on the state and processes and interaction of other things in the environment of the system.
These constraints, or in other words, relatively simple patterns of arrangement and change can be described as properties of the system, and they only emerged after the particular kind of system was able to establish itself in the matter and energy of the region. So in other words, emergent properties.
Another phrase describing this situation might be emergent regularities in complex systems.
They definitely occur, are characterizable, have a degree of independence from many aspects of the specific physics of the constituent parts of the complex system (i.e. layer-independence, leading to non-reductive behaviour of the complex system), and are often the most important features or determinants of the complex system's state and evolution.
It's not bullshit, in general, it's just, well, complex, and admittedly no-one has satisfactorially formalized our knowledge of this kind of phenomenon yet. However progress is being made, such as work on nonequilibrium thermodynamics (maximum entropy principle etc).
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You described general intelligence, with a reflective component, presumeably for purposes of improving performance.
What you described is clearly within range of near-future AI research advances. So while there are some technical puzzles remaining, there are not really any fundamental category-level mysteries about intelligence. It's advanced, general, learning, model-building, model-traversing-and-applying representative-information processing, and it's made efficient with particular architectures, particular algorithms (highly parallel, highly connected, hierarchical (DAG) etc.)
What is still a mystery is the qualia of consciousness. The personally experienced "sensation" or "impression" of being an "I" being in and perceiving the world. The experience of being the real-time "navigator" or "reader" of one's own intelligent aparatus (sensors, nervous system, brain) while not noticing that but rather noticing what it tells us as a narrative and personal-movie about the world around us.
Tononi has a theory that the qualia sensation just emerges when enough highly connected information is collected together in one place (i.e. one information network). I would add that there clearly would need to be information-processing processes comprehensively traversing the highly interconnected information network. A static memory with no processing isn't conscious.I'm on the fence about Tononi. It sounds as plausible as anything else I've heard, but is not really explanatory.I think I would also add that the information network being representative information "about" the world around the network, including the network's own body, would also seem to be a requirement for the emergence of structured narrative qualia.
But is that all of an explanation that is needed for qualia? It might have to suffice.
Qualia, like the possible properties of multiverses, might not be a domain that is subject to investigation by empirical science. But it still just might be an actual thing. Frustrating as hell isn't that? Qualia is one of those things that a sufficiently advanced AI could clearly fake with high fidelity, then tell you a story of all the wonderful things its attention was noticing, one after another.
How would you know it was "faking" it? How do you know your human friend is not faking their story of their feeling of consciousness and introspection? You don't know. You assume they are not "faking" it because it is much simpler to assume they are functionally essentially just like you, so they are experiencing it just like you do. You Occam's Razor the hell out of it. And you're probably right, but just guessing. Their red is probably (save colour-blindness) just like your red, because their complex system including brain and visual system, and their acculturation to associates of red (like blood), is just like yours was. Occam says theirs is just like yours.
So when we get AIs that say they are "feeling it" and noticing one specific aspect after another of our wonderful world, why don't we just say "it's probably not faking it, any more than we are"? And drink a toast to Tononi who dared propose that the qualia of consciousness is an emergent property of large, highly interconnected (actively processed I would add) information networks.
"I" am the program-counter, it seems.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Who doesn't love atheists? Especially really smart ones who write books like this...
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755
Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
Indeed -- note the subtitle.
Fuck that sorry piece of shit bigot
It makes sense now. You go by Bongo because that's the sound your empty head makes when you knock on it.
When a loop makes inventory of its current state in a recursive manner, it is conscious. Previous state mixed with data from inputs and memory is food for the resulting state.
I mean, it is right there in the definition of consciousness: to know itself. What more do we need? What is the mystic type consciousness we have not supposedly reached? An artificial being that would think itself as capable as humans?
Wasn't the mathematician Leibniz the first who coined that idea? - http://www.angelfire.com/md2/t...