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String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
- visarga 10y agoRather than physics, I think computational neurology and machine learning / deep learning / AI have a much better chance at elucidating what consciousness is.
- balazsdavid987 10y agoI can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not. Machine learning has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. From where people get that connection?
- peatfreak 10y ago> I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not. Me too. Sometimes one informs or inspires the other, but so far it seems that is about it.
- eutectic 10y agoDoes human learning have anything to do with consciousness?
- visarga 10y agoI don't think there is something magical in flesh. Consciousness is a process of constructing compact and effective representations of the external world which are necessary in order to learn behavior that maximizes rewards (survival). More sophisticated organisms also develop a model of the world and operate on it by imagination or memory recall, so there is also consciousness of internal mental processes. Such mental processes look like a neural turing machine (read from memory, write to memory, focus on specific parts of sensory field / attention). The mental programs to operate over memory and attention are learned by reinforcement learning. Physical control and operating in the external environment are learned by RL too. The notion of self and language emerge naturally from the need to cooperatively solve problems together with other agents. The teaching signal (reward) is based on the environment and inborn instincts (such as hunger, sleep, defense, sex, cooperation) which are evolutionarily evolved. Part of the perception process is based on unsupervised learning, where raw sense data is encoded in the latent semantic space and then, by a top-down process, is tested by regenerating the original input data. It learns by propagating the error (differences) from the data it generates compared to the original sense data. All these processes have been already implemented, albeit crudely, by machine learning. Deep Mind has stated that their purpose this year is to build a rat level AI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAMuNUixKJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAMuNUixKJ8). That would entail rat-level consciousness too.
- mettamage 10y agoNothing? How do you mean that? Sure, it's not in the vicinity, e.g. machine learning has more to do with statistics and AI but nothing? I'm surprised by that statement, maybe I'm taking it too literal perhaps. I mean, the way neural nets behave in computer vision implies some form of attention. On some benchmarks neurons and deep learning have almost the same biological output (poorly phrased, was from a talk that NG gave). Perceiving, or parts of perception have something to do with consciousness. Attention has something to do with consciousness. And you don't have to agree on everything I say, I'm typing/thinking quickly. My point is: machine learning has at least something to do with consciousness. Neural nets are loosely inspired from the brain (and a ton of math). So it could perhaps nuance certain neuroscientific findigs in some cases or the other way around (e.g., neural net designs for the visual system or other brain systems). Anyways, that's how I get the connection. A stone brick and consciousness, that has nothing to do with each other, nothing practical/inspirational anyway.
- MawNicker 10y agoSubjective experiences are neurologically evolved and psychologically optimized representations of sensory input. Using only the objective world we ought to be able to infer something about them. Your thought process here is interesting. Color is the optimal subjective encoding of light's frequency and amplitude. We use it to infer material (color) and structure (shading) when we're recognizing objects. The models inferred by machines almost necessarily have a similar shape; Provided they're being required to perform similar tasks. If we can make a neural network pass the Turing Test then it's model should tell us all sorts of things about humans.
- MawNicker 10y agoI regret saying color was the optimal encoding. It's an optimal encoding. Also only for our visual instruments, required operations AND cognitive capacity. Different organisms likely have different sensations. I suspect consciousness is some form of self awareness. Our internal model of space is likely an aspect of this. Many/most organisms lack the neurology for this sort of modeling. They may still have consciousness in some form but I'm afraid to speculate about what it looks like. I'd want to see the Turing Test neural net compared to an ant neural net. That's the most apples to apples analysis I can think of. We can't cheat with awareness of our own subjectivity if we want to understand ourselves. We're never going to be ants. We will never know anything about color. Only how many frequencies and amplitudes of it different humans can detect.
- tpm 10y agoIt doesn't, but perhaps what many people are thinking is that in costructing more and more capable learning models, we'll get closer to what human brain does. It's not very likely, but hard to tell what will really happen. As an example, some of the deep dream pictures do really look like what people are hallucinating.
- pizza 10y agoVisarga is saying the data provided by computational neuroscience is a good candidate for analysis by machine learning so that the we can find statistical patterns that may help elucidate the processes that we consciousness comes from.
- mozumder 10y agoConsciousness is based on a fifth fundamental force in the universe, and certain structures, like DNA, are tuned into that force, like an antenna.
- omginternets 10y agoAre you referring to Cartesian dualism? Have you read Gilbert Ryle's "The Concept of Mind" (1949) [0]? This is a very old and tired argument. The form you seem to be endorsing has fallen out of favor in philosophy circles. For an intuitive understanding of why interactionist dualism is a bad explanation of phenomenology, consider the following problems: - How does your non-physical substance (what you call a fundamental force in the universe) interact with a physical "antenna"? - Given that this force interacts with matter (as evidenced by consciousness disappearing after certain brain injuries), how is it that it evades physical measure by scientific instruments? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind
- Scea91 10y agoStatements like this, without any arguments to support them, are quite uninteresting.
- mozumder 10y agoNothing is intrinsically interesting. Everything is just habit, based on what you are used to.
- _98fj 10y agoThat sounds like something Terence McKenna would have said.
- omginternets 10y agoOr Réné Descartes in the 17th century. The fundamental nature of res cogitans so to be conscious... if that rings any bells. :) It's also an idea that few philosophers of mind agree with at this point. Gilbert Ryle did a pretty good job of showing that the mind-body problem is a pseudo-problem [0]. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Concept-Mind-Gilbert-Ryle/dp/0226732967 https://www.amazon.com/Concept-Mind-Gilbert-Ryle/dp/02267329...
- Vanit 10y agoInsert opinion on consciousness here, because having it means I understand it at a low level.
- Natsu 10y agoIt's a subjective experience, so I'm not sure we can reason very well about what anything fundamentally unlike ourselves subjectively experiences. I mean, I can program my computer to print out "I calculate, therefore I am" but who knows what, if anything, the processor experiences as it calculates that.
- paulofalcao 10y agoThe article is based on a video from 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfwsvSjXkJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfwsvSjXkJU
- S4M 10y agoI you want to check the video I'd recommend to skip to approximately minute 13, as the beginning is pretty boring - 1 minute of musical introduction, then the hand of Edward Witten looking in his notes, and then some introduction in what I believe is Dutch.
- JulianMorrison 10y agoSee, if a neuroscientist went and had an opinion on sub-atomic physics, people would say "that's nice" and pat them on the head in a patronizing way. But the problem is general. A scientist outside their field is a layman.
- AReallyGoodName 10y agoIs a neuroscientist more qualified than a physicist on this particular topic? Personally I'd leave it to the philosophy guys since we're that far from any understanding of it.
- JulianMorrison 10y agoIf I was to give my unqualified, layperson opinion, I'd say "horse feathers". Consciousness probably isn't "hard" at all. It's a massively parallel brain architecture (which by its widely-spread and slow nature can't accurately self monitor) using theory-of-mind circuitry (developed to handle interpersonal social relations) to model and monitor its own operation. But it feels more sparkly and special to treat it as a mystery.
- igf 10y agoOkay, fine, but why am I in here experiencing it?
- JulianMorrison 10y agoYou mostly don't self-experience. Mostly you experience what's going on around you, and what you're doing and physically feeling. Mostly, you don't act consciously. But when you direct attention at your own experiencing, or at your own actions in a deliberate way, a subsystem dedicated to that task wakes up and provides you with a homunculus self-model. That would be the 'I'.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
- golergka 10y agoI have no evidence or proof, but personally, I believe that the whole consciousness thing is an illusion. There's certain level of abstraction required for a bran as advanced as human's, but in the end, it's just matter following the laws of physics, same as everything else.
- meric 10y ago>> following the laws of physics The question is, which laws of physics, and are the interaction between those laws of physics, interactions we already know, or new ones we have not discovered yet? Otherwise we might as well say consciousness follows the will of God.
- golergka 10y agoIn terms of brain, it seems that the classical physics and electromechanics is quite enough — we don't really need to invoke quantum physics to explain the basic neurons (except as by proxy with all chemical reactions), and current progress with neural networks shows that these structures can indeed result in extremely complicated behaviour.
- zamalek 10y agoConsciousness must exploit growing entropy somehow - otherwise we'd be completely deterministic and consciousness (as an orthogonal consequence of free will) could not exist.
- deutronium 10y agoDoes having consciousness mean we can't be completely deterministic?
- zamalek 10y agoI struggle to determine how we would evolve into that minima without opportunity for free will, without producing a complex solution.
- thedonkeycometh 10y agoAnd he would know... <insert punchline here>
- paulofalcao 10y agoIf the simulation theory is true, our memory, and all brain activity is done in the simulation (aka real world), but consciousness no. With no consciousness we could have a identical behavior, we would be intelligent zombies. Its cool to think that the world is rendered only when conscious beings see the world ("is the moon there when nobody looks?"). Or... are YOU the only one with consciousness? :)
- chriswarbo 10y ago> all brain activity is done in the simulation (aka real world), but consciousness no. The simulation hypothesis does not make such dualistic arguments.
- Angostura 10y agoThis reminds me rather of Roger Penrose's foray into consciousness in The Emperor's New Mind. If you wade your way through it, you'll find the tl;dr is 'consciousness must be a quantum thing because quantum things are mysterious and so is consciousness- oh and look at those microtubules in those neurons - you might get quantum effects in there.' Rather disappointing for such a brilliant man.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- geowwy 10y agoKind of a snide way to dismiss Penrose's work. If our brains are doing things that algorithms can't and QM really is non-deterministic then there could be something to his book. I don't think we know enough to say yet.
- vixen99 10y agoWhat's disappointing is you thinking your one sentence is a trump card dismissing Orch-OR - orchestrated objective reduction. Perhaps better to say that you don't find his ideas on this subject convincing. That at least is not patronizing.
- fdej 10y agoYep. Penrose's argument goes something like this (oversimplified): 1) Turing machines can't solve the halting problem. 2) Humans can solve the halting problem. 3) Therefore, humans can't be Turing machines. There are two problems with this line of reasoning. The first problem is that 2) is unsubstantiated. A human can see immediately that 15 = 3 x 5, but this doesn't mean that we have a magical ability to factor integers instantly. By the frivolous theorem of arithmetic, almost all natural numbers are very, very, very large. We have some ability to analyze formal systems, but the systems we have managed to understand are very simple in the grand scheme of things. Almost all formal systems are very, very, very complex, and there is no evidence that we can understand them all and/or that our understanding process actually is correct (consistent) when extended indefinitely. Penrose's actual argument is of course more technical, and others have made more precise rebuttals. The second problem is that the argument does not solve the problem of consciousness. Scott Aaronson put it nicely: "Even if we supposed the brain was solving a hard computational problem, it's not clear why that would bring us any closer to understanding consciousness. If it doesn't feel like anything to be a Turing machine, then why does it feel like something to be a Turing machine with an oracle for the halting problem?"
- hacker_9 10y agoWe understand consciousness perfectly, being conscious beings an all. It's the physical world that doesn't make any sense.
- acqq 10y agoIn my experience all those "consciousness is otherworldly magic" people are at least heavily influenced (1) by the religious interpretation of the "magical uniqueness" of the humans compared to the all other living beings. Wishful thinking. Then comes the "free will" and other also "magical" thinking. Especially easy to sell in the US (2) And we aren't made of anything other than what all the animals are made of, and the underlying processes in our brains aren't physically unique. And there's no "spirit" or "soul" needed to explain anything. The word spirit comes from Latin spiritus "breath." Ditto for the term for soul "psyche" which comes from the ancient Greek psykhe with the original meaning "breath." That's all that "leaves us" when we die (as we "have our last breath") and from where all the magical thinking came. The consciousness is just a product of evolution, and "a kind of self awareness" exists by animals too. Not much different from what we observe by ourselves, and actually of direct evolutionary advantage. More about all that: http://www.vice.com/read/sorry-religions-human-consciousness-is-just-a-consequence-of-evolution http://www.vice.com/read/sorry-religions-human-consciousness... http://www.livescience.com/26338-crabs-feel-pain.html http://www.livescience.com/26338-crabs-feel-pain.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is-dead-lets-bury-it.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is-dead-l... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World --- 1) if themselves not explicitly declared believers or at least philosophers, the latter having all the incentives to mystify the topic and stay away from the hard sciences 2) 4 of 10 in the US believe "that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago: http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-h...
- chriswarbo 10y ago> The consciousness is just a product of evolution Exactly. Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense... ). Why do some digger wasps only count their own contribution to a nest ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245965580_Do_Digger_Wasps_Commit_the_Concorde_Fallacy https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245965580_Do_Digger... ), and why do some perform redundant nest-checking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphex#Uses_in_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphex#Uses_in_philosophy )? For the same reason we don't calculate exact solutions to large travelling salesman problems; it's much more economical and evolutionarily advantageous to use heuristics, even if they have quirky side-effects and edge-cases.
- moonshinefe 10y agoIt may be a mystery for some time, but I suspect we'll figure it out eventually. Given the rapid pace medical science understanding has gone through in the last several hundred years, it seems likely.
- tpm 10y agoA very good book about what we currently (minus 3 years, perhaps) know: https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes-Thoughts/dp/0143126261/ https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes...
- acqq 10y agoThe approach I like is: https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Social-Brain-Michael-Graziano/dp/0199928649 https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Social-Brain-Michael-Gr... An article by the same author: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/phlegm-theories-of-consciousness/472812/ http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/phlegm-th...
- tpm 10y agoI like his approach very much, but I think he is a bit too generous with the artistic license and short on actual research, which is the opposite with Dehaene. I might be wrong of course. But Graziano is perhaps the best writer among current neuroscientists.
- HONEST_ANNIE 10y agoWitten: > But I think there probably will remain a level of mystery regarding why the brain is functioning in the ways that we can see it, why it creates consciousness or whatever you want to call it. How it functions in the way a conscious human being functions will become clear. But what it is we are experiencing when we are experiencing consciousness, I see as remaining a mystery... Understanding the difference between __workings__ and experience of consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness [1], is crucial for understanding what Witten says. Witten says that while science will figure out how mind works in great detail the hard problem of consciousness remains outside science. It's easy to be sympathetic to Witten. The problem with consciousness seems to be with intuitive meaning of a word and concept. Imagine that someone builds small programs -- or really small brains in a vat -- that are conscious of color blue, or feel universal love and nothing else. Program's attention and awareness never goes elsewhere and it performs no other cognitive tasks than being conscious in the moment without long term memory. Can you imagine scientists going trough the __workings__ -- code, neuron diagrams or state representations -- of it's mind and going, oh this thing clearly conscious, we can see it now and agree. There seems to be assumption that the hard problem of consciousness is tied to multiple high level cognitive capabilities. I don't see the connection. The crux of being conscious is having the cognitive ability of aware-consiouns-attentative-reflective at least tiny amount of time. If we could scientifically determine what consciousness is, we should be able to make nice hyper-aware-of-blue-and-knowing-it program and it would be relatively simple one. [1]: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciousness http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciou...
- danieltillett 10y agoOf course it will remain a mystery until we can get to an agreed definition of what consciousness is. Until then it is just an argument in semantics. On a personal note I have never been very impressed with arguments over the importance of consciousness. I have had too many experiences in life where consciousness is grey to feel it is anything other than a just-so story of what happened.
- xg15 10y agoPersonal opinion: I can imagine that the reason of how we experience consciousness might be unsolvable, much as the question how the color blue feels is hard to answer objectively. However, I think there are a lot less fuzzy questions that are strongly connected with consciousness that I'm hoping can be find answers for - and that could shed some more light on what consciousness is and what it isn't. Such as: - what are memories? Could we build some machine to extract or even manipulate them? Is it possible to compare memories of different people? - what are dreams? - different parts of our body are affected differently by our consciousness: Some things we can control directly, like hands, feet, speech, etc; some processes we cannot control but we do experience them, such as hunger or sleep; and some we neither control nor experience such as digestion, homeostasis etc, even though they are also regulated by the brain. Even more couriously, many of those autonomous processes are greatly affected by conscious thoughts even though we don't experience them as directly controllable - such as fear and arousal. Inversely, conscious actions often have autonomous "sub routines", such as walking. So what what mechanism in the brain governs which processes are conscious and which are not? - Suppose we could actually do brain transplants. Assume we put an adult human brain in a jar and connect it with some kind of VR. Could the brain learn to control a non-human body such as a spider? How about a human body with different proportions?
- adrusi 10y agoThese are all part of the easy problem of consciousness, so yes, I don't think anyone doubts that they can be answered in principle. But there's the hard problem of consciousness, which this article talks about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...
- xiler 10y agoIn particular see the "Mary the super-scientist" thought experiment for a nice explanation of the difference between the two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/FrankJacksonphil1.pdf http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/F...