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Mind as an emergent self-organizing process

145 points by Osiris30 10y ago

edblarney 10y ago
This is really a little misleading. The 'mind' is an abstraction, it does not exist in physical space, ergo, it never did exist in your 'brain' or 'anywhere else'. It does not have a 'location'. And this is without getting into tangential metaphysical issues ...
- woodruffw 10y ago
  I'm not sure why you were downvoted here -- the mind-body problem isn't nearly as trivial as this article makes it sound.
  - dang 10y ago
    I don't think the article makes the problem sound trivial. The title does, because it's the usual baitiness. We replaced it with a primary phrase from the text itself.
    - woodruffw 10y ago
      The article title definitely colored my perception, thanks for replacing it. That being said, there are parts of this article that come across as trivializing the issue: > Mental life for an anthropologist or sociologist is profoundly social. Your thoughts, feelings, memories, attention, what you experience in this subjective world is part of mind. Neither monists nor dualists would dispute this, but the article makes it sound like it's a sole necessary result of the dualist view. I guess I'm not being a charitable reader, but this does a disservice to both sides (and to Siegel, whose actual claim is much more nuanced than the article makes it out to be).
    - inlikelitude 10y ago
      You lost the essence of the article by changing the title to a trite observation. The point the author is (presumably) making is a bit outrageous: that you not live just in your own brain but in the brain of the others you're related to. I say presumably because I haven't read Siegel's book, but am extrapolating from the same thread which was woven by Hofstadter in "I am a Strange Loop". A more popular yet similar exposition of this idea is the word Ubuntu, which you can roughly grasp using the aphorism "A person is a person through other people".
  - edblarney 10y ago
    "mind-body problem" is indeed not trivial. But the 'mind' does not have a location, it does not make sense describe it as 'in your head' or 'in your body' or anywhere else. Your brain has matter/energy. It has a location. Your mind has neither, it's a abstraction. It has no location. If it did, you'd be able to say where it was without fuss. You'd have to get into fancier metaphysics (i.e. non-materialist) to go too far beyond that.
    - titzer 10y ago
      Not sure if you're positing dualism or just being cautious. Thought exercise: how many lightyears wide would you have to draw a box that contains all the physical processes necessary to simulate your brain (and the experience your brain is having right now)? Any answer in the form of a number implies that you don't really believe in dualism. One could do the same with other "abstractions" (quoting just because of the vagueness of the term in comments sections on hackernews). What about the operating system in your computer? Where is "Windows" or "Linux"? It's a lot of different pages of code and data in memory, but pages are just collections of cache lines and memory activation lines and disk sectors...it's hard to pin down what is "operating system" and what is not "operating system". But even so, one can easily draw a box around your physical computer and say that your operating system definitely _is_ in there. Why should your mind be any different? It is just the software of your brain. It inhabits time and space just as anything else does.
      - edblarney 10y ago
        I'm not hinting at dualism, but I accept someone might infer that. "how many lightyears wide would you have to draw a box that contains all the physical processes necessary to simulate your brain " Well - if you want to map physical processes to the locations of their abstractions, you could say 'the mind is in the brain'. But if you posit your mind and brain are different things (and I think it's pragmatic to do so), then the mind does not have a location. It doesn't matter 'what particles are where'.
        titzer 10y ago
- simonh 10y ago
  If the mind didn't have a specific location, events st any specific location could not affect it. Since they can (someone talking to me here in my house in England affects my mental state) and events at other locations cannot (unless they have a telephone or similar device relocating the sound of their voice here, if they try talking to me in China it won't affect me at all), clearly the mind has a location.
wyager 10y ago
"the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us" This definition is worthless. It has an incredibly high false-positive rate. For example, according to this, any animal would qualify as "a mind", any self-sustaining chemical reaction would qualify as "a mind", and in fact anything that sort of looks like life (key concept is "self-organizing") would qualify as "a mind". Breaking it down: > emergent self-organizing process Any life, and a lot of things that probably wouldn't be counted as life. For example, gravitationally bound spherical bodies in space. > both embodied and relational Mumbo-jumbo, presumably meaning "both physical and abstract". > that regulates energy and information flow Vague bordering on meaningless. This sounds more like it's describing a transistor than a mind. > within and among us Completely ill-defined. Who is "us"? Is this definition impredicative, where "us" is defined over the set of minds? If so, it's useless. It's cool if people want to spin yarn about how to define various difficult-to-quantify abstract concepts, but it's frustrating when they act as if they're talking about some sort of factual discovery they've made.
- djrtwo 10y ago
  I don't think this definition is quite as worthless as you argue. Specifically, you've missed the meaning of "relational". By "embodied" the definition means the physical (brain and rest of body). By "relational" I believe the point is all the stuff that happens to/around/in concert with the physical body and brain. You cannot decouple the brain from the external experiences of the brain, and so the mind must be considered as the processor (the brain) as well as all of the data (stimuli/experiences) that is input and output from the processor.
- visarga 10y ago
  > Completely ill-defined. Who is "us"? Is this definition impredicative, where "us" is defined over the set of minds? If so, it's useless. If you think in terms of behavior, there is the agent, the environment and some kind of reward signal to be optimized. The article "is saying" (liberally adapted by me) that behavior depends on both the agent and dynamics of the environment. Of course it does, the mind learns its values from interaction and rewards. Why are people still trying to solve the mind-body problem when we have Reinforcement Learning? It's a much better conceptualization - without definitional problems, concrete, implementable in both biology and AI, and most of all, it's simple. It does away with most words used in psychology and philosophy, which is a good thing, because they have really imprecise meanings. Just try to define "consciousness" or "mind" - it's a 2000 year old mess.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
It's kind of weird how this comes from a "scientist" instead of a philosopher. I read the article and it's basically saying this scientist guy came up with the definitive "definition" of the mind so other scientists can have a common ground to build upon. While I understand where this is coming from, I still don't understand why a "scientist" is advertising this concept as something novel. Also I can't believe a scientist--who should know better--is trying to define this. This debate has existed throughout human history and you could even arguably say the entire history of philosophy is to figure out the answer to this problem. I also visited the author's book page on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Journey-Heart-Being-Human/dp/039371053X?tag=quartz07-20 https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Journey-Heart-Being-Human/dp/039... (of which this article is an advertorial), and just look at that cover art. This is not a "scientist" material. Really reminds me of some Eckhart Tolle stuff.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  You're probably right on all the other comments, but to say that "the entire history of philosophy is to figure out the answer to this problem" is bad. Real philosophers, like those who lived from Socrates until Descartes, care too little to this question to even mention it, as the answer is given from the start.
  - cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
    Are you saying everyone who called themselves philosophers after Decartes is fake? And I wouldn't just call someone "wrong" when it's obvious that you're making an opinion. As for the "real philosophers" thinking about this, learn more here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_self
    - fiatjaf 10y ago
      When I say "like those who..." I mean that all these were real philosophers, after Descartes that is not a rule anymore. I would say that the real rule today is: everyone who publishes in philosophy magazines or has a chair in some philosophy department on some university is NOT a philosopher, all the others are. As you can see from that Wikipedia article, the theme is totally ignored by philosophers. Wikipedia makes a huge effort to make a full article for it, but only achieves a small text full of sparse references to unrelated topics (self-knowledge, which is clearly not the same thing as we are talking about here; and various superficial silly comments from post-Descartes people).
andraganescu 10y ago
hey folks, if this is not ok i'll remove my reply. I just want to post this article I wrote on the subject a few months ago: https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/life-causes-uncertainty-and-other-problems-7e2e6ee721ef#.sdkrok1iv https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/life-cause... If anyone finds the time and mood to go over it I'd appreciate a discussion :)
- lisper 10y ago
  You lost me at "Life causes the Heisenberg uncertainty". Actually, you lost me at least a paragraph before that, but this statement is just so flat-out wrong that I stopped reading at that point. Life has nothing to do with Heisenberg uncertainty. Your essay in general is poorly informed and borderline incoherent. But asking for feedback on HN is perfectly OK and you should be downvoted for that. I think it is reasonable to expect people to either give you constructive feedback or STFU.
  - grzm 10y ago
    s/you should/you shouldn't/ ?
    - lisper 10y ago
      Um, yeah. Doh!
  - andraganescu 10y ago
    hey, thanks for replying. Yep, this is what I find hardest these days, asking for feedback. If you happen to be in a life setting where you don't have direct access to informed opinion you must risk the usual down vote of coming out of the blue asking for opinion on internet forums. regarding the article itself I think you should try to understand I did my best stay away from the horror of the shitty "new age" quantum bullshit interpretation of the measurement problem. it is NOT my intention or idea. my central idea is that maybe life is a property of the universe not a phenomenon, and try to construct something out of it. I wish you'd give the perspective a chance :), beyond the annoying paragraphs, and put up with my lack of coherence as a gentle gesture towards an amateur wrestling with an extremely complicated subject. Thanks again!
flybass 10y ago
Possibly the worst article I've read about mind-body dilemma.
johndoe4589 10y ago
No need to throw the baby with the bathwater... I thought the point to take away, is that mind is not separate from environment. And futher questioning the inner / outer distinction which causes a sense of separation and disconnectedness. edit: for me it echoes a recent post from Riccardo Manzotti's "spread mind" theory: "Are subjective qualities really more private than objective properties? Or are they the conceptual byproduct of two different ways to address the same stuff?" http://thespreadmind.tumblr.com/post/154801861307/are-subjective-qualities-really-more-private-than http://thespreadmind.tumblr.com/post/154801861307/are-subjec... As Alan Watts beautifully put it: "Every way in which you define your self, can be described in terms of other" ie. just find a single part of "personal" experience that can not be defined as non-personal. arms, legs, face ? those are the body. memories / thoughts? Are obviously made of some kind of echo of sense experience. Content of recent thougghts? Obviously in response to recent experiences or concerns, which themselves again are not self, and never originated as "self".
Cybiote 10y ago
I see that there is much disagreement with this article but I could not find anything with which I seriously disagreed. I suspect most readers are pattern matching in that the arguments sound very dualist but they need not be; most of the piece's problems are more in phrasing and emphasis. While the core ideas offered within might not be known to the broader population, they are in line with current research. There are two aspects to the piece. One that appeals to math and another that is really arguing for a notion of distributed cognition. The math portion is not well written but I don't know whether the fault lies in the article or the original book. Whatever the case, I can summarize more concretely: the idea is that life (and minds) are organizations of matter that more effectively leverage free energy in open systems out of equilibrium. This 4 min video narrated by Sean Carroll gives an accessible description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxTnqKuNygE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxTnqKuNygE. Much of the work in this area was jump started by Jarzynski, who notes non-equilibrium free energy plays a central role in the thermodynamics of processes involving the manipulation of information. In http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/20130475 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/2013047... Friston argues that life "—is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket". And in the work of Susanne Still, we see that all manner of systems, not just brains, are capable of some kind of predictive inference in order to operate at high energy efficiency. the stall torque for the F1-ATPase [26] and the stall force for Myosin V [27] are near the maximal values possible given the free energy liberated by ATP hydrolysis and the sizes of their respective rotations and steps. These and many other biological functions require some correspondence between the environment and the systems that implement them. Therefore the memory of their instantiating systems must be nonzero We have shown that any such system with nonzero memory must conduct predictive inference, at least implicitly, to approach maximal energetic efficiency * * * The other aspect to the essay essentially was an argument for the Distributed Mind Hypothesis, which is certainly more philosophy than it is science. I nonetheless find the viewpoint most compelling. Examples of Distributed and or Extended Minds - Mutually Auto-completing Old married couples where recall of events is most accurate together. - Experts at some task where the knowledge is distributed amongst workers because it is too subconscious to be reliably recorded as text. - Proto cyborgs via mobile phones and laptops. As computers get more personal, the notion of the mind extending outside the brain will get less and less outlandish sounding. - What makes up a person? After you remove the influence of genetics and interactions with books written by others and people met, what is left? Now this part is controversial but someday, we might find that the mind as a single self is a useful illusion but actually a highly correlated subcomponent of a more distributed concept in both space and time. What to look for: Distributed Cognition, Extended Mind, Intelligence Augmentation
vinceguidry 10y ago
I wonder if the mind can be distinguished philosophically from identity. It's an important concept in many spiritual practices, to understand and realize that the mind is not the self.
openfuture 10y ago
This definition is basically a translation of anaxogoras's original definition. It's good to have a more modern way of phrasing it but the idea is older than Christianity.
zdean 10y ago
Defining "mind" or "consciousness" seems like a backwards effort. I would think that the natural progression would be that there is an observed concept which then needs a label (ie, I observe a bunch of tallish greenish things that share a large number of similarities and I label them "tree"). In this case, I would think that there was some observed phenomenon with observable/definable traits that we would then label as "mind" or "consciousness". However, in these cases, it feels as though we came up with the label and are now in search of a concept to fit them.
- xtian 10y ago
  The observed phenomena are the perception, reasoning, and labeling processes you describe. The word "consciousness" refers to the means by which those processes and many others are interconnected.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  You're missing the point. We know that angels are real because we observe their effects on the world around us. The important thing for us to do as scientists is to figure out how angels operate on everything, simultaneously, without leaving any evidence. A thought experiment that will give us unprecedented insight into their function would be to imagine how small an angel could physically get while maintaining all of the properties they are known to have. It would be very, very small, so the best unit to calculate it with might be the maximum density of angels of theorized types, qualities, and distributions within some arbitrarily small area. It'll be the greatest discovery since aether, and has the potential to yield methods for us to wield the power of angels, which would completely disrupt health care, immersive gaming, social multimedia and national defense. Just kidding. Theory-theory is all about discovering the definition of words. It rests entirely on the axiom that when people talk about their motivations and the motivations of other people, they're talking about real objects and real processes. After we assume we're already right and have always been right, all that's left is to locate and quantify "jealousy," and invent ways to create, destroy, and control it. "Jealousy," whatever we may determine that is, is axiomatic before being defined. I ambiguously like the article, just in that it reminds the reader that there's no clear way to detach any physical mind from anything else in the world without making it into a soul. The important thing about you is not that there's introspective rationalizations running on a verbalized loop in your head (and in any reaction requiring speed, slightly later than the action they pretend to explain), but why you can hear the ones running in your head so much louder than you can hear the ones running in someone else's head. It's a proximity problem, not a problem of "consciousness" or "mind." Why am I so much closer to me than I am to you? I have to rely on sounds and visual indications to act upon, and to get feedback from, your nervous system. Why am I in my head and not yours? If I am not this introspective loop; if I were in your head, wouldn't I be in your introspection? If I have no agency, and my behavior and the content of my introspection are an epiphenomenon of the relationship of my nervous system and environment, rather then something that I initiate from wherever I connect with the physical world - am I unitary? Could there be countless me's in my own head observing (living without acting) my life from my perspective? It's far safer to define consciousness or mind as the thing that separates humans from meat, then spend a lot of time studying humans and meat and comparing the two. It's also useful in that you can declare any behavior that you don't like in humans a problem with their meat, or declare some people more meat than human. You'll never be wrong.
dominotw 10y ago
I read the article twice, I still have no idea what he is talking about.
lngnmn 10y ago
What the f* am I reading? The notion of mind is a delusion, caused by confused verbalized introspection in the first place. An observer (the awareness) misapprehends working of a set of semi-independent parts as a whole, like an observer of a large city from the top of a skyscraper could readily mistake it for a living organism. Some rather theoretical scientists are arguing that the notion of so-called [my] self is just an illusion of the same kind. (The Robert Wright's course on Coursera is a good starting point). Consciousness (but not necessarily self-consciousness, which is the notion available only to an abstract-thinking capable entity) or awareness is the property of all animals with a complex-enough brain. It definitely exist as one of many processes in a brain. The notion of an individual mind being a part of the universal mind (in which each individual mind is a drop in a waterfall on the river of Brahman) goes back a few millennia and nowadays is considered to be nothing but a beautiful abstraction. As a person who got The Society Of Mind and The Emotion Machine (among other titles) on my bookshelf I am very concerned about such lousy "science" being promoted on HN.
- red75prime 10y ago
  > Some rather theoretical scientists are arguing that the notion of so-called [my] self is just an illusion of the same kind. Illusion of mind, which is represented as activity of neural patterns in a brain, and therefore causes observable effects, stretches definition of illusion to the point of losing any sense.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    > [mind...] is represented as activity of neural patterns in a brain This is the stretch; accepting electrical activity (EEGs in particular) as a proof of mind. If electrical activity is a proof of mind, my radio has a mind.
    - red75prime 10y ago
      When radio mediates sounds of "I think, therefore I am", there's nothing more than sound and electrical currents correlated with waveform of that sound in it. Source: I can build simple radio. Why brain is probably not like that? Because there's no single experimental result pointing in this direction, while there's nothing contradicting the idea of brain producing mind. I know, philosophers are arguing both pro and contra, but they unlikely to come to agreement in nearest 100 years. Thus I need experimental results that brain is somehow communicates to something, to take this seriously.
kryptokommunist 10y ago
I think there is a much cleaner, more logical approach to the topic without any magical voodoo. I always find that this topic somehow lures people into esoteric explanations that wouldn't be acceptable in other areas, but when dealing with the mind it somehow is okay. In my opinion there is an example for a more productive paradigm when we want to discuss what the mind is. Just take a look: http://www.cognitive-ai.com/publications/assets/Draft-MicroPsi-JBach-07-03-30.pdf http://www.cognitive-ai.com/publications/assets/Draft-MicroP...
- jhedwards 10y ago
  This article looks interesting. I was going to make a similar comment with a much more dated source so I'll piggyback off of yours. Piaget, in his book "Biology and Knowledge", applies biological concepts to the study of mind and comes to the conclusion that consciousness is similar to embryogenesis: both are processes that actively construct a set of interwoven systems that effect biological homeostasis. Many of the basic principles in embryogenesis and learning are the same. For example, isolated subsystems are developed in parallel, with input both from the genetic system and from the environment, and are later integrated to form higher-order functional systems. This idea is more interesting when you consider that the development of mind could be just the final stages of embryogenesis insofar as it is an aspect of the physical development of a child and their integration into society. Piaget's ideas were a little sketchy because of the paucity of information about the brain at the time so I'm excited to look more at the article in the parent comment which appears to be an attempt at a more detailed analysis.
  - kryptokommunist 10y ago
    Well in a way the articles approach is similar to Piaget's in the sense that the approach is also functional. The hypothesis here is that the mind is just a information processing system and the research approach therefore is developing functional models. It will either work or not, you can actually test your models. This approach doesn't just model biological structures but independently tries to find functional explanations/mechanisms that could result in a mind like system. I think the articles model is one of the most sophisticated of the highly integrated ones out there. It really is worth reading, especially the explanation for emotion and motivation i found to be quite interesting. If you need a teaser to get you going, there is also a talk by the author which is a good summary of the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKQ0yaEJjok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKQ0yaEJjok
SubiculumCode 10y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition The article's ideas are related to the extended mind, situated cognition,and embodied cognition hypotheses. They are interesting, and really challenge us to let go of our scientific tendency to separate the world into discrete objects.

145 points by Osiris30 10y ago

This is really a little misleading. The 'mind' is an abstraction, it does not exist in physical space, ergo, it never did exist in your 'brain' or 'anywhere else'. It does not have a 'location'. And this is without getting into tangential metaphysical issues ...

woodruffw 10y ago
I'm not sure why you were downvoted here -- the mind-body problem isn't nearly as trivial as this article makes it sound.
- dang 10y ago
  I don't think the article makes the problem sound trivial. The title does, because it's the usual baitiness. We replaced it with a primary phrase from the text itself.
  - woodruffw 10y ago
    The article title definitely colored my perception, thanks for replacing it. That being said, there are parts of this article that come across as trivializing the issue: > Mental life for an anthropologist or sociologist is profoundly social. Your thoughts, feelings, memories, attention, what you experience in this subjective world is part of mind. Neither monists nor dualists would dispute this, but the article makes it sound like it's a sole necessary result of the dualist view. I guess I'm not being a charitable reader, but this does a disservice to both sides (and to Siegel, whose actual claim is much more nuanced than the article makes it out to be).
  - inlikelitude 10y ago
    You lost the essence of the article by changing the title to a trite observation. The point the author is (presumably) making is a bit outrageous: that you not live just in your own brain but in the brain of the others you're related to. I say presumably because I haven't read Siegel's book, but am extrapolating from the same thread which was woven by Hofstadter in "I am a Strange Loop". A more popular yet similar exposition of this idea is the word Ubuntu, which you can roughly grasp using the aphorism "A person is a person through other people".
- edblarney 10y ago
  "mind-body problem" is indeed not trivial. But the 'mind' does not have a location, it does not make sense describe it as 'in your head' or 'in your body' or anywhere else. Your brain has matter/energy. It has a location. Your mind has neither, it's a abstraction. It has no location. If it did, you'd be able to say where it was without fuss. You'd have to get into fancier metaphysics (i.e. non-materialist) to go too far beyond that.
  - titzer 10y ago
    Not sure if you're positing dualism or just being cautious. Thought exercise: how many lightyears wide would you have to draw a box that contains all the physical processes necessary to simulate your brain (and the experience your brain is having right now)? Any answer in the form of a number implies that you don't really believe in dualism. One could do the same with other "abstractions" (quoting just because of the vagueness of the term in comments sections on hackernews). What about the operating system in your computer? Where is "Windows" or "Linux"? It's a lot of different pages of code and data in memory, but pages are just collections of cache lines and memory activation lines and disk sectors...it's hard to pin down what is "operating system" and what is not "operating system". But even so, one can easily draw a box around your physical computer and say that your operating system definitely _is_ in there. Why should your mind be any different? It is just the software of your brain. It inhabits time and space just as anything else does.
    - edblarney 10y ago
      I'm not hinting at dualism, but I accept someone might infer that. "how many lightyears wide would you have to draw a box that contains all the physical processes necessary to simulate your brain " Well - if you want to map physical processes to the locations of their abstractions, you could say 'the mind is in the brain'. But if you posit your mind and brain are different things (and I think it's pragmatic to do so), then the mind does not have a location. It doesn't matter 'what particles are where'.
      - titzer 10y ago
simonh 10y ago
If the mind didn't have a specific location, events st any specific location could not affect it. Since they can (someone talking to me here in my house in England affects my mental state) and events at other locations cannot (unless they have a telephone or similar device relocating the sound of their voice here, if they try talking to me in China it won't affect me at all), clearly the mind has a location.

wyager 10y ago

"the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us" This definition is worthless. It has an incredibly high false-positive rate. For example, according to this, any animal would qualify as "a mind", any self-sustaining chemical reaction would qualify as "a mind", and in fact anything that sort of looks like life (key concept is "self-organizing") would qualify as "a mind". Breaking it down: > emergent self-organizing process Any life, and a lot of things that probably wouldn't be counted as life. For example, gravitationally bound spherical bodies in space. > both embodied and relational Mumbo-jumbo, presumably meaning "both physical and abstract". > that regulates energy and information flow Vague bordering on meaningless. This sounds more like it's describing a transistor than a mind. > within and among us Completely ill-defined. Who is "us"? Is this definition impredicative, where "us" is defined over the set of minds? If so, it's useless. It's cool if people want to spin yarn about how to define various difficult-to-quantify abstract concepts, but it's frustrating when they act as if they're talking about some sort of factual discovery they've made.

djrtwo 10y ago
I don't think this definition is quite as worthless as you argue. Specifically, you've missed the meaning of "relational". By "embodied" the definition means the physical (brain and rest of body). By "relational" I believe the point is all the stuff that happens to/around/in concert with the physical body and brain. You cannot decouple the brain from the external experiences of the brain, and so the mind must be considered as the processor (the brain) as well as all of the data (stimuli/experiences) that is input and output from the processor.
visarga 10y ago
> Completely ill-defined. Who is "us"? Is this definition impredicative, where "us" is defined over the set of minds? If so, it's useless. If you think in terms of behavior, there is the agent, the environment and some kind of reward signal to be optimized. The article "is saying" (liberally adapted by me) that behavior depends on both the agent and dynamics of the environment. Of course it does, the mind learns its values from interaction and rewards. Why are people still trying to solve the mind-body problem when we have Reinforcement Learning? It's a much better conceptualization - without definitional problems, concrete, implementable in both biology and AI, and most of all, it's simple. It does away with most words used in psychology and philosophy, which is a good thing, because they have really imprecise meanings. Just try to define "consciousness" or "mind" - it's a 2000 year old mess.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

It's kind of weird how this comes from a "scientist" instead of a philosopher. I read the article and it's basically saying this scientist guy came up with the definitive "definition" of the mind so other scientists can have a common ground to build upon. While I understand where this is coming from, I still don't understand why a "scientist" is advertising this concept as something novel. Also I can't believe a scientist--who should know better--is trying to define this. This debate has existed throughout human history and you could even arguably say the entire history of philosophy is to figure out the answer to this problem. I also visited the author's book page on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Journey-Heart-Being-Human/dp/039371053X?tag=quartz07-20 https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Journey-Heart-Being-Human/dp/039... (of which this article is an advertorial), and just look at that cover art. This is not a "scientist" material. Really reminds me of some Eckhart Tolle stuff.

fiatjaf 10y ago
You're probably right on all the other comments, but to say that "the entire history of philosophy is to figure out the answer to this problem" is bad. Real philosophers, like those who lived from Socrates until Descartes, care too little to this question to even mention it, as the answer is given from the start.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  Are you saying everyone who called themselves philosophers after Decartes is fake? And I wouldn't just call someone "wrong" when it's obvious that you're making an opinion. As for the "real philosophers" thinking about this, learn more here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_self
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    When I say "like those who..." I mean that all these were real philosophers, after Descartes that is not a rule anymore. I would say that the real rule today is: everyone who publishes in philosophy magazines or has a chair in some philosophy department on some university is NOT a philosopher, all the others are. As you can see from that Wikipedia article, the theme is totally ignored by philosophers. Wikipedia makes a huge effort to make a full article for it, but only achieves a small text full of sparse references to unrelated topics (self-knowledge, which is clearly not the same thing as we are talking about here; and various superficial silly comments from post-Descartes people).

andraganescu 10y ago

hey folks, if this is not ok i'll remove my reply. I just want to post this article I wrote on the subject a few months ago: https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/life-causes-uncertainty-and-other-problems-7e2e6ee721ef#.sdkrok1iv https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/life-cause... If anyone finds the time and mood to go over it I'd appreciate a discussion :)

lisper 10y ago
You lost me at "Life causes the Heisenberg uncertainty". Actually, you lost me at least a paragraph before that, but this statement is just so flat-out wrong that I stopped reading at that point. Life has nothing to do with Heisenberg uncertainty. Your essay in general is poorly informed and borderline incoherent. But asking for feedback on HN is perfectly OK and you should be downvoted for that. I think it is reasonable to expect people to either give you constructive feedback or STFU.
- grzm 10y ago
  s/you should/you shouldn't/ ?
  - lisper 10y ago
    Um, yeah. Doh!
- andraganescu 10y ago
  hey, thanks for replying. Yep, this is what I find hardest these days, asking for feedback. If you happen to be in a life setting where you don't have direct access to informed opinion you must risk the usual down vote of coming out of the blue asking for opinion on internet forums. regarding the article itself I think you should try to understand I did my best stay away from the horror of the shitty "new age" quantum bullshit interpretation of the measurement problem. it is NOT my intention or idea. my central idea is that maybe life is a property of the universe not a phenomenon, and try to construct something out of it. I wish you'd give the perspective a chance :), beyond the annoying paragraphs, and put up with my lack of coherence as a gentle gesture towards an amateur wrestling with an extremely complicated subject. Thanks again!

flybass 10y ago

Possibly the worst article I've read about mind-body dilemma.

johndoe4589 10y ago

No need to throw the baby with the bathwater... I thought the point to take away, is that mind is not separate from environment. And futher questioning the inner / outer distinction which causes a sense of separation and disconnectedness. edit: for me it echoes a recent post from Riccardo Manzotti's "spread mind" theory: "Are subjective qualities really more private than objective properties? Or are they the conceptual byproduct of two different ways to address the same stuff?" http://thespreadmind.tumblr.com/post/154801861307/are-subjective-qualities-really-more-private-than http://thespreadmind.tumblr.com/post/154801861307/are-subjec... As Alan Watts beautifully put it: "Every way in which you define your self, can be described in terms of other" ie. just find a single part of "personal" experience that can not be defined as non-personal. arms, legs, face ? those are the body. memories / thoughts? Are obviously made of some kind of echo of sense experience. Content of recent thougghts? Obviously in response to recent experiences or concerns, which themselves again are not self, and never originated as "self".

Cybiote 10y ago

I see that there is much disagreement with this article but I could not find anything with which I seriously disagreed. I suspect most readers are pattern matching in that the arguments sound very dualist but they need not be; most of the piece's problems are more in phrasing and emphasis. While the core ideas offered within might not be known to the broader population, they are in line with current research. There are two aspects to the piece. One that appeals to math and another that is really arguing for a notion of distributed cognition. The math portion is not well written but I don't know whether the fault lies in the article or the original book. Whatever the case, I can summarize more concretely: the idea is that life (and minds) are organizations of matter that more effectively leverage free energy in open systems out of equilibrium. This 4 min video narrated by Sean Carroll gives an accessible description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxTnqKuNygE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxTnqKuNygE. Much of the work in this area was jump started by Jarzynski, who notes non-equilibrium free energy plays a central role in the thermodynamics of processes involving the manipulation of information. In http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/20130475 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/2013047... Friston argues that life "—is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket". And in the work of Susanne Still, we see that all manner of systems, not just brains, are capable of some kind of predictive inference in order to operate at high energy efficiency. the stall torque for the F1-ATPase [26] and the stall force for Myosin V [27] are near the maximal values possible given the free energy liberated by ATP hydrolysis and the sizes of their respective rotations and steps. These and many other biological functions require some correspondence between the environment and the systems that implement them. Therefore the memory of their instantiating systems must be nonzero We have shown that any such system with nonzero memory must conduct predictive inference, at least implicitly, to approach maximal energetic efficiency * * * The other aspect to the essay essentially was an argument for the Distributed Mind Hypothesis, which is certainly more philosophy than it is science. I nonetheless find the viewpoint most compelling. Examples of Distributed and or Extended Minds - Mutually Auto-completing Old married couples where recall of events is most accurate together. - Experts at some task where the knowledge is distributed amongst workers because it is too subconscious to be reliably recorded as text. - Proto cyborgs via mobile phones and laptops. As computers get more personal, the notion of the mind extending outside the brain will get less and less outlandish sounding. - What makes up a person? After you remove the influence of genetics and interactions with books written by others and people met, what is left? Now this part is controversial but someday, we might find that the mind as a single self is a useful illusion but actually a highly correlated subcomponent of a more distributed concept in both space and time. What to look for: Distributed Cognition, Extended Mind, Intelligence Augmentation

vinceguidry 10y ago

I wonder if the mind can be distinguished philosophically from identity. It's an important concept in many spiritual practices, to understand and realize that the mind is not the self.

openfuture 10y ago

This definition is basically a translation of anaxogoras's original definition. It's good to have a more modern way of phrasing it but the idea is older than Christianity.

zdean 10y ago

Defining "mind" or "consciousness" seems like a backwards effort. I would think that the natural progression would be that there is an observed concept which then needs a label (ie, I observe a bunch of tallish greenish things that share a large number of similarities and I label them "tree"). In this case, I would think that there was some observed phenomenon with observable/definable traits that we would then label as "mind" or "consciousness". However, in these cases, it feels as though we came up with the label and are now in search of a concept to fit them.

xtian 10y ago
The observed phenomena are the perception, reasoning, and labeling processes you describe. The word "consciousness" refers to the means by which those processes and many others are interconnected.
pessimizer 10y ago
You're missing the point. We know that angels are real because we observe their effects on the world around us. The important thing for us to do as scientists is to figure out how angels operate on everything, simultaneously, without leaving any evidence. A thought experiment that will give us unprecedented insight into their function would be to imagine how small an angel could physically get while maintaining all of the properties they are known to have. It would be very, very small, so the best unit to calculate it with might be the maximum density of angels of theorized types, qualities, and distributions within some arbitrarily small area. It'll be the greatest discovery since aether, and has the potential to yield methods for us to wield the power of angels, which would completely disrupt health care, immersive gaming, social multimedia and national defense. Just kidding. Theory-theory is all about discovering the definition of words. It rests entirely on the axiom that when people talk about their motivations and the motivations of other people, they're talking about real objects and real processes. After we assume we're already right and have always been right, all that's left is to locate and quantify "jealousy," and invent ways to create, destroy, and control it. "Jealousy," whatever we may determine that is, is axiomatic before being defined. I ambiguously like the article, just in that it reminds the reader that there's no clear way to detach any physical mind from anything else in the world without making it into a soul. The important thing about you is not that there's introspective rationalizations running on a verbalized loop in your head (and in any reaction requiring speed, slightly later than the action they pretend to explain), but why you can hear the ones running in your head so much louder than you can hear the ones running in someone else's head. It's a proximity problem, not a problem of "consciousness" or "mind." Why am I so much closer to me than I am to you? I have to rely on sounds and visual indications to act upon, and to get feedback from, your nervous system. Why am I in my head and not yours? If I am not this introspective loop; if I were in your head, wouldn't I be in your introspection? If I have no agency, and my behavior and the content of my introspection are an epiphenomenon of the relationship of my nervous system and environment, rather then something that I initiate from wherever I connect with the physical world - am I unitary? Could there be countless me's in my own head observing (living without acting) my life from my perspective? It's far safer to define consciousness or mind as the thing that separates humans from meat, then spend a lot of time studying humans and meat and comparing the two. It's also useful in that you can declare any behavior that you don't like in humans a problem with their meat, or declare some people more meat than human. You'll never be wrong.

dominotw 10y ago

I read the article twice, I still have no idea what he is talking about.

lngnmn 10y ago

What the f* am I reading? The notion of mind is a delusion, caused by confused verbalized introspection in the first place. An observer (the awareness) misapprehends working of a set of semi-independent parts as a whole, like an observer of a large city from the top of a skyscraper could readily mistake it for a living organism. Some rather theoretical scientists are arguing that the notion of so-called [my] self is just an illusion of the same kind. (The Robert Wright's course on Coursera is a good starting point). Consciousness (but not necessarily self-consciousness, which is the notion available only to an abstract-thinking capable entity) or awareness is the property of all animals with a complex-enough brain. It definitely exist as one of many processes in a brain. The notion of an individual mind being a part of the universal mind (in which each individual mind is a drop in a waterfall on the river of Brahman) goes back a few millennia and nowadays is considered to be nothing but a beautiful abstraction. As a person who got The Society Of Mind and The Emotion Machine (among other titles) on my bookshelf I am very concerned about such lousy "science" being promoted on HN.

red75prime 10y ago
> Some rather theoretical scientists are arguing that the notion of so-called [my] self is just an illusion of the same kind. Illusion of mind, which is represented as activity of neural patterns in a brain, and therefore causes observable effects, stretches definition of illusion to the point of losing any sense.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  > [mind...] is represented as activity of neural patterns in a brain This is the stretch; accepting electrical activity (EEGs in particular) as a proof of mind. If electrical activity is a proof of mind, my radio has a mind.
  - red75prime 10y ago
    When radio mediates sounds of "I think, therefore I am", there's nothing more than sound and electrical currents correlated with waveform of that sound in it. Source: I can build simple radio. Why brain is probably not like that? Because there's no single experimental result pointing in this direction, while there's nothing contradicting the idea of brain producing mind. I know, philosophers are arguing both pro and contra, but they unlikely to come to agreement in nearest 100 years. Thus I need experimental results that brain is somehow communicates to something, to take this seriously.

kryptokommunist 10y ago

I think there is a much cleaner, more logical approach to the topic without any magical voodoo. I always find that this topic somehow lures people into esoteric explanations that wouldn't be acceptable in other areas, but when dealing with the mind it somehow is okay. In my opinion there is an example for a more productive paradigm when we want to discuss what the mind is. Just take a look: http://www.cognitive-ai.com/publications/assets/Draft-MicroPsi-JBach-07-03-30.pdf http://www.cognitive-ai.com/publications/assets/Draft-MicroP...

jhedwards 10y ago
This article looks interesting. I was going to make a similar comment with a much more dated source so I'll piggyback off of yours. Piaget, in his book "Biology and Knowledge", applies biological concepts to the study of mind and comes to the conclusion that consciousness is similar to embryogenesis: both are processes that actively construct a set of interwoven systems that effect biological homeostasis. Many of the basic principles in embryogenesis and learning are the same. For example, isolated subsystems are developed in parallel, with input both from the genetic system and from the environment, and are later integrated to form higher-order functional systems. This idea is more interesting when you consider that the development of mind could be just the final stages of embryogenesis insofar as it is an aspect of the physical development of a child and their integration into society. Piaget's ideas were a little sketchy because of the paucity of information about the brain at the time so I'm excited to look more at the article in the parent comment which appears to be an attempt at a more detailed analysis.
- kryptokommunist 10y ago
  Well in a way the articles approach is similar to Piaget's in the sense that the approach is also functional. The hypothesis here is that the mind is just a information processing system and the research approach therefore is developing functional models. It will either work or not, you can actually test your models. This approach doesn't just model biological structures but independently tries to find functional explanations/mechanisms that could result in a mind like system. I think the articles model is one of the most sophisticated of the highly integrated ones out there. It really is worth reading, especially the explanation for emotion and motivation i found to be quite interesting. If you need a teaser to get you going, there is also a talk by the author which is a good summary of the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKQ0yaEJjok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKQ0yaEJjok

SubiculumCode 10y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition The article's ideas are related to the extended mind, situated cognition,and embodied cognition hypotheses. They are interesting, and really challenge us to let go of our scientific tendency to separate the world into discrete objects.