7 ms·

Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

76 points by robertothais 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
irickt 9y ago
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6551 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6551 >>> Tegmark’s career is a rather unusual story, mixing reputable science with an increasingly strong taste for grandiose nonsense. In this book he indulges his inner crank, describing in detail an utterly empty vision of the “ultimate nature of reality.”
- djtriptych 9y ago
  Unless this vision can be directly disproven, why should anyone attach labels like "grandiose" or "nonsense" or "empty"?
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    That's the exact opposite of the correct approach. Unless it can be proven (and he doesn't, at all, prove his case) then there is no reason to not describe it as such. (Grandiose is the exception - that's a stylistic judgement and quite apt here, irrespective of its truth value)
  - irickt 9y ago
    It's a fair question. The quote is one reviewer's opinion. I posted it without explanation as context for the paper. A more neutral warning is that Tegmark has moved from conventional science towards untestable speculation. That and the fact that he has cultivated funding sources more aligned with the occult than with science has left many of his peers seemingly resentful.
  - derrickdirge 9y ago
    Can you think of something that's sufficiently 'disproven' so as to make those labels appropriate?
- dafash 9y ago
  One has to pay attention very closely to Mr. Tegmark's presentations. He will state very eloquently a number of facts, and then slip in subtly a very important fundamental assumption upon which all of his subsequent statements are built.
  - omarchowdhury 9y ago
    Hey let me know your email if you'd like to talk about how LSD is affecting your life after it opened a spiritual realm for you as you said.
Elrac 9y ago
To me, this read like Alan Sokal's Postmodernism troll piece. I understand Tegmark is a reputable physicist, but the abstract could have been written by Deepak Chopra after skimming a math text.
- vixen99 9y ago
  But it wasn't and certainly not the paper which the abstract introduces.
thriftwy 9y ago
Even if it wasn't nonsense, it would be. Because the description focuses on how we perceive the world; not on who is this we that perceives. The mystery of consciousness in the observer, not in what it observes.
- monktastic1 9y ago
  You have my upvote, but I'm still scratching my head over your first sentence.
- hackinthebochs 9y ago
  I feel you have it backwards. That there are observers doesn't seem like much of a mystery: there doesn't seem to be anything mysterious about observers beyond the right kind of computation. The mystery is the qualitative experience of conscious observers, the feel, the what it is like to be, etc.
  - monktastic1 9y ago
    But what could it mean to be an "observer" other than to have said "qualitative experience?"
  - curo 9y ago
    > "beyond the right kind of computation" Could you explain this? The observer isn't a mystery, I agree. But the original comment seems spot on: if you are describing consciousness as a state of matter, then you're saying something like, "matter inherits a different set of qualities when it's in a consciousness state (as opposed to a solid or liquid state)." If the state change leads to a change of quality, then you're once again proclaiming consciousness as an object with observable qualities rather than a the observer without quality. This is fine if we're talking about an observable consciousness, but then who is that observer? I agree with the original comment that this paper is nonsense. I'm surprised how many papers are spent discussing consciousness this way. In biological terms, fine. In physical terms, impossible.
    - robertothais 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
akyu 9y ago
The math in this paper is beyond your average Hacker News poster. So no wonder these comments are just name calling.
- selimthegrim 9y ago
  Scott Aaronson left a smoking hole where Tononi's theories used to be not too long ago. If you want quantum theorizing about consciousness I suggest you start here instead - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161102-quantum-neuroscience/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161102-quantum-neuroscience...
  - unhammer 9y ago
    Thanks for the pointer, I assume you meant http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 ? That was a fun read anyway :-)
ghughu 9y ago
None of us seem qualified to judge this paper as valid or not valid or to say which parts are valid and which aren't and why. But the only active thing we can do in Hacker News is leave a comment and this article tickles with me enough to want to leave a comment. I guess the best comment I can leave here is one that avoids the ignorant-about-own-ignorance pitfall of false expertise and just leave a meta-comment about the comments.
Insanity 9y ago
(disclaimer: I did not yet read the whole paper) This part stood out to me in their idea of how philosophy views consciousness > A traditional answer to this problem is dualism — that living entities differ from inanimate ones because they contain some non-physical element such as an “anima” or “soul”. I believe this makes it sound like philosophers are actively looking for the soul, or another explanation of consciousness that lies outside of 'physics'. This might be true for some philosophers, but there are other philosophies to adhere to. More contemporary would be the works of Daniel Dennett or John Searle. Cartesian Dualism is surely something not a lot of philosophers would get behind anymore.
- xapata 9y ago
  I understood Searle's "Chinese Room" argument to advocate dualism -- that there's something more to being intelligent than just behavior. Searle says the more is consciousness, but I don't see the distinction between that version of the concept and a soul or "ghost" in the machine.
  - Insanity 9y ago
    Searle is actually an advocate for Biological Naturalism, the chinese room was an argument against computationalism (that the brain works like a computer). Though he admittedly does think the brain is a 'biological computer', and they have their differences.
    - xapata 9y ago
      That's how Searle views himself, but one critique of his work is that he can't distinguish his "naturalism" from dualism. It seems so obvious to him that the Chinese Room isn't conscious, but if it can replicate everything a conscious person would do, it might indeed replicate the phenomena of consciousness. How would we know, after all, since those phenomena are not readily observable.
- erik14th 9y ago
  I interpret "soul", "spirit" and such terms as a poetic concept to represent the kernel of being, as in, what defines individuality. If you understand conscience as the flow of conscious states, what defines you should be the persistent aspects of those states, trying to draw a parallel with programming languages, it's spirit would be it's core functions. So, not what kind of information you have or deal with, but how you deal with it. I just can't understand the search for a metaphysical soul, as it is not an actual search, it's just faith, hope, it's not a reasonable answer or an attempt at one, and I guess a lot of philosophers and poets use the words "soul" and "spirit" with what I said earlier in mind.
d--b 9y ago
There is a long history of pushing the location of human consciousness further and further with technological advances. First it was god, then it was somewhere in the ether, then it was electromagnetic waves, now quantum mechanics. People just can't stand the idea that conscious thoughts are made of matter.
- zepto 9y ago
  People also just can't stand the idea that matter is made of consciousness.
ozy 9y ago
I don't get how very intelligent people can hold such views. Where does the dance go, when the dancers go off stage? The dancers are not the dance, but create the dance. There is some kind of duality there. Similar for the brain. What it does creates the mind/consciousness. Should that feel like something? Why not? How does the brain decide on next actions? By simulating/predicting futures and "feeling" which is desired, and acting towards that future. Why would that not feel like something? The "hard question of consciousness" is not an answer. It is a philosophical device without backing. It is unknown if qualia is actually hard, maybe most learning systems have it. What we do know: it is hard to have intuitions about it ...
- thriftwy 9y ago
  > It is unknown Well, make it known then for starters, if you want to make the question a little bit softer.
  - ozy 9y ago
    But that is the rub, isn't it. How some mind (or system) experiences something is the very definition of subjective. How to measure that objectively? Imagine somebody makes a mind out of machine learning. Passes the turing test and more. It reports to "feel", ie to have qualia. Is it parroting what it hears/reads from humans? Or does it actually have a feeling when you show it an image of a sunset? At what breakpoint do you place your debugger and inspect if it is so?
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      A lot of things which we considered subjective were later found to be measurable. I think we should never stop to find an angle from which we can tackle the consciousness problem.
gator-io 9y ago
The truth is simple. We are in the Matrix.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  This does not in the slightest solve the consciousness problem. Who is this we that are in the Matrix?
runeks 9y ago
Consciousness is a bit like the speed of light: it's defined, not measured. It's not possible to measure the speed of light because we've made this constant the basis of all other measurements. Consciousness is a lot like that: unmeasurable, and the basis of all experience. In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property, which defines the framework. For physics this is the speed of light, for life forms it's consciousness.
- thriftwy 9y ago
  > unmeasurable Says who? > basis of all experience Your consciousness is only base of your own experience. For other people your consciousness is only hypothesis to be studied. > In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property I would like to study consciousness outside of frameworks where it is unquestionable - just as we can do it in e.g. classical mechanics with speed of light.
  - runeks 9y ago
    Admittedly -- and perhaps obviously -- I'm not a physicist. But as far as I can see, once we've defined length and time in terms of the speed of light, the speed of light is constant, by definition. The speed of light can never change after this, because it would be observed as all lengths/units of time changing. Consciousness can't change either, because a change in consciousness changes everything that is experienced, so how can you know whether everything or consciousness changed? There's no difference. Some terms can only be defined in terms of themselves. What's a meter? It's term used to describe a length of measurement equivalent to one meter. What's consciousness? It's a term used by certain life forms to describe what life is. How can we study something that's always there, and when it isn't there we're not there either? Everyone "experiences" the absence of consciousness in deep sleep, and there's simply nothing there.
    - euyyn 9y ago
      But we also use the speed of light to define other units after we found out, by experiment, that it was indeed constant.
euyyn 9y ago
> why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular Hilbert space factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space, say) I'm surprised this is even considered by an MIT Physics professor. Conscious observers like us do perceive "Fourier space" in colors and pitch. Am I missing something?
cool_shit 9y ago
It is tempting to be lazy and criticize this work because it contains a few instances of the phrase "quantum consciousness". This paper has one purpose: To get people thinking of the brain and information-carrying systems from a physical perspective rather than solely a computer-science or information-theoretic perspective, or even worse -- a biological perspective. Physicists were largely responsible for computer science and information theory, and they will be largely responsible for breakthroughs in biology and machine-learning as interdisciplinary laboratories continue to grow. Physics is the most sophisticated area of applied mathematics that currently exists. Whatever consciousness is, it will be understood through physics -- because, presumably, that's what it is. That said, it is interesting to see a consolidated paper touching on common motifs. The brain exhibits many characteristics of any other state of matter; for example, it has phase transitions. One thing I disliked about this paper is the conclusion is draws from its examples with the gold ring and the pond. They go on to say that information is not persistent in a pond; for example if you write your name on the surface, the energy will be propagated away and the surface will return to a higher entropy state fairly quickly. This is true, but one cannot say that the brain is different solely because of this. The brain is constantly under "external" influence. It is constantly being supplied with fresh nutrients; neurons are constantly being supplied with tugs from their neighbors. If you were to remove all incoming nutrients, the brain would surely collapse as an information processor, too (e.g. death of the organism). I would go so far as to say that a conscious system requires constant input, and does not necessarily do anything in the absence of any input. This assertion is in direct contradiction to the heuristics ("principles") established in the paper. For example, computers, bacteria, and brains are all computing systems which require constant input.

76 points by robertothais 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6551 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6551 >>> Tegmark’s career is a rather unusual story, mixing reputable science with an increasingly strong taste for grandiose nonsense. In this book he indulges his inner crank, describing in detail an utterly empty vision of the “ultimate nature of reality.”

djtriptych 9y ago
Unless this vision can be directly disproven, why should anyone attach labels like "grandiose" or "nonsense" or "empty"?
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  That's the exact opposite of the correct approach. Unless it can be proven (and he doesn't, at all, prove his case) then there is no reason to not describe it as such. (Grandiose is the exception - that's a stylistic judgement and quite apt here, irrespective of its truth value)
- irickt 9y ago
  It's a fair question. The quote is one reviewer's opinion. I posted it without explanation as context for the paper. A more neutral warning is that Tegmark has moved from conventional science towards untestable speculation. That and the fact that he has cultivated funding sources more aligned with the occult than with science has left many of his peers seemingly resentful.
- derrickdirge 9y ago
  Can you think of something that's sufficiently 'disproven' so as to make those labels appropriate?
dafash 9y ago
One has to pay attention very closely to Mr. Tegmark's presentations. He will state very eloquently a number of facts, and then slip in subtly a very important fundamental assumption upon which all of his subsequent statements are built.
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
  Hey let me know your email if you'd like to talk about how LSD is affecting your life after it opened a spiritual realm for you as you said.

Elrac 9y ago

To me, this read like Alan Sokal's Postmodernism troll piece. I understand Tegmark is a reputable physicist, but the abstract could have been written by Deepak Chopra after skimming a math text.

vixen99 9y ago
But it wasn't and certainly not the paper which the abstract introduces.

thriftwy 9y ago

Even if it wasn't nonsense, it would be. Because the description focuses on how we perceive the world; not on who is this we that perceives. The mystery of consciousness in the observer, not in what it observes.

monktastic1 9y ago
You have my upvote, but I'm still scratching my head over your first sentence.
hackinthebochs 9y ago
I feel you have it backwards. That there are observers doesn't seem like much of a mystery: there doesn't seem to be anything mysterious about observers beyond the right kind of computation. The mystery is the qualitative experience of conscious observers, the feel, the what it is like to be, etc.
- monktastic1 9y ago
  But what could it mean to be an "observer" other than to have said "qualitative experience?"
- curo 9y ago
  > "beyond the right kind of computation" Could you explain this? The observer isn't a mystery, I agree. But the original comment seems spot on: if you are describing consciousness as a state of matter, then you're saying something like, "matter inherits a different set of qualities when it's in a consciousness state (as opposed to a solid or liquid state)." If the state change leads to a change of quality, then you're once again proclaiming consciousness as an object with observable qualities rather than a the observer without quality. This is fine if we're talking about an observable consciousness, but then who is that observer? I agree with the original comment that this paper is nonsense. I'm surprised how many papers are spent discussing consciousness this way. In biological terms, fine. In physical terms, impossible.
  - robertothais 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

akyu 9y ago

The math in this paper is beyond your average Hacker News poster. So no wonder these comments are just name calling.

selimthegrim 9y ago
Scott Aaronson left a smoking hole where Tononi's theories used to be not too long ago. If you want quantum theorizing about consciousness I suggest you start here instead - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161102-quantum-neuroscience/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161102-quantum-neuroscience...
- unhammer 9y ago
  Thanks for the pointer, I assume you meant http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 ? That was a fun read anyway :-)

ghughu 9y ago

None of us seem qualified to judge this paper as valid or not valid or to say which parts are valid and which aren't and why. But the only active thing we can do in Hacker News is leave a comment and this article tickles with me enough to want to leave a comment. I guess the best comment I can leave here is one that avoids the ignorant-about-own-ignorance pitfall of false expertise and just leave a meta-comment about the comments.

Insanity 9y ago

(disclaimer: I did not yet read the whole paper) This part stood out to me in their idea of how philosophy views consciousness > A traditional answer to this problem is dualism — that living entities differ from inanimate ones because they contain some non-physical element such as an “anima” or “soul”. I believe this makes it sound like philosophers are actively looking for the soul, or another explanation of consciousness that lies outside of 'physics'. This might be true for some philosophers, but there are other philosophies to adhere to. More contemporary would be the works of Daniel Dennett or John Searle. Cartesian Dualism is surely something not a lot of philosophers would get behind anymore.

xapata 9y ago
I understood Searle's "Chinese Room" argument to advocate dualism -- that there's something more to being intelligent than just behavior. Searle says the more is consciousness, but I don't see the distinction between that version of the concept and a soul or "ghost" in the machine.
- Insanity 9y ago
  Searle is actually an advocate for Biological Naturalism, the chinese room was an argument against computationalism (that the brain works like a computer). Though he admittedly does think the brain is a 'biological computer', and they have their differences.
  - xapata 9y ago
    That's how Searle views himself, but one critique of his work is that he can't distinguish his "naturalism" from dualism. It seems so obvious to him that the Chinese Room isn't conscious, but if it can replicate everything a conscious person would do, it might indeed replicate the phenomena of consciousness. How would we know, after all, since those phenomena are not readily observable.
erik14th 9y ago
I interpret "soul", "spirit" and such terms as a poetic concept to represent the kernel of being, as in, what defines individuality. If you understand conscience as the flow of conscious states, what defines you should be the persistent aspects of those states, trying to draw a parallel with programming languages, it's spirit would be it's core functions. So, not what kind of information you have or deal with, but how you deal with it. I just can't understand the search for a metaphysical soul, as it is not an actual search, it's just faith, hope, it's not a reasonable answer or an attempt at one, and I guess a lot of philosophers and poets use the words "soul" and "spirit" with what I said earlier in mind.

d--b 9y ago

There is a long history of pushing the location of human consciousness further and further with technological advances. First it was god, then it was somewhere in the ether, then it was electromagnetic waves, now quantum mechanics. People just can't stand the idea that conscious thoughts are made of matter.

zepto 9y ago
People also just can't stand the idea that matter is made of consciousness.

ozy 9y ago

I don't get how very intelligent people can hold such views. Where does the dance go, when the dancers go off stage? The dancers are not the dance, but create the dance. There is some kind of duality there. Similar for the brain. What it does creates the mind/consciousness. Should that feel like something? Why not? How does the brain decide on next actions? By simulating/predicting futures and "feeling" which is desired, and acting towards that future. Why would that not feel like something? The "hard question of consciousness" is not an answer. It is a philosophical device without backing. It is unknown if qualia is actually hard, maybe most learning systems have it. What we do know: it is hard to have intuitions about it ...

thriftwy 9y ago
> It is unknown Well, make it known then for starters, if you want to make the question a little bit softer.
- ozy 9y ago
  But that is the rub, isn't it. How some mind (or system) experiences something is the very definition of subjective. How to measure that objectively? Imagine somebody makes a mind out of machine learning. Passes the turing test and more. It reports to "feel", ie to have qualia. Is it parroting what it hears/reads from humans? Or does it actually have a feeling when you show it an image of a sunset? At what breakpoint do you place your debugger and inspect if it is so?
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    A lot of things which we considered subjective were later found to be measurable. I think we should never stop to find an angle from which we can tackle the consciousness problem.

gator-io 9y ago

The truth is simple. We are in the Matrix.

thriftwy 9y ago
This does not in the slightest solve the consciousness problem. Who is this we that are in the Matrix?

runeks 9y ago

Consciousness is a bit like the speed of light: it's defined, not measured. It's not possible to measure the speed of light because we've made this constant the basis of all other measurements. Consciousness is a lot like that: unmeasurable, and the basis of all experience. In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property, which defines the framework. For physics this is the speed of light, for life forms it's consciousness.

thriftwy 9y ago
> unmeasurable Says who? > basis of all experience Your consciousness is only base of your own experience. For other people your consciousness is only hypothesis to be studied. > In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property I would like to study consciousness outside of frameworks where it is unquestionable - just as we can do it in e.g. classical mechanics with speed of light.
- runeks 9y ago
  Admittedly -- and perhaps obviously -- I'm not a physicist. But as far as I can see, once we've defined length and time in terms of the speed of light, the speed of light is constant, by definition. The speed of light can never change after this, because it would be observed as all lengths/units of time changing. Consciousness can't change either, because a change in consciousness changes everything that is experienced, so how can you know whether everything or consciousness changed? There's no difference. Some terms can only be defined in terms of themselves. What's a meter? It's term used to describe a length of measurement equivalent to one meter. What's consciousness? It's a term used by certain life forms to describe what life is. How can we study something that's always there, and when it isn't there we're not there either? Everyone "experiences" the absence of consciousness in deep sleep, and there's simply nothing there.
  - euyyn 9y ago
    But we also use the speed of light to define other units after we found out, by experiment, that it was indeed constant.

euyyn 9y ago

> why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular Hilbert space factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space, say) I'm surprised this is even considered by an MIT Physics professor. Conscious observers like us do perceive "Fourier space" in colors and pitch. Am I missing something?

cool_shit 9y ago

It is tempting to be lazy and criticize this work because it contains a few instances of the phrase "quantum consciousness". This paper has one purpose: To get people thinking of the brain and information-carrying systems from a physical perspective rather than solely a computer-science or information-theoretic perspective, or even worse -- a biological perspective. Physicists were largely responsible for computer science and information theory, and they will be largely responsible for breakthroughs in biology and machine-learning as interdisciplinary laboratories continue to grow. Physics is the most sophisticated area of applied mathematics that currently exists. Whatever consciousness is, it will be understood through physics -- because, presumably, that's what it is. That said, it is interesting to see a consolidated paper touching on common motifs. The brain exhibits many characteristics of any other state of matter; for example, it has phase transitions. One thing I disliked about this paper is the conclusion is draws from its examples with the gold ring and the pond. They go on to say that information is not persistent in a pond; for example if you write your name on the surface, the energy will be propagated away and the surface will return to a higher entropy state fairly quickly. This is true, but one cannot say that the brain is different solely because of this. The brain is constantly under "external" influence. It is constantly being supplied with fresh nutrients; neurons are constantly being supplied with tugs from their neighbors. If you were to remove all incoming nutrients, the brain would surely collapse as an information processor, too (e.g. death of the organism). I would go so far as to say that a conscious system requires constant input, and does not necessarily do anything in the absence of any input. This assertion is in direct contradiction to the heuristics ("principles") established in the paper. For example, computers, bacteria, and brains are all computing systems which require constant input.