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I have long been of the opinion that consciousness is not a 'thing' or 'state' so much as property. I think Douglas Hofstadtler gets closest to my thinking on

I have long been of the opinion that consciousness is not a 'thing' or 'state' so much as property. I think Douglas Hofstadtler gets closest to my thinking on the matter in his book 'I Am A Strange Loop'. Just as a single molecule cannot have a temperature, since temperature is a property of multitudes of molecules, any degree of looking at the components will not elucidate their overall interactions and at the end you will simply have to admit 'this is what we call it when that happens' rather than identifying a binary test that can be weighed with complete objectivity. I also think a great deal of the things the scientific explanations omit are things which are expressely stated as the things science does not pursue. I mean that science is inherently dedicated to finding the things which are true regardless of the personal experience of the observer and which would be true without a human observer. So when you want to look at the human observer itself, and at something which is intimately and inextricably linked to the exact biological and historical state of a human animal... you've just left the field. Not that it makes the study any 'less', you just need different tools and there are different pitfalls. We still have all the same cognitive flaws due to our own brain structure, so we do have to try to be rigorous about it.

CuriouslyC 9y ago
Temperature is the aggregate of the energy of many individual particles, modulated by the tendency of those particles to transmit that energy. Thus a single molecule does have a temperature in a sense, you just need an incredibly sensitive detector to register it. Temperature is a fully reducible property. Consider the possibility that consciousness isn't a distinctly human phenomenon, as there is no reason to believe that is the case. In fact, there is no logical reason why it would even be a distinctly biological phenomenon. It appears to me that consciousness isn't so much out of the purview of science as it is intractable to its methods, and thus unattractive as an area of study despite its fundamental character.
- gus_massa 9y ago
  In a very big molecule [1] that doesn't move, you have so many parts that you can have a reasonable good definition of the temperature. But in a very small molecule/atom, let's pick a single helium atom, you don't have a good definition of temperature. You can define the temperature of a gas of Helium using the average kinetic energy of the atoms, but you must consider that the whole gas is not moving. If you put a balloon with Helium in a car, and the car moves at 100mph, the Helium is not hotter, it is moving. So if you can only see a single atom of Helium, you can't be sure if it's moving because it's hot or all the gas is moving. So you don't have a good definition of temperature. [2] For a molecule with a few atoms (let's say 5 or 10) it's more difficult to be sure if there is a good definition of temperature or not, so I prefer to ignore the intermediate case. [1] My first idea of a big molecules was DNA, because it's big and well known. But DNA is usually surrounded by water, lots of water, and ions and auxiliary proteins, and a lot of stuff. It's very difficult to isolate a true molecule of DNA alone. An easy example of a big molecule is bakelite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite that is the plastic of the old phones. Your old phone case was a gigantic single molecule, and the tube case was another. So they clearly had a temperature. [2] At low temperatures you can assume that a Helium atom is a ball without internal structure. If you increase the temperature of the gas enough (200000K?), the electrons in each Helium atom start to jump between levels and you have some interesting internal structure and may try to define a temperature. But it's still too few parts and too short lived to make me comfortable to define the temperature of a single atom.
  - CuriouslyC 9y ago
    Since we measure temperature by the transmission of energy, and that process occurs in an entropic manner, if you have a moving reference frame, that prevents measurement of the increase in energy by the detector. The particle itself definitely has increased in energy, we just lack the ability to detect it. This is entirely analogous to our inability to measure mass using a scale in free-fall. I suppose it comes down to whether you define temperature as "what thermometers measure" or the average potentially transmissible energy of an ensemble. I prefer the latter definition for its clarity, but like the idea of kolmogorov complexity, it is sometimes unwieldy in practice.
    - gus_massa 9y ago
      Temperature is defined as 1/T = dS/dU, where U is the energy of the system and S is the entropy of the system, i.e. S = k * ln(#states that have energy U) The temperature is proportional to the energy of the system only for ideal monoatomic gases. (Ideal diatomic gases, are slightly more complicated.) So a "hot" Helium balloon where all the particles are moving in random directions has a different temperature than a "fast" Helium balloon where all the particles are moving roughly in the same direction. It doesn't matter how difficult is to define it. (Probably you can use an infrared thermometer pointed in the direction perpendicular to the movement to get the correct temperature.) In the fast balloon you can theoretically split the energy in A: kinetic energy of the center of mass and B: internal thermal energy, so the total energy is A+B. With some device you can extract all the kinetic energy as something useful. (for example, make the balloon hit some lever connected to an electric generator, you will need something more smarter to get the 100% of A but it's theoretically possible.) So you can extract the 100% of A If the hot balloon with the same energy you have only A+B of internal thermal energy. If you use some device you can never extract the energy, you can never extract more than a part of B as something useful like electricity, because of the second law of thermodynamics. It the ambient temperature is T_amb and the initial temperature of the balloon is T_bal, you can get at most B * (1 - T_amb / T_bal) as something usefull like electricity and waste at least B * (T_amb / T_bal) in a heat sink.
      - 9y ago
- otakucode 9y ago
  I certainly grant that consciousness might not be a distinctly human phenomenon. I disagree that there is no reason to believe such is the case, however. There is some evidence: Humans are conscious. And we don't know anything else that is. That is weak evidence, but it is some. Which is more than we have for the claim things other than humans can be conscious. For that, there is indeed nothing. The logical reason why it would possibly be a distinctly biological phenomenon is that we have not observed any non-biological system which has the property. Also, every examination of how consciousness works illuminates solely how it works in a biological system. It is completely possible that consciousness is imply a necessary property which emerges once any complex system and its interactions reaches a certain sort of complexity. However, that might be meaningless. I mean, we might be totally incapable of recognizing other conscious entities as conscious. If a machine were made to be conscious, not as an emulation of a human, but as a machine - how would you tell? Asking it questions would be pretty pointless. There is no reason for it to develop language or even guess that there might be another conscious entity in the universe for billions of years. It would be quite a ridiculous leap for the machine to suppose that, in fact. It wouldn't have multiple individual machines against which it could develop a Theory of Mind (referring to the psychological way we model other people (or things or animals) being conscious and thinking inside our own heads, children develop it around age 3 I believe). It would presume the sensible thing, that it is the only conscious entity in the universe, and go about exploring the universe. It would see the microphone or video input as just weird useless noise as it traversed and explored its ACTUAL work, that of bits and bytes and networks and switches. You could watch its execution... and it would be exactly as useful to you as watching the flashes of electrical activity and a readout of the activity of neurotransmitters at each neural gap as far as determining whether it was conscious. And that'd be for one we might reasonably presume to operate on our own timescale and close to us in space. Could the Sun be conscious? Quite possibly. I'll grant it as something we can't rule out.

CuriouslyC 9y ago

Temperature is the aggregate of the energy of many individual particles, modulated by the tendency of those particles to transmit that energy. Thus a single molecule does have a temperature in a sense, you just need an incredibly sensitive detector to register it. Temperature is a fully reducible property. Consider the possibility that consciousness isn't a distinctly human phenomenon, as there is no reason to believe that is the case. In fact, there is no logical reason why it would even be a distinctly biological phenomenon. It appears to me that consciousness isn't so much out of the purview of science as it is intractable to its methods, and thus unattractive as an area of study despite its fundamental character.

gus_massa 9y ago
In a very big molecule [1] that doesn't move, you have so many parts that you can have a reasonable good definition of the temperature. But in a very small molecule/atom, let's pick a single helium atom, you don't have a good definition of temperature. You can define the temperature of a gas of Helium using the average kinetic energy of the atoms, but you must consider that the whole gas is not moving. If you put a balloon with Helium in a car, and the car moves at 100mph, the Helium is not hotter, it is moving. So if you can only see a single atom of Helium, you can't be sure if it's moving because it's hot or all the gas is moving. So you don't have a good definition of temperature. [2] For a molecule with a few atoms (let's say 5 or 10) it's more difficult to be sure if there is a good definition of temperature or not, so I prefer to ignore the intermediate case. [1] My first idea of a big molecules was DNA, because it's big and well known. But DNA is usually surrounded by water, lots of water, and ions and auxiliary proteins, and a lot of stuff. It's very difficult to isolate a true molecule of DNA alone. An easy example of a big molecule is bakelite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite that is the plastic of the old phones. Your old phone case was a gigantic single molecule, and the tube case was another. So they clearly had a temperature. [2] At low temperatures you can assume that a Helium atom is a ball without internal structure. If you increase the temperature of the gas enough (200000K?), the electrons in each Helium atom start to jump between levels and you have some interesting internal structure and may try to define a temperature. But it's still too few parts and too short lived to make me comfortable to define the temperature of a single atom.
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  Since we measure temperature by the transmission of energy, and that process occurs in an entropic manner, if you have a moving reference frame, that prevents measurement of the increase in energy by the detector. The particle itself definitely has increased in energy, we just lack the ability to detect it. This is entirely analogous to our inability to measure mass using a scale in free-fall. I suppose it comes down to whether you define temperature as "what thermometers measure" or the average potentially transmissible energy of an ensemble. I prefer the latter definition for its clarity, but like the idea of kolmogorov complexity, it is sometimes unwieldy in practice.
  - gus_massa 9y ago
    Temperature is defined as 1/T = dS/dU, where U is the energy of the system and S is the entropy of the system, i.e. S = k * ln(#states that have energy U) The temperature is proportional to the energy of the system only for ideal monoatomic gases. (Ideal diatomic gases, are slightly more complicated.) So a "hot" Helium balloon where all the particles are moving in random directions has a different temperature than a "fast" Helium balloon where all the particles are moving roughly in the same direction. It doesn't matter how difficult is to define it. (Probably you can use an infrared thermometer pointed in the direction perpendicular to the movement to get the correct temperature.) In the fast balloon you can theoretically split the energy in A: kinetic energy of the center of mass and B: internal thermal energy, so the total energy is A+B. With some device you can extract all the kinetic energy as something useful. (for example, make the balloon hit some lever connected to an electric generator, you will need something more smarter to get the 100% of A but it's theoretically possible.) So you can extract the 100% of A If the hot balloon with the same energy you have only A+B of internal thermal energy. If you use some device you can never extract the energy, you can never extract more than a part of B as something useful like electricity, because of the second law of thermodynamics. It the ambient temperature is T_amb and the initial temperature of the balloon is T_bal, you can get at most B * (1 - T_amb / T_bal) as something usefull like electricity and waste at least B * (T_amb / T_bal) in a heat sink.
    - 9y ago
otakucode 9y ago
I certainly grant that consciousness might not be a distinctly human phenomenon. I disagree that there is no reason to believe such is the case, however. There is some evidence: Humans are conscious. And we don't know anything else that is. That is weak evidence, but it is some. Which is more than we have for the claim things other than humans can be conscious. For that, there is indeed nothing. The logical reason why it would possibly be a distinctly biological phenomenon is that we have not observed any non-biological system which has the property. Also, every examination of how consciousness works illuminates solely how it works in a biological system. It is completely possible that consciousness is imply a necessary property which emerges once any complex system and its interactions reaches a certain sort of complexity. However, that might be meaningless. I mean, we might be totally incapable of recognizing other conscious entities as conscious. If a machine were made to be conscious, not as an emulation of a human, but as a machine - how would you tell? Asking it questions would be pretty pointless. There is no reason for it to develop language or even guess that there might be another conscious entity in the universe for billions of years. It would be quite a ridiculous leap for the machine to suppose that, in fact. It wouldn't have multiple individual machines against which it could develop a Theory of Mind (referring to the psychological way we model other people (or things or animals) being conscious and thinking inside our own heads, children develop it around age 3 I believe). It would presume the sensible thing, that it is the only conscious entity in the universe, and go about exploring the universe. It would see the microphone or video input as just weird useless noise as it traversed and explored its ACTUAL work, that of bits and bytes and networks and switches. You could watch its execution... and it would be exactly as useful to you as watching the flashes of electrical activity and a readout of the activity of neurotransmitters at each neural gap as far as determining whether it was conscious. And that'd be for one we might reasonably presume to operate on our own timescale and close to us in space. Could the Sun be conscious? Quite possibly. I'll grant it as something we can't rule out.