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I share most if not all of the objections mentioned in the article. But even if one grants that quantum physics or quantum gravity or even undiscovered physics

I share most if not all of the objections mentioned in the article. But even if one grants that quantum physics or quantum gravity or even undiscovered physics plays a role, I still fail to see how this can be of much help in explaining consciousness. Quantum mechanics can be simulated classically with an exponential slowdown. Not that I want to belittle an exponential difference but in some sense it does not bring anything fundamentally new to the table. Quantum mechanics is - setting all the still unsolved problems aside - still just a set rules dictating - or describing - how things have to behave. And even undiscovered physics would have to have a very different character than known physics in order to provide something truly new and capable of bridging the perceived gap between physics and consciousness. Personally I changed my mind quite recently and the following quote from the article now resonates very much. Minsky called consciousness a “suitcase word” that lacks the rigor of a scientific concept. “We have to replace it by ‘reflection’ and ‘decisions’ and about a dozen other things,” he said. “So instead of talking about the mystery of consciousness, let’s talk about the 20 or 30 really important mental processes that are involved. Just sit down and try to nail down what you mean when you say, you are conscious or you feel pain. Try to make precise what you think distinguishes you from a philosophical zombie. When the voice in your head says that this was not the best decision and next time you should do something else, is that really any different from one system monitoring and controlling another system? When you are experiencing pain, when you try to get away from its source, when you maybe scream, is that really any different from you car turning on the low oil pressure warning light? Of course it is! Or is it? Maybe your brain just turned the I-am-special indicator light on...

mathgenius 7y ago
> Quantum mechanics can be simulated classically with an exponential slowdown. This is actually quite subtle. For example, I don't see how you can "simulate" bell non-locality. Is it even possible to define the word "simulate" here? The whole status of quantum randomness is unsettled, I don't think it can be settled, but anyway it is not as straightforward as you suggest. Scott Aaronson has a nice paper where he discusses related ideas: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159 https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
- danbruc 7y ago
  One of the axioms of quantum mechanics is that the wave function completely describes a physical system. Therefore all you have to do in order to simulate a quantum system is to compute the evolution of the wave function which is pretty straight forward given an initial state and the Hamiltonian of the system - you just evaluate the Schrödinger equation. It is however computationally intensive for systems of non-trivial size. Also the evolution of the wave function is unitary, i.e. it is completely deterministic forward and backward in time and there is no randomness involved at all. Quantum non-locality can not be simulated classically if you distribute your computations just as the simulated system is distributed and if you do not allow for communication between the computers. This is however not an issue if you perform the simulation in one place or allow for communication between the computers. An example may help. Take the classical experiment of producing two spins with opposite orientations in one place, then separating them by a large distance, and finally measuring them at those distant locations. You can easily simulate that with one classical computer, but you can not use two classical computers - one to simulate each spin and the measurement of that spin at the distant location - without allowing the two computers to communicate even after the time the spins have been separated [in the simulation]. This especially highlights that quantum mechanics can not be described by a local hidden variable theory, or maybe it is better to think about it the other way round, such an simulation is not possible because quantum mechanics can not be explained by a local hidden variable theory as predicted by the Bell inequality and demonstrated by Bell test experiments. You can not write an algorithm that generates some hidden state while the two spins respectively the two computers are not yet separated and can therefore still communicate with each other and that then reproduces the results of all possible measurement experiments after the separation and without further communication.
zwkrt 7y ago
Re: systems of monitoring and control. The even crazier thing is that upon only the lightest of introspection you can find that there isn’t even some “ego” system controlling or reigning in some other “id” system. It’s just one thing! The “you” that decides to have one cookie and write a novel feels different than the “you” that would otherwise eat the whole box of cookies and watch YouTube all day. But you don’t get to decide when your supervising self will be in charge, or to what degree your animalistic self will be reigned in. There is just one you that does things by whimsy all the time, and at the same time tries to make a coherent story about your immediate behavior in a way that is consistent with your past. A naive stoic might say that one should not become too upset about things outside your control. But in truth the best you can do is take the emotions and thoughts you feel in-stride because even those are outside your control—the stoic’s decision to follow stoicism in the first place is after all ineffable.
- barberousse 7y ago
  >Re: systems of monitoring and control. The even crazier thing is that upon only the lightest of introspection you can find that there isn’t even some “ego” system controlling or reigning in some other “id” system. It’s just one thing! I'm sorry, but because you're using the terms, I have to interject and inform the wider audience that this claim is not at all an accurate reading of Freud. Freud makes it extremely clear in his text The Ego and The Id that Ego/Id is one thing. The perceptible boundary is whether a mental process is available to being represented in language.
  - zwkrt 7y ago
    I agree! But I don’t think this is how the average person thinks about it.
- danbruc 7y ago
  It’s just one thing! While I would agree that in the end the brain is just one thing doing its thing, I would still say that it is also composed out of several interacting components with different functions and responsibilities. For example one part of your brain might have an impulsive response in a certain situation and another part might try to overrule that with a more rational thought. Some third component will of course just pick a winner of the struggle without anything you can do about it. Well, you are of course doing all those thing, but you know what I mean.
mpartel 7y ago
I very much agree with the call for precise communication. People with a behavioralistic/materialistic/empiric view and people more interested in "the hard problem" often seem to talk past each other as long as they both use just the word "consciousness". This tends to get cleared up when a keyword like "qualia" gets mentioned, but it's so common to see lots of words wasted before that happens, if it even does. It's interesting how impactful the breadth of a shared vocabulary can be.
- danbruc 7y ago
  This tends to get cleared up when a keyword like "qualia" gets mentioned [...] Well, qualia is exactly one of the things I would try to avoid. What do we really mean with that word, what are objective properties of qualia? As I said, I am increasingly entertaining the idea that we are just getting fooled by ourselves when our brains tell us that we obviously and undeniably have consciousness and experience qualia. What if this is just a hardcoded, meaningless phrase our brain spits out every time we or somebody else asks us whether we are conscious or experience qualia? Brain: Am I conscious? Brain: Yes. No more than five lines of code.
  - sdfin 7y ago
    Maybe the people who talks about qualia means that the subject has some characteristic which is not objective or measurable. When we talk about subject as opposed object, what do we mean? Would you say that the concept of 'subjectivity' may be also a meaningless phrase?
    - danbruc 7y ago
      Would you say that the concept of 'subjectivity' may be also a meaningless phrase? No, ad hoc and without having thought too much about it, I would say subjectivity is a form of relativity. The temperature on a sunny day being 25 °C is an objective fact, depending on where you usually live that might be a subjectively cold or subjectively hot day to you. Maybe the people who talks about qualia means that the subject has some characteristic which is not objective or measurable. If you cut your finger, you will detect that, you will see the wound and nerves in your skin will sense the wound in it. That are objective things. There will also be objective reactions, blood clotting and other low-level biological reactions starting, you might take actions like looking for a plaster or saying that this hurts. Up to this point, I would argue, most people would agree that a sophisticated robot could behave identical to you. But then you might claim that there is a qualia to this event of cutting your finger, it is painful for you. You feel pain and this is more than you simply detecting the wound and saying it hurts. And we all know what this is supposed to mean, we all know what pain feels like. But now try to nail this down, what is that you claim to have or experience? What is it, that a robot is missing when its cameras see a cut in its skin and some kind of sensors in the skin signal damage, flipping some damage bit in turn starting repair processes and maybe even saying »I cut my finger, it hurts!« What do we have to add to make the robot feel pain? For a long time I was convinced that the robot is missing something, I just could not say what exactly it is. Now I am pretty seriously considering that nothing is missing, that me feeling pain is not much more than flipping the pain and the set of reaction triggered or influenced by that.

mathgenius 7y ago

> Quantum mechanics can be simulated classically with an exponential slowdown. This is actually quite subtle. For example, I don't see how you can "simulate" bell non-locality. Is it even possible to define the word "simulate" here? The whole status of quantum randomness is unsettled, I don't think it can be settled, but anyway it is not as straightforward as you suggest. Scott Aaronson has a nice paper where he discusses related ideas: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159 https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159

danbruc 7y ago
One of the axioms of quantum mechanics is that the wave function completely describes a physical system. Therefore all you have to do in order to simulate a quantum system is to compute the evolution of the wave function which is pretty straight forward given an initial state and the Hamiltonian of the system - you just evaluate the Schrödinger equation. It is however computationally intensive for systems of non-trivial size. Also the evolution of the wave function is unitary, i.e. it is completely deterministic forward and backward in time and there is no randomness involved at all. Quantum non-locality can not be simulated classically if you distribute your computations just as the simulated system is distributed and if you do not allow for communication between the computers. This is however not an issue if you perform the simulation in one place or allow for communication between the computers. An example may help. Take the classical experiment of producing two spins with opposite orientations in one place, then separating them by a large distance, and finally measuring them at those distant locations. You can easily simulate that with one classical computer, but you can not use two classical computers - one to simulate each spin and the measurement of that spin at the distant location - without allowing the two computers to communicate even after the time the spins have been separated [in the simulation]. This especially highlights that quantum mechanics can not be described by a local hidden variable theory, or maybe it is better to think about it the other way round, such an simulation is not possible because quantum mechanics can not be explained by a local hidden variable theory as predicted by the Bell inequality and demonstrated by Bell test experiments. You can not write an algorithm that generates some hidden state while the two spins respectively the two computers are not yet separated and can therefore still communicate with each other and that then reproduces the results of all possible measurement experiments after the separation and without further communication.

zwkrt 7y ago

Re: systems of monitoring and control. The even crazier thing is that upon only the lightest of introspection you can find that there isn’t even some “ego” system controlling or reigning in some other “id” system. It’s just one thing! The “you” that decides to have one cookie and write a novel feels different than the “you” that would otherwise eat the whole box of cookies and watch YouTube all day. But you don’t get to decide when your supervising self will be in charge, or to what degree your animalistic self will be reigned in. There is just one you that does things by whimsy all the time, and at the same time tries to make a coherent story about your immediate behavior in a way that is consistent with your past. A naive stoic might say that one should not become too upset about things outside your control. But in truth the best you can do is take the emotions and thoughts you feel in-stride because even those are outside your control—the stoic’s decision to follow stoicism in the first place is after all ineffable.

barberousse 7y ago
>Re: systems of monitoring and control. The even crazier thing is that upon only the lightest of introspection you can find that there isn’t even some “ego” system controlling or reigning in some other “id” system. It’s just one thing! I'm sorry, but because you're using the terms, I have to interject and inform the wider audience that this claim is not at all an accurate reading of Freud. Freud makes it extremely clear in his text The Ego and The Id that Ego/Id is one thing. The perceptible boundary is whether a mental process is available to being represented in language.
- zwkrt 7y ago
  I agree! But I don’t think this is how the average person thinks about it.
danbruc 7y ago
It’s just one thing! While I would agree that in the end the brain is just one thing doing its thing, I would still say that it is also composed out of several interacting components with different functions and responsibilities. For example one part of your brain might have an impulsive response in a certain situation and another part might try to overrule that with a more rational thought. Some third component will of course just pick a winner of the struggle without anything you can do about it. Well, you are of course doing all those thing, but you know what I mean.

mpartel 7y ago

I very much agree with the call for precise communication. People with a behavioralistic/materialistic/empiric view and people more interested in "the hard problem" often seem to talk past each other as long as they both use just the word "consciousness". This tends to get cleared up when a keyword like "qualia" gets mentioned, but it's so common to see lots of words wasted before that happens, if it even does. It's interesting how impactful the breadth of a shared vocabulary can be.

danbruc 7y ago
This tends to get cleared up when a keyword like "qualia" gets mentioned [...] Well, qualia is exactly one of the things I would try to avoid. What do we really mean with that word, what are objective properties of qualia? As I said, I am increasingly entertaining the idea that we are just getting fooled by ourselves when our brains tell us that we obviously and undeniably have consciousness and experience qualia. What if this is just a hardcoded, meaningless phrase our brain spits out every time we or somebody else asks us whether we are conscious or experience qualia? Brain: Am I conscious? Brain: Yes. No more than five lines of code.
- sdfin 7y ago
  Maybe the people who talks about qualia means that the subject has some characteristic which is not objective or measurable. When we talk about subject as opposed object, what do we mean? Would you say that the concept of 'subjectivity' may be also a meaningless phrase?
  - danbruc 7y ago
    Would you say that the concept of 'subjectivity' may be also a meaningless phrase? No, ad hoc and without having thought too much about it, I would say subjectivity is a form of relativity. The temperature on a sunny day being 25 °C is an objective fact, depending on where you usually live that might be a subjectively cold or subjectively hot day to you. Maybe the people who talks about qualia means that the subject has some characteristic which is not objective or measurable. If you cut your finger, you will detect that, you will see the wound and nerves in your skin will sense the wound in it. That are objective things. There will also be objective reactions, blood clotting and other low-level biological reactions starting, you might take actions like looking for a plaster or saying that this hurts. Up to this point, I would argue, most people would agree that a sophisticated robot could behave identical to you. But then you might claim that there is a qualia to this event of cutting your finger, it is painful for you. You feel pain and this is more than you simply detecting the wound and saying it hurts. And we all know what this is supposed to mean, we all know what pain feels like. But now try to nail this down, what is that you claim to have or experience? What is it, that a robot is missing when its cameras see a cut in its skin and some kind of sensors in the skin signal damage, flipping some damage bit in turn starting repair processes and maybe even saying »I cut my finger, it hurts!« What do we have to add to make the robot feel pain? For a long time I was convinced that the robot is missing something, I just could not say what exactly it is. Now I am pretty seriously considering that nothing is missing, that me feeling pain is not much more than flipping the pain and the set of reaction triggered or influenced by that.