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Electrons May Well Be Conscious
- Seb-C 6y agoThis is very much interesting and exciting, but all I see in this article is arguments from authorities. I fail to see any facts or demonstratable proofs. How is that theory different than any other religious belief?
- caymanjim 6y agoNo.
- klyrs 6y agoYou're so certain -- but can you prove it?
- DougN7 6y agoElectrons might prefer Michael Jackson music and grapes in the summer. Not being able to disprove it is a looong way from it being true.
- klyrs 6y agoGrapes in the summer? That's your sensory experience, not that of an electron -- not the hypothesis being entertained. Some people are seriously considering that quantum choices might be governed by an extremely minimal, 1 qubit, consciousness. And the status is they're looking for a testable hypothesis. I'm not coming close to saying it's true: I asked if OP could prove the claim they asserted.
- enoreyes 6y agoThe mind-body problem is an interesting philosophical debate. It would be funny if our ancestors had been on to something the whole time with the various forms of panpsychism that have occurred throughout history. We tend to overestimate our own ingenuity and heavily discount the intelligence and natural intuition of the past. Not saying this is a credible theory, just an interesting reoccurring idea throughout human history.
- undershirt 6y agoMy favorite approach[1] to the mind–body problem is a recent one, placing the interaction between the mind and body at actual primacy. Neither the perceived nor the perceiver can exist without the process of perceiving. However absurd, the things related can be seen as derivative of the relationship itself. Resonates with zen, as famously espoused by Alan Watts[2]: “How does the thing put a process into action. Obviously it can’t. But we always insist that there is this subject called the knower. And without a knower there can’t be knowing. Well that’s just a grammatical rule, it isn’t the rule of nature. In nature there’s just knowing.” Also said[3]: “The grammatical illusion is that all verbs have to have subjects.” [1]: https://www.magic-flight.com/pub/uvsm_1/imc_01.htm https://www.magic-flight.com/pub/uvsm_1/imc_01.htm [2]: https://www.alanwatts.org/1-1-2-not-what-should-be-pt-2 https://www.alanwatts.org/1-1-2-not-what-should-be-pt-2 [3]: https://www.alanwatts.org/1-1-11-limits-of-language-pt-1/ https://www.alanwatts.org/1-1-11-limits-of-language-pt-1/
- blacksqr 6y agoSpoiler: if you redefine "conscious" to whatever an electron is.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoMore like, consciousness is a matter of degree, rather than a binary yes/no.
- Analemma_ 6y agoEven materialists agree that consciousness is a matter of degree; panpsychists don't have a monopoly on that position. Humans are more conscious than mammals who are more conscious than fish who are more conscious than insects. But the materialist position is that any non-zero degree of consciousness requires a substrate capable of computation, and so you bottom out to zero long before you get to electrons.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoSo if I'm getting this right, the usual materialist position is that thinking is a matter of degree for stuff that can think, and just a straight no for everything else. While the panpsychists think it's just a matter of degree, full stop? No 100% unthinking allowed?
- dvsfish 6y agoGreat explanation. My thoughts approximately (but more eloquently).
- notaphilosopher 6y agoI think I read that somewhere on the side of a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap in the shower. Although, every permutation of writing that could ever be written by a million monkeys at typewriters is on the side of a Dr. Bronner's too. Even this comment. #meta Entities with too much consciousness can't handle their own consciousness and either go Warhol, invent the atom bomb, or make a startup selling silicone girlfriends because their bulging brains get in the way of their more fundamental drives. Mental onany isn't as good as reality.
- robbiep 6y agoWorth looking at - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
- nine_k 6y agoElectrons may as well be <insert anything> as long as we cannot observe it. This is not interesting because the Occam's razor shaves it off instantly. A much more tantalizing hypothesis (also unverifiable by construction) would be to assume presence of a metaphysical being which alters the probabilities of quantum processes ever so slightly as to have a macroscopic effect, but is careful enough to never do it for processes under direct experimental observation. One can invent a number of such undetectable constructs, it's a good entertainment, and does show the limits of the scientific method. Practical applications of these are nil, though.
- Animats 6y agoBack in the 1980s, I had an exam question in Michael Genesereth's AI class at Stanford, "Does a rock have intensions". I answered "no". I forget whether that was considered correct. This was back when AI had more philosophy and less number-crunching. And didn't do much. "Common sense" and "intension" came up a lot back then, but "consciousness", not so much. There hasn't been enough progress on common sense and intension since then. Common sense is being able to predict the consequences of actions, actual or potential, with enough accuracy to get something done without damage. That's a concrete problem, and one that current AI systems do not do well. We don't know enough yet to address the "consciousness" issue.
- hopfscotch 6y agoNonsense. Articles like this are why people treat disease with crystals and don't vaccinate their kids.
- abellerose 6y agoI theorize nothing is truly conscious. Everything reacts from a cause & effect "chain of forces" exerted upon everything in the Universe. I'm curious what we will learn when we can modify the human brain to be exactly the same as it was a year ago for an individual that volunteers to be such a test subject. Would all his/her memories be reverted back to that very day? Or would the experiment result in a failure because our concept of how we react to everything compared to other things in the universe is flawed.
- rdruxn 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism
- adrianmonk 6y agoAlthough there are popular theories of the mind which include both free will and consciousness, the two aren't the same thing. There is no reason why, in principle, you can't have a deterministic thought process and a consciousness that observes and experiences these thoughts from the outside. There's also no reason why you couldn't have a deterministic form of consciousness that is a part of a deterministic thought process.
- abellerose 6y agoI think the two are simply illusions. Humans think of as free will and similar to thinking of having a consciousness in reality is just illusions at play. We can assume consciousness is similar to an outside external force that ends up with causing an outcome. Similar as a domino being interacting with another domino and resulting in a cause & effect outcome. I don't think humans are responsible at all for anything of their own doing. Some things are in fact impossible and even with how hard we desire them. My previous comment is suggesting that it would be interesting to learn if somehow the processing of thinking isn't happening purely in the brain. Such as if we could revert all neurons back to a previous state of time before external forces changed everything up. I like to theorize about the universe having some state that's stored somewhere outside of what's physically observable.
- gmuslera 6y agoIs that statement falsifiable?
- yalogin 6y agoThis feels a lot closer to Hindu philosophy actually. May be someone more knowledgeable can correct me or add more.
- imvetri 6y agoYou are right.
- foxes 6y agoI agree that conciousness of people is not "special", but why the need to add in an extra meta physical quantity of "conciousness". I agree it is probably a spectrum, but I think it is more just an emergent quantity. People are just relatively high up on the scale so its different to imagine what other types of conciousness would be. Yes it is difficult to say what exactly is going on in a human brain, but I believe when you think it is entirely just a physical process, some very complicated electro-chemical interactions.
- fallingfrog 6y agoNo, but neither are we.
- axguscbklp 6y agoYou don't have subjective experience?
- pontus 6y agoHonestly, as weird as it might sound, to me it's even weirder to claim that consciousness somehow is just a manifestation of effect that we are already familiar with. Saying things like "Consciousness is emergent" or "Consciousness is just a side effect of information processing" seems to miss the point. I'm definitely comfortable saying that consciousness is correlated with complexity and information processing, but claiming that it is fully explainable in some mechanistic way sounds suspect to me. It would sort of be like saying that since large electric charges have only been observed in nuclei with proportionally large mass, then somehow charge is just a manifestation of mass. When we go further it turns out that charge is fundamentally distinct from mass, in fact so distinct that we have to add an entirely new attribute to fundamental particles. The same story goes with spin. Once you have spin and electric charge you get magnetic moments. Ultimately the reason why a magnet is magnetic is because all of these subatomic particles conspire in just the right way to have a macroscopic effect. Of course, not all materials have the property of being magnetic even though they all are made from protons and electrons, but some materials are. To me, trying to say that consciousness is just something emergent is like saying that electric charge is emergent from mass. I would not be surprised if some type of proto consciousness would be needed in order to understand how macroscopic objects like human brains are self aware, have sensations, etc.
- Madmallard 6y agoI see absolutely no evidence or suggestion that consciousness is anything else other than the summation of changes that happened in our brain in combination with the input devices we naturally have. You have decades worth of changes that occurred to get you to the point now and it's very clear and easy to see how much _less_ conscious you were when you were younger.
- pontus 6y agoI agree that consciousness is correlated with this, but having a lot of experiences over years does not explain to me why I feel things. Similarly I can definitely see how there would be a mechanistic explanation for intelligence (basically just build a machine that acts intelligently, perhaps even claiming that it's conscious), but there's a distinction between appearing conscious and actually feeling something.
- bufferoverflow 6y agoThat sounds a lot like Deepak Chopra's pseudoscientific woo.
- sitkack 6y agoDeepak studies a specific branch called, Ching Cha Ching, which enables him to make lots of money.
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoWorth watching a Deepak / Sam Harris interview, they tend to turn into - painful, but - great comedy.
- mathgenius 6y agoChopra annoys me too, but he is actually a good dude (IMO): the stuff he talks about is based on Vedanta, which is an old eastern tradition. And he tries to connect this with modern science. I say go for it. I'd much rather put people like Oprah Winfrey or Tony Robbins on a woo-shitlist. But not Chopra.
- bufferoverflow 6y agoNo, he is not a good dude. He spreads pseudoscientific garbage. I don't care if it's based on some old tradition.
- notaphilosopher 6y agoMay the Schwartz be with you. And place the midichlorian detector on the Qi pad, wouldja?
- zozbot234 6y agoSince identical particles[0] are inherent in QM, I don't think you could even define what one "electron" is or what it might mean for it to be conscious. But conciousness (or rather, proto-qualia, which are the part of "conciousness" that really seems to demand some physical explanation) could subsist in more complex systems, probably involving a high-dimensional internal description as a result of some sort of stable quantum entanglement. (Indeed, the fact that the sort of basic subjective experience we're familiar with seems to empirically exist as part of intelligent life is a rather compelling argument for non-trivial quantum computation of some sort being quite feasible in the real world.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles
- ffhhj 6y agoConsciouness is the observation of own states, nothing fancy about it. We humans have powerful machines to observe ourselves, our environment, and to "observe" their future states thru prediction. Observing our observability in a recursive way is what give us a feeling of "consciousness". Even some paradoxes, like Zeno's and Supertasks are simple observer's problems.
- zozbot234 6y agoThe notion that we can "observe our own states" does not stand up to genuinely deep insight about our phenomenology. Experienced practitioners in insight meditation have been able to shatter this illusion, and realize that we can only ever observe memories of some apparent "self" - that no real "self" observation of our observability 'in a recursive way' is going on (thus, pithily: "no self"). But of course, they're still conscious!
- ffhhj 6y ago> we can only ever observe memories of some apparent "self" To make a "self" we observe too many ideas, these experienced practitioners in insight meditation are simply removing those mental models and observing the simplest states. They are saving a memory of that, so when they stop meditating and go back to observing their "self" they remember they were conscious in a basic observation mode. That's all.
- nabla9 6y agoThis is called explanation by definition. You can explain anything by first creating a definition you can explain, then just saying this is it. Your explanation seems to assign non-physical magical properties to 'own state' observation. Why is 'own state' different?
- ffhhj 6y ago> Your explanation seems to assign non-physical magical properties to 'own state' observation What magical properties are you talking about? You would need to study electronics and programming to understand what "observation", "states" and "recursion" means, all of those are real concepts.
- markhahn 6y agopanpsychism is the flying spaghetti monster. with added pretense.
- yters 6y agoWe avoid all the woo and counter intuitiveness is we just take the common sense substance dualism postion we had since childhood. So what if a 'soul' is outside our current scientific paradigm? If we ignored all ideas outside the current paradigm, we would still be substance dualists.
- badrabbit 6y agoI would be very amused if modern science discovered souls (your "operating system") and the spiritual realm exist. Much like dragons/monsters were discovered (but renamed Dinosaurs). I already believe this so I am biased, but I do firmly believe that modern humans overestimate not only what they know but what they are capable of knowing and undetstanding. I think the realm of reality you interact with originated from elsewhere. This and some of the topics I am learning about in quantum mechanics (like virtual particles) remind me of this: "By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible." -- Hebrews 11:3 NIV Just sharing an opinion and an observation.
- joycian 6y agoA virtual particle is only a virtual particle because we as humans implicitly have the particle view as fundamental. There's nothing special about a fluctuation in a quantum field being not long lived enough or not stable enough for us to recognize it as "a real particle". So your quotation is right, but you need to go one level deeper.
- badrabbit 6y agoInteresting and thank you. I have much to learn about quantum physics, but it is very fascinating.
- keithnz 6y agoA while back I read 'Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind' ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41571759-conscious https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41571759-conscious ) which attempts to promote panpsychism. It does a pretty good job at exploring the curious nature of consciousness, but panpsychism I think is just at the level of 'woo'. It makes the case that because we are having trouble with fully understanding what consciousness is, we must fully engage in exploring ideas like panpsychism. While I generally support coming up with all kinds of ideas and exploring them, the proponents of this idea seem a little too convinced it's a real thing based on zero evidence, they promote quite a bit through seemingly scientific "speak" but use words like "may" "might" "possible" etc to exploit the basic fact that we simply don't know yet and want to present it as a credible possibility.
- Xenograph 6y agoYou just shot down the book/idea (panpsychism) without providing a single constructive reason. Instead, you applied a derogatory label ('woo'), and attacked the proponents instead of the idea itself, saying: "the proponents of this idea seem a little too convinced...".
- keithnz 6y agoI thought I made it pretty clear they propose a whole bunch of possibilities in the gaps of our current understanding. The problem is the proponents make out these possibilities are much more probable than any evidence suggests. The reason it is woo, is because they start reasoning about things based on no evidence and present it as "knowledge". Like most woo, if you accept the axioms without evidence, then you can create a world of knowledge that seems logically coherent based on those axioms. That's sort of the nature of woo. It's not attacking the proponents, it's just my observations of the situation.
- elbear 6y agoWhat's the difference between the axioms of woo and the axioms of mathematics? I'm genuinely asking. My understanding is that we also accept those axioms.
- dmix 6y agoDavid Bohm's Implicate vs Explicate Order seems to be a root question here (as indicated in the article)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_explicate_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_explicate_order
- sdhrnrhbrt 6y agoIf we consider a large group of people as a whole, can we say that this group has its own consciousness? For example Congress is a bunch of old dudes with their own consciousnesses, but as a whole it makes decisions by voting and other complex internal interactions between these individual consciousnesses. For an outsider, this organization behaves like a conscious being. Another way to look at this idea is that consciousness is when we impose a boundary condition on a "medium" made of conscious "particles". I'd even compare humans with a liquid. When it flows freely, it obeys some general fluid laws and its behavior is rather uninteresting. It's when you confine a part of this liquid into some boundaries, the captured liquid starts to demonstrate some interesting effects. Same with humans. When they act freely and barely interact with each other, they form a uniform mess, but once we impose various boundaries, such as countries, companies or various forms of organizations, humans captured in those boundaries are forced to interact with each other more often and those interactions are governed by various laws, and at that moment these fictional entities start to look like conscious beings.
- ozzmotik 6y agooh i am definitely going to have to finish reading this as I am certainly an avid fan of the concept of consciousness itself being the substrate of reality. that being said, i don't necessarily viewing it through a panpsychist lens is entirely accurate as that perspective more or less tends to assume consciousness as some base aspect of material reality, and as such a base unit, but my own personal spiritual experiences and development in that regard have shown me that it is rather the other way around, that consciousness is the core metaphor, the non deterministic field of probability that constitutes reality, and more emergent and highly complex life forms also gained with their development a more strict set of deterministic rules to follow (instincts, genetics and such), and as such it would be more apt to suggest that material reality through the "objective" lens we (seek to) perceive it through is just the net output of running that core algorithm of iterate over time propagating some aspect of your essence, ideally in a stochastic system that allows for novelty to form, as really the pursuit of novelty is the only underlying force that, to me, can explain the wondered emergent forms that reality is known to take. not to mention the amazing correspondences between micro and macro scale experiences despite appearing to (which is likely in all reality illusory) be two separate connected-but-not-directly-related constructs. in any case i just always feel compelled to ramble when it comes to consciousness and the nature of reality. i should probably read the rest of the article now. sorry if my delivery or communication was not quite clear, that's a known pain point and something I have been attempting to address ever since back around 1991 when I, having caught the big dumb, evidently never got the memo on reasonable social interaction lol
- sixQuarks 6y agoI've been trying to formulate thoughts I have on consciousness that make sense in my head, but I haven't been able to communicate it effectively. Basically, why is consciousness always attached to the same physical body? Why can't I ever wake up in someone else's consciousness? How does "my" consciousness know to come back into "my" brain whenever I lose it (through sleep or injury, etc). The answer that I lean toward is that there is no such thing as you or me. There is only one consciousness and it is merely being filtered through each living (or perhaps nonliving) being in containerized modules. So, to "me", it feels like I'm experiencing my own consciousness but in reality everyone is the same "me". You are me, I am you, etc, we are simply filtering consciousness through different atomic arrangements. For example, let's say you read about a criminal who does a terrible thing and you can't imagine yourself ever doing that. But in reality, it is the same "you", only that your consciousness has been filtered through a different arragement of atoms that has caused that "module" to act that way. It is the same YOU who committed that crime, all it took was a different filtering device to make you act that way. Anyway, that's kind of what I'm thinking. I'm sure it's not an original thought, but I don't know what kind of philosophy this is called other than "one consciosness".
- simonh 6y agoHang on, if there is only one shared consciousness, you would expect that you would be able to wake up in another person's body. It seems to like that would be an inevitable consequence of that proposition. The fact that this never happens demonstrates, to me, that we do have a persistent discrete individual identity.
- xwdv 6y agoThat means when we die we just slip into someone else and never really even know it because we have all their memories and experiences up to that point in time. Perhaps this process even happens all the time as we lose consciousness and regain it. Our bodies are merely antennas for tuning into the vast universal consciousness. Madness. The takeaway from this for me is to be kind to any living thing as it could be you.
- KingFelix 6y agoSo now build out an experiment, see if you can play around with this filter device and see if you can find something clever. Step 2, invent something crazy, or start a cult. Good Luck!
- xornox 6y agoBecause we do not know what consciousness is, it is not reasonable discuss if electrons have or have not something we do not understand at all.
- pacala 6y agoHumans are unique in evolving recursive language. Consciousness is a recursive agent: observe me observing the world, several layers deep. Likely the exact same mutation / brain structure backs both mechanisms. Neither electrons, nor the Universe, are recursive agents. Maybe some of the Devil's apprentices playing with reinforcement learning AI will inadvertently create a non-human consciousness, but other than that, humans are special.
- stevebmark 6y agoI suggest you stop supporting nautil.us. Look at the bafflingly low quality of this article. Is it coincidence that nautilus articles like these frontpage once a weekend? Is it an organic submission? Or something else? This is like a throwaway class paper (which, given how nautilus sources, may very well be).
- sdhrnrhbrt 6y agoThe idea is very important, though. How the article explains it is another thing.
- nefitty 6y agoI have questions about their agenda. They were exclusively funded, initially, by the John Templeton Foundation. Whatever one’s personal feelings about Richard Dawkins, this bit he said in The God Delusion is apropos, regarding how he feels the Templeton Foundation doles out rewards, “usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion".
- rantwasp 6y agofor a definition of conscious yes. the problem is that we don’t really understand what consciousness is and we tend to anthropomorphize everything. what if consciousness is the synchronicity of the observations of the outside world with the predictions of our brains? no more, no less, with and added layer of hierarchies and recursion.
- kendallpark 6y agoThere are a lot of different philosophical positions with regard to the mind-body problem, but very few attempts at a testable scientific theory about how consciousness works. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is such an attempt. Nature Opinion article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44 Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
- knzhou 6y agoNote that IIT has been criticized [0] for being extremely gameable: it is trivial to build simple circuits that do absolutely nothing, but have more "consciousness" than all humans who have ever lived. 0: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
- GregarianChild 6y agoScott's article devastated IIT. Lot's of people stopped looking at IIT after it appeared. Here is a related question: has IIT ever lead to an interesting neurobiological insight? Has IIT suggested an interesting research hypothesis that has been proven or disproven? In other words: is IIT an interesting scientific methodology? Short answer: no.
- peter_vukovic 6y agoFrom a logical standpoint, questioning whether Consciousness "exists" is ludicrous. Consciousness is the foundation of our capability to observe the world around us and make conclusions about it. Protons, electrons, atoms, molecules and other phenomena do not exist outside of our Consciousness and we cannot prove absolutely anything about the world that is not a part of our Consciousness. Therefore, if something is to be questioned, it is our strange desire to prove the existence of the only thing we are directly experiencing all the time - Consciousness. It's like a computer program becoming aware of itself and trying to find that awareness in the source code. It's not there.
- gitgud 6y agoThere's the Mechanical Universe theory and then there's the Everything is Conscious theory. It's interesting to see the steps taken to arrive at that. - A person has thoughts, yes - A chip has thoughts, yes - A dog has thoughts, yes - A mouse has thoughts, yes - A fly has thoughts, yes - A microbe has thoughts, maybe - A virus has thoughts, maybe not - An atom has thoughts, maybe not - An electron has thoughts, maybe not It's a blurry line between life and matter, and perhaps consciousness goes down to that level too. I'm still a "Mechanical Universe" guy though
- tachyonbeam 6y agoI would argue that intelligence is a tool that life has evolved to become more adaptable to its environment. Intelligence exists at many scales, and consciousness is an emergent property of high intelligence. At some point, as your model of the world becomes sophisticated enough, you have to have a model of yourself, so you become self-aware. Self-awareness evolved because it made for smarter, more effective animals. Unicellular organisms do information processing and react to their environment. You could say they they're intelligent in that sense, they can actually have very complex behavior. However, they're not self-aware, they don't have a model of the world that incorporates a model of themselves. Neurons involved in multicellular organisms as an effective way to quickly send signals across, making multicellular creatures more adaptable to their environment. These neurons started to organize in more complex circuits that could do increasingly sophisticated information processing because that was good for survival, and so on and so on, until you get self-awareness.
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- ChrisCinelli 6y agoI read once of the NDE of a person that is very well documented. I think it was Pam Reynolds. http://www.neardth.com/pam-reynolds-near-death-experience.php http://www.neardth.com/pam-reynolds-near-death-experience.ph... It is hard to explain if you do not want to consider that our counsciuness may trascend our mortal existence.
- Zigurd 6y agoGetting you to consider that seems to be the purpose of the publication in which the article appears.
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- DesiLurker 6y agoI personally like roger penrose's theory (hypothesis?) of orchestrated objective reduction of consciousness (Orch-OR). He stipulates that in evolution of the quantum state of a system the collapse of wave function IS a form of proto-consciousness. Essentially the he is saying that WF collapse is how a system becomes 'aware' of the choice and consciousness emerges from there onwards. A Brain of sufficient/right complexity is a connectionist structure that is responsible for perceiving and/or translating it. What he's missing is the agent responsible for incorporating in the human/animal brain but some interesting candidates have come forwards like microtubules in neurons. But it is all highly speculative, though, there have been some advances in proving that biology is not too wet-warm-noisy for quantum state to persist without decoehrence for instance.. photosynthesis.
- mathgenius 6y agoPenrose's stuff is very interesting, and I always enjoy hearing him talk about it. But for me it is a soup with too many ingredients. Better to look at the ingredients separately, for example, the idea of microtubules maintaining coherent quantum information. That already is very interesting, and would make a good meal.
- DesiLurker 6y agoits a few days late so i dont know whether anybody will read it but my thoughts exactly. there should be a significant more research dollars spent on this as there is so much unknown there. just that fact that we still dont know how general anesthesia works and how we regain consciousness back in itself is quite fascinating. IMO in all this philosophical debate about nature of consciousness we often overlook the basic starting points in front of our eyes what mechanishm are necessary to sustain it. we need serious research on this otherwise it will be dominated by psuedo science BS like deepak chopra.
- toohotatopic 6y agoTwo things that don't fit: 1) Even if electrons have consciousness, why should it be linked to our consciousness? 2) Why is decision making the essence of consciousness? The Schroedinger equation is just a model, not reality. There doesn't even have to be an undecided state in reality. But even if the universe is conscious and decides in every moment, that doesn't explain our consciousness. If everything is conscious, in an ever increasing density why don't we have several consciousnesses in our head? Why is our stomach not conscious? And even if we are not free to make decisions, we could still be conscious in the same way that we watch sporting events without intervening. Actually I would argue that we never decide. We always 'choose' the most preferred option that deterministically depends on our state of mind. And yet, we are conscious.
- Joeri 6y agoWe do have several consciousnesses in our head, which end up acting as a collective and then the left brain interpreter post-rationalizes the behavior as if a single mind is at work. That’s why we act against our own decisions so often. You can see this demonstrated with people with split brain syndrome, where the brain halves are unable to directly communicate and you can trick them out by confronting the speaking left brain with conflicting actions by the right brain. The left brain will invent an explanation on the spot. https://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/split_brain.htm https://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/split_brain.htm
- elliekelly 6y agoDo people with split brain syndrome have an internal “stream of consciousness”? Or two? I’m not sure what the right word/phrase would be but I’m talking about our internal monologue or narration.
- Zigurd 6y agoIt's complicated. Corpus callosotomy, also called commissurotomy, to relieve seizures was not designed for the purpose of creating completely non-communicating hemispheres. Every patient is different. And so on. There is a long list complicating factors and a longer list of possible factors. My guess is that it adds up to it being really difficult to make two truly separate consciousnesses, and that observations of these patients see interesting effects but they are still one mind.
- mirimir 6y agoOnce you take this path, you can make up anything that you like. There's no way to test it. Except, I suppose, based on how you feel about it, how well societies work whose members believe it, and so on.
- TheUndead96 6y agoI agree with this. There are similar arguments that you cannot prove reality is real. Sure, but how does that help us solve the energy crisis or world hunger? It is philosophical musical chairs. Aristotle and Plato investigated how to live a better life.
- seemslegit 6y agoNo they may not well be. IIT is pure sophistry - some years ago Scott Aaronson showed that using their definition of potential for consciousness electronic devices employing certain kinds of algebraic error-correction codes have it - meant as a reductio-ad-absurdum of IIT, apparently its promoters have decided to try and own the absurdity. In other news - nautil.us is an utter garbage chute of an outlet, the new-science-journalism equivalent of British tabloids and I fully expect them to publish a psuedoscientific apologia for astrology or an evolutionary theory supporting the existence of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster - post-Darwinnian cryptozoology anyone ?
- eru 6y agoScott Aaronson wrote about this before https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 The title 'Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander)' tell you what he thinks of the theory. Some more discussion also at https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/7avunr/integrated_information_theory_a_rationally_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/7avunr/inte...
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoStop upvoting retarded woo woo shit please. This is just embarrassing.
- codesnik 6y agothat article (which imho is totally devoid of any substance) still reminded me about other thought experiment by Feynman: What if there's just one electron in the universe, traveling back and force in time, becoming positron when changing time direction, consuming energy when turning forward and releasing when turning back? He was quick to reject this idea, because in this case there would be exactly the same amount of electrons and positrons in the universe, and it doesn't seem to be the case, but I just love the elegance of the conjecture.
- nefitty 6y agoThere’s something fishy about Nautilus. One of their main contributors is the John Templeton Foundation: “The work supported by the John Templeton Foundation crosses disciplinary, religious, and geographical boundaries. Our grantees produce field-leading scholarship across the sciences, theology, and philosophy. From probing gravitational waves to updating the modern evolutionary synthesis, they have contributed to major discoveries in the basic sciences. Other grantees have opened critical new topics to scientific investigation, including prayer, gratitude, immortality, and imagination.” An initial reaction from someone online, https://ksj.mit.edu/archive/does-science-magazine-nautilus-have-agen/ https://ksj.mit.edu/archive/does-science-magazine-nautilus-h... In 2013, Amos Zeeberg, the digital editor of Nautilus said this in an interview: “The Templeton Foundation provided all of the money for our launch and for the initial operation of the magazine. We hope they’ll fund us further, and we also are getting revenue from advertising and potentially other foundations.”
- axguscbklp 6y agoDiscussions of consciousness tend to frustrate me a bit. So many otherwise smart people, for some reason, simply do not understand the hard problem of consciousness. They'll say things like "well, consciousness is just a given pattern of physical stuff" but they do not realize what to me is an obvious objection - to say that consciousness is equivalent to a given pattern of physical stuff does not explain why that pattern of physical stuff is not simply present without any consciousness associated with it. I can imagine a being that is physically identical to a human in every way, but is not conscious - there is no reason to think that intelligent behavior requires consciousness. So what is the difference between such a being and a conscious human, if the two are physically identical?
- KKPMW 6y agoAgreed. And I think it's even harder than that. When it comes to studying or thinking about consciousness - there is no way tor me to prove that any other person in the room is conscious except for myself. Given this, how can we even begin to talk about "AI consciousness" or in this case electrons being conscious.
- tetris11 6y agoForgive me if im being dense, but if that human replica still responds to stimulus in some way, and has basic wants and needs, then surely it is still conscious, just lower down on our human scale?
- axguscbklp 6y agoYou can build a computer that responds to stimulus - we do it all the time - but that doesn't mean that it necessarily is conscious (that is, has subjective experience). If I build a computer that responds to stimulus, that doesn't necessarily mean (to paraphrase Thomas Nagel) that there is something that it is like to be that computer.
- kaffeemitsahne 6y agoWell, sure, there is something it is like to be that computer, but it is only accessible to the computer, which does not pay a lot of attention to what it's like to be itself generally. When you ask me what it's like I can try to imagine becoming the computer, but in the process I would cease to exist, so for me there is only the objective computer seen from the outside. The only reason "what it's like" seems to make sense with other humans is because we evolved this nifty faculty of empathy. But if I examine more closely what it's like to be you, I also find that at the point I'm you, and thus have subjective access to your consciousness, I'm not me anymore. So, it seems that when looking more closely exactly the same problem occurs when asking what it's like to be a computer, or a human, therefore the "what it's like" question is not a valid argument to ascribe consciousness to one but not the other.
- oneiftwo 6y ago>that all matter has some associated mind or consciousness, and vice versa. Where there is mind there is matter and where there is matter there is mind. That doesn't make sense. We know that humans (and probably most if not all conscious animals, in fact sleep may be a prerequisite for consciousness) spend about a third of their lives unconscious. This assertion doesn't hold, unless you want to tell me that all these rocks are just asleep.
- scotty79 6y agoOut of all the crazy theories about electron my favorite is single electron universe. That all the electrons and positrons are actually single particle that that goes back and forth in time, and positron are exactly the same as electrons just going in the opposite direction in time. It neatly explains what and why is antimatter and why all particles of given kind are exactly the same. Although it's a hard sell because it predicts that all of the matter-antimatter symmetry breaking is not intrinsic or even spontaneous. Also it make hard to wrap your head around how antimatter could form any macroscopic objects while going back in time. Or how it can behave exactly like matter while going back in time.
- stared 6y agoClosely related, especially given the context of consciousness, one of my favorite stories: "The Egg" (http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html, or if you prefer read by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI).
- buckminstrix 6y agoReally profound content from a great channel. Another channel with related insightful content is "The School of Life" https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog Panpsychism needs a new name. That word sounds quite alien. But the concept is familiar to humans in their "raw" state. Young children sometimes befriend rocks, elder people sometimes talk to their plants, and some tribes and pre-modern cultures widely believed there was life inside everything. It's a little disappointing the "Wikipedia" article on it does not mention: Australian aborigines, Amazon tribes, Hindus and more.
- Ruphin 6y agoMy favorite version of this story is told throughout Logic's "Everybody" album. I highly recommend it.
- mercer 6y agoPossibly interesting fact: the writer of The Egg also wrote The Martian. Haven't read the book, but the film was great and much funnier than I expected.
- simonh 6y agoIt seems to me that our consciousness is most likely an emergent property of neuronal activity. The thing with emergent properties is it's extremely hard to draw a line where the system that exhibits the property transitions from not exhibiting that property to exhibiting it. Consider a cyclone, a mass of air rotating around a zone of low pressure in the atmosphere. Clearly this is an emergent property of air, or any gas really. But if you statistically analyse any mass of gas you will be able to find volumes where there are regions of lower pressure than the average and the particles nearby will have a (possibly tiny) net angular momentum around that low pressure region. Any volume of gas will have these, but are they cyclones? How long does such a state have to persist to count? How much angular momentum must be present? Must it be on the surface of the earth to count? What about near another similar surface? You can do this with any emergent property, right down to the electrons orbiting a nucleus, does that make them cyclones? The thing is whether you say yes or not, it doesn't really matter because it's not a useful level of analysis if you want to understand the behaviour or nature of cyclones in global weather forecasting. It's a context error. Take the idea that an electron's state is not random but chosen, per the article. Well to make a choice implies considering reasons or following a pattern of behaviour. However we can see experimentally that the states of electrons do strictly follow random statistical distributions. So you can argue that their 'nature' is to 'choose' a random state, but at this point youre jamming a useless and explanation-free definition on the term 'choose'. Now don't get me wrong, I'm basically a materialist. I believe that my decisions as a free agent are determined by my mental, psychological and essentially neuronal state. I believe this is necessary for me to be considered to have free will, because for _me_ to have free will my decisions must come form me, and I am my state. If my memories, instincts, experiences, knowledge and values don't influence or even determine my decisions, then those decisions don't come from _me_ in any meaningful sense. I don't care if that means my decisions are in principle deterministic, that's fine, it just means I'm a consistent being. So yes my behaviour comes from my state and you could argue that the behaviour of an electron comes from it's state, or the behaviour of a gas comes from it's state. All that means is that I'm made out of matter, but it's simply a useless level of analysis when considering consciousness, for exactly the same reasons that studying quantum mechanics and atomic motions isn't practically useful when looking at many other emergent properties of matter. This article is like analysing an engine, reducing down the behaviour of the matter an engine is comprised of down to the fundamental particles the engine is composed of, then extrapolating that up to say that because Jupiter is made of those particles it must therefore be an engine. If you're going to say electrons are conscious, you have to also say they are cyclones, and engines, and economies, and thunder storms, and planets, and whatever else because if you take this mode of analysis as legitimate you can, without crossing any objectively clear boundary, reduce all emergent properties of matter down to the fundamental particles.
- classified 6y agoSo what if they are? Will they talk back if I send them to the anode?
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- CKN23-ARIN 6y agoI suspect the experience of being an electron is something like this: "Wheeeeee!"
- chewbacha 6y agoI’m a little skeptical of this theory. Mostly, because it sounds exactly like animism [0]. The consciousness discussed here sounds a lot like the “soul” that religions asserts exists. But this is the problem with science that is almost entirely theoretical built in a concept that is entirely subjective: what is consciousness? [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
- avsteele 6y agoI would think that a set of particles that are literally indistinguishable from one another could not meet any definition of 'mind'. There is no difference between an electron that's flown around the universe and one that was just created in a particle collider. If that doesn't negate the possibility of 'subjective experience' I am not sure what would.
- jasonlfunk 6y agoThey are only indistinguishable in all the ways that we know how to look. There may be a way to differing them that we haven’t discovered yet.
- sgt 6y agoNext year, you'll have protesters chained up outside of the CERN particle accelerators. Don't smash our particle friends!
- lidHanteyk 6y agoNobody's mentioned the Conway-Specker-Kocken Free Will Theorem!? It lines up perfectly with the idea of "quantum choice" discussed in the article: Free will is when particles choose to reply to quantum measurements with non-predetermined values. From this perspective, electrons are a little conscious, while humans are a lot conscious (because we have lots of electrons in our brain), but we don't have to define consciousness beyond the ability to be forced to make choices.
- willis936 6y agoAll of the quantum choice theories seem to be based around an incorrect answer to the measurement problem. They can be forgiven, as many of the smartest scientists in the past 100 years have fought hard for their own interpretation. I suggest watching this episode of spacetime (and a few before/after if you have time). https://youtu.be/CT7SiRiqK-Q https://youtu.be/CT7SiRiqK-Q
- joncrane 6y agoWhen I used to commute via mass transit, my train load of people would all rush down the platform, into a plaza, and down only one escalator. You had people who would rush forward, people who would take a steady pace, and people who would hang back. I often times looked at the flow of people and it seemed to me it was extremely similar to a flow of particles.
- danharaj 6y agoAt a high enough density, crowds act like fluids. At a high enough speed, so does a person.
- visarga 6y agoConsciousness cannot apply to electrons, they have no life (no need to protect from cold, get food, learn), no senses, limited internal state and no evolutionary mechanism to speak of. In order to be conscious a system must be able to adapt itself to its environment to maximise goals, the main goal being self reproduction. Also requires an evolutionary mechanism in order for complex agents to appear. Consciousness is the inner loop of evolution, they both optimise for reproduction. This absurd idea of conscious electrons is the natural result of armchair philosophising about consciousness. Tononi et. al had a nice idea about integrated information, but it is an unfinished idea. For what purpose is this integrated information? How does learning occur? It says nothing. I'd rather look up recent DL and reinforcement learning papers for inspiration about consciousness.
- mannykannot 6y agoAt the very least, this seems to me to be a way to avoid the difficult and interesting issues of, and relating to, consciousness. I am not interested in debating whether it is possible to come up with some definition of the word "consciousness" such that one can say that even electrons have it; I am interested in how conscious, self-aware, theory-of-mind-holding minds work.
- Nevermark 6y ago"some DILLUTION of the word "consciousness" Fixed that for you and ... agree on all counts. I feel like while we can't explain consciousness yet, it isn't hard to make well supported conjectures about what it needs. First, what I experience and call "consciousness" involves an awareness of a dynamical thing, me, for my environment (a gravitationally organized semi-2D place), myself externally (i.e. controllable hands and feet), my own internal responses to the environment (sensory perception, reinforcements, patterns), and the fact that this awareness on my part seems to be encoded with information that is used by my dynamical response generating apparatus. I.e. Self-reflection does not seem to be segregated from other forms of information used to generate my responses: My awareness of self is not just in a spectator role, since it influences action. The fact that self-awareness is not segregated from responses creates a wonderful side benefit: I can share my self-reflection by communicating to others about it. If you took away any part of what I just described, I don't think I would continue operating in a way I understand as "consciousness" and my behaviors would certainly be very different. I don't think other's would describe me as "conscious" either. And none of these seemingly necessary complicated and recursive pre-conditions for consciousness shout out as reasons to include individual electrons as co-conscious in any way. Question: Assuming an electron has consciousness, what experiment would you attempt to falsify that? I am anti-electron on this issue. :)
- klyrs 6y ago> Question: Assuming an electron has consciousness, what experiment would you attempt to falsify that? This is the question that the article ends on -- the philosophers are entertaining the notion and looking for a testable hypothesis. We're talking about a 1-qubit Turing test, essentially. I'm not about to take a position yay or nay, (I'm a mathematician, goddammit). For an apparatus, we could capture individual electrons in a ring of magnetic bottles. Perform tests on individuals in the chambers, advance them in a "shift register" fashion, and repeat. Do any individuals show behavior that differentiates them? A clear signal of individuality would be a real shocker. One thing we use for macroscopic beings is a "mirror test" -- can an electron recognize itself in a mirror? Again, sounds absurd, but the general question is considered an acceptable proof of consciousness.
- mcrocop 6y agoIf you're going to simply re-define words then you can say a duck is a rock and a rock is a cloud and a cloud is happniess. It's silly and serves no purpose other then allowing you to generate some clickbait-y titles.
- sebringj 6y agoIntuitively we would think if an animal can move, meaning it has locomotion, it is NOT because it is intrinsic to all matter (i.e rocks), rather it is because there is some bio-mechanical reason for it. Scientist could figure out how things moved and the underlying cellular processes to obtain energy in order to do it. A proponent of this article then might say that all matter is in constant motion. Then we are not talking about the same things. We are talking about directed motion to obtain food or some goal for survival. Atoms are not alive so they don't need to survive and do not have goal-oriented motion. But then those same proponents would list off how electrons move according to laws that behave similar to living creatures etc. so its some intrinsic thing. You can't win with those people. They will always have a response framed in some narrow definition that does not have any basis for what we are thinking of what locomotion means. That's a long metaphor.
- sebringj 6y agoI thought of one more but it's less wordy and children can understand it. If you take a lego, with enough of them in a particular arrangement...you can create a wheel of sorts so it rolls. Legos don't roll unto themselves but are necessary parts to create the wheel-like behavior. Legos are boxy so they can't roll by themselves obviously and yet they can roll when put together in a certain way. This concept relates to nature in that atoms are building blocks to create properties of things in a particular arrangement. It's easier to understand because we have no magic bias surrounding legos or sense of purpose or importance in coming to that conclusion.
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- tylerjwilk00 6y agoIf we consider our brains conscious, and the foundational building blocks of that consciousness are electro/chemical reactions, it seems plausible that there is an innate property of consciousness to the underlying matter of those processes.
- im3w1l 6y agoI have taken multiple university courses in theoretical physics, in artificial intelligence and in neuroscience, including on the topic of consciousness. I can directly observe my own consciousness and I can tell that without a doubt it can not be explained by current physics and "complexity". It is completely different in kind. If you believe that consciousness could arise just from complexity and information processing, then you are frankly mistaken. Whether you lack a consciousness or just the introspective ability to perceive it... or I suppose a knowledge of physics. Now beyond saying "there is something going on", things quickly become much more difficult. Pan-psychism is a worthwhile avenue to pursue. If there is some phenomenon going on at a macrolevel, then we do expect it to be made up things going on at a microlevel. Some kind of consciousness or proto-consciousness. But am somewhat pessimistic. We don't really know what we are even looking for, so how can we expect to find it? The attempts to connect wave-function collapse with consciousness are unconvincing to me. It seems basically like tying together two things we don't understand with each other based on... not a lot.
- nsilvestri 6y agoUntil sufficient evidence is provided supporting one way or the other, we do not know whether our current understanding of physics is sufficient for understanding consciousness. You are claiming that it can't, so you now have a burden of proof which you, at the moment, cannot fulfill, and therefore your claim is unjustified.
- im3w1l 6y agoYou are trying to impose an impossible burden on me, and I have no choice but to reject it. I realize that from your point of view, the claim that "I can just feel it" is unsatisfactory, but that really is the essence of it all. If your are sincerely curious meditation and/or drugs may be a path.
- nsilvestri 6y agoIf the burden of proof is impossible to fulfill then you have by definition made an unfalsifiable claim, so your claim can be discarded immediately. "I can just feel it" does not stand as evidence because it is subjective. The only justifiable position you can currently take is "I do not know."
- bobsh 6y agoChristopher Alexander arrived at a similar conclusion, in his later works, albeit from a radically different direction.
- jpfdez 6y agoMaturana and Varela 1987.consciousness like a pilot flying blind in conditions of very poor visibility relying only on the instrumentation in the cockpit where any environmental inputs are mere blips on the radar screen
- odyssey7 6y agoSomething that concerns me for conscious particles is that some of them could be suffering endlessly somewhere in the universe, but I think this is probably rare. The ability to hold a conscious particle in its seat while keeping it uncomfortable implies some sort of system trapping it in place. Life could be such a roller coaster, where good and bad stimuli are always being presented to the particles, and there isn't much hope for getting off the ride as long as the lap bar is down. The sensation of discomfort might in fact be the feeling of a conscious particle straining against its chains, trying to escape the body that has trapped it.
- aetherspawn 6y agoWe can not yet measure consciousness. We can not say for certain, as an example, whether a brain or AI that we design experiences it’s own consciousness or not. And yet, they are made as all the same particles as you and I. We can say that consciousness is something to do with the links in our brain, but how many times can I slice a brain before it is not conscious? Does a brain sliced down into single neurons not experience the world as a billion separate individuals? If I were to reconstruct the brain from its individual parts, would those individuals feel as though they had died as their consciousnesses merged? I’m willing to still accept the traditional view that consciousness is a special sauce. That when we reproduce, it’s something that we can fork, but it is not common in the universe. And I think that the true litmus test to the nature of consciousness is to effectively kill someone by freezing them (so that they are actually dead in the sense there is zero electrical activity) and then successfully bring them back to a conscious state. Then you will have paused a consciousness, and yet it did not leave. I do not think it’s possible. I think something like that ruins the special sauce and the resulting experiment may be able to survive (breath, react at a motor level), but effectively does not live a conscious life.
- pc86 6y ago> I think something like that ruins the special sauce and the resulting experiment may be able to survive (breath, react at a motor level), but effectively does not live a conscious life. But if we have no way to measure consciousness (and arguably, we can't, if it's truly a "special sauce"), you can't prove whether or not this reanimated creature is simply a mechanically moving shell of what was, a la every zombie movie, or the same person, or something in between.
- aetherspawn 6y agoYes, I sat at night thinking about this for a long time after writing that post.
- jodrellblank 6y ago> Quantum chance is better framed as quantum choice—choice, not chance, at every level of nature. But why? All the choice we're familiar with relates to predator/prey interactions, sexual selection, finding food, avoiding danger, protecting the next generation, and so on. What possible reason could electrons have for preferring one outcome of an interaction to another? Say "highly rudimentary" and you can ignore everything else?
- ecoled_ame 6y agocheck out Orch OR theory developed by Roger Penrose and an anesthesiologist from Arizona. Basically they think microtubule proteins create electron resonances that can reach a threshold time to produce consciousness that wouldn’t be available to most electrons outside the system. I’ve been researching this topic during quarantine so i’m happy to answer any questions or supply some cool facts.
- marcAKAmarc 6y agoAfter reading all the comments to this article, I get the weird feeling that some people, though obviously intelligent and convincing in their argument, obtain no consciousness. Further more, for the life of me, I can't decide if that supports or detracts from the idea of panpsychism. Making the argument "consciousness is not special - it simply emerges from data processing" feels so dead, but is really saying that everything is alive to a certain degree. On the other hand, saying "There is something special about consciousness that needs to be explained" almost supports the idea that consciousness is exclusive to certain entities and not others, and therefore needs explaining. That feels so backwards to me for some reason, and I can't put a finger on it.
- mlatu 6y agoSo, there is only this one electron, standing in for every electron we can observe, this electron may well be conscious, so what if there are molecular structures (our brain) that "enjoy to feel conscious"? Perhaps there is only ever just this one consciousness and we all are (read: everything is) part of it?
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- pontifier 6y agoI came up with a similar theory a few years ago. It's based on the idea of a Gaussian surface for information. The surface could be drawn around a rock or a person. In both cases, information passes into the surface from the environment (photons, vibrations, forces, motion, etc), is "processed" by the matter inside the surface, and emitted by the object after processing. Things start to get weird when you play around with different time scales, and where to draw the surfaces. You might see a tree differently when you see it shifting and changing over longer time scales. It's also strange to think about drawing this type of a surface over different regions such as a classroom, non-contiguous regions such as every member of a family, or even conceptual regions such as mathematical functions, a scientific theory, or program source code.