4 ms·

Don't you sometimes "want" to eat some chocolate, or an ice cream, or even better, a nice, juicy, salty steak? I definitely do, and I "like" what I feel when I

Don't you sometimes "want" to eat some chocolate, or an ice cream, or even better, a nice, juicy, salty steak? I definitely do, and I "like" what I feel when I get to eat it. Yet I may be no more than a replicating machine whose purpose it is to build these new machines which may likely replace us one day, maybe keep us in a zoo, or as pets, if we get lucky. I can't imagine what motivates these molecules to behave, to group the way they do; why the existing energies get channeled to make them move that way, since there is no need for the energy to do anything at all. Something motivates me, and I see no reason why there isn't motivation in these molecules; what they do is already complex enough to be considered as something which may have a special purpose. We do have consciousness. There is this something in me which sees and tastes, which experiences life. It's hard to believe that this is something material. To me it feels as if complex enough structures of molecules allow something to plug into this universe, to absorb its information and to feed something into it, like instructions which allow this "me" to interact with it. The same could well be applicable to bacteria or to the most rudimentary lifeforms. Because a bacteria forms part of my body doesn't mean that it can't have its own consciousness; the same may be valid for all this stuff that (maybe) "lives" inside my cells. Lucky me, that I get to stand on its shoulders in order to perceive this universe the way I can and interact with it. "Works" and "replication" isn't wrong, but removing the "wants" and "likes" from this equation doesn't feel right.

jmoss20 6y ago
Sure, but the parent's claim was that there is no "want" and "like" in evolution. You might want and like things; perhaps (perhaps) cells and bacteria might want and like things, but evolution certainly does not.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  The fascinating question is where the line is between action and reaction and our qualitative experience of wanting and liking. Our wants and likes are (probably) physically implemented as a sequence of electrochemical reactions; almost certainly with nothing more than electromagnetism. So which instantiations/states of the electromagnetic field experience feelings and desires? Are they held in the energy potential or in the energy transfer, or both? Is it enough to have a sufficiently complex feedback loop simulating/predicting itself? The answer is likely to be both sort of simple but also profound. Eventually we'll have an a-ha moment studying electrocardiographs or FMRI or individual neural networks and be able to replicate experience in other electromagnetic substrates, and knowing precisely what we are, in a sense, will be pretty neat. Then what will we really know about experience? Is it truly in the electromagnetic field or does it exist in the mathematical relationships that determine the evolution of the fields? That might be a question we never definitely answer from an outside perspective, but is endlessly fascinating to me.
  - selestify 6y ago
    Fascinating question indeed :) > So which instantiations/states of the electromagnetic field experience feelings and desires? Personally this is why I think that perhaps qualia is not an emergent phenomenon after all, and must come from outside the system. I.e. I suspect that philosophical zombies are possible
    - benlivengood 6y ago
      I find it utterly strange that drugs, hallucinogens, concussions, alcohol, electromagnetic stimulation, etc. could all reliably affect consciousness but that a brain identical to mine might be a pzombie. Like; who or what could possibly be doing the detailed-enough tracking to be sure to give my brain consciousness (but not my sleeping brain) while my molecular twin gets none?
  - jmoss20 6y ago
    > Eventually we'll have an a-ha moment... Will we? How can we ever verify that our intervention produces this or that sort of qualia? (For the record, I'm a fan of theories like IIT [0] that aim to answer questions in the neighborhood of these -- but we should be sober about what is even, in principle, knowable to us. We can verify that intervention X gives behavior Y, but I don't see how we could ever verify that intervention X gives qualitative experience Z (intervening on ourselves aside, which in any case will only tell us about our sort of conscious experience).) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
wombatmobile 6y ago
You're onto something when you link "wants" with "energies". Think back 4 billion years to some of the first lifeforms on earth, colonies of slime mould clinging to a rock in the ocean. The first behaviour of these organisms was to respond to the movement of the sun overhead. They'd orient themselves to regulate their exposure to the sun's rays, arranging themselves in a horizontal plane on top of the rock when the sun was overhead, and vertically along the side of the rock when the sun was at an angle. The first "desire" was the want of energy. The first behaviour was to move towards the sun. The first communication was the signal that was passed through the colony of cells to coordinate the movement of the whole community into a mutually beneficial configuration. The first conflict was when the colony became large enough and so diversely distributed that a part of the community "decided" it would rather not obey the signal to move and instead would move to its own preferred surface of the rock.

jmoss20 6y ago

Sure, but the parent's claim was that there is no "want" and "like" in evolution. You might want and like things; perhaps (perhaps) cells and bacteria might want and like things, but evolution certainly does not.

benlivengood 6y ago
The fascinating question is where the line is between action and reaction and our qualitative experience of wanting and liking. Our wants and likes are (probably) physically implemented as a sequence of electrochemical reactions; almost certainly with nothing more than electromagnetism. So which instantiations/states of the electromagnetic field experience feelings and desires? Are they held in the energy potential or in the energy transfer, or both? Is it enough to have a sufficiently complex feedback loop simulating/predicting itself? The answer is likely to be both sort of simple but also profound. Eventually we'll have an a-ha moment studying electrocardiographs or FMRI or individual neural networks and be able to replicate experience in other electromagnetic substrates, and knowing precisely what we are, in a sense, will be pretty neat. Then what will we really know about experience? Is it truly in the electromagnetic field or does it exist in the mathematical relationships that determine the evolution of the fields? That might be a question we never definitely answer from an outside perspective, but is endlessly fascinating to me.
- selestify 6y ago
  Fascinating question indeed :) > So which instantiations/states of the electromagnetic field experience feelings and desires? Personally this is why I think that perhaps qualia is not an emergent phenomenon after all, and must come from outside the system. I.e. I suspect that philosophical zombies are possible
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    I find it utterly strange that drugs, hallucinogens, concussions, alcohol, electromagnetic stimulation, etc. could all reliably affect consciousness but that a brain identical to mine might be a pzombie. Like; who or what could possibly be doing the detailed-enough tracking to be sure to give my brain consciousness (but not my sleeping brain) while my molecular twin gets none?
- jmoss20 6y ago
  > Eventually we'll have an a-ha moment... Will we? How can we ever verify that our intervention produces this or that sort of qualia? (For the record, I'm a fan of theories like IIT [0] that aim to answer questions in the neighborhood of these -- but we should be sober about what is even, in principle, knowable to us. We can verify that intervention X gives behavior Y, but I don't see how we could ever verify that intervention X gives qualitative experience Z (intervening on ourselves aside, which in any case will only tell us about our sort of conscious experience).) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

wombatmobile 6y ago

You're onto something when you link "wants" with "energies". Think back 4 billion years to some of the first lifeforms on earth, colonies of slime mould clinging to a rock in the ocean. The first behaviour of these organisms was to respond to the movement of the sun overhead. They'd orient themselves to regulate their exposure to the sun's rays, arranging themselves in a horizontal plane on top of the rock when the sun was overhead, and vertically along the side of the rock when the sun was at an angle. The first "desire" was the want of energy. The first behaviour was to move towards the sun. The first communication was the signal that was passed through the colony of cells to coordinate the movement of the whole community into a mutually beneficial configuration. The first conflict was when the colony became large enough and so diversely distributed that a part of the community "decided" it would rather not obey the signal to move and instead would move to its own preferred surface of the rock.