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What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project
- arnoooooo 6y agoNo explanation of consciousness cuts it if it does not address how first person perspective comes about. No computation results in first person perspective.
- tim333 6y agoWouldn't that be the default? Like in it's limited way a Tesla must think something like darn I'm going to hit that truck rather a red Tesla that is me is going to...
- simiones 6y agoWhat does this even mean? A computation that results in the thought "I am seeing blue" could be defined as first-person perspective without any problem, and I don't think it's possible to prove this definition differs in any way from your first person perspective.
- mannykannot 6y agoIf you want an excuse for foreclosing on certain lines of inquiry, this is as good as any other.
- Layke1123 6y agoHow much are you willing to bet that consciousness is not a computation? What else could it be? If we don't live in a world organized by physics and causality, then it would extremely unlikely life could even emerge altogether. The fact that the world is ultimately predictable makes it more likely we emerge, not less.
- jodrellblank 6y agoWhat do you define as "a computation"? If water runs down a hill following a windy path to the lowest point, is there any computation happening as it "chooses" its way? If you throw a ball up, is there any computation as it "decides" when to turn around and fall down? If a mirror reflects light rays, is it computing anything as it does so? When a fire burns, is there computation in its flames? When you drop string and it falls into a tangle, is it computing how to land? It seems to me that you could model some factors of those processes in a computer, but they are not in themselves computations. Do you define computation so broadly as to be "anything matter and energy does"? You can look at avatars (human faces on website chat bots) that try to add natural human-like movements, and their eyes move around in different directions governed by a random number generator; the result is that they don't look at all human, human eyes do move around a lot but not at random. Humans look at specific things in the environment, and that comes from having an awareness of the environment - people look at faces, windows, shadows, moving things, clocks, art, and not empty space, walls, nowhere, nothing. Even looking away "at nothing" and thinking has a distinctive look to it. All of this is based on the idea that a human exists in a specific location, and the looking around is about getting information of what might be dangerous/advantageous to the human. I don't really see that you can abstract such a thing away from the meat body and do the same computation in an orbital computer with no inputs and outputs whatsoever, or on pencils and paper spread over thousands of square miles and thousands of years, and say it's the same thing. It's a bit like saying that a human can draw a stick figure or a horse, but a computer can use no ink and that counts as a drawing of everything, a universal drawing, without limits, gasp! Human style consciousness is part of our limits - our limited excent in time, space, amount of energy we can expend, mortality and risks of harm. Take all that away, you don't get a universal consciousness, you get a blank slate. Abstract of any matter and energy and specific situations, what is there to computer? And in a specific situation, a tired human sits like hot wood burns, it just happens. When you sit, is it computational sitting? When you open the irrigation valves on your field and the water flows down the grooves instead of over the surface, is that computation? When you trigger a stored memory release and the neuronal signals flow down the worn grooves of learned patterns, is that somehow different? If so, why, just because they're smaller or there's more of them? You can't grow plants with simulated water, why assume you can think simulated signal flow patterns? > "What else could it be?" A Buddhist monk walks up to a hot dog vendor and says "Make me one with everything". All our words and descriptions of things as discrete, seperate, entities with clear edges, are wrong (but useful). There is only one whole universe, no parts to it. You are what you eat, there's no place in your intestines where molecules change from being food and start being your body, it's a continuum. A sound is a pressure wave in the air, but you can't separate "the sound" from the moving speaker, the moving electric currents in the amplifier, the moving air molecules, the moving eardum, the moving ear canal innards, the moving electric currents in the brain, it's all one continuous system. It's not the case that "sound" is what the air does and those other bits are irrelevant, it's just convenient to talk and build things that way. There isn't really any sound at all, Vitamin D doesn't come from sunlight, the energy in sunlight affects vitamin D precursors in your skin. There is no separation between the light energy affecting your retinas and the consequent electric patterns in your visual cortex anymore than the sound is a separate thing. In this model (wrong, but useful), there is no separate consciousness and no creatures which can be conscious. If there is any consciousness, it's the whole universe which has it in the sense "we are the universe experiencing itself", and your head is one (X,Y,Z,t) coordinate and the computer is another coordinate, and they are different by virtue of being different parts of the universe. Whether you can imbue the computer with the consciousness of a person stops being such an important question - you can clearly organise bits of the universe into responding like consciousness because you can have children and they wind new matter up into thinking, but that only says that "matter thinks", it doesn't say "matter /does/ thinking as a thing which can be separated from that matter". What else could it be? It could be nothing; some bits of matter exhibit complex behaviours and there's no more to it than that. Cameras aren't "seeing", why think eyes are "seeing"? Instead of discussing whether we can make cameras that see, why not discuss whether retinas interacting with photons are doing any more than cameras are, and seeing is an big fuzzy concept blob memory pattern and not a physical phenomenon that exists separate from matter? You can talk about being "right handed", what does it mean to make a computation done in a computer with no hands "left handed" or "right handed"? It makes no sense to take that idea away from a creature with two hands in an environment where they use the hands to do things and have to deal with the limitations of having only two hands and no tentacles/tractor beams/prehensile tails/elephant noses/etc. Does it make any more sense to take "thinking" away from brains?
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago> No computation results in first person perspective. But how would you know that?
- perryizgr8 6y agoComputation that results in first person perspective: #include <iostream> int main() { std::cout << "I am running this code that prints this line\n"; return 0; }
- marshmellman 6y agoIf you think of your brain as a predictive machine that makes models of the world around it, then “first person perspective” is your brain’s model of itself in the world.
- animanoir 6y agoI'd take more seriously Mr. Wolfram's ideas if he pointed out research by others too, not just himself.
- dang 6y agoI understand, but please let's avoid going to the place that all Wolfram threads go. It's not that it's wrong, necessarily, but it's utterly predictable, and therefore uninteresting, and we're trying for something else here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20wolfram&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Wolfram articles are a perfect medium-difficulty exercise for this community: can we respond to the interesting parts while leaving the provocative bits where they are? Both are present every time.
- codezero 6y agoThis seems to follow a theme I've observed lately around the underlying laws of physics and the quantum nature of consciousness, here's some research that's more on the theoretical side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26505858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26505858
- tyrex2017 6y agoTo add one more critic: A couple minutes into the text, I still didnt read something of substance/consequence. Lots of hand waiving and describing the usual phenomena in other terms. I will follow this thread hoping someone points out that good stuff is coming later in the text, but I doubt it.
- 77pt77 6y ago> Lots of hand waiving and describing the usual phenomena in other terms. Not even that. These are impressionistic attempts to describe physics. I suggest people look into how Wolfram says he derived special relativity from his theory. Spoiler, had you not know special relativity you won't have the slightest idea of what it is after he claims to derive it.
- king_magic 6y ago> Lots of hand waiving and describing the usual phenomena in other terms. Pretty par for the course when it comes to Stephen Wolfram. I generally find it hard to take him seriously for that very reason.
- randmeerkat 6y agoI thought it was an interesting article, I would be interested if he eventually dives into the math of it though.
- throw_away98321 6y agoI think of consciousness as a feeling and nothing more. Similar to the feeling of free will, both are an "illusion" and we're not actually aware or free. The universe is made of instructions that everything follows and including us. We believing in awareness is just instructions for how we operate as subsystems of the Universe and like or unlike other subsystems of the universe. I find the idea simpler to grasp if you think of the Universe just bruteforcing every possible sequence of patterns and where we eventually have subsystems assuming they have awareness & free will.
- coldtea 6y agoEven if it was "just a feeling", who said a feeling is something simple? Feelings and qualia are just as mysteries as consciousness. The rest is reductionist. "The universe is made of instructions that everything follows and including us" is so 19th century. >We believing in awareness is just instructions for how we operate as subsystems of the Universe and like or unlike other subsystems of the universe. "Subsystems of the universe" merely running as automated systems based on rules have resulted in the Kardashians fanbase, people debating NY vs Chicago pizza, and OnlyFans?
- fultonla 6y agoSo, what would you say a "feeling" is, exactly?
- tazjin 6y agoIt's just a type of sensation!
- IncRnd 6y agoThat is not correct. Not all words mean the same as each other. A sensation is an experience. A feeling is an emotional state. Sometimes, a feeling is idiomatically thought of as an unfounded belief, which can be traced back to a belief founded on an emotional state.
- nahuel0x 6y ago
- archibaldJ 6y agoWolfram's idea about computational irreducibility is an interesting one. Going through it again reminds me a lot of how intriguingly difficult the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem is. But in this article Wolfram's view on consciousness occurs to be nothing more than a bunch of abstraction layers put together in a badly baked Lasagna. For anyone who is computationally minded, I believe by just having a psychedlic experience one would gain mucher greater insight into the intricacies of consciousness than reading articles like this. I highly doubt without constant experimentation with psychedlics one can come up with anything computationally insightful about consciousness, espeically theroies and mathematical models with practical applications in emerging fields such as BCI e.g. - models about how the brain's (sub)conscious attention mechanism works and how it plays a part in the (sub)conscious process of habit forming - models about the conscious percpetion of time and how can one go about slowing it down or speeding it up and how will that play out in the (sub)conscious memory encoding and decoding processes I believe the study of consciousness ultimiately resolves around the study of cybernetics in a none-ergodicity system within a certain set of constraint satisfactions. I think perhaps one can even apply frameworks such as homotopy type theory (HoTT) for a certain categorical formalization.
- marosgrego 6y agoWhat do psychedelics have to do with computability?
- neonological 6y agoCareful. "Consciousness" may just be a language issue. It seems like a profound concept but it's really just a word with a very vague and complex definition. If someone tried to formalize "consciousness" it would be a technical book about 1000 pages long or something and all we're doing is debating about what goes in the book. It's very similar to the question what is "life?" I mean we understand that biology is just carbon based molecular machines, debating what "life" is as a general concept outside of biology is not a profound issue, it's just a language issue and you'd just be debating what the definition of a word "life" should encompass.
- roughly 6y agoI agree. The ultimate question of consciousness regards the phenomenological experience of being - what is it? Where does it come from? What does it mean about us? Who else shares it? Any theory of consciousness that doesn’t address those questions may indeed be addressing some version of how we might define consciousness, but it’s redefining the mountain from the foothills - justify it all you like, but nobody’s giving you credit for the summit.
- matt-attack 6y ago> Who else shares it? Or what else shares it?
- roughly 6y agoAt the point at which we can determine with certainty something else shares a phenomenological experience of consciousness, I think we're obligated to grant it personhood.
- matt-attack 6y agoNot sure about that. There is a hypothesis that what you describe is simply a fundamental property of matter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
- simmanian 6y agoI like panpsychism: everything in the universe exhibits varying degrees of "consciousness."
- Layke1123 6y agoThis is probably true. There are things definitely less conscious than us. It'll be interesting if it is possible for us to comprehend higher consciousness or if its like a never ending race to the top. Creatures so intelligent they are just beyond our comprehension.
- nahuel0x 6y agoIntuitively we can postulate the humans are more conscientious than a chicken, and the chicken is more conscientious than a bacteria, and the bacteria (maybe it can "feel" pain) is more conscientious than the thermostat (who probably is not conscientious in any way). But conscience is not really measurable, so, we can't be really sure if a rock is more conscientious than us, or than a fellow human is conscientious at all (p-zombies).
- Layke1123 6y agoWho says? We used to could.not measure light precisely, only vague notions of color. Maybe we are just in a similar state.
- codeulike 6y agoPaging Greg Egan
- Afton 6y agoAlso Peter Watts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
- codeulike 6y agoIt's all a bit "if we assume there is an observer that can make sense of things, then they do indeed make sense of things". Like confirmation bias incarnate.
- nahuel0x 6y agoI don't know if something of this is real, falsifiable, or how much of it is original work (and surely you need to peel off the Wolfram classic ego driven sentences) but I think I'm not the only one finding this project thought provoking and beautiful, at least in a poetic sense.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoWait, Wolfram has a physics project? Like, with a lab and everything? Oh, no, not like with a lab. Like with "make some assumptions about what's going on that match Wolfram's pre-conceived ideas, then run some simulations and see if anything that looks somewhat like reality falls out". It's quite a stretch to call that a "physics project". From that starting point, I'm skeptical that anything that falls out is going to shed light on actual real-world consciousness.
- jonsen 6y agoWait, Einstein had a physics project? Like, with lab and everything?
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoHe did not. But Einstein was still far more driven by experimental results (that is to say, by physical reality) than Wolfram is.
- jonsen 6y agoHow can we tell what actually drives Wolfram?
- root_axis 6y agoI'm not a philosopher, but I don't understand why we need an explanation for subjective experience, how could we exist without it? If someone were to shove their hand into an open flame, but they also happened to lack the subjective experience of pain, it's conceivable they might not immediately recoil from the flame. This type of reaction doesn't seem compatible with our evolutionary history, the subjective experience of pain is unbearable because if it wasn't it wouldn't function as an efficient guide for avoiding damage to the body. All other subjective experiences seem to follow from the same logic.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoBecause there is nothing but subjective experience. Not knowing what subjective experience is means there's literally no objective explanation for anything. Everything you experience - including all of science and math - is filtered through subjective processes. If you think this is wrong, try to prove that math exists in a self-consistent form without any subjectivity at all. You won't be able to. If you read Hilbert's original notes on his Project, he was using words like "intuitive" to describe certain fundamental elements in math. This bothered him, but the problem turned out to be more complex than he expected. Philosophers have a special word - 'intersubjective' - to describe how these experiences work. Intersubjective experiences are collectively consistent and reliable but are not provably independent and objective. The best you'll get from them is consistency and predictability. It's easy to confuse this with objectivity, but as members of the human species we can only know our own experiences, and we don't know anything at all about what other possible experiences are available. So it would be naive - and a denial of the Copernican Principle - to assume that human intersubjectivity is somehow definitive and ultimate.
- root_axis 6y ago> Not knowing what subjective experience is means there's literally no objective explanation for anything. Everything you experience - including all of science and math - is filtered through subjective processes. I'm not following the logic here, unless you're suggesting some type of solipsism. Yes, my experience that 2+2=4 is technically subjective, but I'm not sure what it would even mean to "objectively" understand this to be true, I can't understand how it would have any consequences for any aspect of reality as we understand it. > Intersubjective experiences are collectively consistent and reliable but are not provably independent and objective. The best you'll get from them is consistency and predictability. Thanks for this term, TIL. I suppose my question is, what value does objectivity have over intersubjectitivy? I doesn't sound like this type of objectivity is even a coherent concept because it seems like a definitional contradiction to have any experience of objective reality. If something is objective but fundamentally unknowable, it might as well not exist, right?
- airhead969 6y agoThe unexplainable: why are you you and cosmogony. Consciousness seems to be a mostly self-assembling, emergent property of suitably complex learning systems that are capable of abstract pattern matching, modeling, and anticipation. I have a difficult time (intractable) understanding from where you or I come into being as a conscious entity.
- dangoljames 6y agoYOU GO, Stephen :D
- stevebmark 6y agoThis article is absolutely terrible
- andagainagain 6y agoConsciousness... from a physics perspective. Well that sets off alarms already with the title. goign through the article, it does get better, but not much. the first step they go through is redefining consciousness. Well, most definitions of consciousness are vague and nearly meaningless, so that would be good news if there's wasn't. But it is... just as vague and meaningless as any other definition, but without the benefit of at least being the same thing other people are talking about. After that I feel like this gets into my complaints about most philosophy I've read. Complicated ideas based on vague ideas that just sorta ask you to go along and accept it on feel. IMO, I find the whole thing needs some major simplification and/or far more solid premises.
- galaxyLogic 6y agoWe can hear our thoughts and we can remember having "heard" them. I think that is consciousness. It is sensory perception of some of our brain-processes, interpreted by our brain, just like brain can categorize seeing blue as just that.
- marshmellman 6y agoWhy do you say “sensory” perception? Do you just mean that we think about our brain processes, or something else?
- galaxyLogic 6y agoThat's a good question. Somehow we perceive our thoughts. We perceive whether they are in English or in German. We perceive the likeness of what our ears would perceive if we spoke those thoughts out. Now what kind of sensor-mechanism could there be that would perceive those non-spoken thoughts? Well it can simply be perception of "brain-waves". The (original) stimuli for perception need not come from the outside only. When the light enters the eye it immediately becomes brain-signal. Same with our ears etc. So what we "perceive" is really brain-signals all the way. Therefore it does not sound mysterious to me how we could be able to "perceive thoughts", and it appears we can, we can "hear our thoughts".
- patcon 6y agoOK, I'll admit that I enjoy Stephen's writing on this topic, though I find it very longwinded. I like that it gets me thinking in weird directions, very outside the box
- andromaton 6y agoI think the HN community can do better re Wolfram. He is productive and accomplished, and another poster said long ago great to work with. In his interview with Fridman he appears quite enjoyable. It seems Wolfram has a good record of not being factually wrong. Now, regarding this article. I don't know enough math or physics (he has a PHD from Caltech) to be able to judge it on those terms. I also don't know enough philosophy or neurology to be able to pick apart his definition of consciousness. On the other hand, like most of us, I've thought and read about what consciousness might be, and this article expands my thinking space.
- 2342dfasdf 6y agoIt really doesn't matter to know exactly what consciousness is. Because high levels of intelligence and auto-drive can fully operate complexly enough to seem "conscious". I would start a research stating exactly what would constitute a "conscious human", maybe we could find not every human on the planet is actually conscious. Maybe most people are just looping into some psychological / environmental / sociological context, just like scripts running happily in loop, but not stepping outside its own code, at least not intentionally. The hypoteshis of humans being complex algorithms, beside the tabu chit-chat, implies the possibility of hacking minds just we can hack programs, looking for their bugs, triggering exploits to fully manage humans into a different setup, in order to make them work towards a different goal from what they were originally intended (having being pre-programmed by the society and/or parents).