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Electrons May Well Be Conscious
- lololtoday 5y agotheyre like, "weeee!!!"
- cblconfederate 5y agoYeah but are they religious? You can see them praying. Why are people so preoccupied with the extremely useless word "consciousness"
- goatlover 5y agoBecause it's not useless since we're all conscious, and it presents an interesting puzzle, since it doesn't easily fit with a physicist understanding of the world.
- ncmncm 5y agoSpeak for yourself. "Conscious" is an undefined term. Whether something or someone is conscious is a matter of personal preference, therefore moot, by the definition. Unless you are an EMT, and need a release signed.
- goatlover 5y agoIt is well defined in philosophy of mind. So I'm not speaking for myself.
- ncmncm 5y agoWe could equally well say that it is defined completely differently for each group using it. For those of us not listening specifically to one of those groups, it is undefined, because we have no way to choose among indefinitely many. Even within, it is typically much more slippery than they prefer to admit.
- dekhn 5y agoI work on the assumption consciousness and free will don't actually exist. Things are a lot simpler that way.
- goatlover 5y agoSo you don't experience pain, have dreams, visualize or inner dialog? You don't have color, smell, taste sensations? It's kind of silly to deny your own experiences.
- dekhn 5y agoWell, I split the subjective experience of consciousness (which I do experience, although I deny that experience means that consciousness truly exists) from that of free well. I think we're subjectively conscious (the inner movie) but that doesn't equate to any sort "mind" or "free will". Somewhere between determinism and compatibilism, if that helps. I think it's very dangerous to say "I experience consciousness, therefore it's scientifically valid".
- MattPalmer1086 5y agoI'm not sure what you mean by whether consciousness "really exists". Clearly you have a subjective experience... How is that not consciousness? Or are you saying that consciousness is an emergent property of matter arranged in certain ways (i.e. your brain) and has no existence separate from that? Completely agree free will is a separate argument, and that it doesn't exist.
- dekhn 5y ago"clearly" I have subjective experience? prove it. consciousness is an emergent property of matter arranged in certain ways.
- goatlover 5y agoThat's like proving to a solipsist that other minds exist. You know that you have subjective experiences by virtue of having them yourself. And you even admit consciousness is something by saying that it emerges.
- theamk 5y agoPhysicists generally study the things which can be objectively verified by experiment. One of the first things they want to know about any new theory is, "how can we design the experiment to confirm or deny it". The problem of conscious does not seem to be there yet -- there are no non-thought experiments that one can perform to check for consciousness status. There has been some attempts, but they often end up with the silly results -- for example, one definition defined DVD players as conscious [0]. [0] https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
- geodel 5y agoYeah, Electron are conscious and they feel hurt when scientists bang electrons against hard metal surface.
- angelzen 5y agoLike any parent will tell you, 'hurt' is simply a signal for 'avoid'. As language decoheres at accelerated speed, we can safely say that electrons are hurt by the electromagnetic field generated by other electrons.
- HPsquared 5y agoLots of legal and moral significance.
- cblconfederate 5y agoSo has religion, but we got over it
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- b33j0r 5y agoI like your spin on this, if a bit quirky and strange. Is “consciousness” as a pursuit useless only because we don’t know what it means? Or just a pointless endeavor?
- cblconfederate 5y agoconsciousness is a philosophical term, something that belongs to the world of ideas, and our brain is designed to generate ideas regardless of reality. What i find misguided is the various attempts to find a physically measurable quantity of "consciousness", which is like saying we ll find a measurable quantity of "justice". Consciousness has been attributed to the soul, to gods, to some hypothetical physical property, to quantum fluctuations, to nanotubules etc. Unless one has a good definition of consciousness, it can be all of these things or none of them. Until then, it's just a word
- slowmovintarget 5y agoThey are preoccupied with advancing their particular definition of the word. In this case, the concepts of panpsychism, I guess.
- stevebmark 5y agoAt what point do we consider Nautilus a tabloid? They hire writers to generate pseudo-science content, or promote graduate student poorly researched writing.
- angelzen 5y agoGPT + GAN = the future of news
- coldtea 5y agoSo, like any major news outlet?
- myWindoonn 5y agoQuantum choice is not pseudo-science; the poorly-researched writer here is you, not the article's author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_contextuality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_contextuality
- stevebmark 5y agoThis article is flagged. How did you come across the HN post to comment on it so recently?
- myWindoonn 5y agoI use https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ to browse HN. I can easily see flagged and dead articles.
- checkyoursudo 5y agoI know I'm not the person you're asking, but I opened the link when I saw it on the front page at the time (a couple of days ago apparently), and I only just now got around to looking at it. It seems to still let me comment. Are you not supposed to be able to comment on flagged articles?
- remram 5y agoThis entire piece somehow assumes that "modern physics" is investigating consciousness. What a stupid article.
- kazinator 5y agoIf electrons can think, this revitalizes the EE student's great hope: that they could be taught to read and obey schematics!
- anotherhue 5y agoHot take: Fundamental forces are actually particle preferences.
- mdturnerphys 5y agoRelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem
- myWindoonn 5y agoYour comment was the only useful one in this entire discussion. It is shameful that folks here claim to be scientific and yet cannot read a single WP article.
- Ancalagon 5y agoAs much as I philosophically love the idea of panpsychism, you can't take this hypothesis seriously without some kind of test of consciousness. Then your test needs to cater towards not just obviously conscious entities (cats, dogs, humans), but also things we typically consider inanimate (electrons, rocks, boulders). Then you need to define the scale in a way that explains why a cat, despite being significantly smaller than a boulder, is also significantly more conscious. Realistically I believe consciousness is an emergent behavior. It might involve really complicated science we haven't nailed down yet, and is likely a result of environmental stimuli reinforcing it as a survivability trait in what was once unconscious, life-like material (e.g. viruses) over a very long period of time and through a lot of trial-and-error.
- myWindoonn 5y agoWe've had experimental evidence for decades that particles can be forced to make quantum choices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experime...
- theamk 5y agoYes, but those experiments have nothing to do with consciousness
- tmountain 5y agoConsciousness can't be measured with any scientific instrument, so there's no valid argument that electrons are conscious.
- zozbot234 5y agoSince elementary particles are inherently indiscernible for fundamental reasons, it's really only systems in mixed quantum states that could be endowed with consciousness, not so much the particles themselves. This matters because it gives a direct path for gradually more complex concious experiences to arise, via entanglement of multiple, simpler systems.
- malwarebytess 5y agoIt's a serious shame that this was flagged.
- kangnkodos 5y agoEverything, even salt has some small amount of consciousness. That's why I refuse to eat salt.
- feketegy 5y ago(X) Doubt.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]