5 ms·

"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)" Easily answered: * We don't know how consciousness comes int

by lutusp 3y ago

"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)" Easily answered: * We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence. * We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it. * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption. * The alternative would be to argue for a consciousness exceptionalism in "life" forms for which there is no evidence and many counterarguments. * Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy. * Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase transition that confronts physical laws or requires an explanation.

gfodor 3y ago
That's not an answer, that's an argument. Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.
- willmadden 3y ago
  The paper defines life as a chemical reaction, which is also a heuristic. We do not know if aspects of "life" exist outside of our present understanding of physics. It's great to claw away at the edges, but I don't think anyone can answer the question "what is life?" at this point.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  Yes. You can't prove anything by proving it is the simplest explanation. The only way to prove things is to prove that it is the only possible explanation. Occam's Razor is just a useful mind tool that helps us navigate the world based on the observation that oftentimes the simplest explanation tends to be what is actually happening. BTW lots of other logical mistakes.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    It's also a useful tool in science. For example, we do not know and cannot prove the one-way speed of light, only a round trip speed of light. That light travels at the same speed in all directions is just a useful application of Occam's Razor; it is effectively unknowable and no experiments have yet been devised that can falsify the alternatives. Having a set one-way speed of light is a convention
- lutusp 3y ago
  > That's not an answer, that's an argument. Fair enough, and I agree. But there may be no answer in a scientific sense -- testable, falsifiable and so forth. > Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic. Yes, true, but it's not meant to force a conclusion, only offer guidance, which might be entirely wrong at times.
xmonkee 3y ago
I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but I disagree with this one somewhat: > Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption. An even simpler first few steps: * We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists outside of our experience of it * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter exists only within our consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.
- lutusp 3y ago
  > * We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists outside of our experience of it A nice point. One might call it the the solipsistic argument. Not easy to argue against, and not unlike the debate about consciousness -- we aren't close to saying what it is, or which assemblies of matter can be reliably said to possess it.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Is there evidence of consciousness in a rock?
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  It's a reducto ad absurdum argument. Either consciousness only emerges in living things, or it exists in everything. The brain is made of tissue and tissue is made of matter, therefore, it exists in all mater or doesn't exist at all. I believe this is the thrust of panpsychism/panentheism.
- lukifer 3y ago
  There isn’t the same kind of ontological boundary in a rock, as there is an organism. My hunch is: there’s a low-grade subjectivity/qualia to all of the universe, which would include the particles of the rock, but the rock would not experience an independent “rock-ness”. The consciousness of organisms are perhaps more like a dissociative state, analogous to a gravity well of subjectivity, such that the qualia are concentrated inside a boundary (the entity that is intelligently chasing energy differentials), and excluding most information outside this boundary. The primary reason for this hunch is that “ouch” is an experience, rather than merely a mathematical/algorithmic update to a neural net (compare with artificial NN’s, chemical feedback loops, etc). An “ouch” is not needed to strengthen the signal; just tilt the training feedback stronger as necessary (-10,000 points to “eat the berry that made us sick”). And it seems prohibitively expensive expensive to bootstrap “strange loop” subjectivity merely to strengthen those numbers via an “ouch”. But instead, if some form of subjectivity were to pre-exist, Darwinian pressures would co-opt it as an efficient feedback loop mechanism, and then iterate until arriving at the “consciousness” of animals and humans (including an incentive to pay more attention to qualia in the organism boundary, and only minimally outside it)
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    If we scale the rock up to earth, the ontological boundary would be similar, so maybe the earth is conscious?
cameldrv 3y ago
I don't think Kauffman is making any claims about consciousness here. I agree that consciousness is a big mystery. Kauffman's theory (haven't yet read this paper, but have read a lot of his other work), is that self-replicating entities are essentially inevitable in environments that have above some level of chemical complexity. That chemical complexity also weakly implies that there is useable free energy, which is also a requirement for self replication.
- rileyphone 3y ago
  Fwiw Kauffman has a very interesting stance on consciousness that he is hinting at here. Consider this recent paper [1] or interview [0] where he explains his thinking. Cool to see a respected scientist exploring areas that were previously looked down as quackery by academia. 0. https://youtu.be/XWbxdREQ6xM?si=t2-AywFf2cnQfAni https://youtu.be/XWbxdREQ6xM?si=t2-AywFf2cnQfAni 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0303264722002015 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03032...
kurthr 3y ago
What's interesting here is that life on earth has commonly defined has been around gathering negative entropy for several billion years (photosynthesis and the rise of oxygen for over 3 billion) and growing exponentially on earth. That is a sizeable fraction of the age of the universe. Human like ancestors have been using fire for over a million years (based on the oxygen generated above), agriculture for thousands, and industry for hundreds. All of these are exponential increases in energy density, entropy generation, and negative entropy consumption. To not describe them as phase changes is odd. It's telling that economic growth over the last 4000 years (first farming and now industry in the last ~400) also appear to be exponential over several orders of magnitude. Whether there's a quick end to this or not is an open question, but they still look like phase changes. That weather is starting to be affected is equally telling. A conflation of consciousness with life seems weird, though. If ordered psuedo-crystals are life (or clay-RNA / DNA crystals) or even viruses are life, I don't know anyone claiming they're conscious. It would be like assuming life caused capitalism or industry, when certainly they fit very different exponential curves. Making arguments that industrialization (use of power other than human/animal work) isn't a "phase change" in economy would also be similarly strange. Now, whether it "confronts physical laws" or requires an explanation, I have no idea. They do seem to be transitions at least as interesting as weather on Jupiter. https://communities.springernature.com/posts/were-humans-the-earliest-users-of-fire https://communities.springernature.com/posts/were-humans-the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf
bsza 3y ago
> We don't know how consciousness comes into being Consciousness and life are completely different things. The article doesn't even mention consciousness. > Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy It is special in the sense that it's remarkably complex e.g. compared to a mineral. It is not special in the sense that it obeys the same laws as a mineral. > Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase transition that confronts physical laws or requires an explanation No one claims it confronts physical laws. In my understanding, the article states: life may emerge naturally as molecules bump into each other, combine and eventually become complex enough that self-sustaining/self-replicating systems can come into being by chance. This process might be deterministic enough that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a cosmological time scale).
- lutusp 3y ago
  >> We don't know how consciousness comes into being > Consciousness and life are completely different things. Yes, but they have a dependent relationship. We argue that life doesn't require consciousness, but we also argue that consciousness requires life. IMHO both arguments have issues. > The article doesn't even mention consciousness. Yes, that's true, but it's an identifier of life -- that and the ability to reproduce. If the wind waves a flag, we don't attribute life to the wind. If a person waves a flag, we do. If a robot waves a flag, well, that's an open question at the moment. > ... This process might be deterministic enough that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a cosmological time scale). Ah, I see an issue with that. We now know there are galaxies much older than ours (and younger), and if life is a common property of matter (still not determined) and if it relies on a certain set of preconditions, that would mean life would appear at widely different times, depending on location.
nox101 3y ago
> Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption. Plenty of things don't follow that. Heat something up it gets hotter but at some point it tips the scale and burns. Cool down water and it gets colder but at some point it hits a threshold and freezes. 1000s of similar examples. Put a bunch of hydrogen together and not much happens. Put enough and it becomes a star. It seems like consciousness could follow the same pattern and still fit occam's razor
mekoka 3y ago
Hardline materialism is indeed dying and the presumption that all matter possesses a degree of consciousness currently has two major undercurrents: panpsychism and idealism. Most scientists that operate under the assumption that consciousness, as we experience it, is an emergent property align toward panpsychism, matter and consciousness somehow being co-primitives in the ontology to kickstart reality. But there are many problems with panpsychism, the first being that it's a dualism, that is it requires two separate magic tricks at bootup. Since physics only knows about matter, panpsychism is not considered a scientific theory, just an interesting philosophy. The later problems with it are leftovers from the formerly popular materialist framework. How does the proto consciousness of matter grow to give us the taste of sugar, or love? Where is that conscious property? How to identify it? Etc. Now, from an Occam's razor's perspective, I think the less popular idealism (consciousness is the primitive, then it boots up matter) is actually the most parsimonious. It's the least intuitive at first, but when you take the time to listen to arguments from a scientific and analytical philosophy standpoint (e.g Don Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup), it's the only one that actually makes any kind of sense, while in the process solving most of the numerous problems raised in physics and philosophy (e.g. local realism is false, so where is matter when consciousness doesn't experience it? If the probability that we're in the one real reality 1/N, why would we assume that we are? And many more). It also gives us as a bonus that it manages to reconcile those fields with the nondual intuition from traditions that document accounts of people who have lived with that realization (e.g. Buddhism, Advaita, Taoism, Sufism, Christian mysticism). It does require a profound conceptual paradigm shift. Way deeper than at first glance we realize is necessary. So I generally just recommend that people dive into it by reading or listening to discussions by the people that I've mentioned, rather than knee-jerk responding.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

by lutusp 3y ago

gfodor 3y ago

That's not an answer, that's an argument. Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.

willmadden 3y ago
The paper defines life as a chemical reaction, which is also a heuristic. We do not know if aspects of "life" exist outside of our present understanding of physics. It's great to claw away at the edges, but I don't think anyone can answer the question "what is life?" at this point.
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
Yes. You can't prove anything by proving it is the simplest explanation. The only way to prove things is to prove that it is the only possible explanation. Occam's Razor is just a useful mind tool that helps us navigate the world based on the observation that oftentimes the simplest explanation tends to be what is actually happening. BTW lots of other logical mistakes.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  It's also a useful tool in science. For example, we do not know and cannot prove the one-way speed of light, only a round trip speed of light. That light travels at the same speed in all directions is just a useful application of Occam's Razor; it is effectively unknowable and no experiments have yet been devised that can falsify the alternatives. Having a set one-way speed of light is a convention
lutusp 3y ago
> That's not an answer, that's an argument. Fair enough, and I agree. But there may be no answer in a scientific sense -- testable, falsifiable and so forth. > Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic. Yes, true, but it's not meant to force a conclusion, only offer guidance, which might be entirely wrong at times.

xmonkee 3y ago

I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but I disagree with this one somewhat: > Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption. An even simpler first few steps: * We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists outside of our experience of it * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter exists only within our consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.

lutusp 3y ago
> * We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists outside of our experience of it A nice point. One might call it the the solipsistic argument. Not easy to argue against, and not unlike the debate about consciousness -- we aren't close to saying what it is, or which assemblies of matter can be reliably said to possess it.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Is there evidence of consciousness in a rock?

bongodongobob 3y ago
It's a reducto ad absurdum argument. Either consciousness only emerges in living things, or it exists in everything. The brain is made of tissue and tissue is made of matter, therefore, it exists in all mater or doesn't exist at all. I believe this is the thrust of panpsychism/panentheism.
lukifer 3y ago
There isn’t the same kind of ontological boundary in a rock, as there is an organism. My hunch is: there’s a low-grade subjectivity/qualia to all of the universe, which would include the particles of the rock, but the rock would not experience an independent “rock-ness”. The consciousness of organisms are perhaps more like a dissociative state, analogous to a gravity well of subjectivity, such that the qualia are concentrated inside a boundary (the entity that is intelligently chasing energy differentials), and excluding most information outside this boundary. The primary reason for this hunch is that “ouch” is an experience, rather than merely a mathematical/algorithmic update to a neural net (compare with artificial NN’s, chemical feedback loops, etc). An “ouch” is not needed to strengthen the signal; just tilt the training feedback stronger as necessary (-10,000 points to “eat the berry that made us sick”). And it seems prohibitively expensive expensive to bootstrap “strange loop” subjectivity merely to strengthen those numbers via an “ouch”. But instead, if some form of subjectivity were to pre-exist, Darwinian pressures would co-opt it as an efficient feedback loop mechanism, and then iterate until arriving at the “consciousness” of animals and humans (including an incentive to pay more attention to qualia in the organism boundary, and only minimally outside it)
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  If we scale the rock up to earth, the ontological boundary would be similar, so maybe the earth is conscious?

cameldrv 3y ago

I don't think Kauffman is making any claims about consciousness here. I agree that consciousness is a big mystery. Kauffman's theory (haven't yet read this paper, but have read a lot of his other work), is that self-replicating entities are essentially inevitable in environments that have above some level of chemical complexity. That chemical complexity also weakly implies that there is useable free energy, which is also a requirement for self replication.

rileyphone 3y ago
Fwiw Kauffman has a very interesting stance on consciousness that he is hinting at here. Consider this recent paper [1] or interview [0] where he explains his thinking. Cool to see a respected scientist exploring areas that were previously looked down as quackery by academia. 0. https://youtu.be/XWbxdREQ6xM?si=t2-AywFf2cnQfAni https://youtu.be/XWbxdREQ6xM?si=t2-AywFf2cnQfAni 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0303264722002015 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03032...

kurthr 3y ago

What's interesting here is that life on earth has commonly defined has been around gathering negative entropy for several billion years (photosynthesis and the rise of oxygen for over 3 billion) and growing exponentially on earth. That is a sizeable fraction of the age of the universe. Human like ancestors have been using fire for over a million years (based on the oxygen generated above), agriculture for thousands, and industry for hundreds. All of these are exponential increases in energy density, entropy generation, and negative entropy consumption. To not describe them as phase changes is odd. It's telling that economic growth over the last 4000 years (first farming and now industry in the last ~400) also appear to be exponential over several orders of magnitude. Whether there's a quick end to this or not is an open question, but they still look like phase changes. That weather is starting to be affected is equally telling. A conflation of consciousness with life seems weird, though. If ordered psuedo-crystals are life (or clay-RNA / DNA crystals) or even viruses are life, I don't know anyone claiming they're conscious. It would be like assuming life caused capitalism or industry, when certainly they fit very different exponential curves. Making arguments that industrialization (use of power other than human/animal work) isn't a "phase change" in economy would also be similarly strange. Now, whether it "confronts physical laws" or requires an explanation, I have no idea. They do seem to be transitions at least as interesting as weather on Jupiter. https://communities.springernature.com/posts/were-humans-the-earliest-users-of-fire https://communities.springernature.com/posts/were-humans-the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf

bsza 3y ago

> We don't know how consciousness comes into being Consciousness and life are completely different things. The article doesn't even mention consciousness. > Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy It is special in the sense that it's remarkably complex e.g. compared to a mineral. It is not special in the sense that it obeys the same laws as a mineral. > Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase transition that confronts physical laws or requires an explanation No one claims it confronts physical laws. In my understanding, the article states: life may emerge naturally as molecules bump into each other, combine and eventually become complex enough that self-sustaining/self-replicating systems can come into being by chance. This process might be deterministic enough that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a cosmological time scale).

lutusp 3y ago
>> We don't know how consciousness comes into being > Consciousness and life are completely different things. Yes, but they have a dependent relationship. We argue that life doesn't require consciousness, but we also argue that consciousness requires life. IMHO both arguments have issues. > The article doesn't even mention consciousness. Yes, that's true, but it's an identifier of life -- that and the ability to reproduce. If the wind waves a flag, we don't attribute life to the wind. If a person waves a flag, we do. If a robot waves a flag, well, that's an open question at the moment. > ... This process might be deterministic enough that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a cosmological time scale). Ah, I see an issue with that. We now know there are galaxies much older than ours (and younger), and if life is a common property of matter (still not determined) and if it relies on a certain set of preconditions, that would mean life would appear at widely different times, depending on location.

nox101 3y ago

> Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption. Plenty of things don't follow that. Heat something up it gets hotter but at some point it tips the scale and burns. Cool down water and it gets colder but at some point it hits a threshold and freezes. 1000s of similar examples. Put a bunch of hydrogen together and not much happens. Put enough and it becomes a star. It seems like consciousness could follow the same pattern and still fit occam's razor

mekoka 3y ago

Hardline materialism is indeed dying and the presumption that all matter possesses a degree of consciousness currently has two major undercurrents: panpsychism and idealism. Most scientists that operate under the assumption that consciousness, as we experience it, is an emergent property align toward panpsychism, matter and consciousness somehow being co-primitives in the ontology to kickstart reality. But there are many problems with panpsychism, the first being that it's a dualism, that is it requires two separate magic tricks at bootup. Since physics only knows about matter, panpsychism is not considered a scientific theory, just an interesting philosophy. The later problems with it are leftovers from the formerly popular materialist framework. How does the proto consciousness of matter grow to give us the taste of sugar, or love? Where is that conscious property? How to identify it? Etc. Now, from an Occam's razor's perspective, I think the less popular idealism (consciousness is the primitive, then it boots up matter) is actually the most parsimonious. It's the least intuitive at first, but when you take the time to listen to arguments from a scientific and analytical philosophy standpoint (e.g Don Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup), it's the only one that actually makes any kind of sense, while in the process solving most of the numerous problems raised in physics and philosophy (e.g. local realism is false, so where is matter when consciousness doesn't experience it? If the probability that we're in the one real reality 1/N, why would we assume that we are? And many more). It also gives us as a bonus that it manages to reconcile those fields with the nondual intuition from traditions that document accounts of people who have lived with that realization (e.g. Buddhism, Advaita, Taoism, Sufism, Christian mysticism). It does require a profound conceptual paradigm shift. Way deeper than at first glance we realize is necessary. So I generally just recommend that people dive into it by reading or listening to discussions by the people that I've mentioned, rather than knee-jerk responding.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]