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A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

209 points by Hooke 2y ago

gregwebs 2y ago
I don't see the word "consciousness" in the article. I thought that was the thing to figure out to understand the emergence of the mind.
- sctb 2y ago
  My general understanding is that "mind" is an objective concept; people have minds that cognize and think and learn and so on. Some minds are apparently more capable of those things than others. When speaking about intelligence, it makes sense to associate that with the mind. Consciousness, on the other hand, is (even) less well-defined and is usually considered to be subjective. Being subjective, it tends to resist all of the usual objective approaches of description and analysis. Hard problem and all that.
  - Aardwolf 2y ago
    The mind concept here then could apply to computers as well since after all those can also be configured to learn things and behave in certain intelligent ways
  - mirekrusin 2y ago
    I don't understand why people have problem with simply stating that it is emergent phenomenon and that's it. Similarly to how computer is computer and half sized computer is half of its bigger friend – you can keep halving it until there is no "computer" left in it. Or pencil – you have pencil that you call pencil; what about pencil half size of it? and so on until you hit single atom. You had pencil, now you don't, where on this line there was pencil and then there wasn't?
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      Pencil is just an idea, minds objectively have qualia (measured internally). Edit: you can’t measure “pencilness,” but you can’t help but know whether or not you’re in pain.
      - heyjamesknight 2y ago
        You can measure "pencilness" a number of ways depending on how you operationalize the term. It could be a measure of how well it achieves the function of a pencil, how well it matches the collective understanding of the form of a pencil, how closely it materially relates to an existing reference pencil. These are all proxy measures, but all of science is done by proxy.
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        Well sure, but you’re putting “pencilness” onto the collection of heterogeneous matter, same with any other level of analysis. Consciousness isn’t debatable by the thing doing it, it’s an irrepressible fact of existence to the conscious thing. Science needs a falsifiable hypothesis for the “why” of the material->consciousness transition, and constructing such a hypothesis is difficult for a lot of reasons. Saying “it emerges from neuron connections” just doesn’t capture the issue. Why should neuron connections produce this observer thing when we seem to see machines do similar things without it? Is a sufficiently large recurrent neural network conscious by the same process? If not or if so, then why? What precisely produces the phenomenon. Emergence is an observation, not a hypothesis for why that observation occurred. It could just be a trick of the light.
        heyjamesknight 2y ago
        Agreed, I was just commenting that one can measure "penciliness". I see a lot of pedantic arguments against measurement by proxy, as if every single measurement we do wasn't by proxy.
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    - heyjamesknight 2y ago
      Because that's the same as giving up and saying "we don't understand." What is mind emerging into? When a video game experience emerges from the combination of processing, display, sound, and controller input, it emerges into a level of organization that a mind can participate in. It emerges into a system of organization emanating downward from the mind experiencing it. It can't just "emerge" into existence on its own. If a game falls in the woods, its not a game. If you call the mind an emergent phenomenon but can't describe the context into which it emerges, you've added nothing to our understanding.
      - layer8 2y ago
        Emergence has no “into”, IMO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
        heyjamesknight 2y ago
        All of those examples are emergence "into". The snowflake emerges into the mathematical patterns emanating downward. The termite cathedral emerges into the architectural context of the observer. Without emanating structure, there is no "emergence"—just a proliferation of chaos and error.
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        Not to butt in, but if the emergent phenomena only exists in the mind of the observer, and the mind is a material phenomenon, the where in the observer-snowflake system is there anything not fully decomposable to atoms, particle motion, so on?
        heyjamesknight 2y ago
        The mind is not a material phenomenon, in the same way that a video game is not a computational one. The emergent experience exists at the level into which it emerges. It's constructed at a lower level of organization, but not decomposable to them in a way that's meaningful without their recomposition—that's what makes the phenomenon emergent. The qualitative experience of a film does not meaningfully break down to the bits in the video stream, the compressed sound waves carrying the dialog, the photons hitting your eyes' rods and cones, or the biochemical signals in your brain. The mind is not in the brain, but on the brain.
    - LiquidHelium 2y ago
      It depends on what you mean by consciousness, if we are talking about the intelligence or self awareness or thoughts then I don’t see any problem with it being emergent. But if we are talking about conscious experience/qualia (not something that thinks or interacts, but something that just experiences) then I think it’s incoherent for it to be emergent. That there is a consciousness that is experiencing something is the only thing we can know as 100% true, and the world itself is something we can never know is 100% true: we could be a brain in a vat, we could be dreaming, in the matrix, a demon making us hallucinate everything etc. It seems a bit silly to say the 100% true thing is an illusion or is dependent because something that we don’t know is true tells us it is.
  - Symmetry 2y ago
    There's a whole scientific study of consciousness that actually comes out of behaviorism. The thought is, if I have a conscious experience I can then exhibit the behavior of talking about it. From this developed a whole paradigm of investigation including stuff like the research of subliminal images. Stanislas Dehaene's book Consciousness and the Brain does a great job of describing this, though it's 10 years old now.
    - wat10000 2y ago
      Trouble is that you can also exhibit the behavior of talking about it just by being exposed to the idea, even if you don't have the experience. If you were never exposed to the idea and you started talking about it, then I'd be convinced you had the experience, but nobody is actually like that. The fact that the idea exists at all proves to me that at least one human somewhere had conscious experience, and I know there's at least one more (me), but that's it.
      - Symmetry 2y ago
        I was evidently unclear. I mean, if an image of a parakeet is flashed up on a screen for 100ms and you can say "I saw a parakeet" you were conscious of the image. If the image is flashed for 50 ms and you can't you weren't conscious of the image. In this paradigm being conscious is being conscious of particular things.
        wat10000 2y ago
        That seems like a fairly simple machine could be conscious, which is not usually how the word is used. Typically consciousness means that there is some ill-defined entity that has a subjective experience, what the philosophers call qualia.
  - baddash 2y ago
    mind = container of values consciousness = meta-attention
card_zero 2y ago
I read it all, for a certain value of "read". It's very long, and heavy on examples and fascinating facts, but skimps on getting to the point. I enjoyed the line about plant biologists suffering from brain envy. The article gets better from about halfway through as skeptical views begin to be introduced, but eventually it lets go of that and turns back into lot of hand-wavy awe about mycorrhizal networks, and I missed what the "new proposal" is. If it's only saying that intelligence is an emergent property of connections, and could therefore emerge in swarms or societies, we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his sentient ant nests.
- SubiculumCode 2y ago
  'Get to the point' is my primary response to the article..
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- hikarudo 2y ago
  > we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his sentient ant nests. A similar idea is present in Herbert Simon's 'The sciences of the artificial', where he describes a sentient city.
kayo_20211030 2y ago
The whole proposal can be distilled to Connections => Mind. We've been struggling with the causal effect, even the definition, of what the `=>` means in humans. Seems a long shot that the study of, and breathy coverage, of plant signals will illuminate much. Maybe it will, but I'm not holding my breath.
ripped_britches 2y ago
Can we retitle this as there is nothing new here besides long musings
- mandmandam 2y ago
  There is, if you read it. > Which brings us to the most striking idea — that some types of electrical oscillations could mediate an experience of self. > In 2021, Hanson found that similar electrical activity — spontaneous low-frequency oscillations — is evident across many different organisms, from E. coli to humans. She concluded that across a diverse range of creatures, the oscillations may have a shared function: constructing a single organismal whole from many parts. That's fascinating stuff which deserves the title (and the long context). 2021 is pretty damn new as far as theories of mind go.
  - unsupp0rted 2y ago
    This would be a mechanism for how in sci fi they scan a nebula and say "signs of intelligence" or something like that. "Our scanners have picked up the telltale oscillations".
    - mandmandam 2y ago
      Exactly! And even a possible mechanism for the Universal Translator (as long as you don't Darmok your Tanagras too hard).
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Oh that's the key point. I barely noticed it. OK, well, this is very literally about the first steps in how brains evolved. It's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one involving clay crystals "reproducing". But it's steep to say this is about minds, which only works if we accept the various parts of the article that urge us to stop being so egotistical and anthropocentric as to expect that a mind should be capable of doing something clever.
    - 2y ago
sincerecook 2y ago
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xg15 2y ago
Maybe the definition of what "intelligence" is could be sharpened by having a look at LLMs and "traditional" computer programs and asking what exactly the difference between the two is. Almost all the traditional criteria of intelligence - reasoning, planning, decisionmaking, memory etc - are exhibited pretty trivially by standard computer programs. Nevertheless no one would think of them as "intelligent" in the sense that humans or animals are. On the other hand, we now have LLMs, that sent the entire tech world into a multi-year frenzy, precisely because they appear to possess that human-like intelligence. And that is even though they perform worse than classical programs in some of the "intelligence" measures: For the first time, we have to worry that a computer program is "bad at math". They cannot reflect on past decisions and are physically unable to store long-term memories. And yet, we're much more likely to believe that an LLM is "intelligent" than a classical program. This makes me think that our formal decisions of "intelligence" (the ones that would also qualify fungal networks, swarms, cells, societies, etc) and what we intuitively look out for, are really two different things.
- andoando 2y ago
  I wouldn't say that's true at all for traditional computer programs. They're doing explicitly what they are designed to do, there is no adaptation/learning.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Code vs. data. The code needed create, train, and perform inference on a Transformer is quite short. How short depends on how you count the `import` statements in https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py and https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/sample.py https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/sample.py etc. Spreadsheets performing linear regression etc., — Do they learn? Sure! If you accept that Transformers adapt and learn then you must accept that a spreadsheet also does, because someone implemented GPT-2 in Excel: https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need Do polymorphic computer viruses adapt? Border Gateway Protocol? Exponential backoff? Autocomplete? And that's aside from any algorithmic search results or "social" feeds, which are nothing but that.
giorgioz 2y ago
I've been thinking as well that from some perspective a human being isn't actually a single life but rather itself a multitude of separate tiny-life forms that cooperate to survive (the cells). The voice in our head is the emerging consciouness that act as a captain, it's useful for the captain to think of itself as one being. Now this said, I feel the article is jumping a bit too much on the Animism hippie bandwagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism Of course, there is some intelligence in any life form behaviour, but if you want to say that a tomato plant is intelligent than you need to use another word or set of words for more advanced life forms. Putting in the same bag a tomato plant and a dolphin clearly makes the word intelligence so vague it loses almost every practical meaning. To clarify also the part where it talks about earth being an organism. I've thought of this as well, the whole universe could be a life form, each planet and star in it a cell in its body. It's a possibility. Or maybe even our whole universe is just a cell in someone's body. It's possible, but I fear there is little science in the people of that article and just old fashion Animism and protect "the mother earth" natural spiritual thinking that has existed for thousands of years. Those people see the world as if they are druids in a fantasy novel. I see myself more as a wizard. We might have different opinions. I will take them seriously when they can LITERALLY speak with animals daily in useful manners and tell vines to move. Until then is just (a) Fantasy. I can summon electricity and fireballs (with technology), if they want to say they are druids they better step up their enchantments. Telling "sit" to a dog and then writing long articles on how dogs are so intelligent doesn't cut it for me.
- deleted 2y ago
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- truculent 2y ago
  While it shares some similarities with animism, it’s a fundamentally materialist viewpoint, which puts it at odds with animism. Materialism is so rooted within our culture that I think it can be hard to fully grok alternative viewpoints.
- dimal 2y ago
  The term I’ve seen used the most is “basal cognition”. It’s used to describe agentic problem solving behavior seen at lower scales and in different problem spaces where we normally have trouble imagining intelligence. Michael Levin’s paper, “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”[0] is a good, readable explanation of the concept. He does a ton of YouTube talks explaining it as well.[1] Very watchable, and pretty mind-blowing. It’s not wishy washy animism. He and his lab are doing rigorous experiments and finding some very unusual things. [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/ar... [1] https://youtu.be/StqX-LH0IN8?si=NhwMdWxBLZrghUom https://youtu.be/StqX-LH0IN8?si=NhwMdWxBLZrghUom
Jordan_Pelt 2y ago
I'm probably a crackpot, but I'm convinced it's the other way around--matter emerges from mind. The only refutation I'm familiar with is Samuel Johnson kicking a rock, which I don't find very persuasive.
amanaplanacanal 2y ago
The interesting thing about mind (as far as I'm concerned) isn't intelligence, but consciousness. Intelligence isn't well defined. According to our current understanding of physics, everything is cause and effect, which throws free will out the window, so what do we even mean by intelligence? Is it just when chains of cause and effect become so complex we can't understand them any more? And if so, why does consciousness even exist at all? The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying. I guess the other option is to divorce consciousness from physical master entirely, but then we have kind of opened ourselves up to almost any kind of woo. It really is a hard problem.
- messe 2y ago
  > The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying. Integrated Information Theory seems interesting, at least, but far from flawless. Like panpsychism though, I don't think it's falsifiable.
  - skissane 2y ago
    > Integrated Information Theory To me, it seems like a bit of a trick - take a philosophical question, propose an answer, stuff some mathematics into the answer, maybe even a few minor empirical predictions, make people think those added bits make the answer more likely to be correct and more respectable than competing answers which don’t do that - I don’t think that actually works though > Like panpsychism though, I don't think it's falsifiable. Well, I don’t think any theory in this area is falsifiable. Either you give up demanding falsifiability or embrace agnosticism (we don’t know and we maybe never will) Maybe give up on falsifiability, since presenting it as an absolute must-have is self-defeating (the idea that falsifiability is a must-have is itself unfalsifiable)
- skissane 2y ago
  > According to our current understanding of physics, everything is cause and effect, We don’t know whether the apparent indeterminism of QM ultimately reduces to determinism or not. It depends on which interpretation of QM you prefer, and none of them has any strong empirical support > which throws free will out the window, As well as assuming deterministic QM, you also assume incompatibilism. Reject incompatibilism and you can still have free will even if physical reality turns out to be 100% deterministic > so what do we even mean by intelligence? People disagree greatly as to what “intelligence” means, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone suggest that the issue turns on free will. Usually people present “definition of intelligence” and “does free will exist?” as questions having a significant degree of orthogonality > Is it just when chains of cause and effect become so complex we can't understand them any more? Mediaeval philosophers commonly viewed intelligence or intellect as a power, the power to engage in conceptual thought. A “power” is a casual concept - it is the possibility of causing something - but possibility, not necessity. It is orthogonal to the question of free will, so long as our position on free will enables us to meaningfully speak of “things we could have done but never actually did”, “thoughts we could have thought but never actually thought”… It was our dog’s birthday the other day. She’s a smart dog, but she’s never going to understand the concept of a birthday… she enjoyed some special treats but she’ll never understand why she got them on that occasion. She has intelligence, but not the specifically conceptual sort of intelligence mediaeval philosophers were talking about. And free will doesn’t enter into that > And if so, why does consciousness even exist at all? I think intelligence and consciousness are distinct issues. Consciousness is having subjective experiences; intelligence is having thought processes of a certain kind. One entity might have consciousness without intelligence, another might have intelligence without consciousness. > The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying. I don’t think the competitors to panpsychism are necessarily inconsistent. Of course, if you reject panpsychism, you need a non-trivial criterion to decide what is conscious - and people will ask you to justify that criterion - and maybe all you can say is that it is axiomatic - and I get why proposing axioms can feel unsatisfying, but it isn’t strictly speaking inconsistent, assuming your axioms are consistent with each other. By the Münchausen trilemma, every quest for justification must end in either infinite regress, circularity, or axioms - and if axioms feel unsatisfying, infinite regress and circularity are just as unsatisfying - so maybe we are just doomed to feel unsatisfied. > I guess the other option is to divorce consciousness from physical master entirely, but then we have kind of opened ourselves up to almost any kind of woo. I don’t know what you mean by “divorce… entirely”-do dualists (of whatever kind) do that? Do idealists? From my own idealist viewpoint, I reject the claim that idealism necessarily entails “almost any kind of woo”, and I think the thought that it does relies on misunderstanding or misrepresenting idealism, or else confusing certain versions of it which maybe do do that with other versions which don’t
senordevnyc 2y ago
[flagged]
skissane 2y ago
Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinctions between different idealisms, such as realist vs anti-realist and micro-idealism vs macro-idealism… Add to that the typical journalistic fault of forcing one to read through paragraph after paragraph of narrative before actually explaining what the thesis they are presenting is. I’d much prefer to read a journal article where they state their central thesis upfront
- protocolture 2y ago
  I bailed 10 words in and came to the comments to see if the article was worth reading. Thanks for confirming its a skip.
  - felizuno 2y ago
    So many adjectives... and "radical" in the title is a doozy considering this article is essentially a stoner summary of LeDoux's "Deep History of Ourselves" with the science replaced with thesaurus suggestions.
  - rramadass 2y ago
    The gp is wrong. They are just being supercilious with a word salad of their own which is best ignored. The article is pretty good making you rethink all your preexisting concepts of Mind/Intelligence based on what we know from Biology today. It is not an article on various theories of Mind but on how scientific research (conveyed through pointers from various researchers) is advancing rapidly on so many fronts that we are forced to confront our very fundamental beliefs. Absolutely worth reading at least a couple of times.
  - metalmangler 2y ago
    I held out a bit longer, and then skimmed, but started to become offended by the whole ,thing, but couldnt be bothered to be that annoyed by so many different things. That said I am very much into bieng outside in the company of many animals, working with them, and just bieng in wild environments, but language fails, when it comes to describing how species interact, and in the end, we cant describe our own mental proceseses in a clear, intellible by all, way. There is yet to be a genius of the mind, where the definition of genius is,:an idea that once explained, everyone else goes "of course" My main issue is that these sort of philisophical projects, reek, of money and hidden agenda's, and shade very quickly into, policy decisions, and quasi religious beurocratic powers.
lubujackson 2y ago
Just read an interesting sci-fi novel grappling with this question very directly - Blindsight by Peter Watts, if anyone is interested.
- red75prime 2y ago
  The problem with sci-fi and this matter is that the author can portray anything that suits his/her ideas. Can Rorschach exist as described? Who knows.
  - Apocryphon 2y ago
    Watts also believes in the Ganzfeld effect, as per Starfish, yeah so his beliefs in the mind should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.
    - red75prime 2y ago
      What's wrong with the Ganzfeld effect? I can experience it personally even without a uniform visual field by suppressing saccades for about thirty seconds. Or, at least, I could. It seems I lost the knack of controlling saccades. When I was younger I was able to suppress saccades and induce nystagmus-like eyeballs movement. Ah, I still can do it after some tries. Amplitude of induced nystagmus seems to have diminished though. And it's more uncomfortable than it was.
      - Apocryphon 2y ago
        He believes, or rather entertains, the parapsychology claims that the effect relates to ESP https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references
marcus_holmes 2y ago
I found it fascinating how this discussion dovetails with the discussion around free will. In both cases, defining the actual thing under discussion is hard. If you can accurately predict a decision in advance, is that "free will"? If an organism reacts to a stimulus in an appropriate manner, is that "intelligence"? In both cases, we're complex chemical organisms doing all of this with complex chemistry. If we rule out souls and spirits and similar, then it's just chemistry. If we're following a predefined set of chemical rules in response to a set of stimuli, then how is that "free willed" or "intelligent"? The arbitrary line between tropism and intelligence seems very arbitrary. But on the other had, we are made of meat. We experience free will and intelligence. We think, and make decisions, seemingly unrestricted by the method we use to do that. We are clearly intelligent, and clearly make decisions that we are apparently free to make.
- anon291 2y ago
  One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of. And this is where these arguments that seek to reduce intelligence to purely mechanistic processes breaks down. For sure, everything the article is saying is true, and indeed, the system could be classified as intelligent, but this is a wholly different question from 'agency' or 'free will'. Even exceptionally dumb people have free will, and exceptionally intelligent computers (ChatGPT, DeepSeek, et al) have no free agency.
  - koakuma-chan 2y ago
    > Even exceptionally dumb people have free will “Free will” does not exist because the world is deterministic. In other words, if you have made a decision, you couldn’t have made any other decision, so there wasn’t any choice in the first place. A persons IQ has nothing to do with this.
    - NoGravitas 2y ago
      One may object that at the quantum level, the world really is nondeterministic. Epicurus also argued this over 2000 years ago - that sometimes atoms "swerved" unpredictably in their movements, accounting for free will. Of course, the counterpoint to this argument is that randomness is not free will any more than determinism is; neither offers any space for agency as something that's causal rather than just experienced.
ivan_gammel 2y ago
Intelligence is the ability of a system to make observations and adjust itself based on them (like our brain is changing while learning or our environment is changing with technological progress). It’s definitely not binary state. If we put the internal complexity of the system on one axis and external complexity (what can be observed and meaningfully processed) on another axis, there’s a circle on the plane representing what humans perceive as being intelligent. It intersects with a few other species so we do think now that they are intelligent. Everything else outside that circle is either too primitive or too complex for us, so we do not see e.g. plants as intelligent, but we also may not recognize aliens as intelligent because their existence is too complex for us to even notice it. Humans unlocked evolutionary path not based on DNA, so we evolve much quicker now through science and culture. Our circle is thus expanding and we start realizing how more primitive systems think and create new intelligent systems.
tweaqslug 2y ago
The article went straight from mind to intelligence before the first paragraph; admitting defeat before making a move. Intelligence is still riding the wave of an evolutionary hype cycle. Mind, on the other hand, is some supremely useful stuff.
scotty79 2y ago
New proposal for how digestion emerges from the stomach.
_1tem 2y ago
Here's an interesting thought experiment. Take any definition of consciousness or intelligence that is not based on biological components. For example "reacts to stimuli, exhibits anger". You can apply that definition to other entities like the United States. Does the United States react to stimuli (i.e. invasion) and exhibit anger? Yes (e.g. Pearl Harbor). Therefore the United States is conscious? If a person argues that an LLM is conscious or intelligent based on how it responds, is the United States conscious or intelligent?
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
  I think the US is conscious.
- koakuma-chan 2y ago
  > Therefore the United States is conscious? Assuming the United States react to stimuli and exhibit anger, and assuming that the definition of being conscious is reacting to stimuli and exhibiting anger, yes, the United States are conscious.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- svantana 2y ago
  This is one of the themes of the classic 1979 book "Godel, Escher, Bach".
- cjfd 2y ago
  One part of consciousness is the 'stream of consciousness'. I.e., a single-threaded, if you will, sequence of observations and/or language that is extracted from all the parallel processing that is happening in the brain. The US does not have that. If there were one single news broadcast that all people were listening to all the time and were basing their action on, one might start considering that the US is conscious. Also, considering who the current president is, the US is quite the opposite of intelligent.
- timewizard 2y ago
nilslindemann 2y ago
Mind emerges from matter? I thought it was the other way around.
ilaksh 2y ago
Reminds me of concepts like a Metasystem Transition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasystem_transition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasystem_transition or Global Brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain
ilaksh 2y ago
Maybe the increased status management, self pattern persistence, or general problem solving abilities of intelligence comes from processes that integrate data from multiple colony members and use the integration, broadcast and storage of information over a series of immediate steps and long time frames to synthesize concepts and plans at a higher level than individuals can manage. But the intelligent work is in the connections, exchange, and integration of information. I think that security for human groups should be thought of in this context. Many strong communication links or maybe a holistic network are required for preventing sub-colonies from becoming "other".
causality0 2y ago
And they believe that if we can bring ourselves to dramatically reconsider what we think we know about it, we will end up with a much better concept of how to restabilize the balance between human and nonhuman life amid an ecological omnicrisis that threatens to permanently alter the trajectory of every living thing on Earth. Do we really have to resort to total bullshit claims like this in order to make people care about this subject? Knowing what is and is not intelligent has fuck-all to do with not destroying the environment we as a species rely on for survival. The people and forces at work care not one whit. You could prove that chickens can write symphonies and it would make no difference.
carlosjobim 2y ago
What is the god damned problem with writers today? > From a snarl of roots that grip dry, shallow soil, the knobbly trunk of an ancient olive tree twisted into a surprisingly lush crown of dense, silvery-green leaves. Far above, the retrofuturistic pattern of a geodesic dome framed the blue sky outside. Dan Ryan considered the tree: “It’s probably close to 1,800 years old.” Why do articles always have to start this way? These writers are writing the blandest and most boring clichés imaginable and everybody hates it, yet they keep doing it. Is it so fucking important for their egos to be perceived as some kind of antiquated stereotypical writer that they have to continue to humiliate themselves and their readers with this, just to impress who? No wonder everybody is watching short form stuff on TikTok, that gets to the point. No wonder people are listening to three hour podcasts, where the people who are being interviewed can talk uninterrupted, instead of having their quotes salted and peppered between some musings from the writer. Where are the writers that make articles for normally intelligent people to read, that aren't filled with fluff, but aren't filled with equations either? Are these all making YouTube videos now?
keernan 2y ago
Meet the Electrome. It Can Turn You Into an Assassin. In “We Are Electric,” Sally Adee explores the body’s capacity for electricity; the results can be shocking. NYT 2023 https://archive.ph/DpMMr https://archive.ph/DpMMr
whymeogod 2y ago
Makes me wonder what it would be like to be a bat https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf
keernan 2y ago
When I finished reading this article, several of its resource articles, and the HN comments, I returned to my HN feed, and a few HN posts down, I come across: DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures. What an interesting intersection. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185769
standardly 2y ago
Someone hasn't read Julian Jaynes...

209 points by Hooke 2y ago

I don't see the word "consciousness" in the article. I thought that was the thing to figure out to understand the emergence of the mind.

sctb 2y ago
My general understanding is that "mind" is an objective concept; people have minds that cognize and think and learn and so on. Some minds are apparently more capable of those things than others. When speaking about intelligence, it makes sense to associate that with the mind. Consciousness, on the other hand, is (even) less well-defined and is usually considered to be subjective. Being subjective, it tends to resist all of the usual objective approaches of description and analysis. Hard problem and all that.
- Aardwolf 2y ago
  The mind concept here then could apply to computers as well since after all those can also be configured to learn things and behave in certain intelligent ways
- mirekrusin 2y ago
  I don't understand why people have problem with simply stating that it is emergent phenomenon and that's it. Similarly to how computer is computer and half sized computer is half of its bigger friend – you can keep halving it until there is no "computer" left in it. Or pencil – you have pencil that you call pencil; what about pencil half size of it? and so on until you hit single atom. You had pencil, now you don't, where on this line there was pencil and then there wasn't?
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    Pencil is just an idea, minds objectively have qualia (measured internally). Edit: you can’t measure “pencilness,” but you can’t help but know whether or not you’re in pain.
    - heyjamesknight 2y ago
      You can measure "pencilness" a number of ways depending on how you operationalize the term. It could be a measure of how well it achieves the function of a pencil, how well it matches the collective understanding of the form of a pencil, how closely it materially relates to an existing reference pencil. These are all proxy measures, but all of science is done by proxy.
      - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        Well sure, but you’re putting “pencilness” onto the collection of heterogeneous matter, same with any other level of analysis. Consciousness isn’t debatable by the thing doing it, it’s an irrepressible fact of existence to the conscious thing. Science needs a falsifiable hypothesis for the “why” of the material->consciousness transition, and constructing such a hypothesis is difficult for a lot of reasons. Saying “it emerges from neuron connections” just doesn’t capture the issue. Why should neuron connections produce this observer thing when we seem to see machines do similar things without it? Is a sufficiently large recurrent neural network conscious by the same process? If not or if so, then why? What precisely produces the phenomenon. Emergence is an observation, not a hypothesis for why that observation occurred. It could just be a trick of the light.
        heyjamesknight 2y ago
        Agreed, I was just commenting that one can measure "penciliness". I see a lot of pedantic arguments against measurement by proxy, as if every single measurement we do wasn't by proxy.
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  - heyjamesknight 2y ago
    Because that's the same as giving up and saying "we don't understand." What is mind emerging into? When a video game experience emerges from the combination of processing, display, sound, and controller input, it emerges into a level of organization that a mind can participate in. It emerges into a system of organization emanating downward from the mind experiencing it. It can't just "emerge" into existence on its own. If a game falls in the woods, its not a game. If you call the mind an emergent phenomenon but can't describe the context into which it emerges, you've added nothing to our understanding.
    - layer8 2y ago
      Emergence has no “into”, IMO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
      - heyjamesknight 2y ago
        All of those examples are emergence "into". The snowflake emerges into the mathematical patterns emanating downward. The termite cathedral emerges into the architectural context of the observer. Without emanating structure, there is no "emergence"—just a proliferation of chaos and error.
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        Not to butt in, but if the emergent phenomena only exists in the mind of the observer, and the mind is a material phenomenon, the where in the observer-snowflake system is there anything not fully decomposable to atoms, particle motion, so on?
        heyjamesknight 2y ago
        The mind is not a material phenomenon, in the same way that a video game is not a computational one. The emergent experience exists at the level into which it emerges. It's constructed at a lower level of organization, but not decomposable to them in a way that's meaningful without their recomposition—that's what makes the phenomenon emergent. The qualitative experience of a film does not meaningfully break down to the bits in the video stream, the compressed sound waves carrying the dialog, the photons hitting your eyes' rods and cones, or the biochemical signals in your brain. The mind is not in the brain, but on the brain.
  - LiquidHelium 2y ago
    It depends on what you mean by consciousness, if we are talking about the intelligence or self awareness or thoughts then I don’t see any problem with it being emergent. But if we are talking about conscious experience/qualia (not something that thinks or interacts, but something that just experiences) then I think it’s incoherent for it to be emergent. That there is a consciousness that is experiencing something is the only thing we can know as 100% true, and the world itself is something we can never know is 100% true: we could be a brain in a vat, we could be dreaming, in the matrix, a demon making us hallucinate everything etc. It seems a bit silly to say the 100% true thing is an illusion or is dependent because something that we don’t know is true tells us it is.
- Symmetry 2y ago
  There's a whole scientific study of consciousness that actually comes out of behaviorism. The thought is, if I have a conscious experience I can then exhibit the behavior of talking about it. From this developed a whole paradigm of investigation including stuff like the research of subliminal images. Stanislas Dehaene's book Consciousness and the Brain does a great job of describing this, though it's 10 years old now.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    Trouble is that you can also exhibit the behavior of talking about it just by being exposed to the idea, even if you don't have the experience. If you were never exposed to the idea and you started talking about it, then I'd be convinced you had the experience, but nobody is actually like that. The fact that the idea exists at all proves to me that at least one human somewhere had conscious experience, and I know there's at least one more (me), but that's it.
    - Symmetry 2y ago
      I was evidently unclear. I mean, if an image of a parakeet is flashed up on a screen for 100ms and you can say "I saw a parakeet" you were conscious of the image. If the image is flashed for 50 ms and you can't you weren't conscious of the image. In this paradigm being conscious is being conscious of particular things.
      - wat10000 2y ago
        That seems like a fairly simple machine could be conscious, which is not usually how the word is used. Typically consciousness means that there is some ill-defined entity that has a subjective experience, what the philosophers call qualia.
- baddash 2y ago
  mind = container of values consciousness = meta-attention

card_zero 2y ago

I read it all, for a certain value of "read". It's very long, and heavy on examples and fascinating facts, but skimps on getting to the point. I enjoyed the line about plant biologists suffering from brain envy. The article gets better from about halfway through as skeptical views begin to be introduced, but eventually it lets go of that and turns back into lot of hand-wavy awe about mycorrhizal networks, and I missed what the "new proposal" is. If it's only saying that intelligence is an emergent property of connections, and could therefore emerge in swarms or societies, we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his sentient ant nests.

SubiculumCode 2y ago
'Get to the point' is my primary response to the article..
- deleted 2y ago
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hikarudo 2y ago
> we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his sentient ant nests. A similar idea is present in Herbert Simon's 'The sciences of the artificial', where he describes a sentient city.

kayo_20211030 2y ago

The whole proposal can be distilled to Connections => Mind. We've been struggling with the causal effect, even the definition, of what the `=>` means in humans. Seems a long shot that the study of, and breathy coverage, of plant signals will illuminate much. Maybe it will, but I'm not holding my breath.

ripped_britches 2y ago

Can we retitle this as there is nothing new here besides long musings

mandmandam 2y ago
There is, if you read it. > Which brings us to the most striking idea — that some types of electrical oscillations could mediate an experience of self. > In 2021, Hanson found that similar electrical activity — spontaneous low-frequency oscillations — is evident across many different organisms, from E. coli to humans. She concluded that across a diverse range of creatures, the oscillations may have a shared function: constructing a single organismal whole from many parts. That's fascinating stuff which deserves the title (and the long context). 2021 is pretty damn new as far as theories of mind go.
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  This would be a mechanism for how in sci fi they scan a nebula and say "signs of intelligence" or something like that. "Our scanners have picked up the telltale oscillations".
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    Exactly! And even a possible mechanism for the Universal Translator (as long as you don't Darmok your Tanagras too hard).
- card_zero 2y ago
  Oh that's the key point. I barely noticed it. OK, well, this is very literally about the first steps in how brains evolved. It's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one involving clay crystals "reproducing". But it's steep to say this is about minds, which only works if we accept the various parts of the article that urge us to stop being so egotistical and anthropocentric as to expect that a mind should be capable of doing something clever.
  - 2y ago

sincerecook 2y ago

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xg15 2y ago

Maybe the definition of what "intelligence" is could be sharpened by having a look at LLMs and "traditional" computer programs and asking what exactly the difference between the two is. Almost all the traditional criteria of intelligence - reasoning, planning, decisionmaking, memory etc - are exhibited pretty trivially by standard computer programs. Nevertheless no one would think of them as "intelligent" in the sense that humans or animals are. On the other hand, we now have LLMs, that sent the entire tech world into a multi-year frenzy, precisely because they appear to possess that human-like intelligence. And that is even though they perform worse than classical programs in some of the "intelligence" measures: For the first time, we have to worry that a computer program is "bad at math". They cannot reflect on past decisions and are physically unable to store long-term memories. And yet, we're much more likely to believe that an LLM is "intelligent" than a classical program. This makes me think that our formal decisions of "intelligence" (the ones that would also qualify fungal networks, swarms, cells, societies, etc) and what we intuitively look out for, are really two different things.

andoando 2y ago
I wouldn't say that's true at all for traditional computer programs. They're doing explicitly what they are designed to do, there is no adaptation/learning.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Code vs. data. The code needed create, train, and perform inference on a Transformer is quite short. How short depends on how you count the `import` statements in https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py and https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/sample.py https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/sample.py etc. Spreadsheets performing linear regression etc., — Do they learn? Sure! If you accept that Transformers adapt and learn then you must accept that a spreadsheet also does, because someone implemented GPT-2 in Excel: https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need Do polymorphic computer viruses adapt? Border Gateway Protocol? Exponential backoff? Autocomplete? And that's aside from any algorithmic search results or "social" feeds, which are nothing but that.

giorgioz 2y ago

I've been thinking as well that from some perspective a human being isn't actually a single life but rather itself a multitude of separate tiny-life forms that cooperate to survive (the cells). The voice in our head is the emerging consciouness that act as a captain, it's useful for the captain to think of itself as one being. Now this said, I feel the article is jumping a bit too much on the Animism hippie bandwagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism Of course, there is some intelligence in any life form behaviour, but if you want to say that a tomato plant is intelligent than you need to use another word or set of words for more advanced life forms. Putting in the same bag a tomato plant and a dolphin clearly makes the word intelligence so vague it loses almost every practical meaning. To clarify also the part where it talks about earth being an organism. I've thought of this as well, the whole universe could be a life form, each planet and star in it a cell in its body. It's a possibility. Or maybe even our whole universe is just a cell in someone's body. It's possible, but I fear there is little science in the people of that article and just old fashion Animism and protect "the mother earth" natural spiritual thinking that has existed for thousands of years. Those people see the world as if they are druids in a fantasy novel. I see myself more as a wizard. We might have different opinions. I will take them seriously when they can LITERALLY speak with animals daily in useful manners and tell vines to move. Until then is just (a) Fantasy. I can summon electricity and fireballs (with technology), if they want to say they are druids they better step up their enchantments. Telling "sit" to a dog and then writing long articles on how dogs are so intelligent doesn't cut it for me.

deleted 2y ago
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truculent 2y ago
While it shares some similarities with animism, it’s a fundamentally materialist viewpoint, which puts it at odds with animism. Materialism is so rooted within our culture that I think it can be hard to fully grok alternative viewpoints.
dimal 2y ago
The term I’ve seen used the most is “basal cognition”. It’s used to describe agentic problem solving behavior seen at lower scales and in different problem spaces where we normally have trouble imagining intelligence. Michael Levin’s paper, “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds”[0] is a good, readable explanation of the concept. He does a ton of YouTube talks explaining it as well.[1] Very watchable, and pretty mind-blowing. It’s not wishy washy animism. He and his lab are doing rigorous experiments and finding some very unusual things. [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/ar... [1] https://youtu.be/StqX-LH0IN8?si=NhwMdWxBLZrghUom https://youtu.be/StqX-LH0IN8?si=NhwMdWxBLZrghUom

Jordan_Pelt 2y ago

I'm probably a crackpot, but I'm convinced it's the other way around--matter emerges from mind. The only refutation I'm familiar with is Samuel Johnson kicking a rock, which I don't find very persuasive.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago

The interesting thing about mind (as far as I'm concerned) isn't intelligence, but consciousness. Intelligence isn't well defined. According to our current understanding of physics, everything is cause and effect, which throws free will out the window, so what do we even mean by intelligence? Is it just when chains of cause and effect become so complex we can't understand them any more? And if so, why does consciousness even exist at all? The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying. I guess the other option is to divorce consciousness from physical master entirely, but then we have kind of opened ourselves up to almost any kind of woo. It really is a hard problem.

messe 2y ago
> The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying. Integrated Information Theory seems interesting, at least, but far from flawless. Like panpsychism though, I don't think it's falsifiable.
- skissane 2y ago
  > Integrated Information Theory To me, it seems like a bit of a trick - take a philosophical question, propose an answer, stuff some mathematics into the answer, maybe even a few minor empirical predictions, make people think those added bits make the answer more likely to be correct and more respectable than competing answers which don’t do that - I don’t think that actually works though > Like panpsychism though, I don't think it's falsifiable. Well, I don’t think any theory in this area is falsifiable. Either you give up demanding falsifiability or embrace agnosticism (we don’t know and we maybe never will) Maybe give up on falsifiability, since presenting it as an absolute must-have is self-defeating (the idea that falsifiability is a must-have is itself unfalsifiable)
skissane 2y ago
> According to our current understanding of physics, everything is cause and effect, We don’t know whether the apparent indeterminism of QM ultimately reduces to determinism or not. It depends on which interpretation of QM you prefer, and none of them has any strong empirical support > which throws free will out the window, As well as assuming deterministic QM, you also assume incompatibilism. Reject incompatibilism and you can still have free will even if physical reality turns out to be 100% deterministic > so what do we even mean by intelligence? People disagree greatly as to what “intelligence” means, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone suggest that the issue turns on free will. Usually people present “definition of intelligence” and “does free will exist?” as questions having a significant degree of orthogonality > Is it just when chains of cause and effect become so complex we can't understand them any more? Mediaeval philosophers commonly viewed intelligence or intellect as a power, the power to engage in conceptual thought. A “power” is a casual concept - it is the possibility of causing something - but possibility, not necessity. It is orthogonal to the question of free will, so long as our position on free will enables us to meaningfully speak of “things we could have done but never actually did”, “thoughts we could have thought but never actually thought”… It was our dog’s birthday the other day. She’s a smart dog, but she’s never going to understand the concept of a birthday… she enjoyed some special treats but she’ll never understand why she got them on that occasion. She has intelligence, but not the specifically conceptual sort of intelligence mediaeval philosophers were talking about. And free will doesn’t enter into that > And if so, why does consciousness even exist at all? I think intelligence and consciousness are distinct issues. Consciousness is having subjective experiences; intelligence is having thought processes of a certain kind. One entity might have consciousness without intelligence, another might have intelligence without consciousness. > The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying. I don’t think the competitors to panpsychism are necessarily inconsistent. Of course, if you reject panpsychism, you need a non-trivial criterion to decide what is conscious - and people will ask you to justify that criterion - and maybe all you can say is that it is axiomatic - and I get why proposing axioms can feel unsatisfying, but it isn’t strictly speaking inconsistent, assuming your axioms are consistent with each other. By the Münchausen trilemma, every quest for justification must end in either infinite regress, circularity, or axioms - and if axioms feel unsatisfying, infinite regress and circularity are just as unsatisfying - so maybe we are just doomed to feel unsatisfied. > I guess the other option is to divorce consciousness from physical master entirely, but then we have kind of opened ourselves up to almost any kind of woo. I don’t know what you mean by “divorce… entirely”-do dualists (of whatever kind) do that? Do idealists? From my own idealist viewpoint, I reject the claim that idealism necessarily entails “almost any kind of woo”, and I think the thought that it does relies on misunderstanding or misrepresenting idealism, or else confusing certain versions of it which maybe do do that with other versions which don’t

senordevnyc 2y ago

[flagged]

skissane 2y ago

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinctions between different idealisms, such as realist vs anti-realist and micro-idealism vs macro-idealism… Add to that the typical journalistic fault of forcing one to read through paragraph after paragraph of narrative before actually explaining what the thesis they are presenting is. I’d much prefer to read a journal article where they state their central thesis upfront

protocolture 2y ago
I bailed 10 words in and came to the comments to see if the article was worth reading. Thanks for confirming its a skip.
- felizuno 2y ago
  So many adjectives... and "radical" in the title is a doozy considering this article is essentially a stoner summary of LeDoux's "Deep History of Ourselves" with the science replaced with thesaurus suggestions.
- rramadass 2y ago
  The gp is wrong. They are just being supercilious with a word salad of their own which is best ignored. The article is pretty good making you rethink all your preexisting concepts of Mind/Intelligence based on what we know from Biology today. It is not an article on various theories of Mind but on how scientific research (conveyed through pointers from various researchers) is advancing rapidly on so many fronts that we are forced to confront our very fundamental beliefs. Absolutely worth reading at least a couple of times.
- metalmangler 2y ago
  I held out a bit longer, and then skimmed, but started to become offended by the whole ,thing, but couldnt be bothered to be that annoyed by so many different things. That said I am very much into bieng outside in the company of many animals, working with them, and just bieng in wild environments, but language fails, when it comes to describing how species interact, and in the end, we cant describe our own mental proceseses in a clear, intellible by all, way. There is yet to be a genius of the mind, where the definition of genius is,:an idea that once explained, everyone else goes "of course" My main issue is that these sort of philisophical projects, reek, of money and hidden agenda's, and shade very quickly into, policy decisions, and quasi religious beurocratic powers.

lubujackson 2y ago

Just read an interesting sci-fi novel grappling with this question very directly - Blindsight by Peter Watts, if anyone is interested.

red75prime 2y ago
The problem with sci-fi and this matter is that the author can portray anything that suits his/her ideas. Can Rorschach exist as described? Who knows.
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  Watts also believes in the Ganzfeld effect, as per Starfish, yeah so his beliefs in the mind should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.
  - red75prime 2y ago
    What's wrong with the Ganzfeld effect? I can experience it personally even without a uniform visual field by suppressing saccades for about thirty seconds. Or, at least, I could. It seems I lost the knack of controlling saccades. When I was younger I was able to suppress saccades and induce nystagmus-like eyeballs movement. Ah, I still can do it after some tries. Amplitude of induced nystagmus seems to have diminished though. And it's more uncomfortable than it was.
    - Apocryphon 2y ago
      He believes, or rather entertains, the parapsychology claims that the effect relates to ESP https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references

marcus_holmes 2y ago

I found it fascinating how this discussion dovetails with the discussion around free will. In both cases, defining the actual thing under discussion is hard. If you can accurately predict a decision in advance, is that "free will"? If an organism reacts to a stimulus in an appropriate manner, is that "intelligence"? In both cases, we're complex chemical organisms doing all of this with complex chemistry. If we rule out souls and spirits and similar, then it's just chemistry. If we're following a predefined set of chemical rules in response to a set of stimuli, then how is that "free willed" or "intelligent"? The arbitrary line between tropism and intelligence seems very arbitrary. But on the other had, we are made of meat. We experience free will and intelligence. We think, and make decisions, seemingly unrestricted by the method we use to do that. We are clearly intelligent, and clearly make decisions that we are apparently free to make.

anon291 2y ago
One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of. And this is where these arguments that seek to reduce intelligence to purely mechanistic processes breaks down. For sure, everything the article is saying is true, and indeed, the system could be classified as intelligent, but this is a wholly different question from 'agency' or 'free will'. Even exceptionally dumb people have free will, and exceptionally intelligent computers (ChatGPT, DeepSeek, et al) have no free agency.
- koakuma-chan 2y ago
  > Even exceptionally dumb people have free will “Free will” does not exist because the world is deterministic. In other words, if you have made a decision, you couldn’t have made any other decision, so there wasn’t any choice in the first place. A persons IQ has nothing to do with this.
  - NoGravitas 2y ago
    One may object that at the quantum level, the world really is nondeterministic. Epicurus also argued this over 2000 years ago - that sometimes atoms "swerved" unpredictably in their movements, accounting for free will. Of course, the counterpoint to this argument is that randomness is not free will any more than determinism is; neither offers any space for agency as something that's causal rather than just experienced.

ivan_gammel 2y ago

Intelligence is the ability of a system to make observations and adjust itself based on them (like our brain is changing while learning or our environment is changing with technological progress). It’s definitely not binary state. If we put the internal complexity of the system on one axis and external complexity (what can be observed and meaningfully processed) on another axis, there’s a circle on the plane representing what humans perceive as being intelligent. It intersects with a few other species so we do think now that they are intelligent. Everything else outside that circle is either too primitive or too complex for us, so we do not see e.g. plants as intelligent, but we also may not recognize aliens as intelligent because their existence is too complex for us to even notice it. Humans unlocked evolutionary path not based on DNA, so we evolve much quicker now through science and culture. Our circle is thus expanding and we start realizing how more primitive systems think and create new intelligent systems.

tweaqslug 2y ago

The article went straight from mind to intelligence before the first paragraph; admitting defeat before making a move. Intelligence is still riding the wave of an evolutionary hype cycle. Mind, on the other hand, is some supremely useful stuff.

scotty79 2y ago

New proposal for how digestion emerges from the stomach.

_1tem 2y ago

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Take any definition of consciousness or intelligence that is not based on biological components. For example "reacts to stimuli, exhibits anger". You can apply that definition to other entities like the United States. Does the United States react to stimuli (i.e. invasion) and exhibit anger? Yes (e.g. Pearl Harbor). Therefore the United States is conscious? If a person argues that an LLM is conscious or intelligent based on how it responds, is the United States conscious or intelligent?

FeepingCreature 2y ago
I think the US is conscious.
koakuma-chan 2y ago
> Therefore the United States is conscious? Assuming the United States react to stimuli and exhibit anger, and assuming that the definition of being conscious is reacting to stimuli and exhibiting anger, yes, the United States are conscious.
- deleted 2y ago
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svantana 2y ago
This is one of the themes of the classic 1979 book "Godel, Escher, Bach".
cjfd 2y ago
One part of consciousness is the 'stream of consciousness'. I.e., a single-threaded, if you will, sequence of observations and/or language that is extracted from all the parallel processing that is happening in the brain. The US does not have that. If there were one single news broadcast that all people were listening to all the time and were basing their action on, one might start considering that the US is conscious. Also, considering who the current president is, the US is quite the opposite of intelligent.
timewizard 2y ago

nilslindemann 2y ago

Mind emerges from matter? I thought it was the other way around.

ilaksh 2y ago

Reminds me of concepts like a Metasystem Transition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasystem_transition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasystem_transition or Global Brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain

ilaksh 2y ago

Maybe the increased status management, self pattern persistence, or general problem solving abilities of intelligence comes from processes that integrate data from multiple colony members and use the integration, broadcast and storage of information over a series of immediate steps and long time frames to synthesize concepts and plans at a higher level than individuals can manage. But the intelligent work is in the connections, exchange, and integration of information. I think that security for human groups should be thought of in this context. Many strong communication links or maybe a holistic network are required for preventing sub-colonies from becoming "other".

causality0 2y ago

And they believe that if we can bring ourselves to dramatically reconsider what we think we know about it, we will end up with a much better concept of how to restabilize the balance between human and nonhuman life amid an ecological omnicrisis that threatens to permanently alter the trajectory of every living thing on Earth. Do we really have to resort to total bullshit claims like this in order to make people care about this subject? Knowing what is and is not intelligent has fuck-all to do with not destroying the environment we as a species rely on for survival. The people and forces at work care not one whit. You could prove that chickens can write symphonies and it would make no difference.

carlosjobim 2y ago

What is the god damned problem with writers today? > From a snarl of roots that grip dry, shallow soil, the knobbly trunk of an ancient olive tree twisted into a surprisingly lush crown of dense, silvery-green leaves. Far above, the retrofuturistic pattern of a geodesic dome framed the blue sky outside. Dan Ryan considered the tree: “It’s probably close to 1,800 years old.” Why do articles always have to start this way? These writers are writing the blandest and most boring clichés imaginable and everybody hates it, yet they keep doing it. Is it so fucking important for their egos to be perceived as some kind of antiquated stereotypical writer that they have to continue to humiliate themselves and their readers with this, just to impress who? No wonder everybody is watching short form stuff on TikTok, that gets to the point. No wonder people are listening to three hour podcasts, where the people who are being interviewed can talk uninterrupted, instead of having their quotes salted and peppered between some musings from the writer. Where are the writers that make articles for normally intelligent people to read, that aren't filled with fluff, but aren't filled with equations either? Are these all making YouTube videos now?

keernan 2y ago

Meet the Electrome. It Can Turn You Into an Assassin. In “We Are Electric,” Sally Adee explores the body’s capacity for electricity; the results can be shocking. NYT 2023 https://archive.ph/DpMMr https://archive.ph/DpMMr

whymeogod 2y ago

Makes me wonder what it would be like to be a bat https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

keernan 2y ago

When I finished reading this article, several of its resource articles, and the HN comments, I returned to my HN feed, and a few HN posts down, I come across: DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures. What an interesting intersection. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185769

standardly 2y ago

Someone hasn't read Julian Jaynes...