13 ms·

Consciousness as a State of Matter

94 points by evanb 13y ago

JonnieCache 13y ago
That crunching, gasping sound you can hear is Luboš Motl choking on his cornflakes.
- kordless 13y ago
  I have to say, if we're the things rendering this universe, it would be a helluva lot easier to code something similar up over coding up string theory.
  - yeahbutbut 13y ago
    Sorry, we just kind of threw that together in Perl to meet the deadline! ;;
chb 13y ago
"perceptronium"?
- henryaj 13y ago
  See also: 'utilitronium'. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Utilitronium http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Utilitronium > Utilitronium is relatively homogeneous matter optimized for maximum utility (like computronium is optimized for maximum computing power). For a paperclip maximiz[ing artificial intelligence], utilitronium is paperclips. For more complex values, no homogeneous organization of matter will have optimal utility. These sorts of terms are popular in the utilitarianism/rationality/friendly AI communities.
  - mbillie1 13y ago
    These sorts of terms are 'dangerous' if you like, because it's very easy to invent new words or phrases without giving them any actual _meaning_... but inventing the word is often enough for people to latch on to. The best argument is from Wittgenstein: What if the diviner tells us that when he holds the rod he feels that the water is five feet under the ground? or that he feels that a mixture of copper and gold is five feet under the ground? Suppose that to our doubts he answered: "You can estimate a length when you see it. Why shouldn't I have a different way of estimating it?" If we understand the idea of such an estimation, we shall get clear about the nature of our doubts about the statements of the diviner, and of the man who said he felt the visual image behind the bridge of his nose. There is the statement: "this pencil is five inches long", and the statement, "I feel that this pencil is five inches long", and we must get clear about the relation of the grammar of the first statement to the grammar of the second. To the statement "I feel in my hand that the water is three feet under the ground" we should like to answer: "I don't know what this means." But diviner would say: "Surely you know what it means. You know what 'three feet under the ground' means, and you know what 'I feel' means!" But I should answer him: I know what a word means in certain contexts. Thus I understand the phrase "three feet under the ground", say in the connections "The measurement has shown that the water runs three feet under the ground", "If we dig three feet deep we are going to strike water", "The depth of the water is three feet by the eye". But the use of the expression "a feeling in my hands of water being three feet under the ground" has yet to be explained to me. http://www.geocities.jp/mickindex/wittgenstein/witt_blue_en.html http://www.geocities.jp/mickindex/wittgenstein/witt_blue_en....
    - simonh 13y ago
      I understand what the concept of computronium means. It makes a certain kind of sense. The problem I have is that both a slide rule and an iPhone are computronium, yet there is little about their organisation or physical function that is similar. I'm not sure what saying that they are 'computronium' does for us. Furthermore computronium would presumably need a power source, facilities for maintenance or repair, heat dissipation, protection from external disruption, etc. I don't think it's a given that an optimal design would be in any way homogenous. Ultimately I think it's very naive and simplistic way of thinking about things, but if it's just intended as a shorthand for the purposes of thought experiments that's fine. I'm just concerned that some people might take the idea too literally.
      - henryaj 13y ago
        If computronium is a substance 'optimized for maximum computing power', then neither an iPhone or a slide rule are computronium. Computronium by that definition would be more like an entire planet terraformed to be a massive supercomputer - something with maximum possible computation density.
henryaj 13y ago
Tegmark also featured yesterday on HuffPo live: http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/math-our-universe/52bc659a2b8c2a24c500092d http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/math-our-universe/5...
hosh 13y ago
Huxley was a mystic. He knew his stuff :-) Headlessness is a synonym for mindlessness. Only way out is practice mindfulness.
- hosh 13y ago
  Downvoted, haha, I guess most people didn't know about Huxley's psychedelic experiments.
Aardwolf 13y ago
Given the amount of different seemingly unrelated terms in there: quantum factorization Hilbert & Fourier space tensor factorization of matrices Hilbert-Schmidt superoperators neural-network-based consciousness error-correcting codes condensed matter criticality Quantum Darwinism program ... I have to ask just to be certain: This paper is the real deal, and not auto-generated, right?
- mqzaidi 13y ago
  quantom factorization, hilbert spaces, fourier transforms and error correcting codes, all of these would be found in any quantum mechanics 101 course, definitely far from unrelated.
  - thearn4 13y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with this, after skimming the paper. For instance, the author does not seem to be using terms like quantum factorization in the usual way (In the sense of a problem tackled by Shor's algorithm).
    - gjm11 13y ago
      I've only glanced at the paper, but it looks to me as if he's using it in another perfectly usual way, namely referring to situations where the wavefunction and/or the Hilbert space it lives in can be written exactly or approximately as a product over simpler things. There's nothing wrong with that.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Hah! I read that abstract and thought, ok this reads like it was auto-generated. I'm withholding judgement until I've got time later to give it some additional reading.
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
farinasa 13y ago
Real, fake, don't care. Reading that abstract was pure joy.
- thearn4 13y ago
  arXiv's "General Physics" and "General Math" categories are great for finding these kinds of papers.
grondilu 13y ago
Rred the abstract, was about to call it BS, then I realized this was written by Max Tegmark! So definitely worth reading carefully.
samtimalsina 13y ago
Ok. Can anyone explain how Consciousness could be a state of Matter in Plain English? Because quantum mechanics voodoo?
- negamax 13y ago
  Because we are ultimately matter? Some electrical signals in your brain is current you. That's state of matter which is collectively called you.
  - samtimalsina 13y ago
    Undeniably, there is brain involved. But, How does some electrical signals in my brain turn out as an experience I have? Huge gap...
    - robmclarty 13y ago
      Agreed. I have yet to see a non-speculative argument for how mind and matter are connected. It's always explained as "Well, you know, there's just all these electrical signals going on in the brain. And, like, when the brain is damaged, or we prod it with electricity, weird things happen to the person's consciousness" (I'm oversimplifying). I understand that the brain and the mind are essentially connected, but that doesn't explain what consciousness is, where it comes from, or how it got there in the first place.
      - VLM 13y ago
        It gets queasy because its brains talking about brains, but analogies not involving the thinker thinking about itself never seem to cause any queasiness when an aggregate property establishes itself. So where is the strength of an iron I-beam? You can't cut it up and squeeze "strength juice" out of it. There's no little piece you can look at that says, "hey, I'm Euler's column law!". No individual atom decided, hey, I'm an I-beam now. But if you pile up an enormous number of iron (and other) atoms in the shape of an I-beam it inevitably behaves like a beam (or column) and suddenly "knows" its supposed to have angular momentum and collapse at a certain compression force and such. There's no particular magic to it, it just naturally happens to enormous numbers of iron atoms in a small place. About the same with stellar formation. There's no "essence of star" and no individual hydrogen atom decided to create a star. Just pile up a certain ridiculous number of hydrogen atoms and good luck not having it turn into a star. And not enough atoms, well no way it'll ignite, at least not naturally. It can kinda smolder at most. There are other analogies with grains of sand and landslides, water crystals and avalanches, etc. Any time you pile up a certain number of neurons at a certain complexity you get consciousness. We've run a couple billion experiments for quite a few centuries and every time you do it, aside from physical brain damage, it works. Now stuff like Jaynes "Origin of the bicameral mind" is a little controversial, but, perhaps, a great big pile of neurons can boot up in a peculiar mode, sort of. The specific hack of where it came from is only our species was able to add substantial amounts of fish to the diet, and fish oils and proteins seem to allow serious spectacular brain development in a positive feedback cycle until you get consciousness, then you overfish your ocean till all the fish die, then ... we're about to find out what comes after that.
peter303 13y ago
Bong physics!
jpeg_hero 13y ago
I think Tegmark is a straight up genius. interested in reading this article,, but, has he crossed the line from genius into madness?
- deleted 13y ago
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robmclarty 13y ago
Wow. That's a lot of words. How exactly does consciousness "emerge" from matter? Are there some kind of psychophysical bits that aren't currently accounted for in physics? Surely it's not merely epiphenomenal. How do intentions affect the physical world as seems to be happening when our minds move our bodies? What is the solution, here, to the mind-body problem? I just finished reading Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" which highlights some of the salient issues with reductionist explanations of consciousness, cognition, and value. I don't think these things are just a state of matter. http://www.amazon.ca/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755 http://www.amazon.ca/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-C...
- duaneb 13y ago
  Penrose addressed this (poorly, IMHO), but it gives a good idea as to his approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind
- kazagistar 13y ago
  There is no "mind emerging from matter" in the same way a hand does not "emerge" from fingers and a palm. This is because the label we apply is only in our heads. Reality is perfectly ok just being a bunch of quantum interactions; it is humans who have to label things "chair" "hand" "conciousness". Reality is reductionistic.
  - robmclarty 13y ago
    I don't agree that conscious experience is necessarily reducible. When I put a piece of cheesecake in my mouth, certain electrical signals will likely be firing in my brain, but those signals don't mean what it's like to consciously experience cheesecake in my mouth. That is, the signals themselves aren't indicative of the quality of my experience that only I, myself, can have in my conscious existence. The signals are only a physical correlate to my experience. I don't experience electrical signals in my brain. My experience is different than them. My point is, there is other stuff out there in the universe (mental stuff) that is different than physical stuff, that seems almost impossible to be explained as physical stuff. I believe in the physical sciences, evolution, and mathematics, but I don't think that they fully encapsulate all that there is, nor can they definitively explain things like consciousness (they at least need a little more added to them).
bfe 13y ago
So if we come to discover that time is fundamental instead of emergent, it could disprove his hypothesis of how consciousness is emergent. That's at least one way in which he makes his hypothesis testable. Just, please, no one forward this article to any Republican legislators and draw their attention to the NSF grants that supported the research.
jblow 13y ago
I am glad this paper has been written, but already by page 3 there are serious problems with it. For example: It is an easily observable phenomenon (e.g. by anyone who meditates) that you can be conscious without remembering anything. In other words, consciousness is independent of something like memory. Yet Max's list on page 3 has stuff like "independence", "utility", "integration" which have nothing to do with observations of what consciousness is actually like. Rather, they are more like high-level ideas of what human beings are like. But we don't need to explain human beings (complex biological organisms that walk around and do stuff). Science has got that covered already, at least kind of. So if you are going to clearly think about consciousness, you need to factor out what consciousness really is and look at the properties of that. This is supposed to be a foundational principle of science: that your hypotheses are attempts to explain things that are actually observed. The first step is to observe things carefully! You don't just go making up hypotheses. So it's a giant red flag any time a scientist writes a paper about consciousness where they conflate it with memory in some way (which is almost every time). It's a red flag because it indicates that the scientist has not actually spent any time observing consciousness, because they aren't noticing things that are obvious to people who have done that. (You might think that because we are all walking around conscious every day, there would be no need to observe consciousness, but this isn't true. We walk around in a space governed by Newtonian physics, but it took until Newton to figure out this thing called inertia and that a frictional force is required to make things stop, etc, because if you don't look carefully and make careful measurements, most of the everyday world doesn't appear that way at all. Same thing with consciousness.)
- mullingitover 13y ago
  > For example: It is an easily observable phenomenon (e.g. by anyone who meditates) that you can be conscious without remembering anything. In other words, consciousness is independent of something like memory. If you're meditating, how do you know that you're meditating without having, at minimum, a working short-term memory? If meditating actually disabled your memory, wouldn't you immediately forget that you were meditating and stop?
  - webwanderings 13y ago
atratus 13y ago
Paul Adams (macarthur fellow 1986) teaches a class on self organization of the brain, and he begins with similar physics analogies involving phase changes. You can check out his stuff here: http://www.syndar.org/ http://www.syndar.org/
- X4 13y ago
  thank you !!
bananacurve 13y ago
When does a perceptual schematic become the bitter mote of a soul...
thenerdfiles 13y ago
What they're trying to do is address Copenhagen indeterminacy by assuming that the collapse of the wavefunction involves the ontologically similar definition of mental states. How does a mental state cause a collapse of the wavefunction at all? — This is the Quantum Measurement problem. [EDIT:] A better question, then, is when does a mental state cause a collapse, assuming that it can, or should be able to ontologically speaking. Does a materialist framework answer this question? Statistically speaking collapse of the wavefunction and quantum decoherence have the same signature, such that we never know when observation (mental states) causes collapse. To investigate consciousness as matter is to assert the ontological underpinnings of mental states as part of the internal causal nexus of the quantum system. I'm still collecting my thoughts on this subject here: https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/#xl6a68x/NLd6c9 https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/#xl6a68x/NLd6c9 The gist is that observation (including our tools used for observation, along with indexical subjective states) itself has to be treated as a quantum system, not as a classical system[0]. And matter can be described by quantum mechanics. [0]: http://quantum-ethics.org/ http://quantum-ethics.org/
- AnimalMuppet 13y ago
  A mental state doesn't cause the collapse of the wavefunction. (For example, in the Schroedinger's Cat setup, not only is the cat a perfectly good observer, but so is the detector.) Rather, the collapse of the wavefunction may cause a change in someone's mental state - or it may cause a change in nobody's mental state, if it is unobserved by any human. A quantum mechanical "observer" does not need to be a human, or even an animal.
  - pknight 13y ago
    While we can have mechanical detectors in experiment setups that are part of these experiments, the fact is that there is no way to conclusively say that the presence of consciousness does not play a role in the collapse of the wave function. All experiments we do are done by conscious humans, there is always a conscious observer part of the experiment. That is kind of the conundrum for which after 100+ years there still is no definitive answer brought forward by science. You should also realize that you are positing something equally crazy by implying causation the other way around, meaning that the collapse of the wave function somehow can cause changes to the mental state of a conscious person at breathtakingly large distances.
dekhn 13y ago
I'm a physical scientist, work in biology and computer science, but cannot understand this paper for the life of me. Can somebody sum it up? It seems to start from a premise that makes no sense ("computronium" as a form of physical matter distinct from other forms of matter) which strongly contradicts the current mainstream understanding of vitalism and dualism.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  I find it really strange that it is necessary to talk about quantum physics or the nature of time to explore the concept of consciousness. I thought it was pretty clear by now that consciousness is a macroscopic, emergent feature, seeing what very very simple neural networks models are able to do.
  - yk 13y ago
    > consciousness is a macroscopic, emergent feature So far everybody agrees, but if you try to define emergent you get into trouble. So is consciousness weakly or strongly emerging? Is there something special about qualia? So far, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has given a good definition, let alone a really good argument for either side.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
markbnine 13y ago
Anyone with ideas on how can I start my "perceptronium mining" business?
fmax30 13y ago
Sounds more philosophical rather than being quantum physics. With lots and lots of big words. Maybe at one point quantum physics becomes philosophy. Also, Apart from explaining the quantum states Schrödinger's cat has always felt to be more of a philosophical thought experiment rather than being mathematical or quantum one.
Anon84 13y ago
His whole idea of "consciousness as a state of matter" thing might be taken a bit more seriously if he could provide a conscious object... who doesn't want a sentient sword?
- woodchuck64 13y ago
  Easy, but it has to be an object that is processing information in complex ways. From the first page: "I have long contended that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways "
suprgeek 13y ago
As soon as I saw the Title of this paper, there were two ideas that sprung up: 1)"Sokal Hoax" 2)David Deutsch, Max Tegmark, Some Other trouble-maker Max Tegmark has done similar things before:[1]. He is also related to the FQXi which is funded by an organization that has sometimes promoted explicit religious agendas in a scientific context. However we should be judging every paper by its merits alone & the rigor of its arguments. The only problem is that work of this nature is very interdisciplinary, so who is qualified? [1]http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actually-made-of-math http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actu...
shmerl 13y ago
Information is not matter, it's spiritual by its essence. Information can be stored in matter (physical medium), but in itself it's not matter at all. Consciousness lies in the realm of information, or how it's traditionally called a spiritual world. In essence however there is a metaphysical view that there is no conceptual separation between spiritual and physical (or putting it in other terms, physical world is also defined with information). The separation is only that of perception. That can bridge the two approaches.
- hackinthebochs 13y ago
  How would you define information?
  - shmerl 13y ago
    That's not easy. It's the definitive essence of things. To give an example, when you know something, and write that down. The written words are physical, but the essence they convey (the concept, the information) is not physical at all. When others read that, they don't consume the physical words (though they use them as a medium). They consume information which they contain. Here is a good article on this subject: http://philpapers.org/rec/MATBEA http://philpapers.org/rec/MATBEA
    - hackinthebochs 13y ago
      But information is intimately tied to matter, no? Information is capable of having an affect on matter: when I store information on a CD, that information is capable of having an "interesting" affect on a CD player to produce music, or words on a page have an "interesting" affect on the reader. Information is abstract, but I can't call it "spiritual". What is the difference between a random string of bits and, say, a huffman coded string of audio? Both have seemingly random distributions. The informational aspect comes with its ability to cause an "interesting" affect in an information-coupled hunk of matter. It seems wrong to call the random string information when it cannot produce a low-probability, surprising outcome when it interacts with a specific hunk of matter. But the encoded audio stream does exactly that! Independent of a hunk of matter capable of decoding it, can a string of bits be said to carry information?
MarcusBrutus 13y ago
There's physics and there's metaphysics. That's known since the times of Aristotle and Plato. Attempts by physicists to solve the "hard problem of consciousness" are doomed to fail. Different tools are necessary for each "magisterium". Philosophers and Theologians are better equipped to address that problem and write more coherent and logically consistent papers. A transcendental problem should have a transcendental / fundamental answer and there's nothing fundamental about a bunch of equations. I lack the ability and the time to express the last point more eloquently.
RivieraKid 13y ago
Sigh... they're completely clueless. I'm starting to think that I'm the only one who understands consciousness and it's not that complicated really. Hint: the first and most important step is to define "consciousness", specify what exactly does that word mean. Investigating a very vague word with many possible meanings is pointless.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  Reason for the downvote?
nilaykumar 13y ago
One might find another one of Tegmark's papers of note: http://arxiv.org/abs/quantph/9907009 http://arxiv.org/abs/quantph/9907009. I've barely skimmed it, but being vaguely familiar with how decoherence a la Zurek is supposed to work (had a homework on it last year, regrettably), the timescales he notes seem about right.
brudgers 13y ago
Renaming metaphysical dualism doesn't change the fact that it's metaphysical dualism. It's just a new label on the same old can of worms. How do we tell conscious matter from non-conscious matter? By finding or failing to find the non-material property of consciousness. It's perhaps a bit more scientific than relying on souls, but only by virtue of not positing life after death or an immortal being or some other manifold of meta-physics. Being a materialist is all well and good, so long as one takes it seriously, and there are only two serious materialist positions: Deny the idea that mental constructs have any reality [and ignore the paradox required for denial to have any meaning] or posit mind as an inherent property of all matter and live with the consequences of universal animism. Any other form of materialism is a weak waffling half measure.
- fernly 13y ago
  Within my very limited grasp of the paper, it seems to me it is asserting precisely the opposite of your second claim. Tegmark seems to me to be proposing a limited set of properties that an assemblage of matter must have in order to exhibit, or perhaps to implement, consciousness. So he is denying a "universal animism" (because the properties are not univerally present), and attributing consciousness to operations of matter, so not presuming "mental constructs" apart from matter either.
myrrh 13y ago
"How We Became Posthuman" by N. Katherine Hayles - really interesting book that traces the trajectory of how (among other trhings) information came to be considered (im)material essence of consciousness, a "thing" that exists independent of our embodied experience - she succinctly (and briefly) covers ground from turing to norbert weiner to the macy conferences , systems theory, Hans Moravec and so on. The book was published in 1999 I think and makes frequent reference to Francisco Varela's book "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience", which I think touches on a lot of the subjects discussed in this thread (ie, creating a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology) - I think both these books are very well written and may provide valuable context to those who are interested: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo3769963.html http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo376... http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/embodied-mind http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/embodied-mind
mathgenius 13y ago
This guy really hates Penrose: "...Penrose and others have spec- ulated that gravity is crucial for a proper understanding of quantum mechanics even on small scales relevant to brains and laboratory experiments, and that it causes non-unitary wavefunction collapse [35]. Yet the Occam’s razor approach is clearly the commonly held view that neither relativistic, gravitational nor non-unitary eﬀects are central to understanding consciousness or how con- scious observers perceive their immediate surroundings: astronauts appear to still perceive themselves in a semi- classical 3D space even when they are eﬀectively in a zero- gravity environment..." Ugh. That is really lame. People still cite his 1999 article [1] on how the brain can't be quantum, as if that was the end of the discussion. Meh. Anyway, now he seems to be saying the opposite of this, while cleverly avoiding contradicting (or even citing) this earlier work. [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/quantph/9907009 http://arxiv.org/abs/quantph/9907009

94 points by evanb 13y ago

JonnieCache 13y ago

That crunching, gasping sound you can hear is Luboš Motl choking on his cornflakes.

kordless 13y ago
I have to say, if we're the things rendering this universe, it would be a helluva lot easier to code something similar up over coding up string theory.
- yeahbutbut 13y ago
  Sorry, we just kind of threw that together in Perl to meet the deadline! ;;

chb 13y ago

"perceptronium"?

henryaj 13y ago
See also: 'utilitronium'. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Utilitronium http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Utilitronium > Utilitronium is relatively homogeneous matter optimized for maximum utility (like computronium is optimized for maximum computing power). For a paperclip maximiz[ing artificial intelligence], utilitronium is paperclips. For more complex values, no homogeneous organization of matter will have optimal utility. These sorts of terms are popular in the utilitarianism/rationality/friendly AI communities.
- mbillie1 13y ago
  These sorts of terms are 'dangerous' if you like, because it's very easy to invent new words or phrases without giving them any actual _meaning_... but inventing the word is often enough for people to latch on to. The best argument is from Wittgenstein: What if the diviner tells us that when he holds the rod he feels that the water is five feet under the ground? or that he feels that a mixture of copper and gold is five feet under the ground? Suppose that to our doubts he answered: "You can estimate a length when you see it. Why shouldn't I have a different way of estimating it?" If we understand the idea of such an estimation, we shall get clear about the nature of our doubts about the statements of the diviner, and of the man who said he felt the visual image behind the bridge of his nose. There is the statement: "this pencil is five inches long", and the statement, "I feel that this pencil is five inches long", and we must get clear about the relation of the grammar of the first statement to the grammar of the second. To the statement "I feel in my hand that the water is three feet under the ground" we should like to answer: "I don't know what this means." But diviner would say: "Surely you know what it means. You know what 'three feet under the ground' means, and you know what 'I feel' means!" But I should answer him: I know what a word means in certain contexts. Thus I understand the phrase "three feet under the ground", say in the connections "The measurement has shown that the water runs three feet under the ground", "If we dig three feet deep we are going to strike water", "The depth of the water is three feet by the eye". But the use of the expression "a feeling in my hands of water being three feet under the ground" has yet to be explained to me. http://www.geocities.jp/mickindex/wittgenstein/witt_blue_en.html http://www.geocities.jp/mickindex/wittgenstein/witt_blue_en....
  - simonh 13y ago
    I understand what the concept of computronium means. It makes a certain kind of sense. The problem I have is that both a slide rule and an iPhone are computronium, yet there is little about their organisation or physical function that is similar. I'm not sure what saying that they are 'computronium' does for us. Furthermore computronium would presumably need a power source, facilities for maintenance or repair, heat dissipation, protection from external disruption, etc. I don't think it's a given that an optimal design would be in any way homogenous. Ultimately I think it's very naive and simplistic way of thinking about things, but if it's just intended as a shorthand for the purposes of thought experiments that's fine. I'm just concerned that some people might take the idea too literally.
    - henryaj 13y ago
      If computronium is a substance 'optimized for maximum computing power', then neither an iPhone or a slide rule are computronium. Computronium by that definition would be more like an entire planet terraformed to be a massive supercomputer - something with maximum possible computation density.

henryaj 13y ago

Tegmark also featured yesterday on HuffPo live: http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/math-our-universe/52bc659a2b8c2a24c500092d http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/math-our-universe/5...

hosh 13y ago

Huxley was a mystic. He knew his stuff :-) Headlessness is a synonym for mindlessness. Only way out is practice mindfulness.

hosh 13y ago
Downvoted, haha, I guess most people didn't know about Huxley's psychedelic experiments.

Aardwolf 13y ago

Given the amount of different seemingly unrelated terms in there: quantum factorization Hilbert & Fourier space tensor factorization of matrices Hilbert-Schmidt superoperators neural-network-based consciousness error-correcting codes condensed matter criticality Quantum Darwinism program ... I have to ask just to be certain: This paper is the real deal, and not auto-generated, right?

mqzaidi 13y ago
quantom factorization, hilbert spaces, fourier transforms and error correcting codes, all of these would be found in any quantum mechanics 101 course, definitely far from unrelated.
- thearn4 13y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with this, after skimming the paper. For instance, the author does not seem to be using terms like quantum factorization in the usual way (In the sense of a problem tackled by Shor's algorithm).
  - gjm11 13y ago
    I've only glanced at the paper, but it looks to me as if he's using it in another perfectly usual way, namely referring to situations where the wavefunction and/or the Hilbert space it lives in can be written exactly or approximately as a product over simpler things. There's nothing wrong with that.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Hah! I read that abstract and thought, ok this reads like it was auto-generated. I'm withholding judgement until I've got time later to give it some additional reading.
Florin_Andrei 13y ago

farinasa 13y ago

Real, fake, don't care. Reading that abstract was pure joy.

thearn4 13y ago
arXiv's "General Physics" and "General Math" categories are great for finding these kinds of papers.

grondilu 13y ago

Rred the abstract, was about to call it BS, then I realized this was written by Max Tegmark! So definitely worth reading carefully.

samtimalsina 13y ago

Ok. Can anyone explain how Consciousness could be a state of Matter in Plain English? Because quantum mechanics voodoo?

negamax 13y ago
Because we are ultimately matter? Some electrical signals in your brain is current you. That's state of matter which is collectively called you.
- samtimalsina 13y ago
  Undeniably, there is brain involved. But, How does some electrical signals in my brain turn out as an experience I have? Huge gap...
  - robmclarty 13y ago
    Agreed. I have yet to see a non-speculative argument for how mind and matter are connected. It's always explained as "Well, you know, there's just all these electrical signals going on in the brain. And, like, when the brain is damaged, or we prod it with electricity, weird things happen to the person's consciousness" (I'm oversimplifying). I understand that the brain and the mind are essentially connected, but that doesn't explain what consciousness is, where it comes from, or how it got there in the first place.
    - VLM 13y ago
      It gets queasy because its brains talking about brains, but analogies not involving the thinker thinking about itself never seem to cause any queasiness when an aggregate property establishes itself. So where is the strength of an iron I-beam? You can't cut it up and squeeze "strength juice" out of it. There's no little piece you can look at that says, "hey, I'm Euler's column law!". No individual atom decided, hey, I'm an I-beam now. But if you pile up an enormous number of iron (and other) atoms in the shape of an I-beam it inevitably behaves like a beam (or column) and suddenly "knows" its supposed to have angular momentum and collapse at a certain compression force and such. There's no particular magic to it, it just naturally happens to enormous numbers of iron atoms in a small place. About the same with stellar formation. There's no "essence of star" and no individual hydrogen atom decided to create a star. Just pile up a certain ridiculous number of hydrogen atoms and good luck not having it turn into a star. And not enough atoms, well no way it'll ignite, at least not naturally. It can kinda smolder at most. There are other analogies with grains of sand and landslides, water crystals and avalanches, etc. Any time you pile up a certain number of neurons at a certain complexity you get consciousness. We've run a couple billion experiments for quite a few centuries and every time you do it, aside from physical brain damage, it works. Now stuff like Jaynes "Origin of the bicameral mind" is a little controversial, but, perhaps, a great big pile of neurons can boot up in a peculiar mode, sort of. The specific hack of where it came from is only our species was able to add substantial amounts of fish to the diet, and fish oils and proteins seem to allow serious spectacular brain development in a positive feedback cycle until you get consciousness, then you overfish your ocean till all the fish die, then ... we're about to find out what comes after that.

peter303 13y ago

Bong physics!

jpeg_hero 13y ago

I think Tegmark is a straight up genius. interested in reading this article,, but, has he crossed the line from genius into madness?

deleted 13y ago
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robmclarty 13y ago

Wow. That's a lot of words. How exactly does consciousness "emerge" from matter? Are there some kind of psychophysical bits that aren't currently accounted for in physics? Surely it's not merely epiphenomenal. How do intentions affect the physical world as seems to be happening when our minds move our bodies? What is the solution, here, to the mind-body problem? I just finished reading Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" which highlights some of the salient issues with reductionist explanations of consciousness, cognition, and value. I don't think these things are just a state of matter. http://www.amazon.ca/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755 http://www.amazon.ca/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-C...

duaneb 13y ago
Penrose addressed this (poorly, IMHO), but it gives a good idea as to his approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind
kazagistar 13y ago
There is no "mind emerging from matter" in the same way a hand does not "emerge" from fingers and a palm. This is because the label we apply is only in our heads. Reality is perfectly ok just being a bunch of quantum interactions; it is humans who have to label things "chair" "hand" "conciousness". Reality is reductionistic.
- robmclarty 13y ago
  I don't agree that conscious experience is necessarily reducible. When I put a piece of cheesecake in my mouth, certain electrical signals will likely be firing in my brain, but those signals don't mean what it's like to consciously experience cheesecake in my mouth. That is, the signals themselves aren't indicative of the quality of my experience that only I, myself, can have in my conscious existence. The signals are only a physical correlate to my experience. I don't experience electrical signals in my brain. My experience is different than them. My point is, there is other stuff out there in the universe (mental stuff) that is different than physical stuff, that seems almost impossible to be explained as physical stuff. I believe in the physical sciences, evolution, and mathematics, but I don't think that they fully encapsulate all that there is, nor can they definitively explain things like consciousness (they at least need a little more added to them).

bfe 13y ago

So if we come to discover that time is fundamental instead of emergent, it could disprove his hypothesis of how consciousness is emergent. That's at least one way in which he makes his hypothesis testable. Just, please, no one forward this article to any Republican legislators and draw their attention to the NSF grants that supported the research.

jblow 13y ago

I am glad this paper has been written, but already by page 3 there are serious problems with it. For example: It is an easily observable phenomenon (e.g. by anyone who meditates) that you can be conscious without remembering anything. In other words, consciousness is independent of something like memory. Yet Max's list on page 3 has stuff like "independence", "utility", "integration" which have nothing to do with observations of what consciousness is actually like. Rather, they are more like high-level ideas of what human beings are like. But we don't need to explain human beings (complex biological organisms that walk around and do stuff). Science has got that covered already, at least kind of. So if you are going to clearly think about consciousness, you need to factor out what consciousness really is and look at the properties of that. This is supposed to be a foundational principle of science: that your hypotheses are attempts to explain things that are actually observed. The first step is to observe things carefully! You don't just go making up hypotheses. So it's a giant red flag any time a scientist writes a paper about consciousness where they conflate it with memory in some way (which is almost every time). It's a red flag because it indicates that the scientist has not actually spent any time observing consciousness, because they aren't noticing things that are obvious to people who have done that. (You might think that because we are all walking around conscious every day, there would be no need to observe consciousness, but this isn't true. We walk around in a space governed by Newtonian physics, but it took until Newton to figure out this thing called inertia and that a frictional force is required to make things stop, etc, because if you don't look carefully and make careful measurements, most of the everyday world doesn't appear that way at all. Same thing with consciousness.)

mullingitover 13y ago
> For example: It is an easily observable phenomenon (e.g. by anyone who meditates) that you can be conscious without remembering anything. In other words, consciousness is independent of something like memory. If you're meditating, how do you know that you're meditating without having, at minimum, a working short-term memory? If meditating actually disabled your memory, wouldn't you immediately forget that you were meditating and stop?
- webwanderings 13y ago

atratus 13y ago

Paul Adams (macarthur fellow 1986) teaches a class on self organization of the brain, and he begins with similar physics analogies involving phase changes. You can check out his stuff here: http://www.syndar.org/ http://www.syndar.org/

X4 13y ago
thank you !!

bananacurve 13y ago

When does a perceptual schematic become the bitter mote of a soul...

thenerdfiles 13y ago

What they're trying to do is address Copenhagen indeterminacy by assuming that the collapse of the wavefunction involves the ontologically similar definition of mental states. How does a mental state cause a collapse of the wavefunction at all? — This is the Quantum Measurement problem. [EDIT:] A better question, then, is when does a mental state cause a collapse, assuming that it can, or should be able to ontologically speaking. Does a materialist framework answer this question? Statistically speaking collapse of the wavefunction and quantum decoherence have the same signature, such that we never know when observation (mental states) causes collapse. To investigate consciousness as matter is to assert the ontological underpinnings of mental states as part of the internal causal nexus of the quantum system. I'm still collecting my thoughts on this subject here: https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/#xl6a68x/NLd6c9 https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/#xl6a68x/NLd6c9 The gist is that observation (including our tools used for observation, along with indexical subjective states) itself has to be treated as a quantum system, not as a classical system[0]. And matter can be described by quantum mechanics. [0]: http://quantum-ethics.org/ http://quantum-ethics.org/

AnimalMuppet 13y ago
A mental state doesn't cause the collapse of the wavefunction. (For example, in the Schroedinger's Cat setup, not only is the cat a perfectly good observer, but so is the detector.) Rather, the collapse of the wavefunction may cause a change in someone's mental state - or it may cause a change in nobody's mental state, if it is unobserved by any human. A quantum mechanical "observer" does not need to be a human, or even an animal.
- pknight 13y ago
  While we can have mechanical detectors in experiment setups that are part of these experiments, the fact is that there is no way to conclusively say that the presence of consciousness does not play a role in the collapse of the wave function. All experiments we do are done by conscious humans, there is always a conscious observer part of the experiment. That is kind of the conundrum for which after 100+ years there still is no definitive answer brought forward by science. You should also realize that you are positing something equally crazy by implying causation the other way around, meaning that the collapse of the wave function somehow can cause changes to the mental state of a conscious person at breathtakingly large distances.

dekhn 13y ago

I'm a physical scientist, work in biology and computer science, but cannot understand this paper for the life of me. Can somebody sum it up? It seems to start from a premise that makes no sense ("computronium" as a form of physical matter distinct from other forms of matter) which strongly contradicts the current mainstream understanding of vitalism and dualism.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
I find it really strange that it is necessary to talk about quantum physics or the nature of time to explore the concept of consciousness. I thought it was pretty clear by now that consciousness is a macroscopic, emergent feature, seeing what very very simple neural networks models are able to do.
- yk 13y ago
  > consciousness is a macroscopic, emergent feature So far everybody agrees, but if you try to define emergent you get into trouble. So is consciousness weakly or strongly emerging? Is there something special about qualia? So far, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has given a good definition, let alone a really good argument for either side.

deleted 13y ago

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markbnine 13y ago

Anyone with ideas on how can I start my "perceptronium mining" business?

fmax30 13y ago

Sounds more philosophical rather than being quantum physics. With lots and lots of big words. Maybe at one point quantum physics becomes philosophy. Also, Apart from explaining the quantum states Schrödinger's cat has always felt to be more of a philosophical thought experiment rather than being mathematical or quantum one.

Anon84 13y ago

His whole idea of "consciousness as a state of matter" thing might be taken a bit more seriously if he could provide a conscious object... who doesn't want a sentient sword?

woodchuck64 13y ago
Easy, but it has to be an object that is processing information in complex ways. From the first page: "I have long contended that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways "

suprgeek 13y ago

As soon as I saw the Title of this paper, there were two ideas that sprung up: 1)"Sokal Hoax" 2)David Deutsch, Max Tegmark, Some Other trouble-maker Max Tegmark has done similar things before:[1]. He is also related to the FQXi which is funded by an organization that has sometimes promoted explicit religious agendas in a scientific context. However we should be judging every paper by its merits alone & the rigor of its arguments. The only problem is that work of this nature is very interdisciplinary, so who is qualified? [1]http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actually-made-of-math http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actu...

shmerl 13y ago

Information is not matter, it's spiritual by its essence. Information can be stored in matter (physical medium), but in itself it's not matter at all. Consciousness lies in the realm of information, or how it's traditionally called a spiritual world. In essence however there is a metaphysical view that there is no conceptual separation between spiritual and physical (or putting it in other terms, physical world is also defined with information). The separation is only that of perception. That can bridge the two approaches.

hackinthebochs 13y ago
How would you define information?
- shmerl 13y ago
  That's not easy. It's the definitive essence of things. To give an example, when you know something, and write that down. The written words are physical, but the essence they convey (the concept, the information) is not physical at all. When others read that, they don't consume the physical words (though they use them as a medium). They consume information which they contain. Here is a good article on this subject: http://philpapers.org/rec/MATBEA http://philpapers.org/rec/MATBEA
  - hackinthebochs 13y ago
    But information is intimately tied to matter, no? Information is capable of having an affect on matter: when I store information on a CD, that information is capable of having an "interesting" affect on a CD player to produce music, or words on a page have an "interesting" affect on the reader. Information is abstract, but I can't call it "spiritual". What is the difference between a random string of bits and, say, a huffman coded string of audio? Both have seemingly random distributions. The informational aspect comes with its ability to cause an "interesting" affect in an information-coupled hunk of matter. It seems wrong to call the random string information when it cannot produce a low-probability, surprising outcome when it interacts with a specific hunk of matter. But the encoded audio stream does exactly that! Independent of a hunk of matter capable of decoding it, can a string of bits be said to carry information?

MarcusBrutus 13y ago

There's physics and there's metaphysics. That's known since the times of Aristotle and Plato. Attempts by physicists to solve the "hard problem of consciousness" are doomed to fail. Different tools are necessary for each "magisterium". Philosophers and Theologians are better equipped to address that problem and write more coherent and logically consistent papers. A transcendental problem should have a transcendental / fundamental answer and there's nothing fundamental about a bunch of equations. I lack the ability and the time to express the last point more eloquently.

RivieraKid 13y ago

Sigh... they're completely clueless. I'm starting to think that I'm the only one who understands consciousness and it's not that complicated really. Hint: the first and most important step is to define "consciousness", specify what exactly does that word mean. Investigating a very vague word with many possible meanings is pointless.

RivieraKid 13y ago
Reason for the downvote?

nilaykumar 13y ago

One might find another one of Tegmark's papers of note: http://arxiv.org/abs/quantph/9907009 http://arxiv.org/abs/quantph/9907009. I've barely skimmed it, but being vaguely familiar with how decoherence a la Zurek is supposed to work (had a homework on it last year, regrettably), the timescales he notes seem about right.

brudgers 13y ago

Renaming metaphysical dualism doesn't change the fact that it's metaphysical dualism. It's just a new label on the same old can of worms. How do we tell conscious matter from non-conscious matter? By finding or failing to find the non-material property of consciousness. It's perhaps a bit more scientific than relying on souls, but only by virtue of not positing life after death or an immortal being or some other manifold of meta-physics. Being a materialist is all well and good, so long as one takes it seriously, and there are only two serious materialist positions: Deny the idea that mental constructs have any reality [and ignore the paradox required for denial to have any meaning] or posit mind as an inherent property of all matter and live with the consequences of universal animism. Any other form of materialism is a weak waffling half measure.

fernly 13y ago
Within my very limited grasp of the paper, it seems to me it is asserting precisely the opposite of your second claim. Tegmark seems to me to be proposing a limited set of properties that an assemblage of matter must have in order to exhibit, or perhaps to implement, consciousness. So he is denying a "universal animism" (because the properties are not univerally present), and attributing consciousness to operations of matter, so not presuming "mental constructs" apart from matter either.

myrrh 13y ago

"How We Became Posthuman" by N. Katherine Hayles - really interesting book that traces the trajectory of how (among other trhings) information came to be considered (im)material essence of consciousness, a "thing" that exists independent of our embodied experience - she succinctly (and briefly) covers ground from turing to norbert weiner to the macy conferences , systems theory, Hans Moravec and so on. The book was published in 1999 I think and makes frequent reference to Francisco Varela's book "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience", which I think touches on a lot of the subjects discussed in this thread (ie, creating a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology) - I think both these books are very well written and may provide valuable context to those who are interested: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo3769963.html http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo376... http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/embodied-mind http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/embodied-mind

mathgenius 13y ago

This guy really hates Penrose: "...Penrose and others have spec- ulated that gravity is crucial for a proper understanding of quantum mechanics even on small scales relevant to brains and laboratory experiments, and that it causes non-unitary wavefunction collapse [35]. Yet the Occam’s razor approach is clearly the commonly held view that neither relativistic, gravitational nor non-unitary eﬀects are central to understanding consciousness or how con- scious observers perceive their immediate surroundings: astronauts appear to still perceive themselves in a semi- classical 3D space even when they are eﬀectively in a zero- gravity environment..." Ugh. That is really lame. People still cite his 1999 article [1] on how the brain can't be quantum, as if that was the end of the discussion. Meh. Anyway, now he seems to be saying the opposite of this, while cleverly avoiding contradicting (or even citing) this earlier work. [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/quantph/9907009 http://arxiv.org/abs/quantph/9907009