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A Neuroscientist’s Theory of How Networks Become Conscious (2013)

159 points by tegeek 12y ago

RevRal 12y ago
Also worth a read: http://kk.org/thetechnium/2008/10/evidence-of-a-g/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/2008/10/evidence-of-a-g/ Too much emphasis is usually placed on the "consciousness" part of general intelligence.
- sadkingbilly 12y ago
  "But a malformed packet could also be an emergent signal. A self-created packet." If a program sent out a malformed packet, this would indicate an error in the sender's program. Let's assume that a receiving program reads the malformed packet and is able to process it. It results in something favorable (no clue how this would be determined, but let's go with it) and so the receiving program repeats whatever it originally did to get this malformed packet sent to it, so that it gets another malformed packet. Multiply this by thousands of other programs doing similar things to "hack" other programs into sending malformed packets to perform useful functions, and maybe you have something happening here. The above process basically describes a genetic algorithm, which I don't think the Internet is. It also assumes that most programs are flexible enough to produce bugs like this - creating malformed packets. Does this mean we should stop unit testing code to allow more freedom from the programs? Plus, the above also assumes there is some way of ranking an outcome from a malformed packet as "favorable". Maybe that would be humans?
officialjunk 12y ago
The initial basis that electrons just instrinsically have charge isn't proven. Infact there is a proof of why electrons have quantized charge (by Dirac), but it requires that magnetic monopoles exist, which haven't been observed.
- wuliwong 12y ago
  I also thought it was really interesting that they chose that to start with. I personally find the electron to be one of the more confounding and least talked about pieces of the current state of physics understanding. That being said, it is hard for me to imagine what a proof that charge is intrinsic to an electron would even look like. Proving that something is the result of something else seems much more straightforward than proving something not being the result of anything. Also, only talking about an electron's charge being intrinsic is ignoring a lot of the mystery of it. The fact that it is a point particle is a pesky issue as well. An electron is just an electron with no underlying "pieces" or mechanisms. Obviously that could be wrong, but no one has been able to prove it yet. I think using the electron as an example for our understanding of how the universe works is pretty ignorant. It's one of the weirdest parts of physics I've encountered during my career. It is a topic that few people actively work on but feels like their is clearly something amiss with our current understanding.
xnull 12y ago
Integrated Information Theory I think is a fad, and a bad one at that. One could think of integration of information as a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness a la Scott Aaronson [1] who applies more rigorous mathematical examples of integrated systems - in fact ones close to maximal possible integrated information - that very clearly are unlikely have any measure of consciousness (like expander graphs and error correcting codes). What about ciphers, where small changes to a single bit in key, ciphertext or plaintext radically alters the evolution of the internals and output of the system? But even that might be too strong a statement. Aren't minimally interacting systems such as Conway's Game of Life Turing Complete? There are tiny, tiny Universal Turing Machines, and UTMs are essentially free to encode/decode their tape inputs in any way they see fit. Ultimately while IIT has a 'mathematical description' it mostly only serves to obfuscate a naive and trivial notion that 'the system has to be complicated and has to integrate and process local information in some holistic global way'. No shit. [1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
- SapphireSun 12y ago
  Not quite. I attended a talk by Dr. Koch at MIT. I didn't get all of it, but it seemed to me that his definition tries to figure out what's included or excluded in conscious systems and how conscious they are. It may or may not be right, but it at least it's working towards something with predictive value. The examples you gave are mostly abstract and not physical. If consciousness is a physical phenomenon, these algorithms must be manifest before they can qualify. As for the game of life, the pieces on a physical board aren't actually interacting with each other with feedback loops. In a computer, the circuits are mostly feed forward and the algorithm is simulated rather than physically realized.
  - xnull 12y ago
    The examples though _do_ have physical manifestations - everything that exists in the universe has a physical manifestation (by tautology). How is a feed forward circuit carrying information (to be integated) not a physical realization? It's not clear why neurons carrying potentials and mixing them count but not an FPGA (no longer an ALU simulation) doing cryptographic operations for a bitcoin mining rig. Furthermore as an FPGA more directly implements the information integration system than an ALU fetch-execute cycle, is it 'more conscious'? For me that sounds absurd. Presume the Game of Life _did_ have a direct physical implementation, let's say neurons fire according to GOL rules. Would you then be forced to call it conscious or not? Wouldn't it depend on the cell configuration? An all blank cell configuration certainly isn't conscious but the system would have the same low IIT score as a manifestation running some UTM-equivalent setup. Finally, what about physical systems that do highly integrate information? N-body problems exhibit highly integrated behavior manifest in the so-called butterfly effect. Why do the air molecules in a balloon not count as conscious? This physical example escapes the "America" criticism - every molecule applies a force on every other and due to n-body mechanics the system is highly integrated. My worry, which I think is mostly corroborated, is that the definite clarity of the IIT definition will serve to obscure the fact that underlying definition has no real definite clarity or derivation. Ultimately the IIT formula was imagined to capture some heuristic notions - but it was not derived. For this reason, added to those above, I am very skeptical. Or maybe it's my CS background that makes me biased toward thinking that _how_ information is integrated matters purely more than some measure of how much mixing there is (e.g. by one of many versions [5 now?] of the IIT formula).
Xcelerate 12y ago
> Why we should live in such a universe is a good question, but I don’t see how that can be answered now. His last point here is salient. Much like the various interpretations of quantum mechanics, any theories of consciousness are untestable. But my problem with "consciousness" is that it's not even a well-defined concept. Suppose I replace all occurrences of "consciousness" in that article with the word "qualgma". It makes just as much sense. Gravity, electrons, and energy are all concepts that are defined to exist as the manifestation of certain physical phenomena that can be modeled and predicted with mathematical equations. These words are just English simplifications of the equations. But consciousness has no such analogue. It's just a term that people throw around when they talk about the brain. I believe that over time, it has started to acquire a more well-defined meaning -- something along the lines of "the emergent properties of the brain's activity resulting from lower-level processes". This is similar to how a human body is just the emergent result of many atomic interactions. This version of consciousness can be modeled, theorized about, and tested experimentally. There's nothing magical about. As the brain's neural circuitry becomes better understood, you could say consciousness is a simplified model that still has good predictive capability. However, I would also like to focus on a much more interesting topic in the article: > My consciousness is an undeniable fact. One can only infer facts about the universe, such as physics, indirectly, but the one thing I’m utterly certain of is that I’m conscious. I believe Koch is conflating two distinct concepts. If we take the definition of consciousness as the predictive modeling of the brain, then this is something totally different than what he's talking about here. Let me alter his quote: > That I experience my existence is an undeniable fact. One can only infer facts about the universe, such as physics, indirectly, but the one thing I’m utterly certain of is that I am experiencing existence. It's really astonishing to me that he words it this way, because independently I have thought almost exactly the same thing for a long time. I've often struggled to put this notion into words, but let me try it in a new way with an analogy. Suppose you see an apple floating in front of you. You tell other people "Look at this apple!" But they just go "What apple?" So, you try to get crafty. You take a picture of the apple with a digital camera. But when you show people the photo on the computer, they still see no apple. So you zoom in on the pixels and start copying the RGB values for each one by hand onto paper. "Look, this value is 237!" you say. And you sit down with a friend, and start calling each and every pixel's values out as he puts them in manually into his image editing program. When he's does, you say "Ha! Look, there's my apple, right on your screen! And you put it in there yourself!" But he stares at you quizzically, and says, "I still see no apple; just an empty table." And no matter what kind of tricky experimental method you try to come up with to get everyone else to understand the concept of this apple that's always floating in front of you, every attempt to catch it produces a representation of the apple for you and nothing for everyone else. It's frustrating because the people you tell about the apple say "Well, you have provided no testable predictions, and no data that can be independently verified by everyone else in society. Clearly your apple doesn't exist." But it does! You know it does! In fact, out of everything that constitutes reality, the floating apple is the one thing you're most sure of. Frustrated, you walk around thinking you're crazy until one day someone says, "Well, I don't see an apple floating in front of you, but do you see the orange floating in front of me?" Which, of course, you don't. Now replace "apple" with "the fact that I am experiencing my own existence". It's an element of reality that is only apparent to you on a personal level, and since it isn't testable by other people, it is not a part of their reality, and thus does not exist as far as they are concerned. And thus it's not science. Yet even though it's not science, it is the one thing in life I am most certain of. My five senses could all be faked with advanced enough neural circuitry. I could be in an entirely simulated environment, with entirely simulated physics. So when I order things in probability of how likely they are to be an illusion, experiencing existing falls at the lowest probability. In fact, you could strip me of all my senses and put my brain in a vat, and as long as it's running, I'm still experiencing existence. If the idea bothers you that things might exist that are incapable of being verified consensually by society, look at this image of all the particle interactions (so far discovered): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Elementary_particle_interactions.svg/2000px-Elementary_particle_interactions.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Ele... If you'll notice, gluons "hang on" to the rest of the particles by merely one interaction. If this interaction was not present, as far as positivists are concerned, then gluons don't exist. But that seems entirely unreasonable to me. I could imagine plenty of particles that could "exist" that simply don't have an interaction with the ones in the standard model that constitute our reality. Anyway, this is probably the most bizarre post I've ever written on HN, but hopefully what I'm trying to convey "clicks" for some people.
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dominotw 12y ago
Are we discussing consciousness everyday ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515361
pedrosorio 12y ago
"WIRED: Getting back to the theory, is your version of panpsychism truly scientific rather than metaphysical? How can it be tested? Koch: In principle, in all sorts of ways. One implication is that you can build two systems, each with the same input and output — but one, because of its internal structure, has integrated information. One system would be conscious, and the other not. It’s not the input-output behavior that makes a system conscious, but rather the internal wiring." Isn't this the definition of a non-testable assertion? The observable input-output behavior is the same, yet he claims the property of consciousness is different. So where is the test?
- efnx 12y ago
  Maybe one has a higher (non zero) phi rating, which apparently means it is conscious. I agree with you, I don't see the test. I'd also like to agree with Koch, intuitively what he says makes sense - it's possibly a lack of understanding on the writers part that this key point is lost.
- dcre 12y ago
  Well, he's stipulating that we build it, so we know what the internal wiring is. That doesn't necessarily mean that what's he's describing is possible or even coherent.
millstone 12y ago
Many drugs induce unconsciousness, but these don't work by decreasing the complexity or organization of our brains. Doesn't this neatly refute the idea that consciousness is an "immanent property of highly organized pieces of matter, such as brains?"
- kazinator 12y ago
  Not really, because complexity can have an on-off switch: a global one, or at least a partial. If you implement a software system that is conscious, but then suspend it to a storage device, and resume it one week later (so that it is surprised: where did the time go?) its complexity hasn't gone away. It just wasn't conscious for one week because it wasn't running. Another thing to consider is this: there may be more than one consciousness in your brain! The one which is you, the one typing on Hackernews, is just the one which has access to the "console" so to speak: the fingers, the eyes, ... There could be other consciousnesses hidden in your brain that are suppressed. Like "background daemons". Maybe that part of the brain that regulates your body while you sleep (or don't sleep) is also conscious! The consciousness-process which is "you" is deactivated during sleep, but the other background "daemons" remain conscious. (Clearly, sleep is not a complete, global shutdown of brain activity, in other words.) (Also, I'm here reminded of dolphins which put half their brain to sleep at a time.)
  - millstone 12y ago
    I like your computer analogy because it's easy to reason about. Surely a powered-down computer is not conscious. So if consciousness has an off switch, then it's not immanent (inherent) to organization. Koch compares consciousness to the electric charge of an electron. But the electric charge has no off switch!
    - sebastianconcpt 12y ago
      "But the electric charge has no off switch!" Exactly. And "consciousness is computation" is an hypothesis that does not really work.
jostmey 12y ago
I failed to find anything concrete in Koch's argument. Its funny because at some level he is right - there is this thing called consciousness, but even when the most rational people try to describe it they inevitably sound unscientific. I imagine that before Darwin everyone must have sounded crazy when they talked about biology. I guess the field of Neuroscience is still waiting for a revelation.
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Animats 12y ago
According to Koch, consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. All animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious; even the internet could be. That’s just the way the universe works. Clearly one can build a hugely complex system that performs some special-purpose function and isn't anywhere near "conscious". Consider a big supercomputer doing finite-element analysis. Or a big network of packet routers. Koch would probably argue that those aren't "sufficiently complex"? So what's the definition of "sufficiently complex"? Something that is "conscious"? This is not helpful. Perhaps we should focus on "common sense", rather than "consciousness". Common sense can usefully be defined as the ability to predict (at least the near-term) consequences of actions. Given that, planning and evaluation of alternatives is possible. Most animals above the insect level have some capability in that area. They're not purely reactive. We really need to get this figured out so we can build robots that can handle new situations without screwing up too badly. Neuroscience has work to do at the bottom. Check out "http://www.openworm.org/" http://www.openworm.org/", where some people are trying to simulate the simplest nematode known at the neuron level. Until that works, neuroscience doesn't really have neurons figured out. Classic quote: "Philosophy is the kicking up of a lot of dust and then complaining about what you can't see".
- whtrbt 12y ago
  It's not directly related to the original article, but the idea of consciousness arising in any sufficient system reminded me of an essay by Hans Moravec, "Simulation, Consciousness, Existence" [1] (and that essay in turn makes me think of the dust theory of reality described in Greg Egan's "Permutation City"). "Perhaps the most unsettling implication of this train of thought is that anything can be interpreted as possessing any abstract property, including consciousness and intelligence." [1] http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...
- jcfrei 12y ago
  > Consider a big supercomputer doing finite-element analysis. Or a big network of packet routers. There's another perspective here. We always argue from a very anthropocentric point of view and measure experience based on actions and reactions that a human would perform. Ie. asking questions, seeing something and saying something based on what we see, etc. The supercomputer you described can hardly be considered conscious with regards to such actions. However it might be very conscious with regards to a different set of actions, ie. turning off some switches which allow for intercommunication between the different CPUs (the computer might react by rerouting some packets), it might react to raising the room temperature (by spinning up the fans), it might react to removing some RAM (by allocating more data on the hard disk), etc.
Taek 12y ago
When we think of consciousness, we normally associate with the brain. But according to the complexity theory, shouldn't there also be consciousness in most of our organs? The liver is a massive network of cells that are in at least a moderate amount of communication, and yet I am not aware of its consciousness. But perhaps it is conscious, just at a level that's inaccessible to my brain, which is a nearly distinct structure with very minimal relative communication to the liver. I also found it interesting that he denied the idea that America might be one larger consciousness. I've had multiple experiences on LSD which have suggested to me that as an aggregate humans are one larger organism with a single collective consciousness, that operates both at a slower speed and a higher overall awareness. (Most accessible in the 150-200ug range) When you think about how individual neurons work, spraying neurotransmitters at each other to trigger responses from the next neuron, essentially passing information in a complex yet highly organized web, are humans that much different. The set of humans who design cities are different from the set of humans who manage government policies are different from the set of humans that try to go to space. Each human passes information to others in highly complex ways that form super organized macrostructures. It doesn't seem to be that much of a stretch then to say that consciousness also arises from the interactions of the macrostructures in the same way consciousness arises from the interactions of all the parts of our brain. And the internet would seem to be a massive facilitator of this. Because of the internet, the amount of communication I do per day is enormous, and my interactions happen at a global (though mostly English speaking) scale. I doubt communications of this scope and magnitude were available to humans even 20 years ago.
- john2x 12y ago
  The internet, as a neural network, "dreams" of cat videos when they go viral. Huh. In fact, it "decides" for itself which ones should go viral. Interesting thought.
  - ganzuul 12y ago
    I blame my deep integration with the internet for my belief that I'm actually a cat.
- tbastos 12y ago
nl 12y ago
The biggest neural network yet built was a 100 billion neuron simulation of the human brain[1]. That didn't exhibit consciousness, but is considerably smaller than the 1 quadrillion (1 million billion) synapses a human brain has. I'm unsure what the relationship between a synapse and a neuron is. There are claims[2] that a human brain has "only" 100 billion neurons itself. Of course, it's true that consciousness may emerge from the complexity of the connections rather than the raw count. I'm unconvinced. It seems possible that whales (500 million neurons) have more complex brain networks than humans, and yet by some definitions they aren't conscious. Conversely, some argue that birds are conscious, and yet they have considerably smaller brains than some neural networks. [1] http://www.izhikevich.org/human_brain_simulation/Blue_Brain.htm http://www.izhikevich.org/human_brain_simulation/Blue_Brain.... [2] http://www.quora.com/How-many-neurons-are-needed-to-create-a-conscious-entity http://www.quora.com/How-many-neurons-are-needed-to-create-a...
- sebastianconcpt 12y ago
  "Of course, it's true that consciousness may emerge from the complexity of the connections rather than the raw count." Your "of course" is taking as proved something that is not (the consciousness is computation hypothesis). In your benefit you said may so of course you're not convinced. Which is good because people shouldn't believe in things that aren't testable. :) And you talk about birds but there are als unicellular organisms reacting to anestesics, so that doubt should be even broader
brittonrt 12y ago
This brings me to an interesting thought experiment I struggle with: Most likely most people here would agree that if you make an exact copy of a person's brain, whilst leaving the original intact, it would be a new person, identical but divergent from the original. A new thread of consciousness by such definition. But then, what if you destroy the original at the moment of copy? It would appear to the same. But then, what if you replace each neuron one at a time over a period, maintaining the original network? This question is troubling because it brings into obvious doubt the integrity of our notion of consciousness. As it is in fact the case that we shed most of the atomic matter that constitutes us in a given year, we are clearly immaterial. Patterns. So put plainly: should you copy your brain all at once, killing the original, are you a new person? But if you are: transitioning slowly piece by piece over time, which is what we observe in nature, this maintains the conscious strain? How are these different? It's obvious to me there is something fundamental here we are missing. I welcome any insights you all might have had in similar thought experiments.
- coconutrandom 12y ago
  The second question is the same as The Ship of Theseus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  There's nothing fundamental we're missing: the reality beneath our intuitive understanding of personal identity and continuity is just a lot messier than our intuitions allow for. Nondiverging copies are, in some sense, the same person, but they're also completely useless: the instant you "wake them up", they diverge and become different people. Destructive "moving" preserves personal identity, but is goddamn creepy because it provides no way for the "moved" person to verify that they remain the same before-and-after. The "continuous stream of consciousness" model is intuitive and lets us detect when something in our heads changes (you can feel yourself going from "sober" to "drunk" while awake in a very different way than if I just injected you with booze while you slept... For Science, of course).
- dghf 12y ago
  You seem to be assuming the actual existence of a "thread of consciousness" or a "conscious strain", when it could be an illusion. When you wake up after a dreamless sleep, are you the same person, the same conscious entity, as went to bed the night before? Or is that entity now "dead", and "you" are a new entity that has just inherited its memories (most of which it in turn inherited from its predecessors)? How could you ever tell? In fact, are you the same conscious entity from moment to moment, or at least from thought to thought? More "making a copy" thought experiments, none terribly original: - If you're disintegrated and immediately reassembled, are you still you? - Does using different atoms make a difference? - Does leaving a gap between disintegration and reassembly make a difference? If so, how long a gap? What if you're resurrected at the Omega Point by sufficiently advanced aliens/post-humans? - If you're split in two (sagitally, coronally, or however), and each half is immediately reconstructed into a whole human, each identical to you before the split, which is you? Which pair of eyes would you find yourself looking out of? Both? Neither? - If the two "yous" exchange atoms, such that one ends up with the entire complement of atoms that made up you before the split and the other ends up with none, does that affect the claims of either to be the "real" you?
sebastianconcpt 12y ago
That theory is not even close to point in the right direction on research. Consciousness is not computation. An do not just emerge from complexity. If it would, then the ammount of quantum information and complexity in any tropical thunderstorm would make it a supergenius entity. And is not (or prove me wrong). Consciousness is also not mind. Mind is more like the sum of intelligence. Consciousness something else, more fundamental. Only quantum biology could be interesting on researching this.
- stefanu 12y ago
  I don't think we can equate complexity of a tropical thunderstorm to the complexity as described in the article. The discussed complexity arises from local connections (be it persistent bonds or repeated interactions) between entities. While interactions in the thunderstorm might seem "complex" to our mind, they are not "complex" from the point of view of "complex systems", they are rather "complicated". Moreover thunderstorm network (if we consider the interactions of particles in the thunderstorm) is very transient. No feedback loops emerge in the system (to my understanding of thunderstorm). Also the system does not adapt to the surrounding environment through it's reconfiguration of internal connections. Thunderstorm lacks many properties of the complex systems discussed in the article.
  - sebastianconcpt 12y ago
    A storm doesn't have feedback loops in brain-like interconnections. But in a quantic level there is thermodynamic activity re-adapting and re-shaping the system all the time. In any case, as Giulio Tononi would say, "it has zero integration." And it doesn't have consciousness, only energetic physico-chemical activity. I agree with that view. The important part is (a) that it does not have computation and (b) regardless of complexity, computation is not consciousness. Saying it and expecting it to "magically emerge from it" does not make that hypothesis any truer. They are throwing darts in the dart and making it sound cool. But, okay, I'll be nice and not troll the effort of making this subject cool and let's not put theory against theory because is not productive. What about seeing something testable? Take a Paramecium. It does not have many neurons, so it doesn't have synapses but it still learns where the food is and reacts to anestesics as we do. What about that? That radical theory published there is not predicting the Paramecium, much less anything about the one in the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Bring me news on how quantum-biology is behaving down there and we might actually get somewhere.
3beard 12y ago
The idea you can magically "generate" consciousness by running an algorithm is really silly superstition.
- sebastianconcpt 12y ago
  Completely agree. Also as theory is essentially useless as it does not predict anything. They are throwing darts in the dark and making it sound cool.
maebert 12y ago
TL;DR: Christoph Koch says that 1) Make a really complex system. We can even measure how complex systems are! 2) ??? 3) Consciousness! By the way, that's not panpsychism, that's emergentism, and for much better accounts of that read CD Broad or Jaekwon Kim.
jcfrei 12y ago
For me questions on the nature of consciousness have always been deeply connected to the question of identity. Specifically the following thought experiment: What if there was a machine that would read every atom of your body and recreate your body at a different location at a different time whilst destroying the original. Would the arising consciousness still be your own original consciousness or would it be a copy? What if we keep both, the original and the copy? Are there now two separate instances of your consciousness running? I guess the only answer in line with Koch is yes. Consciousness emerges out of a complex system. And I might add that consciousness is not a continuously working "state of mind". It fades in and out during our daily lives. The consciousness we had yesterday is lost today and replaced by a new one, which runs on a different chemical setting in your brain (albeit shares most of the memories of the previous one). I think that while I can "experience my own existence", this "existence" doesn't always refer to the same consciousness - one moment to the next the underlying system might have changed marginally or even substantially (in the case of being based on an entirely new set of atoms, which just happens to be in the same configuration as before).
BasDirks 12y ago
This requires a leap of faith, usually not an indicator of good science, but it's not unimaginable. One could argue that his terms are ambiguous or otherwise ill-defined, but what if this kind of research could be the starting point for such definitions?
ccozan 12y ago
He has also a book about it: http://www.amazon.de/The-Quest-Consciousness-Neurobiological-Approach/dp/1936221047 http://www.amazon.de/The-Quest-Consciousness-Neurobiological... I have read it half way, a lot of information there.
duckingtest 12y ago
This is so much like theology, on which thousands of man hours have been wasted (including Newton's). Mental masturbation. What's the point? The simplest definition is that consciousness is a property of a program which has the capacity to compute something determined by at least one of its previous outputs (which can be an identity function, a perfect memory). Integrated information theory is basically this, only made more complex with the addition of a quantitative property, presumably because people feel an aversion to simplicity. This has a danger of producing absurd results in some edge cases, still, overengineering is a minor infraction compared to the deadly sin of bullshit (like p-zombie).
Synaesthesia 12y ago
Having read and listened to Alan Watts I have become convinced that the self or ego or "I" as we commonly call it is a delusion, and a dangerous one at that. It leads to all kinds of confusions and contradictions. It is this delusion that is the source of our pain and jealousy. We should realize that we are part of a greater whole, that our own existence is inseparable from the rest of the universe. We are all one. Cheesey. Rather than say "I think therefore I exist", I prefer the simpler, "thought exists"

159 points by tegeek 12y ago

Also worth a read: http://kk.org/thetechnium/2008/10/evidence-of-a-g/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/2008/10/evidence-of-a-g/ Too much emphasis is usually placed on the "consciousness" part of general intelligence.

sadkingbilly 12y ago
"But a malformed packet could also be an emergent signal. A self-created packet." If a program sent out a malformed packet, this would indicate an error in the sender's program. Let's assume that a receiving program reads the malformed packet and is able to process it. It results in something favorable (no clue how this would be determined, but let's go with it) and so the receiving program repeats whatever it originally did to get this malformed packet sent to it, so that it gets another malformed packet. Multiply this by thousands of other programs doing similar things to "hack" other programs into sending malformed packets to perform useful functions, and maybe you have something happening here. The above process basically describes a genetic algorithm, which I don't think the Internet is. It also assumes that most programs are flexible enough to produce bugs like this - creating malformed packets. Does this mean we should stop unit testing code to allow more freedom from the programs? Plus, the above also assumes there is some way of ranking an outcome from a malformed packet as "favorable". Maybe that would be humans?

officialjunk 12y ago

The initial basis that electrons just instrinsically have charge isn't proven. Infact there is a proof of why electrons have quantized charge (by Dirac), but it requires that magnetic monopoles exist, which haven't been observed.

wuliwong 12y ago
I also thought it was really interesting that they chose that to start with. I personally find the electron to be one of the more confounding and least talked about pieces of the current state of physics understanding. That being said, it is hard for me to imagine what a proof that charge is intrinsic to an electron would even look like. Proving that something is the result of something else seems much more straightforward than proving something not being the result of anything. Also, only talking about an electron's charge being intrinsic is ignoring a lot of the mystery of it. The fact that it is a point particle is a pesky issue as well. An electron is just an electron with no underlying "pieces" or mechanisms. Obviously that could be wrong, but no one has been able to prove it yet. I think using the electron as an example for our understanding of how the universe works is pretty ignorant. It's one of the weirdest parts of physics I've encountered during my career. It is a topic that few people actively work on but feels like their is clearly something amiss with our current understanding.

xnull 12y ago

Integrated Information Theory I think is a fad, and a bad one at that. One could think of integration of information as a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness a la Scott Aaronson [1] who applies more rigorous mathematical examples of integrated systems - in fact ones close to maximal possible integrated information - that very clearly are unlikely have any measure of consciousness (like expander graphs and error correcting codes). What about ciphers, where small changes to a single bit in key, ciphertext or plaintext radically alters the evolution of the internals and output of the system? But even that might be too strong a statement. Aren't minimally interacting systems such as Conway's Game of Life Turing Complete? There are tiny, tiny Universal Turing Machines, and UTMs are essentially free to encode/decode their tape inputs in any way they see fit. Ultimately while IIT has a 'mathematical description' it mostly only serves to obfuscate a naive and trivial notion that 'the system has to be complicated and has to integrate and process local information in some holistic global way'. No shit. [1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

SapphireSun 12y ago
Not quite. I attended a talk by Dr. Koch at MIT. I didn't get all of it, but it seemed to me that his definition tries to figure out what's included or excluded in conscious systems and how conscious they are. It may or may not be right, but it at least it's working towards something with predictive value. The examples you gave are mostly abstract and not physical. If consciousness is a physical phenomenon, these algorithms must be manifest before they can qualify. As for the game of life, the pieces on a physical board aren't actually interacting with each other with feedback loops. In a computer, the circuits are mostly feed forward and the algorithm is simulated rather than physically realized.
- xnull 12y ago
  The examples though _do_ have physical manifestations - everything that exists in the universe has a physical manifestation (by tautology). How is a feed forward circuit carrying information (to be integated) not a physical realization? It's not clear why neurons carrying potentials and mixing them count but not an FPGA (no longer an ALU simulation) doing cryptographic operations for a bitcoin mining rig. Furthermore as an FPGA more directly implements the information integration system than an ALU fetch-execute cycle, is it 'more conscious'? For me that sounds absurd. Presume the Game of Life _did_ have a direct physical implementation, let's say neurons fire according to GOL rules. Would you then be forced to call it conscious or not? Wouldn't it depend on the cell configuration? An all blank cell configuration certainly isn't conscious but the system would have the same low IIT score as a manifestation running some UTM-equivalent setup. Finally, what about physical systems that do highly integrate information? N-body problems exhibit highly integrated behavior manifest in the so-called butterfly effect. Why do the air molecules in a balloon not count as conscious? This physical example escapes the "America" criticism - every molecule applies a force on every other and due to n-body mechanics the system is highly integrated. My worry, which I think is mostly corroborated, is that the definite clarity of the IIT definition will serve to obscure the fact that underlying definition has no real definite clarity or derivation. Ultimately the IIT formula was imagined to capture some heuristic notions - but it was not derived. For this reason, added to those above, I am very skeptical. Or maybe it's my CS background that makes me biased toward thinking that _how_ information is integrated matters purely more than some measure of how much mixing there is (e.g. by one of many versions [5 now?] of the IIT formula).

Xcelerate 12y ago

> Why we should live in such a universe is a good question, but I don’t see how that can be answered now. His last point here is salient. Much like the various interpretations of quantum mechanics, any theories of consciousness are untestable. But my problem with "consciousness" is that it's not even a well-defined concept. Suppose I replace all occurrences of "consciousness" in that article with the word "qualgma". It makes just as much sense. Gravity, electrons, and energy are all concepts that are defined to exist as the manifestation of certain physical phenomena that can be modeled and predicted with mathematical equations. These words are just English simplifications of the equations. But consciousness has no such analogue. It's just a term that people throw around when they talk about the brain. I believe that over time, it has started to acquire a more well-defined meaning -- something along the lines of "the emergent properties of the brain's activity resulting from lower-level processes". This is similar to how a human body is just the emergent result of many atomic interactions. This version of consciousness can be modeled, theorized about, and tested experimentally. There's nothing magical about. As the brain's neural circuitry becomes better understood, you could say consciousness is a simplified model that still has good predictive capability. However, I would also like to focus on a much more interesting topic in the article: > My consciousness is an undeniable fact. One can only infer facts about the universe, such as physics, indirectly, but the one thing I’m utterly certain of is that I’m conscious. I believe Koch is conflating two distinct concepts. If we take the definition of consciousness as the predictive modeling of the brain, then this is something totally different than what he's talking about here. Let me alter his quote: > That I experience my existence is an undeniable fact. One can only infer facts about the universe, such as physics, indirectly, but the one thing I’m utterly certain of is that I am experiencing existence. It's really astonishing to me that he words it this way, because independently I have thought almost exactly the same thing for a long time. I've often struggled to put this notion into words, but let me try it in a new way with an analogy. Suppose you see an apple floating in front of you. You tell other people "Look at this apple!" But they just go "What apple?" So, you try to get crafty. You take a picture of the apple with a digital camera. But when you show people the photo on the computer, they still see no apple. So you zoom in on the pixels and start copying the RGB values for each one by hand onto paper. "Look, this value is 237!" you say. And you sit down with a friend, and start calling each and every pixel's values out as he puts them in manually into his image editing program. When he's does, you say "Ha! Look, there's my apple, right on your screen! And you put it in there yourself!" But he stares at you quizzically, and says, "I still see no apple; just an empty table." And no matter what kind of tricky experimental method you try to come up with to get everyone else to understand the concept of this apple that's always floating in front of you, every attempt to catch it produces a representation of the apple for you and nothing for everyone else. It's frustrating because the people you tell about the apple say "Well, you have provided no testable predictions, and no data that can be independently verified by everyone else in society. Clearly your apple doesn't exist." But it does! You know it does! In fact, out of everything that constitutes reality, the floating apple is the one thing you're most sure of. Frustrated, you walk around thinking you're crazy until one day someone says, "Well, I don't see an apple floating in front of you, but do you see the orange floating in front of me?" Which, of course, you don't. Now replace "apple" with "the fact that I am experiencing my own existence". It's an element of reality that is only apparent to you on a personal level, and since it isn't testable by other people, it is not a part of their reality, and thus does not exist as far as they are concerned. And thus it's not science. Yet even though it's not science, it is the one thing in life I am most certain of. My five senses could all be faked with advanced enough neural circuitry. I could be in an entirely simulated environment, with entirely simulated physics. So when I order things in probability of how likely they are to be an illusion, experiencing existing falls at the lowest probability. In fact, you could strip me of all my senses and put my brain in a vat, and as long as it's running, I'm still experiencing existence. If the idea bothers you that things might exist that are incapable of being verified consensually by society, look at this image of all the particle interactions (so far discovered): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Elementary_particle_interactions.svg/2000px-Elementary_particle_interactions.svg.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Ele... If you'll notice, gluons "hang on" to the rest of the particles by merely one interaction. If this interaction was not present, as far as positivists are concerned, then gluons don't exist. But that seems entirely unreasonable to me. I could imagine plenty of particles that could "exist" that simply don't have an interaction with the ones in the standard model that constitute our reality. Anyway, this is probably the most bizarre post I've ever written on HN, but hopefully what I'm trying to convey "clicks" for some people.

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dominotw 12y ago

Are we discussing consciousness everyday ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515361

pedrosorio 12y ago

"WIRED: Getting back to the theory, is your version of panpsychism truly scientific rather than metaphysical? How can it be tested? Koch: In principle, in all sorts of ways. One implication is that you can build two systems, each with the same input and output — but one, because of its internal structure, has integrated information. One system would be conscious, and the other not. It’s not the input-output behavior that makes a system conscious, but rather the internal wiring." Isn't this the definition of a non-testable assertion? The observable input-output behavior is the same, yet he claims the property of consciousness is different. So where is the test?

efnx 12y ago
Maybe one has a higher (non zero) phi rating, which apparently means it is conscious. I agree with you, I don't see the test. I'd also like to agree with Koch, intuitively what he says makes sense - it's possibly a lack of understanding on the writers part that this key point is lost.
dcre 12y ago
Well, he's stipulating that we build it, so we know what the internal wiring is. That doesn't necessarily mean that what's he's describing is possible or even coherent.

millstone 12y ago

Many drugs induce unconsciousness, but these don't work by decreasing the complexity or organization of our brains. Doesn't this neatly refute the idea that consciousness is an "immanent property of highly organized pieces of matter, such as brains?"

kazinator 12y ago
Not really, because complexity can have an on-off switch: a global one, or at least a partial. If you implement a software system that is conscious, but then suspend it to a storage device, and resume it one week later (so that it is surprised: where did the time go?) its complexity hasn't gone away. It just wasn't conscious for one week because it wasn't running. Another thing to consider is this: there may be more than one consciousness in your brain! The one which is you, the one typing on Hackernews, is just the one which has access to the "console" so to speak: the fingers, the eyes, ... There could be other consciousnesses hidden in your brain that are suppressed. Like "background daemons". Maybe that part of the brain that regulates your body while you sleep (or don't sleep) is also conscious! The consciousness-process which is "you" is deactivated during sleep, but the other background "daemons" remain conscious. (Clearly, sleep is not a complete, global shutdown of brain activity, in other words.) (Also, I'm here reminded of dolphins which put half their brain to sleep at a time.)
- millstone 12y ago
  I like your computer analogy because it's easy to reason about. Surely a powered-down computer is not conscious. So if consciousness has an off switch, then it's not immanent (inherent) to organization. Koch compares consciousness to the electric charge of an electron. But the electric charge has no off switch!
  - sebastianconcpt 12y ago
    "But the electric charge has no off switch!" Exactly. And "consciousness is computation" is an hypothesis that does not really work.

jostmey 12y ago

I failed to find anything concrete in Koch's argument. Its funny because at some level he is right - there is this thing called consciousness, but even when the most rational people try to describe it they inevitably sound unscientific. I imagine that before Darwin everyone must have sounded crazy when they talked about biology. I guess the field of Neuroscience is still waiting for a revelation.

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Animats 12y ago

According to Koch, consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. All animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious; even the internet could be. That’s just the way the universe works. Clearly one can build a hugely complex system that performs some special-purpose function and isn't anywhere near "conscious". Consider a big supercomputer doing finite-element analysis. Or a big network of packet routers. Koch would probably argue that those aren't "sufficiently complex"? So what's the definition of "sufficiently complex"? Something that is "conscious"? This is not helpful. Perhaps we should focus on "common sense", rather than "consciousness". Common sense can usefully be defined as the ability to predict (at least the near-term) consequences of actions. Given that, planning and evaluation of alternatives is possible. Most animals above the insect level have some capability in that area. They're not purely reactive. We really need to get this figured out so we can build robots that can handle new situations without screwing up too badly. Neuroscience has work to do at the bottom. Check out "http://www.openworm.org/" http://www.openworm.org/", where some people are trying to simulate the simplest nematode known at the neuron level. Until that works, neuroscience doesn't really have neurons figured out. Classic quote: "Philosophy is the kicking up of a lot of dust and then complaining about what you can't see".

whtrbt 12y ago
It's not directly related to the original article, but the idea of consciousness arising in any sufficient system reminded me of an essay by Hans Moravec, "Simulation, Consciousness, Existence" [1] (and that essay in turn makes me think of the dust theory of reality described in Greg Egan's "Permutation City"). "Perhaps the most unsettling implication of this train of thought is that anything can be interpreted as possessing any abstract property, including consciousness and intelligence." [1] http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...
jcfrei 12y ago
> Consider a big supercomputer doing finite-element analysis. Or a big network of packet routers. There's another perspective here. We always argue from a very anthropocentric point of view and measure experience based on actions and reactions that a human would perform. Ie. asking questions, seeing something and saying something based on what we see, etc. The supercomputer you described can hardly be considered conscious with regards to such actions. However it might be very conscious with regards to a different set of actions, ie. turning off some switches which allow for intercommunication between the different CPUs (the computer might react by rerouting some packets), it might react to raising the room temperature (by spinning up the fans), it might react to removing some RAM (by allocating more data on the hard disk), etc.

Taek 12y ago

When we think of consciousness, we normally associate with the brain. But according to the complexity theory, shouldn't there also be consciousness in most of our organs? The liver is a massive network of cells that are in at least a moderate amount of communication, and yet I am not aware of its consciousness. But perhaps it is conscious, just at a level that's inaccessible to my brain, which is a nearly distinct structure with very minimal relative communication to the liver. I also found it interesting that he denied the idea that America might be one larger consciousness. I've had multiple experiences on LSD which have suggested to me that as an aggregate humans are one larger organism with a single collective consciousness, that operates both at a slower speed and a higher overall awareness. (Most accessible in the 150-200ug range) When you think about how individual neurons work, spraying neurotransmitters at each other to trigger responses from the next neuron, essentially passing information in a complex yet highly organized web, are humans that much different. The set of humans who design cities are different from the set of humans who manage government policies are different from the set of humans that try to go to space. Each human passes information to others in highly complex ways that form super organized macrostructures. It doesn't seem to be that much of a stretch then to say that consciousness also arises from the interactions of the macrostructures in the same way consciousness arises from the interactions of all the parts of our brain. And the internet would seem to be a massive facilitator of this. Because of the internet, the amount of communication I do per day is enormous, and my interactions happen at a global (though mostly English speaking) scale. I doubt communications of this scope and magnitude were available to humans even 20 years ago.

john2x 12y ago
The internet, as a neural network, "dreams" of cat videos when they go viral. Huh. In fact, it "decides" for itself which ones should go viral. Interesting thought.
- ganzuul 12y ago
  I blame my deep integration with the internet for my belief that I'm actually a cat.
tbastos 12y ago

nl 12y ago

The biggest neural network yet built was a 100 billion neuron simulation of the human brain[1]. That didn't exhibit consciousness, but is considerably smaller than the 1 quadrillion (1 million billion) synapses a human brain has. I'm unsure what the relationship between a synapse and a neuron is. There are claims[2] that a human brain has "only" 100 billion neurons itself. Of course, it's true that consciousness may emerge from the complexity of the connections rather than the raw count. I'm unconvinced. It seems possible that whales (500 million neurons) have more complex brain networks than humans, and yet by some definitions they aren't conscious. Conversely, some argue that birds are conscious, and yet they have considerably smaller brains than some neural networks. [1] http://www.izhikevich.org/human_brain_simulation/Blue_Brain.htm http://www.izhikevich.org/human_brain_simulation/Blue_Brain.... [2] http://www.quora.com/How-many-neurons-are-needed-to-create-a-conscious-entity http://www.quora.com/How-many-neurons-are-needed-to-create-a...

sebastianconcpt 12y ago
"Of course, it's true that consciousness may emerge from the complexity of the connections rather than the raw count." Your "of course" is taking as proved something that is not (the consciousness is computation hypothesis). In your benefit you said may so of course you're not convinced. Which is good because people shouldn't believe in things that aren't testable. :) And you talk about birds but there are als unicellular organisms reacting to anestesics, so that doubt should be even broader

brittonrt 12y ago

This brings me to an interesting thought experiment I struggle with: Most likely most people here would agree that if you make an exact copy of a person's brain, whilst leaving the original intact, it would be a new person, identical but divergent from the original. A new thread of consciousness by such definition. But then, what if you destroy the original at the moment of copy? It would appear to the same. But then, what if you replace each neuron one at a time over a period, maintaining the original network? This question is troubling because it brings into obvious doubt the integrity of our notion of consciousness. As it is in fact the case that we shed most of the atomic matter that constitutes us in a given year, we are clearly immaterial. Patterns. So put plainly: should you copy your brain all at once, killing the original, are you a new person? But if you are: transitioning slowly piece by piece over time, which is what we observe in nature, this maintains the conscious strain? How are these different? It's obvious to me there is something fundamental here we are missing. I welcome any insights you all might have had in similar thought experiments.

coconutrandom 12y ago
The second question is the same as The Ship of Theseus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
There's nothing fundamental we're missing: the reality beneath our intuitive understanding of personal identity and continuity is just a lot messier than our intuitions allow for. Nondiverging copies are, in some sense, the same person, but they're also completely useless: the instant you "wake them up", they diverge and become different people. Destructive "moving" preserves personal identity, but is goddamn creepy because it provides no way for the "moved" person to verify that they remain the same before-and-after. The "continuous stream of consciousness" model is intuitive and lets us detect when something in our heads changes (you can feel yourself going from "sober" to "drunk" while awake in a very different way than if I just injected you with booze while you slept... For Science, of course).
dghf 12y ago
You seem to be assuming the actual existence of a "thread of consciousness" or a "conscious strain", when it could be an illusion. When you wake up after a dreamless sleep, are you the same person, the same conscious entity, as went to bed the night before? Or is that entity now "dead", and "you" are a new entity that has just inherited its memories (most of which it in turn inherited from its predecessors)? How could you ever tell? In fact, are you the same conscious entity from moment to moment, or at least from thought to thought? More "making a copy" thought experiments, none terribly original: - If you're disintegrated and immediately reassembled, are you still you? - Does using different atoms make a difference? - Does leaving a gap between disintegration and reassembly make a difference? If so, how long a gap? What if you're resurrected at the Omega Point by sufficiently advanced aliens/post-humans? - If you're split in two (sagitally, coronally, or however), and each half is immediately reconstructed into a whole human, each identical to you before the split, which is you? Which pair of eyes would you find yourself looking out of? Both? Neither? - If the two "yous" exchange atoms, such that one ends up with the entire complement of atoms that made up you before the split and the other ends up with none, does that affect the claims of either to be the "real" you?

sebastianconcpt 12y ago

That theory is not even close to point in the right direction on research. Consciousness is not computation. An do not just emerge from complexity. If it would, then the ammount of quantum information and complexity in any tropical thunderstorm would make it a supergenius entity. And is not (or prove me wrong). Consciousness is also not mind. Mind is more like the sum of intelligence. Consciousness something else, more fundamental. Only quantum biology could be interesting on researching this.

stefanu 12y ago
I don't think we can equate complexity of a tropical thunderstorm to the complexity as described in the article. The discussed complexity arises from local connections (be it persistent bonds or repeated interactions) between entities. While interactions in the thunderstorm might seem "complex" to our mind, they are not "complex" from the point of view of "complex systems", they are rather "complicated". Moreover thunderstorm network (if we consider the interactions of particles in the thunderstorm) is very transient. No feedback loops emerge in the system (to my understanding of thunderstorm). Also the system does not adapt to the surrounding environment through it's reconfiguration of internal connections. Thunderstorm lacks many properties of the complex systems discussed in the article.
- sebastianconcpt 12y ago
  A storm doesn't have feedback loops in brain-like interconnections. But in a quantic level there is thermodynamic activity re-adapting and re-shaping the system all the time. In any case, as Giulio Tononi would say, "it has zero integration." And it doesn't have consciousness, only energetic physico-chemical activity. I agree with that view. The important part is (a) that it does not have computation and (b) regardless of complexity, computation is not consciousness. Saying it and expecting it to "magically emerge from it" does not make that hypothesis any truer. They are throwing darts in the dart and making it sound cool. But, okay, I'll be nice and not troll the effort of making this subject cool and let's not put theory against theory because is not productive. What about seeing something testable? Take a Paramecium. It does not have many neurons, so it doesn't have synapses but it still learns where the food is and reacts to anestesics as we do. What about that? That radical theory published there is not predicting the Paramecium, much less anything about the one in the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Bring me news on how quantum-biology is behaving down there and we might actually get somewhere.

3beard 12y ago

The idea you can magically "generate" consciousness by running an algorithm is really silly superstition.

sebastianconcpt 12y ago
Completely agree. Also as theory is essentially useless as it does not predict anything. They are throwing darts in the dark and making it sound cool.

maebert 12y ago

TL;DR: Christoph Koch says that 1) Make a really complex system. We can even measure how complex systems are! 2) ??? 3) Consciousness! By the way, that's not panpsychism, that's emergentism, and for much better accounts of that read CD Broad or Jaekwon Kim.

jcfrei 12y ago

For me questions on the nature of consciousness have always been deeply connected to the question of identity. Specifically the following thought experiment: What if there was a machine that would read every atom of your body and recreate your body at a different location at a different time whilst destroying the original. Would the arising consciousness still be your own original consciousness or would it be a copy? What if we keep both, the original and the copy? Are there now two separate instances of your consciousness running? I guess the only answer in line with Koch is yes. Consciousness emerges out of a complex system. And I might add that consciousness is not a continuously working "state of mind". It fades in and out during our daily lives. The consciousness we had yesterday is lost today and replaced by a new one, which runs on a different chemical setting in your brain (albeit shares most of the memories of the previous one). I think that while I can "experience my own existence", this "existence" doesn't always refer to the same consciousness - one moment to the next the underlying system might have changed marginally or even substantially (in the case of being based on an entirely new set of atoms, which just happens to be in the same configuration as before).

BasDirks 12y ago

This requires a leap of faith, usually not an indicator of good science, but it's not unimaginable. One could argue that his terms are ambiguous or otherwise ill-defined, but what if this kind of research could be the starting point for such definitions?

ccozan 12y ago

He has also a book about it: http://www.amazon.de/The-Quest-Consciousness-Neurobiological-Approach/dp/1936221047 http://www.amazon.de/The-Quest-Consciousness-Neurobiological... I have read it half way, a lot of information there.

duckingtest 12y ago

This is so much like theology, on which thousands of man hours have been wasted (including Newton's). Mental masturbation. What's the point? The simplest definition is that consciousness is a property of a program which has the capacity to compute something determined by at least one of its previous outputs (which can be an identity function, a perfect memory). Integrated information theory is basically this, only made more complex with the addition of a quantitative property, presumably because people feel an aversion to simplicity. This has a danger of producing absurd results in some edge cases, still, overengineering is a minor infraction compared to the deadly sin of bullshit (like p-zombie).

Synaesthesia 12y ago

Having read and listened to Alan Watts I have become convinced that the self or ego or "I" as we commonly call it is a delusion, and a dangerous one at that. It leads to all kinds of confusions and contradictions. It is this delusion that is the source of our pain and jealousy. We should realize that we are part of a greater whole, that our own existence is inseparable from the rest of the universe. We are all one. Cheesey. Rather than say "I think therefore I exist", I prefer the simpler, "thought exists"