The other day I mused on Twitter about three big origin questions: the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of consciousness. Which isn’t to say they are related, just that they’re all interesting and important (and currently nowhere near solved). Physicists have taken stabs at the life question, but (with a few dramatic exceptions) they’ve mostly stayed away from consciousness. Probably for the best.
Here’s Ed Witten giving his own personal — and characteristically sensible — opinion, which is that consciousness is a really knotty problem, although not so difficult that we should start contemplating changing the laws of physics in order to solve it. Though I am more optimistic than he is that we’ll understand it on a reasonable timescale. (Hat tip to Ash Jogalekar.)
[Video has been removed, sorry]
Anyone seriously interested in tackling these big questions would be well-served by acknowledging that much (most? almost all?) progress in science is incremental, sneaking up on major discoveries by a series of small steps rather than leaping right to a dramatic new paradigm. Even if you want to understand the origin of the universe, it might behoove you to think about some more specific and tractable problems, like the nature of quantum fluctuations in inflation, or the emergence of spacetime in string theory. If you want to understand the origin of consciousness, it’s a good strategy to think about something like our perception of color, with the idea of working your way up to the more challenging issues.
Conversely, it’s these big questions that attract crackpots like honey attracts flies. I get a lot of emails (and physical letters) from cranks, but they never have a new theory of the branching ratio of the Higgs boson into four leptons; it’s always about the nature of space and time and everything. It’s too easy for anyone to have an opinion about these big questions, whether or not those opinions are worth paying attention to.
All of which leads up to saying: it’s still worth tackling the big questions! Start small, but think big. Because they are so hard, it’s too easy to make fun of attempts to solve the biggest questions, or to imagine that they are irreducibly mysterious and will never be solved. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we had quite compelling pictures of the origin of the universe, life, and consciousness within the next hundred years. But only if we’re willing to tackle the big problems seriously.
>”Even if you want to understand the origin of the universe, it might behoove you to think about some more specific and tractable problems, like the nature of quantum fluctuations in inflation, or the emergence of spacetime in string theory.”<
Someone posted a question online the other day. I think the topic was some clickbait article about: "Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy in the UCLA College, and colleagues propose that the matter-antimatter asymmetry could be related to the Higgs boson particle, which was the subject of prominent news coverage when it was discovered at Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider in 2012."
The question was specifically about how motion started in the big bang if the universe was in a static state. They had no idea how it could be possible with the initial conditions of the universe being what they are believed to have been. And that is why inflation is so important. Yet "certain people" are so quick to want to say that it's ridiculous and not necessary. I am dumbfounded by this because it answers their question quite well. Inflation is perhaps the best possible answer.
If you remember electrostatics (taught to most high school students in the USA); why is the electric field perpendicular at every point on the surface of an electrostatic conductor? Because if it wasn't perpendicular, then it wouldn't be static; it would be dynamic according to Newton's laws of force. You could always say that some external force acted on the electrostatic system and caused it to become dynamic, but that's the coward's way out of this problem. The real challenge comes when you ask what could happen to the system, and to the system alone, which would produce a change that resulted in normal vectors becoming 'less than normal' or 'more than normal' (not 90 degrees however you like to play it)? The only possible answer that fits all the required parameters while remaining independent is a change in scale. The inflaton field works so well that it seems like willful ignorance to refuse it. But people do. It's a lot like climate change. People willfully ignore evidence because they desire a conspiracy which can't be proven or disproven. It's some deep-seated need in some peoples' minds which can only be compared to religion, even in atheists. Some sort of psychological defense mechanism so that they don't have to acknowledge their mortality and the fact that they aren't all that special. oh well. I guess this is enlightenment.
>”I have to point out that Witten is not a neuroscientist. Why not find someone more qualified to opine on the topic?”<
Sure, what would Schrodinger know about biology? After all, it would be terribly threatening if someone who was brilliant was not limited to one extremely narrow academic discipline. As though brilliance is not topical, but a means of learning how to learn and think critically & logically about a topic. As though brilliance is applying critical thought and not something that one simply repeats like a recording.
http://www.genetics.org/content/153/3/1071.full
>”For example, Time is merely a word (an abstract) – and so semantics can explains Time entirely – something that simply eludes science utterly, though you keep trying!”<
It surely must be a conspiracy. I'll get Batman on the phone; he'll get the Justice League involved and we'll get to the bottom of this. You're days are numbered Sean Carroll! By an individual who lacks the cognitive insight to edit their comment, but has discovered an error in 'science' which can only be explained by philosophy. Me and Smeagol have you right where we 'wants' you. You'll try to take the precious which is our theory of time, but we won't 'lets' you.
Seriously though, the world has got to tackle mental health issues if we want to make it. We can't become masters of nature and yet also have people like this running around. There can't be that big of a gap in intelligence. Just like Iran; you can't have 8th century beliefs with 20th century technology. That's how civilizations end. Is it agression? (definitely on my part) I think so.
Our brain being matter, for sure it meet quantum fluctuations as all the matter in our universe. Of course we would test somewhere in the future if these quantum fluctuations affect randomly our free will. Or if much more than that, our brain is using these quantum fluctuations for correlations. Before testing human brain, for sure there will be animal brains testing. Probably some clever scientists or doctors or genetic engineers are already thinking at that.
Reginald and anybody pursuing reductionism
I don’t know if you read to the end of my posts, or just deal with the first thing you disagree with.
I looked at your link…presumeably you wanted me to? RNA self assembly scenarios are interesting certainly, and obviously stable pre-biotic molecules came about through some set of circumstances. Like our previous discussions about intermediate mutation survivals, we could get into a long discussion about the probabilities, and perhaps invoke the multiverse to help us. It’s really hard to argue with the multiverse, I think you could invoke it in some form to fix probabilities for just about any theory of origins. It could be possible for the properties of energy/matter, seeded in a particular way, to more or less mandate life as we know it, but I doubt it.
I still don’t think we are converging to a simple, plausible, elegant answer to origins, say something similar to the simple beautiful mathematical thing Dirac and others were looking for underlying QED. Even then you would have to explain the veracity of math.
Sometimes I wonder what sort of thing relentless reductionists are looking for? What would your simple underlying answer look like when you have finished simplifying and reducing existence?
John Barrett, you seem to be expecting science to be on a perpetual incremental journey towards an elusive goal of final understanding of our existence. I agree on the whole, it probably is. I just think that on Sean’s big questions the increments are mostly delusory, meaning I don’t think we are getting close to the heart of the matter.
Anybody got any thoughts on what they are really looking for here? When would reductionism be seen to have ‘arrived’?
Matthew is on the right lines here. Consciousness trying to evaluate its own roots accurately may be doomed to failure.
I remember Richard Dawkins talking about memes, his own invention I believe. I’m sure this has been pointed out before, but the idea of memes is itself a meme, and therefore subject to the same lack of absolute veracity.
If we take an EBNS line on consciousness, then our minds evolved primarily to survive, and not to determine absolute truth.
Obviously I am not trying to throwing away logic entirely, just trying to argue for humility and realism when we do a great deal of thinking in the abstract with no verification performed or possible.
“Origin of the universe, origin of life, origin of consciousness. I wonder which one we’ll figure out first.”
Funny, I thought they were all _figured out_ but not yet tested beyond reasonable doubt, and in that precise order.
Inflation in the LCDM turns the old big bang inside out since 1998, so the local universe would originate in the local end of inflation. But that inflation is not tested to everyone’s satisfaction.
Origin of life has possible pathways which has no internal inconsistencies or stumbling blocks. The most likely one (has most homologies between Hadean Earth and modern cells) is Russell’s submarine alkaline emergency theory. In the last year, the three remaining stumbling blocks fell:
– non-enzymatic reaction chains of metabolism can in fact and against expectations be as efficient against side reactions as enzymatic ones
– vent pores would select for elongated replicator chains
– and finally Joyce showed a month ago that cross-chiral replicators work in racemic solutions consistent with ribosome phylogeny (chiral selection happened when coding evolved and is still frozen in into tRNA chemistry). That was the last possibly fundamental barrier between geophysical systems and RNA cells of the RNA world.
But testing these anoxic, high temperature, high pressure geophysical systems and their development of the evolutionary regime could take decades.
Finally origin of consciousness, even better both the “soft” and the “hard” problem, has a late [2013, I think] but already very popular biologically founded basis in Graziano’s toolbox theory:
“In Graziano’s attention schema theory, awareness is the brain’s simplified model of the complicated process of attention. When a person is aware of something such as an apple in front of them, it is because the brain has put together two models: the information describing the apple, and the self-descriptive information about how the brain is focusing its resources. Put those two specialized types of information together and the brain is equipped to introspect, conclude and report, “I am aware of the apple.”
The attention schema theory satisfies two problems of understanding consciousness, said Aaron Schurger, a senior researcher of cognitive neuroscience at the Brain Mind Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland who received his doctorate from Princeton in 2009. The “easy” problem relates to correlating brain activity with the presence and absence of consciousness, he said. The “hard” problem has been to determine how consciousness comes about in the first place. Essentially all existing theories of consciousness have addressed only the easy problem. Graziano shows that the solution to the hard problem might be that the brain describes some of the information that it is actively processing as conscious because that is a useful description of its own process of attention, Schurger said.
“Michael’s theory explains the connection between attention and consciousness in a very elegant and compelling way,” Schurger said.
“His theory is the first theory that I know of to take both the easy and the hard problems head on,” he said. “That is a gaping hole in all other modern theories, and it is deftly plugged by Michael’s theory. Even if you think his theory is wrong, his theory reminds us that any theory that avoids the hard problem has almost certainly missed the mark, because a plausible solution — his theory — exists that does not appeal to magic or mysterious, as-yet-unexplained phenomena.””
[ http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S38/91/90C37/index.xml?section=featured ]
This too is under testing, but who knows how it goes? But I note that it has neatly axed all of Witten’s imagined “tending to believe” problems. [Insert gratuitous comment about physicists and biology here, but then remember how important Schrödinger was for finding DNA and, much later, promoting the crucial thermodynamic theory of replicators.]
I forgot the biological template for the consciousness toolbox:
“Graziano identifies two brain areas that most likely create the model of attention that leads to awareness (above). The superior temporal sulcus is linked to the ability to follow people’s gaze and determine where another’s attention is directed. The temporoparietal junction has been linked to processing internal and external information, and the ability to distinguish between oneself and others. These regions have been shown to be active when people try to understand the minds of other people, as well as when people redirect their attention. Just as important, damage to these regions has been shown to result in a poor ability to interpret other people’s actions and emotions, as well as a condition known as neglect wherein a person becomes totally unaware of anything on the side of the body opposite to the brain damage.”
[FWIW, re consciousness in animals: These regions have homologies in at least ape brains AFAIU, but were heavily remodeled under the Homo brain reorganization and growth.]
@brent meeker: Of course natural selection could select for consciousness. It would clearly confer an adaptive advantage.
@kasuha: “little doubt that large animals are conscious”? Evidence? Which large animals? Elephants but not mice? T. Rex?
@vijay Johan das: these citations are from predatory/fake journals.
“…consciousness is a really knotty problem, although not so difficult that we should start contemplating changing the laws of physics in order to solve it.”
One difficulty is that there’s no agreement about what the problem of consciousness consists in, including the characteristics of the explanatory target (conscious experience) or whether it even exists (Dennett and Graziano among others think not). We all agree that life and the universe exist, but not consciousness, apparently.
The basic difficulty is that experience – e.g., your tactile experience right now – isn’t accessible to observation in the way life and the universe are (as Brent Meeker said above concerning natural selection: it doesn’t “see” consciousness.) This makes it tempting to dismiss experience as an illusion, smoothing the way to a consistent physicalism in which everything that exists exists in public, so to speak. But in fact my experience does exist, but only for me – a private, qualitative reality that correlates closely with certain public, quantifiable neural goings-on having to do with various higher-level cognitive functions (see for instance Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux. 2011. “Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing.” Neuron 70, April 28, 2011.)
A system that does the sorts of things we do, in terms of representing itself and the world (including its own representational work), might *necessarily* end up hosting qualitative states that exist only for it – a root representational vocabulary. Such is the explanatory approach to consciousness that Thomas Metzinger explores in his books Being No One and The Ego Tunnel, well worth a look. I’ve reviewed the latter at http://www.naturalism.org/metzinger.htm The right level of analysis to understand why consciousness comes to exist might be representational, not physical (but it’s still all-natural!).
I don’t know what mechanism in the brain allows for it, but enjoy it while you have it, because there are many out there with Alzheimer’s, dementia and various other deceases and conditions that need research and none of us are immune, including Prof. Sean Carroll
you know that time after work when you’re exhausted? That’s your time. That’s when every great, mediocre, and terrible physicist has ever found the time.
You don’t need funding to study a problem. You can find the best books online, for free, legally. All papers go to arxiv or some sort of preprint server; where they are free. What other excuses do you have?
Dear Carrol, allow me to suggest considering ‘species’ as ‘states of consciousness’, therefore a kind of ‘existential gauge potentials’, taking a mathematical diving into a quantum gravity field (manifold). What do you think of that, sir?
I’ve always thought that Physicist and Theoretical Biologist Howard Pattee best illuminated and clarified the question “What is Life”.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/2013/05/16/howard-pattee/
I’m not interested in a scientific approach to consciousness until it can be operationally defined. That is, a testable definition. Without it, there can be no real scientific inquiry. I have my doubts that this can be done. If a dream state is not a conscious state, then I cannot even prove to myself that I am conscious, much less anyone else. I think that a Turing-like test is about as good as you can get, if an entity seems conscious after interacting with it, then it is conscious. Unless someone comes up with a definition, I’m content to leave it as: you get enough neurons or whatever firing in an organized response to some environment, magic happens, and there is some degree of consciousness.
On physicists and the life question, perhaps one should mention
Freeman Dysons’s essay, Origins of Life.
Maybe one should not forget
the fundamental role the work of John von Neumann had
[see Gregory Chaitin’s Proving Darwin -Making Biology Mathematical]
in the understanding of DNA.
Horace R. Crane, also. He predicted that many cellular structures
(without knowing the specific ones that would fit) would dispose
in an helicoidal pattern, not because they would work necessarily better,
but because they could assemble well with particularly simple structures…
What’s going on is this.
1. You can’t *derive* what it is like to experience the color green from math or physics.
2. What is the origin of the universe? To answer this question is to find the Parfit Selector.
3. The origin of life is a trivial(?!) matter of defining “life” and then finding chemicals that satisfy that definition in early Earth or asteroids.
The End
An illustration. If reality were really simple, and could be represented as a 2-dimensional plot, then probably only an area of that plot is ever going to be accessible to us by observation, analysis and deduction alone. This is a logical statement because of our very own limitations as ‘machines’. The type of information offered here concerning LCDM or RNA synthesis, consciousness analyzing itself etc. is moving towards the edges of that area, but I don’t think it will ever cross the boundary and give final answers on origins.
Another simple analogy from communications. Certain RF demodulators can decode certain digital radio modulation schemes and not others. The information is present, but the demodulator cannot make sense of it. A more sophisticated demodulator would discern the modulation scheme adopted by the sender of the transmission and adapt to it. We do not know how advanced our own capacity for ‘demodulation’ of the ‘signals’ of ‘reality’ are. We cannot change ourselves, or not much.
Several posters have said that there is a bound to what we can figure out because things are so complex and universe is so big and we’re small and limited. There’s one argument on the other side. If the universe is computable, i.e. it would be possible to perfectly emulate it on a sufficiently powerful digital computer, then we should be able to understand everything about it that it is logically possible to understand; because we are universal Turing machines and the Church-Turing thesis says all universal computers can compute the same things – both us and the universe. That doesn’t mean we can compute everything, since Godel incompleteness entails that there will be true but uncomputable facts. But we’re not arbitrarily bounded just because we’re small or because the universe is complex.
Per questions on physics:
Whenever someone has to address questions that require a high level of expertise to answer it is going to be frustrating. Even if you’re in a seminar room talking about a presentation on consciousness, people are going to heavily criticize the presentation.
If fact, one graduate student friend of mine was heavily criticized for trying to use quantum mechanics to explain consciousness. So, it is a minefield even in academic departments, and, particularly, even among very highly respected researchers.
It is harder and riskier for the grad student to do work on this in this field. It is a risky early career move, and particularly risky to try to combine QM and neuroscience in a PhD program. (in some depts)
FrankL: ” … I’m content to leave it as: you get enough neurons or whatever firing in an organized response to some environment, magic happens, and there is some degree of consciousness.”
I think you should be more explicit there in step two.
Brent
‘If the universe is computable, i.e. it would be possible to perfectly emulate it on a sufficiently powerful digital computer, then we should be able to understand everything about it that it is logically possible to understand’
If the universe is indeed deterministic and all the starting variables and equations where all fully known and correct, you would be correct with a perfect computational system. The memory resources of your computational system required to hold the state of the universe as it evolved would be rather high.
I see two other practical problems straight away. Digital systems which are not completely synchronous occasionally go into undefined states due to a property of memory registers called metastability (due to setup/hold time violation). A real computer therefore cannot calculate correctly for infinitesimal time domain resolution however fast the clock speed. Reality itself does not move in synchronous steps as far as we know. Also computers truncate irrational numbers so numerical modelling errors would accumulate.
However these are ‘real world'(!) issues. A perfect computer could do it given a complete set of correct initial information if the starting and ongoing realities are fully encompassed by the math we know and can implement with a Turing machine.
@Sandra Wilde: I think all of the examples you gave are conscious. At the very least, each life form capable of proactive behavior should IMO be considered conscious. But at the very bottom of things it may get very hard to tell proactive from reactive, even for humans.
It’s all so simple.
The basic substrate of reality is mathematics. Mathematics can exist even in the total absence of matter/energy. What we think of as *physics* are the particular branches of mathematics related to geometry. That is to say, anything geometrical manifests itself as appearing to be space, time and matter (but is really just mathematics).
Then what we think as living things (including conscious beings) are a particular sub-set of physics, relating to stable, goal-directed agents capable of forming internal*representations* of reality.
So the correct hierarchy is:
Mathematics > Physics > Living Things
Religions and super-natural views of the world get things totally backward, mistakenly placing the ‘living things’ category as foundational (idealism).
But materialists are equally mistaken when they think that physics is foundational. Mathematics can exist even in the total absence of matter/energy.
Materialism fails because a purely physical explanation of reality can only provide *causal* explanations of the form (B was caused by A) – the only way out of an infinite regress of explanation is to have a first cause (which would have *no* explanation), or a closed loop (B caused by A, caused by B) , but this violates the principle of causality (effects cannot precede causes) and leaves the existence of the loop itself unexplained.
Only mathematical Platonism has any hope of providing a genuine theory of everything. That is to say, *given* that reality is explicable at all, *then* mathematical Platonism must be true. If you deny mathematical Platonism (either because you believe in materialism or supernatural idealism) then, you are denying that reality is fully explicable.
What is consciousness? It’s an informational pattern in a physical substrate that consists of a stable logical representation of some aspects of reality.