For many people, the phenomenon of consciousness is the best evidence we have that there must be something important missing in our basic physical description of the world. According to this worry, a bunch of atoms and particles, mindlessly obeying the laws of physics, can’t actually experience the way a conscious creature does. There’s no such thing as “what it is to be like” a collection of purely physical atoms; it would lack qualia, the irreducibly subjective components of our experience of the world. One argument for this conclusion is that we can conceive of collections of atoms that behave physically in exactly the same way as ordinary humans, but don’t have those inner experiences — philosophical zombies. (If you think about it carefully, I would claim, you would realize that zombies are harder to conceive of than you might originally have guessed — but that’s an argument for another time.)
The folks who find this line of reasoning compelling are not necessarily traditional Cartesian dualists who think that there is an immaterial soul distinct from the body. On the contrary, they often appreciate the arguments against “substance dualism,” and have a high degree of respect for the laws of physics (which don’t seem to need or provide evidence for any non-physical influences on our atoms). But still, they insist, there’s no way to just throw a bunch of mindless physical matter together and expect it to experience true consciousness.
People who want to dance this tricky two-step — respect for the laws of physics, but an insistence that consciousness can’t reduce to the physical — are forced to face up to a certain problem, which we might call the causal box argument. It goes like this. (Feel free to replace “physical particles” with “quantum fields” if you want to be fastidious.)
- Consciousness cannot be accounted for by physical particles obeying mindless equations.
- Human beings seem to be made up — even if not exclusively — of physical particles.
- To the best of our knowledge, those particles obey mindless equations, without exception.
- Therefore, consciousness does not exist.
Nobody actually believes this argument, let us hasten to add — they typically just deny one of the premises.
But there is a tiny sliver of wiggle room that might allow us to salvage something special about consciousness without giving up on the laws of physics — the concept of downward causation. Here we’re invoking the idea that there are different levels at which we can describe reality, as I discussed in The Big Picture at great length. We say that “higher” (more coarse-grained) levels are emergent, but that word means different things to different people. So-called “weak” emergence just says the obvious thing, that higher-level notions like the fluidity or solidity of a material substance emerge out of the properties of its microscopic constituents. In principle, if not in practice, the microscopic description is absolutely complete and comprehensive. A “strong” form of emergence would suggest that something truly new comes into being at the higher levels, something that just isn’t there in the microscopic description.
Downward causation is one manifestation of this strong-emergentist attitude. It’s the idea that what happens at lower levels can be directly influenced (causally acted upon) by what is happening at the higher levels. The idea, in other words, that you can’t really understand the microscopic behavior without knowing something about the macroscopic.
There is no reason to think that anything like downward causation really happens in the world, at least not down to the level of particles and forces. While I was writing The Big Picture, I grumbled on Twitter about how people kept talking about it but how I didn’t want to discuss it in the book; naturally, I was hectored into writing something about it.
But you can see why the concept of downward causation might be attractive to someone who doesn’t think that consciousness can be accounted for by the fields and equations of the Core Theory. Sure, the idea would be, maybe electrons and nuclei act according to the laws of physics, but those laws need to include feedback from higher levels onto that microscopic behavior — including whether or not those particles are part of a conscious creature. In that way, consciousness can play a decisive, causal role in the universe, without actually violating any physical laws.
One person who thinks that way is John Searle, the extremely distinguished philosopher from Berkeley (and originator of the Chinese Room argument). I recently received an email from Henrik Røed Sherling, who took a class with Searle and came across this very issue. He sent me this email, which he was kind enough to allow me to reproduce here:
Hi Professor Carroll,
I read your book and was at the same time awestruck and angered, because I thought your entire section on the mind was both well-written and awfully wrong — until I started thinking about it, that is. Now I genuinely don’t know what to think anymore, but I’m trying to work through it by writing a paper on the topic.
I took Philosophy of Mind with John Searle last semester at UC Berkeley. He convinced me of a lot of ideas of which your book has now disabused me. But despite your occasionally effective jabs at Searle, you never explicitly refute his own theory of the mind, Biological Naturalism. I want to do that, using an argument from your book, but I first need to make sure that I properly understand it.
Searle says this of consciousness: it is caused by neuronal processes and realized in neuronal systems, but is not ontologically reducible to these; consciousness is not just a word we have for something else that is more fundamental. He uses the following analogy to visualize his description: consciousness is to the mind like fluidity is to water. It’s a higher-level feature caused by lower-level features and realized in a system of said lower-level features. Of course, for his version of consciousness to escape the charge of epiphenomenalism, he needs the higher-level feature in this analogy to act causally on the lower-level features — he needs downward causation. In typical fashion he says that “no one in their right mind” can say that solidity does not act causally when a hammer strikes a nail, but it appears to me that this is what you are saying.
So to my questions. Is it right to say that your argument against the existence of downward causation boils down to the incompatible vocabularies of lower-level and higher-level theories? I.e. that there is no such thing as a gluon in Fluid Dynamics, nor anything such as a fluid in the Standard Model, so a cause in one theory cannot have an effect in the other simply because causes and effects are different things in the different theories; gluons don’t affect fluidity, temperaturs and pressures do; fluids don’t affect gluons, quarks and fields do. If I have understood you right, then there couldn’t be any upward causation either. In which case Searle’s theory is not only epiphenomenal, it’s plain inaccurate from the get-go; he wants consciousness to both be a higher-level feature of neuronal processes and to be caused by them. Did I get this right?
Best regards,
Henrik Røed Sherling
Here was my reply:
Dear Henrik–
Thanks for writing. Genuinely not knowing what to think is always an acceptable stance!
I think your summary of my views are pretty accurate. As I say on p. 375, poetic naturalists tend not to be impressed by downward causation, but not by upward causation either! At least, not if your theory of each individual level is complete and consistent.
Part of the issue is, as often happens, an inconsistent use of a natural-language word, in this case “cause.” The kinds of dynamical, explain-this-occurrence causes that we’re talking about here are a different beast than inter-level implications (that one might be tempted to sloppily refer to as “causes”). Features of a lower level, like conservation of energy, can certainly imply or entail features of higher-level descriptions; and indeed the converse is also possible. But saying that such implications are “causes” is to mean something completely different than when we say “swinging my elbow caused the glass of wine to fall to the floor.”
So, I like to think I’m in my right mind, and I’m happy to admit that solidity acts causally when a hammer strikes a nail. But I don’t describe that nail as a collection of particles obeying the Core Theory *and* additionally as a solid object that a hammer can hit; we should use one language or the other. At the level of elementary particles, there’s no such concept as “solidity,” and it doesn’t act causally.
To be perfectly careful — all this is how we currently see things according to modern physics. An electron responds to the other fields precisely at its location, in quantitatively well-understood ways that make no reference to whether it’s in a nail, in a brain, or in interstellar space. We can of course imagine that this understanding is wrong, and that future investigations will reveal the electron really does care about those things. That would be the greatest discovery in physics since quantum mechanics itself, perhaps of all time; but I’m not holding my breath.
I really do think that enormous confusion is caused in many areas — not just consciousness, but free will and even more purely physical phenomena — by the simple mistake of starting sentences in one language or layer of description (“I thought about summoning up the will power to resist that extra slice of pizza…”) but then ending them in a completely different vocabulary (“… but my atoms obeyed the laws of the Standard Model, so what could I do?”) The dynamical rules of the Core Theory aren’t just vague suggestions; they are absolutely precise statements about how the quantum fields making up you and me behave under any circumstances (within the “everyday life” domain of validity). And those rules say that the behavior of, say, an electron is determined by the local values of other quantum fields at the position of the electron — and by nothing else. (That’s “locality” or “microcausality” in quantum field theory.) In particular, as long as the quantum fields at the precise position of the electron are the same, the larger context in which it is embedded is utterly irrelevant.
It’s possible that the real world is different, and there is such inter-level feedback. That’s an experimentally testable question! As I mentioned to Henrik, it would be the greatest scientific discovery of our lifetimes. And there’s basically no evidence that it’s true. But it’s possible.
So I don’t think downward causation is of any help to attempts to free the phenomenon of consciousness from arising in a completely conventional way from the collective behavior of microscopic physical constituents of matter. We’re allowed to talk about consciousness as a real, causally efficacious phenomenon — as long as we stick to the appropriate human-scale level of description. But electrons get along just fine without it.
Ben,
“That is, it is possible for time to be both real and static in some sense. And we should have a very strong suspicion that it’s real, because nobody’s ever managed to write it out of any of the equations.”
This is not true.
Even Schrödinger himself believed that the time-independent Schrödinger equation (TISE) was more fundamental than the time-dependent version (TDSE), which emerges from it.
In reality, it is more likely that ‘interactions’ between parts of a timeless whole gives the illusion of time. What is meant by an interaction without time is the real mystery. These must be some kind of connection between parts, but not one that ever changes.
Time and space are very much the same stuff. Look at the recent developments in wormholes and entanglement.
You can imagine EPR type entanglement as a connection where particles isolated from the environment can freely move forward and backward in time and across any distance. They can go back to when they became entangled, their creation is undone and then redone with a different random orientation, and then forward in time again, over and over.
This is easiest to imagine with photons, as they move at the speed of light, so travel through any distance is instantaneous in their frame of reference, and all interactions are completely time reversible.
But, when one of the entangled pair is observed by becoming entangled with the environment (so it can’t travel back in time anymore), the other is also “locked in” to its complementary orientation, because their creation can no longer be undone and redone. This will be observed, when the forward light cones intersect, as a perfect but random correlation (entanglement).
It now seems probable that this travel of particles back and forward through vast amounts of time and space is exactly the same as if a wormhole were connecting them in the present time, without any passage through time or space necessary.
The only thing that matters in these cases is that the particles or black holes are entangled, and isolated from the environment.
So entanglement shows us clearly that time and space emerge from the same geometric constructions of entanglement entropy. It also appears that gravity emerges from spacetime curvature, which is just a different geometry of the entanglent entropy.
Sean understands this, but he is cautious in his statements.
Ben,
Resources on a scale sufficient to compute the Universe as we observe it would looooooong since simultaneously collapse into a black hole from the density of the circuitry and explode like a supernova from the energy input. Therefore, if the Universe really is a computation, either the physics of the computer doing the computing are so radically different from ours that calling it a computer makes no sense, or else the Universe is radically different from how we perceive it (such as if we’re really brains in vats).
You cannot compute a thing from the inside (Godel again). There’s an inside/outside process even assuming there are no energy restraints. Besides, a computer computing the world with itself inside computation would recursively have to account for all the computation it is doing.
This again creates infinite recursion.
So, again, to “compute” (or to observe deterministically) you have to observe from the outside of the system you’re observing.
the Matrix, even if you wish to posit its existence, must either be in an Universe with radically different physics or our Universe must be radically different from how we think it is.
But this is a stretch. Isn’t your brain creating a fully illusory universe every time you sleep?
Ben G.
I noted that Konrad Zuse suggested the universe might be a cellular automaton back in 1967 – i.e. 3 years before Conway’s “Game of Life” caused such a sensation (Sci.Am. – Mathematical Games), 30 years I suppose before Wolfram’s “New Kind of Science” and over 30 years before GOL was proved Turing complete. (My own view is that the universe is something very like a CA .)
You replied:
“That goes back to the simulation discussion of a week or three back. Computation requires energy and other physical resources. Resources on a scale sufficient to compute the Universe as we observe it would looooooong since simultaneously collapse into a black hole from the density of the circuitry and explode like a supernova from the energy input. Therefore, if the Universe really is a computation, either the physics of the computer doing the computing are so radically different from ours that calling it a computer makes no sense, or else the Universe is radically different from how we perceive it (such as if we’re really brains in vats).”
You miss the point entirely. I believe the universe-as-simulation idea is ludicrous (I gave a couple of reasons in that discussion), not least because it leads to a computers-all-the-way-down (as in “turtles-all-the-way-down”) picture of reality, via a vicious circle in the argument. You have fallen into the same vicious circle. If the universe IS a computation (a cellular automaton) the matter and energy are features of the output; at the fundamental level there would be nothing but information. So the universal computation does not in this view run on a material computer; in fact the opposite is true.
BTW the black hole argument does not work. If the universe of fermions and bosons is a computation, then all these particles and their trajectories ARE the computation and, according to your argument, must collapse into a black hole; but only because of the same vicious circle. Also, read up on Landauer and criticisms of his view: at best, the deletion of a bit has a (very tiny) minimum energy, but even that does not apply to reversible computation. And, of course, it only applies, if at all, when the computation is run on a device. In the it-from-bit view, there is no physical device underlying the fundamental computation.
Picador
You wrote that qualia have no physical consequences. Your sentence is a counter-example.
Moe,
So basically everything is an illusion, except the totality of all events inscribed across the fourth dimension, with an entropic gradient?
Is it entirely coincidence that the foundation of human thought and civilization are the narratives we have been telling ourselves and each other for hundreds of millennia, now stored in everything from papyrus to computer hard drives?
I’m not going to try to disabuse you of your view, but while my own observation, that we can explain it as a dynamic state in which past events have been determined, but are no more physically real than future ones, may not be aesthetically pleasing to the human sense of permanence, it does leave far less explanatory loose ends.
Ben,
I’m also not a big fan of Big Bang theory. Along with the fact that Inflation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy are really just patches between theory and observation, what normally would have falsified less prestigious theories, I also have a problem with the fact that two metrics of space are being based on the same intergalactic light. One, based on the spectrum, is that the units of measure are expanding, while the other, based on the speed of light and the assumption these distant galaxies are receding over time, is that more units, i.e.. lightyears, are required to cover this distance. What is this vacuum through with light travels at C, if it is not space, since the speed of light doesn’t remain constant to this expanding space, but requires more time to cross it?
The original reason it was proposed that space is expanding, rather than it just being an expansion in space, is that we appear to be at the center of this expansion, with everything flying away proportional to distance. Yet if redshift were to be considered as a possible optical effect, this would make sense, as we are at the center of our view of the universe.
One possible explanation is that redshift based on recession is required for single spectrum photons, but if one considers the loading theory of light, that quantization of light is due to emission and reception and travels as waves, then the light of entire galaxies having been reduced to a few photons by the time it reaches our telescopes, is multi spectrum and that will redshift relative to distance traveled.
As it is, there are too many loose ends and future generations of theorists will eventually rebel against a model that is increasingly untestable.
John Merryman,
“So basically everything is an illusion, except the totality of all events inscribed across the fourth dimension, with an entropic gradient?”
“Is it entirely coincidence that the foundation of human thought and civilization are the narratives we have been telling ourselves and each other for hundreds of millennia, now stored in everything from papyrus to computer hard drives?”
Well, if every possibility of worlds exists, all levels of entropy will exist within the set of them. Only one of them will have the lowest possible entropy, which we could call the ‘big bang’ origin. If spacetime is also the result of structure in entropy, then there will obviously appear to be the least space and time in this particular world possibility.
The largest number of world possibilities will be those with the highest entropy. There will be the largest amount of these possibilities, and they will also have the most spacetime within them.
It only appears to us that the lower entropy versions are in ‘the past’.
It is not coincidence, it is part of reality. How can you honestly suggest otherwise?
It would appear that you believe that you existing right now (in the only present world, in 3+1 dimensions) has occured as the result of countless zillions of coincidences over the course of billions of years. Only then could the arrangement of atoms in the universe make it possible for you to exist right here and now.
How is that more likely than all possibilities existing without any coincidences necessary at all? You are there, exactly the same, in both cases. In one scenerio, you are a miracle. In the other, you are inevitable.
What is your preferred explanation of wavefunction collapse when observations are made? That a random thing happens due to your observation and the wavefunction is reset? If a photon from a star is traveling as a wave out in all directions for a billion years, and then you observe it with your eye, how does the rest of the wave, up to 2 billion light years away, know that instantaneously?
Moe,
Where did the energy for the Big Bang come from?
When we actually look out across the universe, we see two primary and opposing processes at work; Energy radiating out and mass coalescing in and so far as we can tell, they are balanced. According to WMAP and COBE, measurements of the background radiation, overall the rate of expansion between galaxies is matched by the gravitational force. Given Gravity is described as collapse of space and most of it is concentrated in galaxies, it would seem the expansion of the measure of space, based on redshift of visible radiation, i.e., light, between galaxies, is balanced by the contraction of space, measured by the contraction of gravity/mass. It would seem to be a cosmic convection cycle.
Entropy is a 19th century mechanical description of usable energy within a closed system. So given these two forces, gravity and radiation, pulling against each other, which direction is entropic? The radiation dispersing to infinity, or until too diffuse to measure, or the gravitational collapse of mass?
If you think about it, they, gravity and radiation, are both entropic. You burn a candle, the energy radiates away. You knock the candle on the floor and the energy also radiates away. Much as two black holes falling into each other radiate away excess energy. Yet at some point, that energy seems to quantify back into mass and start the cycle over again.
So while we need a nice, clear, start to finish process to describe entropy, nature can manage it as a cycle.
Why is my existence have to be a coincidence? For any existence, there has to be the defining fact of structural bounds. I am some combination of mass falling inward and creating definition, as energy radiates outward, propelling this form onward. Energy moves to the future, as form recedes into he past.
As for wave function collapse, wouldn’t it be my wave function being collapsed by the observation? An objective observation would seem to be an oxymoron. I think there are quite a few assumptions woven into our opinions of how nature should act, that we need to unravel, before better understanding how she does act.
There are already lots of cosmic structures that are increasingly hard to shoehorn into 13.8 billion years and I would bet, when the James Webb telescope becomes operational, they will find older and deeper structures in the CMBR. Because if redshift is an optical effect, the CMBR would be the solution to Olber’s paradox. The light of ever more distant sources, redshifted completely off the visible spectrum.
John Merryman,
“When we actually look out across the universe, we see two primary and opposing processes at work; Energy radiating out and mass coalescing in and so far as we can tell, they are balanced.”
Mass and energy are two versions of the same thing.
E=mc2.
Even the pathes of massless particles, such as photons, are bent by the spacetime curvature of energy-filled massive objects, and vice verse. There is no balance at all, because they are the same thing at a more basic level. Entropy ALWAYS increases with time, as a definition.
“Entropy is a 19th century mechanical description of usable energy within a closed system.”
Wow. I don’t know if I can even continue a discussion after that statement.
Entropy is, to this day, the most fundamental aspect of time-related physics. The entire ‘arrow of time’ is just a reflection of entropy. The most cutting-edge ideas about gravity and entanglement, and quantum-gravity, are all based on entropy.
It may sound like an old fashioned idea, but it IS the basis of our reality.
Picador:
This is emphatically untrue, on both counts.
The qualia of seeing red as opposed to green in the traffic light at the intersection will (hopefully!) have the physical consequence of you lifting your foot off the throttle and moving it to the brake.
And, if your color science chops are up to par, everything necessary to describe color perception is encapsulated in the spreadsheet at this page:
http://www.cie.co.at/index.php/LEFTMENUE/index.php?i_ca_id=298
…with some caveats, of course…the quality of the data is overwhelmingly good enough for graphic arts purposes, but better data is available. There’s variability between humans, about on a par with any other physiological variation. And this data just deals with the subjective perception (light with a given spectrum is viewed as the resulting color); you have to go to other sources to trace the pathway from eye to optic nerve to brain, if that’s what you’re after.
But the relevant and too-little-appreciated fact is, if you give me the physical properties of the light reaching your eye, I’ll communicate to you exactly what color you’re seeing. Color perception is no more subjective than, say, weight perception.
It basically never occurs to people that there should be any deep mystery as to why there should be a “feels like” of the weight of an apple when you’re lifting it. Pretty much everybody can appreciate why there’s not much sense to imbuing deep mystery into perception of weight, and we don’t wonder if the weight of an apple to me feels like the weight of a box of matches to you. Yet people get caught up in exactly that same sort of incoherent language when it comes to color vision, for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom.
I think the rest of your confusion will resolve itself once you come to grips with the lack of mystery surrounding color.
Cheers,
b&
@Ben,
.
“This is emphatically untrue, on both counts.”
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Begging the question at its primest!
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Best Wishes,
.
Julio Siqueira
juliocbsiqueira2012@gmail.com
http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/criticizingskepticism.htm
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Moe,
It still leaves open a very large question as to where that low entropy initial state came from in the first place. I’m not going to get in a big argument over it, just that I see various interesting issues being un addressed, some of which I’ve raised. You don’t find them interesting and I have butted heads with more than enough people on the various issues to just get in another argument with someone insisting the current model is infallible. It seems like it will take irrefutable evidence that the universe couldn’t have evolved in 13.8 billion years to really bring the various issues to the fore.
I guess when the theory has a television show named after it, it is beyond argument.
http://www.nature.com/news/nearby-star-is-almost-as-old-as-the-universe-1.12196
@Picador
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“I have to confess to some mysterian/pan-psychist sympathies, so perhaps unsurprisingly Sean’s description here doesn’t seem to address the concerns of my tribe (possibly a tribe of one).”
.
Do not think you are alone in this Holy Path of the Panpsychist, for WE ARE LEGION! (well, at least this is precisely what is implied in panpsychism, isn’t it? 🙂 ). Anyway, I am a panpsychist too. Nice to meet you.
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“It’s easy to write a computer program that can read its own memory state or source code, but most people would be skeptical of attributing conscious experience to such a program. ”
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Well, I wouldn’t exactly be skeptical about that. My panpsychism is really pan.
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“So downward causation doesn’t really address my fundamental uncertainty, i.e. whether consciousness is coupled to physical causation in the first place.”
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I think I said something along these lines in my posts here. Anyway, that seems sound.
.
“So I’m down for the notion that “consciousness” (which might be a really bad term for what we’re talking about, especially in a non-human context) may be a property that suffuses the universe and “looks out through” any of a number of physical systems in various ways idiosyncratic to those systems.”
.
I think you might like to take a look at my previous posts on this thread, and also at an article I wrote some years ago:
http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/essay_on_conscious_water.htm
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“Anyway, I have to go rub some crystals and take my homeopathic antipsychotic meds now. But I hope somebody can educate me about why my assumptions and uncertainties are stupid and unwarranted. This has been bugging me a lot for the last, like, fifteen years.”
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This is all I really want too. Sadly, physicists have often merely stuck their hands in the sand whenever I myself address questions similar to these, and this is what I see them often doing when other people address these questions as well (so it is not only something wrong with me…).
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For example, it seems pretty obvious to me that spirits and God and relativistic rein deers (if these all exist) do not violate the laws of conservation of quantities (first law of thermodynamics) through their interactions with the known Universe. That is, there is nothing unnatural about ghosts (if they exist). They are just as naturalist as Sean Carroll himself; they may even be poetic (Poetic Naturalists, practicing naturism on the very same beach). On the other hand, it seems to me that consciousness (in light of the way certain physicists, like Sean Carroll, see the workings of stuff in the Universe) does violate quantities. Put that in a equations, and physicists like Sean Carroll will just look away. Why so?
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The implicit answer seems always to be something similar to “Oh, poor panpsychist, you are so stupid.” But little attempt is made at least to explain why we (or I) are stupid to begin with. I must admit that good old Daniel Dennett has a quite wise saying in regards to this. I will try to look it up later on.
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Best Wishes,
.
Julio Siqueira
juliocbsiqueira2012@gmail.com
http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/criticizingskepticism.htm
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Hi
Consciousness, since Descartes and many others explained, requires the interaction of two independent systems. A random seeded evolution equation of the universe allows for this, with the present state (of the entire universe) being a unitary evolution of the previous state, but due to a single spontaneous (~planck-time?) random jump. Biological Evolution on Earth had to deal with this physics scenario – so consciousness is just biological evolution’s attempt to record the fleeting past. Brains have consciousness, plants and stones do not, because plants and stones haven’t evolved brains to record the past.
That’s what I think
Ben:
“It’s instead an observation that there are plenty of situations — especially those with high entropy — in which many microstates are macroscopically indistinguishable; those macrostates can then be described with emergent language. ”
Yes, that’s physical emergence. What ’emerges’ from physical properties are more physical properties. (matter,forces, space). More complex physical properties emerge from simpler ones. But all that comes from physical things are more physical things.
“Again consider the emergence of a Bell Curve from coin tosses.”
Here you’re talking about mathematical or ‘informational’ emergence. Arguably, all of mathematics can be built up from basic computational models (Turing machines?). More complex informational properties ’emerge’ from simpler ones. (ordering, relations, sets). But only information comes from information.
Simple information > Emergence of more complex information
Simple forms of matter-energy >Emergence of more complex matter-energy.
But in both cases , note that the physical and information properties *were always there to begin with*. So surely, it’s only reasonble to assume that the same pattern holds for mental properties also? Some very simple type of consciousness always had to be there to begin with (panpsychism).
Simple forms of consciousness > Emergence of more complex consciousness.
zarzuelazen,
” What ’emerges’ from physical properties are more physical properties. (matter,forces, space).”
I don’t think space needs to be qualified as a physical property. If we remove all definition, form and structure from it, then the only, non-physical qualities would be infinity and equilibrium.
Infinity because it has nothing to bound it, while equilibrium is implicit in clocks and distances dilating in moving frames, as the frame with the fastest clock and longest distance would be closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum/space.
So if you are trying to understand reality, space is the ultimate freebie. It needs no prior cause and it is both absolute(universal state) and infinite.
James Gallagher
I think most thinkers, including Searle, have moved beyond Descartes dualism.
Evan Thompson writes:
Elsewhere I have argued that this sort of emergence may involve forms of nonseparability – the emergence of dynamic wholes that supersede or subsume their parts in irreducibly relational structures – and downward causation – the alteration of local behavior by global relational patterns. I also argue, however, that the term “downward causation” is a misnomer. Complex-system causality is not a matter of a higher level acting downwards on a lower level. Rather, the whole entangled system moves at once and always as a result of both local interactions and the way the system’s global organization shapes the local interactions.
However, I think you are definitely onto something with your comment about memory.
We can look at all forms of life as having “memory” in the broad sense that DNA is a recording mechanism of an evolutionary learning process driven by natural selection. With brains this recording and learning becomes real time and within the lifetime of a single organism. With culture learning and recording spans generations.
Consciousness and time are related since we could have no sense of time without a recording of the past and consciousness exists not only for this recording of the past but also for prediction of the future.
Abalieno:
Your dream universes are far less detailed than the real universe. For that matter, they’re nowhere near as detailed as our waking perceptions. As you note, computation from the inside must be smaller than the whole, and the extents of our internal mental models are a perfect fit for the size of our computational hardware.
Logicophilosophicus:
That’s what I was referring to when I noted that the “physics” of the universe in which the “computer” was running would, of necessity, be so radically different from anything we’re familiar with that to call that which is doing the “computation” a “computer” makes no sense. At that point, you’re just talking about physics as physicists are familiar with, and anthropomorphizing it as computation on a computer takes away from the discussion.
John Merryman:
Sorry, but the Big Bang theory is as unassailable these days as heliocentricism, Evolution, plate tectonics, and the Periodic Table. Your local friendly ham radio operator can help you personally observe the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is reasonably explicable only by the Big Bang Theory. Your local astronomy club can help you personally derive Hubble’s Constant from your own observations; that’s dark energy. Direct observation of the mass distribution of a galaxy from gravitational lensing might just barely be within reach of somebody in said club, in which case they can personally show you dark matter.
We don’t have to answer that question to be overwhelmingly confident that the Big Bang (at least, since the Inflationary Epoch) is a full and accurate accounting of the history of the past baker’s dozen billion years of history. But Lawrence Krauss has (and others have) observed that the actual energy of the entire universe is exactly zero, and that “convenient” fact is what inspired him to come up with the physics by which, as he titled a recent popular book, you can get an Universe from nothing. As Lawrence puts it, the Universe is the ultimate free lunch.
No. That’s certainly its recent scientific origin, but the modern formulation of entropy is something you can see in Sean’s photograph of Boltzmann’s gravestone at the top of this page: a statistical count of the microstates of a system which are macroscopically indistinguishable.
zarzuelazen:
That’s the very textbook definition of Cartesian substance dualism, which you elsewhere claim to reject.
Cheers,
b&
Ben,
If cosmic redshift is an optical effect, then the CMBR is perfectly explicable as the solution to Olber’s paradox; The light of ever more distant, eventually infinite light sources, shifted completely off the visible spectrum. You don’t even need Inflation theory to explain why it is universally uniform, with slight local variation, given it is the light of individual sources.
If this effect compounds on itself, then you don’t need Dark Energy to explain why the rate of increase goes parabolic with distance(From the outer edge, why the rate drops off rapidly, then levels out).
Yes, it does add up to zero, because the inward curvature of gravity, into galaxies, is matched by the outward curvature between them. Think if the bowling ball on a rubber sheet analogy, having the sheet on water; So the compression caused by the ball is matched by the outward curvature of areas where there is no gravity. Essentially Hubble discovered proof of Einstein’s Cosmological Constant. The outward curvature to match the inward curvature of gravity.
John Merryman:
It most emphatically is not.
It’s a doppler effect, measured spectroscopically. The absorption bands from elements in stellar atmospheres are trivially identifiable (see the history of the discovery of helium), and we measure redshift by how far those bands shift to the red end of the spectrum.
Nearby objects have little or no doppler shifts, and a significant number are blueshifted, not redshifted. There are different ways of confirming the velocities of at least some of those objects, so we know it really is doppler shifting and not some hitherto-unknown and theoretically-unsupported property of the propagation of light.
Past certain distances, everything is redshifted, meaning that everything is moving away from us. And the farther away the object, the higher the redshift, meaning that the motion is accelerating.
All these observations are well within reach of an amateur astronomer, should you wish to independently confirm them for yourself.
No; infinite space with infinite stars would still create an infinitely bright background, no matter how much your phantom optics “redshifts” it.
But, much worse, the Big Bang theory perfectly predicts various other properties of the CMB, including its temperature and anisotropy. Such facts remain inexplicable with your mystery optics.
Not only are modern cosmologists aware of that fact, but they frequently mention it when describing the Big Bang.
Cheers,
b&
James Cross
Thank you for the comments, I agree about the importance of memory and biological attempts to create it being crucial for consciousness. I just want to have a satisfying divide for Mind and Body that might have some physical science justification, and that justification could be Present and Past, but not in a deterministic scenario, since then there is no convincing separation between Present and Past to suppose consciousness would arise.
Of course biological processes could not operate anywhere close to planck time resolution that might be causing the entire universe to evolve via random jumps – but after all the billions and billions of random jumps in the universe (followed by unitary evolution) that each biological process would operate in, some fuzzy kind of approximate record of the past would be possible to record. It’s accurate to microseconds, enough to give good evolutionary advantage to the species that obtain it. And then THAT interaction, with the fundamental randomness of the universe, at a very coarse-grained level, may be a place where qualia could arise.
All very speculative of course, but just something new (?) to throw into the debate
James Gallagher:
May I please encourage anybody and everybody who insists on searching for or finding a distinction between mind and body, or otherwise between the mental and physical realms…
…to go drink a beer.
I’m very emphatically being serious.
There you will experience, for your own, how a physical substance can directly and very predictably change the functioning of your mind.
Cognitive neuroscience is by now so well established that there’s nothing about your mental experience that can’t be directly traced to your brain in very specific methods, most of which can be directly manipulated by a neurosurgeon as if you were a musical instrument — and much of it can be directly observed and measured with various advanced medical diagnostic and imaging equipment.
Drinking beer is a very crude example, but it’s the exact same category of phenomenon — and it’s one that’s accessible to all and safely enjoyable to most.
(Of course, if you’re prone to alcoholism, please refrain; similarly, if you’ll soon be in a situation where intoxication is dangerous, wait until it’s safe. Or consider drinking coffee or partaking of some other more-suitable-to-your-circumstances mind-altering substance.)
But the fundamental point is that, millennia before, during, and after the time fundamentalists would have us believe that YHWH drowned the planet in a fit of pique, Egyptians were happily refining the craft of brewing beer and thereby providing incontrovertible proof to all who would care to observe that the physical and spiritual are of the same stuff.
Indeed, just look at our language: mind-altering substances, alcohol referred to as spirits, wine as the blood of not just Jesus but plenty of other gods…the integration and melding of the mental and physical has been understood since antiquity. Today, with modern medicine, anesthesiologists who can turn you on and off like a lamp…the conclusion is only opaque to those afraid to face the music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=obiARnsKUAo
Cheers!
b&
Ben:
“That’s the very textbook definition of Cartesian substance dualism, which you elsewhere claim to reject.”
I do reject any form of dualism. My views have clarified somewhat after all these discussions. What I now postulate is ‘neutral monism’, with the underlying stuff of reality being something I call an ‘info-cognition-field’.
There’s only one thing (the info-cognition-field) but it always has 3 components associated with it (information, fields and cognition).
An analogy here is with electromagnetism. The electro-magnetic field is a single unified thing, but it can still appear as two distinct properties – electricity and magnetism.
Similarly, my postulated ‘info-cognition-field’ is a single unfied thing, but it manifests itself as having 3-components: fields (matter), information (math) and cognition (consciousness).
Ben Goren
hey, but even the drunk brain can’t summon up qualia if the sober brain didn’t have qualia in the first place!
We need to build up a worldwide database of early life consciousness experiences. As I was developing consciousness at about age 1-2, I remember older children talking about “teachers” – all my mind could “imagine” was a kind of snowman made out of paper flakes for “teacher” – I’m still fascinated why this was the case!
Ben,
I assume you realize the theory does try to wiggle out of it being a regular doppler shift, because that would make it an expansion IN space, not OF space. As Einstein said, “Space is what you measure with a ruler.” And the ruler in this case is the speed of light. So if it takes light longer to cross, i.e. more lightyears, that is not an expansion of space, just increased distance. Just like the train moving down the tracks is increasing distance, not expanding space.
The problem with this is that if it is an expansion IN space, than we just happen to be at the exact center of the universe. Which is why they try to say it is an expansion OF space and so every point would appear as the center.
Yet they forgot about C. If the speed of light remains constant to the distance, then the speed of light would have to increase as space expands. Which would negate redshift, as the light would still arrive at the same rate.
So the argument is that one metric of space expands, based on the spectrum of intergalactic light, while there is another metric, based on the speed of light, in which more units are required to to measure the same distance.
Which is the numerator and which is the denominator?
Now if it is an optical effect, it would be normal to be at the center, as we are at the center of our point of view.
zarzuelazen:
This trinitarianism of yours is utterly alien to and soundly contradicted by all modern understandings of physics, and utterly unsupported by any evidence more substantial than your own incredulity.
Your analogy with electromagnetism is an excellent example of the breakdown. As Sean likes to respond to the Insane Clown Posse, we do know how effin’ magnets work — and it’s nothing like your summary except in the most superficial of glossed-over ways.
And you continue to insist that cognition is universal. When my chair starts to show signs of cognition, I’ll either take you seriously or I’ll have myself committed to the nearest mental health facility. You’ve either got far and away the most inappropriately hyperactive sense of agency I’ve ever encountered, or your thoughts of what constitutes thinking have no bearing on reality whatsoever.
I mean, really. Just what, exactly, do you think it is that my chair is thinking right now?
b&
James Gallagher:
See that spreadsheet from the CIE that I linked to earlier. It’s got a full accounting of the qualia of color. Qualia is a mystery only to those who insist on refraining from investigating the phenomena of perception.
To repeat my other example: are you mystified by the fact and / or nature of the “feels like” of holding a glass in your hand, how or why it should “feel different” when it’s full or empty, why it doesn’t “feel different” when it’s full of tea or water?
If all that strikes you as bizarre and incomprehensible — as it certainly does me — then you should have no trouble recognizing that your equivalent objections with respect to other perceptions are just as incoherent. Especially when the favored such perception, color, is so perfectly well understood.
Cheers,
b&