cousin_it comments on How to think like a quantum monadologist

Comment author: kpreid 16 October 2009 12:17:29PM 4 points [-]

Suppose I build a computer where all memory contents are stored encrypted. Then any particular program module or data set is at any given time either (a) distributed across the entirety of the memory array in a way which is not any kind of spatial partition or (b) currently in cache/processor, which is sequentially occupied by all parts of the program.

This system has structure, parts, in its computation, but that structure does not correspond to any arrangement in space, and yet its substrate is an aggregation of parts in space, without requiring any quantum entanglement.

(I do not intend to assume “minds are essentially computers” in this argument; I am only attempting to disprove your claim that non-spatial parts cannot have a substrate of spatial parts.)

Comment author: Johnicholas 16 October 2009 03:01:08PM * 2 points [-]

To expand a bit on what kpreid said:

Mitchell_Porter's second claim: "Therefore consciousness cannot be directly identified with any complex entity built up out of aggregation of parts in space." is NOT falsified by kpreid's example.

However, kpreid has given an example of a very reasonable INDIRECT identification which Mitchell Porter's argument would classify as "dualist". This example illustrates that Mitchell Porter is including far more positions underneath the umbrella of "dualism" than the ordinary "substance dualism" that, for example, Decartes espoused.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 16 October 2009 07:39:43PM 0 points [-]

Suppose I build a computer where all memory contents are stored encrypted. Then any particular program module or data set is at any given time either (a) distributed across the entirety of the memory array in a way which is not any kind of spatial partition

It is clearer to say, "where all memory addresses are encrypted".

Comment author: kpreid 17 October 2009 12:42:43AM 1 point [-]

I find your rephrasing less clear. Could you expand on the distinction you're making?

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 16 October 2009 12:48:13PM * 10 points [-]

The human brain is able to create and to maintain a model of reality, but it does so imperfectly. Imperfect operation of your brain is by far the most parsimonious explanation of your conviction that reality cannot be reduced the way most physicists and biologists claim it can be reduced.

If your subjective experience of redness strikes you as so vivid or so affecting somehow as to be incommensurable with standard physical and biological theory, you have no right to expect us (out of politeness to you or out of any other principle) to refrain from chalking that up to yet another of the many ways that the human brain goes astray.

In other words, all the evidence you have offered us so far to contradict the standard story on fundamental reality is vastly more likely to be malfunction of your own brain and the brains of the people persuaded by your evidence. The standard story on what brains are and how brains got here predicts that the brains will produce a large variety of wierd experiences that seem to contradict the standard story. Describing some of those wierd experiences is not an effective indictment of the standard story.

I am all for questioning basic ontological assumptions, especially before launching on a course of action that is likely to rearrange every human life and every human project in an irreversible way, but what I have seen of your contributions to Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong do not yet constitute an indictment of our ontological assumptions worth close study or soul-searching on our part. Since you seem sincere and seem to have put a lot of time and effort into your indictment, and I am sad that I cannot be more encouraging.

In reply to your latest comment (namely, the parent of this comment), do you agree that the same argument applies also to symphonic music?

Symphonies have "parts", but not in the sense of spatial parts. Therefore symphonic music cannot be directly identified with any complex entity built up out of aggregation of parts in space.

ADDED. Another summary: my current model of reality already contains imperfect intelligent agents. Moreover, my current model of the coming into existence of the imperfect agents already predicts that they will tend to report the incommensurable importance of their own existence. Moreover, the model already says that they are articulate social animals whose fitness in the EEA depended strongly on being able to persuade their fellows of their frame or interpretation of events. Note that a sense of the incommensurable importance of their own experiences will contribute to that ability. Consequently, your "But what about the incommensurable experience of redness?" does not cause me to allocate more weight to alternatives to my current model of reality.

I have not (yet) reflected on what you said about monads, microtubules or entanglement because I entertain models more complex than my current model only when I encounter evidence against my current model, which, again, you have not yet presented.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 17 October 2009 04:40:47AM 1 point [-]

Richard, at which step is the brain malfunction: the step where I think I see colors, or the step where I think there are no colors in physics, or the step where I draw the logical conclusion?

Jokes about the parts of a symphony aside, see my latest for more about this issue of "parts of consciousness".

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 18 October 2009 07:46:32PM * 10 points [-]

Richard, at which step is the brain malfunction: the step where I think I see colors, or the step where I think there are no colors in physics, or the step where I draw the logical conclusion?

Consider a community of intelligent agents whose eyes have the following flaw: there is an area of the retina of the eye where there are no photodetectors, with the result that the visual field experienced by an agent contains a black spot somewhere near the center of the field. The human eye has exactly such a flaw (where the optic nerve originates) but the human brain removes the existence of the flaw from the higher awareness of the individual. In contrast to the human case, suppose our hypothetical intelligent agents remain aware of the flaw (or can become aware of it whenever they choose to do so).

Suppose further that one day one of these agents, named Mitchell, addresses the physicists of the community as follows:

Yo, physicists! Although physics is supposed to be the study of fundamental reality, your account of fundamental reality neglects to account for the black disk that has contrived somehow to remain in front of my eyes for my entire life.

Clearly, your physical model needs to be revised to include the black disk. For example, unless the black disk is massless, momentum is not always conserved like your current physical model says it is. But a massless black disks presents problems, too. Research is needed to incorporate massless black disks into a coherent account of reality -- unless of course you decide instead to remove from your physical model the law of the conservation of momentum.

A physicist named Dick replies,

There is a reductionist explanation for the black disk that does not require a revision of our physical model. Here, let me lay it out for you. My model of reality includes my self. In other words, the model consists an agent (my self) and an environment. (Reality contains agents other than my self, but we will not be needing that fact today.) Moreover, the agent maintains a model of the environment. So, to review, in my model of reality, reality contains an agent which in turn contains a model of its environment. Let us appeal to the computer scientist's notion of state. The agent's model contains quite a bit of state. Part of that state is what we might call a low-level representation of the information coming from the environment through the eyes.

This low-level representation takes the form of a two-dimensional array, which we might call the visual field. Near the center of the two-dimensional representation is a blank area, a black area or what appears to be a representation of a black disk. However, the agent containing the low-level representation is an educated agent. It has been to college. It knows about the part of its retina where there are no photoreceptors. Consequently, the agent's highest-level representation of its environment does not include a black disk that contrives somehow always to remain near the center of where the agent is looking becuase it has properly accounted for other evidence (e.g., knowledge of the anatomy of its eye) that overrides the evidence of the low-level representation of the black disk.

Let me stop here, Mitchell, and ask you to confirm that yes, the account given by the fictional intelligent agent Dick is a satisfactory account of the black disk and is a satisfactory answer to the fictional Mitchell.

Second, let me ask you to confirm, please, that yes, for the fictional Mitchell to ask Dick, "At what stage do the quarks, photons, etc, of your physical model turn into a massless or momentum-conservation-violating black disk?" reveals a confusion between representation of reality and reality -- that is, between map and territory?

Jokes about the parts of a symphony aside

I am a little discouraged by your framing it as a joke. You made an argument about consciousness, then I pointed out that the same argument holds for symphonic music. I sincerely, non-jokingly did not understand what is different about consciousness that made your argument apply there, but not apply to symphonic music.

But anyway, you expanded your argument as follows:

I have my conscious experience of the world, which is some complicated mixture of sensations, diverse conceptual positing of objects and situations, and private intentionality . . . Then, I have my physical model of the world, which might be atoms in space, or amplitudes in configuration space, and I seek to identify the experience above with some subset of the posited physical world. On both sides of the equation we have things in relation to each other, so we need a mapping not just between things but between relations.

So my proposition is that it is extremely problematic to identify the constituting relations of consciousness - the relations between its parts at the level of experience - with spatial relations. The constituting relations of consciousness are something like: subjective spatiality, subjective simultaneity, gestalt unification of sensations into a sensory form, conceptual association of posited properties with sensory gestalts, logical and other conjunctions of things as the compound objects of thoughts

Let me ask you this: suppose I show you a computer program with rich, complex non-spatial relationships between elements of the computer program. Would you consider that evidence of the poverty and the unsatisfactoriness of our current physical model?

If you answer no, please explain what it is about you at the level of physical law that is intrinsically different from a computer program.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 19 October 2009 12:31:16PM 0 points [-]

Symphonies: well, they have parts, vocal parts and instrumental parts. The pun obscures matters and I didn't want to go there.

You bring up the physical ontology of computer programs and whether people are different. Computer programs introduce a new slate of complications because they are typically perceived and discussed in a way as full of imputed intentionality as when someone reads a book. As a physical object, a page of text is just ink on paper in a complicated pattern. The meaning is not intrinsic to the physical object. The same thing goes for computer programs. Physically, a given program is a pattern of magnetizations on a disk, a pattern of charge distributions in an integrated circuit, etc. We have computational devices constructed to be finite-state machines of a particular specification, an elaborate array of cultural props such as programming languages which allow us to think of these states and their components as being about anything and everything, and finally we have media-technology peripherals to enhance the illusion by presenting our senses, and not just our intellects, with simulacra.

Now of course the standard cognitive-neuro view of human beings is that, with the ability to move around autonomously thrown into the definition, this is essentially what we are too: finite-state machines with peripherals, all made out of atoms. If our thoughts manage to be "about" something, it's because of what caused those inner states and/or because of how everyone else would interpret them (causal and social theories of intentionality, respectively).

According to the quantum-monadic hypothesis, what makes us different to the computers we have is not carbon versus silicon, it's quantum versus classical computation. Any entity which forms interior entanglements with a high degree of freedom is at least potentially conscious; anything which doesn't, is not. A conscious monad is still a finite-state machine too, when viewed as a black box causally interacting with the world; but (this is the theory, remember) it contains intrinsic intentionality, whereas an entity which reproduces its causality in a way which has many physically separate parts, does not. You could almost say that a complex monad is made of "qualia and intentionality" (sensations and thought, basically), and that you can simulate the causal dispositions of such a complex monad using a multitude of simple ones, but you will not have thereby materialized actual sensations and thought into being.

I realize I'm making still further ex cathedra statements here, when apparently I still haven't persuaded anyone of the plausibility of the previous batch, but though I'm engaging a little bit with the criticism, I am at this point mostly just trying to convey a novel way of thinking. I see that even the mere exposition of the viewpoint is going to require a lot of work, to say nothing of its justification.

Comment author: SilasBarta 19 October 2009 03:01:04PM * 2 points [-]

Symphonies: well, they have parts, vocal parts and instrumental parts. The pun obscures matters and I didn't want to go there.

Pun? No, that's a metaphor (combined with a reductio). A pun is when you exploit an ambiguity that hinges on a phonetic similarity.

More importantly, it's not up to you to decide whether you need to "go there". You used a chain of reasoning about consciousness. Richard Hollerith pointed out that the very same reasoning can apply to symphonies, thereby showing your reasoning to lead to invalid results. So you need to refine the reasoning, not just dismiss it as a pun, which isn't even the right label.

I realize I'm making still further ex cathedra statements here

I don't think it's the ex cathedra bit that bothers anyone here, but the ex pedora [1]. Your'e not even at the point where you can present a coherent, testable (in the broad sense) viewpoint, and you keep finding distinctions that you "should have made" before -- yet you're sure that there's a flaw with the exisitng methods used here. This, despite all the time you've spent on the issue. If correct, you should be able to communicate the idea a lot better than you have been. If the issue's as important as you make it out to be, surely a little more effort on your part is justified when you make top-level posts.

[1] "from the foot-mouth", a term I just made up, which I don't even think is valid Latin. But it's closer to being a pun than the symphony thing!

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 20 October 2009 05:14:47AM 1 point [-]

Richard Hollerith pointed out that the very same reasoning can apply to symphonies, thereby showing your reasoning to lead to invalid results.

I see now that I didn't want to dodge matters because of the "pun", I just tried to use that as an excuse. I wanted to dodge this question because "symphonic music" is, for the purposes of an ontological discussion, ambiguous in its reference and introduces much unnecessary new complexity however you interpret it.

I made the assertion that conscious experience - what happens in the mind of one individual at one time - is not made up of spatial parts. Richard said, I could say the same of symphonic music, do you think it can't be reduced to physics either. Well, first of all, what do we mean by symphonic music? Do we mean all the physical performances ever made by the symphonies of the world? Do we mean the experience of the listeners who hear those symphonic performances? Do we mean the abstract specification of a symphony, which those concrete performances attempt to follow? These are all very different things ontologically, their analysis into parts is going to be different, and the analogy/disanalogy with consciousness is also going to be different. It's one big distraction, I instinctively tried to dodge it, you pinned me down, so there's what I should have said to Richard to begin with.

you keep finding distinctions that you "should have made" before -- yet you're sure that there's a flaw with the existing methods used here. This, despite all the time you've spent on the issue. If correct, you should be able to communicate the idea a lot better than you have been. If the issue's as important as you make it out to be, surely a little more effort on your part is justified when you make top-level posts.

What can I say ... I have refrained for years from talking about this stuff at any length, because I didn't have it all figured out, and I still don't, and simply pointing out the flaws of physicalist orthodoxy changes nothing. On this occasion I have tried the more affirmative approach of introducing a concrete alternative, and I am being induced to bring out extra details as the discussion proceeds. I did not know in advance where the focus would be.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 19 October 2009 11:58:33AM -2 points [-]

We can skip the details of the story and come straight to the point. Let us suppose that what I see is indeed a two-dimensional data structure in my brain. It has pixels and they are neurally encoded somehow, e.g. by spiking rates.

Now suppose I'm seeing something colored - a blue sky, a red apple, anything. By our hypothesis, what actually exists is nothing but a two-dimensional sheet of neurons all firing in different rhythms - ions moving across membranes, and so forth.

Where is the blueness or the redness, if this and only this is the reality?

It seems to me you have two choices. Either blueness is nothing but ions plunging back and forth across a membrane with a certain regularity; or, there is no such thing as blueness - only talk of blueness, neural dispositions to categorize as blue, and so on.

I think that what people usually imagine is that the ions-crossing-the-membrane-at-a-certain-rate "is" the blueness, but they do this by mentally juxtaposing the physical picture (if they think it through that far) with the blueness that they actually see and experience. But in that case they've gone beyond the nothing-but-the-atoms provision. Or, the troublesome color-word will be buried in a larger phrase, and so all those neural firings are identified with "seeing blue" or "the experience of seeing blue". But I don't see how that solves anything, although psychologically it has the effect of directing your attention away from the blueness itself, towards the more abstract states in which it features. And being more abstract, perhaps it is easier - perhaps it is subjectively more plausible - to imagine that they are nothing but neural computations. However, that's just a trick that you play on yourself.

So I bite the bullet and say, the blueness is obviously there, somewhere in reality; it is obviously not there in a physics which consists of nothing but point masses moving back and forth, or any of the other, slightly more complex physical ontologies on offer; so, I had better seek a perspective on physics in which there is a place where it might be. This is the point of a monadic interpretation of entanglement. I don't say it's the only way to do it, but it is a way to create the necessary room.

Comment author: Jack 19 October 2009 12:33:02PM 5 points [-]

Or, the troublesome color-word will be buried in a larger phrase, and so all those neural firings are identified with "seeing blue" or "the experience of seeing blue".

This is a linguistic fact, not a phenomenological one. Our language happens to distinguish verbs by referring to their objects, subjects and using adverbial modifiers. But the language could have just as easily had a one-word verb phrase than means "experience blueness". Say this word was "bluep". If this were the case we wouldn't be asking where the object of blueping was. Rather, we'd see blueping as fundamental and would easily identify blueping with a particular configuration of neural firings.

Since blueness is a phenomenological quality I can't imagine finding it anywhere except as an object modifier of experience. I don't see how a monadic interpretation of entanglement changes that fact-- you're just associating the configurations (or whatever) of monads with the subjective experience of blueness. Blueness itself is meaningless.

Comment author: Amanojack 12 March 2010 11:26:39PM * 1 point [-]

Rather, we'd see blueping as fundamental and would easily identify blueping with a particular configuration of neural firings.

Yes, I'd say blueping is one of your "fundamental concepts that can't be dissolved." But to me it's no surprise that sensations of the five senses are the fundamental units of experience. The only reason I think people posit that there is more to experience than mere sensation is that they say, "What about thinking and emotions? Those are experience but not really sensations of the five senses."

My theory - developed for entirely separate reasons - is that all thinking is done in the (imagined) five senses, but that we don't notice because it's usually happening too fast, or is auto-ignored because the background sensory processes aren't generally relevant and would overwhelm our conscious mind. The sensory thought processes can be noticed in some special situations, though, which is how I found out about them. (In fact, I'm heading to an isolation tank this afternoon to try to "see" more of my own thoughts.) My theory says that emotions are primarily (or perhaps only) imagined physical sensations. I hope to write a main post on the theory once it's more developed.

Anyway, that would indicate that all experience is sensation, hence it would be natural to consider blueping as fundamental (or if you like, undissolvable).

Comment author: jimrandomh 13 March 2010 12:22:40AM 2 points [-]

My theory - developed for entirely separate reasons - is that all thinking is done in the (imagined) five senses, but that we don't notice because it's usually happening too fast, or is auto-ignored because the background sensory processes aren't generally relevant and would overwhelm our conscious mind.

Be warned: thoughts have properties and connections that appear only when summoned. For example, suppose I take a sentence or two from my inner monologue and try to analyze the voice. I will imagine hearing it in the voice of a person or character who might say that sort of thing. But the thought wasn't originally in that voice, or any voice at all; trying to inspect details like tone and inflection caused my mind to create those details, more or less at random, where they would not have been created if I hadn't gone looking for them. I can connect any thought to one of the senses in this way, but that doesn't mean that the connection was there before I summoned it. Words are imported through hearing, but there's no reason the brain has to maintain that connection.

On the other hand, minds vary. People with synesthesia definitely have stronger connections between their senses and other thoughts than normal. Someone with a slightly more active auditory cortex might hear their inner monologue in a specific voice even if they weren't trying to. There're many possibilities, and spending some time in a tank or meditative state to figure out how your mind works is a great idea.

Comment author: Amanojack 13 March 2010 02:01:02AM 0 points [-]

I believe you're cautioning that maybe what I'm noticing are sensory patterns my mind attaches to the thoughts after the fact, when I go in and try to analyze them, rather than the thoughts themselves. I actually had a few false starts this way, but later on I found what I think are my internal representations of the structure of logical reasoning. They are like fundamental thought-widgets (visual and physical, àla Einstein's claim) that fit together with a certain set of rules to form meaning. These could be after-the-fact sensory patterns as well, but since they are mostly visual I've started using them to create a picture-only language as a sort of proof-of-concept. I'll share more as it develops.

Also, I try not to think in words. Habitual word thinkers and non-word thinkers will probably have very different reactions to what I've been writing.

I grant that I might just have a particularly strong case of synesthesia. Hopefully the tank will bring answers.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 19 October 2009 12:44:20PM -1 points [-]

the language could have just as easily had a one-word verb phrase than means "experience blueness".

Are you sure about that? Do you think the meaning of "bluep" could be conveyed to young humans without having blue objects to point at and without those humans at least forming a concept of blue? I also doubt that this would make physicalism any easier subjectively. Whether it's the experience or the object of the experience which is regarded as blue, something's blue.

I have to go offline now, right in the middle of some heated real-time exchanges. Don't anyone get too steamed if you don't hear back from me for a day or so. :-)

Comment author: Jack 19 October 2009 02:09:36PM * 2 points [-]

Are you sure about that? Do you think the meaning of "bluep" could be conveyed to young humans without having blue objects to point at and without those humans at least forming a concept of blue?

You're conflating two things. There is the property some objects have of emitting photons with a wavelength of about 475 nanometers. Then there is the phenomenology of seeing such things which is "blueing" or experiencing blue. Teaching children the word blue just involves teaching them how to describe the reflective properties of certain objects.

Now people tend to divide their experiences along similar lines. Thus, the set of all blue objects is that same for most people. We don't disagree that there is a difference between red things and blue things, unless we're color blind. This lets us share a vocabulary of qualia but we have no reason to think that what the words actually refer to are the same for everyone except insofar as we find correspondence between the physical configuration of the brain and reports of subjective experience.

I also doubt that this would make physicalism any easier subjectively. Whether it's the experience or the object of the experience which is regarded as blue, something's blue.

No. Experience isn't blue... not at all in the same way objects are. This is a HUGE category mistake. The verification conditions for claims about "blue experience" are TOTALLY DIFFERENT then verification conditions for claims about blue objects. We might as well have different words.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 20 October 2009 07:27:43AM -1 points [-]

So, if I understand you correctly, the world is as follows: There are objects that emit "blue" light. And there are nervous systems which respond differently to blue and non-blue light. And some aspect of this differential response is "experiencing blue".

It seems to me that this functions as a way to avoid directly mentioning the problematic entity, i.e. shades of blue. There is a concession that, yes, objects in the external world aren't actually blue. One might suppose, then, that the thing which is actually blue is somewhere in the brain. But instead, by talking about "experiencing blue" as a unit, we get to focus on language ("how to describe the reflective properties of certain objects", "vocabulary of qualia", "verification conditions for claims about 'blue experience'", "reports of subjective experience"), cause and effect, information processing, anything but phenomenal blueness itself.

continue this thread »

Comment author: SilasBarta 19 October 2009 01:15:23PM * 2 points [-]

Are you sure about that? Do you think the meaning of "bluep" could be conveyed to young humans without having blue objects to point at and without those humans at least forming a concept of blue?

Who modded this up? Is this the standard now for what words a language could have? Whether the concept could be explained to a child? You might as well dismiss the word "oxygen" on the grounds that you can't explain the full chemical model to a child, in a way that allows you to make use of the concept.

In any case, you could explain it to a child: "When you're dreaming about blue, you're just blueping. But when you see blue for real, you're blueping and seeing something blue."

Why is it that "It's impossible to explain ..." always seems to say so much more about the speaker than the concept?

Comment author: SilasBarta 19 October 2009 01:22:16PM * 2 points [-]

Where is the blueness or the redness, if this and only this is the reality?

I already explained how blueness can arise: you have to distinguish between kinds of data, and your phenomenal experience of blue, is your label for the kind of data that is blue. Just as a program can use generated symbols to distinguish two kinds of data, you can distinguish between red and blue, or between sight and sounds, by being able to notice distinct traits about them that resist deeper scrutiny at the usual level of operation.

Comment author: jimrandomh 19 October 2009 10:48:24PM 3 points [-]

This is an instance of the fallacy described in Explaining vs Explaining Away. Color can be explained by neuroscience and physics, but it can't explain color away because it's still there after you learn what underlies it. You don't have to modify physics to make color real, because it's already real, as an abstraction layered on top of physics.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 20 October 2009 04:42:07AM 2 points [-]

Mitchell did acknowledge the existence of the identity view.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 19 October 2009 12:20:56PM 0 points [-]

I asked you four direct questions, the first three of which can be disposed of with a yes or a no. Do you not want to answer any of them?

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 19 October 2009 12:36:05PM 0 points [-]

I also asked a question. Could you answer that one first?

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 19 October 2009 01:05:35PM 0 points [-]

A few minutes after I stepped away from the keyboard, I had a revelation about your story - something that was probably obvious to you, but which just seemed like an odd non sequitur to me until now. My alter ego in your story doesn't just think that he sees a black disk, he thinks there's a black disk literally floating in front of him all his life, which is why he goes on about momentum, yes? I had thought momentum was just thrown in there as a random physics buzzword. And so your alter ego is doing nothing but explaining that hallucinations are possible, I think.

This is coming at the problem from the wrong level. The experience of blueness is a problem for physics whether it's veridical blueness or hallucinated blueness. Either way it's there at the level of experience, and either way it's not there at the level of neural physics. I will answer your four questions tomorrow, if you still want me to, but I think you're not engaging with the challenge here. Unless you intend to maintain that the whole of humanity's experience of color is unreal.

Comment author: SilasBarta 19 October 2009 08:19:05PM * 2 points [-]

Unless you intend to maintain that the whole of humanity's experience of color is unreal.

Why do you keep attributing this view to people here? I'm sure you've been corrected on it enough times. No one denies that people experience color. The claim is just that the reductionist materialist ontology is sufficient to explain why it happens, and it is due to a more fundamental phenomenon.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 20 October 2009 11:43:10PM * 1 point [-]

A few minutes after I stepped away from the keyboard, I had a revelation about your story - something that was probably obvious to you, but which just seemed like an odd non sequitur to me until now. My alter ego in your story doesn't just think that he sees a black disk, he thinks there's a black disk literally floating in front of him all his life, which is why he goes on about momentum, yes?

Yes.

The experience of blueness is a problem for physics whether it's veridical blueness or hallucinated blueness.

Reading that was an aha moment for me in that I had not considered that that might be your position. Please allow me to explore your position a little.

If I step on a nail, the resulting sensation of pain is a problem for physics, too?

And if my toe non-painfully bumps into a marble, the resulting sensation of touch or bump is a problem, too?

If I get in my car to go to the store to buy some ice cream, but then I learn that the road to the store is closed, then I decide that finding an alternative way to get to the store is not worth the trouble of having the ice cream, is some aspect of that experience a problem for physics, too? Perhaps the desire for ice cream. Or the intention to satisfy the desire. Or the abandonment of the intention.

If the answer to all of those questions is yes, then is there any internal experience you have had or could have some day which is not a problem for physics?

I will answer your four questions tomorrow, if you still want me to.

Well, no need to answer the first two because I consider what I am replying to an answer to those two.

ADDED. Let me continue my exploration of your position a little. I am walking in the woods. I sit down. I become aware of a mushroom on a log. Then I change my position and I realize that what I thought was a mushroom is really just part of the log. Now I have a question about this transitory nonvericidal experience of a mushroom in my mind. Is it a problem for physics, too?

What I really want to ask is more complicated, and I am probably not setting up the question correctly, but let me ask anyway. Suppose I am sitting in the woods having the experience of seeing a log. Suspend your disbelief and suppose (against your belief) that there is a materialistic reductionistic account for that situation including my experience at that moment. Suppose my mental state then changes so that I think I have come to notice a particular species of very tasty mushroom on the log. Suppose the mushroom is not really there, but rather that my experience of noticing a mushroom is caused by an improbable coincidence in the shape and color of a small part of the log. Is my noticing the nonvericidal mushroom a problem for physics even if (counterfactually, according to your model of reality) my experience of seeing the log does not pose a problem for physics?

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 22 October 2009 09:41:27AM -2 points [-]

is there any internal experience you have had or could have some day which is not a problem for physics?

In the end, no. Physics as we know it contains neither qualia nor intentionality nor anything like the unity of consciousness, so no. But colors are particularly obviously not there in the physics we have.

Having taken such a radical stance, I want to emphasize what I'm not saying. I'm not saying conscious experience is indescribable. I'm not even saying it's indescribable mathematically. Consciousness is a sequence of states; those states have structure and can be compared to each other; we can describe those states using a formalism; we can also describe and analyze the transitions of state and theorize about a larger causal and ontological framework which would produce them and explain them.

I am saying two or three things.

First proposition: It would be a mistake to think that the descriptive formalism is the reality. It's more a calculus for reasoning about the reality.

Second proposition: Belief in physicalism is largely a belief that a particular descriptive formalism is the reality. Because the elements of the formalism are descended from elements of actual experience - e.g. geometry from the experience of space - when people think of reality in terms of physics, they do employ sensory intuitions and not just formal abstractions, so it's not just reification of formalism, but that is a large part of what goes on.

Third proposition - this is the controversial part: The formalism we have actually does not correspond to the manifest nature of consciousness; even if you try to see it in the proper way (according to the first proposition above), no part of the physics we have can in fact be identified with the consciousness we have. This is behind my proposals for minor modifications on the formal level (a single-world physics of transitions between spacelike-tensored Hilbert-space vectors, etc). The objective is to permit a nondualistic ontology true to the actual nature of consciousness.

Postscript: Given the categorical nature of my answer to your first question - all of experience poses a problem for physics - your final question is rendered a little unnecessary. But I should say something about it anyway. After all, I could re-pose it in a form that asked whether the situation described is a problem for monadological physics. I don't think it is, because the chief problems actually stem from the ontology of what Husserl called the "transcendental" aspect of consciousness, the part that transcends veridicality. This is really just a fancy way of saying: the properties of consciousness which are independent of whether appearances are correct. Qualia are there whether or not you're hallucinating, and even hallucinated objects (because they are interpreted sensations) have a structure of intentionality. And even a misinterpreted sensation is still an interpreted sensation, so the example of the illusory mushroom doesn't add anything new at that level.

continue this thread »

Comment author: RobinZ 19 October 2009 08:05:22PM 1 point [-]

Either way it's there at the level of experience, and either way it's not there at the level of neural physics.

Question: Is this post on the LW server at the level of semiconductor physics?

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 20 October 2009 08:55:40AM -1 points [-]

It's like asking whether a book is just ink on paper. As a physical object that's all it is. As a message it also has a semantic content, but that is ascribed rather than intrinsic.

continue this thread »

Comment author: cousin_it 16 October 2009 12:36:27PM * 3 points [-]

Conscious experiences have "parts", but not in the sense of spatial parts.

How in the world do you know that? Can't those parts just correspond to parts of the brain?

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 17 October 2009 04:37:19AM 0 points [-]

It's the relations between the parts which are crucial to this argument, not the parts in themselves. I'm saying that at the level of experience the relations between the parts are not spatial. This discussion becomes unfortunately complicated because so much of conscious experience takes place in subjective space. A genuine monadologist could invert my original statement and say that space only exists inside monads, with the external connections between monads being causal rather than spatial.

But let's go back to the beginning. I have my conscious experience of the world, which is some complicated mixture of sensations, diverse conceptual positing of objects and situations, and private intentionality (thinking, willing, remembering, etc). This is all always there, and then on top of that I can be intermittently aware of particular parts or aspects of it (attention). And I'd better not leave myself out of this list of ingredients: there is a sense that someone or some entity is the entity that thinks, wills, attends.

Then, I have my physical model of the world, which might be atoms in space, or amplitudes in configuration space, and I seek to identify the experience above with some subset of the posited physical world. On both sides of the equation we have things in relation to each other, so we need a mapping not just between things but between relations. In fact, if it's going to be an identity theory, and not just property dualism, we don't just want a mapping, we want to be able to say that the things and relations on one side are exactly the same things and relations appearing on the other side.

So my proposition is that it is extremely problematic to identify the constituting relations of consciousness - the relations between its parts at the level of experience - with spatial relations. The constituting relations of consciousness are something like: subjective spatiality, subjective simultaneity, gestalt unification of sensations into a sensory form, conceptual association of posited properties with sensory gestalts, logical and other conjunctions of things as the compound objects of thoughts, attention to an object of thought under a particular propositional attitude, presence of all this to the observer-self - and that's bound to be an incomplete list.

If we were going to say that consciousness consists of things in strictly spatial relations to each other, then every one of those relationship types would have to be identical with a particular spatial relationship. Now as kpreid has pointed out, things in space can have other sorts of relations to each other, such as causal relationships. So the opportunities for a spatial reductionist are a little broader, but not inspiringly so.

However, if we turn to the quantum option, and specifically entanglement: a quantum state - conceived abstractly, rather than in terms of amplitudes over configurations - is something of a black box. All the physics is telling us is that these states have certain causal relationships to each other, but nothing about their intrinsic qualities. So the idea is to use the manifest nature of consciousness, that which can be seen at the level of appearances, as a clue to what's actually inside one of those black boxes. It's not that quantum physics looks especially more like consciousness than classical physics; it is that classical physics does not look like consciousness, and quantum physics looks like nothing. So instead I want to see if there's a perspective from which consciousness looks like quantum physics, e.g., like a big quantum tensor factor from an entangled physical brain.

Comment author: bigbad 17 October 2009 07:56:59PM 4 points [-]

Brain functional MRI scans show that, to the best available resolution, conscious states are highly correlated with events in space.

The brain operates by electrical and chemical signals, so a complex circuit seems like a better physics-based model of consciousness than what you propose.

Comment author: thomblake 16 October 2009 02:31:13PM * 1 point [-]

Conscious experiences have "parts", but not in the sense of spatial parts. Therefore consciousness cannot be directly identified with any complex entity built up out of aggregation of parts in space.

I'm afraid it's too unclear how the conclusion is supposed to follow from the premise(s?) to determine exactly what fallacy you're committing here. But it reeks of the fallacy of division.

ETA: Maybe it could be clearer if you made your argument symbolically in some formal logic? And if you can't do anything like that, reconsider using the word "Therefore".

Comment author: Steve_Rayhawk 25 October 2009 03:34:34PM 0 points [-]

As in kpreid's question:

[. . .] consciousness cannot be directly identified with any complex entity built up [. . .] in space. [. . .] we need a nonspatial material complex. Quantum entanglement is the only example we have of nonspatial complexity in physics.

Would a classical simulation of an entangled quantum system, using a physical computing device built up out of aggregation of parts in space, have the needed type of nonspatial complexity?

If it would, then your question may be properly about the relationship of phenomenology to physics of computation or computer science as applied to physics (e.g. as in "digital physics"), and not about the relationship of phenomenology to quantum physics.

(A simulation would be different from the quantum system in that it would decohere any quantum inputs.)

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 26 October 2009 10:35:08AM 1 point [-]

Would a classical simulation of an entangled quantum system, using a physical computing device built up out of aggregation of parts in space, have the needed type of nonspatial complexity?

For me, the nonspatiality of an entangled state is that it cannot be identified with a logical conjunction of spatially localized substates. For example, if the individual qubits are spatially localized, a two-qubit state like |01> resolves into a |0> over here and a |1> over there - "spatially localized substates" - whereas a state like |01>+|10> cannot be resolved in that way. If you are simulating the two-qubit state by using, let us say, four spatially localized registers to represent the amplitudes of a general two-qubit state ( c00 |00> + c01 |01> + c10 |10> + c11 |11> ), then you have indeed eliminated the nonspatiality.

cousin_it comments on How to think like a quantum monadologist - Less Wrong

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