Psychohistorian comments on Consciousness - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Mitchell_Porter 08 January 2010 12:18PM

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Comment author: Psychohistorian 13 January 2010 07:00:11PM *  10 points [-]

Where is lesswrong.com? "On the internet" would be the naive answer, but there's no part of the internet we could naively recognize as being lesswrong.com. A bunch of electrical impulses get interpreted as ones and zeroes which get translated in a certain language, which converts them into another language (English), which each mind interacting with the site translates in its own way. At the base level, before minds get involved, there's nothing more complex that a bunch of magnets and electric signals and some servers and so on (I'm not a computer person, so cut me some slack on the details). Yet, out of all of that emerges your post, this comment, and so on.

I know that it is in principle possible to understand how all of this comes together, but I also know that I do not in fact understand it. If I were really to look at how complex this site is - down to the level of the chemist who makes the fertilizer to supply the farmer who feeds the truck driver who delivers the petroleum that gets refined into the plastic that makes the keyboard of the engineer who maintains the power plant that keeps the server running - I have absolutely no idea what's going on, and probably never will even if I devoted my entire life to understanding how this website comes together. In fact, I have good reason to believe there are parts of what's going on that I don't even know are parts of what are going on - I don't even understand the basic underlying structure at a complete level. But if a bunch of people were really dedicated to it, they could probably figure it out, so that by asking the group of them, you could figure out what you needed to know about how the site works; in other words, it is in principle understandable, even if no one understands it in its entirety.

There is thus nothing particularly problematic about saying, "So, I don't get how this whole consciousness thing works, but there's probably no magic involved," just as there's no magic (excepting EY's magic) involved in putting this site together. Saying, "I can't naively figure out how some extremely complicated system works, therefore, the answer is: magic!" is simply not a reasonable solution. It is possible that there is something more going on in the brain that we can currently understand, but it seems exceedingly unlikely that it is in principle un-understandable.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 14 January 2010 05:40:53AM 1 point [-]

There is thus nothing particularly problematic about saying, "So, I don't get how this whole consciousness thing works, but there's probably no magic involved," just as there's no magic (excepting EY's magic) involved in putting this site together.

If I were to say to you that negative numbers can be made by adding together positive numbers, you just have to add them together in the right way - that would sound strange and wrong, yes? If you start at 1, and keep adding 1, you do not expect your sum to equal -1 (or the square root of -1, or an apple) at any stage. When people say that they do not see how piling up atoms can give rise to color, meaning, consciousness, etc., they are engaged in this sort of reasoning. They're saying: I may not know every property that very large numbers / very large piles of atoms would exhibit, but it would be magic to get that property from those ingredients.

Comment author: Psychohistorian 14 January 2010 08:47:28PM 9 points [-]

The problem with the analogy is that we know a whole lot about numbers - math is an artificial language which we created and decided upon the axioms of. How do you know enough about matter and neurons to know that it relates to consciousness in the way that adding positive numbers relates to negative numbers or apples? But I've made this point before.

What I would find more interesting is an explanation of what magic would do here. It seems obvious that our perception of a homogenous shade of pink is, in some significant way, related to lightwave frequencies, retinas, and neurons. Let's assume there is some "magic" involved that in turn converts this physical phenomena into an experience. Wouldn't it have to interact with neurons and such, so that it generates an experience of pink and not an experience of strawberry-rhubarb pie? If it's epiphenomenal, how could it accomplish this, and how could it be meaningful? If it's not epiphenomenal, how does it interact with actual matter? Why can't we detect it?

It's quite clear that when it comes to how consciousness works, the current best answer is, "We don't get it, but it has something to do with the brain and neurons." Answering, "We don't get it, but it has something to do with the brain and neurons and magic" appears to be an inferior answer.

This may be a cheap shot around these parts, but the non-materialist position feels a lot like an argument for the existence of God.

Comment author: Jack 14 January 2010 08:54:44PM 1 point [-]

It's quite clear that when it comes to how consciousness works, the current best answer is, "We don't get it, but it has something to do with the brain and neurons." Answering, "We don't get it, but it has something to do with the brain and neurons and magic" appears to be an inferior answer.

This is perfect and I'm not sure there is much more to say.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 15 January 2010 08:22:09AM 0 points [-]

How do you know enough about matter and neurons to know that it relates to consciousness in the way that adding positive numbers relates to negative numbers or apples?

It's our theories of matter which are the problem - and which are clear enough for me to say that something is missing. My position as stated here actually is an identity theory. Experiences are a part of the brain and are causally relevant. But the ontology of physics is wrong, and the attempted reduction of phenomenology to that ontology is also wrong. Instead, phenomenology is giving us a glimpse of the true ontology. All that we see directly is the inner ontology of the conscious experience itself, but one supposes that there is some relationship to the ontology of everything else.

Comment author: wnoise 09 February 2010 12:55:31AM 3 points [-]

If I were to say to you that negative numbers can be made by adding together positive numbers,

\sum_{n=0}^{infinity} 2^n "=" -1.

That is a bit tongue in cheek, but there are divergent sums that are used in serious physical calculations.

Comment author: Blueberry 09 February 2010 01:32:53AM 1 point [-]

there are divergent sums that are used in serious physical calculations.

I'm curious about this. More details please!

Comment author: wnoise 09 February 2010 05:23:22AM *  1 point [-]

These mostly crop up in quantum field theory, where various formal expressions have infinite values. These can often be "regularized" to give finite results, or at least turned into a form that while still infinite, can be "renormalized" by such means as considering various terms as referring to observed values, rather than the "bare values", which are carefully tweaked (often taking limits as they go to zero) in a coordinated way, so that the observed values remain okay.

Letting s be the sum above, in some sense what we're "really" saying is that s = 1 + 2 s, which can be seen by formal manipulation. This has two solutions in the (one-point compactification of) the complex numbers: infinity, and -1. When doing things like summing Feynmann diagrams, we can have similar things where a physical propagator is essentially described as a bare propagator plus perturbative terms that should be written in terms of products of propagators, leading again to infinite series that diverge (several interlocked infinite series, actually -- the photon propagator should include terms with each charged particle, the electron should include terms with photon intermediates, etc.).

IIRC, The Casimir effect can be explained by using Zeta function regularization to sum up contributions of an infinite number of vaccuum modes, though it is certainly not the only way to perform the calculation

http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/07/28/sum-divergent-series-i/ and the next two posts are a nice introduction to some of these methods.

Wikipedia has a fair number of examples:

Explicit physics calculations I do not have at the ready.

EDIT: please do not take the descriptions of the physics above too seriously. It's not quite what people actually do, but it's close enough to give some of the flavor.

Comment author: Bo102010 09 February 2010 03:03:42AM 0 points [-]

wnoise hits it out of the park!

Comment author: Cyan 15 January 2010 02:58:53PM 2 points [-]

Can you clarify why

When people say that they do not see how piling up atoms can give rise to color, meaning, consciousness, etc., they are engaged in this sort of reasoning.

does not also apply to the piling up of degrees of freedom in a quantum monad?

I have another question, which I expect someone has already asked somewhere, but I doubt I'll be able to find your response, so I'll just ask again. Would a simulation of a conscious quantum monad by a classical computation also be conscious?