= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Vladimir_Nesov comments on Dissolving the Question - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (104)
That's a model along the lines of the one I was thinking of in response to the question; any number of simple algorithms for processing data, creating a worldview, determining the expected utility of a series of actions, and choosing the action which seems to have the greatest utility might believe it has 'free will', by the definition that its actions cannot be predicted, if it is not capable of understanding its own nature.
Humans are, of course, more complicated than this, but idea alone produces the question... is your mind the sort of algorithm which, if all of its processing details, utility functions, and available worldview data are fully known, will produce output which can be predicted in advance, given the information? That doesn't feel like an ending, but it is, perhaps, grounds to explore further.
Following up...
Having (almost) finished the Quantum Physics sequence since this last comment, and come to the point at which this particular assignment is referred to, I figured I'd post my final conclusion here before 'looking at the answer', as it were.
Given a basic understanding of QM, and further understanding that macroscopic phenomenon are an extension of those same principles... Knowing that nothing 'epiphenomenal' is relevant to the question of consciousness... And assuming that no previously unobserved micro-phenomenon is responsible for consciousness, by virtue of the fact that even if there were, there is, at present, no reason to privilege that particular hypothesis...
There's no question left. What we call consciousness is simply our view of the algorithm from the inside. I believe that I have free will because it seems like the choices I make change the future I find myself in... but there are a great many other factors implicit in my thinking before I even arrive at the point of making a choice, and the fact that the probabilities involved in defining that future are impossible to calculate under existing technology does not mean that such a feat will never be possible.
That said, even full knowledge of the state of a given brain would not allow you to predict it's output in advance, as even in isolation, that brain would divide into a very large number of possible states every instant, and QM proves that there is no way of determining, in advance, which state that brain will arrive at at any given time. This is not randomness, per se... given sufficient information, and isolation from contaminating entanglements, one could theoretically plot out a map of possible states, and assign probabilities to them, and have reasonable expectations of finding that mind in the predicted states after a determined time... but could never be certain of finding any given result after any amount of time.
That doesn't mean that I don't have control over my actions, or that my perception of consciousness is an illusion... what it does mean is that I run on the same laws of physics as anything else, and the algorithms that comprise my awareness are not specially privileged to ignore or supersede those laws. Realizing this fact is no reason to do anything drastic or strange... this is the way that things have been all along, and my acknowledgment of it doesn't detract from the reality of my experiences. I could believe that my actions are determined by chance instead of choice, but that would neither be useful, nor entirely true. Whatever the factors that go into the operation of my cognitive algorithms, they ultimately add up to me. Given this, I might still believe that I have free will... while at the same time knowing that the question itself does not have the meaning I thought it had before I seriously considered the question.
Do neurons operate at the quantum level? I thought they were large enough to have full decoherance throughout the brain, and thus no quantum uncertainty, meaning we could predict this particular version of your brain perfectly if we could account for the state and linkages of every neuron.
Or do neurons leverage quantum coherence in their operation?
You don't need macroscopic quantum entanglement to get uncertainty. Local operations (chemical reactions, say) could depend on quantum events that happen differently on different branches of the outcome, leading to different thoughts in a brain, where there's not enough redundancy to overcome them (for example, I'll always conclude that 6*7=42, but I might give different estimates of population of Australia on different branches following the question). I'm not sure this actually happens, but I expect it does...
I'm not sure I understand how quantum events could have an appreciable effect on chemical reactions once decoherance has occurred. Could you point me somewhere with more information? It's very possible I misunderstood a sequence, especially the QM sequence.
I could also see giving different estimates for the population of Australia for slightly different versions of your brain, but I would think you would give different estimates given the same neuron configuration and starting conditions extremely rarely (that is, run the test a thousand times on molecule for molecule identical brains and you might answer it differently once, and I feel like that is being extremely generous).
Honestly I would think the decoherance would be so huge by the time you got up to the size of individual cells that it would be very difficult to get any meaningful uncertainty. That is to say, quantum events might be generating a constant stream of alternate universe brains, but for every brain that is functionally different from yours there would be trillions and trillions of brains that are functionally identical.
If you include electrons a single water molecule has 64 quarks, and many of the proteins and lipids our cells are made of have thousands of atoms per molecule and therefore tens of thousands of quarks. I am having a hard time envisioning anything less than hundreds of quarks in a molecule doing enough to change the way that molecule would have hooked into its target receptor, and further that another of the same molecule wouldn't have simply hooked into the receptor in its place and performed the identical function. There may be some slight differences in the way individual molecules work, but you would need hundreds to thousands of molecules doing something different to cause a single neuron to fire differently (and consequently millions of quarks), and I'm not sure a single neuron firing differently is necessarily enough for your estimate of Australia to change (though it would have a noticeable effect given enough time, a la the butterfly effect). The amount of decoherance here is just staggering.
To summarize what I'm saying, you'd need at least hundreds of quarks per molecule zigging instead of zagging in order for it to behave differently enough to have any meaningful effect and probably at least a few hundred molecules per neuron to alter when/how/if that neuron fires, or whether or not the next neuron's dendrite receives the chemical signal. I would think such a scenario would be extremely rare, even with the 100 billion or so neurons and 100 trillion or so synapses in the brain.
You may be right, I don't really know what's involved in chemical reactions. A chemist knowing enough theory of a physicist would likely be able to reliably resolve this question. Maybe you really know the answer, but I don't know enough to be able to evaluate what you wrote...
See my comment.