Comment author: shminux 20 March 2014 05:28:28PM 1 point [-]

Consciousness exists

If you are trying to be all formal about it, it's good to start by defining your terminology. What do you mean by Consciousness and what do you mean by existence? And one of the best ways to define what you mean by a commonly used term is to delineate its boundaries. For example, what is not-consciousness? Not-quite-consciousness? Give an example of ten. Same with existence. What does it mean for something to not exist? Can you list a dozen of non-existing things?

For example, do pink unicorns exist? If not, how come they affect reality (you see a sentence about them on your computer monitor)? How is consciousness different from pink unicorns? Please do not latch on this one particular example, make up your own.

I am pretty sure you have no firm understanding of what you are talking about, even though it feels like you do in your gut, "but is hard to explain". If you do not have a firm grasp of the basics, writing fancy lemmas and theorems may help you publish a philosophy paper but does not get your anywhere closer to understanding the issues.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 20 March 2014 07:12:23PM 1 point [-]

If you are trying to be all formal about it, it's good to start by defining your terminology. What do you mean by Consciousness and what do you mean by existence?

I'm trying to be slightly formal, but without getting too bogged down. Instead I would prefer to take a few shortcuts to see if the road ahead looks promising at all. So far I feel that the best I've managed is to say "If a system seems to itself to experience consciousness in the same way that we seem to experience it, then we can call it conscious".

I am pretty sure you have no firm understanding of what you are talking about,

Not as sure as I am ;-) But I am trying to improve my understanding, and have no intention of writing philosophy papers.

Thoughts on How Consciousness Can Affect the World

1 DavidPlumpton 20 March 2014 08:32AM

Overview

In "The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle" Eliezer mentioned that one aspect of consciousness is that it can affect the world, e.g. by making us say out loud "I feel conscious", or deciding to read (or write) this article. However my current working hypothesis is that consciousness is a feature of information and computation. So how can pure information affect the world? It is this aspect of consciousness that I intend to explore.
Assumptions

A1: Let's go all in on Reductionism. Nothing else is involved other than the laws of physics (even if we haven't discovered them all yet).

A2: Consciousness exists (or at least some illusion of experiencing it exists).


Tentative Lemmas

TL1: A simulation of the brain (if necessary down to quantum fields) would seem to itself to experience consciousness in whatever way it is that we seem to ourselves to experience consciousness

TL2: If an electronic (or even pen and paper) simulation of a brain is conscious, then consciousness is "substrate independent", i.e. not requiring a squishy brain at least in principle.

TL3: If consciousness is substrate independent, then the best candidate for the underlying mechanism of consciousness is computation and information.

TL4: "You" and "I" are information and algorithms, implemented by our brain tissue. By this I mean that somehow information and computation can be made to seem to experience consciousness. So somehow the information can be computed into a state where it contains information relating to the experience of consciousness.

Likely Complications

LC1: State transitions may involve some random component.

LC2: It seems likely that a static state is insufficient to experience consciousness, requiring change of state (i.e. processing). Could a single unchanging state experience consciousness forever? Hmmmm....
Main Argument

What does is mean for matter such as neurons to "implement" consciousness? For information to be stored the neurons need to be in some state that can be discriminated from other states. The act of computation is changing the state of information to a new state, based on the current state. Let's say we start in state S0 and then neurons fire in some way that we label state S1, ignoring LC1 for now. So we have "computed" state S1 from a previous state S0, so let's just write that as:

S0 -> S1

From our previous set of assumptions we can conclude that S0 -> S1 may involve some sensation of consciousness to the system represented by the neurons, i.e. that the consciousness would be present regardless of whether a physical set of neurons was firing or a computer simulation was running or we if we writing it slowly down on paper. So we can consider the physical state S0 to be "implementing" a conscious sensation that we can label as C0. Let's describe that as:

S0 (C0) -> S1 (C1)

Note that the parens do note indicate function calls, but just describe correlations between the two state flavours. As for LC1, if we instead get S0 -> S(random other) then it would simply seem that a conscious decision had been made to not take the action. Now let's consider some computation that follows on from S1:

S1 (C1) -> S2* (C2)

I label S2* with a star to indicate that it is slightly special because it happens to fire some motor neurons that are connected to muscles and we notice some effect on the world. So a conscious being experiences the chain of computation S0 (C0) -> S1 (C1) -> S2* (C2) as feeling like they have made a decision to take some real world action, and then they performed that action. From TL2 we see that in a simulation the same feeling of making a decision and acting on it will be experienced.

And now the key point... each information state change occurs in lockstep with patterns of neurons firing. The real or simulated state transitions S0 -> S1 -> S2* correspond to the perceived C0 -> C1 -> C2. But of course C2 can be considered to be C2*; the conscious being will soon have sensory feedback to indicate that C2 seemed to cause a change in the world.

So S0 (C0) -> S1 (C1) -> S2* (C2)  is equivalent to S0 (C0) -> S1 (C1) -> S2* (C2*)

The result is another one of those "dissolve the question" situations. Consciousness affects the real world because "real actions" and information changes occur in lockstep together, such that some conscious feeling of the causality of a decision in C0 -> C1 -> C2* is really a perfect correlation to neurons firing in the specific sequence S0 -> S1 -> S2*. In fact it now seems like a philosophical point as to whether there is any difference between causation and correlation for this specific situation.

Can LC2 change the conclusion at all? I suspect not; perhaps S0 may consist of a set of changing sub-states (even if C0 does not), until a new state occurs that is within a set S1 intead of S0.

The argument concerning consciousness would also seem to apply to qualia (I suspect many smaller brained animals experience qualia but no consciousness).

Consciousness affecting the world

-3 DavidPlumpton 06 December 2013 07:37PM

In Zombies! Zombies? Eliezer mentions that one aspect of consciousness is that it can causally affect the real world, e.g. cause you to say "I feel conscious right now", or result in me typing out these words.

Even if a generally accepted mechanism of consciousness has not been found yet are there any tentative explanations for this "can change world" property? Googling around I was unable to find anything (although Zombies are certainly popular).

I had an idea of how this might work, but just wanted to see if it was worth the effort of writing.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 24 October 2013 10:11:15PM 4 points [-]

Suppose you carry a timetable of your daily routine with you. Whenever you look at the whole timetable, it's the same; but if you just look at a random single line of the timetable, there's a "clock observable" (words saying what time it is) and a "state of the universe observable" (words saying what activity should be happening at that time).

This experiment is "evidence" for the emergence of time from entanglement, to exactly the same degree that the experiment I just described, of looking at your daily schedule, is evidence for time being relational. They have a global superposition which remains the same over time, but in which the observed state of one part is correlated with the observed state of the other part.

The "physics arxiv blog" (which has no official relation to arxiv, it's just someone describing random papers) is completely uncritical, and faithfully repeats whatever claims authors make about the meaning of their work.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 25 October 2013 01:56:31AM 0 points [-]

So it sounds like you're saying the details may all be correct but the high level interpretation of the results is significantly overreaching. Not too unexpected, I guess.

In response to Timeless Physics
Comment author: DavidPlumpton 24 October 2013 08:02:18PM 1 point [-]

It seems there may actually be some experimental evidence in this area, https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/d5d3dc850933 with the experiment details at http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4691

It blows my mind that there could be anything experimentally detectable, even in principle.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 29 August 2013 02:31:11AM 1 point [-]

Any WBE could in theory be simulated by a mathematical function (as far as I can see). So what I really want to know is: can a mathematical function experience qualia? (and/or consciousness) By experience I mean that whatever experiencing qualia is to us it would have something directly analogous (e.g. if qualia is an illusion then the function has the same sort of illusion).

Conscious functions possible? Currently I'm leaning towards yes. If true, to me the implication would be that the "me" in my head is not my neurons, but the information encoded therein.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 13 August 2013 02:20:37PM 7 points [-]

Can you elaborate on this, or link?

I agree that the chinese rules are more elegant, anyway.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 14 August 2013 02:54:55AM 6 points [-]
Comment author: JonahSinick 11 August 2013 06:29:13AM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I agree that there are many instances in which it’s possible to rationally come to confident conclusions that differ from those of subject matter experts. I realize that my earlier comment was elliptical, and will try to clarify. The relevant points to my mind are:

The extraordinary intellectual caliber of the best physicists

Though difficult to formalize, I think that there's a meaningful sense in which one can make statements of the general form "person A has intellectual caliber n times that of person B." Of course, this is domain specific to some degree, but I think that the concept hangs together somewhat even across domains.

One operationalization of this is "if person B reaches a correct conclusion on a given subject, person A could reach it n times as fast." Another is "it would take n copies of person B to do person A's work." These things are hard to estimate, but one can become better calibrated by using the rule "if person A has intellectual caliber n times that of person B and person B has intellectual caliber m times that of person C, then person A has intellectual caliber n*m times that of person C."

In almost all domains, I think that the highest intellectual caliber people have no more than 5x my intellectual caliber. Physics is different. From what I’ve heard, the distribution of talent in physics is similar to that of math. The best mathematicians are 100x+ my intellectual caliber. I had a particularly striking illustrative experience with Don Zagier, who pinpointed a crucial weakness in an analogy that I had been exploring for 6 months (and which I had run by a number of other mathematicians) in a mere ~15 minutes. I would not be surprised if he himself were to have an analogous experience with the historical greats.

When someone is < 5x one’s intellectual caliber, an argument of the type “this person may be smarter than me, but I’ve focused a lot more on having accurate views, so I trust my judgment over him or her” seems reasonable. But when one gets to people who are 100x+ one’s intellectual caliber, the argument becomes much weaker. Model uncertainty starts to play a major role. It could be that people who are that much more powerful easily come to the correct conclusion on a given question without even needing to put conscious effort into having accurate beliefs.

The intrinsic interest of the question of interpretation of quantum mechanics

The question of what quantum mechanics means has been considered one of the universe’s great mysteries. As such, people interested in physics have been highly motivated to understand it. So I think that the question is privileged relative to other questions that physicists would have opinions on — it’s not an arbitrary question outside of the domain of their research accomplishments.

Solicitation of arguments from those with opposing views

In the Muslim theology example, you spend 40 hours engaging with the Muslim philosophers. This seems disanalogous to the present case, in that as far as I know, Eliezer’s quantum mechanics sequence hasn’t been vetted by any leading physicists who disagree with the many world’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. I also don’t know of any public record of ~40 hours of back and forth analogous to the one that you describe. I know that Eliezer might cite an example in his QM sequence, and will take a look.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 13 August 2013 05:30:10AM 2 points [-]

In computer science an elite coder might take 6 months to finish a very hard task (e.g. create some kind of tricky OS kernel), but a poor coder will never complete the task. This makes the elite coder infinitely better than the poor coder. Furthermore the poor coder will ask many questions of other people, impacting their productivity. Thus an elite coder is transfinitely more efficient than a poor coder ;-)

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 13 August 2013 05:20:34AM *  10 points [-]

Chinese rules for Go are quite simple. Japanese rules are quite complex (to the point where a world championship level match had a rule disagreement that resulted in a player agreeing to being forced to play a certain move in return for a promise that the rule would get changed in the future. Ouch.)

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 01 August 2013 08:43:29PM 1 point [-]

Maybe interstellar travel is really, really hard--no matter what your level of technology.

Maybe 99% of the habitable planets in the galaxy have been sterilized by unfriendly AI and we owe our current existence to the anthropomorphic principle.

Maybe highly rational entities decide large-scale interstellar travel is suboptimal.

Probably a bunch more possibilities here...

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