This doesn't sound much like a physics paper from the abstract (http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219). "why do conscious observers like us perceive..." is an appropriate angle for philosophical discussion (or maybe psychology, depending on where you took that).
But in physics, we use experimentation and observation of the physical world. Put a brain (or a human) on a table, do some experiments, and write about the results. If you find that atoms and molecules in the brain do strange things that they don't do when part of a brain, document, publish, and theorize.
And if you don't do any experiments, and instead probe the depths of your mind, that's not physics.
(sorry to sound so condescending, but it's frustrating for the word "physics" to be co-opted in the service of bunk science)
There is a strong tradition of physicists (scientists of all stripes, really) assuming they have some deep understanding of the natural universe and logic far beyond that of philosophers and stepping far outside their expertise to say laughably absurd and quackish things about hard problems in philosophy. So I appreciate your caution.
But it's also the case that just because a physicist is trying to tackle consciousness -- a much harder problem than anything physicists have taken on this far -- doesn't make him a quack. To dismiss it out of hand is foolish; IIT is a thing and this paper certainly fits within that framework, though I don't know enough to judge it beyond that without careful study. But from your post, neither do you.
No self respecting physicist would claim to have deep understanding of anything. The entire process of scientific investigation runs on self-doubt. To keep things grounded, theory-experiment-new theory cycle is essential. If you can't verify your theory then you are as well be doing philosophy.
1. It's clear you did not read the paper and are ignorant that the author is high profile physicist and cosmologist famous for developing measurement methods.
2. The view of science you are parroting is naive and mistaken. Theorizing and experiment are both necessary and inform and constrict each other.
There are plenty of great scientists who have nutty ideas about things outside of their specialty. I've only read the OP, but that's the vibe it gives me.
Which is good, isn't it? I mean, how nutty was the idea that matter could bend space(time)? What about time dilation? Black holes? Particle/wave duality? The brilliant dots in the sky being immense balls of burning gas? Big discoveries begin with a nutty hypothesis.
1. I don't care who he is, and nor should you, this is science and not the middle ages. I will not bow to a Barron, and I will not accept what an MIT professor says without applying my critical facilities to it.
The paper is extremely difficult to read and extremely long, very few people will have the time or comprehensive knowledge required to read it completely. This is a fault of the paper, not the readers.
2. Theorizing is great, ideas are free, but that is because their value is very low without proof.
That's a funny perspective, considering that the greatest physicist in history is well known for mainly considering hypothetical and conceptual structures.
meh, the paper was written by Prof. Max Tegmark from the Department of Physics of the MIT, I think it's pretty understandable that it's being associated with "physics"; the paper itself it's pretty much about physics.
I don't think there is a fundamental problem with trying to approach a philosophical/psychological topic with physics, I mean, I really believe that at some point everything will reach the domain of "physics".
Did you open the paper and browse through it? It'd be interested in seeing what he has to say. Just because we can't observe something yet, doesn't mean we can start playing the ideas of what proofs for such things would look like.
In the science fictional world of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, the characters discover that neurons are able to store so much data because they exist in different quantum states; that much of what happens in the brain is unobservable by conventional means.
..of course that's fiction, but we find crazy stuff in nature all the time like the species of Snapper Shrimp that able to generate crazy hot super heated cavitation bubbles.
We don't have any working models on how consciousness works (or even what it really is), so anything at this stage is worth documenting. As science developers, we may find ways to test these hypothesis in the future.
What's interesting is quantum mechanics requires an observation to determine the final state. Without observation the solution is probabilistic with infinite outcomes. By defining a conscious observer we limit the final state to ours, i.e., our current universe.
This is a misconception. When you read about quantum things (superposition, for example), it's convenient to replace "observe" with "interact with."
Without interacting with the universe, it's probabilistic. The problem being that a lot of things in the universe interact with each other as a matter of course. A particle bumping into another particle breaks the probabilistic state that you're talking about – regardless of whether that particle ends up in the view of a conscious observer.
No. Absolutely not. All you have to do is choose which outcome you'd like to predict from the theory, and so you choose the ones that are consistent with observation.
It's sad what's happened to physics. I remember being at an SPIE meeting for optical physics; some of my work on X-ray microscopes was being presented there. I happened upon a giant auditorium filled to the nostrils with people debating life on other planets. Debating. Life on other planets. These folks were full time thinking about this. They weren't doing anything about it; it reminded me of a weed-and-beer-fueled bull session in a dorm room, except all these people were effectively professional exobiologists being paid to have weed and beer fueled bull sessions on exobiology. It didn't even rise to the level of an interesting Science Fiction short story. This at a conference for people doing actual science, people who develop telescopes, optical computers and other optical doodads, as well as new mathematical techniques to master different kinds of optical tricks.
The "physicist" who has this big idea is actually a cosmologist and the first few sentences of his wiki page indicate he is a fairly fruity one. Cosmology itself has gone off in embarrassing directions, and is vastly too large in comparison to its actual importance to the human race. I'm not sure anything has actually been figured out by a professional Cosmologist, though they use cool math sometimes. The actual cosmological results we have come from people doing actual science; astronomers, radio engineers, nuclear physicists, stat mech guys. Mind you, if cosmology could actually figure things out, I'd be all for it, but it seems they mostly do "gee whiz" think pieces which feature some differential geometry and noodle theory. And, apparently, untestable mystical whoop-dee-do about consciousness.
I'm gonna get off my high horse in a minute, but this sort of "celebritization" of science is obnoxious. People used to hang on the words of Fermi and Einstein, and considered their weird speculations to be interesting because those men proved their scientific acuity in other domains; actually increasing human understanding of nature. Now a days we canonize guys like this to do the "gee whiz" think pieces that people enjoy reading articles about ... and they are not of the caliber to justify anyone paying attention to their weird ideas. They're speculative types: science fiction authors who know some impressive math. They don't deserve the appellation of "scientist" let alone "physicist" as they do not study nature in a scientific manner. While Peter Woit has done some admirable work exposing the impostures of the noodle theorists, we really need someone to cleanse the temple of science of such people in general.
This is incredibly shortsighted. First, at least some portion of science has always been dedicated "debating" things. That doesn't mean they're being unhelpful, especially since those are the types of debates which help to steer resources towards practical efforts.
How do you decide which telescope to build if you haven't decided, without such telescope, what exactly it's supposed to be looking at?
It's also worth noting that theoretical inquiries can be incredibly helpful. You know, like all of Einstein's work. After all, he was a mathematician just playing with numbers and then trusting their results – something most "real scientists" were too skeptical to do because the results didn't look like what they expected.
Of course, it didn't help that a lot of Einstein's (and other theoretical scientists) ideas were, at the time, untestable mystical whoop-dee-do, either.
It is supremely unhelpful when 1/3 or more of physics department tenure track positions are going to people who are not doing science, which is the present situation. As far as I am concerned, nobody needs a day job doing this sort of thing. It is recreational philosophical speculation, salted with mathematics. It would be far more productive to pay professors of physics to develop renormalization group theory for the game of go or something; at least that is testable, even if it isn't physics any more than the paper under discussion is.
You apparently don't understand the difference between "you know, like all of Einstein's work" and nonsense like this. Virtually all of Einstein's work was based on experiment (he won the Nobel for explaining the photoelectric effect), and all of it was/is testable both in principle and in practice. The sort of wanking in this paper simply isn't science in any sense of the word. It isn't even testable in principle. It is no more science than a ghost story or a damp t-shirt with an equation on it.
Parts of some of them were confirmed rather quickly.
Other parts of some of them are still unconfirmed, and a subset of those are still well beyond our foreseeable capability of testing. Black holes are one notable prediction that we have virtually no way to confirm.
What's your point? I'm not saying Einstein got things wrong, I'm saying that immediately dismissing science which is not immediately testable is risky. Especially as more and more of the low hanging fruit is picked – cutting edge scientific ideas are going to be more and more difficult to test.
Compare the Cavendish experiment to the Michelson-Morley experiment to the Large Hadron to... Creating a black hole?
Seems to be a steep increase in difficulty. It should be expected.
Einstein didn't come up with the idea of black holes. Laplace did; before General Relativity for that matter. Meanwhile, Laplace gets to speculate about such things without being considered a goofball because he invented big chunks of mathematics, optics and physics.
In fact, nobody in the physics community spoke of black holes at all until the 1960s when they began converting agricultural colleges into warehouses for people who speculate on untestable things.
I believe that's the whole point. This is someone trying to distill a seemingly intractable problem into a testable form.
I think the answer for now is "no," but that's precisely the question he is attempting to answer: "is consciousness something that can be modeled in such a way that we can answer whether or not it is [x]?"
> I'm not sure anything has actually been figured out by a professional Cosmologist
You are 100% wrong. Several Nobel prizes have been awarded for seminal results in cosmology, like observation of the cosmic microwave background and the discovery of accelerated metric expansion.
The observation of cosmic microwave background radiation was done by Penzias and Wilson, working on practical stuff (though Wilson was an astronomer, I think by training). It was explained as cosmic background by Dicke, who was a tremendously productive optical and atomic physicist. None of these guys were considered "cosmologists" -none of them did "cosmology" and the title of "cosmologist" didn't even exist in those days. Penzias actually caught a lot of flack as director of Bell Labs for shutting down a lot of the speculative stuff there.
I'm not sure what the other thing you're referring to is, but I used to go to some of Joe Taylor's seminars: he was an astronomer, not a cosmologist. Cosmologists are people who publish papers that can't be tested by people like Penzias, Wilson and Taylor.
I zoomed in on this comment to tap the upvote button, and the voting buttons disappeared. So hopefully it wasn't a downvote.
To respond to your comment, it seems that brain damage, psychoactive drugs, and transcranial magnetic stimulation are all evidence that, even if a "consciousness" can't be split in two (contradicted by your reference), parts of it can be removed or altered by altering matter, so it's still most likely a simple physical process.
I think what is meant is that you can't have a subjective experience of two different consciousnesses at the same time.
In other words, one of the properties of the subjective experience of consciousness is that of a unified whole.
In the experiments you link, the two consciousnesses are not aware of each other, and presumably(?) don't experience the other, thus they are two separate, individual consciousnesses, each experiencing themselves as an indivisible whole.
In other words, these brains host two separate consciousnesses, just like our two skulls host two separate consciousnesses (in two brains). Whatever wiring links up aspects of the brain that gives the perception of unified conscious has been sundered.
Maybe ignoring the question is right. Maybe philosophers have nothing useful to say about it. But if that's your view, then don't talk about that question.
It seems extremely plausible to me that any matter that is organized enough to support meaningful arbitrary computation (ie. not Seth Lloyd's "it's computing it's own evolution" kind of computation) would share some kind of similarity of organization, or at least fall into a small number of phases, with an order parameter that somehow reduces to computation / unit volume.
That makes me think of "Action, Or the Fungibility of Computation" (1998) [0] wherein Toffoli argues that what the physical quantity known as "action" amounts to is computational spacetime density.
[0] PDF link in the upper right corner of http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.2410
But the problem is not computation, the problem is consciousness. I think we all agree that our level of general intelligence can be achieved "simply" by putting stuff together in the correct order. But consciousness? Why is it even there? Why is there something that it's like to be us?
I don't know. It's not clear to me what consciousness means, but if forced me to take a stance, I'd give a Hofstaderian response and say that it's a matter of degrees, and that perhaps consciousness is the experience of processing information. More than that, I don't think it can be said to be "even there"---or otherwise it's something outside of the content, arrangement, or behavior of our constituent matter.
I should add that he gets into very practical details, like how much should one charge for a fixed amount of computational capacity, in 1998 (before AWS etc. :P).
I think it's open access. The PDF link works without a paywall.
Lot of complicated mathematical notation in the actual paper; will put this on my table and attempt to not get lost reading it on my flight tomorrow.
I also highly suggest reading Bostrom's "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" The mathematics he lays out isn't that complex and he makes a good case for the hypothesis that we are either in a simulation, will eventually be able to create a simulation of our work or we'll go extinct.
I also have issues with his approach to the many-worlds interpretation. Not sure what his current position on that matter is, but one of his talks I saw speculated about identifying the 'branches' of the wavefunction with distant locations of an inflationary multiverse.
This sounded like nonsense to me: One of the major points of that interpretation is making the wave function universal (the title of Everett's dissertation actually was "The Theory of the Universal Wave function").
bah, whatever algorithm necessary to implement consciousness is impossible to implement in reasonable time in this universe. Our brains just perform a suitable monte carlo simulation of that hypothetical algorithm.
but we are able to implement suitable monte carlo simulations digitally and we examine that action as lacking consciousness
that's why i think when we develop algorithms that will relieve our reliance on probability we will begin to see behaviours so inextricable from our notions of consciousness we will acknowledge these actions as being concious
Looking at the ArXIV article, the key ideas apparently come from "Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto," by Giulio Tononi, who is a psychiatrist in Wisconsin.[1] His two big claims are that, for an information processing system to be conscious, it needs to have two separate traits:
1. Information: It has to have a large repertoire of accessible states, i.e., the ability to store a large amount of information.
2. Integration: This information must be integrated into a unified whole, i.e., it must be impossible to decompose the system into nearly independent parts, because otherwise these parts would subjectively feel like two separate conscious entities.
1) is reasonable, although it doesn't say much about how much memory is required. 2) is clearly bogus - we know that biological brains don't work that way. They have at least a hundred or so subunits handling different functions. Some are very specific, such as face recognition. Tononi says that in his paper: "different parts of the cerebral cortex are specialized for different functions, yet a vast network of connections allows these parts to interact profusely." So he admits it's not one big component; it's a network of components with explicit, limited connectivity.
Where Tonini is coming from is the concept of "qualia".[2] This is a philosophical concept, roughly "The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc." Toroni hypothesizes that qualia can be (are?) represented as points in a space of 2^n dimensions. He writes "Each axis is labeled with the probability p for that state, going from 0 to 1, so that a repertoire (i.e.,a probability distribution on the possible states of the complex) corresponds to a point in Q (Fig. 5)." This is similar to the internal state of an artificial neural network.
The physics paper conjectures that if only we had some materials (?) called "computronium" and "perceptronium", we could get work done in qualia space, through a process where energy is removed from the system in a way vaguely similar to simulated annealing. There's a lot of math and discussion around the idea that some randomness has to be applied to make the thing go; not enough, and it stalls out; too much, and it's just noise. There's a suggestion that certain forms of noise will make it work better. All this sound vaguely similar to the way the random initialization of ANNs matters a lot, and recent work has made ANNs better by choosing the random initial conditions in certain ways. Neither paper mentions what's going on in the ANN world, yet they seem to be approaching some of the same concepts. I'm not an ANN expert; someone in that field may have a better idea of whether the concepts are related.
All this is from the "consciousness is special and magic" crowd. Both authors assume that is the case, and try to reason from there. That's closer to theology than physics.
> 2) is clearly bogus - we know that biological brains don't work that way.
But the brain entire is not consciousness (it's probably in the prefrontal cortex). Some parts of the brain, such as heartbeat, object tracking, etc, are obviously not integrated into consciousness.
It's not one big component, but it at least has to integrate all the components of consciousness (again, not all the brain functions), or else we wouldn't have the apparent sensation that "I" am an indivisible whole. By "I", I mean my consciousness, my will and personality, not my body, which is obviously made up of parts, including the brain and its parts.
It might be an illusion, but that doesn't mean that that illusion is not worthy of study, since it is probably the main thing that defines the human experience.
>But the brain entire is not consciousness (it's probably in the prefrontal cortex). Some parts of the brain, such as heartbeat, object tracking, etc, are obviously not integrated into consciousness.
So only mammals are conscious? Sucks to not be an Eagle I guess! Beware zombie Dinosaurs!
Sometimes I have distinctly non integrated experiences, like when I speak and the sentences flow from me containing grammatically correct concepts in logical order, and I didn't have anything to do with it, but there it is an argument that "I" made.
I think other animals, such as certain birds (crows, parrots), might be conscious, maybe octopuses, but that's just my pet theory. To be sure, we'd need a definition of what consciousness is exactly (more than "I'm pretty sure I am conscious, and other people, too") , and probably really good brain scan technology, far better than what we have now.
No, I'm obviously not in an objective sense, but my _subjective experience_ is that I am. That subjective experience is what we're interested in studying. That's what people are referring to when they say they are conscious.
I think I'm channeling Feynman accurately when I say "oy ve" to this one. Come on, conciousness is very cool, and a great mystery; but a state of matter? Maybe in the degenerate sense that any object is a "state of matter". But please don't feed the woo-woo quantum-mechanics-is-god crowd with stuff like this.
What is a "state of matter" other than an emergent property of quantum behaviors? States of matter are merely a construction to simplify those behaviors, and there is nothing inherently flawed with viewing consciousness this way.
That said, there are serious flaws in this write-up, including many simplifying and already debunked presumptions about unified consciousness.
No, there's nothing wrong with it. Exact as javajosh said: it is an abstraction whose analogous forms would make anything a state of matter. If consciousness is a state of matter, why not plant? Isn't plant a state of matter? Why not life? Why isn't sleep a state of matter?
You could see it that way. You could see anything anyway you like. The objection is that seeing things this way causes confusion, not understanding.
In this comment we (1) propose the bullshitonium, which is a paper crammed full of assertions and a heady concoction of weird diagrams and unintelligible mathematics. The bullshitonium introduces fancy sounding terms which can then be written (in crayon on the walls of asylums and secure wards, or more worryingly on internet sites by people who should know better). Having written this "thingy" we (2) will smile enigmatically and make wild claims to anyone who will listen in the hope that they will take a lot of notice of us (3).
(1) me, I, that which is of the thing that I really am.
(2) sighs you really are a glutton for punishment, you're checking these footnotes a little bit toooooo seriously! See (1)
But in physics, we use experimentation and observation of the physical world. Put a brain (or a human) on a table, do some experiments, and write about the results. If you find that atoms and molecules in the brain do strange things that they don't do when part of a brain, document, publish, and theorize.
And if you don't do any experiments, and instead probe the depths of your mind, that's not physics.
(sorry to sound so condescending, but it's frustrating for the word "physics" to be co-opted in the service of bunk science)