We don’t even know what consciousness is, let alone if it’s technically “real” (as in physical in any way.) It’s perfectly possible an uploaded brain would be just as conscious as a real brain because there was no physical thing making us conscious, and rather it was just a result of our ability to think at all.
Similarly, I’ve heard people argue a machine couldn’t feel emotions because it doesn’t have the physical parts of the brain that allow that, so it could only ever simulate them. That argument has the same hole in that we don’t actually know that we need those to feel emotions, or if the final result is all that matters. If we replaced the whole “this happens, release this hormone to cause these changes in behavior and physical function” with a simple statement that said “this happened, change behavior and function,” maybe there isn’t really enough of a difference to call one simulated and the other real. Just different ways of achieving the same result.
My point is, we treat all these things, consciousness, emotions, etc, like they’re special things that can’t be replicated, but we have no evidence to suggest this. It’s basically the scientific equivalent of mysticism, like the insistence that free will must exist even though all evidence points to the contrary.
Also, some of what happens in the brain is just storytelling. Like, when the doctor hits your patellar tendon, just under your knee, with a reflex hammer. Your knee jerks, but the signals telling it to do that don’t even make it to the brain. Instead the signal gets to your spinal cord and it “instructs” your knee muscles.
But, they’ve studied similar things and have found out that in many cases where the brain isn’t involved in making a decision, the brain does make up a story that explains why you did something, to make it seem like it was a decision, not merely a reaction to stimulus.
TLDR:
Nature can’t simply select out consciousness because it emerges from hardware that is useful in other ways. The brain doesn’t waste energy on consciousness, it uses energy for computation, which is useful in a myriad ways.
The usefulness of consciousness from an evolutionary fitness perspective is a tricky question to answer in general terms. An easy intuition might be to look at the utility of pain for the survival of an individual.
I personally think that, ultimately, consciousness is a byproduct of a complex brain. The evolutionary advantage is mainly given by other features enabled by said complexity (generally more sophisticated and adaptable behavior, social interactions, memory, communication, intentional environment manipulation, etc.) and consciousness basically gets a free ride on that already-useful brain.
Species with more complex brains have an easier time adapting to changes in their environment because their brains allow them to change their behavior much faster than random genetic mutations would. This opens up many new ecological niches that simpler organisms wouldn’t be able to fill.
I don’t think nature selects out waste. As long as a species is able to proliferate its genes, it can be as wasteful as it “wants”. It only has to be fit enough, not as fit as possible. E.g. if there’s enough energy available to sustain a complex brain, there’s no pressure to make it more economical by simplifying its function. (And there are many pressures that can be reacted to without mutation when you have a complex brain, so I would guess that, on the whole, evolution in the direction of simpler brains requires stronger pressures than other adaptations)
Yeah. This is related to supernatural beliefs. If the grass moves it might just be a gust of wind, or it might be a snake. Even if snakes are rare, it’s better to be safe than sorry. But, that eventually leads to assuming that the drought is the result of an angry god, and not just some random natural phenomenon.
So, brains are hard-wired to look for causes, even inventing supernatural causes, because it helps avoid snakes.
let alone if it’s technically “real” (as in physical in any way.)
This right here might already be a flaw in your argument. Something doesn’t need to be physical to be real. In fact, there’s scientific evidence that physical reality itself is an illusion created through observation. That implies (although it cannot prove) that consciousness may be a higher construct that exists outside of physical reality itself.
If you’re interested in the philosophical questions this raises, there’s a great summary article that was published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a
On the contrary, it’s not a flaw in my argument, it is my argument. I’m saying we can’t be sure a machine could not be conscious because we don’t know that our brain is what makes us conscious. Nor do we know where the threshold is where consciousness arises. It’s perfectly possible all we need is to upload an exact copy of our brain into a machine, and it’d be conscious by default.
The problem with this is that even if a machine is conscious, there’s no reason it would be conscious like us. I fully agree that consciousness could take many forms, probably infinite forms - and there’s no reason to expect that one form would be functionally or technically compatible with another.
What does the idea “exact copy of our brain” mean to you? Would it involve emulating the physical structure of a human brain? Would it attempt to abstract the brain’s operations from the physical structure? Would it be a collection of electrical potentials? Simulations of the behavior of specific neurochemicals? What would it be in practice, that would not be hand-wavy fantasy?
I suppose I was overly vague about what I meant by “exact copy.” I mean all of the knowledge, memories, and an exact map of the state of our neurons at the time of upload being uploaded to a computer, and then the functions being simulated from there. Many people believe that even if we could simulate it so perfectly that it matched a human brain’s functions exactly, it still wouldn’t be conscious because it’s still not a real human brain. That’s the point I was arguing against. My argument was that if we could mimic human brain functions closely enough, there’s no reason to believe the brain is so special that a simulation could not achieve consciousness too.
And you’re right, it may not be conscious in the same way. We have no reason to believe either way that it would or wouldn’t be, because the only thing we can actually verify is conscious is ourself. Not humans in general, just you, individually. Therefore, how conscious something is is more of a philosophical debate than a scientific one because we simply cannot test if it’s true. We couldn’t even test if it was conscious at all, and my point wasn’t that it would be, my point is that we have no reason to believe it’s possible or impossible.
Unfortunately the physics underlying brain function are chaotic systems, meaning infinite (or “maximum”) precision is required to ensure two systems evolve to the same later states.
That level of precision cannot be achieved in measuring the state, without altering the state into something unknown after the moment of measurement.
Nothing quantum is necessary for this inability to determine state. Consider the problem of trying to map out where the eight ball is on a pool table, but you can’t see the eight ball. All you can do is throw other balls at it and observe how their velocities change. Now imagine you can’t see those balls either, because the sensing mechanism you’re using is composed of balls of equal or greater size.
Unsolvable problem. Like a box trying to contain itself.
Chaos comes into play as a state changes. The poster above you talks about copying the state. Once copied the two states will diverge because of chaos. But that doesn’t preclude consciousness. It means the copy will soon have different thoughts.
We make a giant theme park where people can interact with androids. Then we make a practically infinite number of copies of this theme park. We put androids in the copies and keep providing feedback to alter their behavior until they behave exactly like the people in the theme park.
I see that’s certainly a different way of looking at it :) Of course I can’t say with any authority that it must be wrong, but I think it’s a flaw because it seems you’re presuming that consciousness arises from physical properties. If the physical act of copying a brain’s data were to give rise to consciousness, that would imply consciousness is a product of physical reality. But my position (and that of the paper I linked) is that physical reality is a product of mental consciousness.
Do elaborate on the batshit part :) It’s a scientific fact that physical matter does not exist in its physical form when unobserved. This may not prove the existence of consciousness, but it certainly makes it plausible. It certainly invalidates physical reality as the “source of truth”, so to say. Which makes the explanation that physical reality is a product of consciousness not just plausible, but more likely than the other way around. Again, not a proof, but far from batshit.
I think you’re a little confused about what observed means and what it does.
When unobserved, elementary particles behave like a wave, but they do not stop existing. A wave is still a physical thing. Additionally, observation does not require consciousness. For instance, a building, such as a house, when nobody is looking at it, does not begin to behave like a wave. It’s still a physical building. Therefore, observation is a bit of a misnomer. It really means a complex interaction we don’t understand causes particles to behave like a particle and not a wave. It just happens that human observation is one of the possible ways this interaction can take place.
An unobserved black hole will still feed, an unobserved house is still a house.
To be clear, I’m not insulting you or your idea like the other dude, but I wanted to clear that up.
Thanks, that seems a fair approach, although it doesn’t have me entirely convinced yet. Can you explain what the physical form of a wave function is? Because it’s not like a wave, such as waves in the sea. It’s really a wave function, an abstract representation of probabilities which in my understanding does not have any physical representation.
You say the building does not start acting like a wave, and you’re right, that would be silly. But it does enter into a superposition where the building can be either collapsed or not. Like Schreudinger’s cat, which can be dead or alive, and will be in a superposition of both until observation happens again. And yes, the probabilities of this superposition are indeed expressed through the wave function, even though there is no physical wave.
It’s true observation does not require consciousness. But until we know what does constitute observation, I believe consciousness provides a plausible explanation.
A building does not actually enter a superposition when unobserved, nor does Schrodinger’s cat. The point of that metaphor was to demonstrate, through humor, the difference between quantum objects and non-quantum objects, by pointing out how ridiculous it would be to think a cat could enter a superposition like a particle. In fact, one of the great mysteries of physics right now is why only quantum objects have that property, and in order to figure that out we have to figure out what interaction “observation” actually is.
Additionally, we can observe the effects of waves quite clearly. We can observe how they interact with things, how they interfere with each other, etc. It is only attempting to view the particle itself that causes it to collapse and become a particle and not a wave. We can view, for instance, the interference pattern of photons of light, behaving like a wave. This proves that the wave is in fact real, because we can see the effects of it. It’s only if we try to observe the paths of the individual photons that the pattern changes. We didn’t make the photons real, we could already see they were real by their effects on reality. We just collapsed the function, forcing them to take a single path.
Because it’s not like a wave, such as waves in the sea.
Actually, it is. It’s the same meaning we’ve had for waves in physics since the first time someone figured how to plot a 2d graph. Only the medium is a quantum field instead of water, its amplitude is probabilistic instead of height, and instead of time we have some other property of distributions, usually space-time.
Like Schreudinger’s cat, which can be dead or alive, and will be in a superposition of both until observation happens again.
This idea is based on a misunderstanding of what Schrödinger actually said. The concept of the cat existing in a superposition state was not meant to be taken literally and is not an example of anything that is currently believed to be true about the physical universe.
It’s a scientific fact that physical matter does not exist in its physical form when unobserved.
No, it’s not. The quantum field and the quantum wave exist whether or not you observe it, only the particle behavior changes based on interaction. Note how I specifically used the word “interaction”, not “observation”, because that’s what a quantum physicist means when they say the wave-particle duality depends on the observer. They mean that a wave function collapses once it interacts definitely, not only when a person looks at it.
It certainly invalidates physical reality as the “source of truth”, so to say
How so, when the interpretation you’re citing is specifically dependant on the mechanics of quantum field fluctuation? How can physical reality not exist when it is physical reality that gives you the means to (badly) justify your hypothesis?
That’s pseudoscientific bullshit. Quantum physics absolutely does tell us that there is a real physical world. It’s incredibly counterintuitive and impossible to fully describe, but does exist.
Heh, well… I guess that depends on how you define “physical”… if quantum field theory is correct then everything we experience is the product of fluctuations in various fields, including the physical mass of protons, neutrons etc. “Reality” as we experience it might be more of an emergent property, as illusory as the apparent solidity of matter.
We don’t even know what consciousness is, let alone if it’s technically “real” (as in physical in any way.) It’s perfectly possible an uploaded brain would be just as conscious as a real brain because there was no physical thing making us conscious, and rather it was just a result of our ability to think at all.
Similarly, I’ve heard people argue a machine couldn’t feel emotions because it doesn’t have the physical parts of the brain that allow that, so it could only ever simulate them. That argument has the same hole in that we don’t actually know that we need those to feel emotions, or if the final result is all that matters. If we replaced the whole “this happens, release this hormone to cause these changes in behavior and physical function” with a simple statement that said “this happened, change behavior and function,” maybe there isn’t really enough of a difference to call one simulated and the other real. Just different ways of achieving the same result.
My point is, we treat all these things, consciousness, emotions, etc, like they’re special things that can’t be replicated, but we have no evidence to suggest this. It’s basically the scientific equivalent of mysticism, like the insistence that free will must exist even though all evidence points to the contrary.
Also, some of what happens in the brain is just storytelling. Like, when the doctor hits your patellar tendon, just under your knee, with a reflex hammer. Your knee jerks, but the signals telling it to do that don’t even make it to the brain. Instead the signal gets to your spinal cord and it “instructs” your knee muscles.
But, they’ve studied similar things and have found out that in many cases where the brain isn’t involved in making a decision, the brain does make up a story that explains why you did something, to make it seem like it was a decision, not merely a reaction to stimulus.
That seems like a lot of wasted energy, to produce that illusion. Doesn’t nature select out wasteful designs ruthlessly?
TLDR:
Nature can’t simply select out consciousness because it emerges from hardware that is useful in other ways. The brain doesn’t waste energy on consciousness, it uses energy for computation, which is useful in a myriad ways.
The usefulness of consciousness from an evolutionary fitness perspective is a tricky question to answer in general terms. An easy intuition might be to look at the utility of pain for the survival of an individual.
I personally think that, ultimately, consciousness is a byproduct of a complex brain. The evolutionary advantage is mainly given by other features enabled by said complexity (generally more sophisticated and adaptable behavior, social interactions, memory, communication, intentional environment manipulation, etc.) and consciousness basically gets a free ride on that already-useful brain.
Species with more complex brains have an easier time adapting to changes in their environment because their brains allow them to change their behavior much faster than random genetic mutations would. This opens up many new ecological niches that simpler organisms wouldn’t be able to fill.
I don’t think nature selects out waste. As long as a species is able to proliferate its genes, it can be as wasteful as it “wants”. It only has to be fit enough, not as fit as possible. E.g. if there’s enough energy available to sustain a complex brain, there’s no pressure to make it more economical by simplifying its function. (And there are many pressures that can be reacted to without mutation when you have a complex brain, so I would guess that, on the whole, evolution in the direction of simpler brains requires stronger pressures than other adaptations)
Yeah. This is related to supernatural beliefs. If the grass moves it might just be a gust of wind, or it might be a snake. Even if snakes are rare, it’s better to be safe than sorry. But, that eventually leads to assuming that the drought is the result of an angry god, and not just some random natural phenomenon.
So, brains are hard-wired to look for causes, even inventing supernatural causes, because it helps avoid snakes.
This right here might already be a flaw in your argument. Something doesn’t need to be physical to be real. In fact, there’s scientific evidence that physical reality itself is an illusion created through observation. That implies (although it cannot prove) that consciousness may be a higher construct that exists outside of physical reality itself.
If you’re interested in the philosophical questions this raises, there’s a great summary article that was published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a
On the contrary, it’s not a flaw in my argument, it is my argument. I’m saying we can’t be sure a machine could not be conscious because we don’t know that our brain is what makes us conscious. Nor do we know where the threshold is where consciousness arises. It’s perfectly possible all we need is to upload an exact copy of our brain into a machine, and it’d be conscious by default.
The problem with this is that even if a machine is conscious, there’s no reason it would be conscious like us. I fully agree that consciousness could take many forms, probably infinite forms - and there’s no reason to expect that one form would be functionally or technically compatible with another.
What does the idea “exact copy of our brain” mean to you? Would it involve emulating the physical structure of a human brain? Would it attempt to abstract the brain’s operations from the physical structure? Would it be a collection of electrical potentials? Simulations of the behavior of specific neurochemicals? What would it be in practice, that would not be hand-wavy fantasy?
I suppose I was overly vague about what I meant by “exact copy.” I mean all of the knowledge, memories, and an exact map of the state of our neurons at the time of upload being uploaded to a computer, and then the functions being simulated from there. Many people believe that even if we could simulate it so perfectly that it matched a human brain’s functions exactly, it still wouldn’t be conscious because it’s still not a real human brain. That’s the point I was arguing against. My argument was that if we could mimic human brain functions closely enough, there’s no reason to believe the brain is so special that a simulation could not achieve consciousness too.
And you’re right, it may not be conscious in the same way. We have no reason to believe either way that it would or wouldn’t be, because the only thing we can actually verify is conscious is ourself. Not humans in general, just you, individually. Therefore, how conscious something is is more of a philosophical debate than a scientific one because we simply cannot test if it’s true. We couldn’t even test if it was conscious at all, and my point wasn’t that it would be, my point is that we have no reason to believe it’s possible or impossible.
Unfortunately the physics underlying brain function are chaotic systems, meaning infinite (or “maximum”) precision is required to ensure two systems evolve to the same later states.
That level of precision cannot be achieved in measuring the state, without altering the state into something unknown after the moment of measurement.
Nothing quantum is necessary for this inability to determine state. Consider the problem of trying to map out where the eight ball is on a pool table, but you can’t see the eight ball. All you can do is throw other balls at it and observe how their velocities change. Now imagine you can’t see those balls either, because the sensing mechanism you’re using is composed of balls of equal or greater size.
Unsolvable problem. Like a box trying to contain itself.
Chaos comes into play as a state changes. The poster above you talks about copying the state. Once copied the two states will diverge because of chaos. But that doesn’t preclude consciousness. It means the copy will soon have different thoughts.
Correct
We make a giant theme park where people can interact with androids. Then we make a practically infinite number of copies of this theme park. We put androids in the copies and keep providing feedback to alter their behavior until they behave exactly like the people in the theme park.
I see that’s certainly a different way of looking at it :) Of course I can’t say with any authority that it must be wrong, but I think it’s a flaw because it seems you’re presuming that consciousness arises from physical properties. If the physical act of copying a brain’s data were to give rise to consciousness, that would imply consciousness is a product of physical reality. But my position (and that of the paper I linked) is that physical reality is a product of mental consciousness.
That’s based on a pseudoscientific interpretation of quantum physics not related to actual physics.
It’s not a flaw to not be batshit like you.
Do elaborate on the batshit part :) It’s a scientific fact that physical matter does not exist in its physical form when unobserved. This may not prove the existence of consciousness, but it certainly makes it plausible. It certainly invalidates physical reality as the “source of truth”, so to say. Which makes the explanation that physical reality is a product of consciousness not just plausible, but more likely than the other way around. Again, not a proof, but far from batshit.
I think you’re a little confused about what observed means and what it does.
When unobserved, elementary particles behave like a wave, but they do not stop existing. A wave is still a physical thing. Additionally, observation does not require consciousness. For instance, a building, such as a house, when nobody is looking at it, does not begin to behave like a wave. It’s still a physical building. Therefore, observation is a bit of a misnomer. It really means a complex interaction we don’t understand causes particles to behave like a particle and not a wave. It just happens that human observation is one of the possible ways this interaction can take place.
An unobserved black hole will still feed, an unobserved house is still a house.
To be clear, I’m not insulting you or your idea like the other dude, but I wanted to clear that up.
Thanks, that seems a fair approach, although it doesn’t have me entirely convinced yet. Can you explain what the physical form of a wave function is? Because it’s not like a wave, such as waves in the sea. It’s really a wave function, an abstract representation of probabilities which in my understanding does not have any physical representation.
You say the building does not start acting like a wave, and you’re right, that would be silly. But it does enter into a superposition where the building can be either collapsed or not. Like Schreudinger’s cat, which can be dead or alive, and will be in a superposition of both until observation happens again. And yes, the probabilities of this superposition are indeed expressed through the wave function, even though there is no physical wave.
It’s true observation does not require consciousness. But until we know what does constitute observation, I believe consciousness provides a plausible explanation.
A building does not actually enter a superposition when unobserved, nor does Schrodinger’s cat. The point of that metaphor was to demonstrate, through humor, the difference between quantum objects and non-quantum objects, by pointing out how ridiculous it would be to think a cat could enter a superposition like a particle. In fact, one of the great mysteries of physics right now is why only quantum objects have that property, and in order to figure that out we have to figure out what interaction “observation” actually is.
Additionally, we can observe the effects of waves quite clearly. We can observe how they interact with things, how they interfere with each other, etc. It is only attempting to view the particle itself that causes it to collapse and become a particle and not a wave. We can view, for instance, the interference pattern of photons of light, behaving like a wave. This proves that the wave is in fact real, because we can see the effects of it. It’s only if we try to observe the paths of the individual photons that the pattern changes. We didn’t make the photons real, we could already see they were real by their effects on reality. We just collapsed the function, forcing them to take a single path.
Actually, it is. It’s the same meaning we’ve had for waves in physics since the first time someone figured how to plot a 2d graph. Only the medium is a quantum field instead of water, its amplitude is probabilistic instead of height, and instead of time we have some other property of distributions, usually space-time.
So this video is a pretty good explanation of quantum field theory.
This idea is based on a misunderstanding of what Schrödinger actually said. The concept of the cat existing in a superposition state was not meant to be taken literally and is not an example of anything that is currently believed to be true about the physical universe.
No, it’s not. The quantum field and the quantum wave exist whether or not you observe it, only the particle behavior changes based on interaction. Note how I specifically used the word “interaction”, not “observation”, because that’s what a quantum physicist means when they say the wave-particle duality depends on the observer. They mean that a wave function collapses once it interacts definitely, not only when a person looks at it.
How so, when the interpretation you’re citing is specifically dependant on the mechanics of quantum field fluctuation? How can physical reality not exist when it is physical reality that gives you the means to (badly) justify your hypothesis?
That’s pseudoscientific bullshit. Quantum physics absolutely does tell us that there is a real physical world. It’s incredibly counterintuitive and impossible to fully describe, but does exist.
Heh, well… I guess that depends on how you define “physical”… if quantum field theory is correct then everything we experience is the product of fluctuations in various fields, including the physical mass of protons, neutrons etc. “Reality” as we experience it might be more of an emergent property, as illusory as the apparent solidity of matter.
Physical reality exists inside consciousness. Consciousness is the thing that can be directly observed.