On attempts to resolve the consciousness problem

One has to remember, that any scientific attempt will be an attempt to model the mine. To find approximations that can replicate the observes behavior of the mind. This is again not how the mind works, and we should remember that one can find a model that extremely accurately replicates the mind, but still be completely wrong. Even on fundamentall logical matters. Take Newtonian mechanics as an example. It is a fantastic model of the mechanical reality. It was not possible to do any experiment that could invalidate it for hundreds of years. Yet still, it is merely a model that is not only wrong, it is even obviously wrong, even to Newton him self.

So, we should not expect science to explain consciousness. It can model it. But it will  ot attempt to capture the essence of being.

Mathematics of consciousness and self-awareness

 There is a philosophical idea called panpsychism which argues that consciousnesses is everywhere. This is very appealing to me, and seems like a very logical and naturalistic idea. However, man proponents of this idea tend to have some mystic view that whatever the consciousnesses is, we do not know but it is some unknown trait soon-to-be discovered.

I hold another view which I like to call panpsychistic materialism. This is different from regular materialism in that also in regular materialism there is some mystic ingredient of emerging phenomena giving rise to consciousness. Instead, I would like to argue that no such emergence is needed. Instead all that is needed is already there. Consciousness in its simplest form can instead be described by the most fundamental mathematical operators we know of such as

This is the differentiation operator and a particle that obeys it is conscious of momentum. Equations of motion for a system with interaction describe particles conscious of the other particles in that system.

This way, consciousness is really very simple, it is a systems capability to interact.

Taking this thought a slight bit further, self-awareness can simply be described as self-interaction. A very simple model for this is the feedback-mechanism often seen control systems (of the human body for that matter):

 

With this description, there is nothing strange with consciousness or self-awareness either for that matter. It is simply how the material world operates.

What's it like to be a human

There are of course many ideas about this. So here is one at least I have not heard of before.

The unique thing with being human is that we can form models. The rest of us is really just ordinary animals. But the capability to form and reason in models makes us unique and exceptional.

Why? Well, the idea is that models are extremely powerful tools for comprehending the world and creating things. All achievements we have accomplished during the last 2000 years have been through models actually.

Further, to perform any task that is a bit more complex, it require that there is a model in its basis.

Some things we can do that do not require a model basis is
- creating art
- playing chess
These would seem to be unique human capabilities. But I would argue they are a side effect of our large brain. In principle a monkey could do it. However, a monkey could never build a rocket. Why? Because that require massive use of models to get everything right. And they can't do that.

On consciousness (again)

I just listened to Sams pod with David Chalmers on consciousness. They get it almost right about 50 minutes into the show when they talk about panpsychism and the ideas that everything is conscious at some level. What they miss is that they should really (as I have done in a previous blog p lost) define consciousness as interaction. They talk about information processing which is a complicated non-physical (but rather mathematical) concept. The correct concept to use is interaction which is very physical. And with that, everything is conscious. But at different levels.

These ideas also explain in a natural why we as humans cannot grasp how a chair or even a worm can be conscious. The problem is that the kind of interaction these entities takes part of is so vastly different from ours.

In this sense, consciousness is an illusion. It is a local phenomenon in an hierarchical structure of more and more complex interactions. And a consciousness operating as a certain level and with certain complex interactions cannot grasp, or even experience, a consciousness at a vastly different consciousness level.

It is the self-experience of the interactions occurring in a particular physical structure. We as humans can experience cars and chairs. Complex objects and we interact with these. (This is also probably why small children and illiterates attribute consciousness to objects that are not conscious at our level - it is the only thing we understand)

Later in the show Sam and David got into the thoughts on simulated worlds and that perhaps we live in one. This is also in some sense obvious true as I have also discussed before. We have some experience. That is mediated through our senses. But the world in it self (in Kantian terms) is something we can have no real idea about. Thus we do live in a simulation. It is impossible to say something outside of our experience of the world about the world.

On perception

In a recent blog post I discussed the topology of colors. As a generalisation, I would here like to discuss a fundamental property of perception in general.

The perceptions that a being have are in some sense irreducible. That is, they can not be described in terms of any other quantity  (this is kind of related to Wittgensteins idea of atomic concepts. It might be the perceptions that are those concepts). The reason for that they cannot is that those perceptions are part of the consciousness. They form the representation in the consciousness of the sensory input. Hence, if they were reducible, they would have to be interpreted in terms of something else by the consciousness and thus not be part of the consciousness but only something interpreted.

I am a creator of strange loops

Douglas Hofstadter wrote the great books Gödel, Escher, Bach and I am a strange loop. In these, he argue that we are strange loops. A strange loop is described here so I will not repeat it. Instead I want to claim, that I am not a strange loop, but rather the creator of strange loops. Pah!

Some thoughts on concessions

People are claiming that the material can not account for concessions. I do not believe this. Instead I think there are some key functions that, together with emergence, create concessions.
Those key functions are (partly)
* contents addressing
* association feedback

Contents addressing means that the data is the address. Or rather that there is no difference between  data and memory addresses. That means that by purely thinking about something, that that something is addressed in memory. Once that memory is accessed, if there is data there, there is also a new address that will be looked up. This kind of structure could perhaps be emulated in a computer by having a list of addresses included in each object stored in memory. 

Next, association feedback means that once a memory has been addressed, the memory contents is automatically used as a new address - accessing anything that can be addressed using that memory.

In this way, human (long term) memory is really made up of many interleaved tree data structures. Kind of like a block chain.

Towards a theory of consciousness

It is widely debated what consciousness is. Most of the time it boils down to an idea that consciousness is in some sense atomic. It is a singular property that pops out or exists or was created by some deity.

I would like to propose a different view to attack the problem. The idea is simply to not treat it as atomic, but rather as how physics or chemistry or some other scientific matter is done. Treat it as something that will require models and where it can be acceptable that different models partially contradict each other but explain and treat different parts of a complex "ding an sich".

By that I am also saying that consciousness is not an atomic thing. But rather a complex intertwined phenomena that has be treated and explained in parts. This thought springs from the fact that it seems very hard to define what consciousness is - it is not something deterministic, but is is also not something random. However, these are the only to types of variable we know of. Maybe it is possible to define some third type of variable - a "conscious" variable, but it seem very unlikely to me. Rather, we should treat consciousness as a matter requiring its separate theory.

A proposition on (free) will

I have a proposition on what might constitute (what might appear as free) will. It is a complex set of "high order" rules where by an entity operate or which govern the entity's operation.
This is an intuitive definition of will in the sense that people tend to use the word in contexts which apply to the above definition. It is most clear with computer programs where people can talk about the computers "will" when it does something (it should not). But it can also be seen e.g. when animals or plants are discussed: "The flower wants to have much sun", or rain. Or "the moskito wants to suck blood".

Now, I would like to propose that we should look for these high order rules and see if they can be built in to a program to emulate will.

These higher order rules can probably be associated to different orders of logic or Russells type theory.

Another key aspect of these rules is that they should have a connection to senses and actuators. That is key for interaction.

This might be a bit behavioristic. But one can view mind as an hirarcical entity consisting of entities which can be probed from the outside, but when viewed internally no mind process can be found. The entities them selves consist of further new entities which cannot internally be associated to a cognitive process bytes can perform one as a whole. This is some kind of emerging phenomenon model. Ideas similar to these, but expressed differently were also presented here.

The plasticity of our brains

I am getting older. And I have recently gotten aware of a new state of mind. I literary feel how the plasticity of my brain is disappearing. It is a very interesting feeling.
As an undergraduate, when I was taking a class in vector calculus for example, learning about the curl operator in 3-space you were given the definition and you were building a conceptual feeling for what that operator was doing with a vector field. You could actually feel the spatial properties being molded to you head.
This does not happen nearly to the same extent any more. And I think this has to do with me getting old. But it is interesting to speculate in how this plasticity manifests it self. Is playfulness a consequence of this plasticity? And if humans manage to significantly extend our lives, lets say to 500 years or so, I think it will be crucial that we also manage to control brain plasticity. If you only develop significantly during the first 50 years or less, a 500 years life will probably be quite painful.