
How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention? - mathgenius
http://fqxi.org/community/essay/rules
======
beat
The theme seems weirdly phrased. It's like asking "How can a tree give rise to
the color green?" Their attempt to clarify didn't really clarify. They're
looking for a causal relationship between physical law and thought process
(because "aims and intention" are _thoughts_ ).

Perhaps _causality itself_ is the wrong tool to apply here. Thanks to various
readings over the past year, I'm starting to believe causality as an approach
to understanding is overrated. There's a bit of Golden Hammer to the way we
use the tools of scientific inquiry handed down from Descartes and Newton.

~~~
mathgenius
> various readings over the past year

Yes, what were these?

I tend to agree with you about causality. The attempts to understand how the
classical world arises from quantum laws seem particularly boneheaded to me. I
guess people (scientists) don't want to let go of causality because who knows
what chaos and mayhem will befall the world if we give up on this. And the
philosophers have a term "causal closure" which seems to be axiomatic in alot
of their discussions. But they just don't want to talk about any kind of
mystical stuff that might seep in through the gaps.

~~~
niels_olson
> how the classical world arises from quantum laws seem particularly
> boneheaded

What classical world do you refer to? Newtonian physics? That's well
understood, the general area of study is called thermal physics.

Are you talking about how the brain works? The biologists understand the meso-
scale structures and the microscale structures, and the wiring. What they lack
is a certified, detailed diagram, which is admittedly hard, but it's hard like
understanding the wiring diagram of an ARM chip is hard.

~~~
mathgenius
> That's well understood, the general area of study is called thermal physics.

I don't agree at all. Thermal (classical) physics may be _consistent_ with
quantum physics but this does not at all show how a classical world _arises_
from the quantum.

~~~
niels_olson
Not thermodynamics, thermal physics. You very literally start from quantum
states and work you're way up to large collections about which you make
estimates which are highly consistent with the real world. Perhaps
"statistical mechanics" is a better term.

------
jasode
It seems like the essays they want would be similar in spirit to Douglas
Hofstadter's books: _" Gödel, Escher, Bach"_ and _" I Am a Strange Loop"_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop)

~~~
beat
Just for kicks, I'd suggest that anyone with an understanding of software and
an interest in how thought (or AI) works should set aside six months or so to
read GEB carefully, and absorb the ideas in it. It's a lot to wrap your head
around, but it _will_ change how you view the world.

~~~
koverstreet
GEB is a textbook on AI that's just trying to come at it sideways.

The problem when you're trying to attack any problem like AI where we know
practically nothing about what the actual solution is, is that anything you
write about what you think the solution is is going to predispose people to
not just work down that avenue but to think about the problem in abstractions
that will ultimately turn out to be wrong.

GEB is an incredibly good book in that it picks out problems that are
absolutely at the heart of solving AI (ambiguity in natural language is a huge
one) and elucidates them incredibly well _without_ predisposing the reader as
to what the solution might be.

~~~
squeaky-clean
> GEB is a textbook on AI that's just trying to come at it sideways.

That's because it's not a book on AI at all [0]. It talks about it a lot. And
sets up a lot of fundamental ideas for it. But it's as much a book about AI as
Moby Dick is a book about whaling.

It's great reading if you're interested in AI (edit: If you're on HN, you'll
probably love the book /edit), but if you pick it up expecting an AI textbook,
or a book about AI, you may be disappointed. Or at the very least, won't get
the full message.

Another book I'd recommend is "The Minds I" by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel
C. Dennett. It's a collection of essays about AI and philosophy, relating to
the idea of the "self", with several pages of reflection after each essay by
Hofstadter and Dennett. I'm about halfway through so far, but it was worth it
alone just for chapter 5, "The Turing Test: A Coffeehouse Conversation". Also
the Ant Fugue from GEB is one of the featured essays.

[0] Though you can't really fault anyone for believing that. Hofstadter
complains in the intro of the 20th anniversary edition (and several
interviews) that everyone thinks the point of GEB is something different. And
it's never what he intended the point of GEB to be.

Specifically, he says "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that
animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a
self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"

~~~
koverstreet
I'm aware. I've written most of what Hofstadter has written - I also didn't
say that it was only a textbook on AI or even that it was explicitly intended
that way.

But I do maintain that the book is about precisely the topics that you need a
deep understanding of if you want to think productively about AI. In that
sense, it's a damn good textbook on AI, whether it was intended that way or
not.

~~~
xorxornop
Well, yeah. It's about AI because it's about cognition and the basis of self.
Bit of a wider scope :p

------
awinter-py
If their point is 'behavior is plausibly mindless but experience implies that
there's something more to consciousness', then they're asking the hard problem
of consciousness but doing a bad job of it (like everyone else).

It's also possible that they don't understand computation at all -- but once
again, a lot of people approach the hard problem of consciousness without
separating it from computation.

------
stOneskull
> The goals of the Foundational Questions Institute's Essay Contest (the
> "Contest") are to: Encourage and support rigorous, innovative, and
> influential thinking about foundational questions in physics and cosmology;

> Identify and reward top thinkers in foundational questions; and,

> Provide an arena for discussion and exchange of ideas regarding foundational
> questions.

Cool McCool!

------
MarkPNeyer
In short:

Mindless mathematical laws encode all kinds of patterns.

Our brains also encode patterns in them. These patterns mirror the outside
world.

Once your brain models "the state of the world" it can also model the
configuration space of the world: the ways things could be.

An aim or intention is an ordering in that configuration space. "I could have
many things for breakfast; what I'd prefer is X" is an ordering on your
internal representation of breakfast-space.

~~~
placebo
This is a model. At best it answers the "how". It doesn't answer the deeper
"why", which I think is what the essay should try and address

------
MrQuincle
Just read Bert Kappen on delayed reward. There is optimal behavior between
being driven by (stochastic) environmental input and executing control.
Optimal in Bellman's sense.

Apart from that. Why optimal behaviour arises should not be a question. :-)

Why there are goals in itself is probably also governed by entropic forces
about the flow of information. Read on empowerment by Polani et al. Or study
the robots from Ralf Der.

------
mr_overalls
This is basically a re-phrasing of the Hard Problem of Consciousness -
explaining how and why we, as material beings, have subjective, phenomenal
experiences.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness)

------
eli_gottlieb
Oh, I think I have some material in my Google Docs on this. Might as well
package it up and enter it for a chance at the prize.

------
zuiper
Is this contest even worth entering as an autodidact? Looking at past contest
winners, the majority seem to hold a PhD.

~~~
qntty
If you're interested in the question, it's probably worth writing the essay
even if you think you have no chance of winning.

------
bbctol
Top prize is ten grand (!) so I expect the essays submitted will be higher
quality than your average online contest. I wonder how well I could budget my
time over the next few months... this is roughly what I majored in, but it
might be bad for my health to plunge back into a student's paper-writing
schedule.

~~~
mannykannot
While those with something to say may be motivated by the prize to put extra
effort in, the prize will probably attract many with nothing to say.

------
visarga
> How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

By the wonders of self replicating adaptive systems, tending for their
existence by intelligent behavior and sexual reproduction. Meaning arises from
the context of optimizing their own life (based on rewards and RL).

We, humans, have 3 levels of self reproduction - the cellular level, the
organism level, and the mental (cultural/technologic/AI) level. Each of them
operate their own game of survival and adaptation. There is a fundamental
difference between "mindless mathematical laws" and self replicators - the
second have agency, are embodied and participate into a larger world.

All of these conclusions are immediately visible from the paradigm of
reinforcement learning, but are not so clear from the mainstream consciousness
philosophy. They're still fighting zombies and muse about bats in Chinese
rooms (armchair philosophy at its finest) while the RL guys beat the best
human at Go.

~~~
koverstreet
That's like saying "How do computers compute?" "Well, because we built these
giant fabs and factories to build them".

You're answering the wrong question.

~~~
visarga
No, there is no difference between human survival/replication and purpose.
That's the recurrence, the reentrant loop that bootstraps humans.

Of course individual humans might make their own values and act on them, but
they only exist as a byproduct of the survival/reproduction process, and are
formed by this process.

~~~
koverstreet
You're the one talking about purpose. The rest of us are talking about
mechanism.

You're handwaving away the problem, but that doesn't mean there still isn't a
problem there we don't understand yet.

~~~
stOneskull
what is the problem?

~~~
drjesusphd
It's The Hard Problem.

Suppose we eventually know everything about the body and mind, that some day
science can simulate and predict the motion of every atom in your body. Thus,
all your behavior is deterministic. That still doesn't explain why there's an
"ego" there to experience it all.

~~~
stOneskull
or a consciousness to observe the ego.

------
md224
"They can't. Please send my prize money to..."

------
koverstreet
I just wrote something on this subject on facebook... suppose this would be a
good place for it.

TL;DR though - we aren't ready to try to answer such questions directly yet.

\---------

We are self programmable Turing machines: the core problems (and
frustrations!) of both AI and understanding the human brain are encoded in
that statement. Frustrations, because it's an infuriatingly simple statement
that's obviously true but we're nowhere near actually understanding.

On the one hand, it's almost a tautology if you take the Church-Turing thesis
seriously. That is: there are no hypercomputers, there are only computers -
Turing machines, and they're all fundamentally equivalent except in the
details of capacity or performance. We can compute, thus we are also Turing
machines.

But we are self programmable Turing machines: we're able to create new
programs for other Turing machines (proof by example: any software engineer),
and we're able to modify the existing programming for our own Turing machines
(i.e. learn new things: the set of new things we can learn, or ways we can
change our own behavior, has no fixed bound).

But Turing machines are deterministic: their output is completely determined
by their inputs and the code they run. Completely deterministic: if a Turing
machine appears to have random or nondetermistic outputs, either it's running
a pseudo random number generator (thus deterministic), or it had random input
(e.g. a hardware random number generator), and if you fixed the input the
output would also be fixed.

So, we have this rather baffling conundrum - on multiple levels! of how in the
hell to reconcile all this. We have a proof by example that it is possible to
construct a Turing machine with outputs that are not only effectively non
deterministic, but unbounded in complexity and potentially more complex than
the Turing machine that created them: that this should be possible at all runs
counter to the intuition of every programmer who's ever written a line of
code.

For the first baffling thing: regular Turing machines have deterministic
outputs, and while we are subject to the same rules and math that applies to
any other Turing machine - so this has to be true for us too, in the strictest
sense - it is clearly also true that in a very deep way our outputs are not
deterministic, and not restricted in complexity.

By not restricted in complexity, I mean that it would be uninteresting if you
had a Turing machine that produced nondeterministic output but it was all just
white noise, or a string of random numbers. If that was all, there wouldn't be
much to fuss over - all you need is a cryptographic PRNG and in practice you
can get a seed anywhere. We, on the other hand, can produce things with actual
semantics and structure - there's a big difference between spitting out some
random numbers that seem to come from nowhere, and pulling a proof for the
infinitude of the primes out of thin air.

That is, we're non deterministic in a very deep way: with a regular computer
program, you can predict what will happen when you give it inputs and model
the results, and if your model is correct you'll never be surprised - imagine
sending packets to a network server, you always know more or less what you're
going to get back.

(Digression: fundamentally, the model that tells you what response you'll get
is a program that is in some way equivalent to the original program - it must
be a Turing complete program, else it would not be able to capture all the
possible outputs of the original Turing complete program. You can learn a lot
about how natural languages work, and also about how intelligence must work,
by applying this insight: first, note that natural language is (inherently)
ambiguous, and it is also (like programming languages) Turing complete. When
we construct a sentence that we're about to say to someone else, fundamentally
(there are shortcuts most of the time, but this is really going on) we are
resolving this ambiguity by constructing a (turing complete!) model of how the
other person thinks, and then finding a sentence that, when run as a program
on that model, will produce the desired output - that is, the sentence that
will convey to them what we want them to understand. And when we're reading or
listening to other people, we are treating those sentences as programs to be
executed and run - that we run in our own models that we construct in order to
figure out what the other person means.

This is fundamentally different from how the computer programs we construct
communicate: they send packets back and forth with fixed, predefined meaning.
When human communicate, in programmer speak we are running untrusted code from
other people inside our own brains!).

But the fact that we're non deterministic is, I think, the easiest part to
swallow: it's pretty clear that we make use of and rely on non determinism, so
where we get the initial seed is uninteresting (it's a safe bet that evolution
has provided us with the equivalent of hardware random number generators).

Programs constructing other programs though - and not in a deterministic way
like a compiler, but genuinely new programs - that is baffling, though.

Modern machine learning - deep learning - does appear to actually be starting
to scratch the surface of this: we're starting to figure out how to construct
programs that can discover, on their own, the structure - the grammar - of
things, to a degree that's actually starting to look promising. This is
certainly a prerequisite any "self programmable Turing machine", but there's
still a hell of a lot more we don't understand...

~~~
visarga
You take "determinism" too hard. In fact brains are stochastic and local noise
can and do influence it all the time. It's meaningless to think about
deterministic brains. Even if the brain were physically deterministic, it
still includes too much noise in it's internal processing (as a regularization
process) to be easy to predict.

I think meaning comes from survival, treated as a game theory problem - agent,
world, actions, rewards. Determinism or the lack of it is a false lead. What
does it matter, when we are embedded in the universe, which is so
interconnected (both by interaction and quantum entanglement). You'd have to
simulate the whole universe to predict any piece of it. And where would the
computer running the universe simulation sit?

Better to think in reinforcement learning concepts. Our values are survival
and reproduction (another kind of survival). The first implies ability to move
about and act in the world, socialization, learning, cooperation and even
conflict with aggressors. Everything we do is in the service of self survival
and survival of our genes. Our values come from them - thus, intentionality
problem is solved.

~~~
criddell
> You take "determinism" too hard.

Isn't he just really claiming that there's no room for free will? Is ever a
state where the next immediate thing to happen is not determined by that
state.

~~~
koverstreet
No, I'm not really claiming anything about free will.

The problem of free will is mostly just how to define it in a way that makes
any sense at all. But to the degree that it does make sense I would say we
clearly have it.

What else does it mean for something to have the ability to decide?

~~~
criddell
> What else does it mean for something to have the ability to decide?

Is there any evidence for free will? Or maybe actual free will vs perceived
free will is meaningless.

