
Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014) - robertothais
https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
======
Elrac
To me, this read like Alan Sokal's Postmodernism troll piece. I understand
Tegmark is a reputable physicist, but the abstract could have been written by
Deepak Chopra after skimming a math text.

~~~
vixen99
But it wasn't and certainly not the paper which the abstract introduces.

------
ozy
I don't get how very intelligent people can hold such views.

Where does the dance go, when the dancers go off stage? The dancers are not
the dance, but create the dance. There is some kind of duality there.

Similar for the brain. What it does creates the mind/consciousness. Should
that feel like something? Why not?

How does the brain decide on next actions? By simulating/predicting futures
and "feeling" which is desired, and acting towards that future. Why would that
not feel like something?

The "hard question of consciousness" is not an answer. It is a philosophical
device without backing. It is unknown if qualia is actually hard, maybe most
learning systems have it. What we do know: it is hard to have intuitions about
it ...

~~~
thriftwy
> It is unknown

Well, make it known then for starters, if you want to make the question a
little bit softer.

~~~
ozy
But that is the rub, isn't it. How some mind (or system) experiences something
is the very definition of subjective. How to measure that objectively?

Imagine somebody makes a mind out of machine learning. Passes the turing test
and more. It reports to "feel", ie to have qualia. Is it parroting what it
hears/reads from humans? Or does it actually have a feeling when you show it
an image of a sunset? At what breakpoint do you place your debugger and
inspect if it is so?

~~~
thriftwy
A lot of things which we considered subjective were later found to be
measurable. I think we should never stop to find an angle from which we can
tackle the consciousness problem.

------
akyu
The math in this paper is beyond your average Hacker News poster. So no wonder
these comments are just name calling.

~~~
selimthegrim
Scott Aaronson left a smoking hole where Tononi's theories used to be not too
long ago. If you want quantum theorizing about consciousness I suggest you
start here instead - [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161102-quantum-
neuroscience...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161102-quantum-
neuroscience/)

~~~
unhammer
Thanks for the pointer, I assume you meant
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799)
? That was a fun read anyway :-)

------
cool_shit
It is tempting to be lazy and criticize this work because it contains a few
instances of the phrase "quantum consciousness".

This paper has one purpose: To get people thinking of the brain and
information-carrying systems from a physical perspective rather than solely a
computer-science or information-theoretic perspective, or even worse -- a
biological perspective. Physicists were largely responsible for computer
science and information theory, and they will be largely responsible for
breakthroughs in biology and machine-learning as interdisciplinary
laboratories continue to grow.

Physics is the most sophisticated area of applied mathematics that currently
exists. Whatever consciousness is, it will be understood through physics --
because, presumably, _that 's what it is_.

That said, it is interesting to see a consolidated paper touching on common
motifs. The brain exhibits many characteristics of any other state of matter;
for example, it has phase transitions.

One thing I disliked about this paper is the conclusion is draws from its
examples with the gold ring and the pond. They go on to say that information
is not persistent in a pond; for example if you write your name on the
surface, the energy will be propagated away and the surface will return to a
higher entropy state fairly quickly. This is true, but one cannot say that the
brain is different solely because of this. The brain is _constantly_ under
"external" influence. It is constantly being supplied with fresh nutrients;
neurons are constantly being supplied with tugs from their neighbors. If you
were to remove all incoming nutrients, the brain would surely collapse as an
information processor, too (e.g. death of the organism).

I would go so far as to say that a conscious system requires _constant_ input,
and does not necessarily do anything in the absence of any input. This
assertion is in direct contradiction to the heuristics ("principles")
established in the paper. For example, computers, bacteria, and brains are all
computing systems which require constant input.

------
Insanity
(disclaimer: I did not yet read the whole paper)

This part stood out to me in their idea of how philosophy views consciousness

> A traditional answer to this problem is dualism — that living entities
> differ from inanimate ones because they contain some non-physical element
> such as an “anima” or “soul”.

I believe this makes it sound like philosophers are actively looking for the
soul, or another explanation of consciousness that lies outside of 'physics'.

This might be true for some philosophers, but there are other philosophies to
adhere to. More contemporary would be the works of Daniel Dennett or John
Searle.

Cartesian Dualism is surely something not a lot of philosophers would get
behind anymore.

~~~
xapata
I understood Searle's "Chinese Room" argument to advocate dualism -- that
there's something more to being intelligent than just behavior. Searle says
the _more_ is consciousness, but I don't see the distinction between that
version of the concept and a soul or "ghost" in the machine.

~~~
Insanity
Searle is actually an advocate for Biological Naturalism, the chinese room was
an argument against computationalism (that the brain works like a computer).
Though he admittedly does think the brain is a 'biological computer', and they
have their differences.

~~~
xapata
That's how Searle views himself, but one critique of his work is that he can't
distinguish his "naturalism" from dualism. It seems so obvious to him that the
Chinese Room isn't conscious, but if it can replicate everything a conscious
person would do, it might indeed replicate the phenomena of consciousness. How
would we know, after all, since those phenomena are not readily observable.

------
runeks
Consciousness is a bit like the speed of light: it's defined, not measured.
It's not possible to measure the speed of light because we've made this
constant the basis of all other measurements. Consciousness is a lot like
that: unmeasurable, and the basis of all experience.

In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property, which defines
the framework. For physics this is the speed of light, for life forms it's
consciousness.

~~~
thriftwy
> unmeasurable

Says who?

> basis of all experience

Your consciousness is only base of your own experience. For other people your
consciousness is only hypothesis to be studied.

> In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property

I would like to study consciousness outside of frameworks where it is
unquestionable - just as we can do it in e.g. classical mechanics with speed
of light.

~~~
runeks
Admittedly -- and perhaps obviously -- I'm not a physicist. But as far as I
can see, once we've defined length and time in terms of the speed of light,
the speed of light is constant, by definition. The speed of light can never
change after this, because it would be observed as all lengths/units of time
changing.

Consciousness can't change either, because a change in consciousness changes
everything that is experienced, so how can you know whether everything or
consciousness changed? There's no difference.

Some terms can only be defined in terms of themselves. What's a meter? It's
term used to describe a length of measurement equivalent to one meter. What's
consciousness? It's a term used by certain life forms to describe what life
is.

How can we study something that's always there, and when it isn't there we're
not there either? Everyone "experiences" the absence of consciousness in deep
sleep, and there's simply nothing there.

~~~
euyyn
But we also use the speed of light to define other units after we found out,
by experiment, that it was indeed constant.

~~~
DonaldFisk
It was inevitable that it was measured to be constant. You need to build a
measuring apparatus out of physical matter and use its physical properties to
measure things. Use of any reasonable measuring apparatus will have the built-
in assumption that c and h are constant, and either particle masses or G is
constant, allowing you to measure combinations of lengths, times, and masses.

~~~
euyyn
> Use of any reasonable measuring apparatus will have the built-in assumption
> that c and h are constant

The speed of light was measured constant by the famous Michelson-Morley
experiment, whose apparatus didn't have any built-in assumption about c (nor
had anything to do with h).

~~~
DonaldFisk
The Michelson-Morley Experiment showed that light _velocity_ had the same
magnitude in different directions.

One metre _is defined_ to be the length of the path travelled by light in a
vacuum in 1/299 792 458 seconds. Therefore, c = 299 792 458 metres per second.
The second is defined in terms of the frequency of electromagnetic radiation
emitted during a transition between two specific states in a caesium atom. In
other words, it's a unit of time as measured on a kind of atomic clock, which
by convention is constant.

It's an open question whether a second on a _pendulum_ clock is the same as
one measured on an atomic clock _for all time_ , as that depends on G.

------
irickt
[http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6551](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6551)

>>> Tegmark’s career is a rather unusual story, mixing reputable science with
an increasingly strong taste for grandiose nonsense. In this book he indulges
his inner crank, describing in detail an utterly empty vision of the “ultimate
nature of reality.”

~~~
djtriptych
Unless this vision can be directly disproven, why should anyone attach labels
like "grandiose" or "nonsense" or "empty"?

~~~
irickt
It's a fair question. The quote is one reviewer's opinion. I posted it without
explanation as context for the paper.

A more neutral warning is that Tegmark has moved from conventional science
towards untestable speculation. That and the fact that he has cultivated
funding sources more aligned with the occult than with science has left many
of his peers seemingly resentful.

------
euyyn
> why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular Hilbert space
> factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space,
> say)

I'm surprised this is even considered by an MIT Physics professor. Conscious
observers like us do perceive "Fourier space" in colors and pitch. Am I
missing something?

------
d--b
There is a long history of pushing the location of human consciousness further
and further with technological advances. First it was god, then it was
somewhere in the ether, then it was electromagnetic waves, now quantum
mechanics. People just can't stand the idea that conscious thoughts are made
of matter.

~~~
zepto
People also just can't stand the idea that matter is made of consciousness.

------
thriftwy
Even if it wasn't nonsense, it would be.

Because the description focuses on how we perceive the world; not on _who is
this_ we _that perceives_.

The mystery of consciousness in the observer, not in what it observes.

~~~
hackinthebochs
I feel you have it backwards. That there are observers doesn't seem like much
of a mystery: there doesn't seem to be anything mysterious about observers
beyond the right kind of computation. The mystery is the qualitative
experience of conscious observers, the feel, the what it is like to be, etc.

~~~
curo
> "beyond the right kind of computation"

Could you explain this?

The observer isn't a mystery, I agree. But the original comment seems spot on:
if you are describing consciousness as a state of matter, then you're saying
something like, "matter inherits a different set of qualities when it's in a
consciousness state (as opposed to a solid or liquid state)." If the state
change leads to a change of quality, then you're once again proclaiming
consciousness as an object with observable qualities rather than a the
observer without quality. This is fine if we're talking about an observable
consciousness, but then who is that observer?

I agree with the original comment that this paper is nonsense. I'm surprised
how many papers are spent discussing consciousness this way. In biological
terms, fine. In physical terms, impossible.

~~~
hackinthebochs
>Could you explain this?

I'm not intending to say anything particularly deep. If we could exhaustively
list the features of a "conscious observer", every feature except for qualia
(the qualitative experience) could be cashed out as some kind of information
processing (e.g. knowledge of one's own mental states). And so when it comes
to explaining consciousness, the difficulty isn't the observer part, but the
qualitative experience part.

>In biological terms, fine. In physical terms, impossible.

But if biology is just physics, then it should be possible in principle. We
should encourage people to bring their particular expertise to the problem
instead of taking our own conceptions so seriously to the point of actively
discouraging ideas that don't fit. I'm happy Tegmark seems immune to charges
of being a crackpot.

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
Nobody acting in good faith is smart enough to be 100% wrong.

------
gator-io
The truth is simple. We are in the Matrix.

~~~
thriftwy
This does not in the slightest solve the consciousness problem. Who is this
_we_ that are in the Matrix?

------
ghughu
None of us seem qualified to judge this paper as valid or not valid or to say
which parts are valid and which aren't and why.

But the only active thing we can do in Hacker News is leave a comment and this
article tickles with me enough to want to leave a comment.

I guess the best comment I can leave here is one that avoids the ignorant-
about-own-ignorance pitfall of false expertise and just leave a meta-comment
about the comments.

