
Why Some Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is a State of Matter (2014) - ghosh
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/why-physicists-are-saying-consciousness-is-a-state-of-matter-like-a-solid-a-liquid-or-a-gas-5e7ed624986d#.x9chnrcqf
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dantillberg
This doesn't sound much like a physics paper from the abstract
([http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219](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)

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
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.

~~~
shasta
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.

~~~
explorer666
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.

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scottlocklin
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.

~~~
ethanbond
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.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Um, no. Einstein's ideas were, at least in part, testable. Parts of them were
confirmed rather quickly.

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ethanbond
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.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
OK. This idea that we're actually discussing... is it testable? Is it even
testable _in principle?_

~~~
ethanbond
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]?"

Not: "is consciousness [x]?"

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murbard2
The blog post is much more hand wavy than the actual arxiv article. The notion
of factorization of the wave function in particular is interesting.

Scott Aaronson has fairly convincing arguments against IIT
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799)

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explorer666
It says conscious can't be divided, but that's not true as far as I know.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-
brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain)

"In a more serious effect, the patient may have two different consciousnesses,
one on each side of the brain."

~~~
nitrogen
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.

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hyperpape
It irritates me, perhaps more than it should, how many people cite David
Chalmers' term "the hard problem of consciousness" while proposing solutions
that show they aren't remotely interested in the question (see for yourself:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness),
[http://consc.net/papers/facing.html](http://consc.net/papers/facing.html),
[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/)).

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.

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evanb
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

~~~
explorer666
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?

~~~
evanb
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.

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telotortium
I didn't realize at first that the Physics arXiv blog was the author of this
post. Here's the link to the abstract:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219](http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219)

~~~
djsumdog
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.

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apalmer
Seems to be based on some pretty arbitrary assumptions.

It does not really sound like nonsense. Sounds like some form of information
theory.

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cygx
It's by Tegmark. Make of that what you will...

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revscat
Have no idea who that is. Explain, please.

~~~
FredNatural
Read Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe". All will be revealed, or not
(depending on whether you open the box or not).

~~~
littletimmy
I don't get whether you mean he is a good solid physicist or he is a crackpot.
Considering he's an MIT prof, I'm thinking he's good?

~~~
cygx
He is a solid physicst. Not sure what else he did, but what I do know about is
his analysis of WMAP data.

But that's not all he does, and there's nothing that prevents smart people
from having silly ideas.

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russdill
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.

~~~
justifier
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

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Animats
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.

[1]
[http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full.pdf+html](http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full.pdf+html)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia)

~~~
lawpoop
> 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.

~~~
sgt101
>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.

~~~
lawpoop
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.

~~~
explorer666
I like this definition I've heard from Sam Harris (paraphrasing): An entity is
conscious if there is something that it's like to be that entity.

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javajosh
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.

~~~
crystaln
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.

~~~
Retra
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.

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petegrif
Deepak Chopra is wetting his panties. He was right all along. :)

~~~
FredNatural
Bah. DC is Gucci, not fam.

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sgt101
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)

(3) See (1)

(edited to reformat!)

