
Consciousness as a State of Matter (2015) - headalgorithm
https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
======
sandov
From my really ignorant, but introspective, point of view, this notion that
life and consciousness somewhat escape from the physical rules that govern
rocks, air and the rest of the universe seems like holding onto the theist
idea of soul after the decline of religion.

I think the universe doesn't care about us, we are just the natural result of
the fundamental interactions of matter, the same interactions that burn stars.
We are complex automatons.

~~~
davebryand
The way that non-dualists (those that see a single consciousness of which our
own awareness is an aspect <\-- not a great definition) approach this is from
the basis that consciousness is primary and the physical manifestations that
exist around that flow from consciousness. So, from that perspective, physical
rules that govern rocks are actually subordinate to consciousness.

Non-dualism doesn't make any sense to the rational mind, non-dual realization
usually arises in someone that has explored the realm of their own personal
consciousness very deeply (meditation, contemplation, psychedelics, hypnosis,
lucid dreaming, etc).

~~~
joe_the_user
I would claim a materialist perspective that views the mind and consciousness
as arising out of material processes is also a non-dualistic (monist)
perspective just as much as an "everything flows from consciousnes" (idealist
monist) perspective.

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/)

Quote: "Because common sense tells us that there are physical bodies, and
because there is intellectual pressure towards producing a unified view of the
world, one could say that materialist monism is the ‘default option’."

~~~
09bjb
I think the non-dualists in the parent comment here would agree, saying
something vaguely Alan Watts-y along the lines of "consciousness and matter
are merely two sides of the same coin and imply each other mutually."

Come to think of it, "does consciousness arise from matter, or does matter
arise from consciousness" is a modern Koan par excellence. FWIW, the last time
I grooved on that for a while while on a psychedelic, the answer I came up
was...decidedly spiritual. Caveat lector ;)

~~~
joe_the_user
OP: _" Non-dualism doesn't make any sense to the rational mind"_

Well, someone seeing consciousness arising from matter (materialist
monism/non-dual) isn't impelled to say anything like that. I mean, I'd view
the forms of consciousness the OP describes (acid, meditation, hypnosis) as a
being experiences where immediate language-generating mediation is suspended,
"direct experience" but one shouldn't confuse those sort of sensations with an
experience being beyond relation analysis. There are lots experiences where
you can't think about what you're doing at the point you are doing it but you
can certainly think before and after.

~~~
09bjb
Agreed. I'd have to dive in more on what "relation analysis" is (you probably
mean "relational analysis"?). I guess what I'm saying is that you're unlikely
to get push-back from the monist crowd on the materialist front, and we're
also unlikely to get "experience" (direct or otherwise) into our scientific
crosshairs anytime soon. But we should certainly keep trying!

~~~
joe_the_user
I meant "rational analysis" \- looking at a situation with the tools of logic,
science and related approaches. It's past edit time on my original post,
unfortunately.

------
davesque
Interesting questions. It makes me think of some things I read about how the
brain integrates different sensory information into a seamless experience. I
don't have a source for this, but the idea I remember is that nerve impulses
from different sense organs arrive at different times due to the physical
mechanism of propagation of the nerve signals. So the brain has to do a fair
bit of post-processing to make our conscious experience seem fully integrated.
That's why the sensation of touching our own finger and _seeing_ ourselves
touch the finger seem to correlate with the same moment in time. If our brains
didn't do this, then things would seem all disjointed or perhaps entirely
incoherent.

That got me thinking: if our brain constructs that portion of reality, perhaps
it actually constructs the entire conscious experience of reality down to the
minutest detail. So we're never "directly" experiencing reality but only our
brain's constructed (and evolved) representation of it. Perhaps _that_ is the
explanation for why the universe appears to have four dimensions in our day to
day experience: because that's the most advantageous representation of reality
by some evolutionary metric. So the process of biological evolution has
crafted the brain and the brain crafts the experience of reality which
includes all the rules of logic, laws of physics, and perceived physical
phenomena.

You could go out on a limb and perhaps even say that this explains how
advances in pure mathematics often turn out to have some use in physics and
vice versa; because mathematics (logic) and _perceived_ physical processes are
both rooted in the structure of the brain and are therefore rather intertwined
even though the physical world appears to be separate from the mental world.

These ideas seem remotely similar on some level to what Dr. Tegmark is
proposing: that the observer (or, the evolved observer as I'm saying) plays a
much more significant role in the structure of the universe than anyone has
admitted up to this point.

~~~
achillesheels
Welcome to the world of Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. Yo have exceptional
intuition to arrive at these conclusions independently.

Current natural science is practiced abhorrently in that it ignores such
philosophical understandings of human knowledge which is over two centuries
old and presupposes the subject has a 1:1 correspondence with the object -
this a century after the double slit experiment!

I’m a bit more downstream and conceive of conscious activity more
mathematically formally as a power-limited digital filter of sensory motion,
which includes the discrete-time sampling of its action (“motion”) upon the
body. Consciousness then is the quantization of the motion perceived.

------
kevin_thibedeau
Offtopic, but I really hate arXiv's page layout. Nowhere else is the link to
primary content sequestered off to a sidebar. The abstract isn't that
important and web pages aren't modern index cards with limited space. Horrible
ergonomics with this site.

------
stared
When I see a title with possibly overblown philosophical implications, I get
cautious. When I see "Max Tegmark", it is a sign to close a tab.

While science, in general, suffers from overblowing implications (as in
promising that given research revolutionizes everything, etc - to get credit
and the next grant), he is an ace of that.

To contrast it with "YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement"
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02767](https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02767) in which
the author goes to the other extreme, being bluntly honest.

------
ypeterholmes
A computer running pre-programmed processes wouldn't be said to have
consciousness. But what if one of the pre-programmed processes was for the
computer to monitor all its own sub-processes, and dynamically re-direct them
as necessary relative to pre-programmed higher level goals? Couldn't that
machine be described as conscious?

~~~
daenz
Maybe, but imo there's an infinitely-recursive (up until hardware or wetware
limits) nature of introspection to consciousness. I can reflect on reflecting
on reflecting on reflecting etc etc, until I stack overflow. But on each level
of reflection, I can do something useful wrt adjusting the processes that I am
reflecting on.

I'm not sure how you could program this recursive nature unless you
generalized what it means to be introspective. But by definition,
introspection defines itself. The process of introspection has to also be
aware of itself in order to "break out" to the higher level.

~~~
joe_the_user
_Maybe, but imo there 's an infinitely-recursive (up until hardware or wetware
limits) nature of introspection to consciousness. I can reflect on reflecting
on reflecting on reflecting etc etc, until I stack overflow. But on each level
of reflection, I can do something useful wrt adjusting the processes that I am
reflecting on._

I don't see why one couldn't write program to do something - a subroutine that
called-itself and analyzed some of the contents on up the stack in some
vaguely useful way. One can pretty easily write a program that approximating
satisfies most vague descriptions of consciousness. It doesn't "feel" like
"real consciousness" but that brings up other questions.

~~~
ypeterholmes
Exactly. But to your last point, what are feelings if not data? For example,
if the system was programmed to interpret feedback threatening its higher
level goals as negative data (anxiety, fear) and feedback supporting its goals
as positive data (happiness, joy), then feelings can very much be represented
in the model.

------
TLC555
"So, what about consciousness? As defined above, it is in fact the most
certain knowledge there is. Pure awareness is not even possible to deny, since
the very act of denial takes place in and as an activity of awareness. You can
not escape or avoid it. Thoughts can of course imagine a brain that existed in
the past without awareness, but that itself is a thought in awareness. One can
doubt whether the thought refers to something true or real, but the awareness
is unavoidable. This suggests that consciousness, not matter, is fundamentally
real." \-- Tom McFarlane, B.S. Physics, Stanford University

Ref: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-basis-of-reality-matter-
or...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-basis-of-reality-matter-or-
consciousness-Why#)

------
nabla9
Scott Aaronson has a good critique of s Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information
Theory. Very short version:
[https://youtu.be/cscRdv57oRQ?t=849](https://youtu.be/cscRdv57oRQ?t=849)

IIT is basically just hypothesis that defines consciousness by identifying it
with certain information processing abilities that have lots of integration
and can't be 'divided'.

When Aaronson points out some peculiar things having these abilities (like
error correcting codes) Tegmark doubles down and says they are conscious and
human intuition is wrong.

IIT explains very little, it just defines consciousness to be something.

------
dang
2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192946)

2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024651)

