My background is in theoretical physics, so I absolutely subscribe to this perspective. In understanding my own consciousness, however, I find it a lot harder to see how such an explanation could work.
The only other problem that I feel may require a similarly "out-there" explanation would be the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Why is it that a macroscopic object, made entirely of electrons, protons, etc. when interacting with an electron means that a measurement occurs, but somehow when a single electron interacts with that same electron we can just use the Schrödinger equation? The existence of some type of cutoff between macroscopic and microscopic seems to me to suffer from inevitable inconsistencies. More likely, I would think, is that something like the many worlds interpretation is correct.
Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if something similar will happen when we understand consciousness more deeply. Simply saying that it's an emergent property is sort of cheating and discounting how different the sense of experience is from anything else that we have seen in nature.
> Why is it that a macroscopic object, made entirely of electrons, protons, etc. when interacting with an electron means that a measurement occurs, but somehow when a single electron interacts with that same electron we can just use the Schrödinger equation?
People get hung up on this semantic concept of 'measurement' when that's not what it's about at all. It's not "if you measure a property of a particle then you change that property", it's "if you interact with a property of a particle then you change it, and that it's impossible to measure without interacting".
The electron doesn't care whether you're conscious and certainly not whether you're writing anything down. Its momentum or whatever is still going to change regardless.
Indeed. Measurement is a physical process, not metaphysical one. To measure something, you necessarily need to interact with it (and at this point it's worth remembering that photons bouncing off an object and hitting your retinas absolutely count as interaction, so you can't e.g. put a ruler next to the dog and read out the results, and say you weren't interacting with it, not in the sense physicists use this word).
Did you mean to reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221433? I don't see how QEE is incompatible with the notion that measuring something necessitates interacting with it. Photons are usually measured by absorbing them and turning into electricity.
Absolutely! I wish this were more commonly understood. And, if you take that train of though one step further, it implies that quantum mechanics exhibits non-local causality.
> Why is it that a macroscopic object, made entirely of electrons, protons, etc. when interacting with an electron means that a measurement occurs, but somehow when a single electron interacts with that same electron we can just use the Schrödinger equation?
The way I understand it is that particles are fuzzy, but if they interact with sharper things they get less fuzzy themselves. Naturally large amounts of interacting particles (macroscopic objects) are way sharper than single isolated particles. So measurement is just theoretical concept that relates to system physically getting immensely less fuzzy to a point we can safely assume for the sake of easier calculations that it's not fuzzy at all. You can still describe such sharp system with Schrödinger equation, it still works even after measurement, but you don't do that since there are easier ways like Newtons mechanics. There's no artificial cutoff. There are just many orders of magnitude difference of how sharp things become through interaction.
You can see that experimental scientists managed to make pretty large systems to display quantum superposition if they are properly isolated from interaction with way larger systems that could knock them out of superposition.
As for consciousness my opinion is that it's just some specific algorithm that has some evolutionary utility for some animals. It's fairly good for modelling self, environment and the future. It's not in any way pinnacle of development. It's gradual like human has more consciousness than dog, and dog more than a hamster, but not to the point of absurd, that single electron or even single neuron has some amount of consciousness. Just the same as you shouldn't think that single electron or even neuron has some intrinsic ability to perform sorting or image recognition. You need hardware, and yes, more powerful hardware yields stronger results, but you still need to have at least rudimentary versions of correct algorithm running on that hardware before you can actually say it does the thing.
> So measurement is just theoretical concept that relates to system physically getting immensely less fuzzy to a point we can safely assume for the sake of easier calculations that it's not fuzzy at all.
It appears to be more complicated than that, see Wigner's friend[1] thought experiment and a recent experimental realization of it[2].
From the paper's abstract: "In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we realise this extended Wigner’s friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. If one holds fast to the assumptions of locality and free-choice, this result implies that quantum theory should be interpreted in an observer-dependent way."
Wigner's friend experiment doesn't contradict my interpretation in any way. For me it's not the exchange of information that causes system to become more sharp. It's poking that system with immensely huge stick built out of billions and billions tightly and sharply interacting particles that you have to do to get that information.
So when Wigner's friend makes the measurement of quantum system through interacting with it he causes it to collapse to sharper form. Wigner unaware of the result may still think that there's still some fuzziness in the system that consists of his friend and the experiment he performed. But in fact all the fuzziness was gone when his friend performed the experiment. The fact that Wigner doesn't know that yet, changes nothing in reality. Sure, he can treat his friend and his experiment as if they were quantum system. But they are not. The math I think looks the same if you don't know things about sharp stuff or if you know all there is to know about fuzzy stuff.
The actual 6-photon experiment is a bit too technical for me but I don't supposed "Wigner's friend" in it is built of billions of particles interacting with each other. If the friend is something smaller, like just a few particles that perhaps loosely interact then it's perfectly fine to expect that after measurement of one fuzzy system by another there's plenty of fuzzines left for the macroscopic observer (Wigner) to see.
> For me it's not the exchange of information that causes system to become more sharp. It's poking that system with immensely huge stick built out of billions and billions tightly and sharply interacting particles that you have to do to get that information.
That's exactly what I think about Schrödinger's Cat experiment. It's often implied that the hypothetical cat may be simultaneously both alive and dead, as if there are only two possible states for the cat.
There are approximately 7 x 10^27 atoms in the average human body. The figure for a cat wouldn't be much far from that I suppose. Taking that into account we can safely say that the quantum system (cat + radioactive source + poison) may actually simultaneously be in an abysmally high number of different entangled states, which may converge to, as you say, a "sharp" form.
Doesn't this experiment have a simple explanation that measuring something is essentially entangling yourself with it? So at the end of the thought experiment, both scientists and the test device are in a superposition together...
...except it's not that simple, and here is why I don't like those experiments (and why in reality, they're always realized using atoms, and not cats): there's no Wigner, or Schrödinger's cat, as a unit in physical sense. They're made of atoms. Atoms that interact and radiate information all the time. That box with a cat with it, the cat radiates information at the speed of light, which gets absorbed by the box and reradiated away. If the result of your thought experiment could be changed or confused by the following setup:
- a) put a broad-spectrum camera suite around the box prior to the experiment
- b) have it record data on the hard drive
- c) have the experimenter do their experiment
- d) have someone pull the data from the hard drive and read out the actual state of the experiment subject
... then it means your explanation for the thought experiment is wrong.
Yes it's extremely difficult not to leak (potential) information. This is called decoherence in these situations. It doesn't matter if you don't become conscious of the measurement result as long as some atoms in your body gets contaminated by the measurement they get pulled into the same branch (or whatever concept you subscribe to, it all works the same).
We can imagine consciousness as a purely informational process, which can occur in any adequately complex substrate—real or virtual. In this regard (integrated information theory), the inherent “properties” of consciousness would be more readily described using graph theory or topology.
However, we can also view physics itself as something inherently informational, given that all the base particles in the standard model can ultimately be boiled down to scalar values. Would it be possible to say that those values are ultimately derived from the inherently mathematical properties which result in this reality “existing”? What does it mean for something to exist on the basis of its inherent mathematical identity?
If both consciousness and reality are purely mathematical phenomenon (maybe consciousness is more derived through the computation-generating properties of life), why would one such phenomenon be any less expected than the other? Isn’t it impossible for a non-mathematically-derived (informational) consciousness to exist at all in such a universe?
Last I heard, integrated information theory is _not_ neutral w.r.t. substrate, i.e. to compute the consciousness of a human being simulated on a computer chip, Tononi wants us to apply the IIT calculations to the computer chip.
Oh, certainly the processes occurring on the chip itself could bring about an entirely separate consciousness while at the same time simulating a human one on a different level.
The only other problem that I feel may require a similarly "out-there" explanation would be the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Why is it that a macroscopic object, made entirely of electrons, protons, etc. when interacting with an electron means that a measurement occurs, but somehow when a single electron interacts with that same electron we can just use the Schrödinger equation? The existence of some type of cutoff between macroscopic and microscopic seems to me to suffer from inevitable inconsistencies. More likely, I would think, is that something like the many worlds interpretation is correct.
Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if something similar will happen when we understand consciousness more deeply. Simply saying that it's an emergent property is sort of cheating and discounting how different the sense of experience is from anything else that we have seen in nature.