The idea to define life as the creation of local negative entropy, in a sense pushing disorder out of a local space is not new, in fact that's the premise of Schrödingers 1944 book, What is Life?, which led him to speculate that human genetic information must be stored in something like a crystal, which he thought of as a prototypical structure for storing information, in a way anticipating the discovery of DNA.[1] (a helix instead of a crystal, but in principle not that far off)
I'm not sure I agree though with the connection between life and consciousness in the article. I think it's very possible to have things that are alive in that entropic-displacing sense that need not be conscious or intelligent at all, say fairly trivial, self-replicating machines.
I read recently of a paper that proposed a mechanism for information conservation during black hole evaporation. The model was that information was preserved within the black hole on some layer that was not destroyed, and the information was subsequently released as the black hole evaporated.
I am not a physicist but the Hawking model that black holes destroy information always struck me as an asymmetry. Apparently that asymmetry also motivated some researchers who know more than me.
Is there actually evidence for the conservation of information? I'm not even sure what information refers to within this context, but the writeup on the paper I read used that term.
I have toyed with the idea that the anthropic principle doesn't just rely on chance events on really long time scales. If indeed information is indestructible, the universe could be in a birth-death cycle of refinement, where it orders information in ways to increase self-awareness each cycle.
You might be interested in Lee Smolin’s book which explores this very hypothesis, among others and a generally fascinating review of how physics got where it is…
When I was a grad student I once attended a lecture by Kip Thorne (before he won the Nobel prize but after Interstellar came out). He basically implied something that is vaguely heretical (and kinda tangential to the above): we should look for aliens inside black holes because thats where they prefer to be. For one, from their point of view (and this situation was sort of enacted in Interstellar) they can observe our epic timescales in “real time”. This puts the phrase “angels dancing on the head of a pin” in a new light, where pin could be loosely interpreted to mean “singularity”, I suppose.
FWIW, I could be mistaken, but I once heard that the spirit of that question (angels on the head of the pin) was less about realism than countability -- i.e. more like asking about the countablility of the Real Numbers in an interval, or something of that sort. One way or another I took it as a much more generous description.
'Countability' is too precise a term for the meaning or context. The article as I read it makes the core point I wanted to express: a derisive reference to scholarship of the time period as obcessed with "angels on pinheads" is probably ungenerous.
If you know of JMG one statement of his was roughly this: Every school-child (of that time period) used to know that an 'eternal being' was outside of time, not a being [within time] that would "live forever."
That is, 'eternal' apparently had a precise sense [then] which most are now ignorant of. Again, I could be wrong.
It is hard for me to look down on curiousity about "what could be outside of time" when it remains a popular science question -- i.e., where did the big bang happen?, etc
“ Well, it must minimize the uncertainty of the states that it’s in. I have to actively resist the second law of thermodynamics, so I don’t dissipate into all kinds of states. “
People often make this rhetorical mistake when speaking about the second law. Entropy is increasing full steam ahead, and what looks like a small bit of order is revealed to be hiding ‘the man behind the curtain’ i.e. a massive increase in entropy through the expulsion of heat, so more things in the universe can enter higher entropy states in vibrational modes, rotational modes, etc.
yes, the 2nd law applies within closed systems. You can cheat in reality (where closed systems don't actually exist) by taking energy from outside a bounded territory (say, a human body) and using it to resist entropy. He doesn't call it by name, but he's referencing autopoiesis (or, continuous self-creation) and homeostasis (self-regulation of properties through balancing feedback loops). Both of these processes consume energy (leading to overall entropy increase), but you can nick that energy from the "environment" through food or photosynthesis or whatever.
Which means that ordered systems must create disorder in order to maintain their own order, and the place where you find the greatest order to disorder is in other actively ordered systems. I blame entropy for the existence of evil, if there is a sentient omniscient creator, there better be a good reason for it, and if the reason turns out to be that entropy is the ongoing cost of His omniscient observation of every interaction, The tax of Her constant measurement I shall be both outraged and secretly satisfied that I was right all along.
Entropy is a not instilled by a creator, but a natural consequence of math.
If the number of states labelled ordered is substantially smaller than the number of states labelled disordered and a system moves essentially randomly between states, it is far more likely that it will spend most of its time in a disordered state.
Entropy is just the universe settling into a state that cannot be meaningfully differentiated from most other states; there are far more of these than differentiable states, and so it's overwhelmingly likely that the universe ends up there.
I do get that. While I understand that some people firmly believe in a literal creator, in my case it's an anthropomorphisation of all that is unknowable and truly fundamental to the existence of our universe, just as the green woman with the spiky hat is an anthropomorphisation of liberty. The difference being that I stay open to the idea that the creator might be conscious because I have no way of disproving it, where I'd put put hundred dollars down that the green lady is a big chunk of metal with a slap of copper and asbestos over the top.
I don't know if other universes with different maths are possible. Greg Egan's books take my to the limit of my conceptual capacity, but I do think there are limits to what it is possible to know from within this universe, because everything needs to be built up from axioms from this universe. I agree with your explanation, right now while I'm sitting here in this universe, but if the celestial teapot turns up this afternoon and takes us both to perpetual motion machine universe, we might start to see things differently
Yes, in this universe, life as we know it is a salmon of order swimming up the waterfall of entropy, every flick of it tail powered by its shit fouling the river, because life in this universe is spec'd to the constraints of this universe. But perhaps we can't find the aliens because they have tunnelled out, off to another gentler universe where they grow forever in n dimensions of time and space pondering the beauty of all the integers.
This is lovely but why would they leave their home? There are very unlikely to find another place equally comfortable to the one in which they evolved.
> Life exists because it increases the entropy in the universe
Life causes entropy, but do you literally mean it exists because it increases entropy? I don’t see the connection, only that life causes entropy. Can you explain?
This subject is discussed in the pop sci work of PBS spacetime https://youtu.be/GcfLZSL7YGw with reference to articles and books if you're looking for more
I think so, I've gone back to university to study biology, and I'm encountering two complimentary perspectives on what life is, a pragmatic classification version that says: ok - of the things that we see which ones are alive and which aren't and what are the distinguishing characteristics? and a second definitional version, blending Schroedinger and Shannon, that says life seems to be information propagating itself, but we're not going examine you on that in first year genomics.
Yes, we taught this during course 3 thermo @ MIT. The mystery is how the hell the universe started at such low entropy.
We can predict the final total maximum entropy of the visible universe, we are about half way there. Life produces entropy, but not as ’efficiently’ as exploding stars.
> Which means that ordered systems must create disorder in order to maintain their own order, and the place where you find the greatest order to disorder is in other actively ordered systems.
Wow, that also nicely explains how colonisation & impoverishment of some human groups is necessary in the current framework, so that high HDI can be achieved in other human groups (which then explains various historical facts).
This makes space exploration and attempts of automated resource extraction from celestial objects a noble goal, something that can achieve world peace (assuming the results are distributed).
Your comment seems to have been slapped, perhaps on the interpretation that you are justifying colonialism, or perhaps on the interpretation that you are engaging in space billionaire boosterism, but I read you comment very differently. That our islands of enlightenment rest on pillars of violence, and restumping our civilisation on a foundation of justice and sustainability isn't anti-enlightenment, it is the enlightenment project, and it's taking us hundreds of years not always moving forwards.
Yes, I’m definitely not supporting colonisation. I’m from a country who’s prospects were stunted by merciless resource extraction. I wish it didn’t happen. I’m simply saying that, it’s the “lowest common denominator” means of achieving progress and geo-local maxima by causing ethical global minima. Hence, space exploration is a noble alternative in comparison - extract your resources from dead zones in space and have a human utopia for all here on earth.
Seth's invocation of entropy is nowhere near as egregious as it is in the case of those creationists who claim that evolution would be a violation of the 2nd. law of thermodynamics, but I feel it is, ultimately, an argument that goes nowhere.
His point is that living organisms are, temporarily, islands of relative order in a universe that is generally less so, which is both a fact and consonant with the 2nd. law. As all living organisms, not just conscious ones, share this feature, it is hardly a distinguishing feature, let alone an explanation, of consciousness.
This has led some people to redefine consciousness to encompass all such systems, whether living or not - they all, supposedly, have a certain amount of of it, according to the proponents of panpsychism and its more quantitative offspring such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT).
To me (and I am a materialist in matters of the mind), this seems to be an attempt to force consciousness into the woefully inadequate explanations we currently have on hand. The sort of consciousness we are most interested in, and are most challenged by, is the sort of self-aware, language-creating, theory-of-mind holding consciousness that is most fully developed in our own species (and probably in some of our extinct predecessors), not the sort of consciousness that might be attributed to a paramecium or a thermostatically controlled building. It is not useful to lump together such a diverse range of phenomena, and we are only fooling ourselves if we claim that anodyne statements about preserving order against a chaotic universe are, in any useful sense, an explanation of consciousness.
For a much more thorough critique of IIT specifically, see Scott Aaronson:
Humans define order. Entropy increasing is just like a falling water fall. If you zoom in on some region of chaos and say look at this pattern (like in cellular automata), you have defined that to be meaningful order. Every state in the statistical ensemble has equal likelihood of occurring, there just happen to be a small subset of interest to human minds.
This is the big problem with the idea that consciousness is just complexity, and that sufficiently complex systems might become conscious. Stars, storms, gas giant planets, nebulae, etc. The problem is these things are complex yes, but except at a very macroscopic level they have no mechanism to maintain a consistent state, or to control and reliably change that state. They're just heaving masses of particles. Computers and the brain are incredibly ordered systems, and are incredibly fragile to even the tiniest disruption of that order.
> I just read a wonderful novel, Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is a beautiful articulation of all the ways in which having systems that give the appearance of being conscious can screw with our human psyches and minds.
Boy, that is not at all what I got from Klara and the Sun.
Indeed. But also since it’s told from Klara’s pov, she is clearly conscious, and not just appears to be. You can’t write from first person without that person being conscious. The closest I’ve seen otherwise is Cibola Burn in the It Reaches Out chapters, but that’s really third person omniscient telling the readers what is and is not conscious about the protomolecule. Miller yes, the reaching out, no by design.
Anyway, the humans in Klara and the Sun don’t even question that aspect of AFs. It’s more of a biological snobbery and that the AFs are short lived like Blade Runner replicants, and replaced by newer models.
Imagine a sophisticated enough and transparent webcam with an infinite resolution and a curved enough lens (or mirror) such that it can see its own assembly.
The funny part is every analogy we make is just something in this universe, so all we do is move the mysticism to a lowlier object.
If we eventually do find out that materials cause consciousness, then material will become mystical. Really, we cannot win.
This is very simple: consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. It's a universal force. We don't emit consciousness, we tap into it and experience it as individuations.
This why AI will never happen in the generalized sense. Because as long as we keep thinking we can engineer a mind out of matter, we'll keep chasing our tails.
Matter is a by-product of the universal mind.
And we all experience our lives as singular nodes of that mind.
This has been known for millennia and is the basis for the world religions (which are mostly dumbed down co-optings of this).
You just rediscovered dualism, consciousness is the new spirit, immaterial and beyond scientific investigation. Dualism is a dead end, it took a lot of time for people to understand that.
Why not come to the concrete level and realise that without consciousness you would not get something to eat and quickly die. So it has to do with life. We're complex self-replicators in an environment with scarce resources. We rely on consciousness to continue to exist. It feels like something to be you because you got a lot to win or lose, you're in a game of life and need to choose your actions.
Some things are just beyond what Humans will ever understand in my opinion. Consciousness is one of those things. A computer that is able to understand itself completely would be infinitely powerful since its understanding would be recursive over each new understanding state.
For the latest in consciousness research - look at:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.12798
Here (p14) they make artificial consciousness testable by making mental models of action, and the conscious 'thought' is the difference between what the action that was expected vs the action that occurred.
This kind of aligns with the ideas presented in the 1980 book Life beyond Earth : the intelligent Earthling's guide to life in the universe. A major part of the thesis the authors (Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro) present is that "life" can be identified not only by the biological processes we are familiar with on earth, but by its ability to accumulate energy for organized processes.
When I was younger, I use to believe (maybe I still do) that all lifeform's purpose was to accelerate universe death, by transfer from matter to heat in the form of radiation, like we are just an extension of the universe's agency/"desire" towards that, and everything we do is aimed to that, but never actually thought about consciousness.
Consciousness implies awareness and perception of the world (and not necessarily self-awareness and ability of introspection).
And life is a result of selection what works and fits by trial and error.
Cells are mechanisms and aggregates of other mechanisms. The more correct word would be a process. Biological processes, which is a biochemical processes.
I found the article very interesting and thought provoking. Some points from it -
> We see the world not as it is, but as it’s useful for us to do so.
> A computer that plays chess is actually playing chess. But a computer simulation of a weather system does not generate actual weather. Weather is substrate-dependent.
> This is why I tend toward the substrate-dependent view. This imperative for self-organization and self-preservation in living systems goes all the way down: Every cell within a body maintains its own existence just as the body as a whole does. What’s more, unlike in a computer where you have this sharp distinction between hardware and software — between substrate and what “runs on” that substrate — in life, there isn’t such a sharp divide. Where does the mind-ware stop and the wetware start? There isn’t a clear answer. These, for me, are positive reasons to think that the substrate matters; a system that instantiates conscious experiences might have to be a system that cares about its persistence all the way down into its mechanisms, without some arbitrary cutoff. No, I can’t demonstrate that for certain. But it’s one interesting way in which living systems are different from computers, and it’s a way which helps me understand consciousness as it’s expressed in living systems.
> I think the situation we’re much more likely to find ourselves in is living in a world where artificial systems can give the extremely compelling impression that they are conscious, even when they are not. Or where we just have no way of knowing, but the systems will strongly try to convince us that they are.
That's true, but it doesn't mean that the simulation doesn't have desired effects in the real world. The simulation will not make you wet, but it will keep you dry if you use its predictions and take your umbrella with you.
If consciousness is related to assessment of predictions and their effect on the organism, then those predictions can be assessed by living "through" them in the real or simulated world and there are significant advantages in doing this in simulation.
I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of neurons communicate and synchronize for particular tasks, or just figuring out what exactly are those "tasks", the basic computational primitives of adaptation in "lower" animals and insects, let alone humans.
While scientific reductionism has its limitations (e.g. trying to fully describe the complexity of a single neuron in c.elegans is sort of a rabbit hole) you still have to understand at least some of the basic mechanisms, the "LEGO blocks" of cognition, before talking about such higher level of abstraction, especially when it's so ill-defined.
I think Feynman' definition of "cargo cult science" is appropriate here, where we are trying to explain our perception of reality via superficial "neural correlates", or attaching to it these arbitrary "complexity theories", etc., without understanding the fundamental driving factors, mechanics and constraints of perception, the "why" and "how" first.
Qualia is the ability to experience for example the color red. Or the color blue. An exercise… The universe is interesting, it contains some fields, some particles, some quarks, protons, electrons, photons. Some places don’t have light and others do have light. The universe is even more interesting by the fact that it also contains experience. For some reason we see colors. It is absolutely true. Another thing that we experience is thoughts. They are all different allocations/structures of attention, but they are undeniable parts of the universe.
To be a bit more precise, qualia are not the ability but they are the actual experiential event. The sensation, the conscious experience of seeing red.
What qualia are made up of are not easy to be accurate about. My favourite thought experiment that interrogates this question is,
That's a transparently poor argument because it assumes that Mary's knowledge is complete.
Of course it isn't. We have a very poor understanding of brain states. So all we can say is that Mary will learn something new today. But it's not reasonable to extend this to an assumption that a physicalist explanation of qualia is impossible in principle and will become available in the future.
As it happens I'm not a physicalist, and I suspect - but can't prove - that physicalism won't solve this problem.
But I also don't like poor arguments, and I think the Knowledge Argument is not a good one.
The problem is more fundamental. Qualia are definitively subjective and the only way to prove that physicalism explains them is to somehow make them objective - with some kind of qualia-ometer. Or consciousness-ometer. Or something similar.
That doesn't mean finding correlates - neural states, chemical processes, quantum uncertainty, whatever. It means being able to measure experience itself.
Without that you can build simulacra that show all the correlates, and possibly behave as if they're conscious.
But all you've done is built a robot. You can't prove it actually has experience - including self-awareness - unless you can measure experience with objective instrumentation.
This is a nice paradox, because it requires science to measure subjectivity itself.
It may or may not be possible. But clearly it's not possible now, and is unlikely to become possible any time soon.
I wonder, might the fact that 'observation' has measurable effects, e.g. in the double-slit experiment, be a vector for inquiry into the question of qualia? I don't need to observe the path of a photon in the DSE to know whether someone else has observed it if I can see the presence or absence of an interference pattern. If we get better at formalising what 'observation' means in that context, do you think it could be used to arrive at a measure of subjectivity?
"But all you've done is built a robot. You can't prove it actually has experience - including self-awareness - unless you can measure experience with objective instrumentation."
We build things all the time based on the models of the universe we've got. Your argument strikes me as more or less saying, "sure, we built that jet engine, but unless we can measure what 'being a jet engine' is we've just not really built the complete, real thing."
If we build a thing that appears to have "experiences" indistinguishably from how humans appear to, then that is it. That is, the notion of "experience," as you describe it, is more or less meaningless in the context of the very physical world we occupy.
I send "AI" to the spam folder in general. No one who is actually doing AI calls it AI. It's only called AI in glossy consultant brochures with stock images of a man in a business suit surfing through a tunnel of glowing blue numbers.
Everyone calls it AI. It just so happens that it became a large field, so people tend to say that they work in Machine Learning, or Reinforcement Learning, or Evolutionary Computation. The same as in any other field really.
Yes, it's fuzzy just because there doesn't seem to be a general widespread agreement on terminology, even among "experts", so that someone uses the word consciousness meaning something completely different than someone else. It seems that each time one wants to embark in a consciousness discussion, there should be a glossary preamble to specify definitions.
Regardless of the breadth of the spectrum of definitions, at the very bottom you find phenomenal consciousness. The given, undeniable fact that "it feels like something". We don't have a plausible avenue, not even in principle, to even start addressing this fact of existence, to the point that the most rational stance is to assume that it is fundamental in nature.
You ignore all the dumb ideas that came before Feynman. Falsify a theory specifically. Hand waving it away with gatekeeping weak.
IMO Biology explains consciousness fine. Reinforcement of sensory data given repeat exposure leaves agency memory.
I think “higher abstraction” is such a flimsy term as to be meaningless.
Nothing is more or less abstract. It’s just the abstract it needs to be to “exist”. Humans are the abstract they need to be to exist on Earth.
This idea there’s layers of abstraction and meaning beyond what we can know literally is just a neural implant from years of having tribal elders dictating we fetishize a small set of bad ideas ad naseum, we conjure alternatives in order to escape.
How about consciousness is color, sound, taste, smell, tactile and other bodily sensations in perception, dreams, memories, imagination, hallucinations and other mental states. Pain isn’t a fuzzy concept. You are well acquainted with what pain feels like for you.
I’m not sure it’s fuzzy. Hard to describe with words, sure, but not fuzzy. I have a high degree of certainty when someone else is talking about their own consciousness and when they’re not.
For example, when an optometrist or neurologist talks about “sight” they’re talking about the biochemical mechanisms that allow us to see. When I read Plato say “I see therefor I am” it was clear to me he was describing the metaphysical act of personal perception. He was describing the “observer” that was present in the moment, perceiving the biochemical process, not sight itself.
Consciousness is something you likely have. But we (humans) don’t know what it is. To my knowledge, we don’t even know where to start looking for it. Consciousness belongs to the mystics today, by default, because science can not claim it. There isn’t something we can hold and point to saying “this, this is what the mystics call a soul.”
> Consciousness belongs to the mystics today, by default, because science can not claim it.
Science doesn't yet have an answer, but that doesn't grant the mystics any credibility. There is no 'by default' when we don't know. I'm reminded of a Dawkins quote:
Lecturer: Scientists answer questions of 'how'. If your question is 'why', I refer you to the theologians.
Dawkins: Why the theologians? Why not the gardeners?
(Trivia: If I recall correctly, Dawkins didn't actually give this response, he thought it up far too late.)
> There isn’t something we can hold and point to saying “this, this is what the mystics call a soul.”
That isn't a game-over, though.
The same goes for information processing, but we're fairly confident in what we call a 'computer'.
You can't hold a center-of-gravity, but we're able to reason about those pretty clearly.
I think you misunderstood me. In the vacuum of science providing an answer, someone will.
> Dawkins: Why the theologians? Why not the gardeners?
I’ve never heard this. My initial reaction is that “god” exists in the unknown. Asking “why go to the mystics for mystical stuff” is a tautology. If you go to the gardener with a question unanswered by science, and they have an answer, they’re a mystic (or have made a scientific breakthrough).
> You can't hold a center-of-gravity, but we're able to reason about those pretty clearly.
Consciousness is not understood. Full stop. We don’t know what manifests it. We don’t know where it comes from. We don’t know where it goes.
We’ve scratched the surface of the biological mechanisms that give rise to the phenomenon we experience. If you look at me and see a biological computer, I think your statement holds. But when I look at me, in a mirror, I see a biological vessel I occupy; and I don’t know what “I” is.
Trying to oversell our understanding of the universe and our place in it does a disservice to science and the work left to be done.
I agree with this. There are so many philosophical debates out there regarding what happens after we die, if animals are "conscious", if computers or AI could have "consciousness", but in my opinion it's all a big illusion created out of our own egos as a rationalization for our existence.
We are biological machines. Sure, we have an awareness of ourselves, but so do computers in some contexts; for example you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself. It's already been proven that animals have an awareness of themselves when looking in a mirror, such as Dolphins, Chimpanzees, etc. Humans may be a bit further along in our cognitive development but there is no obvious point where you can say "Humans are conscious" because we're all somewhere on a sliding scale of intelligence and self-awareness.
Isn't that precisely what it means? You are aware of something, thus you can take it and its aspects into consideration in your calculations. You have a representation of yourself - same thing. Of course your representation may not be completely accurate, but what perception would be.
I don't think so. The concept of self is distinct from an image (or other representation). If I run pylint against the pylint source code, it has a representation of itself. It's not aware that those lines of code are in any way special to it. I don't think it mystically becomes self-aware because of that situation.
In your lingo, something can know what it looks like without taking its aspects into consideration.
I think the inverse is true, though: something that cannot perceive a representation of itself cannot be self-aware.
Maybe or maybe not. This is the nub of the debate. I would argue that answering "yes" to this is a partial endorsement of pan-psychism. If the ability to experience qualia is property of certain algorithms or types of information flow then it's a fundemental property of the universe.
Thought experiments about p-zombies and mind simulation are an interesting litmus test to separate different points of view on this.
Science is about finding the answers to questions, and philosophy is about working out what the right questions are, which can be surprisingly tricky. The two progress hand in hand. Philosophy isn't just 'bad science'.
No. Science is about empiricism - scientific method, experiments, etc. Philosophy is an overarching field encompassing all pursuit/love of knowledge. It's why another term for science is natural philosophy. It's why people who attain the highest level of education get a doctorate of philosophy ( PhD ).
Feynman was perhaps a little bit too skeptical of some things.
Everything at one time escaped basic explanation from parts (and there always will be, you can't really explain why the standard model, or whatever more fundamental system which might surpass it)
Consciousness is on the edge of being understood quite a lot better as neurobiology is progressing quite quickly.
All that it reveals is that our suspicions of ontological nihilism were likely correct all along. The universe does not give you purpose or reason. You make your own.
That is not completely correct. We have inherent biological drives from lower level temperature regulation and such to nutrition intake and on an even higher level a proclivity for social interaction including reproduction. The ways these frames can be aligned and satisfied are not infinite. So some level of constraints and requirements are pre-specified. A person’s chosen behaviour must fit within this structure and that of others for it to be sustainable.
There are millions of discoveries per year because the universe has unbounded complexity and detail. Only a small subset of discoveries would ever impact someone.
I'm not sure I agree though with the connection between life and consciousness in the article. I think it's very possible to have things that are alive in that entropic-displacing sense that need not be conscious or intelligent at all, say fairly trivial, self-replicating machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F