A New Proposal for How Mind Emerges from Matter
52 comments
·February 26, 2025ripped_britches
mandmandam
There is, if you read it.
> Which brings us to the most striking idea — that some types of electrical oscillations could mediate an experience of self.
> In 2021, Hanson found that similar electrical activity — spontaneous low-frequency oscillations — is evident across many different organisms, from E. coli to humans. She concluded that across a diverse range of creatures, the oscillations may have a shared function: constructing a single organismal whole from many parts.
That's fascinating stuff which deserves the title (and the long context). 2021 is pretty damn new as far as theories of mind go.
card_zero
Oh that's the key point. I barely noticed it. OK, well, this is very literally about the first steps in how brains evolved. It's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one involving clay crystals "reproducing". But it's steep to say this is about minds, which only works if we accept the various parts of the article that urge us to stop being so egotistical and anthropocentric as to expect that a mind should be capable of doing something clever.
mandmandam
I think you missed more than the key point.
> this is very literally about the first steps in how brains evolved
Well, no; they even highlighted this section:
> “Intelligence, according to some, is a biological function that evolved not with humans or brains but way back in some form to the earliest organisms, a fundamental biological function like respiration.”
It would definitely connect to how brains evolved, but the article and the main idea are a lot broader than that.
> It's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one involving clay crystals "reproducing"
Well no; unless the clay crystals are producing interesting electrical oscillations.
> it's steep to say this is about minds, which only works if we accept the various parts of the article that urge us to stop being so egotistical and anthropocentric as to expect that a mind should be capable of doing something clever.
It's not clever to live for 2,000 years? And, are only clever people worthy of the label of having a mind? ... Because I know an awful lot of people with no interest in doing anything particularly clever.
And yes, your comment is anthropocentric... Definitively so. Whether something has a "mind" depends on the definition used, and if you define that as "what humans call clever", then yeah you're being anthropocentric.
simonh
Is there any reason why we should associate oscillations with any such thing though? Lots of systems oscillate. It could well be that oscillations are a common emergent property of many systems, including consciousness, rather than consciousness being emergent from oscillations.
It seems to me that a key characteristic of consciousness is it's informational character. It is representational of a cognitive state, it's interpretive, introspective. It seems to me that for any system to be conscious it must at a minimum be generating and interpreting representational structures. I'm sure that's nowhere even close to being a sufficient criterion, but I don't see how it can't be a necessary one.
I think that's key to subjectivity, because different systems can have radically different ways to represent and interpret even the same phenomenon they have representations of. The details of the representational structure, and it's network of associations with other representational structures in the system, are intrinsically tied to details of the system processing and interpreting the representation.
unsupp0rted
This would be a mechanism for how in sci fi they scan a nebula and say "signs of intelligence" or something like that. "Our scanners have picked up the telltale oscillations".
mandmandam
Exactly! And even a possible mechanism for the Universal Translator (as long as you don't Darmok your Tanagras too hard).
rzz3
The right way to include all of this context would be to start with the lead and then back it up with the context. I can’t read stuff written like this.
mandmandam
I agree that they buried the lede, but I'll defend the article anyway because the subject matter is still worth the effort imo.
ripped_britches
Is this not the same thing as IIT?
xg15
Maybe the definition of what "intelligence" is could be sharpened by having a look at LLMs and "traditional" computer programs and asking what exactly the difference between the two is.
Almost all the traditional criteria of intelligence - reasoning, planning, decisionmaking, memory etc - are exhibited pretty trivially by standard computer programs. Nevertheless no one would think of them as "intelligent" in the sense that humans or animals are.
On the other hand, we now have LLMs, that sent the entire tech world into a multi-year frenzy, precisely because they appear to possess that human-like intelligence.
And that is even though they perform worse than classical programs in some of the "intelligence" measures: For the first time, we have to worry that a computer program is "bad at math". They cannot reflect on past decisions and are physically unable to store long-term memories. And yet, we're much more likely to believe that an LLM is "intelligent" than a classical program.
This makes me think that our formal decisions of "intelligence" (the ones that would also qualify fungal networks, swarms, cells, societies, etc) and what we intuitively look out for, are really two different things.
andoando
I wouldn't say that's true at all for traditional computer programs. They're doing explicitly what they are designed to do, there is no adaptation/learning.
ben_w
Code vs. data.
The code needed create, train, and perform inference on a Transformer is quite short. How short depends on how you count the `import` statements in https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py and https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/sample.py etc.
Spreadsheets performing linear regression etc., — Do they learn? Sure!
If you accept that Transformers adapt and learn then you must accept that a spreadsheet also does, because someone implemented GPT-2 in Excel: https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need
Do polymorphic computer viruses adapt? Border Gateway Protocol? Exponential backoff? Autocomplete? And that's aside from any algorithmic search results or "social" feeds, which are nothing but that.
Nevermark
A structured program analyzing data as a graph, and optimizing access, is interacting with phenomenon, updating its working knowledge of the phenomenon, and can produce results that are very non-intuitive.
Likewise, any symbolic mathematical system that accumulates theorems that speed up future work as it solves current tasks, seems like a high intelligence type of activity.
Deep learning is “just” structured arithmetic.
I think different kinds of intelligence can look quite different, and they will all be “structured” or “tropic” at their implementation levels.
—
Stepping away from the means, I see at least four “intelligence” dimensions:
1. Span: The span of novel situations for which it can create successful responses.
2. Efficiency: The efficiency of problem solving.
I.e. When vast lookup tables, exhaustive combination searches, and indiscriminate logging of past experience can be matched instead by more efficient Boolean logic, arithmetic, pattern recognition and logging, we consider the latter more intelligent.
3. Abstraction: The degree to which solving previous different novel situations improves the success or efficiency in solving new problems. I.e. generalizable, composable learning.
4. Social education: Ability to communicate and absorb learned information from other entities.
Plants, and I expect all surviving life forms, are very high in intelligence types 1 and 2.
Adaptive nervous systems and especially brains excel at 3.
Many animals, but most profoundly humans (whose languages for communicating are themselves actively adapted for compounding effects), excel at 4.
Today’s humans are effectively more intelligent than 10,000 year ago humans, not because of 1-3, but because of 4. Learning as a child to read/write, do arithmetic, understand zero and negative numbers, and countless other information processing activities and patterns, from others, profoundly impacts our intellectual abilities.
Deep learning, as with the human species, non-trivially spans, and continues to improve, on all 4 types of intelligence.
bryanrasmussen
intelligence is a property of the species and the property of the individual, even unintelligent individuals (except for very pronounced extremes) still have the species property of intelligence.
The species property of intelligence encompasses stupidity.
card_zero
I read it all, for a certain value of "read". It's very long, and heavy on examples and fascinating facts, but skimps on getting to the point. I enjoyed the line about plant biologists suffering from brain envy. The article gets better from about halfway through as skeptical views begin to be introduced, but eventually it lets go of that and turns back into lot of hand-wavy awe about mycorrhizal networks, and I missed what the "new proposal" is. If it's only saying that intelligence is an emergent property of connections, and could therefore emerge in swarms or societies, we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his sentient ant nests.
hikarudo
> we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his sentient ant nests.
A similar idea is present in Herbert Simon's 'The sciences of the artificial', where he describes a sentient city.
SubiculumCode
'Get to the point' is my primary response to the article..
giorgioz
I've been thinking as well that from some perspective a human being isn't actually a single life but rather itself a multitude of separate tiny-life forms that cooperate to survive (the cells). The voice in our head is the emerging consciouness that act as a captain, it's useful for the captain to think of itself as one being. Now this said, I feel the article is jumping a bit too much on the Animism hippie bandwagon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
Of course, there is some intelligence in any life form behaviour, but if you want to say that a tomato plant is intelligent than you need to use another word or set of words for more advanced life forms. Putting in the same bag a tomato plant and a dolphin clearly makes the word intelligence so vague it loses almost every practical meaning.
To clarify also the part where it talks about earth being an organism. I've thought of this as well, the whole universe could be a life form, each planet and star in it a cell in its body. It's a possibility. Or maybe even our whole universe is just a cell in someone's body.
It's possible, but I fear there is little science in the people of that article and just old fashion Animism and protect "the mother earth" natural spiritual thinking that has existed for thousands of years. Those people see the world as if they are druids in a fantasy novel. I see myself more as a wizard. We might have different opinions. I will take them seriously when they can LITERALLY speak with animals daily in useful manners and tell vines to move. Until then is just (a) Fantasy. I can summon electricity and fireballs (with technology), if they want to say they are druids they better step up their enchantments. Telling "sit" to a dog and then writing long articles on how dogs are so intelligent doesn't cut it for me.
null
amanaplanacanal
The interesting thing about mind (as far as I'm concerned) isn't intelligence, but consciousness.
Intelligence isn't well defined. According to our current understanding of physics, everything is cause and effect, which throws free will out the window, so what do we even mean by intelligence? Is it just when chains of cause and effect become so complex we can't understand them any more? And if so, why does consciousness even exist at all?
The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying.
I guess the other option is to divorce consciousness from physical master entirely, but then we have kind of opened ourselves up to almost any kind of woo.
It really is a hard problem.
messe
> The only consistent theory of consciousness I'm aware of is panpsychism, which seems very unsatisfying.
Integrated Information Theory seems interesting, at least, but far from flawless. Like panpsychism though, I don't think it's falsifiable.
Jordan_Pelt
I'm probably a crackpot, but I'm convinced it's the other way around--matter emerges from mind. The only refutation I'm familiar with is Samuel Johnson kicking a rock, which I don't find very persuasive.
gregwebs
I don't see the word "consciousness" in the article. I thought that was the thing to figure out to understand the emergence of the mind.
sctb
My general understanding is that "mind" is an objective concept; people have minds that cognize and think and learn and so on. Some minds are apparently more capable of those things than others. When speaking about intelligence, it makes sense to associate that with the mind.
Consciousness, on the other hand, is (even) less well-defined and is usually considered to be subjective. Being subjective, it tends to resist all of the usual objective approaches of description and analysis. Hard problem and all that.
Symmetry
There's a whole scientific study of consciousness that actually comes out of behaviorism. The thought is, if I have a conscious experience I can then exhibit the behavior of talking about it. From this developed a whole paradigm of investigation including stuff like the research of subliminal images.
Stanislas Dehaene's book Consciousness and the Brain does a great job of describing this, though it's 10 years old now.
wat10000
Trouble is that you can also exhibit the behavior of talking about it just by being exposed to the idea, even if you don't have the experience. If you were never exposed to the idea and you started talking about it, then I'd be convinced you had the experience, but nobody is actually like that. The fact that the idea exists at all proves to me that at least one human somewhere had conscious experience, and I know there's at least one more (me), but that's it.
mirekrusin
I don't understand why people have problem with simply stating that it is emergent phenomenon and that's it.
Similarly to how computer is computer and half sized computer is half of its bigger friend – you can keep halving it until there is no "computer" left in it.
Or pencil – you have pencil that you call pencil; what about pencil half size of it? and so on until you hit single atom. You had pencil, now you don't, where on this line there was pencil and then there wasn't?
heyjamesknight
Because that's the same as giving up and saying "we don't understand."
What is mind emerging into? When a video game experience emerges from the combination of processing, display, sound, and controller input, it emerges into a level of organization that a mind can participate in. It emerges into a system of organization emanating downward from the mind experiencing it. It can't just "emerge" into existence on its own. If a game falls in the woods, its not a game.
If you call the mind an emergent phenomenon but can't describe the context into which it emerges, you've added nothing to our understanding.
BriggyDwiggs42
Pencil is just an idea, minds objectively have qualia (measured internally).
Edit: you can’t measure “pencilness,” but you can’t help but know whether or not you’re in pain.
Aardwolf
The mind concept here then could apply to computers as well since after all those can also be configured to learn things and behave in certain intelligent ways
baddash
mind = container of values
consciousness = meta-attention
kayo_20211030
The whole proposal can be distilled to Connections => Mind. We've been struggling with the causal effect, even the definition, of what the `=>` means in humans. Seems a long shot that the study of, and breathy coverage, of plant signals will illuminate much. Maybe it will, but I'm not holding my breath.
sincerecook
[dead]
Can we retitle this as there is nothing new here besides long musings