A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

As a scientist, articles like this also annoy me. Because it, right off the bat, assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness. Just because we don't experience those degrees, and animals can't convey what they feel through language, we assume it is "emergent", or "suddenly there". I think we are too caught up in believing that consciousness must be something really special or some magic discontinuity of spacetime.

I don't believe it is. Somewhere inside our brain there is some perception of self related to the outside world. So we can project self into the future using information from the now and make better choices and survive better ("Information is that which allows you [who is in possession of that information] to make predictions with accuracy better than chance"- Chris Adami). Why do we need all these difficult words?

I bet animals also have some image of self inside there somewhere, and make decisions based on simulated scenarios. Perhaps to a lesser degree, perhaps because of a lack of language they experience it in a different way? Not being able to label any of the steps in the process... Who knows?

Perhaps when we get to simulate a whole brain we can get some idea. But then there is the ethics. We do attribute great value to organisms that have this image of self.

This. it nicely encapsulates why AI aficionados use words like "hallucinate" which become secret clues to belief around the G part of AGI. If it's just a coding mistake, how can the machine be "alive" but if I can re-purpose "hallucinate" as a term of art, I can also make you, dear reader, embue the AI with more and more traits of meaning which go to "it's alive"

It's language Jim, but more as Chomsky said. or maybe Chimpsky.

I 100% agree with your rant. This time fly likes your arrow.

Yes, it's such a waffle. Instead of the unnecessary title "A Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter" – a more appropriate one would be "On plant intelligence (and possible consciousness)" given the entirety of the article is devoted to plant intelligence. We don't have anything radical, nor is it very deeply related to the mind/matter problem. If an author can't get something simple like that correct, then they don't deserve our time. Shame one has to get paragraphs deep into the article to find out we have a spiel about plants, not about mind.

Here lies the promised land: the possibility of a precise and concise nomenklatura that assigns each thing a unique name, perfectly matching its unique position in the world, derived from the complete determination of the laws governing what it is and how it interacts with others. The laws of what is shall dictate how things ought to be named. What a motivating carrot—let’s keep following these prescriptions, for surely, in the end, the harmony of their totality will prove they were objective descriptions all along. Above all, let’s not trust our own linguistic ability to distinguish between the subtle nuances hidden within the same word, or at least, let’s distrust the presence of this ability in our fellow speakers. That should be enough to justify our intervention in the name of universality itself.

Imagine this: language is an innate ability that all speakers have mastered, yet none are experts in—unless they are also linguists. And what, according to experts, is the source of such mastery? A rigid set of rules capturing the state of a language (langue) at a given time, in a specific geographical area, social class, etc., from which all valid sentences (syntactically and beyond) can supposedly be derived. Yet this framework never truly explains—or at best relegates to the background—our ability to understand (or recognize that we have not understood) and to correct (or request clarification) when ill-formed sentences are thrown at us like wrenches into a machine. Parsers work this way: they reject errors, bringing communication to an end. They do not ask for clarification, they do not correct their interlocutors, let alone engage in arguments about usage, which, under the effect of rational justification, hardens into "rules."

Giving in to the temptation of an objective description of language as an external reality—especially when aided by formal languages—makes us lose sight of this fundamental origin. In the end, we construct yet another norm, one that obscures our ability to account for normativity itself, starting with out own.

Perhaps this initial concealment is its very origin.

I’m a linguistics layman, but can’t you make an even stronger claim about human language? Apparently there are certain constructs in Swiss German that are not context-free.

It's philosophy. It doesn't concern itself with facts or knowledge.

It seems like this might be missing or just talking past parents point. Sure, new paradigms might always make old lines of research irrelevant. But otoh, something like idealism vs materialism vs dualism can’t just be dismissed because the categories are exhaustive! So new paradigms might shed light on it but can’t just cancel out the question. So yes, to parents point some stuff is fundamental, and if you’re not acquainted with the fundamentals then it’s hard to discuss the deep issues coherently. It’s possible I guess that a plant biologist or a journalist or a ML engineer for that matter is going to crack the problem wide open with new lines of inquiry that are completely ignorant about historical debates in theory of mind, but in that case it will still probably take someone else to explain what /how that actually happened.

I agree in spirit, that it's possible for a field to be so lost that a new paradigm fundamentally obviates it and frees you from having to recapitulate the entire thicket. But still, a minimal test for whether you've actually obviated them would be whether you can double back and show how the new paradigm resolves/makes them look naive and confused. And so I'd expect an author to do that for at least one such school of thought as part of their exposition.

So many adjectives... and "radical" in the title is a doozy considering this article is essentially a stoner summary of LeDoux's "Deep History of Ourselves" with the science replaced with thesaurus suggestions.

I held out a bit longer, and then skimmed, but started to become offended by the whole ,thing, but couldnt be bothered to be that annoyed by so many different things. That said I am very much into bieng outside in the company of many animals, working with them, and just bieng in wild environments, but language fails, when it comes to describing how species interact, and in the end, we cant describe our own mental proceseses in a clear, intellible by all, way. There is yet to be a genius of the mind, where the definition of genius is,:an idea that once explained, everyone else goes "of course" My main issue is that these sort of philisophical projects, reek, of money and hidden agenda's, and shade very quickly into, policy decisions, and quasi religious beurocratic powers.

The gp is wrong. They are just being supercilious with a word salad of their own which is best ignored.

The article is pretty good making you rethink all your preexisting concepts of Mind/Intelligence based on what we know from Biology today. It is not an article on various theories of Mind but on how scientific research (conveyed through pointers from various researchers) is advancing rapidly on so many fronts that we are forced to confront our very fundamental beliefs.

Absolutely worth reading at least a couple of times.

This is _not_ about defining intelligence. But it's about supposing intentionality as a tool for explaining the behavior of a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance

Your position is self-refuting: you are dismissing philosophy, yet simultaneously making philosophical claims in doing so-claiming that all knowledge is empirical is itself a philosophical claim (empiricism)

A lot of philosophy is testable and the inspiration for scientific enquiry. Philosophy contains logic as a major area of study and the results of this work are core tenets in mathematics which enables the ability to conduct rigorous science.

Science itself is the product of philosophical enquiry.

> I don't care what your ideas are. If they aren't testable, they're your opinion.

Most of the life and the world involves beliefs that aren't testable. The lack of testability doesn't mean it's arbitrary; testing is just one tool (the most effective one, I believe). But if you restricted yourself to that, if we had no other qualification or judgment, we couldn't achieve anything.

Philosophy is precisely the domain of things that cannot be objectively testable because they are grounded in experience. You can not prove that you are conscious (especially in a world of LLMs) but you know it to be true. Should I assume you are an automaton simply because I can’t prove you are conscious?

So you’re an empiricist.

Is science “reality” or is it just a series of models/ conceptual frameworks ?

You're describing the scientific method. Philosophy is not for "understanding the universe". Surely it cannot be blamed for not fulfilling a goal you only imagine it to have.

> Philosophy has little to do with reality.

Translation: I’ve never read Aristotle.

Nobody views trees as intelligent

Because we take freely from trees. They must be stupid or something because they give things freely. It's kind of why many employers view labor as stupid. They give their labor for very little. Humans dabble in arrogance.

The article mentions intelligence a lot actually. It's also conjecture that consciousness and intelligence are unrelated. Qualia could be functional, and emerge naturally from the development of ever more sophisticated intelligence.

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.

How do you define adaptation and learning? What about say, an autoscaler which is programmed to just track the the load for every hour over the last week, and use the average of the last 7 days at 8am to pre-emptively auto-scale? Is that learning and adapting?

Alternatively, neural networks are also just doing explicitly what they are designed to do… sure there is a larger computational graph with lots of operations, but it’s all deterministic… backprop is not really much different on a procedural level than the simple fitting algorithm that I outlined above, in as much as it is just a specific well-defined algorithm or sequence of steps designed to compute some parameters from data.

You can construct a "computer" that learns and adapts with some matchboxes and buttons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...

I wouldn't say that's more "intelligent" than, I don't know, a workplace scheduling system.

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.

To be clear, trees did not "give" us oxygen. Trees evolved from bushes which evolved from algaes, which evolved from some mono-cell life forms which are a common ancestors to us as well. They were shaped by natural selection, it was indeed awesome for them to get out of the water and start consuming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They did not give us oxygen though, there was no high level consciousness of gifting life to others as your sentence is implying. This said, trees are awesome and we should definitely not cut them or burn them for no reason or pure sadism. We should though also consider them as a parte of the environment where live. If we need them and there is plenty and there aren't other constraints we can use them to build things. Having too much carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere is a constraint very important to value. We don't want to literally destroy our home. I can keep this thoughts rationally in my brain without having to come up with metaphors where the giant rock we happened to be on is a "mother" nurturing us. The earth is not our "mother", we evolved here because simply all other rocks did not have the right conditions to sustain life. The universe is mostly a harsh and cold place, we should save/improve/increase the places that can be home. I feel though the people that start to lean into Animism are just not very scientific, they mean well, but they won't learn all the technology tools that could help me preserve our home planet more effectively.

Ending on a positive note, many scientists both love nature and are rationally scientific (rather than romantic). All the awesome work being done with using LLM to speak with whales and recognize better dogs emotions and pain levels is very inspiring.

This is 100% my experience. There are different captains, but since they share the same memory, there's an illusion that they are one. When you look into who is in the driver seat now at different times, it is clear that there are multiple drivers. Which one is driving now depends on the context and state of my brain.

> There's a great philosophy paper making this argument: Schwitzgebel, Eric. “If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious.”

Maybe, but this strikes me as a borderline category error, like saying, "If databases can order results, then they are probably sorting algorithms". The argument makes assumptions that consciousness is transitive or "sticky" in some sense, where if a property applies to a part of the system it must also apply to some aggregate of those parts.

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?

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.

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

mind = container of values

consciousness = meta-attention

> One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of.

Can one? One of the most disturbing short stories I've ever read is "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death" by Alice Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree). It is the first-person narrative of an unusually self-aware member of a non-technological intelligent species trying to make a life different from "the plan", the species' instincts, in the face of an oncoming slow-motion multigenerational catastrophe. His efforts end up, all for contextually rational and agentive reasons, reiterating his species instinctual lifecycle.

My takeaway from that, from other readings, and from self reflection, is that we are puppets that may or may not become aware of our strings; but if we cut them, we die.

This is an argument for anecdote so feel free to ignore me but if you meditate for long enough or take certain substances you can experience that the conscious experience we are having doesn't actually control things in the way we think it does - you don't actually think your thoughts, you just observe them, like we don't control the sounds we hear - and same with everything else we do. The "only thing one can be assured of" is the experience, not the control of the experience.

This is completely contradicted by the fact I could talk about that experience, which does imply some control from the observer to the physical world. Which makes the whole thing paradoxical. The only way I can square it is with my religious beliefs.

> Even exceptionally dumb people have free will

“Free will” does not exist because the world is deterministic. In other words, if you have made a decision, you couldn’t have made any other decision, so there wasn’t any choice in the first place. A persons IQ has nothing to do with this.

You haven't defined this property you call "agency". How then can you definitely determine whether you posses it or that someone else doesn't? The only thing I can be assured of is my own existence.