Well, this essay benefits from your definition of terms, but my fuller understanding will really require revisiting some of your past essays and the Penrose videos, only part of which I can expect to get to near term.
I am currently influenced in my understanding of "consciousness" from my recent reading of Consciousness and the Brain, by Stanislaw Dehaene [2014], where he summarized prior brain related studies using fMRI and EKG to separate out levels of perception and neural reaction that remained "subconscious" vs. if/when the brain reacted with activity in selected (or expanded) brain areas, in a wide spread and coordinated fashion to obtain "full consciousness". While subconscious activity might be limited to a few brain areas and die out quickly, if the perception response was "long lived" enough [beyond 300 milliseconds?], it could rise to the level of consciousness, then that activity involved a wider (nearly global brain?) network of neurons. This lends credence to my current view* that consciousness is an emergent property (or a consilient one?) from interactions among a major subject of our 10^15 synapses. No "spiritual" or divine aspects are needed, per se. I suspect you have already read the same or equivalent sources??
*which may have also been influenced from something I read previously by you about emergence?
When it comes to ideas that specific quantum effects are also involved in life or consciousness, beyond those buried in the higher level atomic and molecular interaction in the realm of electromagnetic forces, I remain skeptical that any special subatomic features play a role. I wasn't quite sure where you fell on that interpretation or belief (or Penrose's view?), as valid or probably not valid? I may change my mind if I come to understand the Penrose views better, as I would entertain disagreeing with him (and his recognized expertise/experience/wisdom) with some caution.
I don’t have a view on how consciousness arises structurally. Sir Roger has some views on that but they are not relevant to this post. I haven’t read Stanislaw Dehaene.
I have written on the role consciousness plays, but that does not involve wrestling with the how of consciousness. In a sense, this post is on the role consciousness does not play.
That consciousness is an emergent property seems correct to me.
1) I would say that directedness, far from being limited to living things, is a universal feature of reality. The difference is that inorganic directedness is almost wholly passive, evinced by circumstances external to the inorganic thing, while an organism's directedness is in large part active, springing from the organism itself. For instance, a fragile object, say a porcelain vase, is directed toward breaking, in that it will break if it collides with something harder, but it doesn't break of its own accord.
2) I would not say that organisms that aren't animals perceive, but that they respond to stimuli. The reason is that bacteria, plants and fungi do not learn from their experiences; they merely react as their genes specify they should. Evolution generates information across a whole population of a living species over time, and one can say that the species has "learned" when its members change as a metaphor. But the individual organisms gain no information; each one dies with the same DNA it was born with. True perception, individuals learning from the physical environment, is restricted to the animals. (Or if you prefer: animals are able to create a map of reality, and update it as needed, through their perceptions, which other organisms cannot do.)
3) The chief difficulty of psi-epistemic interpretations of quantum theory isn't disagreeing with experimental results (no interpretation disagrees with experiments, because any proposal that did that would be discarded instantly.) It's accounting for the correlations between measurements of entangled particles, such as the particle pairs in John Bell's famous paper, in a way that can be reconciled with relativity's constraints on causality. That's a problem for psi-ontic interpretations too, but it's significantly harder when measurement is supposed to be just the experimenters getting more information about the particles in their experiment.
I might have a quibble or two about your language, too? :-)
1) " ... directedness, far from being limited to living things, is a universal feature of reality. The difference is that inorganic directedness is almost wholly passive, evinced by circumstances external to the inorganic thing..." In rereading this, I find I may be in closer agreement than I thought initially: but I wanted to explore the concept of all inorganic (and organic) reactions being in response to the "laws of physics" that try to minimize free energy differences between various states of existence, sometimes to a fully stable equilibrium state, and sometimes only to an interim semi-equilibrium status. "Life" extracts that energy temporarily to counter entropy and continue its existence if/when possible, but I am not sure the ideas of "directedness" really applies.
2) " ... organisms that aren't animals perceive, but that they respond to stimuli...." But a response to a stimulus is a perception, is it not, even if it does not involve consciousness or other forms of awareness?
"... But the individual organisms gain no information; each one dies with the same DNA it was born with." But it may have gained "better" information from its parents/ precursors and/or passed along something different to its "offspring" or "replicated/ reproduced" genes, cells, tissues, or bodies. If that difference aids survival, all to the good; otherwise not so much.
" ... animals are able to create a map of reality, and update it as needed, through their perceptions, which other organisms cannot do." Your phrasing implies that even the map of reality created by humans is actually a valid representation, rather than just something that sort of lets us carry on more or less successfully, so as to potentially pass our genes (and culture?), etc., to the next generation.
3) I had to look up what "psi-epistemic" meant, and I am still not sure I know, but it seems to be mostly a definitional difference. With the advances of scientific investigations, I surmise that a lot of philosophy as mental gyrations is moving down to such definitional squabbles?
1) "Directedness" to my mind implies merely an inherent tendency to reach some goal, or end-state, without implying any intention to do so. So "A system out of equilibrium tends to change towards equilibrium" does ascribe a directedness to the system. What our host calls "directedness" I would prefer to call "intentionality".
2) An unconscious response to a stimulus is not a "perception" in my idiolect, no; perception assumes and involves some awareness. If a doctor hits your leg just below the knee, the abrupt kick that immediately follows is a response to the hit, but would you say it was a response to your perception of the hit? Not so, to my mind; the perception comes only after the hit and the kick finish.
3) "Psi-epistemic" means "measurement of quantum ensembles occurs in the mind of the experimenter", contrasted with "psi-ontic" which means "measurement is a real physical change to the quantum system". It's a classification of QM interpretations, based on the fundamental entities each interpretation postulates as the things QM is actually about.
When you write about emergent phenomena and directedness I think there is one concept missing from the essay: teleology, or rather non-teleology. Particularly when you ascend from substrate physics into organisms and onto social levels. This is something they drum into you in any class about evolution (in my case some anthropology units I took).
This is very important because it trips up most laypeople into going into completely false tangents - ie they follow the intuitive-but-wrong thinking that giraffes' necks evolved to reach higher leaves. Anyone who understands Darwinian ideas of course understands that giraffe's neck resulted from many generations of proto-giraffes surviving and reproducing more successfully *as a result of* having a (slightly) longer neck than their conspecifics. This non-teleological principle applies to social behaviour as well - I find it to be a perfect escape from the false dichotomy between nature and nurture forced onto gender.
Rather than arguing between nature/nurture, male vs female social patterns can be explained as stable behaviours resulting from the fact that such patterns provided stable reproductive success. (IE any societies without "gender norms" didn't survive because they failed to reproduce sufficiently reliably). They are culturally passed onto successive generations but they are not created/maintained by culture alone, hence can't be "abolished" as so many feminists advocate.
I find the Gödel(-Rosser) incompleteness theorems wildly under-utilized, philosophically; though when I go to bat for them, I tend to get mired in finicky hair-splitting with skeptics also familiar with them. Such is the nature of things, I figure, given the personality generally required to dig through them carefully. I try not to be the kind of person who frustrates me, and occasionally succeed.
Penrose certainly screamed through the basics of an understanding with aplomb. My quick notes, striking off from his overview:
0. He's collapsing the two proofs (which isn't kooky, it's more about emphasis). I find separating them much more useful to the intuition. His statement gives a good grasp of the quick(est?) undecidability proof, useful for both the "decision problem"/termination, and incompleteness; less so, I think, of the inconsistency result.
1. Moreover, the collapse jumps past the consistency/completeness tradeoff. The Gödel-Rosser proofs clinched that you don't get both (unless you're down in raw addition and some multiplication, but that's a bit in the weeds for this level). I find more glimmering insight in the way that a push towards "perceiving all truth" is provably incompatible with "being right all the time". (and in any deductive logic, once you're wrong once, you can derive any falsehood as truth; another intuitional banger)
2. So! We can then moderate our use of the inconsistency results, since consciousness doesn't (can't?) drive for universally rigorous consistency, in the math-logic sense used in the proofs. (see next caveat, though) This is why we can understand that "love your neighbor" and "punch bullies back harder" are both good pieces of advice without being universally consistent (for many/all bullies are neighbors, and we can consider love and nose-punching inconsistent).
3. But despair not! The creation of consistency is exactly what makes the universe comprehensible in history, and remains a vital subject for careful reasoning. This consistency challenge seems to be related to the notion of consistent observations as used in quantum state collapse-- but my physics is dreadfully weak, for me to be sure of the force of the connection. *This*, I think, is where Penrose derives his non-computational notion of consciousness.
4. Also! There's a meta-structure to the proof that too often gets lost, especially when used by physicists (because they can't really use it): every level of reasoning can indeed be proven consistent and complete, by moving "up" a level of reasoning. Now, this new meta-level takes on the impossible discrepancy, but I think this is a vital tool in understanding how we "reason about reasoning", using meta-languages.
I've lost track of my notes on an obscure geometric interpretation of the proof, which I also think is deeply enlightening and more readily applicable. But it's been too many years and the details have fled my skull, apparently to live in the universe's stocks of entropy. I'll have to go digging for them (the notes, not the universe's back stock) again soon.
In the book, superabundance, the authors defined wealth as information. I interpret the word information in this context as “how to“. In this sense, the west is wealthy because of our technological “how to”information.
Lorenzo, another well researched and well-reasoned post. Agreed with every point presented and enjoyed concise yet informative presentation of the points.
Just some ponderings:
Regarding consciousness and self-consciousness - by my simple definition - consciousness is the ability to pay attention to our mental and emotional states, and self-consciousness is the ability to observe ourselves doing it and thus better direct our attention and other faculties to solving our existential problems. This is aided by the gene-culture coevolution of language, and thus the ability to operate on symbolic representations. Thus, two levels of cognitive recursion are necessary and sufficient for this phenomenon: being cognizant of paying attention and directing it, and being cognizant of being cognizant. The beauty and the problem lie in the fact that we don’t use all our time for solving existential problems. They’re solved as they arise (or fail to be solved). To toss in a quip, life is like soldiering: long stretches of dull routine, broken by sudden bursts of solving problems at hand. The combination of both builds up into human civilization, including being perplexed about what our mysterious conscience is, as our evolved cognitive and emotional modules cannot solve this, not unlike a computer program that cannot gain insight into the chips, semiconductors, and power sources that make it function from inside the running code.
Neuroscience’s attempt to find a place in the brain, or localized activity where consciousness resides, is a fool’s errand. Same for spirituality, a conscious universe, and other hallucinations of our idling cognitive-emotional adaptations.
Regarding the word itself: Universe. For years now, I wish we used the term Cosmos. Both words have the same meaning. But smart-aleck doctoral student physicists, hearing a word starting with uni-, feel an irresistible urge to quip multi-, particularly if their equations don't fit in our uni- but can be excused by saying - well - it is still true - somewhere else - where we cannot in principle reach. Rather than drop the nonsense; not the least because our primate symbolic logic evolved primarily to convince and deceive one another, including ourselves.
Not to be too snarky, per se, (and I do like various forms of word play), but with a handle of "Weightless Meaning", how are we to presume that your assertion should carry an weight with us?
As a strict materialist, I have to suppose that during the span from 13+B years ago at the Big Bang (or whatever) to 4.7B years ago when the earth formed, there was no ability for our version of cognition to exist. But we presume that the universe still did.
Well, this essay benefits from your definition of terms, but my fuller understanding will really require revisiting some of your past essays and the Penrose videos, only part of which I can expect to get to near term.
I am currently influenced in my understanding of "consciousness" from my recent reading of Consciousness and the Brain, by Stanislaw Dehaene [2014], where he summarized prior brain related studies using fMRI and EKG to separate out levels of perception and neural reaction that remained "subconscious" vs. if/when the brain reacted with activity in selected (or expanded) brain areas, in a wide spread and coordinated fashion to obtain "full consciousness". While subconscious activity might be limited to a few brain areas and die out quickly, if the perception response was "long lived" enough [beyond 300 milliseconds?], it could rise to the level of consciousness, then that activity involved a wider (nearly global brain?) network of neurons. This lends credence to my current view* that consciousness is an emergent property (or a consilient one?) from interactions among a major subject of our 10^15 synapses. No "spiritual" or divine aspects are needed, per se. I suspect you have already read the same or equivalent sources??
*which may have also been influenced from something I read previously by you about emergence?
When it comes to ideas that specific quantum effects are also involved in life or consciousness, beyond those buried in the higher level atomic and molecular interaction in the realm of electromagnetic forces, I remain skeptical that any special subatomic features play a role. I wasn't quite sure where you fell on that interpretation or belief (or Penrose's view?), as valid or probably not valid? I may change my mind if I come to understand the Penrose views better, as I would entertain disagreeing with him (and his recognized expertise/experience/wisdom) with some caution.
I don’t have a view on how consciousness arises structurally. Sir Roger has some views on that but they are not relevant to this post. I haven’t read Stanislaw Dehaene.
I have written on the role consciousness plays, but that does not involve wrestling with the how of consciousness. In a sense, this post is on the role consciousness does not play.
That consciousness is an emergent property seems correct to me.
I’ve always been fond of the idea that we’ve evolved to develop consciousness then self-conscriousness. Is this consilient with your scheme?
Yes.
I have several quibbles - mostly terminological.
1) I would say that directedness, far from being limited to living things, is a universal feature of reality. The difference is that inorganic directedness is almost wholly passive, evinced by circumstances external to the inorganic thing, while an organism's directedness is in large part active, springing from the organism itself. For instance, a fragile object, say a porcelain vase, is directed toward breaking, in that it will break if it collides with something harder, but it doesn't break of its own accord.
2) I would not say that organisms that aren't animals perceive, but that they respond to stimuli. The reason is that bacteria, plants and fungi do not learn from their experiences; they merely react as their genes specify they should. Evolution generates information across a whole population of a living species over time, and one can say that the species has "learned" when its members change as a metaphor. But the individual organisms gain no information; each one dies with the same DNA it was born with. True perception, individuals learning from the physical environment, is restricted to the animals. (Or if you prefer: animals are able to create a map of reality, and update it as needed, through their perceptions, which other organisms cannot do.)
3) The chief difficulty of psi-epistemic interpretations of quantum theory isn't disagreeing with experimental results (no interpretation disagrees with experiments, because any proposal that did that would be discarded instantly.) It's accounting for the correlations between measurements of entangled particles, such as the particle pairs in John Bell's famous paper, in a way that can be reconciled with relativity's constraints on causality. That's a problem for psi-ontic interpretations too, but it's significantly harder when measurement is supposed to be just the experimenters getting more information about the particles in their experiment.
I might have a quibble or two about your language, too? :-)
1) " ... directedness, far from being limited to living things, is a universal feature of reality. The difference is that inorganic directedness is almost wholly passive, evinced by circumstances external to the inorganic thing..." In rereading this, I find I may be in closer agreement than I thought initially: but I wanted to explore the concept of all inorganic (and organic) reactions being in response to the "laws of physics" that try to minimize free energy differences between various states of existence, sometimes to a fully stable equilibrium state, and sometimes only to an interim semi-equilibrium status. "Life" extracts that energy temporarily to counter entropy and continue its existence if/when possible, but I am not sure the ideas of "directedness" really applies.
2) " ... organisms that aren't animals perceive, but that they respond to stimuli...." But a response to a stimulus is a perception, is it not, even if it does not involve consciousness or other forms of awareness?
"... But the individual organisms gain no information; each one dies with the same DNA it was born with." But it may have gained "better" information from its parents/ precursors and/or passed along something different to its "offspring" or "replicated/ reproduced" genes, cells, tissues, or bodies. If that difference aids survival, all to the good; otherwise not so much.
" ... animals are able to create a map of reality, and update it as needed, through their perceptions, which other organisms cannot do." Your phrasing implies that even the map of reality created by humans is actually a valid representation, rather than just something that sort of lets us carry on more or less successfully, so as to potentially pass our genes (and culture?), etc., to the next generation.
3) I had to look up what "psi-epistemic" meant, and I am still not sure I know, but it seems to be mostly a definitional difference. With the advances of scientific investigations, I surmise that a lot of philosophy as mental gyrations is moving down to such definitional squabbles?
1) "Directedness" to my mind implies merely an inherent tendency to reach some goal, or end-state, without implying any intention to do so. So "A system out of equilibrium tends to change towards equilibrium" does ascribe a directedness to the system. What our host calls "directedness" I would prefer to call "intentionality".
2) An unconscious response to a stimulus is not a "perception" in my idiolect, no; perception assumes and involves some awareness. If a doctor hits your leg just below the knee, the abrupt kick that immediately follows is a response to the hit, but would you say it was a response to your perception of the hit? Not so, to my mind; the perception comes only after the hit and the kick finish.
3) "Psi-epistemic" means "measurement of quantum ensembles occurs in the mind of the experimenter", contrasted with "psi-ontic" which means "measurement is a real physical change to the quantum system". It's a classification of QM interpretations, based on the fundamental entities each interpretation postulates as the things QM is actually about.
When you write about emergent phenomena and directedness I think there is one concept missing from the essay: teleology, or rather non-teleology. Particularly when you ascend from substrate physics into organisms and onto social levels. This is something they drum into you in any class about evolution (in my case some anthropology units I took).
This is very important because it trips up most laypeople into going into completely false tangents - ie they follow the intuitive-but-wrong thinking that giraffes' necks evolved to reach higher leaves. Anyone who understands Darwinian ideas of course understands that giraffe's neck resulted from many generations of proto-giraffes surviving and reproducing more successfully *as a result of* having a (slightly) longer neck than their conspecifics. This non-teleological principle applies to social behaviour as well - I find it to be a perfect escape from the false dichotomy between nature and nurture forced onto gender.
Rather than arguing between nature/nurture, male vs female social patterns can be explained as stable behaviours resulting from the fact that such patterns provided stable reproductive success. (IE any societies without "gender norms" didn't survive because they failed to reproduce sufficiently reliably). They are culturally passed onto successive generations but they are not created/maintained by culture alone, hence can't be "abolished" as so many feminists advocate.
I find the Gödel(-Rosser) incompleteness theorems wildly under-utilized, philosophically; though when I go to bat for them, I tend to get mired in finicky hair-splitting with skeptics also familiar with them. Such is the nature of things, I figure, given the personality generally required to dig through them carefully. I try not to be the kind of person who frustrates me, and occasionally succeed.
Penrose certainly screamed through the basics of an understanding with aplomb. My quick notes, striking off from his overview:
0. He's collapsing the two proofs (which isn't kooky, it's more about emphasis). I find separating them much more useful to the intuition. His statement gives a good grasp of the quick(est?) undecidability proof, useful for both the "decision problem"/termination, and incompleteness; less so, I think, of the inconsistency result.
1. Moreover, the collapse jumps past the consistency/completeness tradeoff. The Gödel-Rosser proofs clinched that you don't get both (unless you're down in raw addition and some multiplication, but that's a bit in the weeds for this level). I find more glimmering insight in the way that a push towards "perceiving all truth" is provably incompatible with "being right all the time". (and in any deductive logic, once you're wrong once, you can derive any falsehood as truth; another intuitional banger)
2. So! We can then moderate our use of the inconsistency results, since consciousness doesn't (can't?) drive for universally rigorous consistency, in the math-logic sense used in the proofs. (see next caveat, though) This is why we can understand that "love your neighbor" and "punch bullies back harder" are both good pieces of advice without being universally consistent (for many/all bullies are neighbors, and we can consider love and nose-punching inconsistent).
3. But despair not! The creation of consistency is exactly what makes the universe comprehensible in history, and remains a vital subject for careful reasoning. This consistency challenge seems to be related to the notion of consistent observations as used in quantum state collapse-- but my physics is dreadfully weak, for me to be sure of the force of the connection. *This*, I think, is where Penrose derives his non-computational notion of consciousness.
4. Also! There's a meta-structure to the proof that too often gets lost, especially when used by physicists (because they can't really use it): every level of reasoning can indeed be proven consistent and complete, by moving "up" a level of reasoning. Now, this new meta-level takes on the impossible discrepancy, but I think this is a vital tool in understanding how we "reason about reasoning", using meta-languages.
I've lost track of my notes on an obscure geometric interpretation of the proof, which I also think is deeply enlightening and more readily applicable. But it's been too many years and the details have fled my skull, apparently to live in the universe's stocks of entropy. I'll have to go digging for them (the notes, not the universe's back stock) again soon.
In the book, superabundance, the authors defined wealth as information. I interpret the word information in this context as “how to“. In this sense, the west is wealthy because of our technological “how to”information.
More think & write about it, less you will know about it.
Lorenzo, another well researched and well-reasoned post. Agreed with every point presented and enjoyed concise yet informative presentation of the points.
Just some ponderings:
Regarding consciousness and self-consciousness - by my simple definition - consciousness is the ability to pay attention to our mental and emotional states, and self-consciousness is the ability to observe ourselves doing it and thus better direct our attention and other faculties to solving our existential problems. This is aided by the gene-culture coevolution of language, and thus the ability to operate on symbolic representations. Thus, two levels of cognitive recursion are necessary and sufficient for this phenomenon: being cognizant of paying attention and directing it, and being cognizant of being cognizant. The beauty and the problem lie in the fact that we don’t use all our time for solving existential problems. They’re solved as they arise (or fail to be solved). To toss in a quip, life is like soldiering: long stretches of dull routine, broken by sudden bursts of solving problems at hand. The combination of both builds up into human civilization, including being perplexed about what our mysterious conscience is, as our evolved cognitive and emotional modules cannot solve this, not unlike a computer program that cannot gain insight into the chips, semiconductors, and power sources that make it function from inside the running code.
Neuroscience’s attempt to find a place in the brain, or localized activity where consciousness resides, is a fool’s errand. Same for spirituality, a conscious universe, and other hallucinations of our idling cognitive-emotional adaptations.
Regarding the word itself: Universe. For years now, I wish we used the term Cosmos. Both words have the same meaning. But smart-aleck doctoral student physicists, hearing a word starting with uni-, feel an irresistible urge to quip multi-, particularly if their equations don't fit in our uni- but can be excused by saying - well - it is still true - somewhere else - where we cannot in principle reach. Rather than drop the nonsense; not the least because our primate symbolic logic evolved primarily to convince and deceive one another, including ourselves.
i think cognition bootstrapping itself is: the universe
Not to be too snarky, per se, (and I do like various forms of word play), but with a handle of "Weightless Meaning", how are we to presume that your assertion should carry an weight with us?
As a strict materialist, I have to suppose that during the span from 13+B years ago at the Big Bang (or whatever) to 4.7B years ago when the earth formed, there was no ability for our version of cognition to exist. But we presume that the universe still did.
You’re not describing or confirming the universe with Materialist perspective.
You’re describing the belief that a universe was,
from within a self-verifying model loop.
If the mind cannot observe,
then meaning is not suspended—
it never formed.
The confidence you feel in that gap with academia focused approach?
It’s the echo of your own structure
pretending it’s outside itself.
That’s all i believe.