Quote:
Originally Posted by PairTheBoard
There is nothing in today's physics which predicts consciousness.
PairTheBoard
You all need to define for me what is the consciousness that you want to be predicted with current physics? List its properties and then why they cant be reproduced with a semi macroscopic system of many degrees of freedom.
Indeed what would satisfy you as prediction of consciousness? It makes absolutely perfect sense to me that if you design a system that reacts based on input and stores the important details of success or failure it will converge to a system that behaves exactly like a human does if you put tremendously more effort into it than current computers and give it significant degrees of freedom, memory and time to experiment, goals, desires and values based on desires etc and then allow even this to be flexible later. How do you wish to see it? From the inside? How could you ever see it from the inside if you are not it? You can only see a prediction of what it is from the inside. Why would current physics fail to make that prediction? What prediction you want to see of what? What property of the inside you want predicted? The voice talking to you now or the endless billions of photons that get to your eyes forming smooth images, the sound in your ears and the trillions of trillions of atoms of objects in that room you are touching?
Being conscious for a primitive animal is elementary easy. A big enough number of electro-chemical conditionals will have it acting properly for most cases and always running away from you even if you mean good.
What you are after is that little voice inside telling you the world makes sense this way doesn't it and the endless stream of thoughts that follow if you ignore certain tasks and focus on on others with a will that we have discussed its probably not even a real "free" thing but an observed thing. Well it was built after a tremendously long time interval of training and now it is so good and rapid that it feels continuously successful and the endless neurotransmitters activated keep you so glad to be alive to witness it. It's all statistically mathematically sound to me and i would expect it starts very erratically exactly like babies. Its a stochastic dynamical system that updates its decision core live based on chemical reactions and electrical signals. The updating is chemically based and connections based. Connections also affect chemistry.
I bet when the first sentient system is created it will describe to you how it is thinking also. It may be similar to our experience of smooth semirandom flow.
Tegmark calls it a new state of matter and i say no it's not a new state of matter, it's a new type of organization of biologically macromolecularly based matter. It is the architecture and interactivity of all its parts that give it its properties. All emergent exactly as you expect when a system of atoms and molecules is organized to give you a house that has a roof in which you can now eg put a ball and it rolls down! lol. Of course the incline created and its properties are emergent! A house has other emergent properties too like it traps heat inside and has no wind or rain inside! Imagine that, all emergent, quarks and electrons cooperating to have no weather inside and funny temperature gradients!
Look at it this way. What if we have a system that based on information flow, information access ie past memory (database) and current objectives that are reinforced by neutronsmitter action of pleasure or displeasure and all this mix re-valuated at every second you decide what comes next in actions or thoughts because that decision connection was maximized as choice of most severe direction. The system is inherently stochastic and unpredictable and yet it does have points of attraction that you converge and works indeed based on wisdom from past experiments. Why doesn't this look like what is going on actually or how it all started even in a clumsy clueless manner? You have a super fast interpretation of the senses input to establish current environment conditions, then based on ongoing objectives you act to maximize satisfaction of the objectives, but because there is randomness and the environment also is highly dynamical and even more so if you interact with it, you end up having such an amazingly chaotic and yet statistically meaningful system. You live and update the system and connections grow etc as you play this endless game. Why is this beyond current physics?
Last edited by masque de Z; 07-08-2018 at 04:28 AM.