“I pay close attention to quantum mind theories, I have specific reasons to take them seriously”
Now I am curious. What specific reasons?
Say I had an hour of focus to look into this one of these days. Can you recommend a paper or something similar I could read in that hour that should leave me convinced enough to warrant digging into this more deeply? Like, an overview of central pieces of evidence and arguments for quantum effects being crucial to consciousness with links so one can review the logic and data in detail if sceptical, a hint what profound implications this would has for ethics, theory and empirical methods, and brief rebuttals to common critiques with links to more comprehensive ones if not immediately convincing? Something with math to make it precise? Doesn’t have to (and can’t) cover everything of course, but enough that after an hour, I’d have reason to suspect that they are onto something that cannot be easily otherwise explained, that their interpretation is plausible, and that if they are right, this really matters, so I will be intrigued enough that I would then decide to invest more time, and know where to continue looking?
If there is genuine evidence (or at least a really good, plausible argument to be made for) quantum effects playing a crucial role for consciousness, I would really want and need to know. It would matter for issues I am interested in, like the resolution necessary in scanning and the functionality necessary in the resulting process for uploading to be successful, and independently for evaluating sentience in non-human agents. It intuitively sounds like crucial quantum effects would massively complicate progress in these issues, so I would want good reason to assume that this is actually necessary. But if we cannot make proper progress without it, no matter how annoying it will be to compute, and how unpopular it is, I would want to know.
Originally I was going to answer your question with another question—what kind of relation do you think exists between fundamental physical properties of the brain and (let’s say) phenomenal properties? I’m not asking for biological details, but rather for a philosophical position, about reduction or emergence or whatever. Since you apparently work in consciousness studies, you possibly have quite precise opinions on philosophy of mind; and then I could explain myself in response to those.
But I already discussed my views with @Adele Lopez in the other thread, so I may as well state them here. My main motivation is ontological—I think there is a problem in principle with any attempt to identify (let’s say) phenomenal properties, with physical properties of the brain that are not microphysically exact.
If a physical property is vague, that means there are microphysically exact states where there is no objective fact about whether or not the vague physical property holds—they’re on the fuzzy edge of belonging or not belonging to that classification.
But if the properties constitutive of consciousness are identified with vague physical properties of the brain, that means that there are specific physical states of the brain, where there is no objective fact about e.g. whether or not there is a consciousness present. And I regard that as a reductio ad absurdum, of whatever premise brought you to that conclusion.
Possibly this argument exists in the literature, but I don’t have a reference.
If you do think it’s untenable to reduce consciousness to computational states which are themselves vague coarse-grainings of exact physical states, then you have an incentive to consider quantum mind theories. But certainly the empirical evidence isn’t there yet. The most advanced quantum phenomenon conventionally believed to be at work in biology, is quantum coherence in chlorophyll, and even there, there isn’t quite consensus about its nature or role.
Empirically, I think the verdict on quantum biology is still “not proven”—not proved, and not disproved. The debate is mostly theoretical, e.g. about whether decoherence can be avoided. The problem is that quantum effects are potentially very subtle (the literature on quantum coherence in chlorophyll again illustrates this). It’s not like the statistics of observable behaviors of neurons tells us all the biophysical mechanisms that contribute to those behaviors. For that we need intimate biophysical knowledge of the cell that doesn’t quite exist.
Mh. I am not sure I follow. Can I give an analogy, and you tell me whether it holds or not?
I work on consciousness. As such, I am aware that individual human minds are very, very complicated and confusing things.
But in the past, I have also worked on human crowd dynamics. Every single human in a human crowd is one of these very complicated human things with their complicated conscious minds. Every one is an individual. Every single one has a distinct experience affecting their behaviour. They turn up at the crowd that day with different amounts of knowledge, and intentions, and strength, and all sorts of complicating factors. Like, hey, maybe they have themselves studied crowd dynamics, and wish to use this knowledge to keep safe.
But if I zoom out, and look at the crowd as a whole, and want to figure out e.g. if there will be a stampede… I do not actually need to know any of that. A dense human crowd starts acting very much like a liquid. Tell me how dense it it, tell me how narrow the corridors are among which it will be channeled… and we can saw whether people will get likely trampled, or even certainly trampled. Not which one will be trampled, but whether there will be a trampling. I can say, if we implement a barrier here, the people will spill around there, if we close a door here, people will pile up there. If we enter more people here, the force will get intolerable over there. Basically, I can easily model the macro effects of the whole system, while entirely ignoring the micro effects. Because they even out. Because the individual randomness of the humans does not not change the movement of the crowd as a whole. And if a grad student said, but shouldn’t we be interviewing all the individual people about their intentions for how they want to move today, I would say absolutely hard no, that is neither necessary nor helpful, but a huge time sink.
Similarly, I know that atoms are not, at all, simply little billiard balls that just vibrate more and push further away from each other if you make them warmer, like we are shown in primary school. There are a lot of chemical and physical effects where that is very important to know. But if I just want to model whether heating the content of my pressure pot to a certain temperature will make it explode? Doesn’t matter at all. I can assume, for simplicities sake, that atoms are little billiard balls, and be perfectly fine. If I added more information, my prediction would not get better. I might actually end up with so much confusion I can’t predict anything at all, because I never finish the math. I also know that Newstons ideas were tragically limited compared to Einsteins, and if I were to built a space rocket, I would certainly want proper physics accounting for relativity. But if I am just playing billards, with everyone involved on earth, and the balls moving insanely slowly compared to the speed of light? I’ll be calculating trajectories with Newton, and not feeling the slightest built guilty. You get the idea.
I see consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, but in a very straightforward sense of the word, the way that say, crowd violence is an emergent phenomenon. Not magical or beyond physics. And I suspect there comes a degree of resolution in the underlying substrate where it ceases to matter for the macroscopic effect, where figuring that out is just detail that will cause extra work and confuse everyone, and we already have a horrible issue in biology with people getting so cluttered beneath details that we get completely stuck. I don’t think it matters how many neurotransmitters exactly are poured into the gap, but just whether the neuron fires or not as a result, for example. So I suspect that that degree of resolution is breached far before we reach the quantum level, with whole groups of technically very different things being grouped as effectively the same for our sakes and purposes. So every macroscopic state would have a defined designation as conscious or not, but beneath that, a lot of very different stuff would be grouped together. But there would be no undefined states, per se. The conscious system would be the one where, to take a common example, information has looped around and back to the same neuron, regardless of how exactly it did.
But I say all this while not having a good understanding of quantum physics at all, so I am really sorry if I got you wrong.
every macroscopic state would have a defined designation as conscious or not [...] there would be no undefined states, per se
But the actual states of things are microscopic. And from a microscopic perspective, macroscopic states are vague. They have edge cases, they have sorites problems.
For crowds, or clouds, this doesn’t matter. That these are vague concepts does not create a philosophical crisis, because we have no reason to believe that there is an “essence of crowd” or “essence of cloud”, that is either present or not present, in every possible state of affairs.
Consciousness is different—it is definitely, actually there. As such, its relationship to the microphysical reality cannot be vague or conventional in nature. The relationship has to be exact.
The conscious system would be the one where, to take a common example, information has looped around and back to the same neuron, regardless of how exactly it did.
So by my criteria, the question is whether you can define informational states, and circulation of information, in such a way that from a microphysical perspective, there is never any ambiguity about whether they occurred. For all possible microphysical states, you should be able to say whether or not a given “informational state” is present. I’m not saying that every microphysical detail must contribute to consciousness; but if consciousness is to be identified with informational states, informational states have to have a fully objective existence.
“I pay close attention to quantum mind theories, I have specific reasons to take them seriously”
Now I am curious. What specific reasons?
Say I had an hour of focus to look into this one of these days. Can you recommend a paper or something similar I could read in that hour that should leave me convinced enough to warrant digging into this more deeply? Like, an overview of central pieces of evidence and arguments for quantum effects being crucial to consciousness with links so one can review the logic and data in detail if sceptical, a hint what profound implications this would has for ethics, theory and empirical methods, and brief rebuttals to common critiques with links to more comprehensive ones if not immediately convincing? Something with math to make it precise? Doesn’t have to (and can’t) cover everything of course, but enough that after an hour, I’d have reason to suspect that they are onto something that cannot be easily otherwise explained, that their interpretation is plausible, and that if they are right, this really matters, so I will be intrigued enough that I would then decide to invest more time, and know where to continue looking?
If there is genuine evidence (or at least a really good, plausible argument to be made for) quantum effects playing a crucial role for consciousness, I would really want and need to know. It would matter for issues I am interested in, like the resolution necessary in scanning and the functionality necessary in the resulting process for uploading to be successful, and independently for evaluating sentience in non-human agents. It intuitively sounds like crucial quantum effects would massively complicate progress in these issues, so I would want good reason to assume that this is actually necessary. But if we cannot make proper progress without it, no matter how annoying it will be to compute, and how unpopular it is, I would want to know.
Originally I was going to answer your question with another question—what kind of relation do you think exists between fundamental physical properties of the brain and (let’s say) phenomenal properties? I’m not asking for biological details, but rather for a philosophical position, about reduction or emergence or whatever. Since you apparently work in consciousness studies, you possibly have quite precise opinions on philosophy of mind; and then I could explain myself in response to those.
But I already discussed my views with @Adele Lopez in the other thread, so I may as well state them here. My main motivation is ontological—I think there is a problem in principle with any attempt to identify (let’s say) phenomenal properties, with physical properties of the brain that are not microphysically exact.
If a physical property is vague, that means there are microphysically exact states where there is no objective fact about whether or not the vague physical property holds—they’re on the fuzzy edge of belonging or not belonging to that classification.
But if the properties constitutive of consciousness are identified with vague physical properties of the brain, that means that there are specific physical states of the brain, where there is no objective fact about e.g. whether or not there is a consciousness present. And I regard that as a reductio ad absurdum, of whatever premise brought you to that conclusion.
Possibly this argument exists in the literature, but I don’t have a reference.
If you do think it’s untenable to reduce consciousness to computational states which are themselves vague coarse-grainings of exact physical states, then you have an incentive to consider quantum mind theories. But certainly the empirical evidence isn’t there yet. The most advanced quantum phenomenon conventionally believed to be at work in biology, is quantum coherence in chlorophyll, and even there, there isn’t quite consensus about its nature or role.
Empirically, I think the verdict on quantum biology is still “not proven”—not proved, and not disproved. The debate is mostly theoretical, e.g. about whether decoherence can be avoided. The problem is that quantum effects are potentially very subtle (the literature on quantum coherence in chlorophyll again illustrates this). It’s not like the statistics of observable behaviors of neurons tells us all the biophysical mechanisms that contribute to those behaviors. For that we need intimate biophysical knowledge of the cell that doesn’t quite exist.
Mh. I am not sure I follow. Can I give an analogy, and you tell me whether it holds or not?
I work on consciousness. As such, I am aware that individual human minds are very, very complicated and confusing things.
But in the past, I have also worked on human crowd dynamics. Every single human in a human crowd is one of these very complicated human things with their complicated conscious minds. Every one is an individual. Every single one has a distinct experience affecting their behaviour. They turn up at the crowd that day with different amounts of knowledge, and intentions, and strength, and all sorts of complicating factors. Like, hey, maybe they have themselves studied crowd dynamics, and wish to use this knowledge to keep safe.
But if I zoom out, and look at the crowd as a whole, and want to figure out e.g. if there will be a stampede… I do not actually need to know any of that. A dense human crowd starts acting very much like a liquid. Tell me how dense it it, tell me how narrow the corridors are among which it will be channeled… and we can saw whether people will get likely trampled, or even certainly trampled. Not which one will be trampled, but whether there will be a trampling. I can say, if we implement a barrier here, the people will spill around there, if we close a door here, people will pile up there. If we enter more people here, the force will get intolerable over there. Basically, I can easily model the macro effects of the whole system, while entirely ignoring the micro effects. Because they even out. Because the individual randomness of the humans does not not change the movement of the crowd as a whole. And if a grad student said, but shouldn’t we be interviewing all the individual people about their intentions for how they want to move today, I would say absolutely hard no, that is neither necessary nor helpful, but a huge time sink.
Similarly, I know that atoms are not, at all, simply little billiard balls that just vibrate more and push further away from each other if you make them warmer, like we are shown in primary school. There are a lot of chemical and physical effects where that is very important to know. But if I just want to model whether heating the content of my pressure pot to a certain temperature will make it explode? Doesn’t matter at all. I can assume, for simplicities sake, that atoms are little billiard balls, and be perfectly fine. If I added more information, my prediction would not get better. I might actually end up with so much confusion I can’t predict anything at all, because I never finish the math. I also know that Newstons ideas were tragically limited compared to Einsteins, and if I were to built a space rocket, I would certainly want proper physics accounting for relativity. But if I am just playing billards, with everyone involved on earth, and the balls moving insanely slowly compared to the speed of light? I’ll be calculating trajectories with Newton, and not feeling the slightest built guilty. You get the idea.
I see consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, but in a very straightforward sense of the word, the way that say, crowd violence is an emergent phenomenon. Not magical or beyond physics. And I suspect there comes a degree of resolution in the underlying substrate where it ceases to matter for the macroscopic effect, where figuring that out is just detail that will cause extra work and confuse everyone, and we already have a horrible issue in biology with people getting so cluttered beneath details that we get completely stuck. I don’t think it matters how many neurotransmitters exactly are poured into the gap, but just whether the neuron fires or not as a result, for example. So I suspect that that degree of resolution is breached far before we reach the quantum level, with whole groups of technically very different things being grouped as effectively the same for our sakes and purposes. So every macroscopic state would have a defined designation as conscious or not, but beneath that, a lot of very different stuff would be grouped together. But there would be no undefined states, per se. The conscious system would be the one where, to take a common example, information has looped around and back to the same neuron, regardless of how exactly it did.
But I say all this while not having a good understanding of quantum physics at all, so I am really sorry if I got you wrong.
But the actual states of things are microscopic. And from a microscopic perspective, macroscopic states are vague. They have edge cases, they have sorites problems.
For crowds, or clouds, this doesn’t matter. That these are vague concepts does not create a philosophical crisis, because we have no reason to believe that there is an “essence of crowd” or “essence of cloud”, that is either present or not present, in every possible state of affairs.
Consciousness is different—it is definitely, actually there. As such, its relationship to the microphysical reality cannot be vague or conventional in nature. The relationship has to be exact.
So by my criteria, the question is whether you can define informational states, and circulation of information, in such a way that from a microphysical perspective, there is never any ambiguity about whether they occurred. For all possible microphysical states, you should be able to say whether or not a given “informational state” is present. I’m not saying that every microphysical detail must contribute to consciousness; but if consciousness is to be identified with informational states, informational states have to have a fully objective existence.