Comment by Aerroon
4 days ago
>The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions...
Isn't that 'just' the laws of nature + the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Life is the ultimate increaser of entropy, because for all the order we create we just create more disorder.
Conway's game of life has very simple rules (laws of nature) and it ends up very complex. The universe doing the same thing with much more complicated rules seems pretty natural.
Yeah, agreed. The actual real riddle is consciousness. Why does it seems some configurations of this matter and energy zap into existence something that actually (allegedly) did not exist in its prior configuration.
I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if something meets the below five criteria, we must accept that it is conscious:
(1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an environment, updated from ongoing input.
(2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that environment.
(3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present into a single temporally extended self-model.
(4) It uses these models with self-derived agency to generate and evaluate counterfactuals: Predictions of alternative futures under alternative actions. (i.e. a general predictive function.)
(5) It has control channels through which those evaluations shape its future trajectories in ways that are not trivially reducible to a fixed reflex table.
This would also indicate that Boltzmann Brains are not conscious -- so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains, which would otherwise be very surprising -- and that P-Zombies are impossible by definition. I've been working on a book about this for the past three years...
If you remove the terms "self", "agency", and "trivially reducible", it seems to me that a classical robot/game AI planning algorithm, which no one thinks is conscious, matches these criteria.
How do you define these terms without begging the question?
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> so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains
I think I agree you've excluded them from the definition, but I don't see why that has an impact on likelihood.
I don't think any of these need to lead to qualia for any obvious reason. It could be a p-zombie why not.
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Is there a working title or some way to follow for updates?
There is no objective evidence consciousness exists as distinct from an information process.
There is no objective evidence of anything at all.
It all gets filtered through consciousness.
"Objectivity" really means a collection of organisms having (mostly) the same subjective experiences, and building the same models, given the same stimuli.
Given that less intelligent organisms build simpler models with poorer abstractions and less predictive power, it's very naive to assume that our model-making systems aren't similarly crippled in ways we can't understand.
Or imagine.
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