[acqq]

So it's your "experience" is that you are simply "special" (based on a wishful thinking) or is there anything else? I don't think so, as you yourself write it's just your own belief: "mostly a negative position in the sense that I don't believe matter, as described by the laws of physics, can give a coherent explanation of the phenomenon of consciousness."

My belief is that you even don't want to understand it.

There are no "laws of physics" that have to be changed to make a computer that is as complex as a person's brain: it's just that our technology is inefficient: one human's brain has some 100 billion neurons, we have had a significant effort to simulate around 100 million times less:

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

The organic cells are simply extremely efficient in the tasks they are doing, compared to our technology.

But even that small order of magnitude of cells are enough to evolve a basic "self awareness": it's simply an evolutionary advantage for multicellular life forms not to treat their own parts of the body the same as the competition and the rest of the environment. Basically a need to treat distinctively "myself" "food" "a potential sex partner" and an "enemy" is built in in the complex life forms that move (i.e. all kinds of animals).

That "special feeling" of you "being special" that you are aware of is something that you share with most of the complex life, and it is not a surprise in any way.

[egjerlow]

I don't claim to be special - what I'm describing goes for all conscious beings, after all (and it could very well be that there are conscious animals). It seems to me you are trying really hard to make it seem like I'm uncomfortable on a personal or emotional level with the concept that consciousness can arise from matter only; please belive me when I say I am not. But on an intellectual and rational level I find the idea untenable. I don't understand why this is so hard to accept for you?

Your argument about the complexity of computers would have weight if I had been claiming that the reason consciousness cannot be found outside humans is because nothing can be as complex as the human brain; I am not claiming that. Hence you can make computers as complex as you want - you still haven't answered how subjective experience can arise from matter.

There is nothing about me in particular that is special, but every conscious being does possess a quality or is inhabited by a phenomenon that is unlike anything else in the universe that we know of. That makes it pretty damn special, yes.

But again, it's not the feeling of feeling special that I am talking about here. It is the phenomenon of subjective experience.

[acqq]

> It seems to me you are trying really hard to make it seem like I'm uncomfortable on a personal or emotional level with the concept that consciousness can arise from matter only; please belive me when I say I am not. But on an intellectual and rational level I find the idea untenable. I don't understand why this is so hard to accept for you?

Thanks for trying to explain your belief to me. If we concentrate on exactly your last post, maybe you can understand how I see it: I see again that you claim that you came to that conclusion "intellectually and rationally" but everything else contradicts that. I see the claim to uniqueness of conscious beings (and I still haven't heard from you if you consider only humans "conscious") as a "the phenomenon of subjective experience." That is, because you "subjectively experience" it, that means to me "not rationally" and I still conclude it's your "feeling of being special."

If you would really approach your claims "intellectually and rationally" you'd understand that that "subjective experience" which you see as something special is an emerging property. And the emerging properties are seldom "intuitive" and all appear to us "unlike anything else in the universe" until we simply use enough computation to reproduce them.

If you are aware of the history of human understanding of the movements of planets you would know that even these simple paths were before seen "unlike anything else in the universe": we didn't know how anything can continue to move so, and before Galileo we didn't even know that anything could not circle the Earth -- note the Earth being completely "special" in that understanding. Then, only better measurements helped us see the truth: Galileo discovering moons circling around other planets (making our Moon not special) and proving that the circular motion around other planets exists. Tycho Brache more accurately measuring the movements of the planets, and Kepler recognizing that all the paths can be seen as ellipsoid once we accept Earth's non-uniqueness, but that it actually moves around the Sun. Note: only to come to that conclusion, Kepler needed the huge amount of precise measurements that nobody before him had! And he had to perform for that time immense number of calculations, something that was certainly out of reach to 99.9999999999% (I'm not sure about the number of nines) of the human population at that moment, especially out of reach even to those who were rich enough and knowledgeable enough to perform them, but who would still not be even willing to spend so much time of their life on that topic unless they were ready to accept that the Earth doesn't have to be special in being a center of the universe.

And finally, even after that unique amount of measurements and calculations, it was still not answerable to anybody what is moving the planets in that ellipsoid paths, that is how anything like that can "arise" from anything we "subjectively knew." That is, anybody could claim exactly what you claim now.

But then came Newton, being lucky to invent a new way to speed up the calculations: the infinitesimal calculus. It was effectively a new "language" that allowed immensely more concise description of the calculations involved, which allowed him to being able to describe the movements of the planets and moons as, up until then completely different from anything anybody "subjectively knew", the continuous free fall toward the object around which they rotate.

Note: unless you studied physics, you most probably don't even know that the planets are really continuously in the "free fall" or even that exactly that is the reason why the humans, being inside of the International Space Station orbiting only 250 mi above the Earth, still can "float" inside of it. The gravitational forces are quite strong only 250 mi above the Earth, but the cause of the stuff and humans floating is their "continuous free fall"! Both the emerging properties of a single simple law.

So was that anything of "subjective experience" before first human was in orbit? Either no, or yes, but proving the opposite, depending whom you'd ask. Is it today? Yes. It it "rationally obvious" even today? Actually no, unless you are definitely able to do the computations following the physics formulas, note, that capability is important to be able to be "rational" about that. Was it possible to calculate it 300 years ago? Yes, but made easier due to the "shortcut" of the infinitesimal calculus. What is that actually? An "emerging property" of just a simple law F = G m1 x m2 / r^2

Do all computations have some nice shortcuts? Depends, but for some emerging properties you actually have to perform all the steps! Take a Jula fractal: f(z) = z^2 + c is the whole formula, and we needed so fast computers like today's to produce this (emerging properties of calculating the formula):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rMyDWoTArU

or (Mandelbrot, also the same formula):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrtGOMKrask

Please watch it, to get an idea how much can emerge from something as simple as f(z) = z^2 + c The computations needed for video are immense, we're just at the moment that we have strong enough computers to do them, record the output and speed it up enough for you to watch it in only 10 minutes. Just 100 years ago nobody would have been able to produce that output in any form.

Note: before Newton, nobody could believe it is so simple: that all the complex (and they are complex) planetary motions are an emerging property of such a simple law.

Likewise, your "subjective experience" of being special being "conscious" is an emerging property. The underlying completely materialistic laws are simple, but simply a lot of computation is needed for the property to emerge, if you want to reproduce it with our current technology.

The nature reproduces it, of course, all the time, having much smaller "building blocks", and there is a physicist who wrote:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/29/seriousl...

"Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood"

And he also wrote a whole book on the topic:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/bigpicture/

[egjerlow]

>Thanks for trying to explain your belief to me. If we concentrate on exactly your last post, maybe you can understand how I see it: I see again that you claim that you came to that conclusion "intellectually and rationally" but everything else contradicts that. I see the claim to uniqueness of conscious beings (and I still haven't heard from you if you consider only humans "conscious") as a "the phenomenon of subjective experience." That is, because you "subjectively experience" it, that means to me "not rationally" and I still conclude it's your "feeling of being special."

I think we already here have some deep reasons for disagreement: If I understand you correctly here, you're saying that no conclusion reached on 'subjective' grounds can be rational - maybe you would even go so far as to say that what is rational is identical to knowledge gained via the scientific method? If so, I would disagree with your definition of what is rational.

(I don't know whether animals are conscious in the same way we are - I would have no problems either way. As I said, it's not about humans (or myself) being special, it is that the phenomenon of consciousness is special).

> If you would really approach your claims "intellectually and rationally" you'd understand that that "subjective experience" which you see as something special is an emerging property.

This is a really bold claim, and it is indeed the locus of our disagreement, so again I'd have to say I disagree :) Emergence is not a magic wand you can wave and make every problem go away; for all phenomena where 'emergence' have been invoked as an explanation, we are really just talking about very complex phenomena that are very very hard to reduce to their base 'constituents' (elementary particles and their force transmitters), but which we can at least imagine can be reduced to these constituent parts - in other words, I can imagine starting from some basic building blocks of matter and, through some very complex patterns of organization, I can imagine moving from that starting point to the end result - conceptually, even if I cannot trace all the steps with my current understanding.

But this is not something I can imagine with the phenomenon of subjective experience. (An aside here: It seems you take me to say that 'because of my subjective experience that I cannot imagine this, this cannot be true' - what I am saying is that it is subjective experience itself that is what we're trying to explain here. So referring to earlier people not 'subjectively experiencing' an understanding of how e.g. planets can move is not really on target: My concern here is with the phenomenon of subjective experience itself).

What I mean is that in order to explain, say, my subjective experience of how an apple tastes, it's not just a matter of saying 'well, now your neurons are firing in this way and we know this is the taste center of your brain, so that's why you have a sensation of taste'. That is showing a correlation. What I'm saying is that this is not an explanation, and to me it shows that it will be impossible to move from a purely materialistic account of this experience to my actual subjective experience of the thing. How can we ever translate the firing of the neurons in my brain into the subjective world my consciousness inhabits? How can atoms, no matter how sophisticately arranged, give rise to this type of phenomenon?

Let me try to say it in another way: You could measure the activity of the brain and give an 'objective' account of what happens to a person: Now they're angry, now they're cold, now they're slightly hungry, etc. But it stops there! How will you move from this objective description to the actual experience of these feelings and states of mind?

Sean Carroll is a great physicist, and it's great that he engages with these questions, but he is mainly a physicist, not a philosopher of mind, and he does exhibit the same hubris that many of our ilk (yes, I'm a physicist too) have when it comes to other fields. The question I'm raising here is far from being unanimously agreed upon, and when Carroll writes stuff like "To persuade anyone otherwise, you would have to point to something the brain does that is in apparent conflict with the Standard Model or general relativity.", it's either disingenous or just a bit lazy. Giving a materialistic account of consciousness is non-trivial no matter whether the brain violates SM or GR or not, and whether it does or not will have little bearing on this problem.

If you're interested in reading more, and indeed seeing that I'm not the only one who sees this as a big problem of a materialistic account of the universe, here is a book I can recommend: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1851683763

[acqq]

> How will you move from this objective description to the actual experience of these feelings and states of mind?

I'm sorry, but that question still sounds to me exactly the same like "how many fairies can dance on the top of the needle." It's a thing of your imagination: for me, you just imagine that there is anything more than the electrical and chemical reactions, and there isn't anything. You are just using empty words that mean something to you, but not to me. Just like fairies don't exist, but many believed.

And I've already written enough how I consider that, what you believe is "something special" just an emerging property of these electrical and chemical reactions, produced in the humans by the evolutionary forces, not different to what any other animal has in order to function. Including the worms.

I know too much math, computing and physics, that I do believe that I can actually write a program that can give exactly the same answers like you do here relatively easily, because you give that little actual arguments. Moreover, I know too much math, computing and physics and have too much experience that you can't convince me that something like that is not possible, as I saw how with my own hands I can replicate a lot of "emerging properties" that were just "uniquely human" only some decades ago, and now there are programs that do that, today. So the computation can explain everything, no need to invoke anything beyond that. Everything is information, which can be stored and processed in many different ways. The physical laws are completely consistent with and sufficient for all the computation needed for all the emerging properties that we observe.

If somebody would believe you, he would have to consider impossible most of what we already produced since we have the computers. Including the, simple as it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

which is, as you can see: "undecidable, which means that given an initial pattern and a later pattern, no algorithm exists that can tell whether the later pattern is ever going to appear." That means that there is no shortcut for it, you have to compute it to see what happens in some future moment. What your claim boils down to is that "you know" that "what happens in the future of Conway's Game of Life can't be explained by the statement 'you just have to compute it'." Which is obviously false. So for me you are just confused by the fact that some emerging property is undecidable, and attribute that property to something coming from "outside."

[egjerlow]

Ok, I think we either have some communication issues or philosophical differences (if I understand you correctly, you're saying that subjective experience is an illusion? Which to me just shows the absurd lengths one has to go to in order to rule out any question that cannot be answered by science. Your own subjective experience is literally the starting point for any investigative endeavor you might attempt in this world, so I'd be careful with claiming it is only your imagination) or a combination of both, so maybe we should recognize this and leave it here.

You have provided ample examples of emergent properties, which are interesting in their own right for sure, but if you really imagine that Conway's game of life and the unknowable future of that game is analogous to the phenomenon of subjective experience, we either are miscommunicating or there is a quite insurmountable barrier of understanding between us.

Either way, thanks for engaging!

[acqq]

> if you really imagine that Conway's game of life and the unknowable future of that game is analogous to the phenomenon of subjective experience

No. Convay's Game of Life does not include all the physical rules that govern the physical world. The actual rules are much, much more complex, but even they can be condensed to a single equation:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/04/the-worl...

Conway's game is just a minuscule subset of those, but it is, just like the fractal formulas are, completely enough to demonstrate that the emerging properties are never "intuitive" by looking at the rules themselves, and that for the outcomes of most of the rules there are no "shortcuts" -- you have to calculate all the steps, not skipping anything.

So I see your claim of "uniqueness" of your "subjective experience" nothing more than a claim that you are unable or not willing to accept that the given rules can produce such emerging properties (and additionally being confused by that property of the rule's application being undecidable for any interesting set of rules and outcomes). As I see it, it's completely obvious, from many examples I've given which show that the emerging properties produced by the application of much more minimal rules were absolutely beyond what people were able to accept. But the "non-intuitive" emerging properties do exist, and the property of undecidability effectively guarantees that nobody can predict them in advance, or imagine an easy "shortcut" to some outcome, and also that you can't claim what you claim (that the outcome you "experience" is impossible) and remain intellectually honest, now after you were made aware of how the emerging properties actually work and what are the properties of most of the applications of the rules. More precisely, to remain intellectually honest, you must admit that the emerging properties you consider "unique" can be the result of the given rules. Your only consistent claim can then be "even if they can, I don't like to think about them as such." Nothing more.

On the other side, we can, once we calculate enough, be certain that the application of the rules is enough for any property we observe in any such experiment. Which is what we did with all the simple examples I've demonstrated. But like I've said, there's no shortcut for many steps (for some subsets we do have some, like Newton's laws for exactly two bodies, but see what happens with three already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem -- "Unlike two-body problems, no closed-form solution exists for all sets of initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required" meaning, again, you have to do all the calculation steps to know what is going to happen), so you not being able to find one shortcut exactly where you'd like is also completely normal and trivial, and can not support any claim. It's the property of how the rules work.