[llamaimperative]

Eh, not really. There are things all along the alive-dead spectrum. “Life” is readily explained as, essentially, chemical reactions. There’s nothing going on in a living thing that you can’t explain in terms of unliving things.

The original emergence of life is rather mysterious/special, but the mechanics of how it now propagates out of “dead” matter is not.

This is not true of consciousness. We cannot find any evidence of anything in particular that would “turn the lights on” in matter that didn’t previously have the lights turned on.

[ASalazarMX]

We are just monkeys trying to explain the universe and failing miserably because we're not smart enough to understand it at the basic level. Having failed repeatedly, some monkeys declare it mysterious and unknowable because they are too proud to embrace our limitations.

That we are not able to understand how, doesn't prove that life and consciousness arise from anything besides physics. Magic doesn't exist.

I'm not foreign to the irony of a dumb monkey declaring something doesn't exist, but I think it's been overwhelmingly clear through the ages that magic never has had any direct effect outside our imaginations.

[llamaimperative]

No one is claiming it arises from anything besides physics, or at least I’m not.

[ASalazarMX]

Oh, I re-read your original comment and you're right. You said the origin of life is mysterious/special, and that we can't find how consciousness starts, but never attributed that mystery/specialness/lack of evidence to magic.

I think the wording made me assume you thought those processes had supernatural aid instead of the the incessant trial-and-error of the universe. That's a common argument when discussing the origin of life and consciousness.

[llamaimperative]

Ah yes, you’re reading me correctly now! Apologies for the lack of clarity.

[mistermann]

> Magic doesn't exist.

This itself seems a bit magical.

Do atoms exist?

If so, when did they start to exist?

[bubblyworld]

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I also think it's a little bit premature to say that life is readily explained as chemical reactions. For instance, ecologists study natural selection (i.e. the dynamics of life as we know it) at a much higher level than that, and for good reason! We really don't know how to reduce high-level aspects of behaviour down to matter and interaction yet - not even close.

Biology is the ultimate spaghetti code - there are causal loops between all the layers of abstraction (I guess as a result of enormous optimisation pressure and lots of time). I think that makes full-scale reductionism like you're describing a bit hopeless.

[llamaimperative]

I didn't mean to suggest we understand every interaction from molecular to organism scales, but there's no reason to think that that stack of unfathomably complex and highly chaotic interactions is anything but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions.

[bubblyworld]

I know that's not what you meant, but consider that there may be no feasible way to map those interactions onto a theory of chemical/electrical/thermal interactions even in principle. Scientifically speaking, in this case it's meaningless to say that those interactions "are nothing but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions", because you have no predictive power at that level whatsoever! This can true even though the constituents of any organism must obey the laws of physics at a microscopic scale.

edit: Anyway, we probably don't disagree about much here, I just think that this appeal to reductionism is a common fallacy.

[llamaimperative]

It's not really true that we have "no" predictive power. Everywhere we've ever looked in any system anywhere in the universe, we've found nothing except the reactions that I've described. Even in biological systems.

We use this knowledge every day to predict and produce new drugs (though again, we are not very good at it).

[bubblyworld]

We have found plenty besides those fundamental reactions - sticking to the theme of evolution, take the concept of the gene in natural selection. In that context, genes and their interactions have enormous predictive power. Fundamental interactions between particles do not.

Genes may be made up of such particles but they are their own concept, with their own interactions, which cannot be reduced to that of their constituents. You could argue that in theory you can measure the state of each particle in all of an organism's genes and simulate them according to the laws of particle physics, but that's not actually possible even in principle, for the simple reason that measuring a system to that degree would destroy it (the uncertainty principle).

There are lots of these "causal blankets" in the world, and I think they're a real challenge to the idea that everything is reducible to particle physics.

[mistermann]

I am extremely and genuinely curious: have you experimented with psychedelics to a high degree?

Personal question, no obligation to answer.

[llamaimperative]

Yes I’ve done psychedelics, though I don’t really trace my (reluctant) belief in panpsychism to that.

Psychedelics are really great at showing you just how much “work” consciousness is doing, and just how fungible all of its contents are. And the most important insight, which is that everything “out there” in the world — everything you experience — is actually an internal, subjective representation.

The way I’ve described it is that we’re all in our own sensoriums, but that is generally totally opaque to us. Psychedelics can temporarily knock that sensorium askew — enough to notice that it’s there all the time and doesn’t have to be configured the way that it happens to be.

The reason I have reluctantly come to believe in panpsychism is because I haven’t heard anything close to a better explanation of when, where, and why “the lights are on.” There’s no reason to think there’s something special about brain matter in particular. There’s probably something special about information processing, but then: what is information processing? Information is just a local reduction in entropy, and all sorts of things are doing that in all sorts of ways all over the universe.

[mistermann]

> Psychedelics are really great at showing you just how much “work” consciousness is doing, and just how fungible all of its contents are. And the most important insight, which is that everything “out there” in the world — everything you experience — is actually an internal, subjective representation.

> The way I’ve described it is that we’re all in our own sensoriums, but that is generally totally opaque to us. Psychedelics can temporarily knock that sensorium askew — enough to notice that it’s there all the time and doesn’t have to be configured the way that it happens to be.

Considering this: do you find it a bit strange that ~all people (including yourself above) write as if the opposite of this is true? I mean sure, "people are imperfect" and "everyone is just expressing their opinion" are attractive memes (cultural "truths" that emerge from the very same simulation), but is there not perhaps something important going on that might be worth paying at least a little attention to?

[llamaimperative]

I’m not sure what you’re referring to?

[mapcars]

> There’s nothing going on in a living thing that you can’t explain in terms of unliving things.

There are myriads of things you can't explain about life in any terms. Just that you did not go deep enough to experience them.

[llamaimperative]

Provide examples. It’s chemical, electrical, and thermal reactions all the way down.

The one exception is consciousness.

[ninkendo]

Provide a definition of consciousness that isn’t circular and we can get a discussion going.

That’s the thing that seems to be missing from every one of these discussions… everyone just seems to assume some vague, fuzzy definition of consciousness and nobody calls anyone on it.

My 2¢: we don’t have a working definition of consciousness. Every attempt at doing so is self referential and/or completely subjective. The term is meaningless and every discussion on whether something is conscious or not is a complete waste of time and energy.

[temporarely]

> please provide a definition

There is no requirement for definition. Each and everyone of us (gpt bots excluded) experiences consciousness continually, in various modalities. The experience is shared.

For example, considering the nature of consciousness and the possible mechanics behind it, we could consider sights. Seeing. We all see things in our minds (and only in our minds!) and we have the first 1/2 of the process pathway mapped out. Light hits a matrix of cells in the 'sensor' which then encodes the sensory data as chemical signals which then side-effect a neural net.

Kindly explain -- using physics -- to YOURSELF how you got from a changed states to perception of light in your mind. The experience of consciousness is not a mystery nor is it 'obscure'. Follow up is to note that it is equally wrongheaded to ask if a rock or something/someone else is conscious.

Can you explain what you experience in terms of known science and please no hand waving about 'the most complex structure in universe'. The said structure changes states. There is no 'projection room' in the "neural net". There is no decoding final stage that takes matrix input and maps it to a 2D representation (generative AI) etc.

[ninkendo]

> There is no requirement for definition.

Sure there is. If the subject of discussion is “is X a kind of Y?”, you can’t proceed without defining Y. Saying “duh, you know what Y is” doesn’t change this. I could have a very different definition of Y in my head than you, and the discussion quickly spirals into madness as we all talk right past each other.

> Each and everyone of us (gpt bots excluded) experiences consciousness continually, in various modalities. The experience is shared.

If the definition of consciousness is simply “that thing that we in particular have”, then of course nothing else has consciousness, because you’ve excluded everything but us by definition! Yawn. What a boring discussion.

The rest of your comment proceeds similarly, with the conclusion that we need to be able to explain our particular experiences. Of course nothing else has consciousness if this is our working definition. If “consciousness” is that thing that arises from what a human brain does, then yeah sure, only a human brain has it. But if you actually make an attempt to classify it by defining it in a non-trivial, non-circular way, you’ll find that nearly everything about it can be applied to non-humans too.

Ho hum, I’m bored. These discussions are just pointless.

(No, I’m not going to try and define consciousness, because I maintain that there is no definition. You can say anything you want about it and be equally wrong or right, it doesn’t really matter because it means whatever you want it to.)

[temporarely]

As I said, the matter of consciousness is a shared experience. By denying its concrete reality due to difficulty of communicating this experience you open the door to nonsense such as LLMs being "conscious" because then people like you line up to claim "define consciousness".

> If the definition of consciousness is simply ...

No one is defining consciousness. You are simply referred to what is expected to be a common shared experience. Then the question is posed to you: please explain to yourself how (merely) a structure is affording the phenomena of what you experience. Physics only please.

This is sufficient to dethrone any purely structural notions. Which is huge, actually. And informative.

Insisting on "what is the definition" allow for various nonsense, hand waving, and large claims regarding the nature of some mechanism.

> Ho hum, I’m bored. These discussions are just pointless.

QED. That's because you insist on missing the point. Naturally it makes for boring discussion. Choose to not engage in such discussions if not contributing anything beyond the red herring of lack of definition for consciousness.

[sambapa]

"we don’t have a working definition of consciousness. Every attempt at doing so is self referential and/or completely subjective."

What a great definition of consciousness!

[llamaimperative]

> every discussion on whether something is conscious or not is a complete waste of time and energy

Then don't participate! :)

[ninkendo]

Touché!

[mapcars]

Samadhi, shoonya

[llamaimperative]

So consciouness.

[yzydserd]

Like, a strawberry?

[llamaimperative]

I don’t understand the question