Category: Metaphysics

Consciousness as Functional Information

Mark Davis1 Comment

 

Congratulations to Anil Seth for winning the Berggruen essay prize on consciousness!  I didn’t learn the outcome until I emerged from one of the rare cellular blackout zones in modern America. My wife and I were whale watching south of Yachats (“ya-hots”) on the Oregon coast in this week of remarkable weather. We came up bupkis, nada, nil for the great migratory grays, but saw seals and sea lions bobbing in the surf, red shouldered hawks, and one bald eagle glowering like a luminescent gargoyle atop a Sitka spruce near Highway 101. We turned around at the dune groupings by Florence (Frank Herbert’s inspirations for Dune, weirdly enough, where thinking machines have been banned) and headed north again, the intestinal windings of the roads causing us to swap our sunglasses in and out in synchrony with the center console of the car as it tried to understand the intermittent shadows.

Seth is always reliable and his essay continues themes he has recently written about. There is a broad distrust of computational functionalism and hints of alternative models for how consciousness might arise in uniquely biological ways like his example of how certain neurons might fire purely for regulatory reasons. There are unanswered questions about whether LLMs can become conscious that hint at the challenges such ideas have, and the moral consequences that manifold conscious machines entail. He even briefly dives into the Simulation Hypothesis and its consequences for the possibility of consciousness.

I’ve included my own entry, below. It is both boldly radical and also fairly mundane. I argue that functionalism has a deeper meaning in biological systems than as a mere analog of computation. A missing component of philosophical arguments about function and consciousness is found in the way evolution operates in exquisite detail, from the role of parasitism to hidden estrus, and from parental investment to ethical consequentialism.… Read the rest

Imagining Transparent Iron and Other Crazy Things

Mark Davis1 Comment

There are some real doozies of arguments that have tied up religious and philosophical thinkers for centuries. Take the Kalam Cosmological Argument or the Ontological Argument. In both of these arguments there is a required reduction of the properties of the universe (or cosmos) to some kind of skeletal representation. In Kalam (and variants) there are assumptions built into the idea of nothingness, for instance, that have no relationship to what we know about the actual cosmos now—specifically that there is no example of such a thing; even in vacuums there are pervasive quantum fields and we have no clear scientific evidence or theories that point to a “philosopher’s nothingness.” In the Ontological Argument, there is the assumption that possibility and existence are inherently combined together, regardless of whether we are talking about a concept of God or a real thing in or supporting the existence of the cosmos. Another example of this philosophical craziness is in the modal argument for the existence of philosophical zombies, where there are people just like us in every way but lacking a phenomenal experience of being conscious beings.

There is a category of thought called “modal skepticism” that argues we should be cautious about making assumptions about things extremely outside of ordinary experience. Whether it’s the properties of gods or nothingness or consciousness, the trouble arises when trying to sketch out the properties that apply to these things. Even before modal logic in its modern form, Kant argued that existence is not a predicate and therefore the existence of God can’t be contained in an a priori definition of God. We are making an incorrect assumption. In Kalam, nothingness is not definable in a way that meaningfully separates it from a posteriori discoveries about the cosmos, where it does not seem to exist.… Read the rest

Searching for Emergence

Mark Davis1 Comment

I have a longstanding interest in the concept of emergence as a way of explaining a wide range of human ideas and the natural world. We have this incredible algorithm of evolutionary change that creates novel life forms. We have, according to mainstream materialist accounts of philosophy of mind, a consciousness that may have a unique ontology (what really exists) of subjective experiencers and qualia and intentionality, but that is also somehow emergent from the meat of the brain (or supervenes or is an epiphenomenon, etc. etc.) That emergence may be weak or strong in various accounts, with strong meaning something like the idea that a new thing is added to the ontology while weak meaning something like we just don’t know enough yet to find the reduction of the concept to its underlying causal components. If we did, then it is not really something new in this grammar of ontological necessity.

There is also the problem of computational irreducibility (CI) that has been championed by Wolfram. In CI, there are classes of computations that result in outcomes that cannot be predicted by any simpler algorithm. This seems to open the door to a strong concept of emergence: we have to run the machine to get the outcome; there is no possibility (in theory!) of reducing the outcome to any lesser approximation. I’ve brought this up as a defeater of the Simulation Hypothesis, suggesting that the complexity of a simulation is irreducible from the universe as we see it (assuming perfect coherence in the limit).

There is also a dual to this idea in algorithmic information theory (AIT) that is worth exploring. In AIT, it is uncomputable to find the shortest Turing Machine capable of accepting a given symbol sequence.… Read the rest

Incredulity as a Moral Failure

Mark Davis4 Comments

I keep encountering arguments from incredulity in the speculative religious community. An argument from incredulity is just an assertion by the arguer that they can’t imagine how something is possible. In two recent examples, the arguers are the Christian faithful and are trying to deconstruct materialist counterarguments to their speculations about collections of facts. I think this is both an intellectual and a moral failure. It is an intellectual failure when the speculators don’t choose the obvious stance with regard to unknowns and unknowables: I don’t know. It is a moral failure when the consequences of such intellectual failures leads to weakly-justifiable faith constructs that harm or might harm others.

Let’s take a couple of examples. First, we have Ross Douthat (I know, I know, I spend too much time on him, but he does have a big platform being at New York Times). He has a forthcoming book about why one should believe in a religion, although he is not forceful about which particular one is the right choice for any individual, it seems. But here is a recent set of three arguments from that book. They all rely on incredulity in some way.

  1. The fine tuning argument. Ross thinks it is highly improbable that some physical constants in our universe happened by chance. He also thinks that one materialist solution to that happenstance is to speculate about multiverses. In the multiverse solution, there are many universes (maybe a cosmic foam with little universe bubbles!) and ours just happened to be goldilocksish for the structure we observe. Of course, we can speculate all day about this. We can instead say perhaps we have been having infinite Big Bangs as a single universe expands then collapses.
… Read the rest

Rise, Teleonomatons!

Mark Davis2 Comments

My essay for the Berggruen Prize this year. Of course, the organization missed an opportunity to drop down a staggering rabbit hole and lean into a whole new regime of neologistic energetics, but I do like the prize-winning essays!

Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

I can’t figure out what some statements about science mean, though I have a fair background in a range of scientific areas. Now, I can peruse highly technical papers, browse abstracts, interpret graphs, study conclusions, and typically do just fine. The professional stuff is a procession of arid facts and assumes the reader knows the basic definitions for things. It’s the popular versions of scientific insights that befuddle me—especially the definitions that try mightily to bridge meanings for learners. So do introductory texts. Light is a wave? Not exactly. Atoms are particles? Well, not quite, but they are small. Electrons orbit the nucleus? No, really, no. A force is an influence tending to change the motion of a body? OK, but what is an influence? People are influenced, aren’t they? Or under the influence.

And then there are texts like those of existential philosophers that leave me completely befuddled. What is this “Being” that they write about and how did it get so enlarged in significance, capitalized, and shoehorned by the translator into incomprehensible juxtapositions with other bulbous words?

It may be low pedantry to expect clarity from words and writing. We generally just roll with it and use the terms according to conventions inferred from reading and learning. We rush over the imperfect metaphorical bridges, the analogies, the similes. For physics, definitions are bound to the equations and measurement properties that accompany the words of description, and they become a semantic pier that is constantly informing our relationship with the ideas.… Read the rest

Causally Emergent vs. Divine Spark Murder Otherwises

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One might claim that a metaphysical commitment to strong determinism is only porous to quantum indeterminacy or atomic indeterminacy (decay behavior for instance). Those two can be lumped together and simply called subatomic indeterminacy or something. Everything else is conceptually derivative of state evolution and therefore deterministic. So does that mean that my model for R fails unless I can invoke these two candidates? My suggestion of amplifying thermodynamic noise doesn’t really cut the mustard (an amusing semantic drift from pass muster, perhaps) because it only appears random and solely characterizable by these macroscopic variables like pressure and temperature, not because it actually is random in the molecule swirl.

But I can substitute an atomic decay counter for my thermodynamic amplifier, or use a quantum random number generator based on laser measurements of vacuum fluctuations. There, I’ve righted the ship, though I’ve jettisoned my previous claim that randomness is not necessary for R’s otherwises. Now it is, but it is not sufficient because of the need for a device like the generative subsystem that uses randomness in a non-arbitrary way to revise decisions. We do encounter a difficulty in porting subatomic indeterminacy into a human analog, of course, though some have given it a try.

But there is some new mathematics for causal emergence that fits well with my model. In causal emergence, ideas like necessity and sufficiency for causal explanations can be shown to have properties in macroscale explanations that are not present at microscales. The model used is a simple Markov chain that flips between two states and information theory is applied to examine a range of conceptual structures for causation running from David Hume’s train of repeating objects (when one damn thing comes after another and then again and again, we may have a cause), up through David Lewis’s notion of counterfactuals in alternative probabilistic universes (could it have happened that way in all possible worlds?),… Read the rest

Uncertainty, Murder, and Emergent Free Will

Mark Davis3 Comments

I’ll jump directly into my main argument without stating more than the basic premise that if determinism holds all our actions cannot be otherwise and there is no “libertarian” free will.

Let’s construct a robot (R) that has a decision-making apparatus (DM), some sensors (S) for collecting impressions about our world, and a memory (M) of all those impressions and past decisions of DM. DM is pretty much an IF-THEN arrangement but has a unique feature. It has subroutines that generate new IF-THENs by taking existing rules and randomly recombining them together with variation. This might be done by simply snipping apart at logical operations (blue AND wings AND small => bluejay at 75% can be pulled apart into “blue AND wings” and “wings AND small” and those two combined with other such rules). This generative subroutine (GS) then scores the novel IF-THENs by comparing them to the recorded history contained in M as well as current sensory impressions and keeps the new rule that scores best or the top few if they score closely. The scoring methodology might include a combination of coverage and fidelity to the impressions and/or recalled action/impressions.

Now this is all quite deterministic. I mentioned randomness but we can produce pseudo-random number generators that are good enough or even rely on a small electronic circuit that amplifies thermodynamic noise to get something “truly” random. But really we could just substitute an algorithm that checks every possible reorganization and scores them all and shelve the randomness component, alleviating any concerns that we are smuggling in randomness for our later construct of free agency.

Now let’s add a rule to DM that when R perceives it has been treated unfairly it might murder the human being who treated it that way.… Read the rest

The Rubbery Road from Original Position to Metaphysical Naturalism

Mark Davis1 Comment

From complaints about student protests over Israel in Gaza, to the morality of new House Speaker Johnson, and even to the reality and consequences of economic inequality, there is a dynamic conversation in the media over what is morally right and, importantly, why it should be considered right. It’s perfectly normal for those discussions and considered monologues to present ideas, cases, and weigh the consequences to American life, power, and the well-being of people around the world. It also demonstrates the fact that ideas like divine command theory become irrelevant for most if not all of these discussions since they still require secular analysis and resolution. Contributions from the Abrahamic faiths (and similarly from Hindu nationalism) are largely objectionable moral ideas (“The Chosen People,” jihad, anti-woman, etc.) that are inherently preferential and exclusionary.

Indeed, this public dialogue perhaps best shows how modern people build ethical systems. It looks mostly like Rawl’s concept of “reflective equilibrium” with dashes of utilitarianism and occasional influences from religious tradition and sentiment. And reflective equilibrium has few foundational ideas beyond a basic commitment to fairness as justice using the “original position” as its starting point. That is, if we had to create a society with no advance knowledge about what our role and position might be within it (a veil of ignorance), the best for us would be to create an equal, fair, and just society.

So ethics is cognitively rubbery, with changing attachments and valences as we process options into a coherent whole. We might justify civilian deaths for a greater good when we have few options, imprecise weapons, and existential fear (say, the atom bomb in World War II).… Read the rest

Be Persistent and Evolve

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If we think about the evolution of living things we generally start from the idea that evolution requires replicators, variation, and selection. But what if we loosened that up to the more everyday semantics of the word “evolution” when we talk about the evolution of galaxies or of societies or of crystals? Each changes, grows, contracts, and has some kind of persistence that is mediated by a range of internal and external forces. For crystals, the availability of heat and access to the necessary chemicals is key. For galaxies, elements and gravity and nuclear forces are paramount. In societies, technological invention and social revolution overlay the human replicators and their biological evolution. Should we make a leap and just declare that there is some kind of impetus or law to the universe such that when there are composable subsystems and composition constraints, there will be an exploration of the allowed state space for composition? Does this add to our understanding of the universe?

Wong, et. al. say exactly that in “On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems” in PNAS. The paper reminds me of the various efforts to explain genetic information growth given raw conceptions of entropy and, indeed, some of those papers appear in the cites. It was once considered an intriguing problem how organisms become increasingly complex in the face of, well, the grinding dissolution of entropy. It wasn’t really that hard for most scientists: Earth receives an enormous load of solar energy that supports the push of informational systems towards negentropy. But, to the earlier point about composability and constraints, the energy is in a proportion that supports the persistence of systems that are complex.… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

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Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest