Category: Evolutionary

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

The Multidimensional Ghosts of Translation (with Seinfeld References)

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I love analytic philosophy. It’s like Seinfeld for ideas, a field with no particular content except the perplexing nature of ideas themselves. I’m reading Scott Soames’ attack on two-dimensional semantics right now, for instance. This has peculiar relevance in that insofar as meaning can be broken up into two dimensions there are ways of building modal logic justifications for things like “philosophical zombies” in the philosophy of mind. It’s a curious corner of this show about meaning and nothing more. I always fall back to Wittgenstein at some point: language is just games we play with one another. There are rules that we internalize and meaning has to do with the constraints those rules put on us. But, ahem, then we start asking what exactly are those rules and what kinds of internal logic helps to bind words and ideas together, so Wittgenstein is more of a deconstructive backstop that helps relieve us of the weight of expectation that there are mega-metatheories that can wrap all this meaning stuff up. Still, there remains the hard work to do that we see in linguistics and cognitive science where meaning representations and all the rules of these games are sketched out towards some kind of effective theory.

Another deconstructive reflection comes from the related concepts of Quine’s radical translation and Davidson’s radical interpretation. If we can’t ever really know with certainty what words mean to someone else then we need strategies to empirically probe, through questions and observations, and gradually develop a working theory about what the hell those other people are talking about. Meaning becomes science experiments. We test, we hypothesize, we have U-shaped curves, and we build up a tentative understanding.… Read the rest

After Z

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The nights and days collide with violence. There is the nocturnal me and the dazed, daylight version squinting away from the glaring windows. There are the catnaps that lace with riotous algebras. I am addicted to caffeine, or run on it, until even it becomes unpersuasive, and I droop over at the keyboard. Then this pulse of creation pulls me out again, stunned for a few beats, and I grasp my mug and stumble back to the lab floor.

Z keeps changing, day by day, midnights into dawns, and reawakening in clanging novelty. Z is for “zombie,” for it is in the uncanny valley of both a physical and cogitating thing. It perceives, stands, jogs in place beside me on the laboratory floor, an ochre braid of wires bouncing in a dreadlock mass behind it. Z plays chess, folds towels (how hard that was!), argues politics (how insane is that one!), and constantly restructures nuances in its faces and gestures. Sometimes I’m tired and Z is an impertinent teenager. Often there are substitutions and semantic scrambling like a foreigner who mistakes a word for another, then carries on in a fugue of incoherence.

There is a half-acre of supercooled GPUs to the north of the lab where the hot churn of work is happening. It’s a spread of parallel dreamscapes, each funneled the new daily stimuli, stacking them into a training pool, then rerunning the simulations, splitting and recombining, then trying again to minimize the incoherency, the errors, and the size of the model. Of the ten thousand fermenting together, one becomes the new Z for a few hours, but then is gone again by morning, replaced by a child of sorts that harbors the successes but sheds the excesses and broken motifs.… Read the rest

All Hail Evolved Irrationality

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From an impersonal distance, watching other people make decisions is always interesting. They may apply reason and passion in varied measures to figure out a way forward, or a lifestyle, or even fashion choices. Often they mindfully weigh the choices and decide to moderate even that process, committing to a radical path that has drama and uncertainty. It’s sometimes better to be interesting than cautious and correct. As a virtue this recalls the romantic movements that arose in opposition to the mechanization of the 19th century as trains and steamships criss-crossed the world. Order and peace were at odds with drama, passion, faith, and love that are somehow in our core, animalistic nature.

Motifs of uncertainty crept into science and reason as we transitioned into the 20th century, from the stochastic rumble of thermodynamics, to the realigning of basic concepts like gravity as a space-time curvature, and then the wave-particle duality of quantum reality. The clockwork of the universe that was so oppressively mechanistic showed fuzzy edges and knotty intersections that defied ordinary-scale expectations. The combined mathematical realizations of incompleteness and algorithmic uncomputability overlaid the investigations of the physical to such an extent that new theories were developed that proposed that the quantum world and mind are inextricably laced together; subjective and objective do not exist independently.

Even as our knowledge and management of the universe has grown, there is a background roil of irrationality, like the primal chaos of Tiamat. Human thought has a collection of ways of organizing the world that appear to be natural consequences of our social development. Religious belief is a widespread catalyst for building predictable and supportive communities by slaving our baser tendencies to coordinating strictures, obligations, and status maintenance.… Read the rest

Deep Zombies

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There is a slang nominal form of the word “deepening” for when a person seems to be purposefully adding awe, mystery, and unknowns to their arguments: deepenings. It often arises in discourse on religion and mystical experiences. As a child in the 70s we had Bigfoot, Nessy, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, near-death experiences, and the strange stuff from Velikovsky, von Däniken, and Sitchin. The books and movies built deepenings into communities and businesses just as surely as Catholicism, Mormonism, or Scientology have done. There is a human desire for mystery. But it doesn’t make the mysteries true. But many religious folks hold on to thin threads that point towards mystery as an added data point for justifying their faiths as real, true, valuable, and beautiful.

Given this, I was curious about David Bentley Hart’s All Things are Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life after Ross Douthat praised it at New York Times. It’s a big book and I’ve just skimmed around a fair bit so far, but there is a repetition of an error (among the extensive repetitions in the volume) concerning the mind-body problem that is also related to arguments from Alvin Plantinga concerning evolution. Specifically, the notion of philosophical zombies is largely irrelevant I think to claiming that subjective experience (“what it’s like…”) is non-material or of a distinct nature from the brain and the nervous system. Given what we know about evolutionary development, I don’t think that we can even conceive of a p-zombie in the way it was originally proposed.

We might try to imagine an evolutionary development of homo sapiens that does not include this subjective experience, but that would not lead to an identical human sans the qualia-experiencer because the developmental trajectory would have to be different, resulting in differing brains.… 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

When the Cranes Cry

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The crane has a symbolic resonance in Celtic mythology. A magician, assuming an elaborate pose—one eye open and one leg drawn up—was said to see into the otherworld, just as the crane itself moved from sky to land to water. But there is the other meaning of the word crane: the ancient lifting contraption that helped build Greece and likely had a role in Egypt and Sumeria before that. And now they protrude into the urban sky, raising up our buildings and even other cranes as we densify our cities. It was this mechanical meaning that Dan Dennett at Tufts chose to contrast with conceptual skyhooks, the unsupported contrivances that save protagonists in plays by dangling gods above the stage. For Dennett, the building crane is the metaphor we should apply to the mindless, simple algorithm of evolution. The algorithm raises up species and thus creates our mysterious ideas about meaning and purpose. No skyhooks or Deus ex Machina are needed.

Dennett passed away at 82 in Maine leaving a legacy as a public intellectual who engaged in the pursuit of reason throughout his adult career. He was committed to the idea that this world—this teeming ensemble of living matter—is intrinsically miraculous, built up by something dead simple into all the convolutions and perilous ideas that we now use to parse its mysteries. He was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse during the so-called New Atheism craze of 2008-2010, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, but even then he was committed to the crane metaphor to displace these ancient skyhooks of belief rather than, say, a satirical impact-analysis of religion a la Hitchens.

There is another phrase that Dennett championed in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life: universal acid.… Read the rest

Tit, Tat, and Political Sensitivities

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I’m almost always surprised by the spectrum of political responses to events and circumstances around the world. The political animal, it seems, is very different from me. I don’t need a fusillade of analysis to understand a Supreme Court decision, or an indictment, or an economic event. I don’t want to be glad handed an interpretation meant to soothe me or align me with a tribe. I just need facts and am willing to hold labeling and castigation at arms length while looking at the matter in as dispassionate a manner as I can summon. Even when I feel a jolt of irreverence or schadenfreude or disgust, I try to maintain neutrality in my initial analysis. I am boringly optimistic, too, which seems quaintly outdated in an America that keeps getting richer and more powerful but acts like a caged animal in raging from one crackpot stimulus to another.

But why are so many of our fellow citizens like that? It is easy to be dismissive—those freakin’ idiots!—but there may be something deeper at play. For example, in many human predispositions and even illnesses we have recent studies that show that insofar as there is a clear genetic channel, the range of genes involved is so enormous that we can’t really nail down any single or distinctive causal factor. The terms for this are polygeny and pleiotropy and they simply mean that many alleles are involved, interact with one another, and likely interact with the environment during development. Most mental illness (and here) as well as gayness are current examples of this. Our understanding may change, of course, but for now we have the unsurprising realization that we are very complex animals.… Read the rest

Follow the Paths

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There is a little corner of philosophical inquiry that asks whether knowledge is justified based on all our other knowledge. This epistemological foundationalism rests on the concept that if we keep finding justifications for things we can literally get to the bottom of it all. So, for instance, if we ask why we think there is a planet called Earth, we can find reasons for that belief that go beyond just “’cause I know!” like “I sense the ground beneath my feet” and “I’ve learned empirically-verified facts about the planet during my education that have been validated by space missions.” Then, in turn, we need to justify the idea that empiricism is a valid way of attaining knowledge with something like, “It’s shown to be reliable over time.” This idea of reliability is certainly changing and variable, however, since scientific insights and theories have varied, depending on the domain in question and timeframe. And why should we in fact value our senses as being reliable (or mostly reliable) given what we know about hallucinations, apophenia, and optical illusions?

There is also a curious argument in philosophy that parallels this skepticism about the reliability of our perceptions, reason, and the “warrants” for our beliefs called the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). I’ve previously discussed some aspects of EAAN, but it is, amazingly, still discussed in academic circles. In a nutshell it asserts that our reliable reasoning can’t be evolved because evolution does not reliably deliver good, truthful ways of thinking about the world.

While it may seem obvious that the evolutionary algorithm does not deliver or guarantee completely reliable facilities for discerning true things from false things, the notion of epistemological pragmatism is a direct parallel to evolutionary search (as Fitelson and Sober hint).… Read the rest

Sentience is Physical, Part 3: Now with Flaming Birds

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Moving to Portland brings all the positives and negatives of urban living. A notable positive is access to the arts and I’m looking forward to catching Stravinsky’s The Firebird this weekend with the Oregon Symphony. Part of the program is a new work by composer Vijay Iyer who has a history of incorporating concepts derived from African rhythms, hip hop, and jazz into his compositional efforts. I took the opportunity this morning to read his 1998 dissertation from Berkeley that capped off his interdisciplinary program in the cognitive science of music. I’ll just say up front that I’m not sure it rises to the level of a dissertation since it does not really provide any significant new results. He notes the development of a microtiming programming environment coded in MAX but doesn’t give significant results or novel experimental testing of the system or of human perceptions of microtiming. What the dissertation does do, however, is give a lucid overview and some new insights about how cognition and music interact, as well as point towards ways to test the theories that Iyer develops during the course of his work. A too-long master’s thesis might be a better category for it, but I’ve never been exposed to musicology dissertations so perhaps this level of work is normal.

Iyer’s core thesis is that musical cognition and expression arise from a physical engagement with our environments combined with cultural situatedness. That is, rhythm is tied to a basic “tactus” or spontaneously perceived regular pulse or beat of music that is physically associated with walking, heartbeats, tapping, chewing, and so forth. Similarly, the culture of musical production as well as the history that informs a given piece all combine to influence how music is produced and experienced.… Read the rest