Nova: Physicists Say Consciousness Might Be a State of Matter

[Binkie The Clown]

From Nova Next at PBS.com

It’s not enough to have a brain. Consciousness—a hallmark of humans, mammals, birds, and even octopuses—is that mysterious force that makes all those neurons and synapses “tick” and merge into “you.” It’s what makes you alert and sensitive to your surroundings, and it’s what helps you see yourself as separate from everything else. But neuroscientists still don’t know what consciousness is, or how it’s even possible.

So MIT’s Max Tegmark is championing a new way of explaining it: he believes that consciousness is a state of matter.

For years I've been saying there are three elemental ingredients to reality: space/time, mass/energy, and information/consciousness. Consciousness does not emerge from matter. Consciousness is an aspect, or manifestation of information, which is not energy, not matter, not space, and not time, but elemental in its own right. (My theory. Not quite the same as what is proposed by the article, but they're getting closer. )

[AuntPatsy]

1. Interesting theory, it's hard for me to see conscienceness as an element though...

[mcranor]

2. Not an element, but elemental (like gravity, e.g.)

[AuntPatsy]

6. I'm thinking about how and or why though perhaps the why would not apply

[roguevalley]

8. perhaps it is around us with the brain accessing it as a computer accesses the internet

I have heard neurosurgeons theorize that our consciousness seems to reside outside our bodies. I love this stuff. Thank you for posting it.

[tridim]

3. IMO this image is a big clue as to what's going on with conciousness...

Fractals at every zoom level are still part of the same root object.

[AuntPatsy]

4. Huge clue, striking similarities, interesting

[Warren DeMontague]

9. Indeed.

[MisterP]

5. how delightfully Scholastic!

[xocet]

7. "Perceptronium"? How about imperceptronium?

Posted by Allison Eck on Tue, 22 Apr 2014
Physicists Say Consciousness Might Be a State of Matter

...

Tegmark calls his new state of matter “perceptronium.” From the Physics arXiv Blog on Medium:

Tegmark discusses perceptronium, defined as the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware. This substance should not only be able to store and process information but in a way that forms a unified, indivisible whole. That also requires a certain amount of independence in which the information dynamics is determined from within rather than externally.

...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/physicists-say-consciousness-might-be-a-state-of-matter/

Imperceptronium: the most general substance that is objectively not even wrong.

[PuraVidaDreamin]

10. Also known as Life force

Or Prana, and chi/qi in Eastern cultures!

Very cool!

[Fairgo]

11. Quantum Dharma

Every religion crumbles under the weight of dogma, turns to dust under the hammer of unyielding philosophy. All that stands in its place is the singular and radical root of spirituality that assumes a unified sense to the cosmos. And that spiritual talisman is only required because my shackeled view of said cosmos is limited to the flickering shadows on the walls of a greek cave. I like your narrative on the shadow play. It creates a universe with a purpose...and the meaning in all its parts and histories.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

12. Roger Penrose was writing about this 25 years ago.

Many thanks for a great post.

[Binkie The Clown]

13. Hve you read anything by/about David Bohm?

http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_sol/plenum/plenum_3.html

Summarizing, Bohm uses analogies most ingeniously as he attempts to simplify his theory. Bohm suggests that instead of thinking of particles as the fundamental reality, the focus should be on discrete particle-like quanta in a continuous field. On the basis of this quantum field, Bohm breaks down the Implicate Order into three categories:

The first category is the original, "continuous field" itself along with its movement. Bohm likens this continuous field to a television screen displaying an infinite variety of explicate forms.

The second category is obtained by considering superquantum wave function acting upon the field. ("This is related to the whole field as the original quantum wave is related to the particle.&quot More complex and subtle, this second category applies to a "superfield" or *information* that guides and organizes the original quantum field. Bohm considers it to be similar to a computer which supplies the information that arranges the various forms--in the first category.

And last, Bohm believes that there is an underlying cosmic intelligence that supplies the information--the *Player* of this game who is the third category. Folling this analogy, Bohm sees the whole process as a closed loop; it goes from the screen to the computer to the Player and back to the screen.

Fun stuff to speculate about.

[bvf]

21. Tipler also comes to mind.

[Jim__]

14. Are you referring to Orchestrated Objective Reduction?

From wikipedia:

...

Penrose and Hameroff initially developed their ideas quite separately from one another, and it was only in the 1990s that they cooperated to produce the Orch-OR theory. Penrose came to the problem from the view point of mathematics and in particular Gödel's theorem, while Hameroff approached it from a career in cancer research and anesthesia that had given him an interest in brain structures. Specifically, when Penrose wrote his first consciousness book, The Emperor's New Mind in 1989, he lacked a detailed proposal for how such quantum processes could be implemented in the brain. Subsequently, Hameroff read The Emperor's New Mind and suggested to Penrose that certain structures within brain cells (neurons) were suitable candidate sites for quantum processing and ultimately for consciousness.[30][31] The Orch-OR theory arose from the cooperation of these two scientists, and was developed in Penrose's second consciousness book Shadows of the Mind (1994).[26]

Hameroff's contribution to the theory derived from studying brain cells. His interest centered on the cytoskeleton, which provides an internal supportive structure for neurons, and particularly on the microtubules,[31] which are the most important component of the cytoskeleton. As neuroscience has progressed, the role of the cytoskeleton and microtubules has assumed greater importance. In addition to providing structural support, microtubule functions include axoplasmic transport and control of the cell's movement, growth and shape.[31]

...

Hameroff proposed that microtubules were suitable candidates for quantum processing.[31] Microtubules are made up of tubulin protein subunits. The tubulin protein dimers of the microtubules have hydrophobic pockets which might contain delocalized ? electrons. Tubulin has other smaller non-polar regions, for example 8 tryptophans per tubulin, which contain ? electron-rich indole rings distributed throughout tubulin with separations of roughly 2 nm. Hameroff claims that this is close enough for the tubulin ? electrons to become quantum entangled.[32] During entanglement, particles' states become inseparably correlated.

Hameroff originally suggested the tubulin-subunit electrons would form a Bose–Einstein condensate,[33] but this was discredited.[citation needed] He then proposed a Frohlich condensate, a hypothetical coherent oscillation of dipolar molecules. However, this too has been criticized by Reimers et al.[34] Hameroff then responded to Reimers. "Reimers et al have most definitely NOT shown that strong or coherent Frohlich condensation in microtubules is unfeasible. The model microtubule on which they base their Hamiltonian is not a microtubule structure, but a simple linear chain of oscillators." Hameroff reasoned that such condensate behavior would magnify nanoscopic quantum effects to have large scale influences in the brain.

...

[DetlefK]

15. So... many... mistakes...

First:
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/why-physicists-are-saying-consciousness-is-a-state-of-matter-like-a-solid-a-liquid-or-a-gas-5e7ed624986d

"And second, this information must be integrated in a unified whole so that it is impossible to divide into independent parts. That reflects the experience that each instance of consciousness is a unified whole that cannot be decomposed into separate components."

This is demonstrably wrong. Mentally ill people have all kinds consciousnesses that don't fit that definition. Most famously, schizophrenics can't tell themselves from the outside world, that's why they "hear voices" and incorporate incorrect memories.



Second:
Science has something called the "correspondence-principle": Theories have overlaps.
This theory has all nice talks, but it offers no possibilities how to look at it from different directions, how to cross-check it against the knowledge derived from other theories.



Third:
"When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, why do we perceive this solution?"

BECAUSE THEY HAVE DIFFERENT ELECTROMAGNETIC RESPONSES AND BECAUSE THEY ARE DIFFERENT THERMODYNAMIC PHASES.



Fourth:
No: "Physicists" are not saying that about consciousness. In fact, I had a statistics professor who worked with neural networks and had the adamant opinion that consciousness is just an illusion of the calculator in our head.

If you go down to more and more stupid systems, where does consciousness stop existing?
Human, dog, baby, cow, insect, earthworm, plant, bacteria, virus, prion... Every single one of them is closed system of information-storage and -manipulation. A prion is just a molecule, but it reacts to the outside world and fits the definition.
It is my opinion that consciousness is not something abrupt or unique, it exists on a sliding-scale and is a natural side-effect of logical systems.

[hunter]

16. Yep, I just can't see any reason to go down that rabbit hole.

My dogs entirely enjoy as much consciousness as I do, and maybe much more of it than some humans I've met who have grown dead inside.

Consciousness is a continuum throughout the eukaryotes; a common pattern of responses mediated by structure and chemistry. Yes, I do attribute some sort of "consciousness" to lifeforms such as trees and fungi.

The other two domains of life, the bacteria and the archaea, have similar responses, with slightly different chemistry and structure.

But there's nothing about consciousness that requires any special states of matter. This universe is wonderfully complex as it is, we have barely scratched the surface of possibilities that might exist within the physics we know.

I have on my desk a tiny little wooden box I built with a computer inside it. The box is 4 X 3 X 2 inches, the computer uses about 5 watts of power, and is more powerful than any computer I ever dreamt of as a kid. It also emulates very well other computers I've owned, the Atari 800s, the 6800 Macs, various DOS machines... I can revisit the 'seventies, eighties, and early 'nineties without digging the original machines out of the garage and crossing my fingers that their old electrolytic capacitors don't explode like firecrackers when I plug them in.

I think we are at the point where, once someone figures it out, we could build a machine that emulates "conscious" behavior. I also believe that this "emulated" consciousness would BE consciousness.

[DetlefK]

17. And if we follow your argument...

Why would we make a difference between on what kind of hardware a software is running?
Why would we make a difference between on what kind of hardware a consciousness is running?

[bvf]

20. Please, please

don't use the term "a software."

Would you call a hammer "a hardware"?

I realize it's a minor point, but it's always bothered me.

[Jim__]

18. Tegmark views the paper as an investigation into the physical properties that conscious systems ...

... must have.

Tegmarks' paper is available here.

From the paper:

This paper is not a comprehensive theory of conciousness. Rather, it is an investigation into the physical properties that conscious systems must have. If we understood what these physical properties were, then we could in principle answer all of the above-mentioned open physics questions by studying the equations of physics: we could identify all conscious entities in any physical system, and calculate what they would perceive. However, this approach is typically not pursued by physicists, with the argument that we do not understand consciousness well enough.

From your post:

"And second, this information must be integrated in a unified whole so that it is impossible to divide into independent parts. That reflects the experience that each instance of consciousness is a unified whole that cannot be decomposed into separate components."

This is demonstrably wrong. Mentally ill people have all kinds consciousnesses that don't fit that definition. Most famously, schizophrenics can't tell themselves from the outside world, that's why they "hear voices" and incorporate incorrect memories.

It's not clear to me what problem you see here. You may be reading the statement about consciousness differently than I do - there's definitely some ambiguity. But that single statement is based on Giulio Tononi's paper, Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto . First, Tononi is a psychiatrist and so is somewhat aware of how schizophrenics experience the world. In the paper he does mention patients with 2 separate consciousnesses. That paper has a great deal of discussion on this point about integrated information, and also links to a 2004 paper that further discusses the point. A brief excerpt from the 2008 paper may clarify the statement that you cited :

...

According to the IIT, the difference has to do with integrated information. From the point of view of an external observer, the camera may be considered as a single system with a repertoire of 2^1,000,000 states. In reality, however, the chip is not an integrated entity: since its 1 million photodiodes have no way to interact, each photodiode performs its own local discrimination between a low and a high current completely independent of what every other photodiode might be doing. In reality, the chip is just a collection of 1 million independent photodiodes, each with a repertoire of two states. In other words, there is no intrinsic point of view associated with the camera chip as a whole. This is easy to see: if the sensor chip were cut into 1 million pieces each holding its individual photodiode, the performance of the camera would not change at all.

By contrast, you discriminate among a vast repertoire of states as an integrated system, one that cannot be broken down into independent components each with its own separate repertoire. Phenomenologically, every experience is an integrated whole, one that means what it means by virtue of being one, and that is experienced from a single point of view. For example, the experience of a red square cannot be decomposed into the separate experience of red and the separate experience of a square. Similarly, experiencing the full visual field cannot be decomposed into experiencing separately the left half and the right half: such a possibility does not even make sense to us, since experience is always whole. Indeed, the only way to split an experience into independent experiences seems to be to split the brain in two, as in patients who underwent the section of the corpus callosum to treat severe epilepsy (Gazzaniga, 2005). Such patients do indeed experience the left half of the visual field independently of the right side, but then the surgery has created two separate consciousnesses instead of one. Mechanistically then, underlying the unity of experience must be causal interactions among certain elements within the brain. This means that these elements work together as an integrated system, which is why their performance, unlike that of the camera, breaks
down if they are disconnected.

...

The full paper goes into a lot more detail.

And, again, from your post:

Third: "When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, why do we perceive this solution?"

BECAUSE THEY HAVE DIFFERENT ELECTROMAGNETIC RESPONSES AND BECAUSE THEY ARE DIFFERENT THERMODYNAMIC PHASES.

Yes, but that's only part of the story. The electromagnetic stimulation of any cone is driven by radiation coming from multiple locations in the visual field, and any given point in the visual field is stimulating multiple cones. A lot of integration happens in the retina, but still more has to happen in the brain which has to integrate complex signals across space, time, and a hierarchy of objects. In this statement, it's that integration that he is mostly concerned with. You see an ice cube, but you also see, a glass of ice water. From the abstract ... why do we perceive the world around us as a dynamic hierarchy of objects that are strongly integrated and relatively independent? You can claim that the integration is just computation, but, part of the integration may well involve memories of former conscious experiences where the consciousness of those prior experiences is essential to this perception.

And, from the text of the paper:

The problem of identifying consciousness in an arbitrary collection of moving particles is similar to the simpler problem of identifying objects there. One of the most striking features of our physical world is that we perceive it as an object hierarchy, as illustrated in Figure 1. If you are enjoying a cold drink, you perceive ice cubes in your glass as separate objects because they are both fairly integrated and fairly independent, e.g. , their parts are more strongly connected to one another than to the outside. The same can be said about each of their constituents, ranging from water molecules all the way down to electrons and quarks. Zooming out, you similarly perceive the macroscopic world as a dynamic hierarchy of objects that are strongly integrated and relatively independent, all the way up to planets, solar systems and galaxies. Let us quantify this by defning the robustness of an object as the ratio of the integration temperature (the energy per part needed to separate them) to the independence temperature (the energy per part needed to separate the parent object in the hierarchy). Figure 1 illustrates that all of the ten types of objects shown have robustness of ten or more. A highly robust object preserves its identity (its integration and independence) over a wide range of temperatures/energies/situations. The more robust an object is, the more useful it is for us humans to perceive it as an object and coin a name for it, as per the above- mentioned utility principle.

From your post:

Fourth:
No: "Physicists" are not saying that about consciousness. In fact, I had a statistics professor who worked with neural networks and had the adamant opinion that consciousness is just an illusion of the calculator in our head.

To a certain extent, I think consciousness is an illusion. For instance, when we see a field of green grass, I don't believe that the electromagnetic radiation that is stimulating a response from our eyes is actually green. I believe the experience of green is a construct of our brain. But believing that, I don't believe that labeling it an illusion resolves anything. Even if we accept that our perceptions do not represent the external world with complete accuracy, they do, as far as we can tell, give us an extremely accurate mapping of the the world, a mapping accurate enough to allow us to survive, and even to investigate properties of the world that are not directly perceivable by us. Labeling consciousness just an illusion does not accomplish much. How does the calculator in our head create this illusion? After all, that calculator is also part of the world we are trying to understand.

From your post:

If you go down to more and more stupid systems, where does consciousness stop existing?
Human, dog, baby, cow, insect, earthworm, plant, bacteria, virus, prion... Every single one of them is closed system of information-storage and -manipulation. A prion is just a molecule, but it reacts to the outside world and fits the definition.
It is my opinion that consciousness is not something abrupt or unique, it exists on a sliding-scale and is a natural side-effect of logical systems.

I believe part of the goal of Tononi and Tegmark is to find the answers to questions like that.

[DetlefK]

19. The riddle of the ice and the water is fairly easy:

Data-compression. By simplifying mols of atoms/molecules into macroscopic objects, you can replace a model that contains mols of objects with a model that contains dozens of objects. As you said, we cannot perceive the world with an objective, perfect accuracy and evolution tends to go for the most practical solution with the least of effort: Why create a detailed model with unreliable data?

Practical example: Your keyboard on your desk. Imagine what your life would be like if you had to think about your desk every time you type something into your keyboard. It is far more practical for your brain to treat them as dumbed-down isolated objects.

Why would a bacteria try to make a detailed representation of its surroundings when it basically only has the senses of taste and touch? Why would a worm or a plant try to do that? We evolved in water and mud and everything we sensed was up close.
If we had evolved from life-forms living in space or high up in a transparent atmosphere, where radiation is the easiest mode of sensing something, then we surely would have evolved different neuronal structures and a different kind of perception and consciousness that gives priority to large-scale patterns (planets, comets, solar storms, clouds, the humidity of the atmosphere changing the color of sunsets/sunrises) instead of patterns fitting the size of our body. Why would some aerial plancton living up in the clouds care about what lies a few micrometers around it? It needs to collect and process information what next day's weather will be like.




Quote from you:
"You can claim that the integration is just computation, but, part of the integration may well involve memories of former conscious experiences where the consciousness of those prior experiences is essential to this perception."

This is actually how a neuronal network gets programmed: You feed it experience and it tries to reproduce a representation of reality. If a neuron does it right, it gets a reward (gets to emit stronger signal). If a neuron does it wrong, it gets a punishment (gets to emit weaker signal).
In the end, the neuronal network (e.g. the brain) can reproduce reality with some resolution. The low resolution actually allows for imagination/adaption. If you give a neuronal network too much experience, the resolution of reality gets higher and higher but at the same time the network gets worse and worse at dealing with things that lie outside its experience.