This ties in very nicely with the earlier one about relational properties. That's a nice way, I think, of having a system be more than the sum of its parts without calling on the services of Mystical Woo. So, consciousness not merely as an emergent but an explicity relational phenomena ?
Well, maybe. The problem I have is that, it seems to me, dualism must be true at least in (possibly but not necessarily more than) a very limited regard : mental concepts exist but in a non-physical reality. If I imagine a giraffe, no physical miniature of a giraffe exists in my brain, let alone if I imagine something more abstract like beauty or circularity or ennui. These things clearly do exist, but not physically. They are mental constructs or other sort of forms. And I have no idea how a relational but physical property can ever give rise to these non-physical concepts.
I'm not saying imagination unlocks some hidden dimension or the Descartian ghost drives the meaty shell that is Rhysy, or anything like that. I'm only saying I don't know what the hell is going on.
Lordy it's hot today.
Using the mathematical language of information theory, Hoel and his collaborators claim to show that new causes — things that produce effects — can emerge at macroscopic scales. They say coarse-grained macroscopic states of a physical system (such as the psychological state of a brain) can have more causal power over the system’s future than a more detailed, fine-grained description of the system possibly could. Macroscopic states, such as desires or beliefs, “are not just shorthand for the real causes,” explained Simon DeDeo, an information theorist and cognitive scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and the Santa Fe Institute who is not involved in the work, “but it’s actually a description of the real causes, and a more fine-grained description would actually miss those causes.”
“To me, that seems like the right way to talk about it,” DeDeo said, “because we do want to attribute causal properties to higher-order events [and] things like mental states.”
Hoel and collaborators have been developing the mathematics behind their idea since 2013. In a May paper in the journal Entropy, Hoel placed causal emergence on a firmer theoretical footing by showing that macro scales gain causal power in exactly the same way, mathematically, that error-correcting codes increase the amount of information that can be sent over information channels. Just as codes reduce noise (and thus uncertainty) in transmitted data — Claude Shannon’s 1948 insight that formed the bedrock of information theory — Hoel claims that macro states also reduce noise and uncertainty in a system’s causal structure, strengthening causal relationships and making the system’s behavior more deterministic.
“I think it’s very significant,” George Ellis, a South African cosmologist who has also written about top-down causation in nature, said of Hoel’s new paper. Ellis thinks causal emergence could account for many emergent phenomena such as superconductivity and topological phases of matter. Collective systems like bird flocks and superorganisms — and even simple structures like crystals and waves — might also exhibit causal emergence, researchers said.
The work on causal emergence is not yet widely known among physicists, who for centuries have taken a reductionist view of nature and largely avoided further philosophical thinking on the matter. But at the interfaces between physics, biology, information theory and philosophy, where puzzles crop up, the new ideas have generated excitement. Their ultimate usefulness in explaining the world and its mysteries — including consciousness, other kinds of emergence, and the relationships between the micro and macro levels of reality — will come down to whether Hoel has nailed the notoriously tricky notion of causation: Namely, what’s a cause? “If you brought 20 practicing scientists into a room and asked what causation was, they would all disagree,” DeDeo said. “We get mixed up about it.”
https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2873
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-theory-of-reality-as-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-20170601/
opentextbc.ca - 1.2 The Evolution of Psychology: History, Approaches, and Questions – Introduction to Psychology – 1st Canadian Edition
ReplyDeletelaurie corzett .... any particular part of that I should read ?
ReplyDeleteit's an overview
ReplyDeleteskim it and delve more deeply when you find parts that interest you
oh so much to read, but i must pipe in here because it's a fav topic of mine. The reason you don't have to fall back on dualism to account for abstract reality is that information theoretic concepts will account for the objectiveness of abstract things. Think of mental concepts as an "encoding", a map so to speak. When we think we process the information in the map, and at various times decode part of our thoughts to map to concrete things. But there's no reason why thoughts can't be perfectly real because information is perfectly real isn't it? Anyway, just a little thought to throw your way that helps tie into that other article on relations.
ReplyDeleteBill Brayman Interesting, but... is information itself something physical ? I would say not. There are physical properties, but information itself is a mental construct. More generally, while a thought might conceivably be a physical thing (e.g. an electrochemical reaction), I see no way in which the content of the thought could be a physical thing - even if it's an encoding process. The physical giraffe and the non-physical mental representation of a giraffe seem like two distinctly different things to me. I could be missing something...
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor Yes i know, giraffes and thoughts of them are different kind of things. But you see, once you say that then how do you account for other really physical properties such as energy? You can point to a bit of energy just as you can point to a bit of information. Both are completely abstract but we don't invoke dualism to account for the notion of energy. Our thoughts are a physical process that happen to operate on information no more mysteriously than a cell operates on energy. So, I have to conclude that invoking a mystery to the objectiveness of thought is not necessary. We just have to accept that information processing is just as physical as energy processing. Now, all that said, I do have to ponder about how descartes notion of dualism could be explained in information theoretic terms. Maybe the notion of information processing is what he needed to account for the otherwise seemingly different kinds of reality - mental and physical.
ReplyDeleteI dunno, Bill Brayman, I can point to an object (or a photon) with some energy, but I can't point to the energy itself. That's a property of the object, but not a physical object. So now we end up with even more non-physical stuff...
ReplyDeleteI suspect we're converging back to the question of how we know the external world is real (i.e. what distinguishes objects from their properties). My answer is, we don't. We can never prove with certainty that we're not being deceived by an evil demon; we simply assume so out of necessity.
Even under that assumption though, I still don't see how it helps. Concepts are fundamentally, unavoidably non-physical, in my view. "Show me one atom of justice",as Pratchett put it. Even though you might very well get a physical basis for some information, such as energy, it doesn't follow that mental concepts follow the same rules. The external and internal worlds are clearly distinctly different - that's the problem - and it doesn't follow that the rules of one apply to the other. External information may be physical, internal information might not be (almost by definition).
Rhys Taylor ok, so there seems to be a clear difference of kind. I'm just saying mental activity is a physical process and it's processing information. And yes rules of information processing are different from energy processing. So that sounds like a dualism and that's why i wondered about it. But to me there's nothing particularly mystical about it. There's nothing to stop robots from having mental activity merely as an emergent property of information processing. So i conclude that mental activity is just a physical process whose behavior is understandable from an information processing point of view. I understand your skepticism and am merely suggesting a different perspective where it seems less mysterious.
ReplyDeleteBill Brayman It's definitely a very interesting discussion. For me there is at least a physical, understandable component to mental processing, I definitely don't want to suggest it's all down to Mystical Woo. It's just equally, I don't think everything can be reduced to the purely physical either. I'm undecided if non-physical things arising from physical things is any less weird than physical things being controlled by Descartian ghosts... My point is really only that non-physical things are different. Beyond that, I'm completely uncertain.
ReplyDelete