The Consciousness Rabbit Hole

By Wayne Brown

There is a great video on the subject here. It's illustrative of the "rabbit hole" we go down when trying to "explain" something. Ultimately, this is the same rabbit hole we go down when we try to "explain" anything. "What is consciousness'' has the same problems as "What is gravity?". Any "explanation" would be another description, requiring a certain amount of hand waving to count as pulling the curtain back.

Toward the end, there is a discussion of the difference between "thoughts" and "reality." The problem is framing the issue as a "problem" to be solved. The "problem" can be reduced to the collapse of the wave function (see below). This is not to say we are not left with a mystery. It's just that it has nothing to do with "consciousness".

For me, conscousness is a side issue. Certainly, consciousness is a vast mystery - perhaps THE mystery. But we don't need to have a solution to this mystery to know that the world we experience is created in our brains. Trivially, experience is experience.

"Consciousness" bites off too much of the mystery. It's a matter of information about the world versus the world itself. We can make this distinction if we are talking about robots or bees. The mystery of consciousness can be set aside.

At a fundamental level, quantum mechanics tells us two things:

  • "Properties" of the world do not exist when not measured. Einstein disagreed, and he was wrong. See "EPR Paradox".
  • The information you can extract from a particle depends on what you are looking for. Precision in one question inevitably results in a lack of precision in another.
A "Scientific" view would assume that the above issues would be true of any information system about the world - consciousness or not. For example, when a mechanical experimental setup is left to do measurements.

This would seem to be a fundamental separation between any kind of "observer" and the actual universe, even if the "observer" is something as simple as a kind of "macro" scale object that produces an "up or down" result.

In the above video, Roger Penrose draws attention to this fundamental idea: the "collapse of the wave function." But he does a lot of "hand waving" to connect the idea to consciousness. His hand-waving wanders off to the area of "microtubules", which have the advantage of being a little understood. Even if he's right, we are still stuck with the "hard problem".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Facebook and Bing - A Killer Combination

By Wayne Brown
Image
 This is a partial list of groups I belong to that focus on Generative AI art: Facebook creates community. I use BING as a kind of Generative AI university: BING U.  I prefer the role of student, so my job is to find good teachers. Think of me as the guy who shows you around the campus and knows his way around, but he's a student himself. Microsoft BING is free and very powerful. It's an excellent way to learn Generative AI and a standard tool that everyone in my imaginary school has. The way to find a teacher is to see their work in a Facebook group. Then, save the picture that caught your eye in a Word document (or document editor of your choice). For example ... Joe McIntosh What we have found here is not only the prompt for the picture but a teacher who shares the prompts for all his pictures. Look for artists who work primarily with BING. Don't get distracted by other platforms or techniques. Learn to do one thing well before shopping for better tools. The best Facebo
Read more

A Process ...

By Wayne Brown
Image
She will be 105 in September. She struggles to recognize her four children, let alone her countless grandchildren. Today, she said, "Nobody told me how to die." She has always wanted to die in her own home, an oversized place that has always had room for an endless parade of visitors. She has always been very "social." Although she struggles to remember the old friends dropping by, she chats happily "on automatic." There are a lot of relatives. She was raised on a farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where her Russian parents raised 16 children. I asked "AI" - specifically Claude 3 Sonnet , to describe this situation in a short essay. I have taken the liberty of letting Grammarly , my AI writing assistant, make a few corrections to Sonnet's purple prose. This is the slightly edited version: She sits in  the twilight of her extraordinary life, a living embodiment of resilience and grace. At 105 years old, her eyes, dimmed by time, still h
Read more

Warp Speed Generative AI

By Wayne Brown
Image
Jump to Warp Speed Warp 2 Warp 3 Warp 4 "Warp Speed"  Illustration of " Language is a Virus " Laurie Anderson Completed in the time it takes to perform the song For a very long time, I have tried to master information processing tools and "wire" them together into a "machine" that suits my purpose. "Warp Speed Generative AI" combines several powerful families of AI tools to turn an idea into one or more pictures. Along the way, we get an explanation of the original idea, references and a detailed explanation of the style. I call it "Warp speed" because AI seems to give me whiplash as it takes my idea and runs with it. I just hang on and enjoy the ride. "Warp Speed" is a response to the current obsession with prompts: how to write them, when to share them, how to monetize them, what books to read, what courses to take and so forth. AI can write pretty good prompts. "Prompt Engineering" is an endangered speci
Read more