How Does Evolution Produce Consciousness/Reason?

[Skyweir]

I found that very interesting and didnt have to read it more than three times LOLS

[peter]

I'm not sure if this thread is the place for this question or if it merits a new thread - but has anything said in the pages above come close, or attempted to face the most fundamental of questions how do we account for the indisputable evidence (from each and every one of us personal experience) that somehow brute matter attained consciousness - became self aware. This seems to me the fundamental paradox where science meets it's boundary if you like. There is nothing in our understanding of matter that, as far as I'm aware, accounts for this possibility - and yet for our present paradigm to be maintained it must somehow be accounted for. What is it then this self awareness? Is it a 'quantum phenomena' (I've seen this postulated). If we are not to grant it special status as a 'divine spark' then it must be accounted for in the material world of physics - and I see no evidence that we have made any concrete progress in doing so to date.

[Fist and Faith]

That is, indeed, the question and focus of the thread. Matter is behaving in ways we cannot account for with the properties of matter as we are currently understands them. We don't seem to be able to study it using the scientific method.


I wonder what the least non-materialistic activity is. And I wonder how we could detect it in what would have to be a fairly simple creature. We couldn't ask it questions, after all, and I don't know that we would be able to prove it in ourselves if we couldn't reason it out.

[peter]

I think life is hard to define; as a secondary student it was done in terms of five criteria - it had to move, respire, respond to stimuli, reproduce and grow. Now I think with increased knowledge of viruses and prion proteins etc the demarcation between living and non living matter is more fuzzy and may actually not exist at all in any concrete sense. On this basis the crossing from non living to living matter becomes, if not less problematic, then at least more manageable by virtue of our ability to see it incrementally. But the self awareness problem seems to me to be of a different order; I can't seem to nail it down as matter 'behaving in ways that we cannot account for' ...... there seems to be a need (in me perhaps) to see something extra - not necessarily divine, but certainly outside the realm of matter which surely by now, we understand pretty completely?

[Fist and Faith]

Even if we were foolish enough to think we understand *anything* completely, this particular issue proves that we certainly don't understand matter completely.

[Vraith]

Even if we were foolish enough to think we understand *anything* completely, this particular issue proves that we certainly don't understand matter completely.

That.
I think I've said before, folk keep pointing at a mysterious gap/shift between conscious/self-aware, and NOT that.

There are definitely gaps/shifts/spaces...but that particular one may or may not, and I think not, be "special." We notice it because everyone, every day, can directly encounter it.
Unlike the deep layers of science/physics.
But...the gap
How do you, or anyone KNOW that the conscious/self-awareness "gapness" is different from what, exactly IS an electron's negative charge, and what IS the field? What CAN it do, and what CAN't it?
We know brain-like things are necessary in every case we've seen for consciousness.

We also know every brain-like thing we've seen operates fundamentally electrically.

So, MAYBE there is a different kind of gap.

But being bewildered by it AS a separate/special thing isn't much different than explaining lightning by Thor because you don't know how weather works.

It's not that how weather works doesn't explain it...it's that our KNOWLEDGE of how weather works is insufficient.
[[[Lightning does have some strange shit going on, of course...but Thor still seems a bit out there]]]

I think we're far enough along to start thinking we know something about it...like that brain-like structures cause it.
We shouldn't fall for the family of myth like the idea that primitive people didn't know that fucking caused babies.
They sure as hell did. They were just, by lack of tech, forced to be SUCCESSFUL underpants gnomes.
Instead of step 1, get underpants, step 2, ??? step 3 profit, it was
step 1 fuck, step 2 ??? step 3 baby.

[Fist and Faith]

I wonder if string theory is right. If so, there are several other dimensions. Maybe the brain causes activity in one or more of them, and maybe that activity is consciousness. Good SciFi story, anyway.

[peter]

I think to postulate that there might be "forces" beyond that which our (by your own concession limited) understanding currently encompass is entirely different from putting forward the explanation of Thor as the cause of thunder. (NB I use the word forces loosely to cover any knowledge of currently unknown fundamental factors that may by future paradigm shift and investigation emerge). This argument would have been applicable to Einstein beavering away in his Swiss patent office, and the history of science is littered with cases great and small where it is wrong. Our current state of understanding of say cosmology is rapidly beginning to creak at the seams with the emergence of dark energy and matter - it's going to need reworking - and no scientist alive can tell me what energy is as opposed to what it does.

But the paradigm of matter - for it is a paradigm just as say Newtonian mechanics was - the standard model perhaps you would call it, has indeed I think just about reached the end of it's explanatory power (the as yet unproven super-symmetries idea notwithstanding) - and I believe will fall to be replaced by the next and superior in terms of its explanatory power, before the conundrum of self-awareness is answered. By your argument above V, we have to see self-awareness as emergent from matter in its complex arrangement (as say meaning is emergent from the arrangement of letters in specific ways in writing) - but there is nothing in the model that allows for this: it simply doesn't stretch that far.

[Fist and Faith]

The model is nothing more than a description of our current understanding. Because consciousness exists, the fact that our current understanding cannot account for it simply means our current understanding is incomplete. And a model that is accurate, though incomplete, will not fall. It will be modified, or become part of a larger model.

[wayfriend]

... and that's where I would bring up Godel's second incompleteness theorem: no formal system can demonstrate it's own consistency. Which, in this case, tells us that consciousness, if it can be modeled as a formal system, cannot fully explain consciousness.

[Vraith]

but there is nothing in the model that allows for this: it simply doesn't stretch that far.

The model is just a model. AND we don't even know what it does, yet.
We know there are things it doesn't seem to explain. But we ALSO keep finding new things it does allow. Like, it doesn't stretch far enough to the EAST, but we haven't come close to what it says about things to the NORTH.
But of course it will be replaced by a different/better one. Perhaps just adjusted, perhaps something entirely new, or perhaps it's a sub-system within a larger one.
Most of what I'm objecting to isn't that, so much...it's the implication I keep seeing that there is some magical "extra."
When you [or anyone, general you] say consciousness can't be explained by electro-brain/material things...first, you don't know that, can't know that at this point, AND that claim will bet true of any and all material things known and unknown [so far]. Any and all material things will, because they are material, will have the same problem with all y'alls insistence on "immateriality."

Anyway...WF, yea. I thought I'd mentioned Godel on this issue/kind of issue somewhere.
There are ways around it...one of which is to use more than one complementary formal system at once. [[that has problems, too...just different kinds of problems]]
The other thing, of course, which I know I've pointed at in many issues/threads, is that Reality is NOT a formal system. So the system will have it's faults/failures...but it will ALSO always be different from/irreconcilable with the thing it is talking about. It will always be a case of partial, resemblance, close enough for gov't work.
Thankfully, we have informal ways of knowing, not just formal ones.

[wayfriend]

Two "complimentary" formal systems put together is a formal system.

"Formal system" basically means nothing happens unless there's a rule that says it happens. If you care to declare that consciousness, or reality, is not a formal system, you are basically saying it is magic. But, more importantly, you're saying it isn't bound by rules ... which again means we can never fully understand it.

[Vraith]

Two "complimentary" formal systems put together is a formal system.

"Formal system" basically means nothing happens unless there's a rule that says it happens. If you care to declare that consciousness, or reality, is not a formal system, you are basically saying it is magic. But, more importantly, you're saying it isn't bound by rules ... which again means we can never fully understand it.

And here I thought we were going to roughly agree...and we still might after...

But, on the first, no.
It's using different things to describe different attributes of one thing. both will still have there internal problems. They might even be contradictory to each other in fundamental irreconcilable ways. AND YET the answer each provides about particular aspects be useful/accurate in describing a whole.
For instance, building a ship to land on the moon requires at least two mutually exclusive kinds of geometry to solve different aspects of the endeavor.

On the second, no.
The math that describes the weak nuclear force is close enough and useful.
But the math is NOT the force and doesn't describe everything...and the force is NOT the math in any way whatsoever.
If either of those things is totally unreal, it is the math. If either is magic, it's the abstract description, not the thing.
Formal systems and following rules are not synonyms.
It's funny to say that, to me...cuz all things that real things do are really possible....but plenty of math that follows the rules perfectly does things that are literally impossible, in reality. In fact, nearly ALL math is "really" impossible.

[wayfriend]

The math that describes the weak nuclear force is close enough and useful.
But the math is NOT the force and doesn't describe everything...and the force is NOT the math in any way whatsoever.

Right .... but what the math -IS- is our understanding of the force. That is what is either a formal system or it's not. And if it's not, that means we don't really understand it. Because if we don't know the rules which describe the force (in a useful way), do we really understand it? I don't think so.

[Vraith]

. Because if we don't know the rules which describe the force (in a useful way), do we really understand it? I don't think so.

That is so. Quite a large portion of reality can't be understood very well without some deep formal analysis.
OTOH---if you ONLY have the formal systems, you ALSO don't/can't really understand it.
Partly that is because of the internal problems---Godel's most famous, but others too.
And partly because some necessary terms, definitions, conditions of formal systems cannot be instantiated in the material universe...and neither can the vast majority of their results/conclusions/objects.
The translation between is ALWAYS rough. Close.
There is a cleavage between...but somehow related, existent in some partly shared space/world, cuz we can breath the atmosphere on both sides. [[I know, I bang on that horse in threads all over the place. Ah well]].

[Fist and Faith]

The moon lander is not a formal system. It may have taken two mutually exclusive formal systems to make it. The fact that neither of those two formal systems can demonstrate its own consistency does not mean the moon lander is inconsistent.

For the same reason, we do not know that the universe is inconsistent. Consciousness's freedom from the properties and interactions of particles should only mean something else is also in play.

[wayfriend]

Well, just to be clear, there is consistency, and then there is the ability to prove consistency. In a formal system, "consistency" means that the system cannot produce two statements that are true and which imply a contradiction. "Proving" consistency means showing why it is impossible to do so in any and all situations, for any and all statements. It's a BIG THING. It means, in essence, that you know WHY everything works, as well as how.

If you use two formal systems to make a lunar lander, they cannot be inconsistent, because the lander would not exist if they were. You cannot create something that is a contradiction to itself. At best you have two systems - two sets of rules - that have nothing to do with each other.

But regardless, this is still short of PROVING consistency. That's the stuff of Universal Theory and such. You can use a system, and get consistent results, and you can even trust that they will be consistent. But you may never know WHY it's consistent.

To swing this back around ... if we build a model that seems to predict what consciousness will do, but we do not know why this model works, we can't really say we understand consciousness. No more than a model that shows which way reflected light will bounce off a wall explains what light is.

The problem is, you're trying to build a formal system for consciousness with consciousness. Which is why Godel applies.

[Zarathustra]

When you [or anyone, general you] say consciousness can't be explained by electro-brain/material things...first, you don't know that, can't know that at this point, AND that claim will bet true of any and all material things known and unknown [so far]. Any and all material things will, because they are material, will have the same problem with all y'alls insistence on "immateriality."

As long as explanations of "electro-brain/material things" are objective explanations, it will remain a problem to explain subjectivity. An objective explanation can never describe a subjective phenomenon, because all the elements of an objective explanation are themselves objective, leaving subjectivity as something beyond this explanation. We almost need a new kind of language or logic, one that transfers subjective meaning into objective terms. Or maybe we should think of consciousness the same way we think of "immaterial," unobservable aspects of objective explanations--like causation. The connective principle of cause/effect is an inference, not an observation. It's an explanation for correlations/patterns of events, without which objective reality would be incomprehensible. Thus, perhaps instead of trying to use materialism to explain immaterial phenomenon, maybe we should have been trying to explain the objective world in terms of consciousness, perhaps as another connective principle between matter and objective events, a teleological connector instead of "blind determinism" of causation. In these terms, consciousness could be the teleological aspect of reality itself.

Anyway...WF, yea. I thought I'd mentioned Godel on this issue/kind of issue somewhere.
There are ways around it...one of which is to use more than one complementary formal system at once. [[that has problems, too...just different kinds of problems]]
The other thing, of course, which I know I've pointed at in many issues/threads, is that Reality is NOT a formal system. So the system will have it's faults/failures...but it will ALSO always be different from/irreconcilable with the thing it is talking about. It will always be a case of partial, resemblance, close enough for gov't work.
Thankfully, we have informal ways of knowing, not just formal ones.

We know that consciousness isn't a formal system from Godel's proof itself. If consciousness were a formal system, we would never have been able to discover, prove, and understand Godel's theorem, because such understanding requires a view "outside" of the formal system. And we cannot place our understanding of this theorem on a larger formal system, for the very reason WF notes above, namely, that this is merely another formal system, with the same limitations. Our understanding of Godel's theorem isn't limited to one system, but is a general understanding of any possible formal system whatsoever. This understanding is not itself a formal system. Thus, as a feature of consciousness, this understanding shows that consciousness cannot be a formal system (which is also why computers will never be conscious).

[Fist and Faith]

The problem is, you're trying to build a formal system for consciousness with consciousness. Which is why Godel applies.

I don't think that's correct. Consciousness is not a formal system trying to build a formal system about itself. Consciousness builds formal systems. What else do we know of that does? So who's to say it can't build a formal system about itself?

Otoh, we don't know that there can be a formal system for consciousness. Could be there are aspects that do not have properties that can be fit into any formal system whatsoever. Could be we can even, one day, figure out how consciousness is able to exist outside of the properties and interactions of particles, and then we'll understand that we can't write rules about it. Could be it is even less constrained than we ever imagined.

[Zarathustra]

Godel was talking about systems like arithmetic. We're not trying to explain consciousness by creating a formal system to describe it. In fact, no explanation relies on creating a formal system to describe the phenomenon. Explanations aren't formal systems, though they make use of formal systems (e.g. math) to make them rigorous. But describing things with mathematical formulas isn't creating a formal system. The system is already created.

Furthermore, just because math itself is incomplete doesn't mean that the explanations which make use of math are necessarily incomplete, since they don't rest on the completeness of math for their veracity. They might be incomplete for other reasons, but those are practical reasons, not logical ones.