Joseph,

Thank you for a deeply thoughtful and nicely written essay. There are aspects of your philosophical view that are very insightful and well presented - for example, in thinking about what it would be like to have no memory, and in your critique of "self" as a basic intuition. And your overview of the progression from thermal physics to bacteria etc. is excellent, very clear-minded.

I'm sorry to say that I don't agree with your thesis about "anthropic reasoning"... though I don't think you're far off track. I fully agree that from bacteria to our primate ancestors, there's a profound continuity in the nature of meaning and how it evolves. But I would put the discontinuity - the beginning of a new kind of evolutionary process that made us human - much further back, as described in my essay, which is also on the emergence of meaningful information.

Of course people born into the most primitive cultures still existing on Earth are fully capable of educating themselves in modern science, given the chance. Their native languages all evidence remarkably sophisticated mentalities, beyond any comparison with other animals. Nonetheless, you're right that there are further intellectual discontinuities, as in ancient Greece (and in other cultures where writing began to be a primary medium for cultural evolution), and with the emergence of modern science. And I agree that new dimensions of self-awareness are key elements in these events.

But I do find baffling the notion that we could tell machine A that it exists - and even more, the thought that this would make all records available in the world meaningful to it. This is surely not in the spirit of the young Heidegger you mentioned in your note above (if by 'young' you mean Being and Time). Self-awareness at any level is not a simple ability or "a cheap trick." It has many "pillars", as you say - not just memory but anticipation, the ability to interpret our perception and create a shared reality, etc.

Language vastly expanded our mental scope in all these respects, and that happened all over again when written records begin to pervade society... and again with the explicit self-reflexion of modern thought. You ask us to imagine what consciousness would be like without memory... so imagine what it would be like in a culture where no information had ever been conveyed except in momentary, face-to-face contact between people, and no one had ever imagined the possibility of recording anything. Yet amazingly complex societies evolved in these conditions.

Of course we can't give due weight to everything in such brief essays! - as it is, I'm amazed at how much you've been able to touch on here. And your ending points to the heart of the matter, I think, where you open up the idea of "mutual information". A central point for me is that "I" always evolves in relation to "you". It's true that modern Western thought has evolved as a dialectic between 1st-person and 3rd-person views of the world, and hardly reflects at all on the "You and I" kind of relationship, that Buber emphasized. But I think this is a key failure of the Cartesian/Kantian worldview, that even Heidegger did not fully overcome.

In any case, I very much appreciate the level at which you're thinking through these issues, and I'm rating your essay at the top of the scale.

Conrad

    Joseph,

    Thanks for the detailed response to my queries. I can see now there is much more to your ideas than could have been crammed into the essay topic. I did misinterpret some of your ideas and would need to read it again I think now that you have clarified things. It would be nice to cover more of these ideas through discussion.

    In your second paragraph you talk of the emergence of self-awareness and say "I don't know what the mechanism was that actually caused this change" (the change that brought about self-awareness). You may be interested in my hierarchical construct theory essay which also talks about a hierarchy of emergent capabilities that have distinctive attributes. I do give an account of how each level, in a three-tiered hierarchy, emerge and evolve.

    Hi Conrad,

    Thanks for the kind words and I'll be sure to look over your essay as soon as I get the chance, I've been travelling and haven't been able to reply freely. I think that you're correct about the weaker parts of my thesis, and I fully admit that I don't have the education in human anthropology, a subject I've never really studied, to properly address the mechanistic causes of our 'general' intelligence, as opposed to the more narrowly niche-based intelligence of most of our animal cousins. As I alluded to in the comments above, I envisioned the argument around anthropic reasoning as more of the 'teleological' explanation for what sets our species apart, and in calling it a "cheap trick" I was leaning on two separate characterizations from science and philosophy. First, I was quoting Bataille. Second, that use of the anthropic principle alone to 'solve' problems is a form of "science on the cheap" (I think Baez said that roughly) is well-known. Part of my point was to try and demonstrate that we actually use anthropic reasoning constantly. Anytime we reason about the past or future practically, we employ the consistency of the past and our own memory, but we only notice that this is problematic when we stretch it to it's limits, like if we say "of course the fine structure constant has to be about 1/137, if it were something else we wouln't be here." So the "cheap" part of self-awareness is that it really is an awfully large gain in computational complexity that comes with only larning one "fact about the world." I want to stress that this doesn't tell me anything about how to make something self-aware; it doesn't tell us anything about the efficient cause or mechanistic explanation. The answer to 'how to make it' will presumably come from people like yourself who know a lot about human anthropology and evolution collaborating with people who have a good imagination for creating machine learning environments. So that's the difference between a 'teleological' and an 'efficient' explanation, to me anyway. The latter tells you how to make something while the former is only possible because we can use our powers of anthropic reasoning to tell stories after the fact that "explain" how something led to the present, or in this case "why evolution kept it." I tried to be clear that I have no idea how to make something self-aware, but it was just that toss away comment about "implementation" and the vague paragraph mentioning hands and memory and writing, which is about the extent of my knowledge concerning human anthropology. I'd love to learn more though, because I do assume that the mechanistic explanation can be found in human evolution, and that assumption too is a product of my anthropic reasoning--I know our evoltion led to our intelligence.

    So for the record I don't think I've said anything in conflict with the Heidegger of Being and Time, though I certainly said many things he never would have. What I really want to retain from Being and Time are all the resources we need to combat all of this neo-dualism that has cropped up in phil mind in response to A.I. paranoia. Those resources are the phenomenological means of accessing the dimensional content of experience, things like its duration and intensity. The dimensional content is exactly what a physicist needs as well to begin thinking about the physical properties of a system, and the language of dualism intentionaly hides the dimensional content of experience. This is why physics and phenomenology need one another, in my opinion.

    If you still think I'm wrong about anthropic reasoning I'll read your essay and perhaps I'll change my mind! :)

    Joe

    Joe,

    Rereading my post, I think it sounds more critical than I meant it to be... I really was impressed by your essay, and it deserves a 10, a rating I don't give lightly. And I'm far from an expert in any field of science, though I try to make sure my writing is accurate. Heidegger I do know fairly well, since he was very important to me in grad school back in the 70's. I'm very glad you know his work, and delighted to find someone with that background doing biochemistry. The truth is I can hardly read "Philosophy" any more, since the world itself is so much more interesting. It often seems to me that while our knowledge has grown exponentially since 1900, we still seem to conceptualize the world largely in terms that were familiar in the 19th century.

    You say, "What I really want to retain from Being and Time are all the resources we need to combat all of this neo-dualism that has cropped up in phil mind" - Yes, this is where Being and Time really succeeds, as still the deepest critique of the Cartesian/Kantian tradition. And he did it by articulating the many "equiprimordial" elements involved in what seems like the perfectly simple idea of "self". I get your point about taking self-awareness as a "teleological" explanation of what makes us humans so different, and you're right that it's implicit in all our experience, from a very early age. And I'm intrigued by your comment about "the dimensional context of experience" that's hidden by dualism... I hope to discuss that further!

    Thanks - Conrad

    Conrad, Mark, Stefan, everyone else who expressed interest in further discussion--

    Thank you all for considering my ideas and it would be my pleasure. I can be reached at josephbrisendine@gmail.com and feel free to reach out anytime. Meanwhile I'll get back in touch once I have properly considered everyone else's entries.

    Best,

    Joe

    Hi, Joseph, congratulations, this is an excellent essay. Both for the ideas in it, and the writing. Many of the things you mention resonate with the ones I chose to focus in my essay (comments from you would be most appreciated). I still get wound up by the anthropic reasoning, though. I understand that conditioning on our existence rules outs a-priori possible evolutions of the universe that do not give rise to us. I also understand that perceiving ourselves makes all things related to ourselves interesting. I do not understand, however, in which way anthropic reasoning provides explanations - and I do care for explanations, whatever those may be!

    In any case, this is an old problem I've been having for ages, it's not your fault, I'll just have to keep thinking. In any case, thanks for the great read!

    inés = one more sign without meaning about to fall apart.

      Hi Ines that was a lovely compliment!

      I had noticed and enjoyed your essay a great deal as well, I will definitely share my thoughts on it with you on your page. But first allow me to say that there's a sense in which you're right, anthropic reasoning explains nothing. If we insist that an explanation must be a mechanistic explanation, which means that it should tell us clearly how to construct the phenomena in question, then we should conclude that anthropic reasoning doesn't furnish explanations. In science, we typically adhere to the spirit of Feynman's "what I cannot create I do not understand", and we don't consider a phenomenon explained until we have a mechanistic explanation. I didn't do the best job explaining this difference in the essay becuase, frankly, I have only just recently begun to piece these thoughts together myself, whereas when discussing thermodynamics and biochemistry I was just presenting things I've understood for years. But anthropic reasoning does provide a different kind of "explanation" for phenomena, although I would also be fine with using a different word for what we mean in this case. My idea was that the explanations it provides are the kinds of explanations contained in stories, which might also be considered what a "teleological explanation" does. Rather than tell you how a thing works and what conditions are required for its stability, a story provides some simplifying narrative that assigns a reason for the existence of the phenomena simply in terms of its continuity with the rest of reality that we perceive. In ordinary life, I think we accept these kinds of explanations all the time, and only when we have the circumspection required by science do we even notice that they aren't very good explanations, or more precisely that the sense of that word in science and in everyday life is not really the same. So I think your instincts are correct! As with almost any situation where the results of science conflict with our ordinary understanding, the problem arises because of ambiguities in language that we don't notice until they conflict with our capacity to interpret the results of experiments. Anyway I hope that helps and I'd be happpy to discuss this or anything else with you further in the future, because your essay also has some ideas in it which I have never considered before but which really impressed me. I'll mention them on your essay's page though.

      Joe

      I think you are right, I am expecting from anthropic reasoning something it cannot quite provide. I just wish I could benefit more from the things it can actually provide. I promise to work on it, and if needed, come back to you...

      Thanks for the great explanation!!

      inés.

      Gee I think it all depends on what you mean by that, and what you include or don't as part of the "spark."

      Dear Joseph,

      your essay is remarkable for the degree of personal participation that you put in your story-telling, both in tone and in contents.

      However, if I were to summarise some of the main points you make, I'd have some difficulty with one which is quite central: the value of the self. On one hand you attribute much higher sophistication and 'computational capability' to the robot with self-awareness (following mainly Aaronson?); on the other, you regard the pretended certainty and stability of the self as a "wonderful irony of the history of philosophy". Maybe the conflict is only apparent? I'd be curious about a final word from you on the issue. (I read your text twice, but didn't go through the comments in your blog. Apologies if you have already covered the issue.)

      Thank you and best regards!

      Tommaso

      http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2824

        Thanks for the kind words Tommaso!

        I'm happy to try to clarify my position. As you intuited, I think the tension is only apparent. I think the gain in computational complexity due to the ability to use "anthropic reasoning" has been demonstrated clearly by Aaronson, just as you say, and that this complexity gain is the "teleological" explanation for our self-awareness. This doesn't mean, of course, that this caused us to become self-aware, as this would be like saying that photosynthesis was discovered "so that orgaansms could use sunlight." only a mechanistic explanation actually tells you how to create something and allows you to infer it's actual cause for existence. A teleological explanation does tell you, however, why it is that once there were self-aware animals they quickly out-learned non self-aware animals, just s it tells you why, once there were photosynthetic organims, they quickly covered the earth. So that's the powerful part of our selfhood. My claim is that it is powerful but also unstable. The sense of its instability can be found everywhere in our experience if we pay attenntion to it, but then my contention is that it also follows logically from understanding how biology increases its thermodynamic efficiency in line with natural selection. If you want to compute things near the Landauer limit, your band gaps have to be as close to kT as they can get without being overcome by noise. Our self-awareness then is the source of our superior understanding of nature and our ability to share information so readily, but the "free energy of formation of self-awareness" appears to be very small, and easily overcome. I hope that all makes sense!

        Thanks also for taking the time to read and consider my ideas, it is very rewarding to know that they were seriously considered by another intellect!

        Joe

        Dear Joe --

        A lot going on in this lovely piece.

        A question, since you anchor meaning in "information relevant to survival".

        Say I simulate an evolutionary process on my computer. The symbols the machine processes have meaning for me, of course. But could they also have meaning for each other? (E.g., could the symbol equivalent to a deleterious simulated environment have "meaning for" the symbol equivalent to a simulated organism? If the agent ignores it, that agent's symbol will die/become less common).

        Yours,

        Simon

          Hi Simon! Thanks for reading my essay and I have to say I'm a little starstruck because I'm a big fan of your work!

          As to your question, I wanted to define meaning more along the lines of attention, I actually had Heidegger's notion of "care" in mind when I was trying to decide what made information meaninfgul. In biology, that's generically connected to survival but then, even for most animals it can be about much more then mere survival. Sexual selection, in particular, appears to be capable of creating very exotic forms of meaning, and for us most meaning is only dimly related to survival.

          In essence my thinking was that mutual information was the first component of meaning, becuase a structure has to be capable of interacting with or detecting certain degrees of freedom in it's environment. Then I think the structure should also be capable of responding in a counterfactual manner, so if the environmental degrees of freedom being detected had taken a different value the structure would have computed a different response. That's how I would technically describe the act of paying attention to and responding to information, which is really what I wanted to say makes information meaningful. The e. coli example might have blurred that point since the bug is behaving that way "in order to" survive, but it's really the fact that it's sensing-computing-acting that causes the sensed degrees of freedom to be meaningful to the structure.

          Finally then, as to the digital agent, if it ignores the symbol then the symbol is not meaningful to it, even if it dies as a result. If a large number of such agents are simulated and they also have some adaptive and reproductive capacity in their programing, then the ones that learn to pay attention to that symbol will in time take over the population. That's how I would depict the relationship between survival and meaning. Natural selection drives information increases in genomes at the population level by selecting for structures that have the fittest meaningful environmental relationships, meaning the ones that pay attention to what matters the best.

          Hope that's clear and thanks again!

          Joe

          16 days later

          Dear Joe,

          Fascinating essay! I found particularly enlightening your discussion of what you identify as a "wonderful irony of the history of philosophy", that selfhood would be the "most certain fact of all". Your example of someone without memory clearly drives home the point that the only thing that can be taken for certain is the (conscious) perception of the present instant, which may or may not come with the "thin veneer" of selfhood.

          Later in your essay, you identify the importance of feedback loops, a theme I also take up in my essay (where I postulate that conscious agents and regular physical laws "resonate" together and co-emerge within the infinite domain of all abstract structures). I like the way you put it: "We are interested in this world which is our home, and it repays us by being interesting. 'In this sense all things are indebted to us.' "

          Overall, I think your essay is well written, interesting, to the point and thought provoking. Congratulations, and good luck in the contest!

          Marc

            Dear Joseph,

            With great interest I read your essay, which of course is worthy of the highest rating.

            I'm glad that you have your own position

            «this "sweet spot" in its parameter space it also where its thermodynamic efficiency is greatest, or equivalently where it can process the most information at the minimum energetic cost, a point I have also argued from my own research as a protein designer.»

            « Structure is never simply structure then, but rather information which may be potentially transmitted from one environment to another and thus shared, becoming mutual information. It was not made to last, but rather to be transmitted. It is a sign, signifying nothing in itself;»

            «If Newton's Principia Mathematica is the logical starting point for modern science, for modern hilosophy Descartes' Meditations surely plays a dual role.»

            Your questions are very close to me

            «but can we actually give a mathematical criteria for when the amount of macro-state degeneracy leads an "aims and intentions" desciption to be more efficient than a thermodynamic description?»

            «I'm definitely not criticizig because I don't think I know the answer either, but it seems like it would be fun to think about.»

            You might also like reading my essay , where it is claimed that quantum phenomena occur in the macro world, where is no measurement problem due to the dynamism of the elements of the medium in the form of de Broglie waves of electrons, where parametric resonance occurs and solitons are formed, which mechanism of work is similar to the principle of the heat pump.

            I wish you success in the contest.

            Kind regards,

            Vladimir

              5 days later

              Dear Joseph Murphy Brisendine!

              Meet up the New Cartesian Physic, based on the identity of space and matter. You need it, because it showed that the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of force which on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.

              New Cartesian Physics has enormous potential in understanding the world. To show this potential I ventured to give "materialistic explanations of the paranormal and supernatural" is the title of my essay.

              Visit my essay, you will find there the New Cartesian Physic. After you give a post in my topic, I have to do the same in your theme

              sincerely,

              Dizhechko Boris

              Vladimir,

              Thank you for the kind words, I've been swamped the past few weeks as I'm trying to complete my dissertation and schedule my defense, but I promise to read and respond to your essay before the contest closes tomorrow as well!

              Joe

              I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to read my essay once more, and say that this has been a rewarding experience for me. I'm particularly glad to have found the appreciation of like-minded intellects, and I learned a great deal from the other entries which have helped to clarify my own thoughts enormously. If I could do it over, with everyone's feedback, I'm sure I could have done much better! But growth is the gift of being, and I am indebted to everyone who earnestly engaged with me. Thank you also to FQXI for sponsoring such a timely and vital discussion.

              Joe

              Marc

              I do apologize that I somehow missed your comment until just now! Thank you though, and best of luck to you as well!

              Joe