Sentience, the ontology of experience by Cristinel Stoica

Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

Thank you for the careful consideration of my essay. Based on your comment, I think we both take the position that S=P and sentience underlies them.

> You have defined VERY NICELY what is NOT consciousness in general. Very good!!

I guess you noticed that I took a neti neti (नेति नेति) path, as the title of my longer essay, The negative way to sentience, suggests.

> Hope you can spend a little time on my essay to see how the above definitions in more detail.

I'd love to!

> I hope to have lively discussion with you on your thinking.

> Best wishes for your essay!!!

I wish the same to you too! Take care!

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

Please call me Cristi. Thanks for your appreciation, it's reciprocal. Indeed, the "negative path" is normally used in the sense you mentioned, as a way to Nirvana. What I mean by negative way or neti neti in the context of my longer essay is mainly science as a negative way. Science allows hypotheses then rejects them. Most powerful results come as no-go theorems, which is also the theme of this contest. The body of science grows, which gives the impression that it's a "positive growth", an accumulation of knowledge. But positivism is no longer the way of science. In some sense the body of knowledge is growing, but the attachment to the accumulated knowledge is not in the spirit of science itself, which works by negation. All of the models and theories are to be seen as provisional hypotheses, always in search for contrary evidence. It's the way of skepticism, in the proper meaning of the word, which is the same as in negative mysticism, but applied to science. As for neti neti as a personal path, my ego probably wants a piece of Nirvana too :) I have no worries about this, my ego is just an ephemeral cloud on the blue sky. It's a form of experience, I take it as it is, with the goods and the bads. Nature built these neural networks as a form of life, and as neural networks, they are made out of biases. But a cloud can neither help nor do any harm to the unchanging blue sky, it's just a playful fluctuation of oblivion which gives too much importance to itself :)

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Jochen,

Indeed, I think we can only talk about the relational structure of sentience. I tried to be more explicit in the longer article, where I discuss that we can only research "the crack". The purpose was to see what can be done by limiting, or rather by being limited to talk only about relations, not about ontology. Kastrup is the closest to how I see it from what I've read, but I think it's "metaphorical", and still at the level of relations, because "metaphor" is all that we can do about it. But I'd rather say it in another way. Suppose you're a materialist. Based on materialism, you would attribute a certain materialist ontology to a rock, a piece of ice, water, or steam. You would see it as derived from the fundamental ontology of the elementary particles. Then, if you try to replace "matter" in the materialist ontology with "sentience", you'd have of course a problem, the combination problem you mention. A better way than materialism is physicalism, and to think of particles as excitations of the quantum field, so to think of objects like some stable excitations/fluctuations of the vacuum. Then, you don't combine, it's just the field, not a combination of particles. Then, the ontology doesn't rely on a bottom-up approach starting from particles. Now replace the physicalist ontology with sentience. This would reduce the combination problem, at least apparently, since you have just a field, out of which separate fields are apparent. But the real problem is the problem of climbing: how does fundamental sentience climb the structure, from the fundamental level, to the coarse grained level that we call brain, to our minds? This view of excitations/fluctuations with the coarse graining is a metaphor that is similar to Kastrup's I think, but closer to what I mean, yet not quite what I mean, which I think it's unspeakable. The closest to what I think the explanation is, is contained in my previous essay, Indra's net, particularly in note 8, which is about the equivalence class of germs defining the holomorphic field. I didn't include this in the essay or even in the longer essay, since I wanted to allow for more options, even though I prefer S=P, and since I wanted to see how far we can go just from the most inevitable principles, i.e. by avoiding speculations.

Cheers,

Cristi

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for the interesting comments, which are complementary to the focus of my essay, in tandem, as you said.

> in terms of consciousness, there is demonstrably an AI analogue to this problem, which is in the interconnectivity of synapses in the human brain, i.e. in terms of the universe, the issue can be related to the density of neuronic pathways.

Certainly, there must be a structural side of the problem, the physical correlates of sentience. You propose a measure of this, the density of neural paths. Another one is the Phi proposed in Integrated Information Theory.

> It is, in a sense directly related to the problem of what makes an entity self aware.

Yes, self-awareness requires structure, to be able to include a self-representation. When I say "sentience" I mean the ontology of the structure, "what is like to be", whether self-aware or not.

I think the so called "easy problems", those related to structure, functionality, behavior, are not easy at all, not understood yet, but understandable in principle, and they are important.

Thanks again for considering my essay and for the comments! I'm looking forward to read yours.

Best regards,

Cristi

Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

Thank you for the comment. Because we moved the discussion here, let me also bring the paragraph where I mention science as a negative way.

What I mean by negative way or neti neti in the context of my longer essay is mainly science as a negative way. Science allows hypotheses then rejects them. Most powerful results come as no-go theorems, which is also the theme of this contest. The body of science grows, which gives the impression that it's a "positive growth", an accumulation of knowledge. But positivism is no longer the way of science. In some sense the body of knowledge is growing, but the attachment to the accumulated knowledge is not in the spirit of science itself, which works by negation. All of the models and theories are to be seen as provisional hypotheses, always in search for contrary evidence. It's the way of skepticism, in the proper meaning of the word, which is the same as in negative mysticism, but applied to science.

What I mean by science as a negative way is in the sense of via negativa, applied to the study of reality rather than theology. I didn't call science a negative way because it rejects people's novel proposals of theories in favor of the "mainstream" ones. I called it so because it keeps testing itself, or at least it is supposed to do so. And because it is never definitive, even though many think it's definitive, and many did so through the entire history of science. So, to make it clear, I didn't complain that it is negative in the sense you mention, although this may be true as well. If I would make a complaint against the scientific community, is that it is not negative enough, but in the sense I meant for the word "negative", not in the sense of rejecting new ideas.

Most of those interested to contribute to science, both gifted amateurs and professionals, have difficulties to get enough attention. Few are those blessed with the attention. Not getting attention is not a proof that the theory is wrong, getting high positive attention and esteem is not a proof that it is right, although it's a proof that at least it's interesting enough to enough scientists. A sure way to be ignored is to not master properly the field, in the most technical details. But mastering it and even solving some good problem is not a guarantee of success. And nice words said by even some authorities don't guarantee success either. They have to cite the work, to join it and develop it in their own papers. Very few are lucky like this. Most published papers are read only by reviewers, and even so, sometimes only superficially. A lot of brain power is used to produce new research, very little of it receive the light of other conscious beings. Who knows what gems are hidden and lost forever in someone's drawer, or even published in a journal but never understood by others.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Eckard Blumschein,

Maybe. My experience doesn't go back to those time. So for the original meaning I trust etymologists, and they say

"observation as the source of knowledge; actual observation; an event which has affected one," from Old French esperience "experiment, proof, experience" (13c.), from Latin experientia "a trial, proof, experiment; knowledge gained by repeated trials," from experientem (nominative experiens) "experienced, enterprising, active, industrious," present participle of experiri "to try, test," from ex- "out of" (see ex-) peritus "experienced, tested," from PIE *per-yo-, suffixed form of root *per- (3) "to try, risk." Meaning "state of having done something and gotten handy at it" is from late 15c.

Words evolve. Take for example the word "calculate" from the title of your essay. Its etymology goes back to "calculus" = "pebble stones", but now it's used in a much wider sense than counting pebbles.

But I'll leave such debates to linguists. The way I use the word "experience" is closer to the way it's used here, and I don't tie it particularly to memories or expected future processes.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Eckard Blumschein,

> As an engineer, I can only analyze a part of a growing "block" of more or less memorized data from past processes. The fuzzy notion present has no logical place between past and future.

This makes sense. To connect it with my essay, the memories and the growth you mention happen at the coarse grained level.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Ernesto,

Thank you for reading my essay and for the feedback.

> Are you claiming that science can not make any progress explaining an ontology?

Yes, but I think I do more than claim, I also explain why it's the case: because science can only deal with relations, and the nature of things is not the object of science. It's just not provable in the way we consider things proven in science. Now, people use the word "ontology" in different ways. So statements like "the wavefunction is ontic" as in the PBR theorem make sense, but there the word "ontic" should be understood as an impossibility to have QM without the wavefunction or something equivalent to it, for example to replace it with just a statistical device.

> Can the hard problem ever be explained through science in your view, possibly indirectly?

Not if science limits itself to objective evidence. Now, this is a necessary limitation, which is the cause for the progress in science. But I can imagine that a "subjective science", as opposed to the "objective science" we do, can make progress, but I doubt that if we limit to objective evidence we can explain it. As for how this could be done subjective, I explained in the longer essay cited in the first footnote in the first page of my essay, in §7.2 and §7.3 how I imagine this to work.

> You say P is a mathematical structure in search of an ontology, do you think it will ever get there?

A possibility is that P=S, so the ontology of P is the same as that of S, and that of S is just what I call sentience. But I can't prove it or disprove it objectively.

Thank you very much for the comment, and for mentioning your essay to me.

Cheers,

Cristi