Sentience, the ontology of experience by Cristinel Stoica

Dear Gemma,

Thank you for reading and making interesting comments.

1) While dictionary is circular, this doesn't mean it doesn't say anything, just that it says only about the relations. Self-references are unavoidable in some cases, and they show something about the system, but not about anything else. I agree with you that Hofstadter makes excellent points in "Gödel, Escher, Bach", and in "I'm a strange loop" takes this kind of self-reference as an explanation of consciousness. I understand this still in the relational, i.e. "easy problems", and to me real semantics has to do with the "hard problem". In my longer essay The negative way to sentience I spend more time with such questions, but the main point is that what I mean by semantics is not something that we infer about a dictonary, because this kind of inference comes from identification meaning based on the very way we give meaning to the world. So we project it, it is not determined by the dictionary.

2) Model theory deals with just this kind of things, and it works. The point being that a structure that exists doesn't have inconsistent facts. If you add on top of the sentences expressing facts other sentences, that introduce additional constraints, like in the case of Russell's paradox, then you'll get paradoxes. But such sentences are expressions of facts of the world. So I am not worried about this. If the world is inconsistent, then the principle of explosion guarantees that everything and their opposites is true and false at the same time, and we will have nothing to talk about, not even relations, because there would be no information.

3) I think this is precisely the case. I doubt there is an universal of an apple, we just experience various instances of apples, train our neural networks, so that it starts to "recoginze" apples. But not because there is some universal of an apple preencoded in the network, or to which we have acces in a Platonic world. It is interesting that in many cases of autism, this mechanism doesn't seem to work so easily, they have problems with "generalization", and when they overcome it, it is because of much more training than it takes to neurotypicals.

Now to the comments.

1) I share your view, to me is something marvelous. I don't think that everybody does, since I've seem some strange reactions to this idea :)

2) My point is quite as old as statistical mechanics, I understand that Flavio takes it one step further.

Thanks, for your excellent comments and questions! I'm looking forward to read your essay!

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Chidi,

You made some interesting proposals, thank you for reading my essay and for the comments. In my essay I don't try to figure out consciousness, just to argue that there is a hard problem and that it worth seeing if there is something fundamental about it, which I call "sentience". Even if this basis is beyond the relational description that can be explored scientifically, it makes some predictions that I believe are testable. On the other hand, you are interested in describing the mind, which I think is complementary to what I was doing. For this, you makes some creative and bold proposals, which are interesting. I don't know enough what they mean or imply to judge, but maybe I can understand more after I visit your forum.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Heinz,

Thank you very much for reading and commenting.

> you don't show why this situation [that we are somehow caught in our private worlds] does not degenerate to solipsism.

Well, we are somehow caught in our private worlds, but I didn't intend to address solipsism. I didn't consider it necessary, because I don't propose that only the subjective exists. I don't reject for example the fact that we can know something about the "objective" world, I just explain that what we can know about it are just relations, not the relata. In particular scientific knowledge is of this kind. And since this is independently verifiable, as I explained in the essay and more in my longer essay, clearly I didn't propose that only subjectivity exists. But if you think that I missed something and there is a danger of solipsism in my essay, you are welcome to explain.

On the other hand, on a funnier note, I think it doesn't hurt to reexamine the possibility of solipsism once in a while, rather than taking by default the position that it is absurd. We spend a lot of our time asleep and dreaming. It's a good point to ask ourselves once in a while if the people with whom we interact are independent sentient beings, or just figments of our minds. This may be useful in a nightmare for example, because it can allow us to wake up or to take control of the dream. Or even just to have a lucid dream, for fun, self-exploration, or preparation for a future event by "simulating" it in the dream. Taking the default position that solipsism can't be true makes us more prone to take seriously whatever bad characters we meet in our dreams, and suffer in that illusion instead of enjoying it by taking control. Other things that help this consist in looking for inconsistencies. The habit of observing inconsistencies helps us get lucid in our dreams.

Another point from the comparison with the dreams is the following. Suppose we have an argument against solipsism. If we apply it to a dream, it should not work, because, well, the other people in the dream are not real. But for an argument to work in some instance and not work in another one, there should be a difference between the two situation. If the dream is self-consistent like the reality is, what difference would be? So, my claim is that the only difference you can notice by passive observation is one of consistency (you can also actively make experiments in the dream, e.g. trying to do things that are impossible in reality, which in general break the self-consistency of the dream). This means that no refutation of solipsism can do better than checking the consistency. Or, in my essay, I didn't reject the consistency of the world, I even took it as a principle. Being trapped in our minds doesn't lead by itself to solipsism any more than being trapped in the house.

> Further, isn't sentience a high level (reflective) idea over the immediate experiences of an observer? Can a reflection be foundational?

Well, what I understand by "sentience" in my essay is "what makes experience possible", or "the irreducible part of consciousness". I tried to explain it more in my longer essay, where I "defined" it like

Nondefinition 1. In the following, I will call sentience the ingredient that makes experience possible. Whatever this ingredient may be, I'll not try to define it.

So I don't understand by sentience "a high level (reflective) idea over the immediate experiences of an observer". If you categorize it as "reflection", of course it can't be foundational. But I don't do this. It's a category mistake to identify what I mean by "sentience" with what others, who use it as a "reflective idea", mean. I had to use a word, some use "consciousness", but this indeed is in large part reflective. Rather than inventing a new word, I repurposed "sentience", and explained what I mean by it.

Thanks again.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Luca,

Thank you for the comments and particularly for challenging and putting at test the statements in my essay. You wrote:

> However while I completely agree with your Principle 1, I do only agree with principles 2 and 3 with some qualifications, that might not correspond the picture your wording suggests.

I don't think principles 2 and 3 apply only "with some qualifications". Here is why. Suppose you have a model where the laws change in time, as I understand to be the one you propose. Also suppose that at each time the state of the world is represented by a different mathematical structure. But this is still a dynamical system like the ones in my essay. Simply, you still have a state, even if it corresponds to a different mathematical structure, and you still have a rule that shows how one state connects to the next one, even if this rule changes in time. And you don't contradict Principle 2 The collection of all true propositions about our physical world admits a mathematical model. Here's why. The collection of all propositions true about the world also include time specific propositions. All propositions about facts of the world valid at a time t have to be consistent, and admit a mathematical model, because this is a result from logic, it's not a postulate I want to impose (so you can't break it). There is also a larger mathematical model, corresponding to all true propositions, for all times, collected together. They can be for example of the form "At the time t things were such and such". To this collection of propositions corresponds a larger mathematical structure, valid for the entire history, and which includes as substructures those valid for each particular time. So Principle 3 The physical world is isomorphic to a dynamical system P is not contradicted.

From your comment I understand that the symmetries at some time give the objectively knowable relations, hence a mathematical structure realizing those relations. And that symmetries can change. You say that this is due to the environment, so I take it that your system is not isolated, it's open. A question may be, what if you take the whole system? Will it's laws still change? But anyhow, let's focus on the possibility that you take it as open, or that even if you take the total system, its symmetries change for some reason. But when you say that the symmetries determine the objectively knowable relations, I understand from this that there is a procedure X which, given the symmetries, gives the relations, like a function relations=X(symmetries). So at least X is not changing, just its argument. Now, when you say symmetries, in general they correspond to transformations of some space (not necessarily the "physical space", it can be a space of other parameters). For example, the system may have rotational symmetry SO(3) at some time, and this be broken in a future time, so that the symmetry reduces to rotations around an axis. But this is just like in usual physics. You can have a large group of symmetries, and a particular state may not be invariant to the full group, but only to a subgroup. So, from changing symmetries I don't think it follows a change in the laws. But, as I explained, even if the law changes in the most crazy ways, there will still be a dynamical system P and Principles 1-3 will still hold. You wrote "I hope this made you curious about my essay". Yes, I am looking forward to read your essay.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear David,

Thank you for the comments! You ask an interesting question: do you think it might be possible to do the reverse: so, to start with consciousness and explain everything else? I agree that we only seem to have conscious perceptions to work with as a starting point for making any theory. And indeed, whatever we learn about the world, and whatever theories we make to explain it, this is based on consciousness. But if someone would ask a stronger question, that we can explain everything about the world just from consciousness, in the absence of any perceptions of the external world, this would likely not be enough. But from perceptions and consciousness, we can do a lot of things, and we know the results obtained so far are obtained like this.

You make another interesting point here I think it would be fair to say that quantity, direction and change are a part of conventional physics and they are also things that can be directly experienced, i.e. they are also part of consciousness. I guess it's about what Kant calls "a priori" cognition, which exists before the experience, and we map to the "a posteriori" cognition that follows from experience associated to perceptions. This is an interesting idea. It may be difficult to prove in practice, but I think it worth being investigated seriously. Thanks for suggesting me your essay for more details.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Luca,

Thank you for the additional details. Your explanations about the Poincaré symmetry requiring that "space must be almost empty and gravitational forces not to strong" make sense to me. Then you say "Now imagine at a time 0 a model P0 is realized, such that principle 2 and 3 hold approximately within P0." I don't understand what it means for principle 2 to hold only approximately. You mean that P0 is not logically consistent? Because if "the collection of all true propositions about our physical world that apply at the time t0" is logically consistent, then it admits a mathematical model. Also, what you mean by P0, is the same what I call "P" but valid at the time t0? Because what I call "P" is a dynamical system, so principle 3 holds. Another thing you say makes me interested. You said "Reversely events of the past (P0) can be explained or even retrodicted from within P1" I tried to see what you mean by this. I checked your essay, and now I know what you mean, although I don't think it is as crazy as you said :). Nevertheless, as I explained, even if the theory changes in time, it can't break principles 1-3 unless it is not self-consistent. I like what you said, "on a fundamental cosmological level I imagine some crystallization process, that brings more and more complex structures to light", and I agree with this. Thanks again for the comments and good luck in the contest!

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Luca,

I know what you mean, but not because you translated it to me in terms of things I mentioned in my essay, that translation is too approximate. In principles 2-3 I don't talk about our models of the world. I talk about the mathematical structures that are models, in the sense of Model Theory, of the collections of propositions true about the world, regardless of what we think about them. Here's another, final, attempt to explain what I said: 1) there are facts of the world, that are true, even if we don't know them precisely or at all. 2) It is not necessary that these facts hold for all times to be true, it is enough to have factual statements about facts of the world at given times specified in the proposition. For example "At date and time t is raining in Rome". This will remain true even if at the time t2=/=t is not raining in Rome. Because that proposition is not universal, it refers specifically to a time and place and a state. You can have such statements for each time in which it makes sense to talk about Rome. The collection of all these states doesn't need to follow any rule, and there is nothing in the environment that is ignored, but, once taken into account, would make these propositions change their validity. This example is a particular fact. There may also be universal facts, like "momentum is always conserved", which may be true or false, even if we don't know it or we can't verify in all instances. 3) The collection of the propositions expressing these universal and particular facts is logically consistent. 4) From 3, according to Model Theory, there is a mathematical structure in which these are true. Period. No room to smuggle in this some presumed approximation, there's nothing approximate here. What I said has nothing to do with the models we cook up as we try to understand the world. Nothing to do with the evolution of our understanding of the world. Also, if I say "the collection of all true propositions about our physical world", there's no environment that I could've left out, no separation I left out, because I referred to the totality of the facts of the world, not of a subsystem, not about the opinion of some people who live at a certain time and not another. Talking about separation in this case is like me saying "all", and you talking about "the things I didn't include in 'all'". So I don't see a connection between what you said I said, and what I really said. I understand your points, and your generous attempt to try to explain them to me in terms of what I wrote in my essay, but I don't think what you think I said is what I said. Fortunately I read your essay, where you explain them in your terms, so I understand, but you don't understand what I said, and this is why you think you found some exceptions to principles 2-3. There's no such exception. You think there is because you have an approximate understanding of what I said.

> Thanks for the conversation.

Thanks for the conversation.

Cristi

Hi Malcolm,

Thank you for reading my essay and for the interesting comments you made. I hope my longer essay sections 6-7 explain more the possible relations between sentience and physical facts, and how these possibilities can be tested empirically. I like the title of your essay, "Je suis, nous sommes Wigner!", and I'm looking forward to read it!

Cheers,

Cristi

Hi Michael,

Thank you for reading, and for the very interesting comments.

> "I was wondering if you though that the thermodynamics of a machine in a physical world are an essential component to sentience?"

It is essential for the brain to work, so for consciousness too, at least for the "easy problems" of consciousness. You said it well "noisy machines", I look forward to read more about this.

Cheers,

Cristi