Sentience, the ontology of experience by Cristinel Stoica

Mihai,

Your examples of the role of concepts are true, and they are important for our understanding and the progress of science. But what I was refering to is what science is about, what can be proven objectively, not what is helpful pedagogically even for the progress of science. They are different things, and you brought the notion of concepts to oppose what I said, but it was not the same thing. Also, I repeat, those concepts are our representations of for example semi-Riemannian geometry, but this geometry like any other mathematical structure are expressable in terms of sets and relations. So you see, I agree with your statements, but it is you who opposed them to my statements out of context. I was simply defining the context. In the context of my essay, the point was to show that there is indeed a hard problem, and it can't simply be reduced to science as usually understood as being about objectively or independently verifiable facts. These things are relations only. The personal touch each of us give to them when we interpret them or represent them internally, the labels we give when we use words as shorthands to communicate with others whom we expect to know what we are talking about, these are outside, meta, even though they are useful. Even so, they can be encoded as information to any desired level, but at the end there is the problem of converting this information into meaning, and I think here is again where we hit the hard problem of consciousness.

> I don't dispute the fact that the way we understand nature of gravity now may not be the ultimate reality in itself due to quantum gravity problems

I don't dispute it either, I even expect that the most important parts of General Relativity will survive in the final theory, even though the majority of physicists searching for it seem to me to be drifting away of it. I worked a lot to fix issues that people consider as arguments to throw General Relativity away. I don't know how this relates to my essay, but since I see that you are interested in this, I gave you a link.

> who is to say that one day will not come along ...

Not me.

I am pretty sure that you unpacked my essay differently than I intended :) It's my fault, I had to reduce it 4 times, and it changed in the process. Maybe the longer version is clearer, though I am not sure even of this.

Cheers,

Cristi

Mihai, I don't know how you do it, but again, every single statement you attribute to me is wrong. I'm impressed.

> Cristi; it has by now become clear to me that you're not a Platonist

Not sure why you say so. This was the core of my essay.

> You keep asserting that in physics [...] concepts play no major role and it's all down to relations

It seems that once you unpacked it the wrong way, there is no way back but to insist in that direction :) I didn't say any of these things you claimed I said. I neither say they play no major role, nor that it's all down to relations in the way you mean it. I'm sorry to see I failed so miserably to convey a simple message.

> and more recently you cared to include sets too

What do you mean by "more recently"? In the very first comment you quoted from my essay "A mathematical structure is (1) a collection of sets (the nature of its elements is irrelevant), and (2) a collection of relations between those sets. Mathematically, relations are subsets of Cartesian products of the sets." How less recent than this being already in my essay you wanted it to be?

... that the concept of manifold it's just a structure, a mere representation of our minds.

I didn't say that "a structure" = "a mere representation of our minds". By structure I mean precisely mathematical structures, you just call them "concepts". I said concepts are representations of our minds, and you can look this up too, but for some reason you seem to be calling these structures.

I am impressed that the correlation between what I said and what you understood is quite large, but it's negative. No worries, it doesn't matter.

Bye,

Cristi

Mihai,

You said

> "Cristi I hope we're both reading the same essay: yours"

If anyone in the world knows what someone means, it's the person who's saying it. And if that person tells you that you misunderstood, you have two reasonable options.

1. Try to read it carefully, without trying to second-guess, and when you don't know the meaning of words like "mathematical structure" you look it up. Preferable following the references.

2. Give up, you are under no obligation to try to understand what everybody says.

There is a third option, which I think is not reasonable:

3. After you are told that it is not what you understood, insist in cherry picking and twisting the meanings of the words, just to prove that you were right in the first place.

If you choose 2, this is fine to me. If you choose 1, we can take it easy and walk you through this. From my part, you are also free to choose 3, but in this case I hope you will understand why I wouldn't want to cooperate. At this point, things seem to indicate that you are very dedicated to 3.

Just an example of how you chose 3: if I wrote "it is often believed that X", you somehow interpret this as if I say that "X" is true, when the entire purpose of my essay is to show the opposite. And unfortunately, the same holds for nearly all of your comments on my essay.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Georgina,

Thank you very much for the very insightful comments about neurons. I fully agree with you, and I find these facts about brain and neurons both amazing and helpful in the brain development. Neuroplasticity of the human brain is amazing. The whole point of my essay was to show that consciousness is not reducible to computation. Now, it may appear to some that there is nothing there that can be modeled, and indeed, it is possible to make machines that change as they are exposed to new data, but my point is that even if we would do this, this is not enough. There's something about consciousness that can't be captured in computation. So, my central argument is that if it would be reducible to computation, then we would all be isomorphic to parts of the two-dimensional tapestry generated by a Rule 110 cellular automaton. So, if we disagree with the conclusion that we are part of that tapestry, then we must reject the hypothesis, that consciousness is reducible to computation. My argument was conceived like a "proof by reductio ad absurdum", targeted at the hard-core reductionism which seems to dominate currently in science. Thanks again for your comments on neurons and the brain, and I wish you good luck with the contest!

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Vesselin ,

Thank you very much for reading and commenting my essay! I enjoyed very much yours as well, and I am happy that you are visiting my page.

> why "science is only about the relations between things, not about the nature of things themselves."

The intention of scientists is of course to know the nature of things, not merely their relations. But their means are operational. I think a good example is the difference of approaches between Einstein and Minkowski. Einstein tried to understand and explain Special Relativity by operational procedures, rods, signals, etc. He used physical objects like rods and clocks, but as means to derive relations between lengths, durations, etc. Historically, this operationalism worked well, and led to the rejection of the "realist" position existing at that time, that aether explained electromagnetism. So Einstein came up as operationalist and aether theory was abandoned*. Minkowski's position is different. He proved indeed that reality is four-dimensional. So he put back reality in its place, and was not merely operationalist. But we can interpret this in two ways. One is that the four-dimensional objects Minkowski talks about are "matter", and the other one is that they are geometric entities. My position is that we know at least that they behave like geometric things. We don't know what is "matter", but we know what is geometry. But both "matter" and "geometry" are metaphysical concepts. People can agree on the Lorentz transformations, but some can interpret it as geometry, and others as matter having geometric properties. So science, to allow the exchange of ideas and independent verification, avoids making metaphysical assumptions, and relies on what can be shared. And operational procedures can be shared. As well, when we have theoretical explanations, we formulate them mathematically, but we don't go into the interpretation of the underlying nature of the things in our equations. The only time we do it is when we can describe things in terms of other things whose description we already have. This is why I say it's about relations, and can't go beyond them.

Take Minkowski's spacetime. It is a geometric space. This means it's a mathematical structure. A general definition of mathematical structure is given in Universal Algebra, in terms of sets and relations. Like a parenthesis, I don't quite like the term "universal algebra", because I see those rather geometrically, but this is a matter of personal taste. Anyway, my point is that Minkowski spacetime is a real element of the Theory of Special Relativity, and I take it in a geometric sense. As a geometry, it is a mathematical structure in the sense of Universal Algebra. So all there is about it is captured in the sets and relations. But the nature of the elements of the sets in themselves play no role in Universal Algebra, than to allow the definition of relations. In fact, Universal Algebra can be reduced to relations alone, by replacing the elements by 0-ary relations.

So we have the description of the world obtained from observations and making theories, as relations, and we have the underlying mathematical structure, which is also as relations. And ideally, when we will have the right theory, the two will be isomorphic. Whatever new we learn by operational means about the objects will simply add more relations. This doesn't mean that there is no underlying reality, no ontology. There is ontology. My claim is just that we can't put the finger on it by operational means, the best we can do is to find relations.

> With regard to "nothing of the nature of the things is accessible to measurement or observation," how would you explain the common view that physics does studies physical objects, not just their relations? E.g., we measure the locations of planets and the sun (even we see them directly or through telescopes!) I agree that we may never have absolute (full) knowledge about them, but physics does measure such objects (not only their relations) and in this way proves their existence. The word "planet" means to other people essentially the same thing (whether it is exactly the same or not, I think does not challenge the fact that we see and measure (all in perfect agreement) an object that we call a planet.

There is an object called planet, of course. It is not like the object is different to each observer, it may look different, but it is the same. We share the same reality. We even agree that it is made of atoms. And we agree that atoms are made of particles. And here is a place where we no longer know what is the nature of things. Particles, fields, wavefunctions, pure probabilities? This is another discussion. Einstein wanted here to keep having a realist description. But Bell's theorem, by using the very EPR experiment, shows that Einstein had to choose between a fixed reality at each time, and locality. But sorry, I divagate. When I say that we can't really know objectively the nature of things, I mean it in a much broader sense. I would say the same in a classical world. The object is there, Einstein criterion of reality is satisfied, but I would still complain that we can't know its nature. I think what I mean is that, to know the nature of something, there is no other way for that object to be, so that what we can measure and observe about it is the same. For example, consider a classical, Newtonian world, where all the elementary objects are balls, cogwheels, pins, etc, all made of steel. And suppose, for the sake of explaining what I mean, that all these elementary objects, identical in density, can't be broken or X-ray-ed. Suppose that there are "people" made of these things, and they try to understand that world. If these steel elementary objects are all there is in this world, can anyone know that they are made of steel? There is no notion of steel there, unless the people they call steel a particular organization of those objects. But they don't know what they intrinsically are. It could be anything, from cheese compressed well enough to have the same density and assuming it is unbreakable, to any other material. We can just call it "adamantium" or whatever. In such a world, we could never know the material. This is what I mean by "their nature". So the objects exist, they can be measured by comparing them to one another, their inertia can be measured, and what we would get are relations only. Nothing about their nature. Of course, we could analyze a planet in that world, and see that it is made of ultimate parts like these, but that would be the end.

> "And, of course, my favourite example that physics does deal with the nature of things - Minkowski's explanation of length contraction demonstrates that length contraction would be impossible if the worldtube of a contracting rod were not a real four-dimensional OBJECT (length contraction showed that the name "3D rod" was incorrect and we have no choice to call it "a 3D rod", because the rod turned out to be a 4D object). I believe this is most evident from the more visualized version of Minkowski's explanation - the thought (which can be made a real) experiments - an image is given on my essay's page in my response to Harrison Crecraft and H.H.J. Luediger."

You are right, of course. It is not the reality of objects that I doubted in my essay, but the "material" so to speak. Somehow, the material is immaterial to science, only the relations. I am using the word "ontology" or "nature of things" in this sense. I was doing this in my essay to make the case that there is something irreducible about consciousness. When people think they can understand consciousness, and it's just computation or processes, they usually make a lot of assumptions on top of what they really know. My thesis is that, once we remove those assumptions that color them, and let computation or what we call processes to be bare, it becomes clearer why this reductionism doesn't work. My personal view is that all there is is geometry+sentience. Geometry is the form, and the substance is sentience. Not sure if this choice of words is very suggestive. It can be compared with Russell's monism, although I am not sure that they are the same.

Cheers,

Cristi

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* Side note: Einstein's approach is very similar to how Bohr tried to explain the quantum world operationally, by relying on classical physical objects like the measurement apparatus. This may seem paradoxical, because Einstein changed completely the approach and opposed Bohr's operationalism, trying to understand reality instead. I think this is due to Minkowski, who showed that spacetime is real. Einstein, I think, was influenced by this, and this reconceptualization helped him to discover General Relativity, where the reality is curved spacetime, and also made him expect similar level of realism from Quantum Mechanics. While Bohr remained, paradoxically, faithful to the operationalist position similar to Einstein's original position. I know this reading of history is very personal, but I try to explain what I mean.

Mihai, you still didn't give a single example of "nature of things" or "heart of reality" or "thing in itself" (as opposed to relations) that can be known scientifically or objectively, i.e. in an independently verifiable way. The only examples you gave are from mathematics, which was precisely my point in the essay.

Dear Vesselin,

I forgot to mention something. I make a distinction between ontology and ontology candidate, which I defined for dynamical systems in The negative way to sentience. I consider ontology to not be part of physics (hence science), but of metaphysics. I considered this also in this paper published last year, Representation of the wave function on the three-dimensional space. I could've claimed that I showed that the many-particle wavefunction has a 3D ontology in nonrelativistic QM (NRQM), and a 4D one in the relativistic ones, as opposed to the 3N-dimensional configuration space ontology it has in NRQM. But since it was a paper of physics, and since physics is a science, and since ontology is a metaphysical thing, I preferred to call my finding "representation" (which is, mathematically), but I didn't call it ontology. And I preferred to say that it allows interpretations of QM to consider the wavefunction as their ontology. This is an example of what I called "ontology candidate". What Bell calls "beable" are part of ontology candidate, when we discuss physics, but can be part of ontology when we discuss philosophy of physics. In interpretations of QM like pilot-wave and GRW, there is a discussion about ontology. Pilot-wave theory, according to Bohm and Bell, contains both the positions of the particle and the wavefunction in the ontology. The more recent version of it, called "Bohmian mechanics", considers ontology only the positions of particles, but this can only be an incomplete ontology, because the same positions can go together with different wavefunctions. Similarly, in GRW, there are two versions of ontology, the mass density ontology (GRWm) and the flash ontology (GRWf), both of them being incomplete, because they can't recover the wavefunction, so I call them "partial ontologies". Anyway, since there is no empirical difference between BRWm and GRWf, it means that the ontology is not testable in an objective, independent manner. So it is not part of physics. So, going back now to the Minkowski spacetime, the shapes are 4 dimensional, as he said. 4 dimensional shapes can be ontological, speaking metaphysically, but science has nothing to say about them except their symmetries, which are relations. From physical point of view it's irrelevant what makes those shapes, what is their "true nature", such talk is metaphysica. Now, to explain "the common view" is a perhaps psychological or sociological question. I don't know. What about the common view that planets are three-dimensional, or that the present exists, but the past and future don't? It's a view, and it is still common, over 100 years since Minkowski's proof that shapes are four-dimensional and time doesn't flow. If one wants to take as evidence against my statement the fact that there is a "common view that physics does studies physical objects", perhaps one should take as evidence against Minkowsi's spacetime the fact that there is a common view that things are 3d and time flows, but we don't take it, for good reasons.

Anyway, in both my essay (first half of page 2) and in the longer version (first half of page 4) I showed that experiments and theory deal with relations only. I couldn't find a single example of experiment or theory dealing with the nature of things. And nobody gave me an example that, at a closer look, doesn't turn out to be about relations only. All such examples come from overlapping our mundane intuitions over the abstract notions of science. Just like people overlap their experience of time and space over physics, and have the opinion that time flows and things are 3d. In fact, I gave the particular example with the presentist view in my longer essay, along with the materialist view and others. Of course, my view that sentience is the ontology of experience and in fact of the system S from my shorter and longer essays, it is also metaphysical, but I think it makes some falsifiable predictions.

Cheers,

Cristi

Dear Lawrence,

Thanks for the visit. I am very sad that you got Covid-19, I hope it is the easiest form and you'll be well as soon as possible. Don't worry about my essay until you get well, but please get well, because I would love to hear some feedback from you, if possible about the longer version, even if it will be long after the contest ends.

> Your paper works with the connection between Gödel theorem or self-reference and consciousness. I have thought that consciousness is a sort of epiphenomenology that is an illusion having an illusion of itself. I have not read it in its entirty, and I do see you connect with what look like fractals.

I didn't appeal to self-reference or fractals, although I'd agree with you that they play a role. But it has strong relation with no-go theorems. As for consciousness, I am interested in the hypothesis that there is something irreducible about it (this irreducible I called "sentience"), and I try to see if this makes testable predictions. My claim is that it does. Indeed, for many who think consciousness is irreducible, the epiphenomenal position seems a good refuge, since it makes the hypothesis unfalsifiable. But I think we should be brave and don't avoid the fact that it does make predictions. So we can test it. We risk, those who deny it risk to see the predictions confirmed, but they can still continue to deny it, since the test of a prediction is not necessarily a proof of what led to the prediction. A rejection of the prediction is a rejection of what led to the prediction, so it is more risky for those who endorse the position that consciousness is not fully reducible. If we want to bring the hard problem into science, we have to take this risk.

I wish you to get back in shape soon!

Cristi

Hi James,

> This is a stunning essay, beautifully written.

Thank you!

> I do have an issue with your regard for mathematics, relatively measured though it is. You write "theories in physics" to be mature need "to be logically consistent and mathematically well formulated." I believe there is another requirement, often missing in quantum physics in particular, that they need to be natural.

Well, you can take my condition as necessary, but not necessarily sufficient then.

> Just to take one example, "the collapse of the wave function" is an absurdity

I think the same, although we may have different reasons for this. Some of mine are for example here and here.

> owing to the inattention to the natural consideration that a "wave function" is actually a purely mathematical "curve function", which merely describes a cognitive transition from not knowing to knowing. An absorption in mathematics has become increasingly detrimental physics

I am aware of the fashion of blaming mathematics for the failures in physics, or at least successes that are awaited for long time and didn't appear. I would say that we should rather blame the misunderstanding of the math.

> Black Hole physics is a prime example

Black Hole physics is a prime example where the reason is precisely the misunderstanding of the math, and not math itself. I wrote a very critical article against the current trends, Revisiting the Black Hole Entropy and the Information Paradox. The point was exactly that black hole physics became a freestyle abuse of math, but taking math seriously does a better job and show that a lot of myths that lead to thousands of papers are just myths.

> I'm not sure you mean to be endorsing "since the collection of all true statements about everything in the world should be logically consistent, it follows that there is a mathematical structure which describes anything that can be said", and "all true propositions about our physical world admits a mathematical model."

I refer to results in model theory.

> But to say "I am sentient" is of course not one of those things that can be said.

I am sentient. Once I've got to say it, it became just a physical process. But what's the source of this thought? Can this make testable predictions? I think it does.

> And later you write "consciousness is irreducible to relations, physical processes, or computation." Assuming you're not inconsistent, it seems you need to distance yourself from those statements in the beginning.

Assuming that I am inconsistent, maybe you can show it to me, because I don't want to be inconsistent.

> Some of my favorites:...

Thank you, these are among my favorites too :)

> "Dualism, materialist reductionism, property dualism, panpsychism, idealism, neutral monism etc., [address] the possible relations between [a dynamical system in which all the true propositions about the world are satisfied] and [a dynamical system, which admits a mathematical model too but includes sentience as well as relations]." (Do these admit a mathematical model?)

Well, yes. In The negative way to sentience I show how various interpretations of QM connect to different of these positions. Of course, I am talking about P and S from my essay, sentience is not S, sentience is the ontology of S.

> I'd invite you to have a look at my paper "Quantum Spontaneity and the Development of Consciousness" in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 26, Numbers 1-2, but the copyright seems to have been sold to ingenta connect, and it's no longer free.

Thank you for the invitation!

> My thesis is that the universe is fundamentally spontaneous (not random or causal), and consciousness is just the organized, convergent (rather than emergent) manifestation of universal spontaneity.

Sounds very interesting!

Cheers,

Cristi

Hi Alyssa,

Thanks for the visit and for reading, and I'm happy that you enjoyed my essay!

You ask great questions:

> Why do you think nature, particularly biological processes, has some need to coarse grain states? Why at all do you think it occurs, and could it be some unexpected result of thermodynamics for example?

It is possible, I think, to imagine numerous possible physical worlds, with their laws, which don't present coarse graining. By this I mean that if we try to coarse grain the state space or the phase space, the dynamical law of the system will ignore the coarse graining and cross it as if there is nothing there. But some dynamical systems admit coarse graining that is consistent with the dynamics, that is preserved well enough to make coarse grained level systems emerge. Ours is like this. The dynamical law doesn't preserve perfectly the coarse graining, and this is why the emergent systems are impermanent. But there are important gains. First, the states at the coarse grained level can be made in different ways at the detailed level. Second, but most important, coarse grained level systems can self-organize without having to do it to the finest detail, and they can store information, and, essentially, forget information, dissipate. There would be no evolution without forgetting. So I think coarse graining is needed for biology, and thermodynamics helps systems evolve while forgetting information. The second law may seem like an enemy to life, and it is indeed, but it also makes possible new, more evolved life. Growth and evolution require thermodynamics, and the price to be paid is deterioration and death. But it's worth paying it.

> I think a state gets coarse-grained according to the physical abilities of an observer. Observers with vision have the ability to coarse-grain groups of atoms according to color in a painting, while observers that do not have vision would coarse-grain a painting in an entirely different way, based on other senses like touch. The whole process of reproducibility seems to rely so much on the ability of an observer.

I absolutely agree, and it is fascinating that at the same time there seem to be a coarse graining, the one that accounts for thermodynamics in terms of statistical mechanics, which seems to be independent of the observer, seems objective. But it is objective to the observers that live in the same coarse grained level, because they are coarse-grained subsystems in that level. There may very well be other levels where information flows consistently and self-organizes, but we don't perceive it, because they are different level of coarse graining. Just like a computer is not able to gain information about the detailed physics of its own processor, it is confined to work at the level of its logic gates and memory chips.

> Consciousness seems like it could be a special case of an observer coarse-graining itself. Observers are not entirely separate from their environment most of the time, and are embedded as a part of the environment in most cases in biology. I'd be curious to hear about your thoughts here!

This is an intriguing possibility. Indeed, we coarse grain ourselves, we approximate ourselves rougher than the coarse grained level that can be explored from the macro level is. This may explain why we are able to claim that we are the same person as years ago, when our bodies and brains may have changed dramatically at the level of coarse graining that corresponds to thermodynamics, for example our cells, particularly neurons. So a question comes naturally out of this: are we capable to undo the coarse graining we impose on ourselves when we define ourselves, i.e. to perceive our own sentient experience at a more detailed level? Can we increase the resolution of self-perception? That would make us aware of how our thoughts come to be. See how they are automatic, and that in many cases when we think we're rational, we are just rationalizing some emotions, biases, or biological needs. Increasing the resolution through awareness could reveal how our thoughts materialize out of more primitive elements that we ignore, ideas, images, feelings etc. And keep going beyond these. And if we can see the moment when a thought arises in our mind, maybe we can change its course. Be able to overcome depression, anger, numerous biases we have, simply by not letting the snowball become an avalanche. And we could also be able to transform some intuitions into logical arguments, and see where they fail and where they are right. But of course this would require that, within our own consciousness, something higher-resolution exists than our mundane thoughts. That sentience indeed comes from a lower level, from the ignored details of the coarse graining of our regular thoughts. This may be computationally difficult to extract by looking at our brain with fMRI or other tools, for the same reasons you excellently exposed in your essay. But it may be possible by subjective self-exploration, assuming we're not creating yet another coarse graining that we take as finer graining :) This is in fact a huge trap for those who try to explore their own consciousness by means like introspection or meditation. On the one hand, a finer level of awareness would help with all these, on the other hand, as soon as we leave that state and try to put it in regular thoughts and words, we are back at the coarser grained level. This is the reason why, despite having flashes or longer experiences of the finer grained level, we usually end out by distorting them by processing them at the coarse grained level as just regular thoughts. Maybe this interplay between finer and coarser levels are captured by Lao Tzu in the words He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Thank you very much for the brilliant questions, and good luck with your excellent essay!

Cheers!

Cristi