Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

Re:Consciousness and the Laws of Physics by francasso on Saturday July 17, 2021 @10:25AM (#27866000)

I don't find it that difficult, in fact yours is just as much of a belief as the one of the people you subtly criticize. You believe that the standard model and gravity (or whatever unknown theory that can have some experimental evidence to generalize both) are enough to model the behavior of human beings/animal as an "emergent" phenomena, even though there is no direct evidence for that. Even worse actually, there is no mathematical model.

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Re:Consciousness and the Laws of Physics by roywiggins on Saturday July 17, 2021 @10:37AM (#27866088)

Emergent phenomena are often hard to predict, like the weather. That doesn't actually tell us a whole lot about the underlying physics, it seems to me. The halting problem is an emergent property of turing machines, and we know mathematically that the behavior of a Turing machine cannot usually be predicted or mathematically modeled without just running it.

The mathematical underpinnings of superconductivity are still in flux, but there's still every reason to believe that it's an emergent phenomenon from known physics. I don't see any obvious reason why consciousness can't be something like that.

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Re:Consciousness and the Laws of Physics by francasso on Saturday July 17, 2021 @10:51AM (#27866183)

I don't think either of those examples is in the same category as consciousness, or actually lets stick to "modeling of human and animal behavior", because I don't know what you mean by consciousness since we all have a feeling for what it is but there is no good precise definition, or framework in which you could give one.

In both examples you made we do in fact have good mathematical descriptions that allow us to describe the system and the way it works, and moreover we can infer/predict non obvious things about it. Do you know of anything similar that can be applied to human/animal behavior?

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Re:Consciousness and the Laws of Physics by roywiggins on Saturday July 17, 2021 @11:19AM (#27866378)

My point is more that, even when you know the underlying mechanisms perfectly and with infinite precision, there are systems for which you can't make any statistical claims about its behavior. Even the Game of Life can encode a Turing machine, which makes its medium-term evolution impossible to predict ahead of time. That doesn't mean there's anything we are missing in our understanding of the rules of the Game of Life.

Emergent behavior can be totally opaque, even when we have perfect understanding of the elements of the system. Just because the behavior is totally inscrutable doesn't mean there's anything we are missing about the underlying mechanisms. There's no hidden principle of Turing machines that would let us predict them reliably either- their underlying mechanisms are totally understood, the behavior is still essentially unknowable.

Perhaps living systems are like that. It seems quite likely, since their underlying mechanisms are actually much more complicated than toy models like the Game of Life, that they can manifest totally opaque behavior without requiring any new physics at all.

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Re:Consciousness and the Laws of Physics by eurasiantiger on Saturday July 17, 2021 @10:31AM (#27866043)

There are various models that could possibly be developed to accurately account for the emergent complexity we experience. Dimensionality of causal sets and Wolfram’s recent research into causal graphs come to mind.

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