Are some molecules alive?

[qwe]

Emergence

does not add any abilities that you would not be able to predict from the constituent parts and their interaction.

when you see the pieces form an atom or molecule, is that emergence because the molecules exhibit different behavior? sure, but you could still view the entire system as a group of subatomic particles; assuming you have the right theory, it'd take a stronger computer, but you could make it work. you could predict the behavior of molecules, based on the behavior of subatomic particles.

emergence only helps us to understand how sciences link to one another, but to say that emergence produces life leaves a hell of a lot of questions unanswered, and doesn't make any rational argument for life. life is a pattern of those subatomic particles whose laziest (least energetic) paths lead the pattern to perpetuate itself (or, it is usually more useful to view that pattern as a more static group of biochemicals), but emergence didn't produce it... that's just how the underlying particles roll.

how did humans gain consciousness? do other animals have similar consciousness? (it seems the answer to the latter seems to be yes...)

do things without complex information flow (and maybe another mechanism ??) experience any sort of consciousness? well maybe our universe does have a potential for consciousness everywhere, and it can come into play either A) when circuitry in e.g. the human brain becomes complex enough to allow it to be shaped by evolution, or B) a more complete explanation of how our brains "tap into consciousness" is needed

So why do you seem to take it is a given that qualia exist? I think the concept of qualia is meaningless, an attempt to shy away from the issue of exploring the phenomenon of conscious experience, and a huge distraction.

isn't qualia just the objects/phenomena that exist in consciousness/head-space?

This is just like people saying simulated universes are "less real' than their container universes. Rubbish. If you perform math in a simulated universe, is the resulting answer 'less real' than if you had done it in the container?

while we could certainly simulate complex behavior and human-like behavior, we can't be sure, yet, imo, about whether the software would gain actual consciousness/qualia - it's a huge unknown whether it's just information flow that is required, or if our brains could use some other mechanism?

because consciousness, my headspace and all the 'objects' in it, is sort of like the rest of the universe - we have a certain amount of mental energy and capacity, for example, and there are other limitations tying consciousness to the rest of the universe. i'd say that this mental energy, this headspace and its objects, etc, are linked to normal energy/matter as we know it, but i think we could be tapping into something entirely unknown (multidimensional) to produce consciousness.

i still can't see consciousness rising out of a silicon or wooden or even artifical neural network computer, for example, without the appropriate mechanism added (what that mechanism is, i obviously can't say, but i feel like the discussion is incomplete if we just say "we are conscious because anything that gains sufficient intelligence/sentience becomes conscious" - that is not testable, and doesn't make sense because emergence doesn't allow entirely new forces to exist)

 

[ColdNorth]

I hope there's another solution to the HPoC but qualia being just an emergent property of an insanely complex machine seems pretty reasonable. If that's the case, no matter what kind of care we take in creating AI, another might emerge on it's own and the evolution of our intelligence couldn't be called any more natural. I was blown away by Wolfram's experiments with cellular automata and the complexity they were able to produce with the simplest rules. Too bad there's no theory of complexity yet. Google for 'rule 110' if you're interested in that.

 

[MattPsy]

Consciousness, IMO, is what you get when you tie a massively parallel neural computer with a task-directive mechanism (as in, attention) and an information representation network. Especially the attention part. The flow of conscious experience, then, is the ever-changing torrent of data being made available to modes of processing, in different representational forms, tied to memory, such that the represented objects or concepts have properties of past events and the sensory data attached to them... If that makes sense.

And no, qualia usually means states of experience, qualitative aspects of it that are not able to be derived from their quantitative aspects. A qualia-adherent might say, for example, that you could give an AI the ability to sense wavelengths of light in the spectrum we humans identify as being "blue", say, and it consequently would report back that they were present, but they wouldn't really be "blue".

Qualia also pose huge problems in the context of evolution. Did we at some point have half blue "ness"? At what point exactly did we achieve full blueness? Is it possible to have half a qualia? Is this question a non-sequitur?

 

[ColdNorth]

Ah, indeed. Thanks for correcting my terminology.

What I meant to say was that on any given moment one experiences, all the variables that make up the whole are in different states (time, position, neurotransmitter levels, etc..the quantifiable things that make you 'feel' different) and so no two separate events ever 'feel' exactly the same, especially as the experience is subjective to each. Kind of like if the snapshot of full or partial system state on that moment is the experience we remember and attribute to a something-ness.

I don't understand why they need to be intrinsic, will read about all this as the coffee starts to work. If all our machines are mechanically alike, then couldn't the ability to translate those states into feelings even be hard coded into us simply to make more complex, abstract communication (and empathy!) possible? A tribe with no tradition or language of math was found to understand geometry just as well as us without any training, so we do have some awesome skills automatically. I'm trying to think of how this could be tested but I'm getting glimpses of why it's such a hard problem instead

I'm a newbie at all this, for the rest of my life possibly but this whole experience is very interesting. I hope there's more to us than meets the eye currently and that we soon learn to quantify the mind better, feels like psychiatry for one is lagging behind other sciences and could benefit the most from understanding how the whole experience forms in the first place. Many people for now are stuck with their buggy brains when we don't know exactly what's wrong with them.

 

[CoffeeDrinker]

Or perhaps instead of matter creating consciousness, consciousness created matter. That eliminates any evolutionary problems because you accept that it was there the whole time, and we know that with quantum mechanics the presence of consiousness alters the behavior of matter. Or that they coexisted always.
The athropic principle is being suggested here. Our universe works because we exist, or we exist because it works, but if sentience didn't exist there'd be no observation of the universe, and there's no way to know if it'd be there at all. Either way consciousness is something fundamentally different than processing information. I think people who work with computer science often fall into the trap of thinking that just because they can make a robot mimic conscious activities that's how it must be (like the guy who created amino acids in a lab thought that's the only way life came about, and ignorantly defied other scientists' discoveries of alternate pathways to live), that's only an extention of OUR consciousness (just like a hammer is), not that the robot(no matter how complex) has consciousness itself.
It's pretty obvious that consciousness has more than simply information flow going on.

And MattPsy, many causes can lead to the same effect, and many effects can be generated from the same cause. So I'd rethink this:

An arrangement of matter that behaved like a human would not just be mimicking a human, it would be one. We name things according to their function or utility. Any entity that managed to replicate the behavior of a human would, then, be human.Our complex behavior is generated by complex function. Any entity complex enough to replicate the behavior of a human would be as complex as one.

Certainty is folly, of that I'm certain.

 

[ColdNorth]

True, pretty sure I'm cursed with that unwanted computer science filter myself. It's a useful mental exercise that becomes less useful when stuff doesn't actually work that way. A conscious universe is a cool idea, there are many ways the evidence could be hidden from us forever. Scales too small to measure and no intuitive understanding of time on a larger scale. We're stuck in this one size and one way of experiencing time. Certainty, never. I don't even have a way of knowing for sure whether or not I exist. I just assume I do =)

 

[CoffeeDrinker]

lol, but then whos the one doing the assuming?
Certainly there is, if nothing else, at least you "The assumer"
Ever learned the phrase "I think therefore I am"?
That's the most basic, yet essential, bit of philosophical reasoning there is.

Stuff like Goebbles incompleteness theorem, or the Heisenber uncertainty principle, is what makes me always wary of people who say "science has all the answers, religious people are deluded" as if science is anything other than the collective effort of people merely jotting down notes about nature.
I think science and technology and religion and philosophy all NEED to coexist in order for there to be a fully unified theory.

 

[qwe]

So why do you seem to take it is a given that qualia exist? I think the concept of qualia is meaningless, an attempt to shy away from the issue of exploring the phenomenon of conscious experience, and a huge distraction.

well, it feels like they exist. i don't feel like a philosophical zombie. and, while i've studied many mechanisms concerning our cognition and how we think that could produce a "mind" of sorts -- a "dead/nonexistant mind", an idea workshop/workspace with no consciousness, the philosophical zombie -- i see no mechanism, anywhere in anything i've studied, that could produce consciousness.

if you get a computer complex enough to ponder life, i don't think it's actually "pondering". it's thinking, in a sense. but there is no....i'll call it reality-fabric instead of qualia.

our brains somehow do something more than self-perpetuate. apparently, it was evolutionarily advantageous (maybe it was a shortcut for information processing) to connect some reality-fabric (from god knows where... pun unintended) to the information inside of our brains/bio-computers, and use this reality fabric to help process output-behavior based on input-signals.

that reality-fabric is what i mean when i say qualia. perhaps i'm not using the word qualia correctly.

What about chirality? Where one molecule is useful to life, and the mirror image formation can be extremely fatal.

thalidomide has two isomers, one extremely disastrous, the other medically useful. it's the same molecule, just mirror image. but what about it?

"life" is the same as everything else... it is geometric patterns of energy, falling into their least energetic states available. complexity can grow to pretty high degrees (e.g., see homo sapiens) given the right environment. but it's all just geometric patterns interacting, lazily falling down force-line slopes.

using that lens, chirality isn't a special case to consider at all... if you simulate something interacting with L-thalidomide or L-whatever, you'll get different results than if you simulate D-thalidomide, just because they are different shapes. though, yes, in most *simple* cases, the isomers do not differ in their properties

we know that with quantum mechanics the presence of consiousness alters the behavior of matter.

"Quantum mechanics describes how thought or consciousness affects (or generates) matter"

To put it bluntly, quantum mechanics ignores thought and consciousness completely. There's no spot in any equation or algorithm to plug in any information about what people are thinking. The misconception that consciousness has been somehow been proven to affect quantum phenomena is usually based on one of the following.

Poorly controlled experiments/cherry-picked data

Example: Masaru Emoto claims that water crystals can be made more or less beautiful simply by positive or negative thinking directed at the water. He attempts to demonstrate this by exposing water to various messages, freezing the water, and picking photos of water crystals that he thinks will illustrate his point. No independent researcher has been able to replicate these results in a properly controlled experiment, and Emoto does not consider himself a scientist. He has profited considerably from selling books and other products such as special "Indigo Water" based on this questionable research.

Effects of measurement

It is well-established that changing which properties of a particle are measured changes the apparent behavior of the particle. This has led to statements such as "Just the act of observing a particle changes it," or more radically, "Matter has no existence independently from our minds." But in fact this attitude is misguided in (at least) two ways.

Firstly, there are many experiments in which the uncertainty principle is not relevant, where the outcome of an experiment can be predicted precisely in advance. The uncertainty principle has a precise mathematical meaning, and does not simply state that all quantum measurements are unpredictable.

Secondly, in order to see the effects of different measurements, one needs to change the measurement apparatus itself, and it is this change which appears to affect the results, not the mental state of the researcher. In other words, particles only behave differently when measured because researchers have to hit them against something in order to measure them. It's how the experiment impacts the particle that matters. Whether or not some conscious entity is watching the experiment is, as far as we know, irrelevant.

 

[CoffeeDrinker]

I know all that and much more about quantum mechanics, and I NEVER place credence in pseudo-science. I can't stress that enough.

I have no idea why you brought up some random new-age water crystal dude, but if you're trying to discredit the idea that thoughts or intentions don't affect how things happen, that's absurd as well. "Right thinking" is essential. But that has nothing to do with this discussion. Why you even brought up the water crystal dude boggles my mind.

And I never said chirality was anything special, I was just demonstrating how slightly altered geometry can lead to vastly different results. I guess the whole study of chemistry proves that, but I thought you asked a question of why certain molecules would be better suited to undertake a "process" (life as defined by the OP) than others. It's all about the environment those molecules are in, survival of the fittest, certain shapes work, certain ones don't.

And if you think consciousness has nothing to do with quantum mechanics, or quantum theory, then you either don't understand one or the other.
Keep trying to marginalize consciousness and it'll only prove to confound you in the end. I don't like it when physicists are ignorant of the implications of their own experiments. Their belief that what they study only affects the physical world can serve to blind them to wider truths. Truth being the most important thing in this Whole debate or inquiry.

The act of observing a particle DOES change it. That's nature, nothing to dispute.

Don't talk to me about misconceptions of quantum theory, yes I'm not a physicist, I'm a musician, a philosopher of air vibrations, but I know enough to realize that physics effects our brains, therefore our thoughts, therefore our lives, therefore philosophy and religion and the wider search for truth.

When you take seriously the implications of quantum mechanics, you undoubtedly confront enigmatic possibilities. I understand why people would want to ignore them, especially scientists (bunch a sticks in the mud!...useful sticks in the mud, of course...lol) but that's just consciousness, posing as psychology, working to keep itself hidden in even more mysterious ways.