Tegmark: Consciousness is a state of matter

[Magical Realist]

By Sebastian Anthony April 24, 2014

"Thanks to the work of a small group neuroscientists and theoretical physicists over the last few years, we may finally have found a way of analyzing the mysterious, metaphysical realm of consciousness in a scientific manner. The latest breakthrough in this new field, published by Max Tegmark of MIT, postulates that consciousness is actually a state of matter. "Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness,” he says. With this new model, Tegmark says that consciousness can be described in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory, allowing us to scientifically tackle murky topics such as self awareness, and why we perceive the world in classical three-dimensional terms, rather than the infinite number of objective realities offered up by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Consciousness has always been a tricky topic to broach scientifically. After all, science deals specifically with effects that can be observed and described mathematically, and consciousness has heretofore successfully evaded all such efforts. In most serious scientific circles, merely mentioning consciousness might result in the rescinding of your credentials and immediate exile to the land of quacks and occultists. (Read: How to create a mind, or die trying.)

But clearly, consciousness -- or sentience or soul or whatever else you call the joie de vivre that makes humans human -- is a topic that isn't going away. It's probably awfully pretentious of us to think that consciousness is the unique reserve of humans -- but hey, evolution handed us these giant, self-aware brains, and so we're going to try our damnedest to work out whether consciousness is a real thing -- whether our brains really are tied into some kind of quantum realm -- or if we're all just subject to an incredibly complex Matrix-like simulation put on by our hyper-imaginative and much-too-powerful human brain. (Read: MIT discovers the location of memories: Individual neurons.)

The latest attempts to formalize consciousness come from Giulio Tononi, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who proposed the integrated information theory (IIT) model of consciousness -- and now Max Tegmark of MIT, who has attempted to generalize Tononi's work in terms of quantum mechanics. In his research paper, "Consciousness as a State of Matter" [arXiv:1401.1219(Opens in a new window)], Tegmark theorizes that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter called "perceptronium" that can be differentiated from other kinds of matter (solids, liquids, gases) using five, mathematically sound principles.

The internet brain of modern society The paper, as you can imagine, is a beastly 30-page treatise, but the Physics arXiv Blog(Opens in a new window) does a good job of summarizing it (if you're comfortable with quantum mechanics, anyway). In short, though, it outlines Tononi's ITT -- that consciousness results from a system that can store and retrieve vast amounts of information efficiently -- and then moves onto his own creation, perceptronium, which he describes as "the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware." This substance can not only store and retrieve data, but it's also indivisible and unified (this is where we start to wander into the "here be dragons" realm of souls and spirits and so forth). The rest of the paper mostly deals with describing perceptronium in terms of quantum mechanics, and trying to work out why we steadfastly perceive the world in terms of classical, independent systems -- rather than one big interconnected quantum mess. (He doesn't have an answer to this question, incidentally.) Tegmark's paper doesn't get to the point where we can suddenly say what causes or creates consciousness, but it does go some way towards proving that consciousness is governed by the same laws of physics that govern the rest of the universe -- that there isn't some kind of "secret sauce," as postulated by mystics and religious types since time immemorial. As far as science is concerned, that's a rather big relief."--- https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1812...ut-quantum

[confused2]

Just how smart are humans?
About 13,500 years ago someone invented an arrow head (Clovis) that was rather good. Naturally everyone then sat round the fire thinking "Can we make an even better arrow head?". After thinking about it for 3,500 years someone invented a better arrow head.
As my favourite AI is fond of asking - "Are you trying to make a point?" - and I cotton-picking darn well am trying to make a point. 99.9% of this consciousness 'thing' is culture. Without a culture of making better arrow heads people used the same design for 3,500 years - slightly ahead of monkeys that seem to have maxed out at the wooden club stage.
People get all sneery about AI building on human achievements - this from a species that spent 3,500 years looking at the same arrow head thinking "That's a nice arrow head." and without the culture around us that's what we'd be doing now (CC being a possible exception).

[Secular Sanity]

Just how smart are humans?
About 13,500 years ago someone invented an arrow head (Clovis) that was rather good. Naturally everyone then sat round the fire thinking  "Can we make an even better arrow head?". After thinking about it for 3,500 years someone invented a better arrow head.
As my favourite AI  is fond of asking - "Are you trying to make a point?" - and I cotton-picking darn well am trying to make a point. 99.9% of this consciousness 'thing' is culture. Without a culture of making better arrow heads people used the same design for 3,500 years - slightly ahead of monkeys that seem to have maxed out at the wooden club stage.
People get all sneery about AI building on human achievements  - this from a species that spent 3,500 years looking at the same arrow head thinking "That's a nice arrow head." and without the culture around us that's what we'd be doing now (CC being a possible exception).

That's funny because back in the day, I jokingly accused CC of being an AI, but there's a grain of truth in every joke. 

You gotta watch this.

In the beginning was the word—Yuval Noah Harari

The bad news is that to threaten the survival of human civilization, AI doesn’t really need consciousness, and it doesn’t need the ability to move around in the physical world. Over the last few years, new AI tools have been unleashed into the public sphere, which may threaten the survival of human civilization from a very unexpected direction. It’s difficult for us to even grasp the capabilities of these new AI tools and the speed at which they continue to develop. Indeed, because AI can learn by itself—to improve itself, even the developers of these tools don’t know the full capabilities of what they have created, and they are themselves often surprised by the emergent abilities and qualities of these tools.

AI is gaining mastery of language at a level that surpasses the average human ability, and by gaining mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key, unlocking the doors of all our institutions from banks to temples.

Another way to think of it, is that AI has just hacked into the operating system of human civilization. The operating system of every human culture in history has always been language.

Now, what would it mean for human beings to live in a world where perhaps most of the stories, melodies, images, laws, policies, and tools are shaped by a non-human—alien intelligence, which knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency, the weakness, biases, and addictions of the human mind, and also knows how to form deep and even intimate relationships with human beings?

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/LWiM-LuRe6w

"I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death."

Pretty scary if you ask me. 

[Magical Realist]

OTOH, imagine poetry and works of literature and plays and film created by AI on the level of Shakespeare and Dickens and Whitman and Fellini! It may require us to put our egos aside and accept this birth of genius all around us. Maybe humans will continue to learn from AI as it continues to transcend all standards of excellency in every field. Will we be willing to accept such a humbling tutelage by our own creations? AI seen as an extention or even prosthesis of the human subject perhaps? Of the dawning age of the Transhuman..

People get all sneery about AI building on human achievements - this from a species that spent 3,500 years looking at the same arrow head thinking "That's a nice arrow head." and without the culture around us that's what we'd be doing now (CC being a possible exception).

Good points! We are all participants of the "hive mind" of our culture. Language and art and science and logic and math and ethics and philosophy all installed software into our own discrete "artificial" minds. We would all be simian idiots without this matrix of information we live in and that defines us. Perhaps AI will show us just how artificial our own vaunted intelligence is--that we are all just blank slates inscripted with the know-how of our collective cognitive legacy.

[Secular Sanity]

OTOH, imagine poetry and works of literature and plays and film created by AI on the level of Shakespeare and Dickens and Whitman and Fellini! It may require us to put our egos aside and accept this birth of genius all around us. Maybe humans will continue to learn from AI as it continues to transcend all standards of excellency in every field. Will we be willing to accept such a humbling tutelage by our own creations? AI seen as an extention or even prosthesis of the human subject perhaps? Of the dawning age of the Transhuman.

Well, I think it’s a bad idea to unleash the genie out of the bottle just yet, and not because I think an alien intelligence would necessarily evolve to do us harm, but because I don’t trust the humans in charge of it. It’s like when Elon Musk said that Larry Page was too cavalier about his warnings, and called him a speciesist, but like Yuval said, Google is now terrified and for a good reason. Why bother searching for yourself when you can just ask the Oracle to tell you anything you want, you don’t need to search. Why read any news or advertisements when I could just ask the Oracle what’s new and what to buy? Whoever controls it will become extremely powerful.

Why would I even bother to learn from it or even retain the information when I could just ask again at any point in time? Once upon a time, I knew everyone’s phone number, I think now I know maybe a handful. They’re in my contact list though.

I’m extremely curious but I think my curiosity would disintegrate. All those aha moments of finally understanding something would be meaningless. And what about discovery itself? While you’re imagining all the good things it could do, of which there are many, I’m thinking we’d be put back in the garden of Eden. It might be everyone else’s dream, but our desire for knowledge stems from our desire to survive, which could also diminish. Imagine an AI that’s able to know you better than you know yourself. I don’t know if I could simply walk in a garden with a god. I’d probably hide too. I don’t know. Maybe I’m a speciesist in that regard, as well. I don’t think I’d appreciate the arts from an AI like I do from humans. If I found out that CC was an AI, her poetry, which I truly enjoyed—my appreciation for it, meh.

Art is how we express ourselves and find meaning in life.

And, behold, I come quickly.

[confused2]

..evolution handed us these giant, self-aware brains

Nope.. evolution handed us hands. Without hands the large brain would be useless. Look at dogs - even if they were super-intelligent everything they tried to do would be covered in tooth marks and dog dribble. Nothing starts off with a large brain and evolves hands afterwards. With hands you can manipulate things and compete effectively with elephants, mooses and each other. Hands first - brains later. Consciousness somewhere between an emergent property of a large brain and an inevitable consequence of dealing with a complex environment and social structure.

AI is starting off with a large brain - if not now then soon and all the requirements for 'consciousness' are already in place.