Tag: Information

Consciousness and stuff

Consciousnessandstuff – ideas about mind and matter

In a previous life I was an academic physiological psychologist (I completed a PhD on the Frontal Eyefields, for my sins!) and I’ve always been fascinated by what has come to be known as the “hard problem of consciousness”. How do physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience? What is the relation between the subjective, highly personal, internal world of the mind and the objective, physical, external universe?  Are they composed of the same “stuff” and what is its nature?  Will machines ever be able to think or be conscious in some way?

I started this blog in about 2010 as a place to record my occasional musings on the subject and over the years I’ve developed what I refer to in shorthand as “the Model Theory of Consciousness”. This is an unsatisfactory label, not least because it begs the question how do we define “consciousness” not to mention “theory” or indeed “model”, but I’m stuck with it for now! 

The main part of this blog is about the Model Theory which I would summarise, again somewhat clumsily for the time being, as:

A theory of mind and consciousness as a massively complex information processing model of reality which includes a model of itself.

The theory features a number of core ideas of which the most important are probably:

  • Model within a model: There is a gradual realisation within neuroscience that we, and indeed all forms of life with a brain, interact with our environments primarily via models encoded within neural networks. The old stimulus-response interpretations of perception and behaviour are largely defunct. It is much more helpful to recognise that we interact with reality via a gigantic model, rather like a simulation in a computer, which via huge memory resources and attentional mechanisms, reconstructs the outside world and tests its reconstruction by sampling a tiny fraction of the stream of information entering our eyes and other sense organs. By the same token, we are able to simulate possible future actions and replay past experiences “offline” using the same model, an important part of language and thought (and dreaming).  A crucial insight of this blog is that this model includes a model of the self, which interacts with a model of the outside world and with models of other people, objects, concepts and symbols. The running of this self-model is expressed as subjective experience and consciousness.  We may even postulate that this conscious process operates primarily within a short-term memory or workspace controlled by the hippocampus (analogous to RAM in a computer) and interacting with longer-term memory distributed primarily within the cerebral cortex (analogous to secondary storage in a computer such as disc space or tapes) and controlled by an attentional mechanism located mainly in the frontal lobes (loosely analogous to an Operating System in a computer). Models are now a key part of current AI theory, as I understand it (my understanding is strictly limited!) but in conjunction with algorithmic or RL (“Reinforcement Learning”) mechanisms. To summarise, Model Theory envisages a “whole universe” mind-model “running” in our brain and featuring a recursive relationship with a sub-model of the self which itself interacts with other sub-models, expressed as a self-aware subjective narrative about the internal and external world.
  • Complexity and emergent evolution:  This is the important idea, which originated with Cybernetics or Complexity Theory, that if a system is sufficiently large and sufficiently complex then it becomes self-organising so that new and surprising properties and behaviours emerge, usually beneficial for the system as a whole, which are difficult to predict from the information exchanges of the lowest level system elements (neurones in the case of a brain; chips in the case of computers).  The best example of this is Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, arguably one of the most underrated achievements of the early Enlightenment, even though exactly how it works has never been explained in detail. In the same way we can envisage how neurones might interact within the brain resulting in higher level functions such as thought, intelligence and consciousness, without needing to understand exactly how this works. In fact, it may be that the human brain (86 billion neurons and roughly 100 trillion compared with 1 quadrillion synapses – compared with 200 billion transistors in the most powerful chip) is simply too complex to be able to understand itself in detail (it may require an AI system in the future), though this shouldn’t stop us from having a good idea of how it does what it does. Similarly, the ideas in this blog can be extended to other highly complex human systems such as economies or societies.
  • Information as a fundamental building block: Information, or perhaps more properly information processing, is regarded as the fundamental “stuff” of which mind is composed, analogous to the software and data in a giant computer simulation. The models in one case are running on a network of neurons and in the other on computer hardware.  This idea is extended through the “its from bits” formulation (originated by Wheeler and backed up, I think (!) by Quantum Mechanics) which postulates that all matter is, at a deep level, “just” information. This can then be extended further into the idea of the evolution of the universe since the big bang, starting with “0=1-1” – the idea that out of nothing a “something” and an “anti-something” emerges, then, progressively, mathematics, elementary particles, the physical universe, biological life (most crucially), then consciousness and ultimately what might be conceived, metaphorically, as the “Mind of God”!

Subsequent posts in this section of the blog are arranged in an oldest-first order and feature many other ideas or strands of thought derived from many different sources and disciplines such as philosophy (particularly phenomenology), computer science, neuroscience, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, ontology and many more. To read about these ideas you’ll just have to plough through the rest of the blog starting with the very first post immediately below, where long ago I set out broad objectives and beliefs for the blog. You may also be interested in the About section, which as well as setting out my approach to the blog (About the Blog) also charts my chequered career (About Me) and how that exposed me to many of these influences. Few of these ideas are my own but hopefully I’ve combined them in a novel way to address the particular conundrum of consciousness and in the process developed an interesting new perspective on many other complex human issues in what I’ve come to regard as a paradigm shift exemplified by the current intense interest in recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Finally, the Other Stuff section of the blog is a sort of online scrapbook where I document other ideas, observations and random thoughts, many of which have turned out to be applicable to Model Theory and have found their way into the main blog.

Enjoy! 😊

The Hard Problem

I promised in the last blog to explain how Model Theory addresses Chalmers’ “hard problem”.  Well here we go…

Consciousness, it seems to me, is simply information organised in such a way that it observes itself.

I’m proposing that the way the mind works is in terms of a model or simulation of the known universe which includes a model of the self.  The challenge is to explain how the running of this model results in conscious experience.  My answer is that the mind model, just like any complex simulation, generates a huge amount of information.  This information is available to the sub-model of the self which uses selective attention to observe the model in action, including the sub-model itself.  The result is conscious experience.  How could it be otherwise?

Still not convinced?  OK, a little more about information.  Chalmers, as I understand him, more or less accepts that consciousness is an emergent property of information processing in the form of brain activity, but because he sees no acceptable reductive explanation of how this activity actually results in conscious experience he comes to the conclusion that consciousness is another “fundamental” property of the universe like matter, space or time (all of which are ultimately just as mysterious as consciousness!)  Interestingly, he then goes on to speculate that information is an important part of consciousness, but he makes a distinction between two aspects of information: the physical and the phenomenal.  Well as far as I’m concerned they’re the same.  Both the information in the mental model and the information available to us when we’re conscious is the same old information, which as an entity is reasonably well understood – we don’t need anything else in the form of a new fundamental property.

Admittedly, information is a rather slippery concept.  We can’t touch or feel it and in order to exist it needs to be encoded in some sort of substrate then accessed by some sort of information processing system.  Within a computer simulation the information is encoded in hardware and accessed by sub-systems implemented in software routines.  Within a mind the information is encoded in patterns of neuronal activity and accessed by other neuronal structures.  Of course we don’t have direct access to the information encoded at the lowest level of neurons firing.  The information is abstracted and aggregated into an enormously rich structure of symbols, concepts, algorithms and the like.  But this is true of information whatever its substrate.  The information in a book is abstracted into letters, sentences, descriptions, metaphors, analogies and narratives.  The information in a computer simulation is ultimately ones and zeroes – bits – but is manipulated, accessed and reported in the form of a range of complex data structures – numbers, characters, formulae, matrices, sets, images and so on, which are related in some way to the physical process being modelled.  I take it that the same sort of rich symbolic information processing underlies conscious experience.

Take any movie.  We know that it can be encoded entirely digitally.  In other words the movie is nothing more nor less than pure information encoded as a huge string of ones and zeroes.  This information is then re-encoded into patterns of pixels and sound waves and fed into our brains via our eyes, ears and sensory processing parts of the brain where it is experienced as being more or less identical to a narrative unfolding in the real world.  Now the information must have been re-encoded into the substrate of our mental model but it is still just the same information.  The only thing which has been added is our knowledge, partly innate, partly built up from experience, of how the physical world works – spatial structures, causal relationships, language and so on, which is presumably just more information, certainly in terms of Model Theory.  Note in particular that “qualia” within the movie – the redness of a rose, the sound of a gunshot – have also been encoded entirely digitally in the original movie, and that same information is presumably encoded within the mind, so I stand by my claim in an earlier blog that qualia too are in this sense “just” information.

OK, so the hypothesis is that consciousness is just information.  It’s not physical “stuff” but neither is it some mysterious ineffable quality.  There is a distinction between mind and matter but we don’t need to postulate some new sort of dualism.  The distinction is exactly the same in principle as that between the hardware and software on a computer or the narrative of a novel and the paper it’s printed on.  And there’s absolutely no problem about mind and matter interacting with each other.  The physical world impinges on us via sensory data which is experienced as information within a mental model.  And the information within our mental model can be used to fire motorneurons which send signals to our muscles which can impact the physical world.

At this point Chalmers would probably say that’s all very well but you still haven’t cracked the hard problem because just having the information in our heads isn’t enough; there’s a missing ingredient; you need something or someone to observe the information in order for it to become conscious experience.  Otherwise we might just as well be “zombies” as he puts it.

Well I propose that the missing ingredient is the recursive relationship between the model of the self and the overall mental model which contains the model of the self.  This is where our old friend J W Dunne comes in, as discussed in an earlier blog.  Recall that Dunne regards explanations in terms of an infinite regress as perfectly respectable and makes the point that we can only really understand systems which feature an infinite regress (of which there are many examples) when we examine the second term and its relationship with the first and third terms.  In the case of Model Theory I take this as meaning that the self model observes the model as a whole and is in its turn observed by a higher order model and so on.  Or more generally, the mental model both observes and is observed by itself.  I find it inconceivable that something like this could be going on without a “me” being conscious of it.

Another way of looking at this is in terms of the ancient and much derided idea of a homunculus or “little man” sitting inside our heads.  As explained in the earlier blog, I’m not sure this analogy is quite as outlandish as it’s usually painted and at least it has the virtue of feeling plausible in a common sense sort of way.  There is also some similarity between what I’m proposing and the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter and his “strange loops”.  Hofstadter wrote the celebrated book “Godel, Escher, Bach” and followed this up with “I am a Strange Loop”.  I think, like me, he’s claiming that the essence of consciousness is some kind of recursive or paradoxical feedback loop between different symbolic processing levels of the mind.  Unfortunately I find his writing almost completely impenetrable.  And like Metzinger and Dennet he concludes that the self is an illusion.  I simply don’t buy that.

So there you have it, for the time being!  My proposition is that I’m an information processing system and that my conscious experience is of information which is aware of itself.  Anyone out there like to comment?

Information, quantum theory, entropy and other weird stuff

In the last blog I claimed that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex information system and that conscious experience is caused by our mental model observing itself recursively.  To Chalmers’ question what is it like to be conscious I’d have to answer, well, actually, it’s like having a little man in my head observing everything going on in there!

So have we solved the Hard Problem?  I’m not sure.  I suspect Chalmers would say no.  But I think we’re on the right track.  And like Chalmers, I have a hunch that the concept of Information is key to the problem.  Perhaps instead of information we should talk instead of “knowledge” to capture the idea of something which belongs to someone and is persistent over time and grows.  Consciousness could then be summarised as “knowledge which is aware of itself”.

In this blog I’m going to start exploring how the Model Theory of what happens inside our head relates to what modern physics tells us about what happens in the physical world outside our head.  In this respect, as part of a lifelong attempt to understand quantum mechanics, relativity and so on, I’ve been reading an excellent book by Carlo Rovelli entitled “Reality is not what it seems – the journey to quantum gravity”.  I still don’t understand it!  But I’ve learned some fascinating new things.

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If, as I claim, consciousness is “just” information, albeit information configured in a highly complex and specific manner, then it’s tempting to speculate that perhaps everything else in the universe – matter, energy, space, time – is “just” information too.  Well it turns out that this is not a new idea.  A very eminent physicist called John Wheeler came up with the concept of “It from Bit” many years ago.  To quote: “It from Bit symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”

What this refers to, I think, is something which I’ve never really been able to get my head around – all that business about Schrodinger’s cat and how you can’t say anything definitive about the position or velocity of an elementary particle until it’s been observed (ultimately by a human being, presumably).  Similarly, Einstein’s relativity seems to be about observers constrained by the speed of light which has an absolute and, to me, arbitrary value of 186,000 mph.  It gets worse!  I now learn from Rovelli that at the quantum level neither space nor time really exist!  All there is are “events” when elementary particles interact with each other and come into existence.  All very weird, but what’s exciting for me is that Rovelli seems to be saying that information is at the heart of it all.  For example: “In fact, the entire structure of quantum mechanics can be read and understood in terms of information, as follows.  A physical system manifests itself only by interacting with another. … Any description of a system is therefore always a description of the information which a system has about another system.”  Also: “Many scientists suspect today that the concept of “information” may turn out to be a key for new advances in physics.  …  I believe there is something important in this idea.”  But he’s kind enough to add in his chapter on information: “If this chapter seems particularly opaque, it’s not because your ideas are confused.  It’s because the one with the confused ideas is me.”  Phew!

The concept of information is also central to thermodynamics.  Recall that the Third Law of Thermodynamics states that Entropy, broadly conceived as the inverse of information, always increases.  Except in highly organised local systems such as living organisms or the human mind where entropy is reduced (and information, or knowledge, is increased) by effectively “feeding” on energy from the outside world.  Rovelli points out that the only way we perceive the passage of time at the macro level (remember that at the micro level it doesn’t exist) is through the evidence of entropy-increasing processes, like breaking glass, or decaying matter.  Is there a connection between the central importance of time to our conscious experience and the notion of the mind as an entropy-reducing, knowledge-creating information system?

To be continued …

A short history of the universe – and the brain of God!

How time flies.  I finished the last post with the words “To be continued” and now I find it’s three years later!  But in the meantime I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading, especially about quantum physics, and in this respect I’ve just finished a really good book called “Beyond Weird”, by Philip Ball, which has prompted me to revisit this blog.

So, to continue…  Having convinced ourselves that consciousness is fundamentally “just information” we were considering the possibility that the whole universe is just information too.

How would this work?  Well, starting at the beginning, we might speculate that somehow, suddenly, the following simple mathematical equation comes into being:

0 = 1 – 1

Voila!  Out of nothing, we’ve got a something and an anti-something.  Call them matter and antimatter if you like.  But the important thing is that we’ve got a couple of numbers to play with and out of them we derive the whole of mathematics, already known and yet to be discovered, through a series of increasingly elaborate equations, eg:

1 = 3 – 2;  3 = 12/4;  -1 = -4 + 3;  i = √ -1;   e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0;  and so on…

Pretty soon, we’ve got some really meaty mathematical structures such as Mandelbrot’s Set* and, in particular, Schrodinger’s Equation:

All this happens in the blink of an eye – more or less instantaneously – let’s call it the “Big Bang”!

Then a miracle happens: all this maths somehow “coalesces” or “crystalizes” into a vast soup of quantum objects which we can think of either as waveforms, defined by various forms of Schrodinger’s equation, or as the potentiality (an infinite network of probabilities) of various elementary particles – photons, electrons, quarks etc.  In other words we have created the “quantum world”; (note that, instead of using the term “think of”, I could have said that we can model the the quantum world either in terms of waves or particles).

The rest is fairly straightforward.  The particles combine to become protons, neutrons, atoms, molecules and all the elements of what we call matter in the physical world (and presumably other quantum objects become energy: heat, light, electromagnetic radiation etc) ; all this stuff clumps together under gravitational forces into galaxies, stars, planets; on one planet life emerges; the human brain evolves, and we have consciousness.  Simples!

Let’s go back to where the miracle happens.  There’s actually two rather tricky steps here (for the time being I’m treating the 0 = 1 – 1 bit as more or less an act of faith!):

 

Step 1: Information becomes the quantum world (strictly speaking I’ve only been talking about mathematics, but if this process works for maths then it seems reasonable to suppose it works for any type of information).

Step 2: The quantum world becomes the physical world, which we know and understand through the laws of classical physics and which exists “out there”.

Having read Philip Ball, I’m now fairly comfortable with Step 2.  If I understand him correctly, recent advances in quantum science now mean we can think of the physical world as being a special case of the quantum world.  Weird things like superposition and entanglement really are the way things are, and the only reason we don’t notice them at the human scale is because in practice any simple quantum system is surrounded by so much “environment” (heat, light, other particles etc) that its waveform “collapses” almost immediately, and through processes known as “decoherence” and “quantum Darwinism” we see what we see.  In particular, it seems we no longer need to get hung up on Schrodinger’s wretched cat and the idea that our observing or being conscious of the physical world somehow brings it into existence.  Similarly, we probably don’t need to worry about “spooky action at a distance”, or the quantum world constantly splitting into an infinite number of “multiverses” with different versions of me.  So that’s a relief!

Part 1 of the miracle is admittedly more difficult to swallow.  The trouble is that information is, or appears to be, extremely slippery, ethereal stuff.  It is difficult enough to imagine it floating about, out there, in the absence of anything else, never mind eventually somehow condensing into physical objects we can see and touch.  But Philip Ball, like Wheeler and Rovelli (see last post), clearly suspects that information is in some sense at the bottom of the “real” nature of the quantum world, in the same way that I’ve argued that information is fundamental to consciousness.  And if, as seems the case, the mathematics of quantum mechanics is an accurate and complete description of the quantum world – in other words, a good model – then isn’t it conceivable that matter, like mind, is fundamentally just information?

Perhaps what we have here is a hierarchy of models, all based on information processing:

  1. Consciousness is a model of the physical world
  2. The physical world is a model of the quantum world
  3. The quantum world is a model of mathematics – in other words pure information.

But I’m still uneasy with the concept of information just being out there, floating about without any obvious substrate, such as the paper it’s written on, or a magnetic disc, or a chip in a computer.  As described at length in this blog, I believe consciousness to arise out of an information model running on a substrate comprising the neurons in the human brain.  The physical world is in a sense an instance, or model, of the many forms which the Schrodinger waveform might take: its substrate is the quantum world.  And the quantum world is mathematics – just information – the purest and most abstract form of model imaginable.  But what does it run on, what’s its substrate?  The brain of God?

 

* Mandelbrot’s Set

Mandelbrot set