Xeroxing the brain

penrose

Regarding: "The only way you can emulate a person with a computer is by first defining the person to be a machine."

Consider:

"The question is this — Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence the contrary view, which is I believe, foreign to the conscience of humanity - Benjamin Disraeli"

In case it isn't clear, I'm quoting that ironically.

Or, he might have said:

"The only way you can evolve a person from an ape is by first defining the person to be an ape." (not an angel)

Can't they focus on making a cellphone that doesn't ring when I'm tired and sleeping, and it's that annoying bully calling again? I mean: not all human beings respect that rule (especially the latest models, issued during the last two years) — but this seems more pressing then giving Clippy the not-so-intelligent-assitant-from-Microsft-Office some random-based free-will.

In all seriousness, trying to make sense out of natural language is a tricky problem in itself, and might be a better way to intelligence then mimicking the brain organ.

Once again, people miss a critical point: the spirit.

We can emulate a few brain cells with a computer model. But when you put billions of brain cells together the resulting brain has a spirit / conscience / soul / whatever you name it. At this point there is no indication the computer model still fits. Think of it as Newton's laws which work fine for low speeds but break when we get closer to the speed of light.

Where does this spirit in the brain come from? Is it a side effect of electricity? Of some chemical reaction? Something else? We - Have - No - Clue.

So it's completely premature to talk about free will.

It is quite premature, indeed, to talk about adding random noise to a model to simulate free will.

These guys need to be schooled by Alva Noë.

I'd love to hear what neuroscience discoveries point to anything other than a materialist conception of the mind. I'm pretty interested in this field and i've never read anything credible to the contrary.

"...(a conception that is in tension with some of neuroscience's more interesting recent discoveries)"

I second Michaels request. You're teasing us, Nick. Where are the links?!?

- Apemachine Frank

so, will we travel to Permutation City?

"At this point there is no indication the computer model still fits."

Actually, there's every indication that the computer model fits and is explanatory. But looking at your desktop PC and saying it doesn't look like a brain is a bit like knocking two sticks together and saying it doesn't look like a power generator.

My perception of the past few decades is that there is a long story behind work like this, coming out of an academic philosophy department.

Other historically traditional departments tended to be more "self-funding" and even revenue generating, compared to the philosophy departments. The industry of academic philosophy underwent an enormous contraction in the 1980s and one subset of the attempts to rescue it focused on "multi-disciplinary" stuff -- e.g., maybe the philosophy dept. could piggy-back on the grant money of the C.S. department by working on all of the (assumed into existence) philosophical challenges of new high tech.

Can't rock the boat too much if you're a philosopher going in that direction. For example, better not actually be planning to spend a lot of work, say, critiquing Google from an ethics point of view or an analysis of power point of view. No, instead, the forumla became: learn some jargon and how to apply it well enough that it takes a while and some effort to figure out you are b.s.'ing. Using that jargon, come up with a fanciful prediction of some big thing that's just around the corner in science (like "WBE"). It's complete b.s., to be sure -- but it just has to sound plausible. Then relate that to some classic sophistic topics like questions of free will and go into the seminar business.

They're talking, in other words, about a big nothing ("WBE" is not even on the map of possibilities by any sane estimation) but making it sound plausible enough that they then get to talk about Descartes -- back to comfortable territory.

A hell of a waste of words, at best.

In the "actually interesting" category I see that J. H. Conway et al. have issued a new paper this year strengthening their "Free Will Theorem." That's good stuff, in applied philosophy.

-t

links: here, then here and here and here and follow the end notes.

Nick,

Another place your BS filter can get some tickling is looking into modern genomics -- both the "cheap sequencing" push and the GMO stuff. See a recent /. article (yes, really, just for links) about how we don't know more than the first tiniest thing about "gene expression" and hold that up against those other fields (and, the federal regulators recent decision to streamline open-air growing of GMO drug-producing crops). It really, really matters when people BS in ways for which this WBE article is paradigm. It's hard to wake people up. (As you know, I'm sure.)

-t

Hmm?

"While some may disagree with LeDoux's conclusion that "the brain makes the self" through its synapses, he makes an important contribution to the literature on the relationship between these two entities."

Seems quite materialist to me.

"The only way you can emulate a person with a computer is by first defining the person to be a machine."

Meh. That's a pretty meaningless piece of sophistry. We already know that everything running on the laws of physics are effectively machines, and pieces of meat are no different.

Or to make my point more clear: are you arguing that brains violate the laws of physics?

If so, how do they do that? I submit that it can only be by our lack of full knowledge, that there's a few missing laws. Once discovered, they can be included in the emulation.

If not, then there's no argument. The existing laws of physics can be calculated, quite simply because our calculations are run on machines that themselves run on the laws of physics; any recourse that seems incalculable can be devolved to the hardware.

I give the authors kudos for at least trying to find algorithm for digitalizing the brain; the problems is that there are some many things we don't know. For example, the authors assume that neurons are the only cells involved in intelligence, memory and etc. There is evidence that other cell types including glial cells have a roll as well. They would need to be scanned and simulated as well. However, the fundamental problem with any "computer simulation" of the brain is that consciousness is an artifact of massive super parallel networks of billions of self organizing units (neurons) in a physical three dimensional space. It's not been proved that consciousness could exist outside of a complicated network of self organizing units, e.g. inside a serial program running on a single processor. I wish they had addressed this issue too.

Barry, you wrote:

Or to make my point more clear: are you arguing that brains violate the laws of physics?

[....]

If not, then there's no argument. The existing laws of physics can be calculated, quite simply because our calculations are run on machines that themselves run on the laws of physics; any recourse that seems incalculable can be devolved to the hardware.

It doesn't actually work that way.

First, the WBE paper assumes and hand-waves its way to a conclusion that models of brain structure and brain environment, if *simplified so as to be computationally tractable*, are sufficient for (various interesting "levels" of) WBE. They assume their conclusion (sort of, see below). This is only a "practicality" objection, though, and doesn't really get to your question about the "laws of physics".

Second, see that Conway paper ("The Strong Free Will Theorem", widely available on-line). No amount of computation in advance can predict the correlated squared-spin measurements of the twinned particles in the thought experiment. If scientists have free will, so do electrons and, more importantly our very best physical theories seem to confirm that we can not prove that either scientists or electrons *lack* free will. In other words, there may very well not exist, even in principle, a theory capable of emulating a brain: the universe may very well grant us but one way to determine the behavior of a brain and that's to watch it and see what it does.

Formally, a "roadmap" it is, describing a kind of master plan of experiments to test the assumptions in the hand-waves. For example, is there really a "scale cut-off" in brain structure above which the details are both computationally tractable and a complete (enough) theory of how the brain produces the mind? In some sense, all they are saying is that "Well, we'll be able to run the experiment soon."

That's multi-disciplinary academic philosophy in its role as a surveyor of other fields and an illumination of the internal discourse of those fields by "elevating" it to a philosopher's "big picture".

However, if they are going to perform that role well then when they identify a hypothesis that will become testable, that hypothesis must be coherent, convincing, and consistent with what is already known.

Their work fails that requirement. When they talk about emulating to the point of recognizability the personality of a pet, or of "in tact memories and skills" they are making up rather implausible stuff out of whole cloth and calling it a hypothesis.

Thus, while we are getting computers and scanners fast enough and detailed enough to run larger and larger "simulations" if we want to know what those simulations will prove or disprove, those philosophers have given us a misleading, incoherent answer.

I've little doubt that increasing mappings and simulations of various aspects of brain structure will yield new "things we can do to brains". That's interesting (and alarming).

What do we get from these folks though? We get told that really with these experiments we're on a quest to discover how the physicality of the brain gives rise to the phenomenology of the whole mind. How breathless. How inspiring-sounding. And how dangerously wrong and meaningless.

-t

Regarding: "are you arguing that brains violate the laws of physics"

Well, I don't want to put words into anyone's mouth, but I think the answer is, of course they are. Humanity is deemed to possess a shard of divinity, an essential soul which transcends the animal kingdom, err, the materialistic universe. Otherwise we'd just be vile apes, err, mere computers. Brute beasts, brute computation, both are concepts which scare a certain worldview.

By the way, is there anything in that "WBE" paper which hasn't been done better in dozens of science-fiction stories? The idea that if we can replicate the exact state of a brain, it can be copied, is pretty old story stuff. Heck, the fan Star Trek guides wrote stuff like that a long time ago.

Seth:

Gee, I can't push the Conway paper enough. It offers a conclusion that from a very small subset of axioms that are very rock solid assumptions from special relativity and quantum mechanics we can prove that if humans contain a spark of something beyond physical law -- let's call it free will -- then so do (for example) electrons.

Isn't that interesting in the sense that it suggests a world view which accepts our best science, 100%, and yet which gives us a universe that is also "animistic" in some sense? This is not to say that, for example, the free will of an electron would be recognizable in anthropocentric terms. It's just to hint that our best theories add up to the conclusion that, indeed, humans might have some "spark of the divine" just because everything that exists might.

There's a third way, in other words, between a clockwork universe and an anthropocentric concept of soul per se: and that third way seems to be implied by our best physics.

And, incidentally, the axioms from which the theorem are derived are all quite settled empirical questions. There appears no danger of them being over-turned by any future experiment. The permanent ambiguity between animism and unknowable determinism is a real, measurable phenomenon. Whatever the universe is, physicists have proved that it may very well include the participation of the divine. Go figure.

(And, boy, the public debate over intelligent design was really poor in related ways. The correct answer is not that I.D. is obviously wrong but, rather, in it's most plausible form it is formally unprovable -- and so is its negation. Thus it is not a scientific hypothesis although it does point out an ambiguity that can't be shed from our best theories of physics. You can believe it and you can simultaneously believe everything you hear in science class about evolution: they are mutually consistent beliefs. The only difference is that I.D. is beyond proof (as is "Not(I.D.)") and thus makes a good topic for "philosophy of science" rather than science per se.

-t

"if humans contain a spark of something beyond physical law -- let's call it free will -- then so do (for example) electrons."

I would call that a hilarious _reductio ad absurdum_.

Just off the top of my head, I think this is equivocating between free will in the philosophical meaning, and some sort of analytic indeterminacy.

Or, from another direction, I don't think the brains-are-not-computers people are going to be converted if you tell them that computers have souls too.

I would call that a hilarious _reductio ad absurdum_.

I'm not sure if you mean that as a very clever joke (Conway's argument involves two very elegant "reductios" and it is (typically for the author) playful.).

The Free Will Theorem ("FWT") describes a real experiment that you can perform (not easy, but doable). It proves (by a pair of reductios) that there does not exist any mathematical function (computable or not, whether we know the "fundamental constants" or "initial conditions" or not) which takes as input the complete history of the universe up to that experiment, from any perspective, and gives as output the results of the experiment. The universe is logically free to choose an arbitrary outcome based on empirical axioms that are very, very well established.

Weirdly, the arbitary outcome is not *meaningless*. The universe is free to decide, but not arbitrarily free.

That doesn't prove that the universe is animistic and it doesn't prove that the universe is deterministic. One thing it does prove that an animistic interpretation and a deterministic interpretation are *both* non-scientific. Neither can be proved or disproved empirically.

Logically, and accepting only quite uncontroversial empirical truths as axioms, if you say you are a determinist you are professing a formally non-scientific faith. Likewise if you say you are an animist. Likewise if you *very carefully* profess faith in a cleaned up expression of intelligent design. None of those hypotheses (determinism, animism, et al.) are scientific questions. We can't find experiments to prove one of those or the other because we've already done experiments that prove we can't.

You've heard all of that in pop-sci "creepy-crawly" accounts of QM and Relativity before but what's new in Conway is three-fold:

(a) If you are into the "technology" of math -- the nitty gritty -- Conway's arguments are great. Elegant, playful, convincing, brashly generalized.... typical Conway (see the interlude chapter of "On Numbers and Games"). But, that's not (in detail) for this blog.

(b) Not only does he rigorously show the universe's inherent scientific ambiguity about determinism vs animism but in doing so he relies only on an extremely small, extremely well verified set of empirical facts. This isn't a theorem about QM and Relativity per se. This is a theorem about very tiny, weakened subsets of QM and Relativity -- I mean: take a few of the smallest, least-controversial parts of QM and Relativity that you can find -- the most banal of tiny subsets -- and then Conway builds his proof on those axioms.

(c) he starts to elevate these results back into the philosophical domain rather well, in particular as relates to the "phenomenology of the mind"

In part, the "Free Will" papers are about vocabulary:

For one thing: When Conway writes math like in these papers he's writing in a style that could be called "multiply formalizable". He's talking in abstractions that can be formalized into machine-checkable proofs -- but in more than one way. For example, he uses words like "function" but he doesn't mean "function" per any one axiom/definition system of math but, really, he's talking about an abstraction that is some "uncontroversial common properties of 'functions' in any of the commonly used axiom/definition systems".

It's hard to keep up with his writing, sometimes, because he's so overwhelmingly good at talking at that level of abstraction. He has a keen eye for the "landscape" of math.

That's one way the paper is "about vocabulary" but the other I notice is, well, the way it uses words like "free will" and the way it draws deliberate attention to the problematics of the way it uses such words.

Pointing to the scientific ambiguity of freedom vs. determinism, the paper forcefully points out by example that the language of freedom and choice is more consonant with the mathematical reality of our least controversial empirical observations.

Saying that an electron has free will, Conway points out, is the most natural common (English) way to convey the gist of the mathematical characteristics of the situation.

-t

I think it WOULD be possible to emulate or mimic the observed effects of a brain in the short term -- it could almost be done right now. The brain I'm referring to of course wouldn't be human, but it would be fairly complicated as brains go; say, for example, the brain of an advanced insect like a hornet or an ant. Notice, also, that I said the effects of a brain, i.e. results of decisions -- NOT consciousness. I'll get to explaining myself in a minute; but I don't think it is even theoretically possible to create consciousness with silicon, although a very intriguing possibility is that you might get something similar, yet profoundly different.

If you are a gamer you have certainly played a shooter with bots. I am a huge fan of some older games like Doom and Quake, and play death-match with bots all the time. Even in such simple games the bots seem to make semi-intelligent decisions. The 'decisions' they make are just the results of some pretty simple rules encoded into C. The gap between the 'intelligence' of these bots and that of a worker ant isn't that great. That's NOT saying, however, that the bots are conscious, or could ever be.

I'm not exactly a dualist; I think consciousness is the by-product of a particular kind of mechanistic process; it's just that I think that that process is carbon-based, and couldn't work with the kind of simplified silicon-based system people will eventually make.

If you think about it there are common natural, inorganic processes that mimic life and consciousness, and examining them for a minute could be very instructive. For example, take any vortex, like a dust-devil, tornado, or just water going down the drain. The movable vortexes like a tornado have a shape, a trajectory or path, a birth, a death, and, while they exist, both a past and a future. In all of this they mimic life. Yet they are entirely incorporeal. A tornado, for example, is just air.

Now, obviously, a tornado is much simpler than any thing alive. But like living matter at least for a while it is a SELF-REPLICATING PROCESS.

To proceed with my argument I need to take a step back a say something about why I am not a dualist (we'll get back to the tornado in a bit). I think, as have many before me, that whatever the building blocks of consciousness are, that they are shared by all matter, even inanimate matter like stones. This is not the same as saying that inanimate matter is conscious. It isn't, at least in the sense we use the term. Specifically, I would like to make a totally unfounded assumption, that consciousness is a by-product of movement or activity -- something like a spark, say, maybe an almost imperceptible warping of time, that accompanies the movement of electrons. Like I said, I know this assumption is unfounded, but bear with me for a minute. If this were the case, normally, as for example in a stone, this by-product of molecular activity -- this "consciousness' -- would be random (because of the immense number of molecules), and therefore both imperceptible and for all practical purposes nonexistent.

Yet any organism more complicated than a bacterium, at any one time has several orders of magnitude more processes acting in parallel than even a vortex like a tornado. In a way the analogy between vortexes and life breaks down here. For it to be exact, the vortexes would have to be something like three billion years old, and gradually increasing in complexity the entire time. In any event, with the incredibly complicated, organized "mechanical substratum" that carbon-based life provides, the amalgamated conscious processes that are part-and-parcel with matter become non-random, not all at once, but increasing in their non-randomness the more their substratum -- e.g. the animal they're based in, can benefit from their activities, through the process of natural selection. We -- people, or rather our minds -- are the cumulation of this whole process.

So even a computer that may seem to mimic consciousness -- an intelligent machine, if you will -- will be MUCH simpler, and with an entirely different base than an organic system like a human, or even an ant. If such a thing actually has a consciousness, I would be surprised if it were anything like our own.

Just to make my point, supposing such a computer were built, would YOU be willing to "upload" your own consciousness to it, with the price being that the 'old' you would immediately die? I sure wouldn't, unless I knew my death was irrevocably immanent.

BTW, I've been reading Bergson's "Creative Evolution" but still have a long way to go. What I've written here wasn't influenced by the little I've read; but I've read enough to know that it is pertinent to this discussion.

Haven't had a chance to read through all the comments yet, but I want to assure Seth that I haven't gone all New Age on him. What I believe I wrote in the post was "old school materialist" - the longstanding view that the (fixed) structure of the physical brain explained everything about mind/consciousness/self. Map the brain, and you've got the self. Free will? An illusion - or perhaps "noise." That view - which is very much a mechanical, machine view - is outdated. The mind does actually seem to exist, and thoughts seem to exert a physical influence on the structure of the brain. Map the brain, and you have, well, a map of the brain. Mystery doesn't have to be a sign of divinity, Seth; it may just mean we don't know. The history of physics provides a very good illustration, also calling into question old ideas of materialism.

Nick, well, maybe I misread you, but that last paragraph about "defining the person to be a machine" did seem rather mystical.

Let's put it this way - there's nothing that says the brain, complete with mind, can't be emulated, and plenty that indicates it can. Of course it will be difficult. Look at it this way - nobody has built a cell yet, but people don't say nowadays that cells have some vital essence that makes them forever unsynthesizable by mere chemistry.

The mind is self-modifying code, to a certain extent, and common programs aren't self-modifying, so people tend to think that all programs are fixed that way. But it's quite possible to write self-modifying code.

When you say:

"The history of physics provides a very good illustration, also calling into question old ideas of materialism."

Umm, I have a degree in physics from MIT.
There are indeed deep paradigm shifts that happened. But there's also much more abuse of metaphor.
One of the most intellectual experiences I recall was studying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and trying to grasp its meaning in terms of the mathematical operators. Quite profound. But inversely, I didn't think much about the way that it was abused as a philosophical statement.

I think the deep question as to whether the universe is determinate or statistically indeterminate is like the Uncertainty Principle, in that people often take a real but highly technical matter and try to turn it into all sorts of metaphorical implications.

Q1: Why are non-experts discussing such a topic?

A: There are no experts on this topic.

Q2: Why are these guys planning to scan the brain? Isn't it better to try and understand the fundamentals instead?

A: Can write a bigger thesis this way.

Q3. Why all this talk of materialism, free will?

A: Because the real topic of intelligence is too complicated.

Q4.Should we all shut up then?

A: Yes. Please...

Seth,

There are three ways in which a physical phenomenon might be beyond emulation: (a) we can describe how to construct a finite emulation but the universe is too small to contain it; (b) we can only describe how to construct a non-finite emulation; (c) emulation is mathematically impossible.

Phenomenon of type (a) would seem to be fairly common. The WBE paper invites us to regard as plausible that the brain is not example of a class (a) phenomenon but the evidence offered is flimsy. On the other hand, the brain qualitatively looks like the kind of chaotic system we wouldn't be surprised to find in class (a).

Conway showed the existence of real phenomenon in class (c). Moreover, he showed that the phenomenon in class (c) have some essential metaphysical properties in common with an intuitive sense of human choice in a free-will universe: that choices are not prefigured by the history of the universe to that point and that they create meaningful relationships between space-like separated parts of the universe. So perhaps the right question is, as Conway puts it, "why shouldn't we" find quite plausible that the some essential properties of the mind (such as choice) are a class (c) phenomenon?

Could the mind be of class (b)? Can anything? I'm not sure it can in the sense that a "non-finite emulation" seems to me to be an oxymoron. There may be ways in which a construction that we'd dub "a non-finite emulation" is in some ways descriptive of a phenomenon but it isn't in any sense an emulation -- it can never be carried out even in an infinite universe (because the speed of light ensures the emulation will never reach an infinite size in a finite amount of time).

Looking deeper into the possibility that the brain / mind is a class (c) phenomenon: the structure of the brain is certainly good for amplifying some class (c) phenomenon to create macro-scopic changes in brain structure. The experimenters measuring spin in Conway's experiment illustrate that. Why should we not suppose that the brain's structure internally produces examples of class (c) choices and then also amplifies those into macroscopic changes in brain structure? If brain's do that, then there is no function mapping a brainstate at t0 to its future states -- the "mind" is a class (c) phenomenon.

To argue that the mind is not a class (c) phenomenon you would have to argue that although the brain can efficiently amplify the choice of a particle into physical changes to the brain and meaningful changes in the mind, that somehow it just happens to not do so. That seems unlikely.

-t

Nick, what is 'free will'?

No, seriously. Lots of people throw that term around without really having any clue what it means. Let's tackle the two most common descriptions:

One: Free Will is the premise that, for any given decision in the past, you could have chosen differently. This is a very common definition; it's also tautologically true. Yes, you could have chosen differently. You didn't. Even more importantly, you can't go back and change the past. You can't choose differently now that you've chosen.

Two: Free Will is the premise that, for any given decision in the future, you can choose different from decisions made in the past. This is a silly, almost absurd definition, because it's apparently true. Any decision you make in the future will be informed by the consequences of decisions made in the past, as well as any changes in your environment– both external and internal– that have happened in the intervening time. Of course you will weigh the matter differently; you're a different person at a different place and time. You may well choose differently.

Why do you choose?

That's the question underlying every choice. Why do you choose? Think about your left hand. Touch your thumb to your pinky. Too late: even before you registered that you were thinking about touching your thumb to your pinky, signals were racing down the nerves in your spine and arm, telling the muscles to get ready for the action, performing the action, and telling your brain that the action had been performed. What we think of "consciousness" and "free will" is an after-effect of some meta-consciousness, some meta-free will, that manifests as interactions with our selves and each other only after the fact. The hundreds of mental modules that regulate us-- our hunger, our quest for success, our sex drive, our wish for sleep, our reactions to beauty or to filth-- compete for attention, each gaining or losing its voice in the chorus that makes up "you" and "me," depending upon underlying physical signals-- digestion, exhaustion, the presence of a loved one, the demands of work, the learned threat of retaliation.

For all the rationalization that might bubble to the surface of what we call "conscious free will," we might exhaust all alternative explanations for choosing one way or another, and we come down to tie breakers: simple, illogical, animal emotions. Want and fear. The things that turned Naked African Plains Ape into Homo sapiens, that made us incredible survivors and reproducers on the sveldt. We haven't graduated from that status just yet.

Nobody in this conversation has yet defined "free will," so let me throw out Daniel Dennett's: "Free will is when conscious agent A makes choices without the direct compulsion of another conscious agent." This is without regard to the underlying, non-conscious processes that cause choice-making to arise in agent A.

The WBE project meets that criteria: until we understand what even a successful WBE is doing, we won't be able to compel the will of a working WBE. If it's a successful emulation, its "consciousness" will have as much free will as the rest of us, and one hell of a better opportunity than you or I to introspect. After all, it'll have access to its own hardware.

Almost by definition that would be an "unfriendly AI." That ought to frighten the hell out of us.

Elf,

Choice is choice. It's what people think it is. You try to show otherwise with your "touch your thumb and forefinger" experiment but that doesn't show anything much new about choice: we already new choice worked like that.

For example, consider the literary trope in which a narrator says something like "When I sat down to decide whether or not to go on the journey I realized that, in fact, already made the decision months ago. I had ordered my affairs, I'd avoided scheduling appointments for after the departure date. More to the point, I saw in retrospect that certain knowledge I would go on the journey was always in the back of my mind ever since that conversation with Dr. Memento...."

It's not un-common to talk of the action of choice as one that appears in prominent consciousness only in retrospect and, even so, we describe choices in terms of the rich, human subtlety of their meaning with no need to reduce all choice to some kind of simplified "animal instinct". In literature, choice is commonly understood to be holistic - to have many meanings at once.

-t

Tom, it's really not acceptable to say "choice is choice." The mechanism of choice is a mystery, and you seem to be implying that it should stay that way.

I disagree. The walls of mystery are exactly what need to be pulled down. Each choice we make has an underlying rationale.

Let's put it this way, in the simplest terms possible: You and I are not jittering blobs of uncontrolled plasma, nor are we apparently constantly jerking around like epileptics. We choose to sit still, to have this conversation, to get up for coffee, to go to bed.

Either there is a reason why we do the things we do, either there is a mechanism, a collection of rules, of processes, that lead to each and every choice-- or there is not.

I will grant, because I can't see how it can be otherwise, that some choice mechanisms are probabilistic, even stochastic, but those must go through the essential filters that make us the successful survivors and reproducers that we are. There might even be random event generators in the brain.

But a random event generator is not free will: it's just randomness. How that randomness mixes into the great stew that is human consciousness and emerges as qualia and behavior is the mystery that needs solving. To argue, as Conway seems to, that your (c) condition is both "free will" (has some meaning) and "inaccessible" (meaning that we cannot grasp) is to consign mankind to hopelessness: whatever we learn about ourselves, it will never be enough. Growth-- of Self, of consciousness, of who and what we are as individuals and as humanity-- will forever be the stuff of fantasy. I can't accept that.

We are the subtlest creatures on the planet, but there's absolutely no reason to throw out Occam and suppose that we're somehow qualtitatively different from every other species on Earth, right down to the Sphex Wasp. We are certainly quantitatively different: we have more subtlety, show more awareness and self-awareness and consciousness, but I have serious doubts that all of that is a difference of kind.

The WBE experiment is a stab in the dark, but it's better to take that stab and light that candle than live with ignorance. Carl Sagan once famously described those who believed in supernatural intervention as a living in a "Demon-Haunted World." The last demon in that haunetd world will be the humunculous that lives behind our own eyeballs.

The mechanism of choice is a mystery, and you seem to be implying that it should stay that way.

Not quite. There are three mysteries which we generally accept as axiomatic (or at least as trivial consequences of a more elaborate set of axioms we use). No empirical result has yet disproved these axioms. They are that information travels at finite speed, that the squared spins of certain particles along orthogonal axes is constrained to be a permutation of 1, 1, 0, and that we can entangle two particles such that they have the same squared spins in parallel directions yet are space-like separated. From those three axioms we can prove that such particles exhibit choice in the sense of exhibiting behavior for which no mechanism is mathematically possible because the behavior is indeterminate with respect to the history of the behavior. Yet at the same time the behavior is both real (measurable) and meaningful (conveying truths about space-like separated events).

In other words, no new mystery is posited by saying the electrons "have (at least a primitive kind of) choice": rather, the existence of that choice is proved from very uncontroversial axioms of physics -- some of the best empirically verified axioms we've got.

It is unknown if what we call human choice is the same sort of phenomenon or not. It's a viable hypothesis that it is the same sort of phenomenon because that would explain how human choice can be a real thing with some of the main characteristics we usually attribute to it (like not be prefigured by the past, and being meaningful in the causality-simultaneous universe).

I disagree. The walls of mystery are exactly what need to be pulled down. Each choice we make has an underlying rationale.

Why say that? It's not true of the choices of electrons, for any ordinary sense of the word "rationale". Why deprive human minds of such a capacity, a priori?

Either there is a reason why we do the things we do, either there is a mechanism, a collection of rules, of processes, that lead to each and every choice-- or there is not.

And Conway points out that we have well established the reality of meaningful phenomenon for which there are no such rules, given just the three simple axioms. If there were such rules in every case, we would be led to a contradiction (the existence of a mathematical function which we prove separately can not exist). The consistency of the three axioms (at least per Conway, I haven't followed that reference) is well proved.

There simply are no rules for the electrons in the experiment unless those three non-controversial axioms are false.

But a random event generator is not free will: it's just randomness.

Randomness and meaninglessness are not the same thing. The digits of pi are both random and meaningful, for example.

Now, if you think the universe can be shown to be just a set of rules with a random number generator attached then surely we can just as well run the random number generator separately, call it's output a a new fundamental constant (and recognize that it's a transcendental number), and combine our rules and that new fundamental constant to produce a function that predicts the outcome of a spin measurement given just the resulting theory and the history of the experiment. Yet we can not for that would lead to a contradiction (no such function can exist without the three axioms being inconsistent and we know our three axioms are consistent -- so no such function exists.) It isn't, in other words, just some rules with an RNG attached.

So: (a) stochastic behavior by the universe (e.g., the distribution of spins in repeated experiments) can be random without being meaningless; (b) you can't make a complete rule-set for the universe even if we permit your rules to include an infinite table of random numbers.

The choice of an electron can be meaningful, unpredictable, and not determined by any fixed set of rules. E.g., it can exhibit "will".

To argue, as Conway seems to, that your (c) condition is both "free will" (has some meaning) and "inaccessible" (meaning that we cannot grasp) is to consign mankind to hopelessness: whatever we learn about ourselves, it will never be enough.

In what way is that hopeless? That's freedom, brother. Becoming predictable, boring old farts, on the other hand -- that seems to me like a reasonable definition of hopelessness.

We are the subtlest creatures on the planet, but there's absolutely no reason to throw out Occam and suppose that we're somehow qualtitatively different from every other species on Earth, right down to the Sphex Wasp. We are certainly quantitatively different: we have more subtlety, show more awareness and self-awareness and consciousness, but I have serious doubts that all of that is a difference of kind.

I agree. And go further. At least as a hypothesis, there isn't a big difference in kind between our selves and, say, an electron -- at least as pertains to choice. We can understand and characterize the wasp in great detail. We can understand and characterize the electron with even finer precision and comprehensiveness. Yet the electron retains some meaningful choice, why not the wasp, and why not us?

You find no hope in freedom from constraints?

The WBE experiment is a stab in the dark, but it's better to take that stab and light that candle than live with ignorance. Carl Sagan once famously described those who believed in supernatural intervention as a living in a "Demon-Haunted World." The last demon in that haunetd world will be the humunculous that lives behind our own eyeballs.

A superstition is an empirically testable hypothesis that finds no (true) empirical support. What we are talking about here is different: we're talking about the existence of real and meaningful phenomenon for which we can prove that no consistent hypothesis can exist.

-t

I'll have to admit I'm a little bit lost about all this talk on free will vs. determinism, and on relating the term "free-will" to anything an electron might do.

It's my understanding that electrons SEEM to be unpredictable because of two interacting facts -- 1) they can occupy any of a multitude of positions in what for lack of a better word might be called an "orbit" about a nucleus, and 2) we have no way of knowing (ever) which one of these positions they're in at any point in time, without altering the original state in the process. It follows that all we can do practically is to express the PROBABILITY of a certain configuration being true. Thats NOT the same as saying that in reality, an election isn't at a certain point at a certain time, and it's certainly not the same as saying that the electron has "choice" or "free will." All it is saying, is that we can't know for sure where in the heck the electron is. It's a limitation of our ultimate investigative abilities, not something built into the Universe.

I see free will in a mind as the same sort of thing. A mind, especially a human mind, is just too complicated to predict, other than by stating probabilities, just as with the orbit of the electron. A mind is so dependent in some ways on slight influences which either are hard to characterize, because they occur at the molecular level; or are synergistic, group effects that exist solely at the functional level of the whole thing. Also, as someone pointed out, a mind is self-programming, which means that the environment and interactions with the environment must occupy a huge share in any of its resulting paradigms or decisions. But once again, I don't think that that means that someone necessarily has "free-will;" just as with the electron, our inability to predict does not translate into some mysterious power of choice.

Speaking of free-will vs. determinism, I don't think there is any difference. They are the same thing, just viewed from different points. If the Universe were completely deterministic (and I think it probably is), then people would still think, for example, that they had the choice to touch their nose with their finger, or not. The apparent "choice" is in the mental debating or process of deciding, which, like everything else, could logically completely be determined by it's antecedents. As an example, in one of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries Holmes outlines to Dr. Watson the latter's processes of thought, in coming to some conclusion, taking each link in the thought chain as it followed its predecessor. I went back and looked, but unfortunately I couldn't find the exact passage. Another way to look at this is to say that "choice" is just apparent, because we are self-conscious. If we weren't self-conscious, the result might be the same, but there would be no question of choice.

One other thing I wanted to point out is that I, and probably some others here, may have mixed up three separate concepts, namely, 1) choice or free-will, 2)consciousness, and 3) intelligence. The first two of these may or may not depend on one another. The third, however, I believe at least can be totally separate. It is possible to built an intelligent machine.

Anyway, enough. I could be wrong on all counts. Unlike Seth, I hated Physics in college. I do agree with Tom Lord that the WBE thing has more to do with grant money than science.

Stephen,

No, it's not like you think.

You are saying you think it's possible that the electron has a definite state (position, spin, etc) and that that definite state, combined with a few rules, determines what the electron does next. You allow that we might not be able to *know* this state and hence must model it stochastically, but you reserve the possibility that the definite state exists.

Ok, well, long story short -- that is one of the things that Conway proves incorrect. Whether we know the state fully or not at time T0, there is no set of rules that give the state at T1 -- no "function" mapping a T0 state to a T1 state.

-t

Yet the electron retains some meaningful choice, why not the wasp, and why not us? You find no hope in freedom from constraints?

No, and I know exactly why. In all of this, we've talked about freedom. About how we're not slaves to determinism, about how, despite all the underlying influences that might be deterministic, there's an element of freedom.

The problem with this freedom is that it's exactly like the freedom we describe in a 3D video game: the degrees of freedom describe the viewpoint's capability to move, to turn, to look.

Nowhere does it describe why one would move at all. The difference between you and I is that in the phrase 'free will,' you concentrate on the word 'free.'

I concentrate on the word 'will.'

Freedom to jerk about randomly isn't freedom; it's just jerking around randomly. What you've proposed is that the metaconsciousness that makes decisions and announces them to our consciousness has a tie-breaker no better than the roll of a die. Even if that tie-breaker has its own set of rules, those rules are inaccessible to us.

Yes, I find that a hopeless, even pathological condition. How is that "will?" How is that by any stretch of the definition the person who is me making a decision? Weighing the pros and cons. Coming to a conclusion. Acting on it.

I really hope that Litt, Eliasmith, Kroon, et. al. in their paper "Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?" have it right: no, it is not. There is no reason to believe that the brain needs anything more than mere biochemistry to explain itself. That we are temporally involved machines and nothing else.

(This is why I'm unimpressed with Nick's carting out these plasticity articles; of course the brain reacts to the environment-- including its own thoughts, over the passage of time-- that's what a good evolutionarily adapted brain does. To find this "remarkable" now is to get all of your news from screamsheet media but to be otherwise unaware of the last twenty years of the interaction between evolutionary biology and neurophysiology.)

Because if we are extraordinarily, wonderfully complex but nonetheless definite and finite machines, the progression of which through time can be grasped and codified, than our will is within our reach. It is free, even if it's wholly deterministic: it has the one variety of free will worth wanting, the will to make future choices free of the compulsion of other willful agents. We can grasp the knobs and dials of who we are, turn them up, turn them down, make of ourselves whatever we want. Passion, focus, harmony: we will have undiluted access to each and every individual's bliss, free to follow as we will. We can reach substrate independence, no longer locked into the bubbling, decaying meat that is our legacy.

We will not only have the one definition of free will worth wanting: we will have the freedom to embrace, or enhance, or even reject the human condition. And that's a future for which we should earnestly strive.

This is why I'm unimpressed with Nick's carting out these plasticity articles; of course the brain reacts to the environment-- including its own thoughts, over the passage of time-- that's what a good evolutionarily adapted brain does. To find this "remarkable" now is to get all of your news from screamsheet media but to be otherwise unaware of the last twenty years of the interaction between evolutionary biology and neurophysiology.

This is a bit of an overstatement, Elf. Yes, in retrospect, we can see the steadily mounting evidence of neuroplasticity, and, yes, that evidence has become pretty much overwhelming over the last 20 or 30 years (and, no, I'm not suggesting otherwise), but that doesn't change the fact that neuroplasticity was long treated as heresy by mainstream neuroscience, which perpetuated the idea of the adult brain as a mechanism, the fixed and specialized parts of which determined our thoughts and perceptions in a one-way relationship. And that mechanistic view, entrenched for a couple of centuries, continues to influence broader public perceptions about the brain and the mind.

As for implying that the evolutionary biologists deserve credit for breakthroughs in our understanding of neuroplasticity, that's just wrongheaded. Neuroplasticity in fact calls into question (explicitly, if you read the literature) some of the assumptions of the evolutionary biologists, who have tended to argue that our thoughts and perceptions have been determined, in a rigid way, by our evolutionary past.

But, anyway, thanks for contributing to a fascinating discussion.

Nick

Elf,

Very briefly (and repeating myself), your assumption that the choices of the electron are simply "random" is unjustified. If you do repeated spin experiments the outcomes have a random distribution, sure, but this does not mean that they are meaningless any more than it means the digits of pi are meaningless.

On the basis of that mistake you plead for the importance of "transhuman freedoms" but I don't see it: either the justification you're offering, or the realistic prospects. Your metaphor of "grabbing our own knobs" seems apt, but perhaps not in the way you meant, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, you do leave me with this image of a an imagined future in which Wallmart is having a holiday shopping season special on "post-human kits" which the happy consumer can take home and apply to themselves or their loved ones, effectively replacing themselves an equivalent or superior worker drone who, nevertheless, can't help but enjoy it's time on earth owing to all the special effects added to its perception.

-t

Modeling the brain alone is insufficient. There are countless numbers of proteins produced by other parts of the body which affect brain function, and ignoring their vital role in brain activity is a gigantic misstep.

Adrenal glands, genitals, hormones. Even nutrients provided by our diet. These all affect our thinking on a moment-by-moment basis. They are not mere accessories to the brain, but vitally entwined with it.

Modeling a brain alone without input from these other body systems is like modeling a car engine and not including a gas tank. Pretty useless.

DJFarkus,

Yeah, that's a big gaping whole in the WBE paper.

A fine example of the point is that they want to model pet-scale mammals well enough that, for example, the personality traits of a pet are recognizable: a fine example of where the individual quirks of blood chemistry are going to be vital. (And, look at what they say about "haptics".)

It's a very quaint little retro piece, that paper. Could have been written in the 1930s, mostly, with just a slight change in vocabulary and choices of handwaving cites.

-t

Nick, I think the problem is here, where you say "the idea of the adult brain as a mechanism, the fixed and specialized parts of which determined our thoughts and perceptions in a one-way relationship ..."

Taking you at not going New Age, I think what you mean is more like "the idea of the adult brain as a rigid and inflexible mechanism ...". Mechanisms can be flexible, can have feedback loops and react to their environment (a thermostat does so, to give a very simple example).

This has nothing to do with quantum blahblahblah or free will.

Indeed, to use deliberate computer terms, it's just saying something like "We used to think everything was a dedicated line, but we've learned there's in fact a lot of connection pooling and load-based resource allocation". And this how knowledge gained from relatively simple software engineering helps in understanding how the brain works.

Nick:

>>The mind does actually seem to exist, and
>> thoughts seem to exert a physical influence
>> on the structure of the brain.

The problem with the "ghost in the machine" model of conciousness that you seem to be expounding on here, it that it is simply not supported by scientific research. Cat scan and EEG studies have showed that brain activity preceededs perception by several milliseconds. What that means is that awareness or perception of actions that we think are part of "free will" actually comes AFTER the nuerons have fired NOT before. Seems that "free will" is a literal "after thought" due to complex processing of neural inputs for prior to perception and action.

Nick:

>>The mind does actually seem to exist, and
>> thoughts seem to exert a physical influence
>> on the structure of the brain.

The problem with the "ghost in the machine" model of conciousness that you seem to be expounding on here, it that it is simply not supported by scientific research. Cat scans and EEG studies have showed that brain activity preceededs perception by several milliseconds. What that means is that awareness or perception of actions that we think are part of "free will" actually comes AFTER the nuerons have fired NOT before. Seems that "free will" is a literal "after thought" due to complex processing of neural inputs for prior to perception and action.

Enough, enough already, do rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions? The relationship between freedom and cause might help one to understand whether the laws of “nature” are causally deterministic. Then one would need to consider the question, what is “human” freedom?

The long thread demonstrates that there might be no definitive answer but we all would like to understand just what this all means.

The thought that the human brain can be replicated, road mapped, “"whole brain emulation," “a fully functional human brain inside a computer” come on! Achieving anything even remotely similar by using computers in just nonsense, maybe fun or a good exercise in trying to convince one another, but fruitless.

Did Nick exercise free will in posting this article? Thank god he has much more than a modicum of intelligence and yes, he exercised its complementary element, humor, by posting the last two sentences.

http://mreditor.logoscomics.com/_photos/Adam%20and%20Eve.jpg

Alan

Linuxguru1968, you wrote:

The problem with the "ghost in the machine" model of conciousness that you seem to be expounding on here, it that it is simply not supported by scientific research. Cat scan and EEG studies have showed that brain activity preceededs perception by several milliseconds

That is a common, mistaken belief. Those experiments show only that (considering for example, various kinds of choice) that the beginnings of choice and its full manifestation -- a full appreciation of it -- is spread out over time.

In a comment above I gave an example of a literary trope that shows how this is really nothing new: we've known that about ourselves for the longest time as when someone says "When I sat down to make the decision, I realized I'd already inwardly decided months prior... I'd already made my choice."

Experiments such as you describe show only that this also happens on much smaller time-scales than we usually talk about.

The experiment Conway talks about, and his analysis of it -- measurements of the squared spin of space-like separated twinned particles -- takes it a step further. That experiment shows a form of very small-scale choice which is "really choice" (in the sense of being meaningful, consequential, and not prefigured by history) yet which also does not correspond to any single event in space-time. "Ghostly" isn't a bad choice of word to describe such a choice.

-t

Alan,

In citing Nick's humor ("The Future of Humany institute would seem to be misnamed" because their first step here is to redefine "human" as a kind of "machine") -- that hits on why there's more to Nick's attention here than just calling out a bad philosophy paper. Freedom is at stake.

For, let's suppose that that a prestigious group of elites manages to promote a redefinition of "human" as a "kind of machine" and, being elites, their redefinition takes hold among all kinds of powerful elites (e.g., judges, or research ethics committees, etc.). All of the rules those elites use in general -- the rules that refer to "human" one way or another -- now have a new, retroactive, socially effective interpretation.

In other words, a paper such as the one being torn to shreds here, if widely enough accepted, can cause many humans to be (more than already) treated as machines by more powerful people.

That's what's really at stake when a paper like this comes out of Oxford.

-t

Tom you make a really important point, one that had not entered my consciousness regarding this conversation.

Suffice it to say it’s already well underway on several fronts not least of which are rights, homeland security and the associated change of attitudes/mind warp toward the general public that appears to be firmly entrenched already!

Boil all the elements down that might be connected to the dangers you mentioned and one must surely end up with two words that define the problem, common sense and the diminished appurtenances thereto.

It would be an interesting study to look back and define the process that started with the disciplines and enabled a narrowing of perceptions that led to the present disconnects!

I must add that I am not anti science just anti mindlessness!

Warm regards, Alan

Tom, that's exactly an argument some Creationists give to oppose Evolution - they say that if humans are biological animals like any other, then that, if widely enough accepted, can cause many humans to be (more than already) treated as animals by more powerful people. But rejecting Evolution because of Social Darwinism is multiple abuse of science.

Seth,

Many bad arguments are given on both sides of, for example, the "Evolution vs. Intelligent Design" debate and it would not be fair of you to ask me to defend any of those bad arguments that I did not myself offer up as an argument.

I will say this:

The (hereby dubbed) Defensible Intelligent Design Hypothesis says:

1. The hypothesis that no divine (i.e., meaningful in human terms and yet outside of the constraints of causility) influence over genetic mutations has taken place is not a scientific hypothesis: it can not be verified through experiment.
2. That hypothesis that a divine influence over mutations has not taken place is not a scientific hypothesis, for the same reason
3. This hypothesis (the "Defensible Intelligent Design Hypothesis") is a scientific hypothesis, in the same sense (it can be positively verified by experiment).

The defensible hypothesis is looking pretty good in terms of Conway's proof. And that means, oddly enough, that a "teach the controversy" answer to the intelligent-design-controversy in schools is sane, if it is done well. The lesson is that the truth or falsehood of a carefully stated form of intelligent design is not a scientific question -- neither side (who claims that this form of ID is true or false) is speaking other than out of personal faith, not science.

-t

Tom, I lost you somewhere. I know this is oversimplifying, but you seem to be smuggling in what's called the "It's only a THEORY" Creationist argument - the one which runs "Creationism is a THEORY, Evolution is a THEORY, neither theory can be proven absolutely, so both deserve respect". And it's nonsense because some theories fit the world much better than others, in complicated ways hard to explain in a comment-box, but that shouldn't cause us to lose sight of the difference.

Again, in a most technical sense you might not be saying that, but what you write comes across as confusingly close.

Now, I'm not saying information processing science is the be-all and end-all of studying the mind - but it has so much scientific understanding to offer that it's absurd to be playing logical games of you-can't-prove-it's-NOT-so.

I may have missed it, but I don't think Tom provided a link to that Conway and Kochen paper. So here it is (2008 version).

It surprises me that, at this late date, anyone is taking Dualism at all seriously, just as I'd be surprised if someone took Vitalism seriously.

We know that alterations to the brain - damage, chemicals, electrical or magnetic stimuli, etc. - can change consciousness, personality, memory, pretty much every characteristic we consider to be "mental."

We know that alternations in consciousness can change the operation of the brain.

We have no evidence of consciousness that isn't associated with a living brain.

Why believe, now, today, that there's some "ghost", some immaterial "special ingredient" necessary for consciousness? Where is the evidence to support such a belief? Why give serious consideration to the position that "the mind" or "consciousness" are anything other than emergent phenomena of the operation of the nervous system?

Assuming The "Strong Free Will Theorem" is true, and assuming that indeterminacy at the level of electrons translates to indeterminacy at the level of neurons (which is by no means a given), that just tells us that we can't perfectly simulate a brain's future output... but what it doesn't do is tell us we can't instantiate a software version of a brain.

It may well be that the Whole Brain Emulation effort won't actually lead to the emulation of a brain... and that's fine. We'll still learn something along the way. We won't know unless we try. Just sitting around saying "It's impossible" won't get us anywhere useful.

As for "Intelligent Design", the Kitzmiller v. Dover trials put it in the dustbin of history. I think it best we leave it there.

Mike_A,

The only thing anyone around here has said about dualism is that the complementary (contradictory) hypotheses, "DUALISM" and "not(DUALISM)", are both non-scientific hypotheses. Neither has claim to "empirical support".

-t

I just realized that there's (at least poetically) a kind of Wittgenstein-Conway connection in that the former admonished "Whereof one can not speak, thereof one must remain silent," the latter showed this to be an empirical truth under extremely conservative assumptions and referring to objectively measurable phenomena. We're stuck with mystery.

-t

(The upside being that anyone who claims to be a know-it-all is provably lying. :-)

-t

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