Born to Do Math 184 – Technical, Not Mystical
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/09/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We use a lot of terms consistently. Since we us them a lot, we should specify some more. What meant by technical consciousness rather than mystical consciousness?
Rick Rosner: I call consciousness a technical not a mystical phenomenon. It has been clear for decades, maybe a century, that when consciousness is figured out. It will be materialistic. That is, it will be generated by the same stuff that generate everything else in our world, the rules of physics and matter. That consciousness is made of stuff. Given that you can map consciousness into a separate space made of an abstract stuff, it doesn’t change the fact that consciousness is generated by matter doing regular things.
Jacobsen: Can I pause you there?
Rosner: Sure.
Jacobsen: If you look at the worldviews on offer, the major ones, the assumptions are non-materialistic origins of this stuff. It puts us as odds.
Rosner: As scientism has become more prevalent, it has become apparent consciousness isn’t magical. Even when we didn’t understand how it worked, it became increasingly obvious that it would be materialistic.
Jacobsen: You mean undeniably materialistic explanations.
Rosner: There is no extra fluid. There is no extra world consciousness exists subject to some mystical God-given or some hocus-y pocus-y separate set of phenomena. You can mathematicize consciousness and show the information within consciousness as existing within its own physics. Normal physics, but the physics of a separate space, we assume under IC. We assume consciousness can be mathematically represented in its own space. Just because we can’t do that now, it doesn’t mean consciousness can’t be represented via the processes in the brain, and the brain itself is built from physics.
Also, we have thought about consciousness under IC, as we have been working together for 5 years.
Jacobsen: It is more physics than metaphysics and more philosophy of physics too.
Rosner: As we built this out, I do not find this particularly hard to understand. Consciousness is the sharing of information among different sensory and processing subsystems, so that they all inform each other in a kind of shared arena. So, they generate a vivid, rapidly-changing, moment-to-moment picture of the environment and your thoughts of the environment and associated emotions with those inputs.
Jacobsen: In a way, you take among those who accept modern standards of science. You take premises most people would agree with and then come to conclusions only a minority of people agree with.
Rosner: If you sit people down and talk to them, here is what is feels like to have consciousness, what is consciousness, I think you’ve convince a significant number of people: Shared processed information generates the feeling of inhabiting a vivid reality.
Jacobsen: I don’t think it’s unreasonable. I do think it’s too optimistic. In North American culture, people would assume “immortal otherworldly stuff connects to me.”
Rosner: Take my wife, she doesn’t think a lot about science stuff. I get this a lot when I throw jokes at her. I will throw a decent one. He will say, “Anyone could have thought of that.” It doesn’t make it a bad joke.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: It means a lot of people could get the joke. I tried explaining IC to her. Similarly, it is obviously not obvious because we are sitting on thousands of years of thinking about consciousness, which we believe gets it wrong.
Jacobsen: What are the impediments to understand our view of consciousness? What have been the impediments?
Rosner: The impediments consisted of not existing in the right technological and scientific space in which we exist in a growing jungle of AI and apps, and increasingly CG and burgeoning brain science. We have the conceptual tools to think about consciousness as an information processing process. An emergent property, if you want to call it that; although, I’m not sure how emergent it is because it is right there.
Have a system that is getting multi-dimensional, that is, multi-faceted analyses of its current situation. All of the analysis that goes into fleshing out its world will produce what acts like and feels like consciousness. Obviously, that needs to be further mathematicized, as we have said a thousand times.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s another one.
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