Ask A Genius 904: Travel, “Valence,” and Abstractions

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/06

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I took a long ride from New Orleans to Chicago and Chicago to Los Angeles.

Rick Rosner: We were saying making distinctions in quantum mechanics is a big deal. You would have virtual landscapes of possible things happening and, occasionally, things changing in the quantum mechanical characterization of a system reflecting that specific event; that particular event has occurred and has been chosen. A t=1, you’ve got an open quantum question. 

Jacobsen: I found a definition that is pretty much bang on. What do I mean by “valence?” Which is “The importance that somebody assigns to something, whether personally relevant or not.” That can incorporate instincts, drives, and motivations. 

Rosner: You are talking about a precise determination. 

Jacobsen: This is the most broad-based thing I could find. You could translate this entirely as informational. 

Rosner: But generally,’ drawing a distinction is one of the building blocks of physics and cognition; quantum events don’t happen. They have happened. You find yourself in a world, in a moment, after a distinction has been drawn. I do not know the physics. The guy who owned the first gym I ever joined came to Boulder to do his postdoc. He was trying to capture the moment a hemoglobin molecule would open up and grab four oxygen atoms. So, I think part of his deal was that it should be a process that you should be able to see happen. Until then, this is the 1960s. You could only see a closed hemoglobin molecule without fully blown open oxygen. His idea was that you should be able to see those get loaded on.

Similarly, it is 60 years later. They have seen how that works now. But I don’t know that you can see a quantum process, an individual event in action. There is no event. There is potential for an event. There is the aftermath when an event has happened. The thing has happened. It is now part of your world; an event has happened, and a distinction has been drawn. So, you see it in quantum mechanics. You see it in AI, where AI takes its probability landscape and makes a distinction, which is the same as a division. Fill in a blank out of all the possible things in its probability map that could go in the blank, like Watson playing Jeopardy, doing calculations based on the input, which is the Jeopardy question, that leads to, as the calculations happen; an answer might arise to the point of being 85% likely according to the probability landscape. Watson dings in with that answer. But it is all drawing, picking something out of a set of probabilities, one of the building blocks of existence, of cognition. 

Jacobsen: The thing is, we are living behind. You look at a mirror. You are not seeing you, but you a billionth of a second ago.

Rosner: Our image of the world, our picture of the world, in human consciousness can probably be mathematized in a quantum mechanical way. But it is a quantum mechanical abridgement. It is an abridgement of our world that can be mathematized via quantum mechanics while the world itself is quantum mechanical. 

Jacobsen: You could argue valence even in a general sense there. The valence of the universe is things existing or those that do not, statistically. That is the most general argument I could make in defining a valence. 

Rosner: It comes up with Schrodinger’s Cat in the Copenhagen Interpretation. I saw this in a pretty annoying new show called Dark Matter, where this guy is wrestling with versions of himself. He is lecturing on Schrodinger’s cat. The deal is that you’ve got a box. You don’t know whether the cat in the box is alive or dead. Everybody knows by now. Your model of the world has an open question about the cat’s state. That doesn’t mean, contrary to the Copenhagen Interpretation, that the cat is both alive or dead and dead in the actual world. Your abridgement of the world; the cat can be represented as alive and dead because you don’t know. In the actual world, the cat could be alive or dead depending on what the world, the universe itself, knows about what happened in the box.

Jacobsen: The universe has incomplete knowledge about itself.

Rosner: Right, the universe can go either way. You would have to set up a precise situation for what the universe knows about the cat to be confined entirely with a box. Eventually, the news is going to get out. Somebody is going to get in the box. It will be apparent to anyone who looks in the box what happens. You could set up a special box that you could set up yourself, where you know and the cat could be alive or dead. It is much more likely that your model of the world doesn’t know, but the universe itself knows shortly after the event that would determine whether the cat lives or dies occurs. 

Jacobsen: There is almost an informational lag time in everything. Everything is filtered through consciousness or the screen of consciousness. The universe is constantly in motion. So, I try to describe it as sets and the information that we’re getting in the universe, and then we get our conscious screen. We are making distinctions and valence to make significations in the universe.

Rosner: So, we contend that it’s possible for, given the right circumstances, evolved consciousness or, shortly, engineered consciousness; we argue that consciousness could be characterized via the math of quantum mechanics. So, given that it is possible for systems that quantum mechanics could characterize to arise within the world to be part of a quantum mechanical world than the universe itself, which is characterized by quantum mechanics, you can have these little quantum systems bubbling up all over the place. Not “all over the place” because a tree is not conscious. There is nothing that I can think of that necessitates a quantum mechanical characterization of the information on the tree’s awareness because I don’t think the tree has significant awareness. 

Jacobsen: It is the way the patellar reflects is alert.

Rosner: It doesn’t even deserve the term “alert.” It is part of a mechanical-ish system that does not arise to the level. It is not conscious at all. It is no more conscious at all, really than a rock. 

Rosner: That show, Dark Matter, the first episode, casually mentions things. One of the scientists is a scientist who won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for showing consciousness arising from the frontal lobe, which I find annoying, as consciousness is magic. There is a factory in your brain pumping out consciousness, which is an unreasonable characterization of consciousness. I think consciousness is a whole brain phenomenon or parts of your brain sharing information with other parts of your brain. When you are walking, you are not aware of all the mechanics of walking. Signals are being sent from your brain to your nervous system about walking that isn’t part of your consciousness, but there is more of your brain – I would guess – sharing information in this wide open association shared with the rest of the brain, and the sharing is consciousness. You are not getting consciousness squirted into your brain from someplace else. That would be magic. 

Jacobsen: Anything of spirit, soul, or consciousness and a ghost in the machine. Decentralized processing makes sense of things. 

Rosner: There are arguments about what a soul might be when discussing a mental landscape, like AI having a probabilistic landscape. When I say a sentence, I am not super conscious of every word choice. When I say, “In a…,” I am not thinking, “What comes after ‘in a’? You are making choices, filling in the blanks, that have different levels of conscious consideration. You are not conscious of choosing “a.” 

Jacobsen: It is more akin to being a skilled musician. You are not thinking about every single note. You are thinking about the overall piece. 

Rosner: So, many things that happen in your consciousness are built from these probability landscapes that AI uses to generate material when you ask it to do a task for you. AI, as it stands now, is not conscious. We use the same probability landscape that AI does. It is possible to characterize things like the soul versus something about consciousness or existence as being at a certain level in the probability landscape. You might have certain underlying tendencies of thought based on your entire history of thinking, or maybe not. Maybe that is an inaccurate simplification. But it seems like people have different styles of thought. Maybe there is something like a soul in that. It all still boils down to probability landscapes. In a conscious system, you have a bunch of modalities and little AIs, and they are doing their functions based on their probability landscapes. They are sharing their results with the rest of your brain. This multimodal sharing generates consciousness. 

Jacobsen: In all these senses, you can characterize it. It is a weird way to think about it. They’re all making ‘cuts.’ 

Rosner: Drawing distinctions. 

Jacobsen: You see this in synesthetes, where they get cross-talk in the senses. They will taste the sound of G-sharp. They will see salty. This cross-talk there are rare cases where they have three senses cross-talking. 

Rosner: It doesn’t mess them up or cause them to get into traffic accidents. It gives them an analytical tool different from most people’s. Some people have feelings about numbers that correspond with other sensations, such as a number being bitter or sweet. I read some places where four is an unlucky number. I like eight because it is supposed to be lucky. I would not say I like 13 because it is supposed to be unfortunate. I am superstitious. I know it is bullshit. It is part of the associations I have with the number. I like 17 because it is the last random number. It looks pretty random. So, it is often picked when mathematically unsophisticated people are writing a script. When they need a number that sounds random, they like 17. 

Jacobsen: Then it’s not random. 

Rosner: Right, so it becomes not random when people begin picking 17. Also, in a punchline, “My girlfriend is with 17 guys.” It is a random number. It seems more trustworthy or jokeworthy because 20 sounds like an approximation, and 17 sounds like a specific thing that happened. I don’t think that 17 smells any particular way. People with synesthesia have these different sensory systems, but they don’t believe that 17 out in the world, if there were 17 out in the world. That’s a meaningless phrase.

Jacobsen: What if everyone evolved to be a synesthete? What if that was the norm to have cross-talk?

Rosner: It wouldn’t change if you had 17 lemons at the grocery store. Those lemons wouldn’t smell any different than any other number based on embodying 17. 

Jacobsen: I would take those as concepts, as abstractions from this base. 

Rosner: Synesthetes aren’t arguing that the number 3 out in the wild smells or looks a certain way. It is some internal bookkeeping that is a little wacky. 

Jacobsen: I think synesthetes tell us something profound about experience. These are different ways of wiggling the universe to harvest information. 

Rosner: Processing information. Marilu Henner is a renowned actor who has perfected eidetic recall at every moment of her life. You can give her a date. She will be able to tell you in great detail what she was doing on that date, even if 30 years ago, from moment to moment. It doesn’t mean that she is experiencing a different world than we do. She is parsing the world in a way that most people don’t.

Jacobsen: I think you can take the five traditional senses as delimits. There’s probably some weird multidimensional way you can characterize the number of ways you can harvest information from the world. I think the five traditional senses might be folk psychology and folk physiology. 

Rosner: We have five pretty clear sensory systems. Maybe there are some other senses, like proprioception, like knowing where your limbs are in space, which is half of a sense. We have the senses that we do because they make the most sense in terms of our evolutionary budget of resources for us. If synesthesia offered an advantage to people in understanding the world, it would be more widespread among people. It doesn’t cost you much. Marilu Henner’s perfect recall helps her as an actor because she can look at a page once. She doesn’t have to memorize. She automatically memorizes everything. It is helpful. In general, that investment in perfect recall isn’t worth the expense. So, most people don’t have it. If it offered a substantial evolutionary advantage, then people with perfect recall were babies who survived and people who don’t don’t. Then that would be something to persist, but no: That’s an accident.

[Recording End]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.