Ask A Genius 968: Rick is Tired, also The Universe
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/23
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have been arguing that an informational universe can be taken as, in the final analysis, deriving the universe reflected as the process of some mind. That mind or its processes reflect some armature, which is its framework. Regardless, the fundamental idea is that the universe has a mind. You are more inclined to do that, but I am not. Let’s debate.
Rick Rosner: Okay, all right. So, the universe consists of around 10 to the 85th particles when we say particles, like electrons and protons. I guess photons. I don’t know what goes into the inventory, but all that stuff is arranged in vast space and has existed for a vast time in such a way that everything’s self-consistent, that the universe agrees with itself, that everything is fairly durable, that the space particles don’t just pop in and out of existence or when they do, it’s according to the rules of quantum mechanics. It’s not arbitrary. The universe looks the same regardless of where you stand in it. The contents of the universe don’t… The universe isn’t materially different. Just because you go ten light years in some direction, it doesn’t change. The universe doesn’t reconfigure itself based on your point of view. If you went ten light years away and then came back, you’d come back to the same stuff just however long it took you to get 10 light years away and back. The universe is highly self-consistent according to the rules of physics, specifically quantum mechanics, and for large-scale stuff, general relativity. And that self-consistency built from quantum mechanics says to me that the universe is processing information, and that information is about something.
There’s so much information being processed. Whatever is processed is experienced by the universe with extreme authenticity, the feeling of authenticity that we associate with consciousness. That’s the whole argument in a nutshell. Experiencing the authenticity of what you’re experiencing based on the magnitude of self-consistent multimodal information you’re getting about whatever the information is about. When you try to figure out what makes us feel conscious, it’s multimodal information about the world. In real time as we move through the world, but it wouldn’t have to be about the information the universe processes. It doesn’t have to pertain to anything real. It could be made up. You have to imagine that it can’t just be random. There has to be some agency behind shaping the armature that supports the information’s processing. It can’t just be the random origination of a vast mind. The universe is processing information about something. It doesn’t have to be real, but it reflects some durable structure that allows that information to exist over a long period. But it’s the magnitude and consistency and multimodality of the information that gives it an authentic feeling. There’s other stuff we have that contributes to our particular flavour of consciousness: agency and judgment. You can have consciousness without agency. Maybe without judgment about the events being analyzed. Anyway, that’s my argument.
Jacobsen: If we have a system in which the universe is more likely to exist than not, it cannot be said that minds are simply inevitable, but we don’t have to make the fallacy of composition. Where you have a part of the universe having a mind, but not the universe as a whole. Is it not just a logical fallacy to make that extension?
Rosner: You said you used something that sounded like an official term, the fallacy of composition.
Jacobsen: That is a fallacy.
Rosner: It sounds like it’s a fallacy of thinking one thing is like another thing and having that thing you think has all the same characteristics as the thing you’re referencing. Is that the deal?
Jacobsen: Take an analogy. If you save money, it can be good for your financial security. Therefore, everyone should save money because it’s good for the economy.
Rosner: I don’t know. All right. So, my argument is simply that a well-ordered onslaught of information and the processing of that information, when it hits a certain size, is conscious. It has the feeling of consciousness based on magnitude and self-consistency. There’s the assumption that it’s likely multimodal in the universe. You have a bunch of things sharing local analytics. But all the analytics pertain to some whole thing. Those assumptions don’t have to be true. The universe doesn’t have to be multimodal, though I think it’s likely that it is. We know that from looking at AI, that AI is not, at this point, very multimodal. It does a lot of Bayesian analytics, and it’s not conscious. You could imagine that the universe is some massive training set. But it would have the self-consistency we see in the universe if it were scattered collections of the information that doesn’t feed into each other.
But then we have to talk about what that feedback looks like about AI versus consciousness, because as AI gets more sophisticated, we do see more feedback that has the appearance of the universe learning about. I mean of AI learning more and more about stuff like perspective and the rule like nobody told AI the rules of perspective. It has appeared to be figured out by being trained on billions of images, it pulls out Bayesian consistencies. It sees enough of certain things, like the curve of shadow or the way shadow plays across a curved surface, like a face or a boob or a butt. It’s seen enough examples to make a Bayesian bet. When it sees something boob-like or butt-like, it’s also concluded that there are these things that are boobs and butts, and if you’re looking at AI pictures of naked people, that this is where… These structures go on the person. You have all these Bayesian conclusions or semi-conclusions because they’re not conclusive that AI has reached. They all work together to form images, or the AI makes a ton of best bets. An image generated by an AI. The image generator must have made hundreds and probably thousands of bets. That falls short of consciousness, and it may be that you could have systems like this, no matter how big they get. They fall short of consciousness. But I think that in practical terms, in terms of the universe, that’s unlikely.
Jacobsen: What if the principles of existence derive something different than information processing? What is a different way to characterize the degrees of freedom in the universe? We have this quantum mechanical approach. You have fuzziness, but you can derive precise numbers from the probabilities. You have a precise probability basis to know how things can be built in the universe on that. Yet, that’s mathematical. It’s a way of saying information processing, but we typically think of it as digital. So, what’s a way we would properly need to re-characterize information processing to incorporate this more precisely?
Rosner: Our closest analogy for information processing is ones and zeros in a computer. That’s the model that we all have in our heads. If you think about the universe, you eventually conclude that making the ones and zeros model fit what’s happening is hard. A way of looking at the universe is that the universe has a size. That size is reflected in the amount of matter it contains, the number of particles, and the fuzziness of those particles. It would help if you had a number, size, or fuzziness to assign a scale to the universe. You’re looking at number, precision, overall size. You’re able to extrapolate an age of the universe. I’d argue that all these things are tightly bound with each other. The apparent age of the universe doesn’t have much choice about the amount of matter, the amount of precision, and the amount of space. All those things are locked together.
You can derive the amount of information in the universe. The amount of interaction, let’s say the universe, is defined by every particle in the universe’s history of interactions. The universe is braided. Hawking imagined a knotted universe, where interactions across the history of the universe were, in a way, weaving the universe with these obligatory relationships based on shared histories. You could also look at the universe as a weave or a set of knots. Out of that whole thing, you don’t have to calculate the amount of information, but you can. I don’t think you can divorce the amount of information it would take to specify the universe with the precision that it’s specified. But anyway, you can’t get away from that. You can always come up with a number, the amount of information it takes to characterize our universe.
Jacobsen: To simplify for a mind, though, would be an argument for a mind of God, for a God in terms of… this is a whole. You’re not a religious person. You have reformed Jewish orientations, but you don’t have religious or supernatural beliefs. My argument…
Rosner: I can’t imagine, maybe because we’re in the early days of this stuff or because my imagination is limited, a universe containing this much information without that information conveying a sense of being of actuality that we call consciousness. But we have that feeling in our minds. And our minds are built from much less information. They’re built in a specific way. We keep coming back to multimodal. We get our analytics from… we have a bunch of different analytic systems. We have our senses, and then we have tools like perspective to analyze the world around us. We have colour, we have analytics around sound. I don’t know. I’m getting tired, but… Can we stop here and return when I’m less tired?
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