Glen, et al. -
Here is my throwdown...
For convenience, the 12 questions are:
And I hope others will weigh in here...
1. Why is there a major chasm with the minimal cognitive capabilities
necessary for survival by pre-Holocene hominids on one side, and on
the other side, all those cognitive capabilities that Kurt Gödel,
Albert Einstein, and Ludwig van Beethoven called upon when conjuring
their wonders?
I have been dancing back and forth across those general
borderlands/shadowlands myself. Kim Stanley Robinson's book "Shaman"
made for an interesting speculation of what it might have been like to
have lived in the early pre-history period... at the end of the
ice-age. The emergence of neolithic technology and language itself, one
easiest to study (for it's persistent record in the world) and the other
quite hard (for it's ephemerality, especially pre-written record).
My most/best ad-hoc thoughts on this seem to be using the analogy (maybe
more tight than a metaphor) of resonance. In my pursuit of "what is
consciousness, and how might it transcend a single neural locus such as
a human (or other) brain), I have focused a lot on "holding and
manipulating a model of the world" with "including a model of the self
within the model of the world" as at least 'interesting' and probably
deeply salient features of such (self-other) consciousness. This
suggests to me that the very fundament of what I believe is
"consciousness" is self-other dualistic? Is there something unique
about (our familiar form of) consciousness that requires the self-other
duality?
c
2. Restricting attention to what are, in some sense, the most
universal of humanity's achievements, the most graphic demonstrations
of our cognitive abilities:
Why were we able to construct present-day science and mathematics,
but no other species ever did? Why are we uniquely able to decipher
some features of the Cosmic Baker's hands by scrutinizing the
breadcrumbs that They scattered about the universe? Why do we have
that cognitive ability despite its fitness costs? Was it some subtle
requirement of the ecological niche in which we were formed — a niche
that at first glance appears rather pedestrian, and certainly does
not overtly select for the ability to construct something like
quantum chronodynamics? Or is our ability a spandrel, to use Gould
and Lewontin’s famous phrase — an evolutionary byproduct of some
other trait? Or is it just a cosmic fluke?
I am currently focused on the fact of language, with written language as
a special case and the "language" of made objects (homo faber) which
carry at least a shorthand understanding of their construction (reverse
engineering) with particular focus on neolithics. If you have the
facility with flaking stone to a bifacial (or better) level, then
finding a "clovis point" for example very likely allows you to create
your own, and through (at the very least) randomized production
"errors", the shape (and by extension function) of the artifact will
mutate with every reproduction. This begs the question of whether the
"maker" might have a mental model of the resulting "tool" outside of the
image of the one in his hand/view and whether such a mental model would
allow an accelerated and *directed* series of changes in form (with an
eye to function). It would seem that "mashups" would be an easy place
to start... just noting the most desired features of each of 2 artifacts
and expressing them both as-best in a new artifact.
The fitness payout vs the fitness cost, I would claim *is* tool
creation/use... both physical artifacts (e.g. neolithic cutting tools)
and mental constructs (models and logic, no matter how limited) which
could be *shared* (communicated).
This still leaves a huge leap to quantum chromodynamics, but it is maybe
not unfair to mention that Feynman's virtual particle diagrams, as an
abstraction and as a boundary object went a long way to broadening the
number of people interested in and able-to-discuss things just above the
level of QED.
3. Are we really sure that no other species ever constructed some
equivalent of present-day SAM? Are we really sure that no other apes
— or cetaceans or cephalopods — have achieved some equivalent of our
SAM, but an equiva- lent that we are too limited to perceive?
As with the human archaelogical record, we only have recognizeable (to
our sensibilities) artifacts and preserved (if from another era) or
transported (if from another locale) to apprehend/interpret. Our own
Richard Lowenberg has spent some time studying/co-creating with Koko
<http://www.richardlowenberg.com/blog/koko-the-gorilla>... his stories
expand my idea of interspecies "communication" in a way that may be
responsive (if only mildly) to this question. I don't know if our
current understanding of the Cetacean or Cephalopod world hints strongly
one way or another, but I'd not be surprised if either/both were to be
"dreaming" in something like SAM as they go about what sometimes seems
like mundane business (singing songs that travel halfway around the
world in one case while changing colors and
flowing/dancing/fiddling-with-stuff in the other).
4. If the evidence of the uniqueness of our SAM is the modifications
that we, uniquely, have wreaked upon the terrestrial biosphere,
should the question really be why we are the only species who had the
cognitive abilities to construct our SAM and were able to build upon
that understanding, to so massively re-engineer our environment? To
give a simple example, might some cetaceans even exceed our SAM, but
just do not have the physical bodies that would allow them to exploit
that understanding to re-engineer the biosphere in any way? Should
the focus of the inquiry not be whether we are the only ones who had
the cognitive abilities to construct our cur- rent SAM, but rather
should the focus be expanded, to whether we are the only ones who had
both those abilities and the ancillary physical abilities (e.g.,
opposable thumbs) that allowed us to produce physical evidence of our
SAM?
I do think the physical-evidence is part of it, I also think that this
is an extension of the point of "our sensibilities" and "our values".
Wengrow and Graeber offer good anecdotes in Dawn of Everything about how
the Jesuits and more aptly French Military had a hard time recognizing
the "genius" of the Wendat (familiarly known by the perjorative "Huron")
Natives <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk>. To re-iterate, the
Cetacea are not obviously equipped to manipulate artifacts in the world
as we recognize them, though the spatiotemporal nature of their
"whalesongs" spread over vast distances of ocean may well represent
something at least as interesting/sophisticated as Australian Aboriginal
Songlines which are also held only (traditionally) in oral culture (and
by definition become "dead" if they are not constantly "used").
Cephalopods may well be more "familiar" in their expressions... my
knowledge of the current research with them is dated as well as a bit
scant. I am also interested in the *emergent collective* capabilities
that exist *only* in groups... the obvious area of study are the
overtly eusocial creatures but the human experiment seems rather rife
with (if not dominated by) activities and artifacts which are truly
"standing waves" of information set up and maintained by collectives of
human activity. The Libertarian chide about "Fiat Currency" is the
perfect example, IMO... they insist it is a transient illusion, but I
think it is more like one of Feynman's Virtual Particles at the very least.
5. Ancillary abilities or no, are we unavoidably limited to enlarging
and en- riching the SAM that was produced by our species with the few
cognitive abilities we were born with? Is it impossible for us to
concoct wholly new types of cognitive abilities — computational
powers that are wholly novel in kind — which in turn could provide us
wholly new kinds of SAM, kinds of SAM that would concern aspects of
physical reality currently beyond our ken?
"Hypercomputation" in this context would be but one example? Not just
computing the extra-computable, or effing the ineffable but
qualitatively new structures that transcend that which we all consider
to be the limits to our conceptual universe? This is an area where I
am hopeful for CT becoming the language that allows us (maybe not me,
but many people) to express the fullness of what our limited conceptions
can express so that we *can* recognize where they might be lacking or
where a meta-construct can be laid atop?
6. Is possible for one species, at one level of the sequence of
{computers run- ning simulations of computers that are running
simulations of ...}, to itself simulate a computer that is higher up
in the sequence that it is?
This might be argumentative or arbitrarily constraining? You (Glen)
stated early on that many examples of "hypercomputation" have been
debunked. If the very (f)act of human consciousness (individual and
collective) does not *gesture* toward hypercomputation, then I don't
know what else would. I accept that creating controlled (physical or
thought) experiments in this domain is slippery. I look forward to
seeing what comes "next"... Before Kurt Godel flipped the world of
math/philosophy, I don't think Russel/Whitehead (or much anyone else)
had a hint that there was something beyond the "boundaries" of knowledge
they had circumscribed around themselves?
7. Is the very form of the SAM that we humans have created severely
con- strained? So constrained as to suggest that the cognitive
abilities of us hu- mans — those who created that SAM — is also
severely constrained?
this is where I become more interested in the abstractions of "what is
life?" "what is intelligence?" "what is consciousness"... because at the
very least those questions look to hop over the limits of "mere
extrapolation" from what we are most familiar with. the very terms
life/intelligence/consciousness may likely be the epitome of those
constraints? Deacon's "Teleodynamics" feels to me to be one of those
terms that might help us peek around the edge of the constraints we
already have (mostly) given over to?
8. Is this restriction to finite sequences somehow a necessary
feature of any complete formulation of physical reality? Or does it
instead reflect a lim- itation of how we humans can formalize any
aspect of reality, i.e., is it a limitation of our brains?
It does seem to be a limitation of our primary modes of conception of
"what means reality". Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler#Participatory_Anthropic_Principle>
rears it's pretty head about this time?
9. In standard formulations of mathematics, a mathematical proof is a
finite sequence of “well-formed sentences”, each of which is itself a
finite string of symbols. All of mathematics is a set of such proofs.
How would our per- ception of reality differ if, rather than just
finite sequences of finite symbol strings, the mathematics underlying
our conception of reality was expanded to involve infinite sequences,
i.e., proofs which do not reach their conclu- sion in finite time?
Phrased concretely, how would our cognitive abilities change if our
brains could implement, or at least encompass, super-Turing
abilities, sometimes called “hyper-computation” (e.g., as proposed in
com- puters that are on rockets moving arbitrarily close to the speed
of light [1])? Going further, as we currently conceive of
mathematics, it is possible to em- body all of its theorems, even
those with infinitely long proofs, in a single countably infinite
sequence: the successive digits of Chaitin’s omega [69]. (This is a
consequence of the Church — Turing thesis.) How would mathe- matics
differ from our current conception of it if it were actually an
uncount- ably infinite collection of such countably infinite
sequences rather than just one, a collection which could not be
combined to form a single, countably infinite sequence? Could we ever
tell the difference? Could a being with super-Turing capabilities
tell the difference, even if the Church — Turing thesis is true, and
even if we cannot tell the difference?
Godel Numbering/Church-Turing seem to constrain this ideation pretty
solidly. Even though I'm a big fan of Digital Physics ala
Fredkin/Tofolli/Margoulis I think their formulation only reinforces
this constraint? I'd like to say that I understand Tononi's IIT
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory>well enough
to judge whether it offers an "end run" around this or not. More cud to
gurge and rechew...
I'm also left reflecting on a very strange series of events around
Penrose where he asserted to me in private correspondence in 1985 that
"the key to consciousness was in the infinities of a-periodic
tilings". This was in response to a simulation I built with Stuart
Hameroff in 1984
<https://experts.arizona.edu/en/publications/cellular-automata-in-cytoskeletal-lattices>
demonstrating how information processing might occur on the surface of
microtubulin structures (Cytoskeletal Membrane) which were only *mildly*
non-traditional CA geomotry/topology (sqewed hexagonal local geometry on
a 13 unit diameter/3-off helical lattice). He went on *later* (see
Emperor's New Mind) to invoke Quantum effects, but in 1985 he seemed
quite adamant that the magic dust of complexity-cum consciousness was in
aperiodic tilings. I dismissed this as "one-trick-pony-ism". I was
young and naive and arrogant.... now I'm old. I wish I had engaged. As
you probably know he and Hameroff climbed into the same bed later
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/#PenrHameQuanGravMicr>.
I JUST found this strangely formulated (but recent) tangent to the MT
aspect of the topic:
https://www.texaspowerfulsmart.com/tunneling-microscopy/mt-automata-holographyhameroff-watt-smith.html
https://www.texaspowerfulsmart.com/tunneling-microscopy/the-microtrabecular-lattice-mtl.html
I don't know if any of this offers a possible "end run" around the
finiteness-problem.
Going yet further, what would mathematics be if, rather than
countable sequences of finite symbol strings, it involved uncountable
sequences of such symbol strings? In other words, what if not all
proofs were a dis- crete sequence of well-formed finite sentences,
the successive sentences being indexed by counting integers, but
rather some proofs were contin- uous sequences of sentences, the
successive sentences being indexed by real numbers? Drilling further
into the structure of proofs, what if some of the “well-formed
sentences” occurring in a proof’s sequence of sentences were not a
finite set of symbols, but rather an infinite set of symbols? If each
sentence in a proof consisted of an uncountably infinite set of sym-
bols, and in addition the sentences in the proof were indexed by a
range of real numbers, then (formally speaking) the proof would be a
curve — a one-dimensional object — traversing a two-dimensional
space. Going even further, what would it mean if somehow the proofs
in God’s book [5] were inherently multidimensional objects, not
reducible to linearly ordered sequences of symbols, embedded in a
space of more than two dimensions?
I'm not sure why the Space Filling Curve conception (e.g. Peano Curve)
does not map away the arbitrarily high (yet still finite?) idea of "not
reducible" to a linearly ordered sequence... "?
Going further still, as mathematics is currently understood, the
sequence of symbol strings in any proof must, with probability 1,
obey certain con- straints. Proofs are the outcomes of deductive
reasoning, and so certain sequences of symbol strings are
“forbidden”, i.e., assigned probability 0. However, what if instead
the sequences of mathematics were dynamically generated in a
stochastic process, and therefore unavoidably random, with no
sequence assigned probability 0 [106, 32, 44]? Might that, in fact,
be how our mathematics has been generated? What would it be like to
inhabit a physical universe whose laws could not be represented
unless one used such a mathematics [39, 53, 54]? Might that, in fact,
be the universe that we do inhabit, but due to limitations in our
minds, we cannot even conceive of all that extra stochastic
structure, never mind
recognize it? As a final leap, note that all of the suggested
extensions of the form of cur- rent human mathematics just described
are themselves presented in terms of ... human mathematics.
Embellished with colloquial language, I de- scribed those extensions
in terms of the formal concepts of uncountable in- finity,
multidimensionality, Turing machines, and stochastic processes, all of
which are constructions of human mathematics involving finite sets of
finite sequences of symbols. What would a mathematics be like whose
very form could not be described using a finite sequence of symbols
from a finite alphabet?
And to those of us who (want to believe we) "gesture" at whatever is
hidden "between" or "beyond" those constraints, where do we find
traction? I often defer to the practical bisection that the mighty
Mississippi river posed to the early European explorers (exploiters).
If you waited for someone to build a bridge (or ferry service) across
the river, you would never get around to finding the seven cities of
gold or the grand canyon or the great salt lake or a route to the
pacific.. someone had to throw themselves (maybe on a raft or in a
canoe) into the river and clamber out downstream possibly exhausted, or
at least a little disoriented on the other side and forge west to "see
what they could see". I realize this is a weak analogy in at least one
way. On the *other side* the explorers still wore the same deerhide
mocassins and coonskin caps and weilded their same swords and muskets
and ate (for a few days anyway) whatever jerky and pemmican they were
able to keep dry as they crossed. And they kept their journals in
notebooks manufactured in the East, writing in French or Spanish or
English "from the old countries", and told stories using the same old
idioms (gold and fountains of youth, and dragons and ...) when they got
back.
10. Is it a lucky coincidence that all of mathematical and physical
reality can be formulated in terms of our current cognitive
abilities, including, in par- ticular, the most sophisticated
cognitive prosthesis we currently possess: human language? Or is it
just that, tautologically, we cannot conceive of any aspects of
mathematical and physical reality that cannot be formulated in terms
of our cognitive capabilities?
REminds me of the bad joke I can never tell right which starts with a
traveler asking a local how to get to a spot on the other side of a
natural barrier (river, mountain range, canyon, etc.) and after the
local tries to pick a route he can describe to the traveler in language
the traveler can understand without having "been there" he gives up and
says "well, you just can't get there from here!" which we agree is
patently not true. I get this feeling whilst speaking with (familiars
of) convincing "mystics" of the caliber of the Dalai Lama or Thich Nat
Hahn (RIP)... I feel like these folks have traveled these realms and
if only I had already been into those realms myself, could I understand
some of their more nuanced descriptions?
11. Are there cognitive constructs of some sort, as fundamental as
the very idea of questions and answers, that are necessary for
understanding physical re- ality, and that are forever beyond our
ability to even imagine due to the limitations of our brains, just as
the notion of a question is forever beyond a paramecium?
I suspect the answer is in the analogy here... If we believe that the
paramecium (or something of similar caliber) made the long climb of
becoming a complex multicellular multi-organ complex capable of abstract
language and logic and SAM through a torturous series of intermediate
evolutionary steps (mutation as well as mashup), then perhaps the "magic
dust" is (also?) in emergence? Or if we defer to Bohm or
Penrose/Hameroff or even our beloved Pearce, then the magic dust is also
quantum? I know I'm just kicking the can down the road and under the
rug here. Just maundering speculatively.
12. Is there any way that we imagine testing — or at least gaining
insight intowhether our SAM can, in the future, capture all of
physical reality? If not, is there any way of gaining insight into
how much of reality is forever beyond our ability to even conceive
of? In short, what can we ever know about the nature of that which we
cannot conceive of?
I do believe that there is a forward chain of hindsight-about-foresight
that might well have us (well, not us, but some crazy
hyper-consciouses/hypercomputable thing) looking back at our
proto-hyper-consciousness and wondering how we ever missed what was
dead-obvious to anyone with half a hypercomputing-brain.
All good questions Mr. Wolpert and I look forward to others here
offering yet-more concise, complete, or at least pithy observations on them!
- Steve
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