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Consciousness as a State of Matter

Max Tegmark

2014 · arXiv

NeurosciencePhysicsLanguage models
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From the abstract

We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. We explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids and gases: the information, integration, independence, dynamics and utility principles. If such principles can identify conscious entities, then they can help solve the quantum factorization problem: why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular Hilbert space factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space, say), and more generally, why do we perceive the world around us as a dynamic hierarchy of objects that are strongly integrated and relatively independent? Tensor factorization of matrices is found to play a central role, and our technical results include a theorem about Hamiltonian separability (defined using Hilbert-Schmidt superoperators) being maximized in the energy eigenbasis. Our approach generalizes Giulio Tononi's integrated information framework for neural-network-based consciousness to arbitrary quantum systems, and we find interesting links to error-correcting codes, condensed matter criticality, and the Quantum Darwinism program, as well as an interesting connection between the emergence of consciousness and the emergence of time.

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5 selected excerpts · 5 total mentions

garmaine
Recommendation · rule
I never said there was broad consensus among all philosophers and physicists, etc. It takes generations for these ideas to truly die, just as it did with other widely believed falsehoods. No one really attacked consciousness from a mechanistic perspective until Turing, and that work wasn't followed up on outside of the AI community until the 70's and 80's, and it wouldn't be until very recent advances in AI that others took these philosophical ideas originating from computer science seriously. So in the philosophy of physics and the mind, there are whole departments filled with tenured professors who came of age in their thinking at a time when consciousness was a Hard…
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Problem, and have focused their mental tools on a class of solutions (qualia, observer-triggered wave collapse, etc.) which are irreconcilable with mechanistic physical reality, making the problem even more intractable and mysterious. It'll take another generation or two before the ideas of Dennett, Dawkins, Tegmark, etc. get more widely recognized and consciousness finally goes the way of phlogiston. For references, I recommend Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and really anything by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins--materialistic explanations of consciousness pervade their work. For a compatible (hah!) physical perspective, I suggest Max Tegmark: https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
Original comment The crisis in physics is not only about physics
leepowers
Neutral mention · rule
To be pedantic - that would only show that consciousness is non-neuronal. Max Tegmark has this idea of "consciousness as a state of matter"[1] - that neurons aren't particularly special - what matters is are particular patterns. These consciousness patterns can be composed of neurons, but they could also be composed of computer circuits, or rain drops, or any other particles.[2] To be pragmatic - the absence of a physical cause for consciousness does not preclude any other causes. Whatever environment consciousness exists in that environment must have rules, laws, constants, and symmetries that define that environment. So all we're doing is trading the laws of the…
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universe for the laws of some ethereal no-material realm or supernatural realm. We're not actually performing any useful work, we're just shuffling the problem around. The hard problem of consciousness, the questions of determinism and free will - these problems will challenge any consciousness that finds itself in a rule-bound system. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzCvlFRISIM
Original comment The Hardening of Consciousness
jes5199
Neutral mention · rule
relatedly, Max Tegmark tried to do some estimates of Phi values of neural networks in his paper "Consciousness as a State of Matter" https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v2.pdf And while he seems to take IIT pretty seriously, his conclusion sure seems like a refutation of the idea that IIT's definition of Phi means anything: > Information stored in Hopfield neural networks is naturally error-corrected, but 10^11 neurons support only about 37 bits of integrated information. This leaves us with an integration paradox: why does the information content of our conscious experience appear to be vastly larger than 37 bits?
Original comment Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness
dantillberg
Neutral mention · rule
This doesn't sound much like a physics paper from the abstract (http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219). "why do conscious observers like us perceive..." is an appropriate angle for philosophical discussion (or maybe psychology, depending on where you took that). But in physics, we use experimentation and observation of the physical world. Put a brain (or a human) on a table, do some experiments, and write about the results. If you find that atoms and molecules in the brain do strange things that they don't do when part of a brain, document, publish, and theorize. And if you don't do any experiments, and instead probe the depths of your mind, that's not physics. (sorry to sound so condescending, but it's frustrating for the word "physics" to be co-opted in the service of bunk science)
Original comment Why Some Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is a State of Matter (2014)

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