this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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True.
That's why consciousness is "magical," still. If neurons ultra-basically do IF logic, how does that become consciousness?
And the same with memory. It can seem to boil down to one memory cell reacting to a specific input. So the idea is called "the grandmother cell." Is there just 1 cell that holds the memory of your grandmother? If that one cell gets damaged/dies, do you lose memory of your grandmother?
And ultimately, if thinking is just IF logic, does that mean every decision and thought is predetermined and can be computed, given a big enough computer and the all the exact starting values?
You're implying that physical characteristics are inherently deterministic while we know they're not.
Your neurons are analog and noisy and sensitive to the tiny fluctuations of random atomic noise.
Beyond that: they don't do "if" logic, it's more like complex combinatorial arithmetics that simultaneously modify future outputs with every input.
Thanks for adding the extra info (not sarcasm)
Absolutely! It's a common misconception about neurons that I see in programming circles all the time. Before my pivot into programming I was pre-med and a physiology TA - I've always been interested in neurochemistry and how the brain works.
So I try and keep up with the latest about the brain and our understanding of it. It's fascinating.
Though I should point out that the virtual neurons in LLMs are also noisy and sensitive, and the noise they use ultimately comes from tiny fluctuations of random atomic noise too.
Physics and more to the point, QM, appears probabilistic but wether or not it is deterministic is still up for debate. Until such a time that we develop a full understanding of QM we can not say for sure. Personally I am inclined to think we will find deterministic explanations in QM, it feels like nonsense to say that things could have happened differently. Things happen the way they happen and if you would rewind time before an event, it should resolve the same way.
Fair - it's not that we know it's not: it's that we don't know that it is.
Probabilistic is equally likely as deterministic - we've found absolutely nothing disproving probabilistic models. We've only found reinforcement for those models.
It's unintuitive to humans so of course we don't want to believe it. It remains to be seen if it's true.
Its worth mentioning that certain mainstream interpretations are also concretely deterministic. For example many worlds is actually a deterministic interpretation, the multiverse is deterministic, your particular branch simply appears probabilistic. Much more deterministic is Bohmian mechanics. Copenhagen interpretation, however, maintains randomness.
Sure but interpretations like pilot wave have more evidence against them than for them and while multiverse is deterministic it's only technically so. It's effectively probabilistic in that everything happens and therefore nothing is determined strictly by current state.
Individual cells do not encode any memory. Thinking and memory stem from the great variety and combinational complexity of synaptic interlinks between neurons. Certain "circuit" paths are reinforced over time as they are used. The computation itself (thinking, recalling) then is "just" incredibly complex statistics over millions of synapses. And the most awesome thing is that all this happens through chemical reaction chains catalysed by an enormous variety of enzymes and other proteins, and through electrostatic interactions that primarily involve sodium ions!
Seth Anil has interesting lectures on consciousness, specifically on the predictive processing theory. Under this view the brain essentially simulates reality as a sort of prediction, this simulated model is what we, subjectively, then perceive as consciousness.
“Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system“. In other words consciousness might exist because to regulate our bodies and execute different actions we must have an internal model of ourselves as well as ourselves in the world.
As for determinism - the idea of libertarian free will is not really seriously entertained by philosophy these days. The main question is if there is any inkling of free will to cling to (compatibilism), but, generally, it is more likely than not that our consciousness is deterministic.
Interesting about moving towards consciousness being deterministic.
(I haven't been keeping up with that)
Its not that odd if you think about it. Everything else in this universe is deterministic. Well, quantum mechanics, as we observe it, is probabilistic, but still governed by rules and calculable, thus predictable (I also believe it is, in some sense, deterministic). For there to be free will, we need some form of “special sauce”, yet to be uncovered, that would grant us the freedom and agency to act outside of these laws.