Yep, I am a physicist and the world is stranger. Many people invoke physics to show the world is materialistic and they don't understand that the deeper you go into physics, the less materialistic it becomes.
And here are the last few paragraphs of that column:
"I find myself relying on a critical difference between people and Nature as an explanation of the inadequacies of financial theory. But aren’t people part of Nature too? Schrodinger, the unconventional father of the wave equation in quantum mechanics, wrote a short summary of his personal views on determinism and free will in the epilogue to What is Life? his influential lectures on the physico-chemical basis of living matter. “My body functions as a pure mechanism according the Laws of Nature,” he wrote. “Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.”
The only way he could reconcile these two apparently contradictory experiences-his deep belief in the susceptibility of Nature to human theorizing and his equally firm sense of the individual autonomy that must lie beneath any attempt to theorize-was to infer that “every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’ … [is] the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.”
Schrodinger was following a long line of earlier German philosophers who thought that all the various worldly voices referring to themselves in conversation as ‘I’ were not really referring to independent I’s, but to the same universal I-God or Nature. It’s a comforting notion. But it still doesn’t explain why, if all the I’s add up to God, it’s so much harder to predict the world of I’s than the world of God."
"Schrödinger curing tuberculosis in an alpine sanatorium, Schwarzschild computing the geometry of black holes from a Russian trench."
I would suggest editing "curing" -- "taking the rest cure for tuberculosis," "treating his tuberculosis," etc. As written, it is too easy to read as "Schrodinger successfully researching how to cure tuberculosis." The current usage is abnormal and particularly confusing given a) Schrodinger is a genius and might conceivably have done biomedical research and b) the parallel to Schwarzschild.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
Nice column!
Yep, I am a physicist and the world is stranger. Many people invoke physics to show the world is materialistic and they don't understand that the deeper you go into physics, the less materialistic it becomes.
Here is a column that I wrotein 2001 about this:
OR
file:///Users/emanuelderman/Documents/ederman%20website/Previous%20websites/ed.old.com/Experiment/ederman.com%20copy/RecentColumns/GreatPretender.html
And here are the last few paragraphs of that column:
"I find myself relying on a critical difference between people and Nature as an explanation of the inadequacies of financial theory. But aren’t people part of Nature too? Schrodinger, the unconventional father of the wave equation in quantum mechanics, wrote a short summary of his personal views on determinism and free will in the epilogue to What is Life? his influential lectures on the physico-chemical basis of living matter. “My body functions as a pure mechanism according the Laws of Nature,” he wrote. “Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them.”
The only way he could reconcile these two apparently contradictory experiences-his deep belief in the susceptibility of Nature to human theorizing and his equally firm sense of the individual autonomy that must lie beneath any attempt to theorize-was to infer that “every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’ … [is] the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.”
Schrodinger was following a long line of earlier German philosophers who thought that all the various worldly voices referring to themselves in conversation as ‘I’ were not really referring to independent I’s, but to the same universal I-God or Nature. It’s a comforting notion. But it still doesn’t explain why, if all the I’s add up to God, it’s so much harder to predict the world of I’s than the world of God."
I screwed up the link to the original column. Here it is
https://emanuelderman.com/the-great-pretender-derivatives-strategy/
"Schrödinger curing tuberculosis in an alpine sanatorium, Schwarzschild computing the geometry of black holes from a Russian trench."
I would suggest editing "curing" -- "taking the rest cure for tuberculosis," "treating his tuberculosis," etc. As written, it is too easy to read as "Schrodinger successfully researching how to cure tuberculosis." The current usage is abnormal and particularly confusing given a) Schrodinger is a genius and might conceivably have done biomedical research and b) the parallel to Schwarzschild.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow