Reality Is Analog

Posted on December 22, 2023 by James Cross

Another interesting item that came out the Scott Aaronson thread mentioned in last post was a question to Scott about David Tong’s views on “physics laws can’t be simulated on a computer.”.

It turns out that there an unsolved puzzle that doesn’t allow the Standard Model to be simulated on a computer. I’ll let Tong explain it:

The difficulty lies with electrons, quarks and other particles of matter, called fermions. Strangely, if you rotate a fermion by 360 degrees, you do not find the same object that you started with. Instead you have to turn a fermion by 720 degrees to get back to the same object. Fermions resist being put on a lattice. In the 1980s Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya, now at the Okayama Institute for Quantum Physics in Japan, proved a celebrated theorem that it is impossible to discretize the simplest kind of fermion.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-quantum-reality-analog-after-all/

Scott mostly dismissed the problem at first as a technical matter, but then later found the topic intriguing and one he might later post on. He still thinks its a technical; matter however, if it isn’t just technical it would mean:

“Reality is ultimately analog rather than digital. In this view, the world is a true continuum”. 

Prasanna who posed the original question provided a video link. While I’m not a fan of videos, I found this one particularly interesting. The core explanation begins around 24 minutes, but there is a lot leading up to it, some of which I will need to listen to again. By the way, some of the question at the end are also really interesting.

The answer to whether we are living in a matric would be “no” if reality is analog. More correctly, it should be said we would not be living in a digital simulation.

A couple of things that caught my attention even though they are probably well-known to many.

Protons are an emergent phenomena. They emerge actually from thousands of quarks, but there happens to be small difference in the types of quarks and that number is usually what people use when they talk about the number of quarks in a proton.

Photons and gravitons are both massless. This allows them to travel at the speed of light. Odd isn’t it that the particle of gravity itself has no mass? Also, so interesting that gravity and the speed of light both have such prominent roles in Relativity. Is there some deeper connection?

The way he described reductionism made it seem to me that it might be better called “constructionism”. We can derive larger things with smaller things (although even that is practically impossible in most cases), but we can’t go the other way. We can’t look at the big things and derive the small things.A corollary is effects of the smaller things wash out as things get bigger. This is usually stated in the context of quantum fluctuations, but it might be more universally true. For example, we can derive biochemistry from chemistry but we can’t derive chemistry from biochemistry.

Posted in Information, Quantum Mechanics, Randomness | 15 Comments

Naked and Afraid AI Test

Posted on December 21, 2023 by James Cross

If you haven’t seen the TV show Naked and Afraid it puts two naked individuals, man and woman usually, in a challenging wilderness situation – savannah of Africa, Ecuadorian rain forest, for example – with a map and, a few basics like fire starter and machete. They have to figure out how to survive 21 days. The majority make it but in a decent number of cases one or both of contestants drop out. Depending on the environment, they could endure incessant rain, wild animals, thorns (they’re barefoot remember), incessant heat, freezing cold (even in the rain forest – I know this first hand)., and insects. They have to build shelter, hunt for food, and move to an extraction point on the last day.

That is TV, of course, but there have been a remarkable number of real life survival situations too. One hiker cut off his arm, I think, because it became caught under a boulder. Some young children have even survived in difficult conditions for days.

Over on Scott Aaronson’s blog there is an interesting conversation about predicting AI growth. In a minor part of the discussion I proposed a test for human-level AI.

Let’s put AI on the savannah of Africa with a robotic body and see if it can survive longer than 21 days (naked and afraid so to speak). It does have to do things that humans might do like navigate a tough terrain, find water, procure resources, etc with no oil changes or extra charge-ups. Its robotic body should have roughly the same physical capabilities and deficiencies as humans. It can’t have a shell that protects it when the rhino gores it, for example. But it can move just as fast as a human – in other words slower than almost every other animal on the savannah.

I would expect an AI approaching human level intelligence would survive at least as often as humans can survive the challenge.

Somebody objected that few humans can do this challenge. True, many on the TV show are trained survivalists. I also stipulate the AI can also be trained.

Another variation that occurred to me was to have the robot AI run off batteries and the AI was tasked with finding battery caches in order to survive. This is akin to hunting for food.

The idea is that the AI will have approximately or equivalently human challenges and vulnerabilities.

Twenty one days in the savannah tests vision, hearing object recognition, reasoning in unpredictable situations, ability to optimize with scarce resources, and more. It would be a test in a real environment similar to which we think humans evolved. The Turing test in contrast only requires a way with words, a Wikipedia knowledge of the world, and a facility for logic and math.

What do you think?

Posted in AI, Human Evolution | 6 Comments

Do We Misunderstand the Hard Problem?

Posted on December 11, 2023 by James Cross

Or, maybe the question I should be asking: have I been misunderstanding the hard problem?

I had occasion to go back and look at Chalmers’ famous paper. Here’s one place where he talks about the hard problem:

At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.

https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf

I think the way the majority of people, with have any understanding of the hard problem, understand it is much as I have understood it. It is the problem of explaining how consciousness arises from physicality. Typically joined to this understanding are discussions of qualia, the question of how physical processes can generate them, and some general “mystery” of consciousness.

Take a look at the last line again of the Chalmers’ quote. It seems to me that an understanding of why experience emerges by physical theory is not all that intractable. In fact, a reasonable explanation could be arrived at without explaining qualia at all. It is all a question of what would constitute physical theory explanation for the emergence of experience.Explaining why and how consciousness has emerged shouldn’t require a complete explanation for how it works; however, a more complete explanation of how it works might fall into Chalmers’ category of easy problems: ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli; the integration of information by a cognitive system; the focus of attention, the deliberate control of behavior; and others.

A few observations:

1- Consciousness has emerged in biological organisms

2- Consciousness, if not a spandrel, performs some function of evolutionary value or it would not have evolved.

3- Intelligent motility is a good candidate for why consciousness might provide evolutionary value.

4- Intelligent motility requires memory, learning, and ability to predict based on memory and learning.

If we look at the complex of learning, intelligent motility, memory, and prediction (LIMMP), we have nearly a complete evolutionary explanation for why consciousness has emerged in physical organisms. Of course, there is one relatively large thing missing – the direct physical links between consciousness and the LIMMP complex – but we already have good scientific evidence that these links exist. No organism moves with intelligence while unconscious. No memories form or complex learning take place in an unconscious person. Decisions and predictions can be traced to brain processes that involve conscious experience in one or another.

Some will say that the missing physical links is exactly the problem needing explanation in the hard problem. But the problem of missing links is completely researchable by science. It is so researchable that it could actually be placed with the easy problems.To be clear, we don’t completely understand memory and learning. But we already have good reasons to understand these to involve physical processes in the brain since synaptic connectivity patterns change when learning takes. Fundamentally, we need to link the physical processes identified in prediction, learning, and memory to conscious experience.

In other words, what we have to discover is what the brain is doing physically to itself when it has conscious experience.We could derive the why and how consciousness from physical theory by successfully correlating physical change in the brain with conscious experience.No explanation of qualia is required and no explanation of the “mystery” is needed. The research topics are all closely related to Chalmers’ easy problems.

Some might say a robot or zombie could also learn, have memory, and exhibit intelligent motility; hence, consciousness isn’t needed and the hard problem remains. Yes, a robot could do all of those things but the point is irrelevant. The questions are why and how living organisms predict, learn, remember, and move intelligently. It is not any or all of those things are consciousness by themselves. It is that those abilities require consciousness in living organisms. That means that consciousness is itself physical and can modify the brain. We only need to discover how and when we do, since the brain is physical, we would have a physical theory.

So, tell me. Was I misunderstanding the hard problem? Or, am I misunderstanding it now?

Posted in Consciousness, Human Evolution, Intelligence | 21 Comments