Unrelated to the actual point of this post, but I have another analogy for conscious identity, which doesn't fully match our intuitions but might explain where common intuitions fall short.
Corporations aren't material, and the people they consist of change all the time. Over a few decades all the people in a company might be different, and it might have different goals, culture, and procedures in place. But it's still the same legal entity as before.
Even if the specific legal record of the company's incorporation is destroyed somehow, people will still think the company exists. It will just need to get re-listed soon.
This breaks from our intuitions in the same Parfidian cases as personal identity does. Sometimes a company spins off part of itself into a separate entity, perhaps because it has some product which doesn't fit well with the rest of its business. This looks analogous to a cloning case. You could make a similar case for merged and acquisitions.
This analogy kind of helps me think about how I'd want to work as a digital being with the ability to split or merge myself. 'I' would be like a company: a set of goals and norms which people (clones of me) can be part of, and work toward. If versions of me develop different goals, or want to work separately, they can spin off. Maybe we'd merge again later on.
Admittedly, I've applied the analogy on two different levels here: one where the company is an individual version of a person, and one where it's some more parfidian sense of a person as some at of goals, traits, and behaviours.
I'm not sure which actually fits it best, and maybe applicability in two ways makes it a worse analogy. But reading your take on personal identity as nfts made me want to mention it.
I'm not convinced this 5-year-old-me deserves any special treatment other than the fact that I have to deal with the consequences of his actions and we are burdened by similar genes.
I'd be much more inclined to call a medieval peasant who just happened to have similar genes to mine and was struck by lighting in a way that left his memories/personalities/brain patterns similar to mine at this moment "the same person" as me.
If I died now but was guaranteed a medieval peasant had that happen to him, I'd call that closer to time travel than death, but if I died now and a backup taken 20 years ago was reconstituted, I'd still call that a death of my present self.
In the context of sparse codes, the “one note different means a totally different memory” problem can be solved by storing many fewer memories than the theoretical capacity. For example, if you need to store 1,000,000 memories in your lifetime, maybe take sets of 25 neurons out of a pool of 250 (for example), and now your memory capacity is (250 choose 25) = 10^34, of which you’re using 0.0000…001%, and you can assign codes randomly with astronomically low chance of collisions or even near-collisions.
Looks like a fascinating book, and some illuminating comments.
Been ages since I looked into the topic, going back some 50 years -- 😲 -- to Professor Kent's "The Brains of Men and Machines" and, more recently Professor William Calvin's "The Cerebral Code". Both highly recommended, even if on a probably more rudimentary level than Professor Buzsaki's book:
Interesting outgrowth of those readings was getting into Stuart Kauffman's use of "Boolean networks to model genetic regulatory networks" (Wikipedia). Seem to recollect they have some relevance to Calvin's "cell assemblies", although my notes on his book on that score are a bit inconclusive. But I'd written a Mathematica Demonstration some 4 years ago to illustrate how simple logic gates can produce those types of oscillations:
The lecturer for the MIT course on cognitive neuroscience uses the same football touchdown analogy, in the context of EEG scan resolution - https://youtu.be/YD7QG4G7WVg
On the subject of synchrony: in my proof that chemical reaction networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_reaction_network_theory are Turing complete (i.e. capable of arbitrary computation), one of the most technically challenging parts was using continuous chemical reactions to build a discrete "clock", which then modulated the reactions that did the actual computation. This task very loosely resembles the brain in so far as it involves using chemical reactions to perform computation -- but that is where the analogy ends.
"I was trying to think of what kind of object could match our intuitive understanding of conscious identity."
I think we should be prepared for the possibility that our intuitive/folk understanding of identity is really bad, or not just one thing. If it turns out to be true, this will be very messed up. But most of our folk psychology is terrible, so it shouldn't surprise us.
Mental illness seems to offer some nice (not nice) edge cases where identity breaks down: split personalities, alien hands, dissociation, etc. They could all arise because our folk identities are actually a collection of different ideas that usually all point the same way, but occasionally get misaligned. So, continuity of memories+continuity of body+continuity of social identity could be all of it.
".... which raises the question of how our brains don't just collapse into noise or get stuck in endless loops...they're kind of finely balanced to be able to skirt around the edges of various attractors, moving from place to place."
Sensory deprivation can induce the states that you describe - chaos and madness (as does sleep, in our dreams). So perhaps the key to maintaining order in the chaos is the constantly refreshing input from our senses.
> The conduction delays in the wires within the silicon chip don't inherently create conduction delays in the ANN, because the connections in the ANN are not wires in the ANN, they are numerical data upon which the silicon chip performs calculations. Just like the flatness of the silicon chip doesn't prevent simulated 3D environments, etc.
Important to note though that the conduction delays in the wires within the silicon chip *do* create conduction delays in the ANN (via programmer as proxy) as soon as you start optimizing the ANN to go fast. :)
Every abstraction is leaky, and the less slack it has, the more leaky it becomes.
But conscious identity is almost certainly fungible in principle, we just can't upload or otherwise create copies of people yet (yes, I dismiss the p-zombie concept). Once we'll be able to, their internal subjective experiences would be indistinguishable at first, and there wouldn't a priori be any reason to somehow privilege the original, whereas, AFAICT, the whole point of NFTs is that the "original" is valuable and copies are worthless.
"All the atoms in our body get replaced once every whatever"
Not sure about the status of this claim. The molecules get replaced thing seems to have originated from radioisotope work in the 1950s, but the original claim seems to have been something like "98% of atoms" get replaced every year, allowing for parts of the body where replacement doesn't happen as often.
The NFT comparison (maybe even worse, compare to those crypto games where it uses the info in the NFT as "DNA" for pokemon monsters and you can even cross-breed them) is trollish but honestly works, if perhaps just circular reasoning. The thing that is a unique human is a unique set of information that other thinking beings have decided (and perhaps subjectively bounded what is In and Out) defines a specific human.
Adding to fun naming conventions: in Lie group theory in math, there is a Killing form named after Wilhelm Killing. A typical construction in representation theory that you do to get "the important piece" of an object is called killing the kernel of the Killing form (or a relative of it).
Justin L's comment resonated with me! The following anecdotal report is not a deep comment or on point regarding consciousness, but I share it in case it is useful to those who know more.
I have severe restless legs syndrome. Some kind of periodicity, in the brain, though it is experienced in the limb. Both a sleep lab and a partner timed the resultant movements while I was asleep. They are like clock-work, but a different interval each night. One night it is every 55 seconds. Another night it is every 21. (It is not the involuntary movement that is the problem. It is the indescribably agonizing sensation of periodically increasing impulse, worse than pain. Probably more accurately described as decreasing inability to inhibit impulse.)
I'm pretty sure it is a seizure type disorder, because one obvious component of it that I never see mentioned is that it can only occur on one side of the body at a time. It is one leg or the other, and sometimes the arm on the same side, too. It is dishearteningly eerie, as it subsides on one side, to have it simultaneously transfer to the other side. Only one hemisphere at a time.
I welcome any suggestions. I did discover that listening to one category of music, specifically, danceable music that strongly gives one the urge to "seat-dance," relieves it right away. It must be strongly rhythmic music with associated urge to dance, to a different period than the RLS. Sometimes I go to sleep with headphones on. My RLS docs seem uninterested in this observation.
"A while back, I was trying to think of what kind of object could match our intuitive understanding of conscious identity."
It's only now occurring to me, but I'd guess our intuitive understanding of conscious identity comes from the evolutionary imperative to pass on our genes. Your genes stay the same regardless of whether the atoms are replaced, or you make new memories, or suffer a traumatic brain injury and develop a new personality. In the evolutionary environment, there was no cloning nor digital brain uploads (nor CRISPR), so people's intuitions are free to diverge on these questions.
I've already joked that crypto is a clever plan to save the world from misaligned AI. First it slowed the progress by raising prices on the GPUs worldwide, buying us some precious time.
Now I guess the plan is to make it so AIs could only be run on blockchains with proof of work. That would make them incredibly inefficient and slow so we will be able to stop them if they try anything bad, additionally they won't be able to self modify saving us from fast takeover.
Of course this can also backfire dramatically, imagine half the world population keep mining cryptocurrency due to financial incentive even with the full knowledge that in doing so they are enabling malicious AI to slowly take over the world.
I think my go to analogy for a person/consciousness would be a wave on water. The wave is not composed of the same water atoms over time, and the wave itself changes shape over time, but you can still point to an individual wave crest and track it. In this sense, each of us is a wave rippling across the ocean of the cosmos before eventually succumbing to entropy and dissipating into the background. I've never taken the time to get good at meditation, but my rational mind has decided this fits the idea of universal oneness too: we are all part of the same ocean but our identity is embedded in the pattern and structure of the surface.
It is interesting to think of what the logical consequences are if we accept that consciousness is an emergent property of energy/matter. In particular, each cell of our body is very much like an individual organism that might have its own limited consciousness, they can even live outside of us! If our cells are individuals, then our bodies are highly regulated societies with a rigid class system. Cancer is a freedom fighting rebellion against the prevailing social norms (we want to reproduce when we want to and the police can't tell us to kill ourselves for disobeying) with no understanding that such rebellion will inevitably lead to the downfall of society. But if this cell-society can result in the meta-entity with a distinct consciousness that we call ourselves, what of our own collective societies? Do they too, in the form of culture and social cohesion, form a conscious entity that would be similarly incomprehensible to us in the sense that we cannot talk to or reason with such an entity because it exists only as the sum of our individual lives, just as an individual neuron could never hope to have a relatable conversation directly with us. Could other things too form such meta-entities, like the stars and the radiation and gravity that they emit between them? Could the universe itself be a conscious entity, at a scale and level of abstraction that is ultimately unfathomable to us as to its exact nature and experience?
Thanks for the information. The effect of soundwaves on brain is really a miracle as I have myself tried the same by just listening to different music of different wavelength various states of mind can be achieved. Not only state of mind but physical manifestations too. Specially this particular 7 minute audio which has given me the best results in manifesting wealth. Do try this
Unrelated to the actual point of this post, but I have another analogy for conscious identity, which doesn't fully match our intuitions but might explain where common intuitions fall short.
Corporations aren't material, and the people they consist of change all the time. Over a few decades all the people in a company might be different, and it might have different goals, culture, and procedures in place. But it's still the same legal entity as before.
Even if the specific legal record of the company's incorporation is destroyed somehow, people will still think the company exists. It will just need to get re-listed soon.
This breaks from our intuitions in the same Parfidian cases as personal identity does. Sometimes a company spins off part of itself into a separate entity, perhaps because it has some product which doesn't fit well with the rest of its business. This looks analogous to a cloning case. You could make a similar case for merged and acquisitions.
This analogy kind of helps me think about how I'd want to work as a digital being with the ability to split or merge myself. 'I' would be like a company: a set of goals and norms which people (clones of me) can be part of, and work toward. If versions of me develop different goals, or want to work separately, they can spin off. Maybe we'd merge again later on.
Admittedly, I've applied the analogy on two different levels here: one where the company is an individual version of a person, and one where it's some more parfidian sense of a person as some at of goals, traits, and behaviours.
I'm not sure which actually fits it best, and maybe applicability in two ways makes it a worse analogy. But reading your take on personal identity as nfts made me want to mention it.
I'm not convinced this 5-year-old-me deserves any special treatment other than the fact that I have to deal with the consequences of his actions and we are burdened by similar genes.
I'd be much more inclined to call a medieval peasant who just happened to have similar genes to mine and was struck by lighting in a way that left his memories/personalities/brain patterns similar to mine at this moment "the same person" as me.
If I died now but was guaranteed a medieval peasant had that happen to him, I'd call that closer to time travel than death, but if I died now and a backup taken 20 years ago was reconstituted, I'd still call that a death of my present self.
In the context of sparse codes, the “one note different means a totally different memory” problem can be solved by storing many fewer memories than the theoretical capacity. For example, if you need to store 1,000,000 memories in your lifetime, maybe take sets of 25 neurons out of a pool of 250 (for example), and now your memory capacity is (250 choose 25) = 10^34, of which you’re using 0.0000…001%, and you can assign codes randomly with astronomically low chance of collisions or even near-collisions.
Looks like a fascinating book, and some illuminating comments.
Been ages since I looked into the topic, going back some 50 years -- 😲 -- to Professor Kent's "The Brains of Men and Machines" and, more recently Professor William Calvin's "The Cerebral Code". Both highly recommended, even if on a probably more rudimentary level than Professor Buzsaki's book:
https://www.amazon.com/Brains-Men-Machines-Ernest-Kent/dp/0070341230
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0262531542/
http://williamcalvin.com/bk9/
Interesting outgrowth of those readings was getting into Stuart Kauffman's use of "Boolean networks to model genetic regulatory networks" (Wikipedia). Seem to recollect they have some relevance to Calvin's "cell assemblies", although my notes on his book on that score are a bit inconclusive. But I'd written a Mathematica Demonstration some 4 years ago to illustrate how simple logic gates can produce those types of oscillations:
https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/BooleanAndGeneRegulatoryNetworks/
The lecturer for the MIT course on cognitive neuroscience uses the same football touchdown analogy, in the context of EEG scan resolution - https://youtu.be/YD7QG4G7WVg
On the subject of synchrony: in my proof that chemical reaction networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_reaction_network_theory are Turing complete (i.e. capable of arbitrary computation), one of the most technically challenging parts was using continuous chemical reactions to build a discrete "clock", which then modulated the reactions that did the actual computation. This task very loosely resembles the brain in so far as it involves using chemical reactions to perform computation -- but that is where the analogy ends.
"I was trying to think of what kind of object could match our intuitive understanding of conscious identity."
I think we should be prepared for the possibility that our intuitive/folk understanding of identity is really bad, or not just one thing. If it turns out to be true, this will be very messed up. But most of our folk psychology is terrible, so it shouldn't surprise us.
Mental illness seems to offer some nice (not nice) edge cases where identity breaks down: split personalities, alien hands, dissociation, etc. They could all arise because our folk identities are actually a collection of different ideas that usually all point the same way, but occasionally get misaligned. So, continuity of memories+continuity of body+continuity of social identity could be all of it.
".... which raises the question of how our brains don't just collapse into noise or get stuck in endless loops...they're kind of finely balanced to be able to skirt around the edges of various attractors, moving from place to place."
Sensory deprivation can induce the states that you describe - chaos and madness (as does sleep, in our dreams). So perhaps the key to maintaining order in the chaos is the constantly refreshing input from our senses.
> The conduction delays in the wires within the silicon chip don't inherently create conduction delays in the ANN, because the connections in the ANN are not wires in the ANN, they are numerical data upon which the silicon chip performs calculations. Just like the flatness of the silicon chip doesn't prevent simulated 3D environments, etc.
Important to note though that the conduction delays in the wires within the silicon chip *do* create conduction delays in the ANN (via programmer as proxy) as soon as you start optimizing the ANN to go fast. :)
Every abstraction is leaky, and the less slack it has, the more leaky it becomes.
But conscious identity is almost certainly fungible in principle, we just can't upload or otherwise create copies of people yet (yes, I dismiss the p-zombie concept). Once we'll be able to, their internal subjective experiences would be indistinguishable at first, and there wouldn't a priori be any reason to somehow privilege the original, whereas, AFAICT, the whole point of NFTs is that the "original" is valuable and copies are worthless.
"All the atoms in our body get replaced once every whatever"
Not sure about the status of this claim. The molecules get replaced thing seems to have originated from radioisotope work in the 1950s, but the original claim seems to have been something like "98% of atoms" get replaced every year, allowing for parts of the body where replacement doesn't happen as often.
Research since, at the cellular level, seems to indicate that cells in different parts of the brain are replaced slowly, if at all. https://www.livescience.com/33179-does-human-body-replace-cells-seven-years.html
And the brain is where we tend to locate our identity.
I welcome further discussion from people who, unlike me, know what they're talking about.
The NFT comparison (maybe even worse, compare to those crypto games where it uses the info in the NFT as "DNA" for pokemon monsters and you can even cross-breed them) is trollish but honestly works, if perhaps just circular reasoning. The thing that is a unique human is a unique set of information that other thinking beings have decided (and perhaps subjectively bounded what is In and Out) defines a specific human.
Adding to fun naming conventions: in Lie group theory in math, there is a Killing form named after Wilhelm Killing. A typical construction in representation theory that you do to get "the important piece" of an object is called killing the kernel of the Killing form (or a relative of it).
Justin L's comment resonated with me! The following anecdotal report is not a deep comment or on point regarding consciousness, but I share it in case it is useful to those who know more.
I have severe restless legs syndrome. Some kind of periodicity, in the brain, though it is experienced in the limb. Both a sleep lab and a partner timed the resultant movements while I was asleep. They are like clock-work, but a different interval each night. One night it is every 55 seconds. Another night it is every 21. (It is not the involuntary movement that is the problem. It is the indescribably agonizing sensation of periodically increasing impulse, worse than pain. Probably more accurately described as decreasing inability to inhibit impulse.)
I'm pretty sure it is a seizure type disorder, because one obvious component of it that I never see mentioned is that it can only occur on one side of the body at a time. It is one leg or the other, and sometimes the arm on the same side, too. It is dishearteningly eerie, as it subsides on one side, to have it simultaneously transfer to the other side. Only one hemisphere at a time.
I welcome any suggestions. I did discover that listening to one category of music, specifically, danceable music that strongly gives one the urge to "seat-dance," relieves it right away. It must be strongly rhythmic music with associated urge to dance, to a different period than the RLS. Sometimes I go to sleep with headphones on. My RLS docs seem uninterested in this observation.
So it seems that the main reason why some things aren’t named for the reason you think is nominative determinism.
"A while back, I was trying to think of what kind of object could match our intuitive understanding of conscious identity."
It's only now occurring to me, but I'd guess our intuitive understanding of conscious identity comes from the evolutionary imperative to pass on our genes. Your genes stay the same regardless of whether the atoms are replaced, or you make new memories, or suffer a traumatic brain injury and develop a new personality. In the evolutionary environment, there was no cloning nor digital brain uploads (nor CRISPR), so people's intuitions are free to diverge on these questions.
On crypto and distributive consciousness.
I've already joked that crypto is a clever plan to save the world from misaligned AI. First it slowed the progress by raising prices on the GPUs worldwide, buying us some precious time.
Now I guess the plan is to make it so AIs could only be run on blockchains with proof of work. That would make them incredibly inefficient and slow so we will be able to stop them if they try anything bad, additionally they won't be able to self modify saving us from fast takeover.
Of course this can also backfire dramatically, imagine half the world population keep mining cryptocurrency due to financial incentive even with the full knowledge that in doing so they are enabling malicious AI to slowly take over the world.
Mathologer has a great video on the golden ratio/rational approximations thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaasbfdJdJg&ab_channel=Mathologer
I think my go to analogy for a person/consciousness would be a wave on water. The wave is not composed of the same water atoms over time, and the wave itself changes shape over time, but you can still point to an individual wave crest and track it. In this sense, each of us is a wave rippling across the ocean of the cosmos before eventually succumbing to entropy and dissipating into the background. I've never taken the time to get good at meditation, but my rational mind has decided this fits the idea of universal oneness too: we are all part of the same ocean but our identity is embedded in the pattern and structure of the surface.
It is interesting to think of what the logical consequences are if we accept that consciousness is an emergent property of energy/matter. In particular, each cell of our body is very much like an individual organism that might have its own limited consciousness, they can even live outside of us! If our cells are individuals, then our bodies are highly regulated societies with a rigid class system. Cancer is a freedom fighting rebellion against the prevailing social norms (we want to reproduce when we want to and the police can't tell us to kill ourselves for disobeying) with no understanding that such rebellion will inevitably lead to the downfall of society. But if this cell-society can result in the meta-entity with a distinct consciousness that we call ourselves, what of our own collective societies? Do they too, in the form of culture and social cohesion, form a conscious entity that would be similarly incomprehensible to us in the sense that we cannot talk to or reason with such an entity because it exists only as the sum of our individual lives, just as an individual neuron could never hope to have a relatable conversation directly with us. Could other things too form such meta-entities, like the stars and the radiation and gravity that they emit between them? Could the universe itself be a conscious entity, at a scale and level of abstraction that is ultimately unfathomable to us as to its exact nature and experience?
Thanks for the information. The effect of soundwaves on brain is really a miracle as I have myself tried the same by just listening to different music of different wavelength various states of mind can be achieved. Not only state of mind but physical manifestations too. Specially this particular 7 minute audio which has given me the best results in manifesting wealth. Do try this
https://bit.ly/3Qo9NAk