[ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2025-04-30 10:17, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote:
> One of the great puzzles when it comes to understanding consciousness
> and its role in the universe is the question of how conscious thoughts
> could have any causal power in a universe fully governed and
> determined by particles blindly following forces of nature.

Thinking and information processing, conscious or otherwise, has casual 
power through its information content. This is a direct application of 
the Laundauer's principle. Mental causation is exactly how Maxwell's 
Demon works. It uses it knowledge of the positions and momentum of all 
the individual particles of gas to create a temperature gradient. 
Maxwell's Demon seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics by 
decreasing the entropy of the gas. But, this is not the case, because in 
the process of memorizing the positions and momenta of every particle in 
the gas and enabling it to increase the system's potential energy, the 
Demon increased the entropy or information content of its own brain or 
data storage. This could only have been done by erasing whatever 
information was there before and incurring some minimal energy cost 
given by the Landauer principle E >= k * T * ln2 with k being the 
Boltzmann constant and T being Kelven temperature.

Basically the causal power of wanting ice cream is the energy cost it 
takes to forget you want ice cream either by distracting yourself or by 
getting yourself the ice cream.

> 
> Some solve this problem by supposing our will must somehow
> miraculously intervene in physics. Others solve this problem by
> denying human will or agency, relegating consciousness to an
> ineffectual, and inessential "epiphenomenon."

Our will directly intervenes in physics, not miraculously, but through 
the mathematical connection between information, entropy, and energy. We 
are  giant Maxwell's demons made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons 
called cells, which are made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons called 
mitochondria, and so forth all the way down.

> But I think a more nuanced view can show that consciousness can have
> causal power in a universe fully determined by particles following
> physical equations. Here is my attempt at describing such a view:

> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qCuCc9kvbw5KKHJ223l7MbbNhZkTamhA/view?usp=sharing
> An answer to this question is relevant to whether uploaded minds, AI,
> or robots can have will or agency, despite their behavior being fully
> determined by low-level machine code.

Yes, but while consciousness or agency are examples of downward 
causation or what you call strange loops, these causal loops are far 
more general of a phenomenon than consciousness or agency. For example 
subatomic particles give rise to atoms in a standard upward causation, 
but atoms also give rise to subatomic particles through radioactive 
decay which is downward causation. Another example would be the surface 
tension of a water droplet ordering the water molecules into a perfect 
sphere. Strange loops are not magic, they are physics incorporating 
information theory.

Stuart LaForge