[ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation

[Jason Resch]

Stuart,

I was hoping you would have something deep and insightful to add, you don't
disappoint!

On Sat, May 3, 2025, 3:09 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

To be clear, are you equating the causal potency of information, with it's
necessary generation/storage always incurring a cost of increasing entropy
elsewhere? Or is this just one example of how information (or it's
processing) can have physical effects?

The process that analyzes an approaching gas molecule, judging it's
temperature and trajectory, and ultimately deciding whether to open or
close the door could itself be viewed as a kind of primitively aware
(conscious) thing. It's discriminated high-level information state then
occupy a spot in the causal chain, without it, the door could not respond
intelligently to it's environment. And I would say the discriminated
high-level information state is its conscious state.



> 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.
>

Would this mean a conscious mind running on a reversible computer (which
escapes Landauer's principle) could have (or allay) no desires?


> >
> > 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.
>

I agree there are many levels of organization all of which can possess
their own upwards and downwards causal forces.


> > 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.


I agree with this. Consciousness is by no means unique in expressing
downwards causation. I give the example of a nerve cell ordering
neurotransmitter molecules around.


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.
>

Sperry gave the example of a tire rolling down a hill. The tire is made of
molecules, but the rolling of the tire largely guides the motions of all
the atoms in the tire.

I guess the question then becomes what kinds of information processing
activities are conscious ones.

You make the comparison to erasing or overwriting information, but is any
process of recording information conscious? And what of processing
information without overwriting or erasing? Are such processes not
conscious? I think the dividing line for consciousness may be something
other than entropy increasing operations. I agree that information
processing, consciousness, and entropy are all closely related, but are
they equal?

Jason
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