[ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2025-05-04 06:38, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote:
> Stuart,
> 
> I was hoping you would have something deep and insightful to add, you
> don't disappoint!

Thanks, Jason. Really though it is a result of your own insightful 
investigation into consciousness overlapping with and often being 
tangential to my own investigation into the general phenomenon of 
emergence and emergent properties. Unfortunately most of my 
investigation currently consists of hand-written notes and mathematics 
that I cannot easily share at the moment.

> 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?

To be clear, the Landauer principle or limit is the LOWER bound of 
physical effect, a "thought" can have on the world, because it is the 
physical cost of allocating and overwriting memory to have that thought, 
which is itself a physical action that takes energy and increases the 
entropy of the universe. So information at, a minimum, incurs the cost 
to keep track of it, and so that is its basal causal power. However 
information itself has a latent potential energy as exemplified by 
Maxwell's demon. As the early scientist and late sorcerer Francis Bacon 
a.k.a. Dr. Mirabalis once wrote, "Knowledge is power." This is the 
simple observation that information can act as a catalyst for extracting 
"hidden" potential energy from the environment to the direct benefit of 
the system capable of tracking that information. This is how enzymes 
operate by using information to lower energy barriers for chemical 
reactions. This is how mitochondria work by using electron tunneling to 
create a proton gradient across a membrane. Being able to organize 
far-flung elements from the environment into nuclear weapons is another 
example of the causal power of information. So I use Maxwell's demon as 
an example of a general class of systems that exhibit similar behavior 
all up and down the emergence scale with conscious brains being one of 
these systems fairly high up on the scale.

> 
> 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.

I would tend to agree although I am reluctant to directly address 
consciousness with my theory because it is a fraught word in scientific 
circles. It has no clear or rigorous definition. A rock might be 
conscious or a dolphin or self-driving car not conscious depending on 
whose definition you use. Ultimately though Maxwell's demon is like a 
Turing machine, a simplified abstract mathematical model used to 
understand actual physically real systems.

>> 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?

Depending on your definition of consciousness, I am not sure it could 
exist as an irreversible computation. So much of the mechanism of 
consciousness is tied up into environmental awareness and the survival 
benefits of its causal potency on that environment. Any desires such a 
consciousness might have would be brief ephemeral things which vanish as 
spontaneously as they occur and cannot have any casual effect on the 
outside world. So assuming it can be conscious in the first place, a 
reversible computer I suppose could imagine desires and imagine 
fulfilling them without an entropy cost, but we are in "angels dancing 
on pinheads" territory here. :)

> 
>> 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.

Yes, the ability to roll down a hill is an emergent property of the tire 
with respect to the vulcanized rubber polymers that make it up. There is 
both a downward causation as the tire-shape causes the molecules to roll 
down the hill in a cycloidal trajectory and upward causation as the 
rubber molecules cause the tire to bounce, both contributing to its 
final chaotic trajectory of the tire down the hill. That being said, 
there is not enough self-referential causal closure to consider a tire 
rolling down a hill to be a strange loop process.

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

It is tricky to discuss consciousness in a precise way without a good 
definition of it. So are you talking minimally conscious or fully 
self-aware?

Maxwell's demon as a model of a minimal consciousness suggests that 
information processors that are bidirectionally coupled to the 
environment through some sensor and some corresponding actuator are 
conscious enough to have causal potency upon base reality. So the demon 
and his tiny door is like a thermostat and a heating element, which is 
also a feedback loop with causal power in base reality. The more such 
environmental feedback loops that the information processing system 
contains, the more complex it becomes and the more memory it will need, 
and the more energy it will consume, and presumably, the more conscious 
it will become, and the more causal potency it will have.

> You make the comparison to erasing or overwriting information, but is
> any process of recording information conscious?

No, mud is not conscious just because you can step in it and leave a 
footprint.

> 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.

Every causal process either directly or indirectly increases the entropy 
of the universe. Reversible computing cannot be causal to anything 
external to the reversible computer. So yes, if entropy increase was the 
dividing line between conscious systems and unconscious systems, then 
almost all physical processes would be conscious and clearly most 
physical processes are not conscious.

> I agree that
> information processing, consciousness, and entropy are all closely
> related, but are they equal?

No, information processing and entropy are not equivalent to one 
another, let alone consciousness. In fact in set theoretical terms, one 
could say that entropy is a subset of information processing, which is 
in turn a subset of consciousness, which is in turn a subset of emergent 
properties.

Stuart LaForge