[ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation

Sun May 4 22:58:31 UTC 2025

On 2025-05-04 15:38, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat wrote:
> 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.

Here I meant to write reversible not irreversible.

> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
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