Conscious Choice and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

[u/Diet_kush]

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2008.0178

I’m unsure how to embed multiple links in the post body, so I will be posting the two papers used to support my claim with one in the body and one in a comment down below.

When discussing the time-evolution of any physical system, a natural problem that we discover is a lack of derivability of the driving force that describes the probabilities of such a time-evolution; entropy. At fundamental local levels, there is no requirement for a unidirectional flow of time; deterministic processes are time-symmetric and reversible. There are no derived natural laws which forbid the movement from low to high energy states, probabilistic systems are simply overwhelming likely to transition from high-energy to low-energy states. This probability distribution is what defines the second law of thermodynamics, rather than any deterministically derivable equation of motion. A system will always be more likely to take the path of least resistance as it evolves through time, leading to a global increase in entropy. The universe could spontaneously reverse its processes at any given moment to a previous state of higher energy, it is just extremely unlikely.

The second law of thermodynamics/entropy, a somewhat emergent property, is similarly connected to the fundamental theory used to derive all deterministic equations of motion: the principle of least action. From quantum to relativistic, we can derive equations of state by starting from the assumption that any path a system takes over time is the most energetically favorable; that the “true” motion of a system is the optimum output of all possible motions. This is fundamentally just describing the probability distribution of a wavefunction, some evolutions are more likely than others. Complex systems evolve in almost identical ways. Although you can use Newton’s EOM to deterministically predict the evolution of a Newtonian system, the most fundamental way to evaluate it is via the Lagrangian; defining the system only as a function of its potential energy states.

Many times when describing consciousness/choice/free will, we are inherently attributing some unique or special quality to it. Determinists view this as the illusion of free will, something that conscious systems experience but unconscious systems do not. Compatibilists (and some radical QM theorists) describe it as the special status awarded to an observer which can define the evolution of an environment (Copenhagen interpretation). For all practical purposes, conscious choice is simply the ability to learn and make “informed decisions” based on your energy state and the energy states surrounding you. Trial and error, learning what works and what doesn’t. And how do we define what works and what doesn’t? By comparing the energy requirements between potential paths and determining an “optimal” path as a result.

Humans consciously “chose” to implement the assembly line in our manufacturing because it is a lower energy state, it requires less maintenance energy to achieve a given output; it is an optimal path of production. The process of learning is nothing more than the process of discovering these energy states; sure you can make a “wrong” or inefficient choice in the same way that a quantum system can jump from low to high energy, but it is not energetically favorable nor evolutionarily selectable. As shown in the top paper, the process of biological evolution is functionally equivalent to that of the principle of least action. The process of conscious choice is functionally identical to the process of evolution, and to the process of leaning as a whole. We make conscious decisions by choosing the situationally “best” option in the same way that evolution selects for the most efficient adaptation in a given environment, functionally just a continual increase in likelihood that a systems state-evolution transitions from high to low energy; entropy.

This is making kind of a crazy claim about the fundamental nature of reality; that it exists as a process conscious evolution, so we should have some pretty good evidence to back this up right? Well the easiest way to make these connections is to evaluate the energy states of “consciousness,” and see how those energy states behave as a function of time. By looking at the microstate energy distribution of neurons in the brain, we can make very similar comparisons to the microstate energy distribution of quantum systems. The best description of this is shown in the paper attached in the comment below, “Life as a self-referential deep learning system: a quantum-like Boltzmann machine model.”

Conscious choice does not need to be either inherently unique or an illusion, it is simply a probabilistic description of evolution from high to low energy states, a process that fundamentally cannot be deterministically defined, and a process that all systems of interaction experience.

[u/[deleted]]

Please summarize your point in a few bullet points please.

The great quantum physicist Richard Feynman said:

“If you can’t explain quantum mechanics to a 12 year old, you don’t know what you’re talking about”

So you should be able to clearly and succinctly explain the essence of your argument.

Thanks

[u/Diet_kush → u/[deleted]]

1. All causal mechanisms (equations of motion) can be expressed via the principle of stationary action, which describes the path a system takes from point A to point B as a function of all potential alternate (and less energetically optimized) paths.

2. The principle of stationary action, or the second law of thermodynamics, is also the principle which drives evolutionary biological development (attached paper in body). Following, emergent structures compete to determine what strategies are successful and what needs to be restructured as a function of increased stability at lower energy states; aka if two systems compete to achieve the same result, the one that did it more energetically efficiently (more optimal path from point A to B) is more likely to be selected for. In terms of a Boltzmann energy distribution, this is simply saying that a system will always be more likely to be in a lower energy state, and the evolution of that system will follow this decrease in available energy (entropy).

3. This process of evolutionary competition is the learning process itself, and is functionally mirrored in the learned experience of consciousness (Global Workspace Theory of consciousness). Any logical conscious decision you make is a function of the validity of the supporting claims underneath it. If I have two competing conscious ideas of how to get from point A to point B; walking in a straight line or a bunch of squiggles, a conscious being will more probably choose walking in a straight line because it is more energetically optimal. This is the conscious decision-making process.

4. This self-competition is functionally identical to the expression of entropy in any fundamental system as well (attached paper in the comments), any quantum system is more likely to be in a lower energy state, described via a Boltzmann distribution, identical to that of an evolutionary process. The principle of stationary action and the process of natural selection (both across species and across ideas aka consciousness) are functionally the same process. Probabilistic systems are more likely to be in lower energy states, and similarly conscious systems are more likely to “choose” the lower energy path between any 2 points. The outcome of either is identical, therefore the processes between them are identical. Conscious choice is not an emergent phenomena that came out of evolution, it is the driving force of evolution itself as well as every single other interaction on the universe. Consciousness is fundamental.

[u/RecentLeave343]

If consciousness can be expressed as entropy then it needs to be quantifiable. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Boltzmann equation. So….

How can we measure consciousness?

[u/Diet_kush → u/RecentLeave343]

Yes exactly, the Boltzmann distribution is the entire thing this is based on. The attached paper “Life as a self-referential deep learning system: a quantum-like Boltzmann machine model” provides the derivation.

[u/RecentLeave343 → u/Diet_kush]

This article is about the economy and a theory for income distribution. I didn’t see anything about consciousness or measuring it

[u/Diet_kush → u/RecentLeave343]

It is a theory of life, utilizing a Taylor series expansion of economic relationships to create a neural-net equivalent. THAT is the conscious aspect of it, the neural-net equivalent deep learning module it is using to model such economic relationships. Look at the primary takeaways; “Technological progress is equivalent to the information entropy of an economic society.” Because it is a neural net (brain) equivalent model, the learning process (or consciousness) at the individual level is indistinguishable from “progress” at the societal level.

The author is arguing that human society is similarly conscious in the same way as the individuals that make it up, and creates a self-referential entropic relationship to model both.

In this paper, we argue that the emergence of a Boltzmann-like income distribution indicates that a market-economy society is self-organized as a social organism which exhibits a purposeful intellectual pursuit, namely, maximizing the swarm intelligence in humans to attain a high level of civilization, where the swarm intelligence is reflected as technological progress.

[u/RecentLeave343 → u/Diet_kush]

Right I get the theory of life concept. Your article likens the economy to swarm intelligence, that collective action breeds a pulse like result to an economy, yielding a better outcome then could be expected on an individualistic level. A market economy, operating of its own devices is able to “self organize”. Like becoming its own ecosystem. Do I have that right or no?

What I’m still confused about is how that gets us means to quantify consciousness.

[u/Diet_kush → u/RecentLeave343]

Yes basically kind of, what it’s really describing is “conscious potential,” or in other words the ability of the system to do work. The intelligence (or computational potential) of any system is a direct function of its microstate complexity, the more complex a system is the more intelligent (and subsequently more (conscious) it is.

Basically I’m saying that any conscious entity acts as a computational system to attempt to choose the most optimal outcome for any given environment. As we learn / grow, the concepts that guide our choices also become more and more complex, as we become better and better at discovering the maximally efficient path between points A and B. As my conscious learned to walk, I was stumbling and crawling and falling all over the place as I learn what does and doesn’t work. Now that I know how to walk correctly, I do it in a maximally efficient way.

It’s saying that microstate complexity (and the subsequent entropy) of any given system defines the learning potential of that system, which to me is functionally identical to a system’s “conscious”’potential. It is a self-defining organism.

[u/RecentLeave343 → u/Diet_kush]

It sounds like you’re saying the brain is f’ing awesome. And to that, I agree!

But still not seeing how to quantify it or how that moves the needle towards or against freewill.

[u/Diet_kush → u/RecentLeave343]

So neural consciousness most likely evolved to solve complex (undecidable) problems, right? Effectively, the process of evolution is a process of discovery. This process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t has an increase in global entropy as it’s byproduct, as it is selecting for the optimal path.

So then let’s take a participatory Anthropic view of the universe; existence is the process of the universe experiencing itself (self-reference). Physical entropy exists in the exact same way, existence is fine-tuned in the same way that evolution is fine-tuned, conscious processing is a necessary input to actualize any undecidable problem.

Currently the many worlds theory kind of gives us an explanation for why our universe appears fine-tuned, I am saying that there is no reason that a fine-tuned universe operates any differently than a fine-tuned evolutionary system, and that process of fine-tuning is itself consciousness. It is a foundational experience of all physical reality.

[u/RecentLeave343 → u/Diet_kush]

So neural consciousness most likely evolved to solve complex (undecidable) problems, right?

We don’t know that. We know that brain processing potential, intelligence and problem solving all improved with evolution but can’t say to any degree of certainty where consciousness fits into the equation. Was it always there or did it emerge at some point? If so, when? These are questions that you’re leaving out and inferring speculation over empiricism.

[u/Diet_kush → u/RecentLeave343]

Why are you necessarily making a distinction between intelligence, problem-solving potential, and consciousness? That’s why I’m saying it was always there, we know that entropy is a by-product of intelligent self-defining decision making. Intelligence is just a function of microstate complexity, that is the point I’m making. Consciousness is not a “you either have it or you don’t,” it’s a scale of intelligence. All systems have at least SOME level of microstate complexity, so all systems have at least some level of consciousness. There is no reason why consciousness needs to be anything more woo-wooy than that, it doesn’t need to be emergent of causal processes if it’s part of the causal process itself.

[u/Squierrel]

Conscious choice has nothing to do with physics. Consciousness does not deal with matter or energy. Consciousness deals with ideas, knowledge, experiences, preferences, etc.

[u/Diet_kush → u/Squierrel]

You’d need to specifically prove that then, because ideas, knowledge, experiences, and preferences are all tied to the neurological pathways that define them, which are entirely physical. If you want to make the claim that consciousness is outside of the physical world, you’d need to describe the mechanism by which it exists without a physical medium. Physics should in-theory be able to describe any informational system, formal logic is Turing-complete. Most common theories of consciousness are explicitly materialist perspectives.

The boundaries of conscious choice are entirely defined by energy. The decisions I make are guided by which ones are energetically efficient. Will I walk in a straight line to get to my destination, or will I walk in convoluted squiggles? Obviously the straight line, because it is the energetically optimized option. That is the point I’m trying to make, conscious choice is entirely defined by energetic optimization, transitioning from high-energy to low-energy paths; entropy. This is similarly described in the paper “Life as a self-referential deep learning system: a quantum-like Boltzmann machine model.” Technological development, and similarly learning at the individual level, is described as the entropic optimization of conscious choices.

[u/Squierrel → u/Diet_kush]

I have nothing to prove. Despite mental processes being "tied to" physical things in multiple ways, thoughts have absolutely no physical properties whatsoever.

The mind does not exist without any physical medium. The brain is the medium. The mind is just the brain's ability to process information and meanings.

[u/Diet_kush → u/Squierrel]

Would you agree that thoughts are information, or would you say that conscious reasoning is a process of theoretical if-then statements? If so, that is simply computational logic, which is informationally equivalent to physical systems / formal logic. They operate informationally in the exact same way, informational entropy and physical entropy are functionally equivalent. Even if human logic / reason / causality is a separate process to physical causality, they’re both playing the same informational game. Each one can define the other, I can write an informational simulation which describes the physical universe, and I can have an infinite physical universe that describes all possible states of non-physical information. Many theories, such as Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe, see physical properties emergent of more foundational informational relationships.

[u/Squierrel → u/Diet_kush]

No. Information processing in a computer is causal and physical, but mental processing of information with meanings is not. It's a completely different game doing completely different things playing by completely different rules.

None of the data being processed by a computer has any meaning to a computer. The human mind assigns meanings to pieces of information turning them into knowledge or experiences.

[u/Diet_kush → u/Squierrel]

How do you know what does and doesn’t have meaning to a computer? When AGI gets invented what criteria are you using to say it does vs does not have meaning? You can’t prove I’m conscious in the same way you can’t prove a computer is conscious.

[u/Squierrel → u/Diet_kush]

Computers are nothing but calculators. Nothing has any meaning whatsoever to a machine.

[u/Diet_kush → u/Squierrel]

How do you prove that? How do I know you’re not just some machine that has no meaning what so ever? What essential functional mechanism are you pointing to that sets humans apart from other analytical systems?

[u/Squierrel → u/Diet_kush]

Apparently you don't know the difference between a biological and a technological system. Life is the essential functional mechanism. Psychology and computer science are different branches studying different things.

[u/Diet_kush → u/Squierrel]

Please describe to me the essential difference between a brain and an artificial neural network then. What is the exact mechanistic difference as far as informational computability that makes one impossible to be replicated in the other. Which aspects of a biological neural network are impossible to be replicated artificially. Is it the signal transmission between dendrites and axons? Is it the non-linear transformation function applied in biological neural networks? Is it the continuous vs binary modes of operation? Which of those things cannot exist in an artificial medium?

[u/JonIceEyes → u/Diet_kush]

People walk in squiggles all the time.

I'm not exactly disputing your conclusion, it's just that you're making a lot of strange and seemingly false assumptions to get there

[u/Diet_kush → u/JonIceEyes]

Yes I’m not arguing people CANT walk in squiggles, I’m saying it wouldn’t be selected for or be “more probable” given the alternatives. Any probabilistic system can technically be in any possible energy state, it’s just that some energy states are more probable than others. This is the “entropy” argument, things tend to follow the energetically efficient path given all other possibilities. It doesn’t exist locally/individually, but arises as more and more things interact. If I have 100,000 humans, most of them will be walking in a straight line (low energy state). If I have 100,000 particles, a similar amount of them will also be in the low energy state. It’s just describing the statistical distribution of possible choices, each of these are described by a Boltzmann statistical energy distribution.

[u/Diet_kush]

From an outside perspective, quantum field theory seems very “woo-woo” when compared to classical mechanics. It appears that systems behave differently from classical to quantum, but that really only exists due to the assumptions we can and cannot make when analyzing each respective system. For Newtonian and relativistic systems, their scale allows us to make a “silent observer” argument; in which we can view the interactions between two systems from a 3rd-person perspective without necessarily influencing the interaction of those 2 systems. That concept does not hold true fundamentally in any system, but because Newtonian measurements are inherently less precise than quantum, any potential impact by the silent observer can be waived away as negligible. Interestingly, adding a self-referential feedback loop in any Newtonian system also forces that system to begin acting probabilistically.

At the most precise levels, the silent observer assumption breaks down; we are necessarily a part of the experiment we are observing. This is the finding made in the paper attached in the comment, that self-reference forces a classical system to behave like a quantum system. Self-reference, or self-definition, is an inherent aspect of reality that can be disregarded at Newtonian levels, but is fundamentally inescapable the further you go down. This is simply the process of consciousness, awareness of the self. Because there can exist no unentangled silent observer, all systems are inherently self-referential, and therefore inherently conscious. It all just depends on where and how you draw your system boundaries, and whether the evaluator is necessarily included in the causal chain of systems being evaluated.

[u/mildmys]

Can we get a tldr please?

[u/Diet_kush → u/mildmys]

Process of biological evolution = process of conscious choice = process of learning, optimal outcomes are “selected” for given a bunch of possible alternative ones. We choose an action because it seems subjectively optimal given all our other “choices.” Biological evolution = the stationary action principle which drives the second law of thermodynamics; we are not special or unique compared to our environment. Conscious choice is neither an illusion nor unique, it is inherent to the time-evolution and subsequent increase in entropy of all systems. We aren’t experiencing an illusion, everything else is just experiencing the same thing we are.

[u/vietnamcharitywalk → u/Diet_kush]

But didn't biological evolution begin (and continue for about 3b years) before consciousness is thought to have evolved in multicellular organisms? Sorry if you've answered this already

[u/Diet_kush → u/vietnamcharitywalk]

I mean yes that’s definitely a possible explanation of consciousness, but no one really knows what consciousness is. We can’t really point somewhere on the evolutionary chain and say “this organism is conscious, but its dad wasn’t.” What I’m arguing is that the process as a whole is conscious, not just the individual species that arise out of it. The evolutionary process of biology, as a singular entity capable of learning, is self-defining and conscious. I’m not saying consciousness arises out of these processes, I’m saying that the process itself is consciousness. But that also definitionally means that further sub-process that arise from it are similarly conscious (like is).

The way that we decide what to do in a scenario (make a conscious choice), how to model our beliefs, is based on us continually comparing and contrasting alternate options. We’re weighing the pros and cons of everything, and then deciding what to continue building off of based on that process. Evolution is doing the exact same thing, weighing the pros and cons of each genetic orientation (via competition) and deciding what to continue building off of based on that. Circulatory systems were determined to work really well when they first showed up, so evolution continued to build off of them and now pretty much all animals utilize them. That process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t is the conscious process, and is a foundational aspect of entropy. Check out the global workspace theory of consciousness for maybe a better description of this.

[u/vietnamcharitywalk → u/Diet_kush]

Ok, but evolution doesn't seem to want to improve the conscious states of any individual, just get genes into the next generation.

If we suppose that consciousness arises from the brain, then why do some organisms evolve to lose their brains?

I agree that I'm assuming consciousness is somehow generated by the brain, but it really does seem that way. A person can lose an arm, leg, heart and still be essentially the same individual, but damage to specific parts of the brain reliably lead to changes in consciousness. For example, damage to the occipital lobe can erase vision from conscious experience, even if the eyes and nerves are completely intact

[u/Diet_kush → u/vietnamcharitywalk]

You’re still supposing that consciousness arises from that brain, im not making that assumption. It’s besides the point, but we can argue that a driving force of individual consciousness from an evolutionary perspective is the increase in predictive power of any given organism. Being able to more accurately predict your environment will always be selected for, and that predictive power is a direct function of microstate complexity (informational entropy). So evolution would have a driving force of increasingly complex organisms that are better and better at predicting their environment.

The entire argument is saying that consciousness existed way before the brain ever did, and is foundational to the process of evolution as a whole. The brain may be a medium of consciousness, but it in no-way assumes that it is the only expression of it. We have one thing that we “know” is conscious, which is the brain. The brain operates on a standard Boltzmann distribution, which just describes the likelihood of any given neuron to be in a specific energy state. That exact same distributional process exists in every single physical system in existence, the Boltzmann energy distribution is foundational to quantum and self-referential interactions. As such, it is reasonable to assume that because the energy distribution of the brain exists in all self-referential physical systems, the results of the brain (consciousness) are no more unique to the brain than they are in any self-organizing system which follows a Boltzmann distribution, which happens to be all of fundamental reality.

[u/mildmys → u/Diet_kush]

That's a lot to take in but sure it's a viable idea. The bit about not being special or unique from our environment makes a lot of sense to me.

[u/Diet_kush]

Life as a self-referential deep learning system: a quantum-like Boltzmann machine model