Not sure why a physicalist would be repulsed by the conscious board game. It seems like an easier pill to swallow than saying a room or China itself could be conscious
The Boltzmann brain concept seems flawed to me. The frequency at which random bits come together to form any complex object in a particular region in space is directly related to the density D of the bits in that region (more bits means more chances of collision in that volume). The volumetric rate of coming together of N bits to form a complex object like a Boltzman brain is then proportional to D^N. The density is proportional to the total matter in the universe M divided by the volume of the universe V. The volumetric rate then becomes
rate/vol = K' * M^N / V^N where K' is the constant of proportionality
The total rate over a universe of size V is the above expression multiplied by V or
total rate [K' * M^N] / V^(N-1) = K * V^(1-N) where K = K'*M^N
Let v be the expansion rate (distance v per time) of the universe from the big bang at t = 0, then the volume of the universe at time t would be V = 4/3 PI * (vt)^3
Putting this into the expression for total rate yields
total rate = K * [(4/3 PI v^3]^(1-N)] * t^(3 -3N)
The quantity in brackets is constant for a given value of complexity (N). This is multiplied by another constant K to give the new constant G for a given complexity N and the total rate becomes
total rate = G * t^(3-3N)
As time t rises the frequency of collisions falls, which make sense as the bits become ever further apart and less likely to ever meet.
But as time goes on we have more time for such collisions to happen. To get an idea of how many collisions can happen we multiply the rate by time to get the total expected number EN or
EN = G * t^(4 - 3N)
For N = 2 we have EN = G * t^-2.
As t goes to infinity, the expected number goes to 0 as the square of time. For N larger than 2 the number falls to zero more rapidly. For N in the quadrillions as expected for atoms forming into a brain, the number falls to zero almost instantly. Only in the very early existence of the universe could any brains form after which, given the very high temperatures present then they would fly apart and cease to exist. Therefore the number of Boltzman brains in the universe would be vanishingly close to zero.
Hence it is extremely unlikely we are Boltzman brains.
> The Boltzmann brain concept seems flawed to me. The frequency at which random bits come together to form any complex object in a particular region in space is directly related to the density D of the bits in that region (more bits means more chances of collision in that volume). The volumetric rate of coming together of N bits to form a complex object like a Boltzman brain is then proportional to D^N. The density is proportional to the total matter in the universe M divided by the volume of the universe V.
You're confusing matter density with bit density. The bit density of a region of space is known as local entropy, and by the second law of thermodynamics, entropy is increasing.
I'm not sure if your math checks out or not. But I think I can follow its logic.
It seems that some people much better at math and physics than me take the thought experiment seriously. Their thinking seems to contain an assumption that in the state of heat death, the universe will cease expanding. Which is to say, rather than the diffuse particles moving apart from one another forever, maintaining their momentum in the absence of any counteracting forces, they will instead be held together in some finite space in which the probability of collisions between particles eventually stops decreasing with time.
I do not understand the reasons for this assumption, but it seems to me you are obviously correct that in its absence, nothing interesting is going to happen from particle collisions as the time between those collisions approaches infinity.
The math was overly simplified to make the point that the Boltzmann brain argument involves an indeterminacy: Zero times infinity. The value of this can be zero, infinity or something in between. It depends on how the rate at which the piece tends to zero compares to the rate the other piece tends to infinity. In this case the zero piece gets there faster and the product goes to zero.
This cessation of expansion with heat death is a new thing to me. Everything I've always seen implies that in the far future galaxies will be so far apart so that intelligent lifeforms living on planets orbiting red dwarfs (the only stars left), assuming there are any intelligent life forms on planets with red suns, would believe themselves to alone in the universe, And as the last stars turn to brown dwarfs the heat death would ensure then until all matter has fallen to near absolute zero and nothing at all happens any more.
So as I best understand it (which is not very well), most of the theories suggest that even after all the stars and black holes go out, there would probably still be "local structures" -- (e.g. galaxies), very large, diffuse, and non-expanding clusters of particles, held together by gravity for eternity, which would allow for thermal fluctuations and hence Boltzmann brains.
The "Big Rip" is the scenario in which no structure whatsoever survives, just all the matter in the universe scattered to infinity, which I also think is what you're proposing (and honestly is how I previously understood heat death). But it seems to be a minority view.
No I had the first thing in mind. But these galaxies would be in thermal equilibrium with the space around them, which continues to expand. Hence thermal movement and collisions continue to decline as the universe expands. The same zero times infinity relation applies. Also structure formation and brain operation need energy that is absent in heat death.
1. I would think that the vast majority of interaction between particles happens within galaxies. Other galaxies are pretty to look at, and by way of gravity they influence the movement of other galaxies within relation to one another, but they don't have all that much influence on what is going on with the particles within each galaxy.
2. At some point, as galaxies move apart, whatever influence galaxies have on one another decreases to zero. You basically posited this scenario yourself, with red dwarfs in the far future. Each galaxy becomes, for all practical purposes, its own universe. At that point, the further movement of galaxies away from one another has no influence on anything, and therefore the expected frequency of galaxies forming Boltzmann brains would not continue to decrease, which means that if it's any nonzero number within ANY galaxy, an infinite number of Boltzmann brains would form over the course of eternity.
The issue here is temperature. Once all the stars and other formerly luminous objects in these galaxies stop generating energy, they will cool.
Cool to what? The usual answer is to the “temperature of space” also known as the cosmic microwave background. The value of this is inversely related to the size of the universe. After a trillion years and all energy generation has long ceased, the now cold and dark galaxies will be at this temperature that is be well under 1K. It will be too cold for anything to happen. That is what is meant by heat death of the universe. Death is the gradual cessation of chemistry, no creation of anything.
The finite lifespan of stars and other luminous objects coupled with expansion drive things to effectively zero in finite time, after which as time stretches to infinity it will just be and endless string of zeros that never to sum to anything greater that zero.
I’m not seeing how this game board example is supposed to work. Why would the physicalist be pushed into thinking the game board is conscious under their view? Couldn’t they just said that there is an obvious qualitative difference between the game board and an actual brain which would allow for an emergent qualitative experience?
One common claim is that "consciousness is information processing". Since the game board processes the same information as a brain, the game board would have to be conscious.
It's conceivable that a physicalist could hold a version of physicalism other than "consciousness is information processing." But it's not clear what that view would be. Physicalists in general are committed to saying that both brains and highly intelligent AIs are conscious. It's going to be very hard to come up with a non-arbitrary criterion which includes AIs but excludes the game board.
Nothing was said about the connections between the board components. A brain is not just 100 billion cells. We have that many skin cells and a ferment has that many yeast cells. Nobody thinks their skin or their homebrew is a brain.
And it's not just 100 billion neurons, but a 100 billion interconnected neurons, a so-called connectome.
What do you mean by change states? Do the things on the board operate like neurons and are they connected like neurons in a brain? If yes, then this would be an artificial brain. If it changed states (i.e. was operating, and so "alive") it probably would experience something we would consider as consciousness.
There is a sort of connection between the spaces on the board because the players move the pieces around in accordance with certain rules. The rules could match the way that electrical signals travel through the brain.
The way you say “the rules match” is ambiguous enough to cause confusion. If the rules match in the sense that the board game processes outside information because every square is moved by the player, then certainly it is not capable of information processing as every step of the way requires the player making the move for the game. (Btw there is no atheist that claims “processing information” is enough for consciousness as this would mean writing down “2+2=4” on a sheet of paper would denote consciousness of the paper with ink on it. There is usually some condition of autonomous processing).
The board game require a human player to move its pieces. Your brain requires the laws of electromagnetism to move electrical signals through your brain. What's the difference?
Honest question: would you by your own set of rules here denote that the board game exhibits the same extent of autonomous information processing as chatGPT? Because this conclusion seems absurd as well
Difference being that a board game requires the consciousness of another person to impart a constant stream of information. The brain does not, as the laws of electromagnetism are not conscious. That is what I mean when I say autonomous
1) This assumes something like a functionalist account of consciousness. Your example is reminiscent of Ned Block’s China brain argument against the theory. While functionalism is definitely very popular among physicalists it’s not necessarily entailed by physicalism and there are alternatives like Searle’s biological naturalism.
2) Dualism doesn’t entail that brains don’t cause consciousness! Dualists just think that consciousness isn’t reducible to, or identical, or entirely constituted by physical entities like brains. In fact, most forms of interactionism and epiphenomenalism assume that brains do cause consciousness. If you dive into the philosophical literature on the hard problem for example, basically all the contemporary non-physicalists agree that brains cause consciousness.
If brains didn’t cause consciousness then it seems like a miraculous coincidence that neural correlates exist (e.g. that some brain state is always correlated with me feeling a particular emotion). Neural causation of consciousness is the simplest and most obvious explanation for this phenomena. Alternatively, you might believe in idealism and think that consciousness causes brain states.
My point was just that physicalists have to believe that brains cause consciousness, while Dualists have the option to not believe that brains cause consciousness. So if the Brains Cause Consciousness position has absurd conclusions, that's a problem Physicalists, but not for Dualists.
And yes, I am an Idealist so I think consciousness causes brain states.
I see the two as distinct in fact. The reason to believe in physicalism is mostly distinct from the reasons to believe that the brain causes consciousness. Physicalists don’t have to believe that brain states are sufficient to cause consciousness! And notice that your Boltzmann brain argument assumes this to be the case.
For example naive realists think that (sensory) consciousness is a matter of standing in some physical relation to a quality in the outside environment, which Boltzmann brains lack. And many representationalists (Dretske, Tye) similarly think that if you’re not embedded in an active environment (i.e. if you’re a Boltzmann brain), you won’t be conscious.
And yeah dualists don’t have to accept neural causation, but then they need for neural-phenomenal correlation. One possibility is to just accept the coincidence of parallelism, but argue that they are theistically aligned or something like that.
Basically the competing theory is that minds/consciousness are fundamental building blocks of the universe, so asking “what is consciousness?” is as meaningless as asking “what is a material object?” or “what is a number?”
"What is consciousness" is vague, but it is it meaningless to ask more narrowly, "What is human consciousness?" Even if human consciousness is not possible to define exactly, we can say some definite things about it. And if emotions, desires, thoughts, feelings have no weight or mass, and cannot be seen, weighed or measured, does that not demonstrate, or strongly argue, that the human mind is not strictly material in its operations and so cannot be strictly material in nature and origin?
Looking forward to this follow-up. I lean toward a panpsychist framework in which matter and consciousness are understood to be two ways of looking at the same phenomenon. And yes, I do believe that game boards can have some form of phenomenal consciousness. If lumps of meat can, then why not game boards? “Information” has nothing to do with it, although the activity of an arrangement of matter may affect the /contents/ of phenomenal consciousness.
Of course, this explanation will not be plausible or competing for many, but the divine creation of man is I believe the best and only explanation for human consciousness. By the way, Jesus Christ taught there was a body/soul duality when he said "Do not fear those who can only destroy the body but after that have nothing they can do. But fear him that can destroy both body and soul in hell."
Brilliant! The concluding argument reminds me of Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism. For the second section, Searle’s Chinese room is apt.
I am also sympathetic to a lot of externalist arguments that a brain alone can’t be conscious because it has to be part of, as Ruth Millikan says, a “world-head system.” The isolation of the brain in physicalist philosophy is similar to Descartes’ isolation of the soul in dualist philosophy. Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus, Alva Noe, Hilary Putnam all make arguments of this type. Physicalism is just Descartes but the brain is serving for a soul.
Have you ever held the opposing view? Been a physicalist?
I was never a physicalist because I was never an atheist. I didn't think about the mind-body problem too seriously until college, where I became some kind of Idealist.
One can believe that consciousness is a physical/physiologic brain process without holding to the IIT theory or getting into any of the Boltzmann brain stuff.
Pretty weak arguments in my opinion. The board game is not sensitive to environmental inputs and does not act in the world. If the game pieces were hooked up to a robot with sense organs, and its sensory representations were synchronized, enduring, integrated, and mapped onto objective and dynamic features of the world, and elicited a variety of motives and impulses to act in the robot, and the game pieces caused the robot to act in certain context-sensitive ways, then it’s not at all obvious that the game board / robot is not conscious. Besides, I can always just bite the bullet and say the game board is conscious. Yea, that’s counterintuitive, but many aspects of reality are counterintuitive, as science has repeatedly shown us. The mere fact that something is counterintuitive is not very strong evidence against it. The Boltzmann brain argument is equally easy to dismiss; just deny that the universe is infinite, or that it’s infinite in a way that would make Boltzmann brains possible (there are different types of infinity), or that there are intrinsic physical constraints to random particles coming together to form biological brains, in the same way there are physical constraints on the conservation of energy or faster than light travel. Or, if all else fails, just bite the bullet. Fine, maybe I’m a Boltzmann brain. So what if that’s counterintuitive? The world is a counterintuitive place. Why should we expect our untutored intuitions about game board robots and Boltzmann brains to tell us anything interesting about reality?
«Since atheists don’t believe in anything like a soul, they have to believe that all of our conscious experience is produced by our brains, »
Incorrect, also obviously the rest of the wider nervous system is involved in consciousness.
I can be conscious of my hands and what they feel, due to the wiring that goes from my brain to my hands. Though the signal is boosted/manipulated in the interim, it's still info from the extended nervous system, that I am consciously aware of.
«and all of your experiences are ultimately just atoms bouncing around»
Absolutely not. It's electrical signals that are conducted between neurons across synapses. Neurons are cells, which consist of around 40 million molecules. 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses per brain. The average molecule consists of... I don't know... from 3 to hundreds of atoms. Why are you talking about atoms? Human consciousness appears on the substrate of a far more complex structure. And I'm not being pedantic here, for the sake of it. You're equating a bloody masterpiece to a toddler's fingerpainting. Do you have no respect for the majesty of creation?
«One alternative view is Dualism, which posits that we have physical bodies, but that the mind is distinct from the physical body.»
Well yes, those are distinct concepts. Mind = software. Body = Hardware.
When programmers analyze and write software, they don't think about "the metal" either, but abstract away from it.
Lots of objects and processes in an operating system are written in higher level programming languages, which also have no inherent knowledge about their own lower level implementation, like where they're exactly stored on the hard drive or which exact processing cycle triggered them.
Consciousness is mixed-level and dynamically changes in its scope, due to it being a hodgepodge of cooperating/competing neural networks. You can stimulate individual nerve endings and you can map that sensation to a discrete place. Or you can think of an elephant, but you won't be conscious of where all the signals are coming from. In general, we also aren't aware of "where precisely" consciousness itself happens. But we certainly know it's not happening in the next room over!
By knowing all the places where consciousness is definitely not happening, you get a very strong hint about where it IS happening. This vague "in the head"-feeling is all you need to know, that consciousness is happening in your brain (and nervous system), because those are actual locations, containing lots of consciousness-relevant matter!
But fine, I admit that I mostly cannot point to exactly which brain regions (if I can even name them) and definitely not which neurons are responsible for a particular conscious thought. [though there are some theories, which posit that there are distinct grandmother cells encoding specific concepts]
Should I therefore conclude, that consciousness is not embodied? No.
Imagine you could always exactly say, where each sensation or thought arose exactly.
That information would need to be stored somewhere. But if you accessed that info, you'd need to know, where it's stored, but if you accessed that info, you'd need to know where that's stored....no conceivable physical implementation would allow you to perfectly self-locate for everything, because you'd have infinite storage demands. It's self-contradictory.
«But the idea that a game board is conscious seems absurd. If the theory that brains cause consciousness implies that game boards can also be conscious, we should doubt that brains cause consciousness.»
Consciousness is not a binary property. You cannot say "X is conscious" and evaluate it to true or false. Or say things like "Well, I'm more conscious than a mouse, which is more conscious than an ant, which is (probably) more conscious than your gameboard, which is more conscious than a rock which is more conscious than a grain of sand which is more conscious than an atom.". You could formalize this with fuzzy logic, if you want to be super fancy about it.
I personally don't, a rough conceptual understanding suffices.
But if you're blindly assign absolute truth values, in a context when they are obviously not appropriate for, you're just playing idiotic word games. Sorry, for going ballistic on you in particular. Most philosophy of consciousness is based on this category error and I'm getting quite sick of it.
«There is a hypothesis in modern physics that entropy will increase until all the matter in the universe is spread out across a vast space, at which point the universe will remain in that state forever.
...
The atheist naturalist has to conclude that he is probably a Boltzmann brain.»
Maybe, but this particular Boltzmann brain is honestly not good enough at physics to evaluate the plausibility of this hypothesis. Even if I did and agreed, I don't see how it would matter? If I was a Boltzmann brain, it's not action-relevant information, as there's nothing I could do about it.
And it's unverifiable information. So why should I introduce the concepts of souls into my reasoning process? Would deeply understanding the concept of a soul, verify somehow whether I'm a Boltzmann brain or not? I don't see how that would work. Also I don't understand why a theist shouldn't believe all that.
It matters because if you actually were a Boltzmann brain, you would not have any basis for believing any of the things you just wrote about neurology and physics. i.e. if you are a Boltzmann brain, then brains probably don't contain 86 billion neurons, there probably are no such things as electrons, etc.
«A1: In other words, if you believe that brains cause consciousness AND A2: you discover that your theory of physics implies that Boltzmann brains will exist, then
C1: your theory of physics is almost certainly wrong, because the theory is self-defeating;»
I don't see why you need to AND the left side with A1. That seems irrelevant.
Maybe there is a world where I will have convinced myself, that A2 must absolutely be true. Somehow I refuse to think, that I might just be mistaken about physics.
[I am unlikely to have that problem, but maybe physics will indeed get me there]
Then yes, I could introduce ¬A1. But that raises the next problem. If my brain is not causing consciousness, then what is? If there is a meta-material layer, on which my consciousness is run, that I don't have access to, then that implies physics is completely beyond my understanding (since we sure can't access that layer) or a simulation hypothesis. So accepting ¬A1, I'd just trade one existential horror for another.
True. But the original claim was, that A1 leads to an absurd contradiction. But assuming ¬A1 also leads to the same absurd contradiction.
Whether brains cause consciousness is entirely independent of the potential existence of Boltzmann brains. Therefore, the Boltzmann brain contradiction is neither evidence for A1 nor ¬A1.
[epistemic status: I might have smuggled in an unwarranted assumption or made a reasoning mistake. Maybe I'm improperly interpreting assumptions. But I'm earnestly trying to do formal logic here, and at least I'm attempting to do this more rigorously than the original argument, so I don't feel that bad about not giving it more time/attention/energy to double-check.]
Yeah, I was wrong, thanks for pointing it out. So I'll fix it to this:
However, only because this leads to a contradiction, does not imply that I should reject therefore A1, to avoid it. Rejecting A2 seems much more straightforward to me.
objection 2:
You could also argue that C1 is not implied, because "almost certainly" can not be "rounded up" to "certainly". Because rounding up percentages already implies the acceptance of an underlying fuzzy-logic in your model, and once we're beyond binary properties, we can no longer use the term "consciousness" as a binary property of an object either.
objection 3:
But if I were to assume ¬A1 instead, that does not imply that Boltzmann brain are non-conscious either. Just because I would reject that consciousness is not caused by brains, does not warrant blithely assuming that the phenomenon is not observed in people/things that have (or are) brains. On the contrary, I still have excellent evidence for the slightly weaker A1* "Most brains are intimately connected to consciousness", because shooting a bullet in a brain, strongly, (if circumstantially) implies "This person/thing that has or is a brain is no longer conscious now.". However, now we have the same problem as before:
So now you have to argue ¬B*, whilst still accepting B. However, I would strongly argue that B->¬(¬B*). Alternatively you could argue that A1* is false, but what is your experiential evidence for that being true?
Not sure why a physicalist would be repulsed by the conscious board game. It seems like an easier pill to swallow than saying a room or China itself could be conscious
It's basically the same as the China Brain thought experiment, I just like my version better.
The Boltzmann brain concept seems flawed to me. The frequency at which random bits come together to form any complex object in a particular region in space is directly related to the density D of the bits in that region (more bits means more chances of collision in that volume). The volumetric rate of coming together of N bits to form a complex object like a Boltzman brain is then proportional to D^N. The density is proportional to the total matter in the universe M divided by the volume of the universe V. The volumetric rate then becomes
rate/vol = K' * M^N / V^N where K' is the constant of proportionality
The total rate over a universe of size V is the above expression multiplied by V or
total rate [K' * M^N] / V^(N-1) = K * V^(1-N) where K = K'*M^N
Let v be the expansion rate (distance v per time) of the universe from the big bang at t = 0, then the volume of the universe at time t would be V = 4/3 PI * (vt)^3
Putting this into the expression for total rate yields
total rate = K * [(4/3 PI v^3]^(1-N)] * t^(3 -3N)
The quantity in brackets is constant for a given value of complexity (N). This is multiplied by another constant K to give the new constant G for a given complexity N and the total rate becomes
total rate = G * t^(3-3N)
As time t rises the frequency of collisions falls, which make sense as the bits become ever further apart and less likely to ever meet.
But as time goes on we have more time for such collisions to happen. To get an idea of how many collisions can happen we multiply the rate by time to get the total expected number EN or
EN = G * t^(4 - 3N)
For N = 2 we have EN = G * t^-2.
As t goes to infinity, the expected number goes to 0 as the square of time. For N larger than 2 the number falls to zero more rapidly. For N in the quadrillions as expected for atoms forming into a brain, the number falls to zero almost instantly. Only in the very early existence of the universe could any brains form after which, given the very high temperatures present then they would fly apart and cease to exist. Therefore the number of Boltzman brains in the universe would be vanishingly close to zero.
Hence it is extremely unlikely we are Boltzman brains.
> The Boltzmann brain concept seems flawed to me. The frequency at which random bits come together to form any complex object in a particular region in space is directly related to the density D of the bits in that region (more bits means more chances of collision in that volume). The volumetric rate of coming together of N bits to form a complex object like a Boltzman brain is then proportional to D^N. The density is proportional to the total matter in the universe M divided by the volume of the universe V.
You're confusing matter density with bit density. The bit density of a region of space is known as local entropy, and by the second law of thermodynamics, entropy is increasing.
I'm not sure if your math checks out or not. But I think I can follow its logic.
It seems that some people much better at math and physics than me take the thought experiment seriously. Their thinking seems to contain an assumption that in the state of heat death, the universe will cease expanding. Which is to say, rather than the diffuse particles moving apart from one another forever, maintaining their momentum in the absence of any counteracting forces, they will instead be held together in some finite space in which the probability of collisions between particles eventually stops decreasing with time.
I do not understand the reasons for this assumption, but it seems to me you are obviously correct that in its absence, nothing interesting is going to happen from particle collisions as the time between those collisions approaches infinity.
The math was overly simplified to make the point that the Boltzmann brain argument involves an indeterminacy: Zero times infinity. The value of this can be zero, infinity or something in between. It depends on how the rate at which the piece tends to zero compares to the rate the other piece tends to infinity. In this case the zero piece gets there faster and the product goes to zero.
This cessation of expansion with heat death is a new thing to me. Everything I've always seen implies that in the far future galaxies will be so far apart so that intelligent lifeforms living on planets orbiting red dwarfs (the only stars left), assuming there are any intelligent life forms on planets with red suns, would believe themselves to alone in the universe, And as the last stars turn to brown dwarfs the heat death would ensure then until all matter has fallen to near absolute zero and nothing at all happens any more.
This alternative seems whack. DO you have a link?
I bounced around Wikipedia some until stumbling on this article, which is the most interesting summary of theories that I found:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
So as I best understand it (which is not very well), most of the theories suggest that even after all the stars and black holes go out, there would probably still be "local structures" -- (e.g. galaxies), very large, diffuse, and non-expanding clusters of particles, held together by gravity for eternity, which would allow for thermal fluctuations and hence Boltzmann brains.
The "Big Rip" is the scenario in which no structure whatsoever survives, just all the matter in the universe scattered to infinity, which I also think is what you're proposing (and honestly is how I previously understood heat death). But it seems to be a minority view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip
No I had the first thing in mind. But these galaxies would be in thermal equilibrium with the space around them, which continues to expand. Hence thermal movement and collisions continue to decline as the universe expands. The same zero times infinity relation applies. Also structure formation and brain operation need energy that is absent in heat death.
I don't follow that point.
1. I would think that the vast majority of interaction between particles happens within galaxies. Other galaxies are pretty to look at, and by way of gravity they influence the movement of other galaxies within relation to one another, but they don't have all that much influence on what is going on with the particles within each galaxy.
2. At some point, as galaxies move apart, whatever influence galaxies have on one another decreases to zero. You basically posited this scenario yourself, with red dwarfs in the far future. Each galaxy becomes, for all practical purposes, its own universe. At that point, the further movement of galaxies away from one another has no influence on anything, and therefore the expected frequency of galaxies forming Boltzmann brains would not continue to decrease, which means that if it's any nonzero number within ANY galaxy, an infinite number of Boltzmann brains would form over the course of eternity.
The issue here is temperature. Once all the stars and other formerly luminous objects in these galaxies stop generating energy, they will cool.
Cool to what? The usual answer is to the “temperature of space” also known as the cosmic microwave background. The value of this is inversely related to the size of the universe. After a trillion years and all energy generation has long ceased, the now cold and dark galaxies will be at this temperature that is be well under 1K. It will be too cold for anything to happen. That is what is meant by heat death of the universe. Death is the gradual cessation of chemistry, no creation of anything.
The finite lifespan of stars and other luminous objects coupled with expansion drive things to effectively zero in finite time, after which as time stretches to infinity it will just be and endless string of zeros that never to sum to anything greater that zero.
I’m not seeing how this game board example is supposed to work. Why would the physicalist be pushed into thinking the game board is conscious under their view? Couldn’t they just said that there is an obvious qualitative difference between the game board and an actual brain which would allow for an emergent qualitative experience?
One common claim is that "consciousness is information processing". Since the game board processes the same information as a brain, the game board would have to be conscious.
It's conceivable that a physicalist could hold a version of physicalism other than "consciousness is information processing." But it's not clear what that view would be. Physicalists in general are committed to saying that both brains and highly intelligent AIs are conscious. It's going to be very hard to come up with a non-arbitrary criterion which includes AIs but excludes the game board.
What's the difference?
Nothing was said about the connections between the board components. A brain is not just 100 billion cells. We have that many skin cells and a ferment has that many yeast cells. Nobody thinks their skin or their homebrew is a brain.
And it's not just 100 billion neurons, but a 100 billion interconnected neurons, a so-called connectome.
Let's assume for the sake of the argument that there's a way for the board to change states. Now is it conscious?
The state is changed when the players move the pieces.
What do you mean by change states? Do the things on the board operate like neurons and are they connected like neurons in a brain? If yes, then this would be an artificial brain. If it changed states (i.e. was operating, and so "alive") it probably would experience something we would consider as consciousness.
There is a sort of connection between the spaces on the board because the players move the pieces around in accordance with certain rules. The rules could match the way that electrical signals travel through the brain.
The way you say “the rules match” is ambiguous enough to cause confusion. If the rules match in the sense that the board game processes outside information because every square is moved by the player, then certainly it is not capable of information processing as every step of the way requires the player making the move for the game. (Btw there is no atheist that claims “processing information” is enough for consciousness as this would mean writing down “2+2=4” on a sheet of paper would denote consciousness of the paper with ink on it. There is usually some condition of autonomous processing).
The board game require a human player to move its pieces. Your brain requires the laws of electromagnetism to move electrical signals through your brain. What's the difference?
Honest question: would you by your own set of rules here denote that the board game exhibits the same extent of autonomous information processing as chatGPT? Because this conclusion seems absurd as well
Difference being that a board game requires the consciousness of another person to impart a constant stream of information. The brain does not, as the laws of electromagnetism are not conscious. That is what I mean when I say autonomous
Well if the game can do the same things the neurons in a brain do, then I don't see why it cannot be conscious.
Hi Simon! Some quick points:
1) This assumes something like a functionalist account of consciousness. Your example is reminiscent of Ned Block’s China brain argument against the theory. While functionalism is definitely very popular among physicalists it’s not necessarily entailed by physicalism and there are alternatives like Searle’s biological naturalism.
2) Dualism doesn’t entail that brains don’t cause consciousness! Dualists just think that consciousness isn’t reducible to, or identical, or entirely constituted by physical entities like brains. In fact, most forms of interactionism and epiphenomenalism assume that brains do cause consciousness. If you dive into the philosophical literature on the hard problem for example, basically all the contemporary non-physicalists agree that brains cause consciousness.
If brains didn’t cause consciousness then it seems like a miraculous coincidence that neural correlates exist (e.g. that some brain state is always correlated with me feeling a particular emotion). Neural causation of consciousness is the simplest and most obvious explanation for this phenomena. Alternatively, you might believe in idealism and think that consciousness causes brain states.
My point was just that physicalists have to believe that brains cause consciousness, while Dualists have the option to not believe that brains cause consciousness. So if the Brains Cause Consciousness position has absurd conclusions, that's a problem Physicalists, but not for Dualists.
And yes, I am an Idealist so I think consciousness causes brain states.
I see the two as distinct in fact. The reason to believe in physicalism is mostly distinct from the reasons to believe that the brain causes consciousness. Physicalists don’t have to believe that brain states are sufficient to cause consciousness! And notice that your Boltzmann brain argument assumes this to be the case.
For example naive realists think that (sensory) consciousness is a matter of standing in some physical relation to a quality in the outside environment, which Boltzmann brains lack. And many representationalists (Dretske, Tye) similarly think that if you’re not embedded in an active environment (i.e. if you’re a Boltzmann brain), you won’t be conscious.
And yeah dualists don’t have to accept neural causation, but then they need for neural-phenomenal correlation. One possibility is to just accept the coincidence of parallelism, but argue that they are theistically aligned or something like that.
Then they need an explanation for neural-phenomenal correlation*
What is the plausible and presumably competing explanation for consciousness?
Great question. I will write more on this soon.
Basically the competing theory is that minds/consciousness are fundamental building blocks of the universe, so asking “what is consciousness?” is as meaningless as asking “what is a material object?” or “what is a number?”
I look forward to your comments.
"What is consciousness" is vague, but it is it meaningless to ask more narrowly, "What is human consciousness?" Even if human consciousness is not possible to define exactly, we can say some definite things about it. And if emotions, desires, thoughts, feelings have no weight or mass, and cannot be seen, weighed or measured, does that not demonstrate, or strongly argue, that the human mind is not strictly material in its operations and so cannot be strictly material in nature and origin?
Looking forward to this follow-up. I lean toward a panpsychist framework in which matter and consciousness are understood to be two ways of looking at the same phenomenon. And yes, I do believe that game boards can have some form of phenomenal consciousness. If lumps of meat can, then why not game boards? “Information” has nothing to do with it, although the activity of an arrangement of matter may affect the /contents/ of phenomenal consciousness.
Of course, this explanation will not be plausible or competing for many, but the divine creation of man is I believe the best and only explanation for human consciousness. By the way, Jesus Christ taught there was a body/soul duality when he said "Do not fear those who can only destroy the body but after that have nothing they can do. But fear him that can destroy both body and soul in hell."
Brilliant! The concluding argument reminds me of Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism. For the second section, Searle’s Chinese room is apt.
I am also sympathetic to a lot of externalist arguments that a brain alone can’t be conscious because it has to be part of, as Ruth Millikan says, a “world-head system.” The isolation of the brain in physicalist philosophy is similar to Descartes’ isolation of the soul in dualist philosophy. Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus, Alva Noe, Hilary Putnam all make arguments of this type. Physicalism is just Descartes but the brain is serving for a soul.
Have you ever held the opposing view? Been a physicalist?
I was never a physicalist because I was never an atheist. I didn't think about the mind-body problem too seriously until college, where I became some kind of Idealist.
One can believe that consciousness is a physical/physiologic brain process without holding to the IIT theory or getting into any of the Boltzmann brain stuff.
If you don't hold the IIT, what theory do you hold?
I'd say illusionism, or something close enough.
Consciousness is the one thing which cannot be an illusion.
Why do you say that?
It's the one thing we directly experience.
Pretty weak arguments in my opinion. The board game is not sensitive to environmental inputs and does not act in the world. If the game pieces were hooked up to a robot with sense organs, and its sensory representations were synchronized, enduring, integrated, and mapped onto objective and dynamic features of the world, and elicited a variety of motives and impulses to act in the robot, and the game pieces caused the robot to act in certain context-sensitive ways, then it’s not at all obvious that the game board / robot is not conscious. Besides, I can always just bite the bullet and say the game board is conscious. Yea, that’s counterintuitive, but many aspects of reality are counterintuitive, as science has repeatedly shown us. The mere fact that something is counterintuitive is not very strong evidence against it. The Boltzmann brain argument is equally easy to dismiss; just deny that the universe is infinite, or that it’s infinite in a way that would make Boltzmann brains possible (there are different types of infinity), or that there are intrinsic physical constraints to random particles coming together to form biological brains, in the same way there are physical constraints on the conservation of energy or faster than light travel. Or, if all else fails, just bite the bullet. Fine, maybe I’m a Boltzmann brain. So what if that’s counterintuitive? The world is a counterintuitive place. Why should we expect our untutored intuitions about game board robots and Boltzmann brains to tell us anything interesting about reality?
«Since atheists don’t believe in anything like a soul, they have to believe that all of our conscious experience is produced by our brains, »
Incorrect, also obviously the rest of the wider nervous system is involved in consciousness.
I can be conscious of my hands and what they feel, due to the wiring that goes from my brain to my hands. Though the signal is boosted/manipulated in the interim, it's still info from the extended nervous system, that I am consciously aware of.
«and all of your experiences are ultimately just atoms bouncing around»
Absolutely not. It's electrical signals that are conducted between neurons across synapses. Neurons are cells, which consist of around 40 million molecules. 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses per brain. The average molecule consists of... I don't know... from 3 to hundreds of atoms. Why are you talking about atoms? Human consciousness appears on the substrate of a far more complex structure. And I'm not being pedantic here, for the sake of it. You're equating a bloody masterpiece to a toddler's fingerpainting. Do you have no respect for the majesty of creation?
«One alternative view is Dualism, which posits that we have physical bodies, but that the mind is distinct from the physical body.»
Well yes, those are distinct concepts. Mind = software. Body = Hardware.
When programmers analyze and write software, they don't think about "the metal" either, but abstract away from it.
Lots of objects and processes in an operating system are written in higher level programming languages, which also have no inherent knowledge about their own lower level implementation, like where they're exactly stored on the hard drive or which exact processing cycle triggered them.
Consciousness is mixed-level and dynamically changes in its scope, due to it being a hodgepodge of cooperating/competing neural networks. You can stimulate individual nerve endings and you can map that sensation to a discrete place. Or you can think of an elephant, but you won't be conscious of where all the signals are coming from. In general, we also aren't aware of "where precisely" consciousness itself happens. But we certainly know it's not happening in the next room over!
By knowing all the places where consciousness is definitely not happening, you get a very strong hint about where it IS happening. This vague "in the head"-feeling is all you need to know, that consciousness is happening in your brain (and nervous system), because those are actual locations, containing lots of consciousness-relevant matter!
But fine, I admit that I mostly cannot point to exactly which brain regions (if I can even name them) and definitely not which neurons are responsible for a particular conscious thought. [though there are some theories, which posit that there are distinct grandmother cells encoding specific concepts]
Should I therefore conclude, that consciousness is not embodied? No.
Imagine you could always exactly say, where each sensation or thought arose exactly.
That information would need to be stored somewhere. But if you accessed that info, you'd need to know, where it's stored, but if you accessed that info, you'd need to know where that's stored....no conceivable physical implementation would allow you to perfectly self-locate for everything, because you'd have infinite storage demands. It's self-contradictory.
«But the idea that a game board is conscious seems absurd. If the theory that brains cause consciousness implies that game boards can also be conscious, we should doubt that brains cause consciousness.»
Consciousness is not a binary property. You cannot say "X is conscious" and evaluate it to true or false. Or say things like "Well, I'm more conscious than a mouse, which is more conscious than an ant, which is (probably) more conscious than your gameboard, which is more conscious than a rock which is more conscious than a grain of sand which is more conscious than an atom.". You could formalize this with fuzzy logic, if you want to be super fancy about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic
I personally don't, a rough conceptual understanding suffices.
But if you're blindly assign absolute truth values, in a context when they are obviously not appropriate for, you're just playing idiotic word games. Sorry, for going ballistic on you in particular. Most philosophy of consciousness is based on this category error and I'm getting quite sick of it.
«There is a hypothesis in modern physics that entropy will increase until all the matter in the universe is spread out across a vast space, at which point the universe will remain in that state forever.
...
The atheist naturalist has to conclude that he is probably a Boltzmann brain.»
Maybe, but this particular Boltzmann brain is honestly not good enough at physics to evaluate the plausibility of this hypothesis. Even if I did and agreed, I don't see how it would matter? If I was a Boltzmann brain, it's not action-relevant information, as there's nothing I could do about it.
And it's unverifiable information. So why should I introduce the concepts of souls into my reasoning process? Would deeply understanding the concept of a soul, verify somehow whether I'm a Boltzmann brain or not? I don't see how that would work. Also I don't understand why a theist shouldn't believe all that.
It matters because if you actually were a Boltzmann brain, you would not have any basis for believing any of the things you just wrote about neurology and physics. i.e. if you are a Boltzmann brain, then brains probably don't contain 86 billion neurons, there probably are no such things as electrons, etc.
«A1: In other words, if you believe that brains cause consciousness AND A2: you discover that your theory of physics implies that Boltzmann brains will exist, then
C1: your theory of physics is almost certainly wrong, because the theory is self-defeating;»
A2-> C1. But C1 -> ¬A2. Therefore A2 -> ¬A2. Contradiction.
I don't see why you need to AND the left side with A1. That seems irrelevant.
Maybe there is a world where I will have convinced myself, that A2 must absolutely be true. Somehow I refuse to think, that I might just be mistaken about physics.
[I am unlikely to have that problem, but maybe physics will indeed get me there]
Then yes, I could introduce ¬A1. But that raises the next problem. If my brain is not causing consciousness, then what is? If there is a meta-material layer, on which my consciousness is run, that I don't have access to, then that implies physics is completely beyond my understanding (since we sure can't access that layer) or a simulation hypothesis. So accepting ¬A1, I'd just trade one existential horror for another.
You need A1 to conclude that Boltzmann brains are conscious.
True. But the original claim was, that A1 leads to an absurd contradiction. But assuming ¬A1 also leads to the same absurd contradiction.
Whether brains cause consciousness is entirely independent of the potential existence of Boltzmann brains. Therefore, the Boltzmann brain contradiction is neither evidence for A1 nor ¬A1.
The absurd conclusion, namely that you are a Boltzmann brain, depends on Boltzmann brains being conscious.
[epistemic status: I might have smuggled in an unwarranted assumption or made a reasoning mistake. Maybe I'm improperly interpreting assumptions. But I'm earnestly trying to do formal logic here, and at least I'm attempting to do this more rigorously than the original argument, so I don't feel that bad about not giving it more time/attention/energy to double-check.]
Yeah, I was wrong, thanks for pointing it out. So I'll fix it to this:
B:= A1 ∧ A2-> C1. But C1 -> ¬A2. Therefore A2 -> ¬A2. Contradiction.
objection 1:
However, only because this leads to a contradiction, does not imply that I should reject therefore A1, to avoid it. Rejecting A2 seems much more straightforward to me.
objection 2:
You could also argue that C1 is not implied, because "almost certainly" can not be "rounded up" to "certainly". Because rounding up percentages already implies the acceptance of an underlying fuzzy-logic in your model, and once we're beyond binary properties, we can no longer use the term "consciousness" as a binary property of an object either.
objection 3:
But if I were to assume ¬A1 instead, that does not imply that Boltzmann brain are non-conscious either. Just because I would reject that consciousness is not caused by brains, does not warrant blithely assuming that the phenomenon is not observed in people/things that have (or are) brains. On the contrary, I still have excellent evidence for the slightly weaker A1* "Most brains are intimately connected to consciousness", because shooting a bullet in a brain, strongly, (if circumstantially) implies "This person/thing that has or is a brain is no longer conscious now.". However, now we have the same problem as before:
B*:=A1* ∧ A2-> C1. But C1 -> ¬A2. Therefore A2 -> ¬A2. Contradiction.
So now you have to argue ¬B*, whilst still accepting B. However, I would strongly argue that B->¬(¬B*). Alternatively you could argue that A1* is false, but what is your experiential evidence for that being true?
This is just sloppy reasoning on both arguments. They both rely on caricaturish oversimplifications.