Donald Hoffman - Fusing agents and qualia: a formal solution to the combination problem

[Stranger]

Thanks for your insights, Eugene!
On the subject of top-down, bottom-up, I guess there may be a way round it: Top down has minimal "understanding" so goes with simple structures it evolves (almost by chance or by repeated iterations trying to make sense out of chaos), then builds these up as different combinations of independent (dissociated) structures. I suppose there would need to be some kind of combinatory power which produces an ego - the "executive control" structure, with an extra level of dissociation, which provides a being with its unitary sense of personal identity and makes no reference to elements of its own structure that interfere with that.

Yes, that makes sense. I think the ego does not just randomly develop, there is also a component of biological evolution here: once there becomes a structure that enables competition for limited resources and survival, then it inevitably leads to the development of ego and dualistic mechanism of perception in the dissociated beings (partitioning the perceived world into separate subjects and objects), since these perceptional structures are crucial for biological survival.

[Stranger]

I don't really understand the bold sentence. How can it be a scientific breakthrough if we know the laws of physics cannot be reduced to anything else? I wonder if you had a chance to visit the link that Cleric shared in his initial response. In that post, he discussed Levin's research of morphic spaces, which is based on direct observation and contemplation of the intelligent agency implicit in living processes, even those we experience as being 'mechanistic' ones. The dynamics of any given morphic space cannot be reduced to another - for ex. biological processes cannot be reduced to the laws of physics, and neither can the laws of physics be reduced to biological (etheric) laws or the laws of simple conscious agents. Mathematical models are only useful to the extent they overlap with our first-person living experience, such as Levin investigates. Otherwise, they are floating into assumptions that are not warranted by that experience and inevitably lead to irresolvable hard problems.

I used the word "reduced" here in a sense that the physical laws can be "mapped" to the dynamics of conscious processes in a certain morphic space. This closes the explanatory gap in idealism between the fundamental reality of consciousness and apparent reality of the physical world. But I agree with you on the irreducibility of different morphic spaces, more on it below.

Got it. I am still pretty unclear on what DH imagines "fusing" to be - is it simply our way of understanding the hierarchical relations of agents already in existence, i.e. the qualitative states of being of higher-order agents provide the 'fields of potential' in which lower-order agents exist and unfold their states of being, or does he think we can derive an understanding of the evolutionary process in this way, i.e. we can explain how thinking consciousness emerged from lower-order instinctive consciousness?

I don't know what DH thinks about it, but I don't believe such "fusion" can automatically explain the formation of higher-order qualia and meanings from instinctive lower-order ones. There is still a mystery here (at least to me), I'm convinced that the higher-order intuitive/imaginary meanings are in principle irreducible to lower order ones, and one of the reasons for that is that they are incomputable and qualitative by nature (and therefore no computable mathematically-describable process such as "fusion" can ever explain it). This is also the reason why any kind of AI, no matter how powerful it is, will never be able to understand these higher-order meanings, even though it can almost perfectly mimic such understanding.

[AshvinP]

I don't really understand the bold sentence. How can it be a scientific breakthrough if we know the laws of physics cannot be reduced to anything else? I wonder if you had a chance to visit the link that Cleric shared in his initial response. In that post, he discussed Levin's research of morphic spaces, which is based on direct observation and contemplation of the intelligent agency implicit in living processes, even those we experience as being 'mechanistic' ones. The dynamics of any given morphic space cannot be reduced to another - for ex. biological processes cannot be reduced to the laws of physics, and neither can the laws of physics be reduced to biological (etheric) laws or the laws of simple conscious agents. Mathematical models are only useful to the extent they overlap with our first-person living experience, such as Levin investigates. Otherwise, they are floating into assumptions that are not warranted by that experience and inevitably lead to irresolvable hard problems.

I used the word "reduced" here in a sense that the physical laws can be "mapped" to the dynamics of conscious processes in a certain morphic space. This closes the explanatory gap in idealism between the fundamental reality of consciousness and apparent reality of the physical world. But I agree with you on the irreducibility of different morphic spaces, more on it below.

Got it. I am still pretty unclear on what DH imagines "fusing" to be - is it simply our way of understanding the hierarchical relations of agents already in existence, i.e. the qualitative states of being of higher-order agents provide the 'fields of potential' in which lower-order agents exist and unfold their states of being, or does he think we can derive an understanding of the evolutionary process in this way, i.e. we can explain how thinking consciousness emerged from lower-order instinctive consciousness?

I don't know what DH thinks about it, but I don't believe such "fusion" can automatically explain the formation of higher-order qualia and meanings from instinctive lower-order ones. There is still a mystery here (at least to me), I'm convinced that the higher-order intuitive/imaginary meanings are in principle irreducible to lower order ones, and one of the reasons for that is that they are incomputable and qualitative by nature (and therefore no computable mathematically-describable process such as "fusion" can ever explain it). This is also the reason why any kind of AI, no matter how powerful it is, will never be able to understand these higher-order meanings, even though it can almost perfectly mimic such understanding.

Upon watching the interview with Riddle, I noticed DH makes a key point here (based on Penrose):





"A person who understands Godel's theorem is understanding something beyond the formal system." In other words, in our understanding, we have already transcended Godel's theorem that applies to the logical systems produced through our understanding. The theorem is only a limit for those who want to theoretically encapsulate the qualitative dynamics of the morphic spaces in formal mathematical systems. For those who seek to understand the spaces and our participation within them through imaginative symbols (which can be expressed in lucid concepts), there is no such limit. How could it be otherwise if our intelligence is continuous with the higher-order intelligence that structures our flow of thinking experience?

This is the seed point of modern initiation through the portal of thinking. It is the recognition of 'true time' (T) in the experience of thinking that intuitively knows how its perceptions transform. DH often mentions how 'we need to beyond spacetime' to explore the intelligent architecture that projects into our normal consciousness as spacetime and its perceptual transformations. Actually, we go beyond spacetime every time we sleep and the astral-ego radiates outwards from the physical-etheric. All we need to do is awaken within our sleeping states to be consciously present in the movements beyond spacetime. Then we come to know, in full lucidity, the source of our intuitions and inspirations that allow us to understand Godel's theorem and all mathematical models and relate them to the underlying structure of ideal reality.

[Stranger]

"A person who understands Godel's theorem is understanding something beyond the formal system." In other words, in our understanding, we have already transcended Godel's theorem that applies to the logical systems produced through our understanding. The theorem is only a limit for those who want to theoretically encapsulate the qualitative dynamics of the morphic spaces in formal mathematical systems. For those who seek to understand the spaces and our participation within them through imaginative symbols (which can be expressed in lucid concepts), there is no such limit. How could it be otherwise if our intelligence is continuous with the higher-order intelligence that structures our flow of thinking experience?

Right, I agree.

[Stranger]

Therefore, my question to you is what exactly are the above mentioned quantitative and computable aspects of consciousness?
Please, list as many of them as you remember, or revisit your sources, please.

When you think a mathematical thought, for ex. "2+2=4", your thought itself is qualitative by nature (as it is a first-person qualitative cosncious experience). However, the mathematical structure in the content of the thought is still quantitative. So, quantitative-qualitative is not an opposition/contradiction, but it is an inclusion: the quantitative/computable is a limited subset of qualitative, or we can say, a limited aspect of it. Therefore, reality can never be fully described by quantitative, yet quantitative (being an aspect of qualitative) can still describe certain aspects of reality, in particular, its certain structural and quantitative properties and aspects.

[lorenzop]

"A person who understands Godel's theorem is understanding something beyond the formal system." In other words, in our understanding, we have already transcended Godel's theorem that applies to the logical systems produced through our understanding. The theorem is only a limit for those who want to theoretically encapsulate the qualitative dynamics of the morphic spaces in formal mathematical systems. For those who seek to understand the spaces and our participation within them through imaginative symbols (which can be expressed in lucid concepts), there is no such limit. How could it be otherwise if our intelligence is continuous with the higher-order intelligence that structures our flow of thinking experience?

Right, I agree.

I'm not sure what is meant by 'imaginative symbols', but I would guess that the Yin/Yang symbol and idea is an example. Obviously no one such symbol can completely describe reality, and I can't imagine you'd think that the body of 'imaginative symbols', even as a whole, can explain\describe or be a substitute for reality.
Perhaps I don't understand your point.
I think what we are learning is no positive claim about the nature of reality can withstand scrutiny - there will always be conflicting data and or contradictions built in to any theory or 'imaginative symbol'.

[AshvinP]

Dear Ashvin,

I would like to respectfully ask you for your opinion, please.

Would you like to be so kind and tell me, please,
if you completely agree with everything
that Cleric wrote in the following post of his:

viewtopic.php?p=22991#p22991

Respectfully, Jon, I will answer your questions once you intelligently respond to Cleric's several posts to you on that thread. So far the substance of everything he wrote to you about the nature of Ahayuasca-fueled visions of the etheric spectrum (confused for 'spiritual reality'), which do nothing to elucidate the meaningful structure of our normal experience, has been completely ignored.

[AshvinP]

Respectfully, Jon, I will answer your questions once you intelligently respond to Cleric's several posts to you on that thread. So far the substance of everything he wrote to you about the nature of Ahayuasca-fueled visions of the etheric spectrum (confused for 'spiritual reality'), which do nothing to elucidate the meaningful structure of our normal experience, has been completely ignored.

Ashvin, thank you. I would like you to know that I have carefully studied all the posts of Cleric that were addressed to me, and after meditating on their meaning, I have come to completely agree with everything that Cleric wrote, except his speculations about what might be happening inside my mind, because I know it first-hand that he wasn't correct.

Ok, so for instance, if we look at this part of the post:

Now what you call spiritual reality is really the impression taken from an altered state of consciousness. Think about it: in what ways your intuition of existence has expanded after you beheld the etheric landscape? Do you understand better how life originated? Did you see why there are stars and planets? Why there are mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms? Did you see what the place of man is within the Cosmic mystery? What is the direction worth pursuing? Did you see what happens with the soul after death? Whether it returns back in the sensory spectrum?

You agree the brain-tweaked altered state does not elucidate our intuitive orientation to these questions out of itself? If you agree, do you think it's important to gain an intuitive orientation to such questions?

[Stranger]

"A person who understands Godel's theorem is understanding something beyond the formal system." In other words, in our understanding, we have already transcended Godel's theorem that applies to the logical systems produced through our understanding. The theorem is only a limit for those who want to theoretically encapsulate the qualitative dynamics of the morphic spaces in formal mathematical systems. For those who seek to understand the spaces and our participation within them through imaginative symbols (which can be expressed in lucid concepts), there is no such limit. How could it be otherwise if our intelligence is continuous with the higher-order intelligence that structures our flow of thinking experience?

Right, I agree.

I'm not sure what is meant by 'imaginative symbols', but I would guess that the Yin/Yang symbol and idea is an example. Obviously no one such symbol can completely describe reality, and I can't imagine you'd think that the body of 'imaginative symbols', even as a whole, can explain\describe or be a substitute for reality.
Perhaps I don't understand your point.
I think what we are learning is no positive claim about the nature of reality can withstand scrutiny - there will always be conflicting data and or contradictions built in to any theory or 'imaginative symbol'.

You are right, the imaginative symbols cannot fully describe reality, they only apply and can describe thinking and structures created by it. However, there are other (nondual) aspects of reality that cannot be fully described by symbols and ideas of thinking, yet they can be experientially known through direct first-person experience. So, comprehending certain aspects of reality by higher-order thinking definitely has its place, but it we limit ourselves only to the path of thinking, our knowledge of reality will necessarily be limited. However, the same limitation applies to another extreme if we neglect the thinking path and only approach reality through direct nonconceptual experience. So, both of these extremes have their limitations, it's only their integration and understanding their limitations that brings us to the most comprehensive path to the knowledge of reality.

[Cleric K]

I used the word "reduced" here in a sense that the physical laws can be "mapped" to the dynamics of conscious processes in a certain morphic space. This closes the explanatory gap in idealism between the fundamental reality of consciousness and apparent reality of the physical world. But I agree with you on the irreducibility of different morphic spaces, more on it below.

Eugene, what's below is not intended as a comment on something you said but I simply decided to add some thoughts on the topic.

Contemplating the theoretical developments in the recent years allows us to encompass the intellectual evolution from a higher standpoint – if we are willing to do so.

We have used the Day and Night Escher painting many times to explain how for quite some centuries we’ve been stuck in a very one-sided cognitive stance. Through the ages, human thinking gradually crystalized from the holistic mythological conditions, where the soul felt as embedded in the spiritual Cosmos. The possibility to analyze our existence into atoms and forces goes hand in hand with the development of the intellectual soul. Reality felt much more fluid for the ancients. It would have been bewildering if someone was to tell them that reality consists of separate units that pull and repel each other. This would sound completely contradictory to their dreamy consciousness, where everything felt to be flowing along streamlines of godly intents. Only when the human “I” emancipated itself from this flow and could recognize its existence in its ability to arrange inert thought structures, became possible to see the Cosmos as made of units governed by laws of nature. In other words, we can comprehend reality to the extent we can fill it with our thoughts. As a simplified example, if our thoughts could only take rectangular shape, then we would only be able to grasp existence as made of rectangles.

Things really took off with the work of Newton. From that point on, man was really eager to understand what the World is made of. What he has been unconscious about, however, is that in this way he was exploring the possibilities of his thinking.

Let me use this Iterated Function System gif again:



We’ve talked many times that it only seems to us that the metamorphoses of our thinking are completely free. In fact, the basic feelings and ideas (and many deeper factors) that are part of our intuitive context, act as the coefficients of the function. For a hands on example, it may be interesting to play with this tool. Press the NEW button several times until something interesting is generated. Then you can play with the L-shaped gizmos. Each of them represents a simple affine transformation (scaling, rotation, translation) except the large white L shape which acts as the coordinate system. The gizmo is simply a visual way to set the coefficients of the function, instead of inputting them as numbers.

Here the method of generation is different that the accumulation of pixels in the gif above. It is more like video feedback loop, where we start with few rectangles which are transformed by the functions (scaled, rotated, translated in exactly the way the corresponding gizmo is positioned). Then the resulting image is transformed again by the same functions and so on. Nevertheless, the resulting image is attracted to the same shape as with the pixel walk.

The point of these examples is that according to the current ‘coefficients’ of our stream of becoming, our mental states can land only in quite specific patterns.

When we began thinking through the coefficients of the Newtonian worldview, our thoughts could correspondingly form only specific patterns and relations. In other words, by thinking through these iterations, there’s practically no chance to land, for example, in a genuine thought that resonates with something of the depth of spiritual reality. Newtonian thoughts move through attractors where the mental states are experienced as replicas of sensory states.

Quantum mechanics demanded that the coefficients are tweaked such that we can traverse quite unintuitive (from the previous ideal stance) thinking states. To be able to think in terms of quantum mechanics our mental states need to be able to land in patterns that are part of the black area of the Newtonian pattern. We were forced by the facts to think about reality not as things of which it is made but in terms of a superposition of states.

Now what has been the trend in physics thinking in the last decades? Basically, to find general mathematical objects (such as the E8 group), which are general enough that they can fit the observed quantified relations.


(E8 lattice)

What DH is doing, is going even further – he seeks mathematical objects that are even more general, which are not sought for their ability to mimic 4D spacetime, but which are so general that that latter is contained only as a special case.

To make this more accessible, imagine the patterns in which our thinking can move as a simple grid of points.



Then if someone tells us “draw a cat”, we can try but the resulting figure looks only like a bunch of rectangles. By probing more and more our thinking degrees of freedom in novel ways, it can be said that this grid becomes much finer. Now if someone asks us to draw a cat, we say “Sure” and connect the dots in any way we like.

Such is the direction where something like what DH is doing, is headed. By thinking in terms of these super general mathematical structures, we create for ourselves a very fine thinking grid which can capture much more freely our imagination. Basically, we can connect the dots in any way we like and we can show that any physical theory is already contained as a special case.

In a way, this is bound to happen in the course history. What we’re thus doing is unknowingly coming to know the Day part of the Escher’s painting. Gradually we’ll learn to think about reality not in terms of what it is and what it is made of, but in terms of what it could be. In other words, reality is not a fixed arena where elements can exist and various permutations but any existential state will be seen only as an instance filtered of the infinite potential of what existence could be. Evolution will be seen as gradual emergence from the attractors (governed by our subconscious interests, sympathies, antipathies, ideas, and all the higher orders of reality) through which our states of existence were metamorphosing.

The big question today is whether we’ll recognize that the intellect is only an octave of spiritual activity. By refining the intellectual grid we approach the upper boundary of the octave. This is the reason why so many people today believe that by dissolving the intellect into an infinitely fine grid, we have reached the source of all existence. And in a sense, this is already similar to that source but only at a different scale, within a deeper convolution of the Cosmic potential. We have only unfolded one such convolution and the fact that we still continue to walk the Earth and be steered by Karma, is the clear evidence that we haven’t undone the Cosmos.

The challenge now is to have the courage to seek the higher forms of consciousness at whose level can be found the ‘coefficients’ of the patterns that our present flow traverses. Not as some abstract objects but as living spiritual activity of beings.  As a metaphor, in Imaginative cognition it is as if we adjust the coefficients in the IFS tool above. For example, by tweaking an opinion that we hold, we can experience in a panoramic way what our mental states could traverse. Our opinions are like filters. They are coefficients which make our thinking life rigid and our mental states can land only in certain patterns. If we can overcome the emotional resistance of our sympathies and antipathies, when we transform an opinion, we immediately become conscious of other mental states that we can iterate.

As long as we avoid to experience our thinking as the expression of our innermost spiritual being, we’ll simply iterate patterns that we naively accept to be our free expressions. We’ll experience ourselves jumping from mental state into mental state and seek the answers within the mental states themselves. Today many already understand that no matter how fine our grid of thinking becomes, as long as we jump around this grid, something of reality remains out of bounds. It is only felt but can’t be brought down in its entirety into the grid points. This is the reason for all the talks about the impossibility of ToE, Gödel incompleteness and so on.

Emerging in the higher octave of cognition demands organization of our soul life and ultimately concentration of thinking. Concentration of thinking is not the same as dissolving our spirit in an infinitely fine grid and calling that pure consciousness. In that case our life still continues to flow in patterns quite unknown to us. When we concentrate our spiritual force (and this requires that we resist the usual patterns), we can gradually begin to sense how the deeper coefficients of our soul life determine the patterns that our intellect traverses in its octave. When we purify our passions, when we overcome our prejudices, unfounded opinions, and when we develop the sacred attitude and reverence towards the Cosmic Intelligence on whose flow our own more limited existence is modulated, then we begin to awaken to a higher being whose spiritual activity is similar to what we do in the IFS tool when moving the gizmos. In other words, in Imagination we smoothly transform the constellations of our sympathies, antipathies and ideal curvatures, which results in panoramic insights about what our thinking being in the intellectual octave would traverse.