I walked to the electronics store yesterday morning and bought some opamps. I find it amusing to think of opamps as bringing intentionality to circuits: they invert causality in precisely the same way as you do when you are making tea. The non-inverting input voltage is the op-amp's intention, the inverting input voltage is its observation which it interprets as a model of the world, and its output current is the behavior it controls according to that model to bring the world into accordance with its intentions.
The op-amp's behavior is only effective if there is a "structural similarity" between the world as the op-amp imagines it and the world as it really is, namely, if spewing out more current on its output will raise its inverting input relative to its non-inverting input, and sucking in more or spewing out less will lower it; we normally call this the negative-feedback condition. An op-amp hooked up backwards so the feedback instead is positive and drives it into overload is, in this analogy, like an insane or otherwise irrational person who keeps taking actions that predictably achieve the opposite of their intention, like posting comments on HN in order to enjoy thoughtful conversation.
When we design analog circuits with op-amps, we do routinely use the same kind of inverted-causality reasoning we use with the tea. Suppose it succeeds at making its inputs equal; what then is the situation that must prevail in the circuit? Oh, Vo = V1 + V2 - V3 - V4. Or Vo = -5Vi. And so it is, at least if the op-amp's feedback is not frustrated, or so effective that it sends the circuit into oscillation.
Op-amps (and thermostats) are clearly doing something that shares important features with human goal-directed activity, to the point that it seems practically useful to ascribe intentions to it, saying "this op-amp wants these currents to be equal" in a way that it isn't useful to say "this weight wants to move downward".
So I wonder what it is like to be an LM324N op-amp. I imagine it to be a very simple sort of existence, if not always a happy one. I prefer to be a human, but, failing that, I'd rather be a bacterium than an op-amp.
So it's amusing to see that Chalmers had the same thought. I wonder if I got it from him through indirect memetic contagion. (Though as far as I can tell he doesn't discuss oscillation, positive feedback runaway, or this peculiar inversion of causality. But I really doubt those are original to me, either.)
Great examples with the tea and the opamp for how a final cause be in the "future" of the effect, I'll remember them for the exam :)
Yet I think of electrical engineering as the epitome of modern materialism, however mystical the jargon about imaginary current phasors and complex permittivity may seem to the uninitiated. Electrical engineers think of electrical fields as material things that exist in the universe and follow probabilistic but all-encompassing laws, not as supernatural spiritual entities. Could your professor be wrong?
With vibe coding, one could even say that you can believe in the computer's intent to write the code and the code working through that intent. You might not even know how the code looks after all.
Arlecchino: does something stupid
Pierrot: smacks Arlecchino across the back of the head
Arlecchino: Ow! What for?
Pierrot: Not "what for", but "why", dumbass.
(Been a bacterium btw. Strong emotions all around, as there's nothing to temper them with. Do not recommend. An opamp is nicer - as long as they make sure to keep you within operating parameters, and not put you in a configuration experiencing infinite positive feedback, lmao)
For the record, Aristotle had a total of four types of causes:
When someone says "I am making tea", to me, they mean "I have a plan! The execution of that plan has begun. The goal is to make tea." and in the context, because that's the answer to the question, they are also saying "The reason the stove is on is because I am executing that very plan."
Is this just idiomatic English? If we went formal logic on every sentence it would be a verbose world. Maybe other languages are more explicit.
This is a confusion specific to the English language, not consciousness in general. Some languages distinguish between the past-oriented cause-why and the future-oriented goal-why explicitly (e.g. Russian: почему vs зачем).
<s>An incredibly obsolete part btw~~</s> oops, that's the the LM741
There are better alternatives to the LM324B but almost all of them are more expensive.
Oh, I see your edit. Yeah, I confuse them too.
But this article ain't it.
Good starting point to the topic is Chalmers' "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness".
This cybernetic alchemist also invented functional air conditioning, a perpetual motion machine (wound a clock powered by daily changes in barometric pressure), solar powered fountains and the first functional submarine (along with torpedos).
I have a full sized replica of his wooden submarine in Amsterdam. He also invented a mechanism for generating oxygen — necessary for the rowers, of course.
His thermostat was used to incubate eggs. It appeared in Chinese literature, with illustrations, within 50 years.
https://drebbel.net/2013%20Drebbels%20Athanor.pdf
This is pre steampunk — alchemy-punk?
Both Shakespeare and Ben Johnson wrote plays with characters based on Drebbel.
He also invented magic lanterns (projection devices) and camera obscures for painters.
He was widely discussed by members of the Royal Society, but had been generally forgotten. Largely because a few early Dutch scientists thought he was a charlatan.
You frame it as if there's a wrong way and a correct way. We're still watching the effects of the colors of the oil paint smeared on our hands while we just have an idea of the painting, but we don't even know if using a brush would be better than using a painting knife.
If you explain it the other way around, you'll also face some serious issues. Do we live in a shared reality, independent of us, which allows us to "come in" and interact with other beings, with pre-set rules of how this reality shares ours and other's interactions among all of us, or is this an all-encompassing reality which is the result of the imagination of a single being, possibly even one seeing itself through multiple simultaneous interaction points we call conscient beings in this place we call reality, which this thing has invented all by itself, from the ant walking over a grain of sand to you reading this message on a screen, a screen "we" first had to invent? If not even that is clear, how can anything be easy about any of this?
But the subjective quality of "what is it like to be X" is not easily captured by such descriptions - not unless you make some kind of panpsychist assumption that everything that has self-reference is subjectively conscious.
That said, a number of materialists say that there's no there there, and thus no problem. We're just all deluding ourselves into thinking that we have subjective experience. I don't think that argument is very strong, but it is made, and could explain why some find the whole business of consciousness seemingly trivial while others consider the hard problem to be very hard.
More information can be found at https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/
> Nagel challenges the possibility of explaining "the most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena" by reductive materialism (the philosophical position that all statements about the mind and mental states can be translated, without any loss or change in meaning, into statements about the physical). For example, a reductive physicalist's solution to the mind–body problem holds that whatever "consciousness" is, it can be fully described via physical processes in the brain and body.[5]
[…]
> The paper argues that the subjective nature of consciousness undermines any attempt to explain consciousness via objective, reductionist means. The subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a system of functional or intentional states. Consciousness cannot be fully explained if the subjective character of experience is ignored, and the subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a reductionist; it is a mental phenomenon that cannot be reduced to materialism.[6] Thus, for consciousness to be explained from a reductionist stance, the idea of the subjective character of experience would have to be discarded, which is absurd. Neither can a physicalist view, because in such a world, each phenomenal experience had by a conscious being would have to have a physical property attributed to it, which is impossible to prove due to the subjectivity of conscious experience. Nagel argues that each and every subjective experience is connected with a "single point of view", making it infeasible to consider any conscious experience as "objective".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
But the hunters still eat us.
The hunters have a faction who agitate for equal rights on our behalf, since we feel pain and suffer, and create engines (but not interstellar ones).
None of us want to tell them they are a little bit wrong in the essays, having picked up rudiments of their language and writings, even though both we and they understand calculus.
Or we could tell them, and propose we are just as important to the idea of an intergalactic organization, although we do just want to borrow some of their schematics around movement and weapons. (For our protection, of course.)
Therefore, the only beings a conscious folk consider likewise are those who may emerge in a fashion to make war to preserve themselves.
Does that mean we should expand consciousness otherwise to species that cannot?
What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42548641 - Dec 2024 (80 comments)
kubb•18h ago
I don’t like it because it’s so fundamentally unproductive, trying to fit formal logic onto the fuzziness of the language.
PunchTornado•18h ago
kragen•18h ago
JohnKemeny•18h ago
kragen•18h ago
And the first step in reducing some phenomenon of the contingent world, such as "heat" or "work" or "light" or "circle" or "strategy", to an abstraction you can apply math to, is precisely to "take[] some word from the natural language and tries to [invent] a formal definition for it with necessary and sufficient conditions." That's how you start applying the hypothetico-deductive method to anything.
You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy", but Plato, Newton, Kant, and Gauss would say you were full of shit.
Retric•17h ago
Ancient Egyptians didn’t know why the height of a pile of grain doesn’t grow linearly with the amount of grain in a column etc, instead mathematics was seen as a useful shortcut. Which has always been what applied mathematics ends up as.
> You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy"
There’s a far longer list of famous people including philosophers, scientists, etc who disagree with that idea than agree with it. Fundamentally they operate in different directions with philosophy attacking from the top down and science and mathematics from the bottom up.
Plato specifically disagreed with the notion that observation alone can lead to truth.
kragen•17h ago
Whether Plato believed that you could figure out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter from pure logic, or whether that required empirical observation, is irrelevant to the fact that he considered figuring out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter to be properly part of philosophy. This is an assertion that it would never have occurred to anyone to challenge until very recently, with the advent of the useless popular definition of "philosophy" you seem to be championing for some random reason.
Retric•16h ago
Plato specifically argued for truth independent of physical reality where Aristotle believed in empiricism.
As to your edit> You seem to want to redefine "philosophy" to mean "philosophy that doesn't work", which admittedly is a widespread definition today among the common people. But if we stipulate that definition, it has the practical problem that we cannot tell whether what Chalmers is up to here is "philosophy" or not until we find out whether it was a productive line of inquiry or not, perhaps in two or three hundred years.
Hardly, I specifically mentioned that some philosophers are open to observation but they get there as a philosophical stance first. Meanwhile Thomas Aquinas and many others argued that truth flowed from religious text. It’s easy to dismiss such reasoning especially when it disagrees with observed reality but that doesn’t erase such people from history.
Edit2: I’m done responding to your edits.
dr_dshiv•16h ago
For a Pythagorean, the world is made of math: “All is Number.” The math exists in immaterial reality — and harmonies in math manifested as harmonies in the material world (ie “harmony of the spheres”).
Plato merely critiqued that a focus on empirical mathematical modeling distracted from how geometry and other pure mathematics revealed basic truths about reality. I can provide source texts as well.
Retric•16h ago
Edit: He didn’t take the real world as a 1:1 mapping with Forms. So, deeper truths flowed from his abstract ideals, but they didn’t directly describe the physical world. We think of physics as descriptive an electron with respond this way to an electrical field, but that wasn’t how he thought of physics. Which is why he would argue studying the world isn’t a path to truth.
dr_dshiv•14h ago
There, I’m familiar with how Plato associated the four classical elements—earth, air, fire, and water—with specific geometric solids:
Fire: Tetrahedron
Air: Octahedron
Water: Icosahedron
Earth: Cube
The geometrical properties corresponded to the physical properties; for instance, the sharp points of the tetrahedron caused the penetrating nature of fire; whereas the cube produced solidity, etc.
Retric•13h ago
It’s not a single line but rather a mental model I found that makes reading what he wrote seem more consistent. I can support the argument, but there’s a reason people write long books about several thousand year old works.
Trying to wade through ancient philosophy even when reading translations is a difficult process as they fundamentally think in different terms. For us the moon and the stars are just different physical places we could in theory visit, I’ve touched moon rock and seen photos taken on other planets. However, for much of human history it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to treat the stars as other. I can’t really prove how someone thought that, but it definitely fits a great deal of writing.
jampekka•17h ago
The problem in many branches of philosophy is becoming the opposite: people debating without shared definitions and thus not even talking about the same thing.
Chalmers has been central in trying to find reasonable shared definitions for (some of) the many different phenomena that are all too often referred to as "consciousness".
kubb•15h ago
That’s part of what I dislike. It’s not enough (for the philosopher) for the definition to be useful inside a field of study. It has to be binding for everyone, presumably because it then can be used to persuade people in other matters.
jampekka•14h ago
xtiansimon•7h ago
For who? It’s wonderful for creative thinking [1].
It’s unproductive to deliver _new_ facts.
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/spring/feature/louis-kah...