cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/1293808
Archived version: https://archive.ph/fHjNq
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230810182753/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66407099
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Forces of Nature
- electromagnetism
- strong nuclear force
- weak nuclear force
- gravity
5?. whatever the hell might be acting on the muons in this article
Quick, everyone ignore 0 because it’s “too hard”, even though it’s the only reason we can study 1-5: consciousness
Why would you assume consciousness is a fundamental force rather than an emergent property of complex systems built on the forces?
Why would you assume it’s an emergent property and thus should be dismissed as not being a force of nature? I’m making fewer assumptions than you are by wanting to list it alongside the other forces until we can determine if it is emergent or not, and the implications of such emergence. It’s kind of a big deal that we can sit here and ponder the forces of nature with some degree of control over our little sack of atoms.
It’s safe to say that this list is going to change over time and represents a current snapshot of humanity’s limited understanding. Under the current snapshot of human understanding, leaving it off of the list seems to me to indicate an ironic bias on the behalf of researchers who must use the very force in question to do anything. By necessity, it is the overarching phenomenon surrounding all other forces since the only place we can definitively know these forces even exist is within our own mind. To say anything more is to make assumptions.
While I agree that a certain level of assumptions are necessary if we’re going to get anywhere, I’m also acutely aware that they’re still assumptions and that assumptions are not scientific. If we’re going to be scientific about this, we need to make as few assumptions as possible.
The fundamental forces are physical forces. Consciousness is not a force, as far as we know.
Your comment doesn’t make any sense.
The fundamental forces are physical forces.
It is feasible for consciousness to be something like a force (more accurately, perhaps, a field) and as such it would be by definition a “physical” force. The use of the modifier “physical” on force doesn’t make much sense here: all forces are physical, as are all things that actually exist. It could be useful to consider the objects of consciousness as emergent, and the force of consciousness as fundamental; I don’t know enough about this line of thought to say much on that.
Consciousness is not a force, as far as we know.
That’s literally what the comment you’re replying to says. Emphasis on “as far as we know”. There’s no obvious way to dismiss it outright as not being a force, it’s just that as far as we know currently, it isn’t a force.
I don’t personally have a well thought out stance on the matter.
Consciousness is relevant, and your point should not be dismissed. But it is difficult to measure, so science is not able to comment on it yet, rightfully so.
Force of nature or not, some abstract philosophical conceps will have to wait to be tested experimentally or better described empirically in order to be applied the same way.
At a sketch:
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We know that when the brain chemistry is disrupted, our consciousness is disrupted
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You can test this yourself. Drink some alcohol and your consciousness will be disrupted. Similarly I am on Gabapentin for nerve pain, which works by inhibiting the electrical signals my nerves use to fire, and in turn makes me groggy.
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While we don’t know exactly how consciousness works, we have a VERY good understanding of chemistry, which is to say, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (fundamental forces). Literally millions of repeatable experiments that have validated these forces exist and we understand the way they behave.
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Drugs like Gabapentin and Alcohol interact with our brain using these forces.
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If the interaction of these forces being disrupted disrupts our consciousness, it’s reasonable to conclude that our consciousness is built on top of, or is an emergent property of, these forces’ interactions.
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If our consciousness is made up of these forces, then it cannot be a fundamental force as, by definition, fundamental forces must be the basic building blocks of physics and not derived from other forces.
There are no real assumptions here. It’s all a line of logical reasoning based on observations you can do yourself.
I find emergence to be the least reasonable of the 3 main hypotheses I consider, but I still accept that it’s possible since I can’t disprove it. However, it is illogical to conclude your hypothesis must be true at this stage.
Your comparison proves nothing. It is no different than insisting a radio must be creating the signal it’s picking up, because if you poured alcohol or liquid gabapentin all over it, it will no longer be able to play music. I’m sure you realize that if your radio breaks, that doesn’t mean the radio signal has disappeared. It is possible our brains are simply interfacing with consciousness rather than inexplicably fabricating it from more than the sum of its parts.
Based on everything science has taught me, it seems far more likely to me that consciousness is not magically created by my brain, but rather one of two things are happening:
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My brain is able to interface with a conscious field
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Consciousness is a force inherent within the universe, and our brains are able to make use of the force
it seems far more likely to me that consciousness is not magically created by my brain,
Where “magic” means “I don’t understand a single bit of information theory, computer science, suchlike”.
Something becoming more than the sum of its parts to such a degree would indeed be magic. Are you claiming we’re AI computer programs and that real life is analogous to ChatGPT? Are information and consciousness synonymous? I would say that one of us indeed doesn’t understand the complexity of the situation.
Are you claiming we’re AI computer programs and that real life is analogous to ChatGPT?
No, those are T2 systems and we’re (at least) T3 systems, roughly speaking we don’t have pre-programmed methods of learning and can generate behaviour from that, but we have pre-programmed methods of learning how to learn to generate behaviour. Notice the additional “learn”. T4 if you count evolution itself as a further level, learning that which is pre-programmed in us.
Practopoiesis is currently the best model we have, incorporating all the neurological and psychological data we have in a cybernetic understanding of things respecting (as cybernetics generally does) issues of computability and complexity theory. Trying to replicate the information processing capacity of the human brain with our current AI tech, all T2 systems, indeed would require computers (or brains) the size of multiple planets. It’d also make us prone to forget how to play piano when learning to cook pasta as compartmentalisation of learning requires said capacity to learn how to learn, to encode things in distinct ways and not just smear everything into an overgeneralised whole, overwriting unrelated information.
Are information and consciousness synonymous?
Now that would be rather strange and terminally fuzzy. You could say that consciousness is a by-product of information processing. Best I can put it (and this is meditation experience, not fancy science) is that the field of consciousness is a point of different information processing systems coalescing, integrating their individual results. A committee meeting room of sorts. We like to identify with that and think it’s oh so important but, eh, is it really? I mean the identification, not the coalescing and integrating. If the experience was not present but its function was still fulfilled, what would change in practice? Are you sure that none of those sub-systems contributing to your consciousness aren’t themselves conscious, you generally just don’t notice it because there’s no need to? If your motor cortex cracks a knuckle and you’re not around to notice it, did it really crack a knuckle?
I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let’s say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.
Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which… It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.
In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can’t have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.
Your example is a really really good one.
we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon
This statement begins with the assumption that the brain produces consciousness, then says that because the thing that produces consciousness has components, that it can’t be fundamental. This is a really really good example of circular logic.
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You also forgot 6. My dick.
Not my fault it’s so forgettable.
I bet you don’t think about gravity everyday either, but it still makes the world go round.
I thought it was capitalism /s
The 5th force of nature is the machine code.
Big whoop, I already found the sixth.
Yes, and please close that bathroom door to save us from that smell!
I’m hoping it turns out to be “funk”.
I love you’
What’s the other 4? Gravity… and… Light? Kinetic? Magnetic?
Gravity, The weak force, Electromagnetic force, The strong nuclear force
They’re literally listed in the article
Well, the article currently lists them as: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force.
If you’re not familiar, you wouldn’t be able to guess that the last two are nuclear forces and in the context of a new force, that list is rather confusing.
The body of the article lists them, they just aren’t listed in the title.
- Strong nuclear force: holds the nucleus of an atom together
- Weak nuclear force: responsible for radioactive decay
- Electromagnetic force: of charged particles
- Gravitational force: attractive force between objects with mass
Not all decays are weak-based, though, and not all weak phenomina are directly related to radioactivity. That’s just the only thing a layman has heard of where it’s relevant.
The strong force only holds atoms together through a sort of trickle-down force, too, but that one feels like splitting hairs.
The person I replied to wasn’t able to name the forces beyond gravity, so I think over-simplification and reduction to specific phenomena they would have heard of is appropriate.
Oh, absolutely. I was adding on for anyone else reading who might appreciate answer gravy. Sorry if it came across as critical of what you wrote, my bad.
Gotcha, no problem, I did take it as criticism of my comment but that was a reflex.
Reading it back I don’t blame you. It does come across as an attempt to argue.
If I remember there’s weak and strong nuclear force, then two others.
No, there’s two others, then the nuclear forces
I think there’s a nuclear force, then two others, then another nuclear force. But I could be wrong.
Maybe it’s nuclear forces all the way down
Yes, but the real nuclear forces were the friends we made along the way.
Someone’s trying to connect the dots on a grand unified theory.
The best ones are all untestable.
From Wikipedia: this is only a 1-sigma result compared to theory using lattice calculations. It would have been 5.1-sigma if the calculation method had not been improved.
Many calculations in the standard model are mathematically intractable with current methods, so improving approximate solutions is not trivial and not surprising that we’ve found improvements.So what? I mean, not to be shitty, but this is important work that allows for this downplayed and pedantic take to even exist.
Experimental verifications should be celebrated, and the fact that they’re not is the problem with the current state of science journalism.
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