I your description of how complex physical processes like global attention / GWT to simple ones like feedforward nets.
I think you missed a word. :P
E.g. to describe a recurrent net as a feedforward net you need a ridiculous number of parameters (with the same parameter values in each layer).
That’s true, but there’s no good line to draw for the number of iterations, so this seems more a matter of degree than kind. (I also don’t see why the parameter values should be the same, but maybe this could be important. I wrote that I found this unlikely, but not extremely unlikely.)
So that doesn’t imply that the universe is full of recurrent nets (even if it were full of feedforward nets which it isn’t).
I do think the universe is full of both, see Brian’s comment. E.g. an electron influences other particles which in turn influence the electron again.
To draw a caricature of your argument as I understand it: It turns out computers can be reduced to logic gates. Therefore, everything is a computer.
Basically. The claims these theories are making are that certain kinds of physical processes are required (perhaps in certain ways), but these processes are ubiquitous (so will often be “accidentally” arranged in those certain ways, too), although to much lower degrees. It’s like “Computers are physical systems made up of logic gates. Logic gates are everywhere, so computers are everywhere.” Their necessary conditions that can be explained in physical terms are too easy to meet.
Or another caricature: Recurrent nets are a special case of {any arrangement of atoms}. Therefore any arrangement of atoms is an RNN.
This would of course be invalid logic on its own. I’d say that ubiquitous feedforward processes simulate recurrent ones to shallow recurrence depth.
On further reflection, though, I think A→B→A→B or A→B→A→B→A may be better called recurrent than just A→B→A, since the latter only includes one of each of A→B and B→A.
(I do think most actual local (in the special/general relativity sense) arrangements of atoms have recurrence in them, though, as long as the atoms’ relative positions aren’t completely fixed. I expect feedback in their movements due to mutual influence.)
I agree that physical theories of consciousness are pan psychist if they say that every recurrent net is conscious (or that everything that can be described as GWT is conscious). The main caveats for me are:
Does anyone really claim that every recurrent net is conscious? It seems so implausible. E.g. if I initialize my net with random parameters, it just computes garbage. Or if I have a net with 1 parameter it seems too simple. Or if the number of iterations is 1 (as you say), it’s just a trivial case of recurrence. Or if it doesn’t do any interesting task, such as prediction...
(Also, most recurrent nets in nature would be gerrymandered. I could imagine there are enough that aren’t though, such as potentially your examples).
NB, recurrence doesn’t necessarily imply recurrent processing (the term from recurrent processing theory). The ‘processing’ part could hide a bunch of complexity?
Does anyone really claim that every recurrent net is conscious? It seems so implausible.
I think IIT supporters would claim this. I don’t think most theories or their supporters claim to be panpsychist, but I think if you look at their physical requirements abstractly, they are panpsychist. Actually, Lamme, who came up with Recurrent Processing Theory, claims that it, IIT and GNWT endorse panpsychism here1, and it seems that he really did intend for two neurons to be enough for recurrent processing:
Current models of consciousness all suffer from the same problem: at their core, they are fairly simple, too simple maybe. The distinction between feedforward and recurrent processing already exists between two reciprocally connected neurons. Add a third and we can distinguish between ‘local’ and ‘global’ recurrent processing. From a functional perspective, processes like integration, feature binding, global access, attention, report, working memory, metacognition and many others can be modelled with a limited set of mechanisms (or lines of Matlab code). More importantly, it is getting increasingly clear that versions of these functions exist throughout the animal kingdom, and maybe even in plants.
1. In a more limited form applying to basically all animals and possibly plants, too, but I think his view of what should count as a network or processing might be too narrow, e.g. why shouldn’t an electron and its position count as a neuron and its firing?
I think you missed a word. :P
That’s true, but there’s no good line to draw for the number of iterations, so this seems more a matter of degree than kind. (I also don’t see why the parameter values should be the same, but maybe this could be important. I wrote that I found this unlikely, but not extremely unlikely.)
I do think the universe is full of both, see Brian’s comment. E.g. an electron influences other particles which in turn influence the electron again.
Basically. The claims these theories are making are that certain kinds of physical processes are required (perhaps in certain ways), but these processes are ubiquitous (so will often be “accidentally” arranged in those certain ways, too), although to much lower degrees. It’s like “Computers are physical systems made up of logic gates. Logic gates are everywhere, so computers are everywhere.” Their necessary conditions that can be explained in physical terms are too easy to meet.
This would of course be invalid logic on its own. I’d say that ubiquitous feedforward processes simulate recurrent ones to shallow recurrence depth.
On further reflection, though, I think A→B→A→B or A→B→A→B→A may be better called recurrent than just A→B→A, since the latter only includes one of each of A→B and B→A.
(I do think most actual local (in the special/general relativity sense) arrangements of atoms have recurrence in them, though, as long as the atoms’ relative positions aren’t completely fixed. I expect feedback in their movements due to mutual influence.)
I agree that physical theories of consciousness are pan psychist if they say that every recurrent net is conscious (or that everything that can be described as GWT is conscious). The main caveats for me are:
Does anyone really claim that every recurrent net is conscious? It seems so implausible. E.g. if I initialize my net with random parameters, it just computes garbage. Or if I have a net with 1 parameter it seems too simple. Or if the number of iterations is 1 (as you say), it’s just a trivial case of recurrence. Or if it doesn’t do any interesting task, such as prediction...
(Also, most recurrent nets in nature would be gerrymandered. I could imagine there are enough that aren’t though, such as potentially your examples).
NB, recurrence doesn’t necessarily imply recurrent processing (the term from recurrent processing theory). The ‘processing’ part could hide a bunch of complexity?
I think IIT supporters would claim this. I don’t think most theories or their supporters claim to be panpsychist, but I think if you look at their physical requirements abstractly, they are panpsychist. Actually, Lamme, who came up with Recurrent Processing Theory, claims that it, IIT and GNWT endorse panpsychism here1, and it seems that he really did intend for two neurons to be enough for recurrent processing:
1. In a more limited form applying to basically all animals and possibly plants, too, but I think his view of what should count as a network or processing might be too narrow, e.g. why shouldn’t an electron and its position count as a neuron and its firing?