One of the most peculiar facts about conscious beings is the way they invert causality. Normally we think, for example, of a fire under a teakettle as being a cause for the water in the kettle eventually boiling. But if I asked you, "Why is this stove burner on?" it would be entirely normal for you to answer, "I'm making tea." Mystically, the tea that does not yet exist, and will never exist if it turns out we're out of tea leaves, is purportedly causing the water to boil (in the future), which in turn is causing the fire to burn, all through the medium of your conscious intention to make tea. It's really a quite surprising ontological claim, and yet nothing could be more quotidian, at least for those of us in the tea-drinking parts of the world.
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.)
Your comment came at a right moment, right after my lecture in ontology yesterday where the proffesor presented the inverted casuality of a controller feedback loop as an example of a 2 types of causes described by aristotle that are lost in modern materialistic thinking, the formal cause and the final cause.
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?
He wasn't saying that the engineers believe that in ontological sense. Rather he was presenting the difference in how we usually think about complex systems (i.e. the thermostat "wants" to keep a stable temperature). We abstract away the materialism we believe in because it's not practical and in a way we come back to the causes that aristotle wrote about, just metodologically not ontologically.
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.
Modern materialistic thinking is causally downstream from the erasure from language of the distinction between the 2 types of causes -- as exemplified by the following buffonade:
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)
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.
> But if I asked you, "Why is this stove burner on?" it would be entirely normal for you to answer, "I'm making tea."
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).
Interesting! But it's not just a linguistic coincidence; it's really part of the causal structure of the world, arguably because there are conscious beings in it. In my example, if I use up the last of the tea leaves today, that can cause the stove burner to stay off tomorrow, because you might realize that the lack of tea leaves means you can't make tea. Me using up the tea leaves might cause you to visit the grocery store, too.
It's not all that bad; it's certainly no μA741. The LM324B is fine, but that isn't what my neighborhood electronic parts shop had in stock. Does yours?
There are better alternatives to the LM324B but almost all of them are more expensive.
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.)