What If Consciousness Comes First?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mysteries-consciousness/201907/what-if-consciousness-comes-first?

by devilcius • 7 years ago

328 548 7 years ago

I thought it was fascinating as I read the thesis statement that over two hundred years later we still haven't left Immanuel Kant's orbit. The author ended the article citing Kant's proposition that space and time belong to the mind rather than as properties of external reality however Kant directly answers her question, paraphrasing, "What is it that lends perception the power of perceiving", to which Kant answers with a technical term, original apperception, which more concretely means that the structure of consciousness, no matter its belonging to subjectivity (so-called empirical apperception, your spontaneous sense of selfhood), is itself objective (those terms are actually one in Kant, universal === necessary). There are readings of Kant to go further and suggest that math, by extension, must be the descriptor of anything that can exist therefore.

Interesting enough, the grandfather of the modern Left, Michel Foucault, spent a considerable amount of his career trying to dislodge Kant's claim before coming upon the realization that power informs our perceptions.

katttrrr• 7 years ago

What a thoughtful response. I'd love to know which readings you'd suggest reading and in what order.

claudiawerner3• 7 years ago

Not the user you replied to, but there's no harm (and in my judgement great benefit) from diving right into Kant, or more generally, German idealism - so Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Marx is also worth visiting for his "Hegelian" materialism (in this case opposed to idealism). That'll provide the basics to know what Foucault was talking about.

The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (I forget which year) is also highly recommended though I haven't looked into that myself.

barberousse2• 7 years ago

In order to understand Kant, first read David Hume's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Kant's major ideas are entirely a response to this essay (we English-speakers are lucky to have this crucial piece of the Enlightenment in our native tongue). Hume argues that cause and effect are entirely empirical concepts, which has the implication that we can't actually talk about "eternal laws of nature" with any sense. Kant wrote The Critique of Pure Reason and his subsequent critiques in the trilogy to argue that the laws of nature are laws because they are the laws of our ability to experience subjectivity at all. The Critique is very dense and technically written and the English translations do little to abate this. I would recommend reading it with a companion commentary text though unfortunately that wasn't the path I'd taken so I can't pick out a specific one.

donclark• 7 years ago

What about people that have a distaste for authority? Would this distrust dissolve how power informs our perceptions? Is there something in the transition period in the teenage years that also sets the foundation of perceptions? I ask because that is a time it seems where we take the most risks and question everything.

beat3• 7 years ago

Distrust of authority does not change the fact that power informs our perceptions.

Imagine trying to have a conversation in a loud room. You struggle to hear the person you're conversing with. The loudness of the room informs your perception of the conversation. You might not enjoy the loud room, but it's nonetheless there. And your frustration with the loud room is probably affecting your responses to the conversation.

nostrademons2• 7 years ago

Disagreement is shaped as much by power as agreement, because in both cases you accept the framing of what gets discussed posed by the people in power. Truly claiming that power for yourself requires breaking out of the frame entirely and directing your attention where you want it.

For example, public educators have near-absolute power over K-12 students in the U.S. Many students rebel against this (I certainly did), and do things like argue about homework or refuse to go to class. But that accepts the educators' power as legitimate; if it weren't, you wouldn't bother to rebel against it! Someone truly intent on seizing power for themselves would devote the minimum amount of effort and attention to pleasing his teachers, and then go off and write a machine-learning based MP3 player that he can go sell to Microsoft for a million dollars.

Analemma_• 7 years ago

For this reason, the “what it’s like” to be a conscious mind can’t be described in the purely relational, dispositional terms accessible to science. There’s just no way to get there from here.

Chalmers can keep saying this until he’s blue in the face, but it doesn’t make it true.

zepto2• 7 years ago

People can keep denying this until they are blue in the face but it doesn’t make it false.

blacksqr4• 7 years ago

The burden of proof rests on those asserting that something is true.

htns• 7 years ago

We are able to report our own consciousness, so it obviously has "classically" physical effects that can be measured.

scarejunba• 7 years ago

That's correct. Both you and the guy you're responding to are correct.

mrkstu• 7 years ago

It hasn't been falsified yet. It will be interesting to see if it can be. I hope it can, because the interesting path of AI probably requires it.

0815test• 7 years ago

To the extent that "the what it's like to be conscious" is part of physics - that is, to the extent that it enters into causal relations with the rest of the universe, it can of course be described as such. However, the way by which such casual relations occur is itself of interest, since it opens up other means of description that are not dependent on the inherent limits of an "outside" observer, acting through known physical mechanisms to make her observations.

mcguire3• 7 years ago

The breeding behavior of orchids can certainly be described in terms of quantum mechanics. However, I do not have an existence proof of that.

Robotbeat• 7 years ago

I tend to agree. I found the article unconvincing. Perhaps Chalmer’s statement is true, but I’m not yet convinced that it is.

human20190310• 7 years ago

The thing that astonishes me is that we really haven't made a dent in the problem.

It's surely something we've wondered about since prehistory, and since then we've made scientific discoveries about things we never even suspected existed. But we still don't know much more about consciousness, except for some additions to the chemical and physical events that can disrupt it.

beat3• 7 years ago

Just because you don't like the reality the consciousness is subjective rather than objective does not make consciousness objective.

Many people much smarter than you and I have been exploring this problem since forever, with both ancient thought experiments and modern science. They've not found what you assume is there.

codeulike11• 7 years ago

There are plenty of philosophers in this area that disagree with Chalmers

naasking9• 7 years ago

These "thought experiments" don't prove anything. At best, they simply identify which camp you intuitively belong in, dualist or non-dualist.

For a preliminary scientific theory of consciousness, see: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

xamuel9• 7 years ago

One assumption people often take for granted about consciousness is that everyone is conscious. I agree we should operate under that assumption for the purposes of making ethical decisions, but I think we should challenge it for the purpose of trying to understand consciousness better. What if philosophical zombies aren't just a hypothetical thought experiment, what if some people are conscious and others only pretend to be conscious? Is there some particular event that triggers consciousness?

Lacan thought that consciousness is triggered by looking in a mirror (or something equivalent to a mirror). If someone was carefully raised without the ability to look in a mirror, see their own shadow, hear their own voice, etc., would they never become conscious? How could you tell?

What if consciousness is triggered by something totally unexpected, like: circumcision; submersion baptism; chicken pox; or some particular bacteria in my gut? I can find someone who never had chicken pox and ask them if they're conscious, but how do I know if they're answering truthfully?

Everyone has a big incentive to profess consciousness, because anyone who professed non-consciousness would be in danger of losing the privileges and protections which society grants to conscious people.

AnIdiotOnTheNet6• 7 years ago

In my opinion the only value in this idea is that it highlights the absurdity of trying to apply an empirical model on an un-empirical concept. Since "consciousness" can not be measured, and indeed is difficult to even define in words, it is excluded by any model which insists upon an objective reality.

To your point: how do we know that all people posses consciousness? We don't. We make that assumption because other people are like us. The less like us something is, the less likely we are to assume it has consciousness. For most of human history animals were not afforded this assumption and that is only now starting to change because, as it turns out, animals are a lot more like us than we like to admit.

In other words, it's speciesism. The whole discussion about what does and doesn't have conscious is a desperate attempt to justify human exceptionalism.

xamuel9• 7 years ago

We make that assumption because other people are like us.

Yes, and I think this is a mistake, because it shuts down any hope of isolating what it is about us that makes us conscious. Perhaps this will change as human-lookalike-robot technology gets better, breaking down the "looks like me, must be conscious like me" argument.

People are starting to grant animals the rights of consciousness, but let me ask, what about sperm? I myself was sperm once, and over time I became a full-grown human being. If consciousness is a boolean, then at what exact moment did I become conscious? Was it when I reached the egg? When the first neuron in my brain formed? When my umbilical cord was severed? When I first recognized myself in a mirror [Lacan]?

pmoriarty• 7 years ago

"We make that assumption because other people are like us."

Then how do we know that we ourselves are conscious?

tictoc• 7 years ago

What is consciousness?

CharlesColeman4• 7 years ago

The subjective experience of being.

deltron3030• 7 years ago

It's another word for awareness. It depends on information and a drive to map information and navigate it.

I think that there is no hard divide between conscious and unconscious, more like a continuum. All sentient beings are conscious, but maybe not about themselves if the information about themselves doesn't get fed back to them in some way. But they're certainly conscious about their environment to be able to find food.

Consciousness is essential for actions within an environment. Self consciousness isn't essential for learning though, you can learn by doing, like animals. But it's essential for betterment, expanding your options and not relying on the first best thing you've found that worked by doing.

goatlover5• 7 years ago

The experience of color, sound, taste, smell, feels in perception, memory, imagination, dreams and other states of mind.

rabidrat• 7 years ago

We are all not-conscious for large swaths of the day. We think we are conscious all of the time, because it is only when we are conscious that we think to think about it. So we subconsciously maintain a kind of linked-list of conscious periods, and so the illusion of permanent/static consciousness persists. But there are gaps between every conscious period, which are scarcely noticeable unless you have figured out to look for them. (It is a paradox of the mind that there can be awareness during non-conscious periods).

xamuel9• 7 years ago

+1. Here's a trick you can use to trip yourself out (also works as a party trick to trip other people out). Look in a mirror. Look at your left eye. Look at your right eye. Look at your left eye. Look at your right eye. You won't see your eyes moving; it is as if your eyes are holding still. But to someone watching you, your eyes make very visible movements whenever you switch which eye you're looking at.

It's an example of "Chronostasis", which is very much like you describe, only perhaps at a much smaller granularity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronostasis.

This gif alone speaks a trillion words if you study it closely: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Ch...

DFHippie• 7 years ago

It isn't quite this. We have memories for only part of the day. We have no memories for other parts. We don't know whether we are conscious at these times. It isn't that we know we are unconscious when we are asleep except inasmuch as the term "unconscious" is sloppy and applies to whatever we are when we are asleep and the hypothetical state of existing without consciousness. These are two things we don't have direct experience with and which we assume are the same.

gpderetta2• 7 years ago

To this day I still can't say 100% that I'm fully conscious during some deep hacking session when I'm in the zone.

girzel2• 7 years ago

others only pretend to be conscious
how do I know if they're answering truthfully?
anyone who professed non-consciousness

The ability to lie seems to me to imply at least some level of consciousness. How could/why would you deceive others if you have no concept of your own existence?

xamuel9• 7 years ago

I can easily write a computer program that tells lies, that doesn't mean it's conscious.

beat3• 7 years ago

Is a dog conscious? Dogs sense and categorize; dogs feel emotions; dogs form conclusions about their reality; dogs sleep and die just like we do.

What do you mean by "consciousness", if it includes humans but excludes dogs? And if it includes dogs, does it include insects? Plants?

We need to be reasonably specific when discussing these things.

mcguire3• 7 years ago

Am I conscious? How would I know?

If I'm capable of fooling everyone else, can I be fooling myself?

AnimalMuppet5• 7 years ago

I think there are two different things called consciousness. The first is awareness of your surroundings. Yes, your dog is conscious, unless asleep. And even then it's conscious to some degree, because it can be awakened by external stimulus.

The second kind of consciousness is being aware of your awareness - being able to watch your mind work. To our knowledge, dogs don't have that. Nobody does but humans, so far as we know. The problem is, my definition here is a purely internal, subjective one. I can't prove to you that I am conscious in the second sense; I can't prove to you that anyone else is or is not. All I know is that this is something my own mind can do, and maybe I can describe a bit of what it's like to have my mind do it. That's not much to go on for further investigations.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

The p-zombie concept always struck me as stupid solipsism. If you can't tell the difference doesn't that mean there is no meaningful difference?

Likewise if they fear the loss of priviledge that implies some degree of consciousness /somewhere/. If some absurd set of state and pseudorandom random number generator capable of passing every metric of consciousness in response to inputs then it is a consciousness even if it is made of a bizzare set of equations and state.

Anyway for the consciousness somewhere - take a hypothetical hyperintelligence or supercomputer capable of simulating a human brain completely calculation by calculation in various events like say being flayed alive. It isn't torturing anybody because the actions are simply calculations that it itself is running. The victim may not be real but there is a real intelligence somewhere behind it - and it may or may not care about the simulated suffering. Where it is "run" is material like the difference between acting out a murder and actually murdering someone.

hnarn• 7 years ago

The p-zombie concept always struck me as stupid solipsism. If you can't tell the difference doesn't that mean there is no meaningful difference?

That's a very strange argument. If you hold your nose and you taste a piece of potato and then a piece of apple, you can't tell the difference. So now suddenly the difference is meaningless because the sense required to tell the difference is removed from the equation? The apple is still (in a, to you, non-observable reality) an apple, regardless of how your perception changed.

hateful• 7 years ago

I think a lot of this stems from a trick of sorts. Nothing that we are is "magically" consciousness. If we had a machine and emulated every aspect of a "mind", would it be conscious? If you're answering no - then why? What's missing? I think the answer is: the only thing that's missing is that you couldn't possibly believe that that thing could be conscious. And this is simple because you believe that you are "conscious" to an extent which you really are not.

In other words, we think we're this thing called "conscious", but that thing isn't what we think it is!

When you look a bunch of different things: the left brain/right brain separation and the prefrontal cortex - you realize that you're not even just one brain, but many? Which one is you? And I seem to recall an article recently that challenged the existence of an unconscious. How does that relate to this?

rjf722• 7 years ago

Consciousness is not an outward product but an inward one. We are, in large part, deterministic. Our genetics and other factors can determine an increasingly large amount about us long before we're even self aware. Yet, for whatever reason, we all (though I suppose as per the GP comment - that is an assumption) have this inner dialog and observer who is not only watching every single thing as time gradually elapses, but also feels as though it is the one that is running the show.

Imagine you write a program to determine a pseudorandom number. You obviously don't imagine some entity puffs into existence, imagines itself picking the random number which our RNG already independently chose, and then puffs out of existence afterwards. Yet why would this somehow suddenly become true as the program became more complex? It requires extensive handwaving and speculation. Even if you somehow wrote similar pointless inner dialog mechanics into it, would something puff into existence and perceive itself then running those mechanics? I don't see any way you can answer yes to this question without, again, resorting to handwaving and speculation.

snowwrestler• 7 years ago

I think we're more likely to make intellectual progress on consciousness by either redefining it in a more objectively rigorous way, or (more likely IMO) abandoning it as a philosophical construct analogous to "the soul" and focusing research on a subset of phenomena that can be rigorously defined.

It seems to me like discussions of "consciousness" here on HN seem to frequently devolve into arguments over the semantics of that particular word. That feels more philosophical than scientific to me.

AnIdiotOnTheNet6• 7 years ago

Because the philosophical part is the only reason we care what consciousness is. Otherwise we are just talking about, what, perceptive abilities? Reactions to stimuli? That's all well and good, but we can't as easily use that to justify our enslavement and/or slaughter of other beings.

codeulike11• 7 years ago

I think you're making a mistake here. The mistake is to think that something/someone could very convincingly _seem_ to be conscious but somehow not actually be conscious. I would argue that, beyond a certain point, there is no difference.

The Turing Test is a good tool to roll out in these sorts of arguments. People often mention the Turing Test, but have you ever stopped to think how good a conversation would need to be to _convincingly_ pass it?

Dennett gives an imaginary example of a Turing Test conversation in his book Consciousness Explained:

Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. “Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.”

CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss.

J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me.

CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes.

J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke “works”?

CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough?

Dennett goes on to say:

"The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all."

xamuel9• 7 years ago

Love that story, thanks! Ok, now a serious response. You come administer a Turing Test (in sign language) to a puppet which I'm controlling with some strings which you can't see. Using puppetry, I help the puppet pass the test. Is the puppet conscious?

jpttsn7• 7 years ago

Well, maybe it would produce a hurricane on the other side of the globe.

If I told a time traveling Newton how I’m replying to this on my phone, he might conclude the phone is conscious.

I think the only thing we discover with this line of reasoning is that humans tend to ascribe consciousness to complex behavior.

This could be because complex behavior implies consciousness, but that’s generous. Humans have probably just been programmed to ascribe because it’s a good heuristic esp. in the Paleolithic world.

friendlybus4• 7 years ago

The joke isn't funny because the irishman is stupid. The joke is funny because the irishman holds Guinness as his highest value.

That puppet can't tell you how to behave in life. Unless it is embodied in a human body that is relevant to the speaker and has a life context that is similar (requiring to eat, sleep, ect). The physical actions of the mind required to have a conversation are only part of our greater identity and awareness of ourselves in the world.

The puppet's existence in the world would be meaningless, though very intelligent. Why is there a puppet that can talk? What is it's purpose? Only a conscious being can answer that. The irishman's joke is funny because he chose Guinness as his reason to live, his highest value, his god, his philosophy.

What is the reason for a robot to be?

o_nate2• 7 years ago

Obviously it's absurd to think not everyone is conscious the same way we are, but I don't think you need to assert that for the hard problem of consciousness to exist. It's enough that I (whoever I am) am conscious, and no one can lead me to doubt that, although they can cast confusion on the terms I use to describe it.

jonnycomputer2• 7 years ago

This is the sort of idea that would appeal to xenophobes, racists, and others of their ilk. Not calling you one--not at all--but its the sort of idea that seems quite dangerous in the wrong hands.

ph4• 7 years ago

For those interested in potential viable ontologies other than reductive physicalism, I encourage you to read the works of Bernardo Kastrup. His most recent book, The Idea of the World, is well-argued and very interesting.

drbojingle• 7 years ago

Why are we Conscious? I think the answer, at a very high level, must be that evolution followed the path of least resistance: consciousness has high value per amount of energy expended on it and is easy to achieve.

gnode5• 7 years ago

It seems to me that the properties of consciousness would naturally follow from any generally intelligent system. An intelligent agent must be aware of phenomena in its environment, it must be able to distinguish phenomena (qualia), its experience is subjective to the extent of the limitations of its connectivity.

The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.

I think before this can be said to be a problem, it should be explained how such a brain (with human-like intelligence) can exist without mechanisms corresponding to the properties of consciousness.

codeulike11• 7 years ago

Yeah, Chinese Room Argument, and see Dennett's take on it

edit: see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518623

agitator10• 7 years ago

To me it seems obvious that any intelligent living thing that has some level of intelligence would be conscious... as in take in sensory data, is aware of it's environment, and can make decisions based on that.

But I would even argue that most living things above a certain neuron count are conscious. I think it's really flawed to assume that only we as humans have an awareness of self and are "conscious".

I don't see the distinction between my awareness of myself and my environment, and that of my dog for example. He is aware of himself, has ideas and acts on them, interacts with his world consciously. It's as if humans are grasping for some sort of uniqueness in nature. If you were a robot with sensors and cameras fed into a generally intelligent neural network. You wouldn't see a display of the data on a hud. You would be consciously immersed in the data. You would be the neural network. You would have an awareness of your environment, and you would be conscious of your existence in it.

I think consciousness is evolutionary. It allows living things to want to survive and preserve what they are. I think without consciousness a creature wouldn't have the strong drive for survival. In my opinion, it's what makes you long to continue your existence.

jpttsn7• 7 years ago

It’s not obvious to me. I don’t see any evidence that favors it over the alternative.

Why assume that they are conscious, over the simpler hypothesis (fewer assumptions) that they aren’t?

djmips• 7 years ago

This is almost exactly what I would have written so thanks. It too me a lifetime while to combat my childhood bias to arrive at this point. And now I feel like a lot of people have to similarly overcome their own internal bias and realize that consciousness isn't all that special. We search for intelligent life with out in space but intelligent conscious life surrounds us.

gnode5• 7 years ago

I think the particular shape of normal human consciousness is a product of evolution, but I don't think consciousness itself is. People can experience altered states of consciousness which can be detrimental to their survival such as psychosis, disassociation, alexithymia (inability to perceive emotions of oneself and others), and aphantasia (inability to create mental imagery). Additionally some psychologists theorise that consciousness / intelligence is in fact a liability to survival because it allows us to ideate suicide as a solution to negative feelings, and that we have had to evolve mitigations to prevent this.

umvi• 7 years ago

The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious.

Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine?

The atoms in one pocket of the sun's chaotic fusion reaction might randomly and momentarily behave like an intelligent quantum computer - does that mean the sun is momentarily conscious from time to time?

MrLeap• 7 years ago

Your comment got me thinking so I'm going to ramble a bit. The sun being conscious makes sense to me. Not as we are, but then again nothing is as we are. Cats communicate with each other, cleverly explore and learn about their environment but they aren't conscience like us.

Growing up, my vocabulary advanced waaay faster than my experience. I learned what the word "nostalgia" was well before I first felt nostalgic. In fact, I remember feeling it a few times about summers with friends that had moved before connecting the feeling with the word. It was a slap on forehead moment. I concluded that nostalgia was an inbuilt "thing", everyone else probably experienced it in the same way. It's easy for me to consider nostalgia as just an inbuilt reaction to a certain kind of signal. (Something periodic that makes you feel good, then it stops. Recalling the period creates a bittersweet feeling).

The space between consciousness and inanimate intuitively feels to me like a gradient. Various levels of brain damage might yield someone unresponsive to speech but responsive to pain. Then there are people who feel no pain, but otherwise are completely normal.

Therefore, I'd put on the lower end of the consciousness scale "reacting to changes" the more changes something reacts to, and the more varied their reactions, the more conscious it is. We're talking things between the sun and single celled organisms. Single cells don't seem to do much rumination, but they get hungry.

Advanced consciousness seems to require heritable lessons and skills. A feral human that somehow survived alone on an island from birth wouldn't be conscious like the rest of us are, but I bet it would still feel nostalgia if its favorite berry went extinct.

I'm comfortable ascribing feelings to things with full knowledge they aren't feeling it like we are. I bet red giant stars feel fat and old.

naasking9• 7 years ago

The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious.

See panpsychism and integrated information theory.

NoodleIncident2• 7 years ago

Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine?

This is just defamiliarization. It's an excessively common belief that a computer with the right inputs, outputs, and software could realize that it is itself a computer program. The same software on a marble machine would be a lot harder to hook up to useful sensors, and would be too large to be at all practical, but it's the same thing.

fipar• 7 years ago

Since you happened to use marbles as the analogy, I think you may find "I am a strange loop"[1] and the concept of simmballs and the careenium[2] interesting.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop [2]https://philosophyandpsychology.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/the...

gnode5• 7 years ago

The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious.

The thing would have to have correlates of consciousness; mechanisms which perform the properties which constitute conscious thought. I see no reason why such a mechanism could not be created by such general machinery as a marble run, albeit a very large one. The sun however is a chaotic ball of plasma, so I can't see how it could play home to an arbitrary complex mechanism.

rjf722• 7 years ago

Consciousness is something separate from environmental awareness. Consciousness is what you have that lets you observe yourself carrying out the actions you are all while thinking yourself to be the one running the show, even though its entirely possible your behavior is not really "yours" to control, but the processes of your body and mind. In other words the 'thing' inside of you that's along for the ride of one quite immersive movie, is what consciousness is.

When you write a program to determine a pseudo-random number, I doubt there's any person that would seriously indulge the possibility that in that moment some entity puffs into existence, imagines itself picking a number, and then puffs back out of existence. But if this is true it makes any path towards artificial consciousness require some rather extensive handwaving and speculation that is not logically justifiable based on what we currently know.

manifestsilence4• 7 years ago

The only sane and productive model of consciousness I've encountered (and I've been around a bunch through growing up in the Transcendental Meditation movement) has been the one described in Hofstadter's works, such as Godel, Escher, Bach.

He talks about consciousness as an epiphenomenon, where the pattern itself is what makes something conscious, rather than some magical property that some matter has and other matter doesn't. With mathematical precision, he describes how consciousness relates to the ability to self-reference and how this relates to fundamental paradoxes in various fields such as the Halting Problem, Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, Russel's Paradox, and the works of Escher and Bach.

This line of thinking brings up some very interesting moral questions: What is it about life that makes us want to value it? Why do we have the notion of "higher" and "lower" life forms and value some species more highly than others? If we created a sufficiently advanced AI, that gave all the appearances of having feelings, a sense of self preservation, an identity, and desires, would it be immoral to unplug it or control its freedoms? What if it felt and understood even more than a human? Would its needs supersede our own?

Anyway, I highly recommend that book, GEB. It has made most other philosophizing about consciousness seem flat to me.

k__• 7 years ago

I found "the ego tunnel" was nice.

manifestsilence4• 7 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation!

John_KZ• 7 years ago

What is it about life that makes us want to value it?

That's an excellent question. All the questions about consciousness are probably an attempt to better understand (and avoid?) death.

However I still have a hard time imagining a scenario where we can scientifically understand consciousness. Eventually we will understand all about how the mind works. All the various processes and how they lead to higher functions like thinking consciously in natural language etc. We'll be able to manipulate and alter our conscious experience. But even if there was a neural switch to turn consciousness on and off, we would still fail to convince ourselves of the physical nature of it, as we could never experience a state without consciousness.

My personal belief is that although we are painfully physical, we will never explain why we're actually here, experiencing those calculations, or in fact being them. Being calculations of a meat sack. Why would this happen?

manifestsilence4• 7 years ago

Yeah, I agree with the sense of mystery you talk about. To me the two great, and linked, mysteries are why matter, space, time, etc. exists at all, and why some part of it experiences it in a self-aware way. They're both meta-questions to me, that probably can't be answered from within the universe by observing it, just like how one of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems says arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency from within. I know that's playing fast and loose with math metaphors, but it's an analogy not a rigorous proof.

syn0byte• 7 years ago

We will be able to explain and understand consciousness in objective terms 1 second after the first person achieves flight by pulling themselves into the air with the bucket they are standing in. About 5 seconds after a computer can run a 100% simulation of itself running a 100% simulation of itself. A whole minute after someone writes a program that can tell if/when any other programs will stop running.

As a question that's dogged us for thousands of years, maybe its time to accept its just a shitty question.

drclau• 7 years ago

Nonsense. Consciousness is a matter of information processing. We're just biological computers running a program. The so called hard problem of consciousness is really just folklore by now. Neuroscience will eventually provide a complete explanation of consciousness. I'm frankly surprised we still think in magical terms about consciousness, in this time and age, knowing all we know about how the universe works, knowing how the brain works.

Pragmatic philosophers, such as Thomas Metzinger, have already accepted the failure of philosophy in this regard, and support the neuroscience approach.

I can refer you to Thomas Metzinger's book, "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self". He went through great efforts to make it accessible to laypersons, such as myself. It's well worth the time.

Side note, I got to Thomas Metzinger from Peter Watts' Firefall. He says something along the lines "Metzinger is THE man" (will try to find the exact text and come back with an edit at some point).

louwrentius• 7 years ago

How is it that an article that basically describes the concept of qualia never once mention the word?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

zamalek• 7 years ago

It doesn't exactly. I think this quote really clarifies what the article is trying to discuss:

While physical properties cannot explain consciousness, consciousness is needed to explain physical properties.

If consciousness is (and, yes, qualia are) how we perceive reality, how can we define consciousness based on observation? It would be like trying to use a telescope to capture an image of itself.

If "consciousness comes first" that means that consciousness contains reality, not visa-versa.

naasking9• 7 years ago

It would be like trying to use a telescope to capture an image of itself.

Which you can do with the equivalent of a mirror. So assuming your analogy holds, then we just need to discover the equivalent of a consciousness mirror.

As for the article itself:

While physical properties cannot explain consciousness, consciousness is needed to explain physical properties.

This is conjecture. There is literally no proof that physical properties cannot explain consciousness, nor is there proof that consciousness is needed to explain physical properties.

blacksqr4• 7 years ago

The issue is that physical properties are by their nature relational, dispositional properties. That is, they describe the way that something is related to other things

Author neglects to mention that this may apply to everything except the universe itself.

Something in the universe has to have some kind of quality in and of itself to give all the other relational/dispositional properties any meaning. Something has to get the ball rolling.

The "something" may be the universe, i.e. its total wave function. Occam's Razor suggests looking for simple explanations rather than assuming the existence of things not detectable.

Could the universe itself be conscious? Making such a claim would seem to make the author's argument a tautology.

o_nate2• 7 years ago

That's an interesting idea though it's hard to see how it would work in practice. In practice, our scientific concepts are ultimately grounded in observational data, data accessible to a conscious observer. I don't see how scientific concepts could be restated in terms of the universe as a whole, especially when one considers we only have very indefinite information about the ultimate characteristics of it.

blacksqr4• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction

buboard10• 7 years ago

The hard problem will be a very hard even after it has been solved. Philosophers dont even want it solved, they just like to discuss it.

Anon84• 7 years ago

As with any other philosophical problem. Discussing it is the point.

buboard10• 7 years ago

The hard problem is leaking dangerously into the real world though. Chalmers' original paper posited consciousness as a physical quantity, which presumably could be empirically studied.

sgt1012• 7 years ago

I wonder why we believe that the evolution that has equiped us to be conscious and to wonder about consciousness (which I think is probably part of the deal of consciousness) has provided us with minds and languages that can understand or discuss it? In fact, it seems quite likely that being able to understand consciousness has no evolutionary value at all!

Animats• 7 years ago

The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works to work effectively on this problem. We don't know what questions to ask or how to break down the problem into smaller problems.

We may get there. Read something about how vision works from a century ago, when nobody had a clue. The first real progress came from "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959).[1] That was the beginning of understanding visual perception, and the very early days of neural network technology. Now we have lots of systems doing visual perception moderately well. There's been real progress.

(I went through Stanford CS at the peak of the 1980s expert system boom. Back then, people there were way too much into asking questions like this. "Does a rock have intentions?" was an exam question. The "AI winter" followed. AI finally got unstuck 20 years later when the machine learning people and their "shut up and calculate" approach started working.)

[1] https://hearingbrain.org/docs/letvin_ieee_1959.pdf

dqpb2• 7 years ago

Completely untrue. Read Consciousnes and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. There is plenty of research and progress in this area.

eanzenberg3• 7 years ago

Eh, this still doesn't go beyond the fundamental "I think therefore I am." I can prove to myself that I have consciousness, but for everyone else, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

furyofantares• 7 years ago

This was a wonderful book. As I recall, it catalogs a lot of convincing evidence that things come into conscious awareness basically upon a certain level of global activation in the brain -- when enough parts of the brain are "talking" about it, typically when different parts of the brain are having conflicting activation patterns. It likens this to the "workspace model" of awareness. And it's clear why the brain would need to resolve such a conflict, why it would need something like focus or attention to do so, and how this would relate to all sorts of information processing needs of organisms that behave in ways that keep them alive.

But there's just nothing that I recall in that book that suggests or even hints at any reason for this to result in a subjective experience. And I don't believe it rules out an electron having a nano-unit of subjective experience, for example.

The book suggests that something is a subjective experience if an organism can report it as one, and goes to great detail about what's going on in the brain when an organism is able to report a subjective experience, and makes the very reasonable suggestion that something is probably a subjective experience in a brained organism that can't report it as one so long as it exhibits all the same patterns in that organism's brain (infants, other animals).

But I don't think it does any work at all to show that there is no subjective experience in plants, or rocks, or even nano-units of subjective experience in individual electrons. It can't do this, because, as far as I recall, there is simply no progress on the problem of why this global activation in the brain would produce a subjective experience.

50656E697313• 7 years ago

"Does a rock have intentions?"

Didn't all organic life arise from inorganic molecular structures like rocks?

As a result of the theory of the big bang, molecular structures have progressively evolved in complexity, eventually becoming so complex that the boundaries of physics and chemistry are transcended into biology, life, and consciousness.

This suggests that "rocks" -- inorganic molecular structures -- indeed have "intentions" to the extent that they are primordial building blocks of consciousness

greiskul8• 7 years ago

Please don't say things like this, the theory of the big bang says no such thing at all. What it says is how the universe expanded from a very high-density and high-temperature state.

There are entirely separate theories to explain how that matter, after it arose, interacts with itself to give rise to chemistry. Then there is the origin of life, which is another problem. And then we get to evolution, which is how the initial life modified itself to become the species we have today. And then we have a bunch of other theories that explain how the brain operates.

Any one of these theories could be wrong, but that wouldn't invalidate any of the other ones. Some of them we have much more data and certainty on then others. But the only people that talk as if they were the same thing are creationists, not scientists.

Yajirobe• 7 years ago

In other words, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

jonny_eh2• 7 years ago

Good job proving the parent's point. This line of reasoning is such a waste of everyone's time.

Just because it's hard to define the lines between inorganic life, simple life, and sentient life, it doesn't mean there's no distinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

buboard10• 7 years ago

A rock never hated me

mensetmanusman6• 7 years ago

Not sure why you got down voted. You can use words like intention if you define your terms. Also, people are studying now rocks turned to life.

The real question is not consciousness, but why the laws of physics are perfectly tuned for its existence.

candiodari3• 7 years ago

We do. We know enough to state with absolute certainty that it's an emergent property. Nothing in your head is conscious. Nothing. Not even the whole of the human mind. It's in the "software", it's something you learned (and therefore did not have even when you were born, not even until quite a bit after that).

It's equally clear that most of what we associate with consciousness, such as thinking, awareness of the body and the moment and time and decision making and ... doesn't exist either. Because time and time again studies prove that when a decision is made (this is well studied in traffic for instance) there are no conscious reasons. Reasons only happen afterwards.

Is it therefore such a stretch to say that consciousness simply doesn't exist until long after the fact, and it is only once we ask one of these bags of mostly water to explain themselves (or ... well when we ask them something) that any trace of consciousness, at least the way humans understand it, is actually forthcoming ?

Consciousness is a trick. A learned trick. Human minds are not conscious and it is most definitely not a certainty that they, even when born fully formed and healthy that they will become conscious (read the reports on children raised by animals. They are old, sometimes 20 years old and they most definitely aren't conscious, not even on the level that a primate is conscious. The 12 year old boy they found in the wild in France never learned to speak only to articulate 2 words).

This is weird, because this is not most humans experience. Everyone around them always had consciousness. But let's compare. Everybody who has kids realizes that memory, firstly, isn't actually memory. We are very much not storing events when they happen in our brain. We learn a trick, because our parents keep referring to our past and "what we've done". We learn to calculate back from our current state of mind to what happened before.

That and of course philosophers have a millennium or 3 of history of ... philosophers getting consciousness wrong. Consciousness has been accepted in history to be being religious, to being able to rhyme, to composing music, to being able to talk and explain ourselves, to being able to love, to convince a professor (via chat) that you are conscious, to solve problems (all kinds), to walk around, to play chess, to ... all of these are now of course considered wrong. Why ? Mostly because things that definitely aren't conscious, from little dumb tricks, even mechanical contraptions in some cases, to rule based engines, to deep learning and now reinforcement learning algorithms can do this.

So can we please just conclude that whatever this article claims is ... wrong ? Just wrong. Nothing of value, other than perhaps interest a few people for stories with enough alcohol present. The current consensus seems to be that more details will be forthcoming the first time a reinforcement learning algorithm gets far enough to explain it's actions. So you want to know more ? Start there.

basicplus23• 7 years ago

Just because you don't remember your conscious experiences at birth or before does not mean you were not conscious

ambrop73• 7 years ago

It's equally clear that most of what we associate with consciousness, such as thinking, awareness of the body and the moment and time and decision making and ... doesn't exist either. Because time and time again studies prove that when a decision is made (this is well studied in traffic for instance) there are no conscious reasons. Reasons only happen afterwards.

Since a person can tell what they experience and what they do not, the distinction between conscious experience and unconscious processing must have a base in physical reality (brain activity). With sufficiently advanced technology, one could analyze the brain processes and see which processes are associated with the reported conscious experience.

The fact that not all brain activity is associated with conscious experience in no way implies that conscious experience does not exist.

artur_makly3• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyron

phkahler• 7 years ago

> We learn to calculate back from our current state of mind to what happened before

And how exactly does that back calculation happen?

mensetmanusman6• 7 years ago

All of what you say could happen without consciousness though. No one has to be there listening or groking.

oneiroviator2• 7 years ago

You assume that there is a physical reality "out there", because you perceive and you experience it (or you don't, in which case you are a p-zombie). The theory you are proposing is probably the most widely accepted theory in scientific circles, which is that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but that ultimately everything that causes this consciousness are just impersonal, physical events devoid of an inherent quality of "experiencing". When you die, that consciousness ceases to exist. Fair enough.

However, I think the article is simply suggesting to invert this assumption about physical reality. It proposes that for something to be "out there", you first need an "in here" (rather than afterwards), i.e. an experiencing of forms. This would be consciousness. At this point we are not even talking about decision making, thinking, memory, intellectual pursuits... Just subjective experience. So everything you're taking into the discussion regarding how thinking and decision making and memory happens is really a bridge further; not immediately relevant to the point the author is making.

I understand if this line of reasoning feels uncomfortable. You were literally pleading people to think that this is wrong. I think that is a mistake. There is value in challenging your assumptions, even if only philosophical with ethical/moral ramifications.

Balgair3• 7 years ago

We are very much in the infancy of the understanding of the Brain. New tools like optogenetics, CRIPSR-CAS9, and Clarity should assist greatly in understanding the brain and the body in general. Still, we are starting to know that we don't know a lot about the brain.

EDIT: Some links to the new tools mentioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb07TLkJ3Ww (optogenetics)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKbrwPL3wXE (crispr-cas9)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3bSx4TBs6M (clarity)

notJim• 7 years ago

"Does a rock have intentions?" was an exam question.

What does a good answer to this question look like in this context? Genuinely curious what they were looking for.

Imo the real question is whether humans have intentions. It seems like if you look at it rationally, we're just collections of chemicals reacting with each other. Set the initial conditions and then the whole thing is deterministic. It's pretty uncomfortable to think this though, so I think it's best if we avoid the subject.

andyburke• 7 years ago

I would encourage you to think on this some more until the discomfort diminishes. Just because things are deterministic (at a level of complexity that is difficult or even possible to imagine, let alone predict with our current understanding), doesn't mean your experience is any less real or important for you.

Imagine you are on a rollercoaster: you know your course is pre-determined, but you can't see too far ahead, and it sure is a fun and surprising ride along the way.

xaedes• 7 years ago

I think the question one has to answer first is what "intention" is in itself, at least some informal definition to work with is necessary. how you define it will shape the answer to the rock intention.

sdfin5• 7 years ago

Intentions are deterministic and your discomfort about the topic is deterministic too. Are you aware of the cause of that discomfort?

This reminds me of Sam Harris' book "Freewill", I recommend it to the people who believe in freewill.

By the way, what determines the whole chain of deterministic events?

ivanhoe• 7 years ago

Set the initial conditions and then the whole thing is deterministic

If quantum physics theories are correct than there's always some amount of pure randomness in the game, making it impossible to create perfectly deterministic and repeatable system of any significant complexity.

JustSomeNobody• 7 years ago

Rocks are strictly inadvertent.

tuesdayrain• 7 years ago

Videogames are deterministic too, but that doesn't mean all of the things that a player's character does are predetermined inside the videogame. I like to think that there is a similar analogy for our universe, where a soul is controlling our body the same way we might control a game character.

antonvs• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbow_Room_(book)

marmaduke• 7 years ago

Maybe the focus on the brain is part of the problem. Sure, neuroscience has yielded some interesting results, but consciousness is a social and behavioral phenomenon, and the brain evolved to satisfy such social and behavioral constraints. The acceptance per se of the Turing test suggests the brain may be irrelevant here.

buboard10• 7 years ago

Well the ancients thought it was the liver, maybe i should do a sonogram

Florin_Andrei3• 7 years ago

I went through Stanford CS at the peak of the 1980s expert system boom. Back then, people there were way too much into asking questions like this. "Does a rock have intentions?" was an exam question. The "AI winter" followed. AI finally got unstuck 20 years later when the machine learning people and their "shut up and calculate" approach started working.

Isn't it the other way round, though?

They were twiddling their thumbs back then because they had no other option. There was no way to do machine learning back then. I've played with perceptrons on '90s hardware and it was basically just a toy.

And then Moore's law opened the flood gates some decades later.

owyn• 7 years ago

I used a Cray Y-MP back then but you're still right... My iPhone is faster than that hardware now, which is pretty neat.

It wasn't so much "thumb twiddling" though, there was a lot of work being done on systems which were more focused on knowledge representation (like Cyc [1], which still exists). Also a lot of work was being done from a more Psychological direction (mental models, scripts etc) and from a physical/neuro-science direction (brainz!).

These were all happening simultaneously and it wasn't clear (partly because of the MIPS issue you mention) that ML was the winning pony (for now) and I still appreciate the broad spectrum of knowledge covered in my particular Cognitive Science program.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

nl• 7 years ago

It seems obvious now, but back then it wasn't obvious that "AI" required a learning system at all. Knowledge Engineering was a popular approach, and rules based systems running over knowledge bases were supposed to be the path to AI.

And don't forget Minsky's decimation of neural network research at the start of the 1970s [1], which led to major research centers like MIT ignoring them completely.

[1] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26629

Aaronstotle• 7 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree on your first point. I was a philosophy major and it was frustrating how so much of the philosophy of mind field were attempting to "run" off with their ideas before they could "stand".

I realize this could be true for a lot of other schools of thought, but it seemed especially prominent when arguments about what makes a person seem to rely on a lower-level assumption of how the brain works.

jfengel• 7 years ago

The way I see it, that's basically the definition of philosophy. When some sub-discipline of philosophy becomes clear enough to define its questions, they give it some other name (cf linguistics, economics, "natural philosophy")

What's left as "philosophy" is always the stuff where we don't even really know what questions to ask. So we kick them around for a few centuries, or millennia, in the hopes that something will eventually take on a shape that can be pursued in a better-defined fashion.

xelxebar• 7 years ago

To me "consciousness" feels mostly like early chemists talking about pholgiston. Or like early biologistis discussing elan vital. Or even current physics' "dark matter". These are words that don't really point to single externalities with sharp borders, instead they are terms we apply to disparate, but seemingly (somehow) related phenomena.

The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works...

I don't think the "problem of consciousness" is one of missing empirical evidence so much as simply a fuzzy (ill-posed?) question. Though enough evidence might be sufficient to forcefully dissolve an irreal question. On the flipside, a lot of the current ML research does a good job at addressing consciousness by breaking it into concrete, communicable actions.

Instead of asking, "What is consciousness?" try asking, "What actions could XYZ take that would convince me it's conscious?" A related question is "What actions (in minute detail) are involved as I believe/think/feel I'm conscious?" Those two questions are similar, but tend to evoke quite different sets of "external" experiences and actions.

It might turn out that there is some mathematically invariant property of things that are capable of acting as convincing conscious agents, a la the physically precise definition of heat turning out to behave kind of like a phlogiston. In such a case, we might in fact find a "thing" that deserves the label "consciousness"---such as Hofstadter's idea of a strange loop---but for now I think the term is used pretty much used in a way that's synonymous with "magic".

Throwaway_42852• 7 years ago

A related question is "What actions (in minute detail) are involved as I believe/think/feel I'm conscious?"

I think we can define a generalized version of what we call a "conscious thought" as a thought that can be "consciously reflected" about. With "conscious reflection" I mean using some representation of the thought as an input for another thought in such a way that the new thought, including the usage of the original thought, can be used as an input for another thought in the same way. The representation doesn't have to correspond particularly closely to the execution. (We remember to think in natural language, but maybe the thought process is just converted into natural language after the fact for the purpose of saving and reflecting.)

Computer programs can also be conscious according to this generalized definition if the process of executing it is saved in some way and can, depending on the circumstances, be used in some way, which is saved in the same way.

That different "ways" of using a thought as an input for another thought are possible means that there can be different consciousnesses in our brain. One of them (if there are multiple), which is the one responsible for our output, at least on a higher level, or does at least significantly inform the output, is what we call "my consciousness". The reason why we don't know whether "my consciousness" is responsible for the output, despite having the appearance, is that it may be mostly a "post-hoc rationalization engine" for decisions made on another level, possibly for other reasons. But it does at least inform the output, since thoughts of "my consciousness" in the past inform our later output. For example, if we are asked about our past thoughts, we talk about the ones that are remembered in "my consciousness". This is the thing that puts it in such a special position compared to other hypothetical consciousnesses, which don't inform our output in this way, and are therefore invisible to other people, and obviously also to "my consciousness".

goatlover5• 7 years ago

On the flipside, a lot of the current ML research does a good job at addressing consciousness by breaking it into concrete, communicable actions.

I wasn't aware ML had anything to do with consciousness.

In such a case, we might in fact find a "thing" that deserves the label "consciousness"---such as Hofstadter's idea of a strange loop---but for now I think the term is used pretty much used in a way that's synonymous with "magic".

So you consider your experiences of color, taste, pleasure, etc. to be akin to "magic"? Because those sensations are what make up our conscious experiences.

otakucode3• 7 years ago

I don't know that learning more about the brains operation will satisfy people who resist the notion that their consciousness is a property of a physical system. Since it is an emergent property of a complex system, even if we understood the functioning of each independent piece, we would still be left with the question of why all of those pieces in concert have the property of consciousness. While we gather more and more data on the brain, we barely even have a beginning notion of how emergent properties actually work. If we had to take everything we know about atoms and their interactions and explain where phase transitions and states of matter come from, we would be stymied. We know from experimentation that very large groups of many atoms do experience distinct phase transitions. We know every way individual atoms can interact. But bridging that gap from components to being able to predict large-scale complex nonlinear dynamics... we have more proofs of our inability to do such things (with conventional tools) than hints of how we might tackle it.

thrwwya39479• 7 years ago

The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works to work effectively on this problem.

If we imagine there's a God and I could ask any 1 question about the brain and get an anaswer, all I would need to ask is:

"Hey God: w.r.t. the human brain, are there any special shenanigans like is connected to a soul that's responsible for consciousness, or is it WYSIWYG, just a bunch of cells and that's it?"

Luckily for you, there is no God and I can answer definitively: no, there are no shenanigans. It's just some cells and that's it. I am telling you this definitively. There are no metaphysical shenanigans going on in the human brain.

Note: you might wonder why, for this answer, I decided to phrase it in terms of asking God. The answer is in order to activate the natural scientist's reaction "that's silly, God can't tell you there's no God like that". Well, brain metaphysics is exactly and equally silly. It's just some cells, that's all.

baggy_trough3• 7 years ago

You can't really say that definitively. It is just a philosophical belief.

Izkata• 7 years ago

Does a rock have intentions?

My first thought: Depends on if the rock is magnetized.

mycall• 7 years ago

"Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition" [1] in 1986 broke the log jam with backpropagation.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200033859_Parallel_...

PhilZomb• 7 years ago

Personally, I think the brain as a data processing unit is a model that's seriously limiting the way many philosophers and neuroscientists think about this problem. You may be able to correlate an individual's reported experience of periwinkle down to the exact number of potassium ions crossing the cell membrane of every relevant neuron upon there acknowledgement of the color, but you still will know nothing about why it feels like something to see periwinkle.

bePoliteAlways• 7 years ago

Interesting. Three points one from science, one from spiritual and one from literature. 1) This article talks about "causal entropic force" which can give "intentions" to inanimate object. https://www.wired.com/2017/02/life-death-spring-disorder/ 2) Read somewhere that instead of figuring out "self" exist or not, Buddha suggested to observer and realize how concept of "self" arise. 3) In the book "of human bondage" author writes, the concept of self arises from pain.

Symmetry• 7 years ago

The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.

That's really not true. In Neural Correlates of Consciousness research there are two very important things people can only do for experiences that they're consciously aware of: remember then and communicate about them. Someone with blindsight can pick up and apple in front of them as well as a sighted person. But give them a blindfold and they won't be able to reach for the spot their eyes once knew the apple was located in. And they can't tell anyone what is in front of them either.

TimTheTinker7• 7 years ago

The examples you give are of brains for which there is conscious experience, at least in some areas. For an existing consciousness-capable brain to have some capabilities that are both unconscious and memory-inaccessible does not disprove the potential existence of fully-functional, non-conscious brains.

Although I'd agree that otherwise functional non-conscious brains would probably be unable to communicate coherently about personal experiences/thoughts/memories/etc.

afro88• 7 years ago

That's just memory isn't it? A raspberry pi can learn the position of a thing with a camera and then control a mechanical arm to reach that thing with the camera switched off.

naasking9• 7 years ago

But give them a blindfold and they won't be able to reach for the spot their eyes once knew the apple was located in. And they can't tell anyone what is in front of them either.

There's no reason this functional behaviour requires the subjective quality of conscious experience. The recorded movement of a robotic arm doesn't, and it can replicate this feat, for example.

ilovecaching• 7 years ago

Just a summary of Wittgenstein's Tractatus

viach2• 7 years ago

Is there a formal language in philosophy? So that one can define the input formulas (axioms) and with some kind of "philosophy math" calculate things like "what is the meaning of life and everything" and "what is consciousness"?

Otherwise for me it all looks like words juggling continuing for many centuries. They really should implement a programming language for philosophy and outsource the hard parts to Ukraine.

dmreedy2• 7 years ago

There is indeed. It's called Formal Logic, and the broad class of philosophers who have attempted that program you describe are usually referred to as "Analytic Philosophers".

They haven't made a ton of progress (I mean that as a statement of fact, not disrespect), and tend to tackle much more primitive, foundational problems than what the Continental philosophers like to deal in ("what is the meaning of everything" and all that).

Turns out it's a pretty hard problem to even pin down exactly what a word means, or what a name is, much less what the meaning of everything is. The trick is, those questions are the axioms. And so the act of asserting them is a philosophical act in and of themselves. The rest is just moving stones around.

viach2• 7 years ago

Thanks for clarifying things to me, I didn't even know the "Analytic Philosophers" term exists.

They haven't made a ton of progress

But they progress is what should be provable and repeatable, like the real science requires? So probably, this kind of progress is the only real one in the field?

Grimm1• 7 years ago

This article begs the question of our conciousness not being a physical process which is cool I guess If your peddling thoughts from a dualist from over a century ago. I still have no reason however, not to believe our conciousness doesn't arise from the physical configuration and other processes therein related. To paraphrase "Science cant talk about this purely in physic terms." No, Science simply hasn't FOUND the way to talk about it in physical terms which I personally believe in time we will. To be absolutely fair, as you may have noticed I'm in the camp of people who think Kant is largely garbage so I'm have a natural bias against works using his thought on the matter.

paulddraper2• 7 years ago

Science hasn't found or even begin to find a way to talk about this.

It's not like a physicist looking at an amoeba. That's a very complicated physical system, but it seems obvious that each of the parts can be progressively broken down into the fundamental physical forces and particles.

Consciousness....we can't even begin to talk about that in a fundamental physical way. The operation of the brain? Sure. But as far as we know, you could have an otherwise identical brain/computer firing circuits, producing actions, etc without consciousness. Which gets to the heart of the issue: we have no way to observe consciousness outside our own.

greiskul8• 7 years ago

But as far as we know, you could have an otherwise identical brain/computer firing circuits, producing actions, etc without consciousness.

We don't know that at all. Can you describe how that would be like? Would a person with no consciousness not talk about their own consciousness? But talking about the self is an action. It seems pretty clear that the reason brains talk about their consciousness is their consciousness.

TimTheTinker7• 7 years ago

Your assumption that consciousness is only physical is merely that - another assumption. It proves nothing, and claiming otherwise begs the question.

The problem is that all scientific results around the consciousness question derive from what people report about their personal experience. There's no other known way to answer any questions about consciousness, and science hasn't discovered any way to answer questions about the immaterial.

Hence, from a scientific perspective, it's not a question for which an answer can be deduced from observation -- so questions about it are left to philosophical inquiry (reasoning inductively from first principles, instead of deductively from observation) or religion-based worldviews (which can be coherently accepted/rejected based on their correspondence to reality and internal consistency).

root_axis3• 7 years ago

assumption that consciousness is only physical is merely that - another assumption

What does it mean for consciousness to be non-physical? If it is non-physical then it cannot have any impact on the physical world by definition.

naasking9• 7 years ago

The problem is that all scientific results around the consciousness question derive from what people report about their personal experience.

There are also correspondence tests between experience and behaviour.

There's no other known way to answer any questions about consciousness, and science hasn't discovered any way to answer questions about the immaterial.

Because there's no such thing in science. If it's observable, then it will be absorbed into a scientific explanation. If it's not observable, then it must obtain by logical necessity, or it might as well not exist.

ajmurmann2• 7 years ago

The problem with the religion-based worldviews is that it opens us up to a vast amount of made up believes and leads to a huge variety of different axioms that become undebatable and completely mess up or public discourse. I think it's vastly preferable to just accept that we don't know the answer to some questions, rather than making something up.

greiskul8• 7 years ago

Science is better then this. We don't need to directly observe something, it's OK to be able to just indirectly observe.

So, let's assume that consciousness is only physical. What would be the implications of that? It would imply that other physical objects can interact with it. We see plenty of evidence of that, with victims of brain damage, or when using drugs.

Now, to assume that consciousness is not physical, not only you need a mechanism for it to interact with our physical world (since it can order our bodies to do stuff) but also for the physical world to act on it.

Hence, from a scientific perspective, it seems pretty clear that consciousness is physical.

mikeash5• 7 years ago

Personal experience still counts as evidence. If you get a lot of different people reporting the same stuff then that’s a pretty solid indication that there’s some common basis for it.

From this, we know that the physical world affects consciousness in many ways. You can change its perceptions with alcohol. You can make it hallucinate with LSD. You can stop it entirely by applying force to the brain.

So either consciousness is physical or it is non-physical but somehow connected bidirectionally to the physical world. If it’s the latter, in what way is it actually non-physical? If there is some way in which it’s non-physical, shouldn’t that manifest as something that makes it act differently from physical objects? Some force that doesn’t perturb it or some attribute that remains constant when you’d expect it to change?

fifnir• 7 years ago

it's not a question for which an answer can be deduced from observation

Another assumption. Throughout history, again and again, science has discovered ways to answer questions, and when science finally arrives, it brings the "final" answer since no other method can compete. Haven't we learned this lesson yet? Why is consciousness the final bastion ?

Of course, philosophizing on issues like the OP article is incredibly valuable. After all, science is just philosophy with extra steps.

Iv3• 7 years ago

I challenge the assertion that something immaterial (other than information) is at play here.

Consciousnesses as we experiment it is exactly what would appear if you were to instruct an intelligent system into thinking it had a subjective "I".

My theory is that consciousness is what appears when your mind theories (your model of other people's mind) become elaborate enough that you need to embed in them a model of your own mind into the model of their mind (aka "how do they see me" ?).

Once you reach that point, you have the ability of having a model of your own mind superimposed on your own perceptions. You also have your animal brain shouting to you that survival is essential and that you are unique (which are obvious beneficial traits to have) and lets your rational mind rationalize as it can.

Consciousness is just the (limited) ability to introspect your thoughts and model an "I". There is nothing happening there that can't be explained through information processing.

Groxx• 7 years ago

One reason to prefer the physical-causes-consciousness route is that it gives a fairly clear way to try to answer the question: investigate the physical. We'll know if we have useful answers when we can manipulate it / create a consciousness.

We don't currently have a clear direction to go to get answers. That's normal, and it doesn't at all imply that there is no direction. And while we investigate the physical, we get more side benefits, like better and better medications / treatments / tools / etc.

If consciousness is "something else", how do we make progress towards understanding it? What can we do with that information?

moj• 7 years ago

Science simply hasn't FOUND [...] I personally believe in time we will

Lets call that Scientism. Beliefs about what may be discovered later are just beliefs, something that should be considered anathema to science itself. (Of course these beliefs may or may not come true, and curiosity about them may indeed provide insight that allows their eventual discovery.) But in the meantime unfounded beliefs may indeed hamper further scientific insight and discoveries. Ironic, given the history of science & faith, that science might be stymied by limitations of its own faith.

VyperCard2• 7 years ago

Meta science is a science.

camelNotation• 7 years ago

No, Science simply hasn't FOUND the way to talk about it in physical terms which I personally believe in time we will.

Sure, but that's a largely useless belief.

People don't put enough value on the usefulness of a belief. They seem to think it is all about what is true from a data perspective, but truth is only valuable as both thought AND action, with emphasis on action over thought. Example:

- If you think gravity exists but don't behave as if it exists, you're gonna have a bad time because you will probably fall off a cliff, even though you're right about gravity in theory.

- If you don't think that gravity exists, but still behave as if gravity exists, you'll be alright because you won't fall off a cliff, even though you're wrong about gravity in theory.

If dualist thinking helps someone achieve the goals of a psychologist or therapist, then dualist thinking is more valuable than just waiting around for science to fill a gap it may never fill. And just because someone adopts a dualist perspective today doesn't mean they can't reject it tomorrow. There's no rule saying you have to believe the same thing your entire life. So if science comes up with a better explanation, the dualists can adapt then.

buboard10• 7 years ago

You re about to enter an endless discussion about the semantics of words which will end nowhere.

Florin_Andrei3• 7 years ago

This article begs the question of our conciousness not being a physical process

Not really. It could be just a more fundamental kind of physical thing.

crispinb• 7 years ago

Your position, sometimes labelled Scientism, is Faith.

eternalny119• 7 years ago

I went through the whole indoctrinated-religious, "devout" atheist, "scientific" agnostic, and now I guess I'm a theist.

Why? Because I read a book on consciousness that came like a bolt out of the blue and I understood that we do not understand.

I don't buy this "emergent property of the mind" thing because while I understand evolutionary theory I am not sure how you bridge that gap to subjective experience.

I have absolutely no clue what this "god" is that I accepted, but I know I'm not going to be punished for leaving this comment.

EDIT: just read the comments. I've been to BNL and CERN.

xamuel9• 7 years ago

"The wind blows where it wishes. You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)

byproxy• 7 years ago

Which book did you read?

eternalny119• 7 years ago

I think it may have been Fire in the Mind by Johnson although Paul Davies pushed me along.

jhedwards4• 7 years ago

What part of subjective experience exactly do you think that evolutionary theory fails to explain? I study evolution quite a bit and, while there are many details about behavior and learning that are still missing, AFAICT it seems to explain consciousness and subjectivity pretty well.

eternalny119• 7 years ago

What part of subjective experience exactly do you think that evolutionary theory fails to explain?

Consciousness. We could and should be robots. There is nothing to reproducing that requires this, which is the survival of the fittest.

Brain teaser: Take absolute nothingness (not the "void" of space, true nothing) then have that create something that allows me to reply to you on HN.

naasking9• 7 years ago

I don't buy this "emergent property of the mind" thing because while I understand evolutionary theory I am not sure how you bridge that gap to subjective experience.

So you don't know, or aren't aware of any existing scientific theory, therefore it's magic?

The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050...

eternalny119• 7 years ago

So you don't know, or aren't aware of any existing scientific theory, therefore it's magic?

Possibly magic, would depend on your definition of "magic".

It's odd to see tech-minded people comment on this, because for us, every 0 and 1 is controllable and we hopefully get the expected output.

And here we are commenting on this "thing" that we clearly understand because X, Y, and Z study that affirms our beliefs says it's so.

I digress.

And don't get me started on solipsism. In that case, I'm not real and this comment is, because it has to be.

eternalny119• 7 years ago

How are you able to post this comment ... take it from the start, the real deal start.

No laws of physics, no time ... nada.

Now you get to post on HN ... and you have the hubris to state "because, science" ... seriously ...

Science has been given to you ... from where, exactly?

sailingparrot3• 7 years ago

I understood that we do not understand

There are many things we don't understand, and as time pass we gradually understand more and more of them. What does this have to do with the existence or not of God? Do you go back and forth between atheist/theist every time a new answer is discovered and a new question is asked?

eternalny119• 7 years ago

There are many things we don't understand, and as time pass we gradually understand more and more of them. What does this have to do with the existence or not of God?

How did it start?

vlunkr2• 7 years ago

This idea is called "God of the gaps" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps.

50656E697313• 7 years ago

There are many things we don't understand, and as time pass we gradually understand more and more of them.

On the contrary, when it comes to the fundamental nature of the universe, the more we've come to understand, the more we've come to realize how much even more we do not understand.

eternalny119• 7 years ago

Good luck with this coming full-circle when you have to create all of this, from nothing.

"Good Lord"

Don't worry he's cool with that.

acchow• 7 years ago

What you're saying essentially boils down to "we don't get it... ergo god"

eternalny119• 7 years ago

Pretty much that. Sorry if I left my fact-checking behind but that stopped once I visited CERN in search of the "truth".

You might be surprised at how many quantum physicists agree with my odd world-view.

It gets to a point where you can't go further (literally) ... then you get this.

a_wild_dandan• 7 years ago

Unless I've misunderstood you, it sounds like you're advocating the "god of the gaps" argument. Don't understand something? Hide it behind the ol' God Band-Aid and call it a day. But that's just ignoring the problem with extra steps.

As a side-note, there are some radical, fascinating attacks on the hard problem of consciousness, such as dual-aspect monism.[1] I'd love to hear y'alls thoughts.

[1] http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious

eternalny119• 7 years ago

Not to get all "Matrix" on you but yes to my feeble mind it would seem to require a "god" to create god.

Then all things break down, as they do now at the quantum boundary.

DidISayTooMuch• 7 years ago

What was that book? Irreducible Mind?

eternalny119• 7 years ago

Commented earlier, either Fire in the Mind by Johnson or something by Paul Davies.

glitchc4• 7 years ago

You’ve committed a mental shortcut. It’s too hard, therefore God, or magic, or whatever.

I’m convinced the ability to form short and long-term memories is crucial to our consciousness. Take that away and a human being is little more than a fruit fly, mentally.

hsbaut76• 7 years ago

It really depends on his theology. I'd agree if he succumbed to a prescribed framework of dogma. But for those freethinkers seeking inner truth there are no shortcuts.

I think it's invalid to say he casts it in the "too hard basket" because he chooses theology. On the contrary, I think you cast it into the too hard basket because you're so steadfast on believing in the rational.

drevil-v2• 7 years ago

What was the book?

eternalny119• 7 years ago

I kept an eye on my own comment. From +14 to negative whatever.

There was a noticeable trend. You may want to believe you're not "sheople". Studies suggest otherwise.

ilaksh2• 7 years ago

Christof Koch on consciousness https://youtu.be/piHkfmeU7Wo

ilaksh2• 7 years ago

This "problem" is mainly a symptom of religious worldviews that are still holding out deep inside some heads.

meroes5• 7 years ago

Sure maybe from a philosophical point of argument consciousness trumps all and physical existence and objective external reality should be viewed through that lense. But every single particle has a worldline tracing back to the Big Bang, where there were no conscious beings present yet. Only until the universe cooled and became less dense did consciousness become possible. So can consciousness really claim supremacy over external reality. To do so would require retroactivity or bootstrapping. Unless you accept the idea of a timeless universe where no point on a worldline (or collection of worldlines) is privileged, and now is a statistical reality more than anything in that there are more collections of worldlines with consciousnesses when the universe is relatively evenly made up of dark energy and regular matter+energy (highest amount observers compared to much closer or much further from Big Bang).

The flow of time may be a subjective illusion.

lorenzsell• 7 years ago

Conscious beings not being present does not mean that consciousness is not. This article basically asserts that your cognition of yourself as "conscious of the world" (as you imply here) may be inverted. The big bang may actually be the birth of consciousness, which we, as human beings, are gradually becoming more conscious of.

meroes5• 7 years ago

I took issue with this part:

In the same way, if the universe is to actually exist, its properties can’t be exclusively relational/dispositional

People who believe the mathematical universe hypothesis would take issue here (I'm not educated enough to make a full opinion but I know they would oppose this quote). They would say the universe is entirely relational - it's all one set of mathematical relations. Max Tegmark is one such person and he explains consciousness and self awareness as arising out of evolution (being aware and not a slave to sensory inputs can be beneficial), and subjective reality and the flow of time are just subjective/conscious illusions. Albeit he doesn't give a mechanism for consciousness to form in the brain, but no one has yet.

driverdan3• 7 years ago

There is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, nor is there any plausible reason to believe it.

harlanji• 7 years ago

tracing back to the Big Bang, where there were no conscious beings present yet. Only until the universe cooled and became less dense did consciousness become possible.

This view neglects that matter responds to magnetic fields which surely existed prior to the big bang and could have been vibrating until a resonance or similar event triggered the matter to expand. There is an idea that expansion and contraction are an oscillation of their own; seems logical, but I can’t prove it.

meroes5• 7 years ago

Thanks for the response. I'm not a physicist but we can't speak of before the Big Bang usually. But you are right fields could have existed before neutrons and protons formed. As far as we know, consciousness requires protons, neutrons, and electrons, among other objects, and those were not present or in the right arrangements right at the Big Bang, so I think my argument still holds.

bratbag• 7 years ago

If I understand this article correctly, what you and I consider to be the 'Big Bang' is itself an event filtered through the lens of our consciousness.

The big bang, the time that has passed since them, even the concept of time, are not in fact reality but rather the interpretation of reality made by our consciousness.

There is no argument that there is a fundamental reality that predates consciousness, but our problem is that everything that we view as 'reality' is just the subset of that true reality that is filtered through our consciousness.

What we perceive as reality starts with consciousness as its fundamental building block, because everything we have discovered has been built upon that foundation.

meroes5• 7 years ago

The big bang, the time that has passed since them, even the concept of time, are not in fact reality but rather the interpretation of reality made by our consciousness.

I think that is very reasonable/likely

There is no argument that there is a fundamental reality that predates consciousness, but our problem is that everything that we view as 'reality' is just the subset of that true reality that is filtered through our consciousness.

See to me the article was saying a fundamental, consciousnessless reality isn't possible when it stated everything can't only be relational (the spreadsheet example) - there must be some initial value/setting, i.e. consciousness.

sabarn012• 7 years ago

This is an ontological problem only. The goal here is to solve the problem of that we can't find a rational basis for knowing. If the physical world has primacy then you have to figure out how to solve the irreconcilable perception problem. It makes the philosophy easier to say conciseness is first. I don't understand why we need to have an absolute basis for knowledge as long as our approximations for knowledge are so astoundingly useful.

meroes5• 7 years ago

But then why is this in a Psychology posting and not a Philosophy one if it's just about ontology?

elliotec• 7 years ago

Only until the universe cooled and became less dense did consciousness become possible.

I'm not sure that statement must be true. There seems to be no reason that consciousness wasn't possible before or during the big bang.

youdontknowtho• 7 years ago

I still don't understand what people mean when they say something like

"Rather than trying to reduce consciousness to fit into the box of relational/dispositional properties, it is time that we begin to explore it for what it is—and for the answers that studying it on its own terms, in its full splendor and variety, stands to provide."

What are you supposed to do with that? What does recognizing the ontological primacy of consciousness actually entail?

A lot of this sounds like the kind of "center of what's known" fallacies that plagued human thought in the pre-scientific era. The sun isn't central to anything, the Earth isn't central to anything, human consciousness is probably not central to anything either. Why wouldn't that pattern hold here. Why wouldn't we just be wrong about how unique consciousness is?

chaoticmass• 7 years ago

I've wondered this myself-- what if instead of the brain growing the create consciousness, it grows to receive consciousness? Like a tree growing to receive light.

baron_harkonnen• 7 years ago

The most interesting view of consciousness that really changed my thoughts on it was from Wegner's "The Illusion of Conscious Will". He basically argues this:

We have an agent-based model to understand the behavior of certain things in the world. When we see a cat chase a mouse we assume that the cat as an agent which has a goal which is to catch the mouse. That is we imagine the intentions of the cat (and the mouse) to better predict what will happen next. This is just a mental model, but it's different than the causal model we use to predict where a baseball will land when you throw it.

We apply this model to all sorts of things because it is useful to help predict behavior. That is we imagine conscious intention as a tool to understand things in our world.

The catch is that when we observer our own mind at work... we apply this same model. This is a weird moment where we try to imagine that we have conscious intentions, but since it is own on selves we are watching this creates the illusion of conscious will.

Whether or not Wegner really nails it, I become increasingly suspicious that consciousness is far less special and much more of a trick than we believe it is. But because that illusion is tied to who we "are" we have a very hard time letting go (of course this idea goes back to Buddha and earlier)

jonnycomputer2• 7 years ago

Can you not have consciousness without free will?

Lowkeyloki2• 7 years ago

I don't know if this "problem" can ever truly be "solved" as there's not really a way to prove there to be a difference between something truly "feeling" emotions compared to faking it convincingly. I have to wonder at what point the difference becomes moot, a sort of Chinese room for emotions. I tend to lean towards solipsism when it comes to this kind of stuff, though. Does the difference actually matter?

ambrop73• 7 years ago

I could argue that even people who genuinely feel emotions have, unconsciously, learned to feel them through their interactions with other people. Who can prove to me that emotions are something fundamental to humans and not acquired through culture? In a sense, everyone may as well be faking it.

Lowkeyloki2• 7 years ago

So you're positing that emotions are a cultural virus.

msiyer• 7 years ago

The building blocks of this universe are "things" vibrating. That is all I know.

Consciousness is a very tricky problem. I often question what happens when a man loses his "mind". Is the being now just a machine with stored memory which responds to stimuli?

What happens when a person loses his memory? What role does consciousness play in this scenario?

How do we let split personality disorder and consciousness to play together?

Also, I look around and see the geometry of flowers and seeds. Geometry that emanates from the universe. Everything that looks chaotic at one level becomes extremely beautiful and organized at another.

Also, I see that everything is terribly interconnected. If we think deeply enough we can easily see that a stone lying outside and us are all the same as far as building blocks are concerned. The stone is not an unnecessary object, but our existence and the stone's existence are inextricable.

The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it.

I do not know.

agitator10• 7 years ago

You could just tie it all back to physics.

Not much intelligent about gravity coalescing matter.

But that had the side effect of releasing atomic energy in the form of stars. The rubble attracted by these stars, orbited till it coalesced itself into planets.

Those planets are bombarded by atomic energy by stars. Chemical reactions happened to break down this energy. Life, aka chemical reactions that are able to persist, started happening as a side effect.

The more robust and more intelligent reactions were able to persist through fluctuations in environment. ie. ice ages, meteors, etc.

We are nothing more than a persistent, stubborn reaction. A fungus on a hot rock. Maybe someday we can send some spores to another hot rock, and continue our fungal infestation. Provided that we don't consume all the resources here before that happens and fizzle out. In any case, I'm sure there is a fungus, perhaps a more evolved one, somewhere else in the universe that will.

wppick• 7 years ago

The brain is connected to the gut via the vagus nerve. It's possible that humans are just a vehicle for bacteria to more quickly and interact with their environment in a more substantial way in a similar way that human use cars as a vehicle. I feel like I am an individual with my own consciousness, but it's possible it is all one shared consciousness by a super network of bacteria

buboard10• 7 years ago

If you do not know why do you assume it exists?

EForEndeavour• 7 years ago

The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it.

I think everyone can appreciate this viewpoint, but it's an emotional, visceral reaction to size- and timescales that are literally incomprehensible to the human mind. The complexities of nature engage one's sense of awe and strongly suggest the existence of an intelligent agent in some people, but this belief says nothing about whether that's actually true.

Koshkin2• 7 years ago

to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it

People used to think that about, say, the origin of a lightning bolt. (Now we know for sure there is no "intelligence" behind it.)

glitchc4• 7 years ago

What if it doesn’t?

There, see how easy that was?

d1zzy3• 7 years ago

I think the problem is looked at in a confusing way. On one hand, we use a scientific/empiric analysis of the success of science to explain consciousness on the other we are ready to admit science may not be able to explain it but we don't apply the same rigorous mechanism to test the non-scientific explanation of it. I also think we are not seeing the forest from the trees and are too hooked up to some kind of "magic explanation" of consciousness that is defined by having people explain their experience.

I'm a strong proponent of the "what acts like a duck is a duck" principle. If in the future we manage to create machines which will be, for a very large statistical value, indistinguishable from a human in terms of behavior (that is, make the Turing test seem like a childish joke), is it fair then to say that those are just machines made to emulate our behavior and don't really reflect "real" consciousness? Why is it fair to define consciousness just as something that humans and personal human experience can decide?

Yes, machines may never have human consciousness, but if for all intends and purposes they behave as having one, then they have one, in my opinion.

Also, saying that humans are more than biochemical machines is the same like saying that my home gaming PC is more than wires and electrons. Yes, the experience enabled by the software running on those wires and electrons goes beyond just the physical support for it but that doesn't mean, that at the end of the day it isn't just wires and electrons.

agitator10• 7 years ago

Hold up, Is this thread being inundated by a religious group or something?

Where is the rational thought behind this consciousness discussion? If all of you "critical thinkers" are really responding with "You just don't want to accept that consciousness can't be explained with science" then I have lost my last remaining bit of hope in humanity's intelligence.

jonny_eh2• 7 years ago

Right, it's the classic "God of the gaps". People invested in some kind of faith latch onto areas not yet explained by science. This relies on the false belief that if something isn't explained by science, then there's an opportunity for faith to provide value (aka faith is needed to provide an explanation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

prmph• 7 years ago

But the many worlds interpretation is also a sort of gap-plugging, unfalsifiable argument to me. With it, no need to actually explain why the universe is one way or another: all the possibilities exist in different worlds.

I think people delude themselves that science, at least as currently practised, is always objective.

Balgair3• 7 years ago

I'm also a bit confused here. It seems that a lot of the commentors here have either not read the article posted at all, or are intentionally trying to manipulate the HN comments so as to confound any future ML algos with what amounts to jibberish and noise. There seems to be an inordinate amount of people talking past each other and calling each other names (or something similarly in bad faith). I may just be tricking myself though and seeing things that are not out of place in any other thread.

buboard10• 7 years ago

Philosophers of mind still insist on metaphysical descriptions of consciousness Eventhough there is so much progress in neuroscience that makes it hard to take it seriously anymore. Afaik, most young neuroscientists abstain from these endlessly-goal-shifting discussions. Its a pity too because with recent progress in deep learning there couldnt be a more exciting time to do mind philosophy

(You should have realized that HN has been infiltrated a long time ago)

iagreewithyou12• 7 years ago

dooglius2• 7 years ago

Did you mean "humanity's intelligence" or was that a play on words?

I too am disappointed in the low comment quality here

agitator10• 7 years ago

Fixed.

Geez, one spelling mistake ruined your day? I hope the rest of your week treats you better.

AnIdiotOnTheNet6• 7 years ago

Define consciousness in a way such that it can, even theoretically, be objectively measured.

If it cannot be so defined, then it cannot be explained within an empirical framework, or "science" if you insist, by definition. Empiricism requires objective measurement. The kind of consciousness people are talking about, the experience of being, cannot be objectively measured because it is a purely subjective concept.

If you want to talk purely about ideas that exist within an empirical framework, then you're talking about things like minds and brains, complexity of interactions, etc. All objectively measurable and perfectly scientific things.

But that isn't what people are talking about, because it isn't interesting. Because when you get right down to it what people really want to know is how badly we're allowed to treat things. If it isn't "conscious", then we need not concern ourselves over its apparent suffering need we?

PinkMilkshake• 7 years ago

Something is up. I haven’t seen this much scientific woo and pseudo-philosophical nonsense on HN at one time before. Unless this is a part of the community I’ve never noticed before.I think I’ve read at least 3 posts that end in “because quantum physics”.

kpU8efre7r• 7 years ago

Point to consciousness. Measure it.

lostmsu13• 7 years ago

Put a guy playing DotA 2/chess/any other multiplayer game. Estimate his ranking/MMR. Give him a drink. Watch the number drop.

Not precisely consciousness, but scientifically way better, than this BS article and many comments supporting it, because it is:

- measurable

- gives verifiable predictions, that actually hold true

- actually has some relation to real world which is also a multiplayer game of sorts

- shows you can reproduce the phenomenon in other forms (classical state enumerating programs, neural nets)

driverdan3• 7 years ago

You're forgetting that Silicon Valley is saturated with new age beliefs and other woo. Just because someone's smart and is good with computers doesn't make them any less susceptible.

pavas4• 7 years ago

There are two broad categories of comments that you've conflated together into an "irrational" label. The first is grounded in mystical woo-woo, and the second is grounded in philosophy of science (meta-science) and philosophy of mind.

I do think that "consciousness likely can't be explained by science" if you take science to mean the scientific method and models produced by it, and not just "rational thought" which I would argue is not the same thing.

Science at its core is a series of predictive models and they don't tell you how things "are" (whatever that means), but rather how things behave within some error bound. On the one hand I can see how it's dangerous to cast any sort of criticism in scientific results and theorems especially when they've been well established, but that doesn't mean they are "facts" or universal, only that they've withstood repeated criticism quite well.

The problem that this article is talking about is that you can't observe experience (consciousness) like you can observe "physical" phenomena, so you can't use the same sort of tools like you would use for conducting other sorts of science.

You obviously approach any intelligent discussion in consciousness with rational thought, and the people you can take seriously in this field do just that.

If you're interested in reading more about this I can point you to resources, which should probably start with Chalmer's "Hard problem of consciousness".

xyzzyz2• 7 years ago

Claiming that science cannot explain consciousness is not "religious" or "irrational", it simply is going back to what science is, namely, that "ideas are tested by experiment". Science as we understand it today cannot really explain consciousness, the same way it cannot really explain what it feels like to be a bat. It can explain how bat's use senses perceive environment using physical principles of sound transmission, but it can't convey what bats feel when they perceive environment. Similarly, I cannot convey my internal conscious experiences to you. I can only try to describe them to make you interpret them in terms of your own conscious experiences, but I can never make you feel what I feel, or if I can, there's no way to tell that.

Of course, in future we might understand things like consciousness and qualia, and it's likely that people who do it will be scientists. It won't be "science" though as we understand it today, it will necessarily have to be something bigger. Let's call it "science+".

And, of course, just because science can't explain consciousness doesn't mean that religion can. It can certainly claim to be able to do it, but will be as convincing as the religion is at explaining everything else.

buboard10• 7 years ago

Science cant explain a lot of things, but it has a habit of not introducing needless entities in order to explain them away. There is a certain sense in which those ‘belief based’ entities are qualitatively similar to religious mythology.

tim333• 7 years ago

the question of why we have conscious experience at all.

Maybe because being conscious rather than say knocked unconscious is an advantage for survival and reproduction?

While that is semi joking, consciousness quite likely arose as a functional, being aware of what's going on, thing with qualia (what it feels like) a kind of side effect.

lone_haxx0r• 7 years ago

The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. That is, there could be brains that react as though sad but that don’t feel sadness, brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue or any other color, brains that direct their bodies to eat certain foods but that don’t taste them. So why is there nevertheless something that it’s like to be us?

I don't think so. What even is this "conscious experience"? I hypothesize that it's an illusion. A sufficiently complex robot would indeed have the same "conscious experience". Qualia is nothing more than complex arrangements of molecules in our brains, it's an abstraction, not something fundamental to the universe. Maybe stars and planets too have some sort of rudimentary "conscious experience".

I can't prove this, but you can't prove that you have "conscious experience" either.

that no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to be conscious.

I think that it can be explained but we just don't have enough knowledge of the internal workings of the brain yet.

For some reason I get really exalted when people such as the author disagree with me on this, of all topics. I don't know what it is, maybe it makes me angry that people don't realize it. I know that sounds really arrogant (specially when author has a phd in philosophy), and I might be wrong and look like an idiot, but I can't control this feeling. I feel the same way a teenage atheist feels when he hears a religious person speak about god (I know this because I was that teenage atheist).

ambrop73• 7 years ago

If a brain performs the same sensory and decision-making functions, it is also going to claim that it feels emotions and experiences colors in particular ways. For all practical purpose, such a brain is conscious.

mikekchar• 7 years ago

I can answer a little bit of the question. Why do rotten eggs smell like rotten eggs and not roses? The answer is: it's actually arbitrary.

In my 20s I broke my leg fairly badly. It damaged the nerve, but luckily left the sheath of the nerve undamaged. The end result was that half my foot was paralysed. What I never realised is that if the nerve sheath is undamaged, the nerve will regrow! So slowly over time I started to get feeling back in my foot. I don't know exactly what goes on, but I'd get this sharp shooting pain, like a needle in my foot and slowly after each time, I'd regain a little bit of feeling (I don't know... is that just the nerve endings "reattaching"???)

Eventually, I got pretty much all the feeling back... except it wasn't mapped properly. The space between my toes felt like the sole of my foot and various other strangeness. Slowly I got used to it. A few years later, my brain had completely translated everything and the space between my toes felt like the space between my toes. Even though I know it's mapped differently I can't consciously distinguish between the feelings I have now and the feelings before I broke my leg.

So a rose smells like a rose because the receptors that are activated when you smell a rose are different from the receptors that are activated when you smell a rotten egg. It's just like the nerve endings between my toes are different than the nerve endings on the sole of my foot. But it's just input for your brain, nothing more. Of course we have an aversion to the smell of rotten eggs, but that's just hard wired -- more input for the brain. There are lots of people who have aversion to smells that other people like.

In terms of "consciousness", I think it's likely an illusion of sorts. We experience a kind of continuum of consciousness. In reality, though, there is only an instant. Our awareness is an artefact of our memory.

Behaviour couldn't exist without a feedback loop. For those of us who are programmers, this is pretty obvious. In order to have a state machine, the new output needs to not only look at new input, but also its current state. Every instant we exist we are processing new input and also our current state (which seems to prioritise recent inputs). We exist instantaneously, but because we are processing previous data along with new data, it creates an illusion of having existed over a continuum. Additionally, the only reason we have an ego is simply because our data networks are isolated. If I could access the data of another brain in the same way I can access data in my own brain, there would be no way to distinguish between the "two of us". There would be no way to distinguish between "my thoughts" and "somebody else's thoughts". "I" would not exist... or rather "I" would be the "two of us". It's just an artificial distinction based on a lack of ability to access the data.

Or at least that's the way I look at it. There is no way to know for sure. It might just be the FSM manipulating me like a puppet.

73737373732• 7 years ago

I wouldn't call the mapping necessarily arbitrary. The causal/information processes that your nerves connect to may have some mathematical structure that distinguishes them.

There's the symmetry theory of valence which proposes that symmetric (in some strict mathematical sense) processes feel good, and vice versa with bad qualia.

But this is only one of many subproblems: https://opentheory.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Eight-Prob...

flipcoder• 7 years ago

I've also heard that it could be that everything that exists, is "potentially conscious", such that if it is connected in such a way where it can experience and actuate, it can become aware of it's own essence, and that consciousness is just the first person experience of the universe itself. That idea is interesting but it doesn't quite solve anything, since the harder problem is figuring out exactly how the brain awakens it.

Causality1• 7 years ago

The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. That is, there could be brains that react as though sad but that don’t feel sadness, brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue

That's an assertion I believe to not be so obvious it can be assumed to be correct with no argument to the contrary. If you can't define consciousness why do you believe it exists independent of these other systems and that these other systems exist independent of it? The study of consciousness is absolutely full of non-falsifiable claims like this. We decide apes and dogs and frogs and ants are not sapient but that is an outside observation. It may be as erroneous as looking at Specimen A and its great to the five hundredth generation ancestor and deciding that because they should count as two separate species there must have been some momentous leap in the middle to make Specimen A possible. Consciousness could easily be a smooth spectrum from human to insect and we wouldn't know it because everything next to our level is extinct.

zarmin• 7 years ago

See also: Dean Radin

gashaw5• 7 years ago

I think consciousness is one of those things that is not defined well enough for us to understand it. Until there is a breakthrough in the understanding of consciousness itself there won't be any real conscious ai.

It's like when we learned to fly, we needn't understand how birds' wings work. We had to understand the principles of aerodynamics or what is flying itself.

That's why I think imitating the brain won't work, (deep learning etc.) just like the early attempts to fly didn't, even if we'll know the function of every single neuron.

visarga3• 7 years ago

Sorry to be so direct, but I have to say it like this otherwise it doesn't get through.

Consciousness is that which makes us go take something to eat in the morning so we don't die of hunger, keeps us from running into cars or falling off a high place, allows us to work and be intelligent in our actions so that we cover our needs, guides us to form relations and make babies (thus replicate consciousness further).

I think we are agents with the purpose of survival and reproduction. That is only possible by adaptation to the environment, including society and nature. While we're busy at keeping ourselves alive, we have to act intelligently and learn from our mistakes. There is nothing outside the realm of physics and nature, just plain old agent+environment+learning+self-replication.

It feels like something to see blue (or to be a bat) because it is linked to survival, because we have senses and brains to create models of the world, because we have positive and negative signals (rewards) that guide our present and future actions and the value we attach to all life situations, and ultimately because life depends on it and self-replication would eliminate inefficient agents and leave those who are fit.

In short, consciousness is an adaptation mechanism in service of self replication in an environment with limited resources and competition.

I think all this dualist incredulity towards science is bullshit. Instead, the evolutionary process and the reinforcement learning process are sufficient to explain it. If we want to learn about consciousness we should not look only at the brain but at the environment and its limitations. It is the environment that shaped consciousness into existence.

I know it's not as poetic as souls and hard-problems, but it is the simplest explanation that fits.

bollockitis• 7 years ago

That's very well said. Consciousness isn't a "thing" to be discovered, it's a process. It's only visible when a variety of "things" are functioning in harmony. It's like asking which guitar string plays the G chord. It's _all_ of them and only when in tune.

attilakun• 7 years ago

Many people would reject your definition of consciousness. You can easily imagine a universe where agents perform all the activities you listed, but without an experiential flavour to them. It would all be an "empty" process, much like a simulation in software except with more complex rules.

Yet our universe seems nothing like this. There is an experiential flavour to it which everyone has access to from a first person perspective.

visarga3• 7 years ago

I am not convinced that a successful agent in a competition driven environment could be an empty process. It would have values based on the utility of its actions . Sensations plus values equals experiential flavor.

Florin_Andrei3• 7 years ago

Consciousness is that which makes us go take something to eat in the morning so we don't die of hunger

A thermostat does essentially the same thing for your room's temperature, and yet it's not conscious.

visarga3• 7 years ago

A thermostat doesn't need to compete for resources to keep itself in good shape and make little thermostats. There is no evolutionary pressure, no learning from the environment.

edoloughlin• 7 years ago

Maybe I'm just dumb, but I have a problem taking anything meaningful from that article. There's an ontological problem in defining consciousness in terms of observations - this is circular because we don't have a meaningful starting point so we should throw it all away and... then what?

newsreview1• 7 years ago

I may get pooh poohed here, but to me, this discussion is one of a spiritual nature. My belief is that God created all things spiritually first, before he created them physically. And, God is what gives all life it's sentience. Understanding the brain is only part f the equation. The soul of man (and woman) is both the physical body (including the brain) and the spirit. Until we can fully grasp the spiritual, we will never be able to make the "leap" between paper and conscience. Anyone else feel this way?

kartan• 7 years ago

If the spirit interacts with the brain, then a spirit is a phisical thing that can be measured and is in the realm of science. If the spirit does not interact with the brain, then its existence does not have any effect and it is irrelevant to understand consciousness.

cestith• 7 years ago

Does consciousness itself suffer from intractability similar to Gödel's incompleteness theorems? Is there a consistent set of axioms that can even include all the truths about what we mean when we say "consciousness"? If so, can we go further and use consciousness to actually fully enumerate all the interactions necessary for it or all the implications of it from within a conscious system?

DennisP• 7 years ago

Bernardo Kastrup has written some compelling books arguing that idealism is more rational and skeptical than materialism. The best introduction is probably Why Materialism Is Baloney. A more academic version, consisting mostly of peer-reviewed papers, is The Idea of the World.

sandinmytea• 7 years ago

If so, this would be backed by a great many ancient sources on this topic.

If so, it also creates great need to ponder how consciousness(es) are made to respond to their effects on others. If consciousness IS as wisdom traditions state, also what is needed is not empiricism, but plain commitment to respecting each other.

After all, saying "okay - if I exist regardless, what gives?" Others do too, and might also some reason or actual thing which makes this possible - and to honor that possibility is actually to behave safer, have more pleasant dealings, and ultimately concern ourselves with best practices in getting the most of what we get in addition to our bare consciousness.

If it can exist without any particular structure, it can be placed in other circumstances less desireable.

I.e. every cultural tradition regarding virtue and karma, and G-d.

I see evidence that the scientifically minded would be thrilled to know the makings of this, even if it would be n=1 revelation. I feel like the traditions given us are sensibly concerned with preserving awareness of these lately-arriving observations of upper dimensional/physics-derived approximations of how our selves are maintained in this projection by [previously unseen/ allegorically hinted in tradition] structures which are indeed real.

yadda yadda.. the wisest people always say this, and they themselves often got there the hard way, and yet report good and thankful circumstances from choosing respectful behavior.

So its somewhat able to be "controlled-for." The least-empirical and most curious, agenda-less, all say: do right, there is a supporting element that deserves respect, and since we do exist "hereafter" by some model in many different ways, its always worth not EXCLUDING this.

If we ARE, then what currently we are is only a portion. That creates curiosity and investigation - I do it. I discover what I didn't expect. Now I hope others do, and do better at getting this idea to those who refuse its possibility.

If so - if we are - that is to say, we exist regardless - it also means there's much to concern regarding not combating factors that will otherwise never preserve us. Instead, preserving mutual respect is greatest beneath whatever preserves all - because there would be no way free of the "other" if forever allowed for any result.

basicplus23• 7 years ago

What if self awareness comes first?

sklivvz1971• 7 years ago

What a useless article.

Consciousness is not an impossible problem. It only becomes absurd if it's tinted of mysticism and dipped into a half-digested understanding of the current scientific consensus.

First, let's demystify conscience. Scientifically, there's no soul - it's a religious concept that has no meaning outside of it. What's left of conscience is its shell, its interface.

If we can model something that behaves like conscience, well, we created a genuine conscience.

There are two sides to the shell of conscience. One is the outer shell: the problem is to build something that appears to be conscient. This is a reasonably hard CS or neurobiology problem but by no means impossible. We are getting reasonably close to generating seemingly conscious automata. Surely it's possible to see specific parts of the brain connected to this function: for example, the speech center, and so on. So: hard to do, but doable.

The other part is the inner shell, or "self-conscience." This has to do with perception, mostly, and abstraction. We have already created expert systems that can perceive and give meaning to a lot of inputs.

The trick is creating a system that can perceive itself, its state like it sees the world. This will require a general AI or strong AI, which is currently believed by many experts to be possible although super hard to do. Again though, this is a CS problem, it's addressable by science, and I have no doubt it's a matter of time until we can settle it.

A machine with both characteristics would be just as alive as you or me. It would perceive the world semantically. It would understand to be conscious, and we would recognize it to be conscious too.

At that point, the question of consciousness will become once more only attractive to philosophers and priests. The rest of us will have less problem accepting one of these machines as "alive and conscious."

crazygringo2• 7 years ago

For anyone curious for more, the article surprisingly doesn't bother to mention the philosophical name given to this view:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

"In philosophy, idealism is the group of metaphysical philosophies that assert that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In contrast to materialism, idealism asserts the primacy of consciousness as the origin and prerequisite of material phenomena. According to this view, consciousness exists before and is the pre-condition of material existence. Consciousness creates and determines the material and not vice versa."

hcarvalhoalves• 7 years ago

I've recently watched this talk titled "Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality" [1] by Anil Seth, seems relevant to the topic. If you are intrigued by the question of the original article you might like the TED talk.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo

eblanshey7• 7 years ago

The idea that consciousness comes first has been known as in eastern philosophy as non-dualism (advaita vedanta) -- everything is consciousness. The basic idea is that it is impossible to experience anything outside of our consciousness--thus any assumption there is something outside of consciousness is just that -- an assumption or belief. We can theorize, we can argue, but it will always remain a belief, because it's not possible to experience anything outside of consciousness.

I'd like to share Rupert Spira, a modern non-dualist teacher that holds this view-point. Here is one video in which he explains the consciousness-first approach to someone, a scientist, who holds to the materialist approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgcfa0LFKXc

Perhaps someone will find it interesting and peruse some of his other videos, which I find very enlightening.

lioeters• 7 years ago

I think the controversy of consciousness arises from (and is deeply tied to) the history of Western philosophy and science: the "death of God", matter/spirit and mind/body duality. Something that's not widely acknowledged is how Indian philosophy (Hindu, Buddhist) had significant influence in the course of that history.

A major assumption of the currently dominant worldview is that there's no God, spirit, and even "mind" is questionable. Everything must be explainable as physics, and layers above like mechanics, chemistry, biology. Psychology as a field - in the "West", which is basically a global culture now - is based on that assumption.

The word "consciousness" is so ill-defined and the concept so misunderstood, mainly because it's mixed up with ideas of free will, mind, spirit - the animating principle. It's just the most modern term for categorizing and trying to understand a class of phenomena.

Seeing how "consciousness studies" is widely considered a pseudo-science, I suspect that it's actually related to some critical "flaw" in the fundamentals of the modern worldview, the assumption of a completely physical universe - "physical" meaning consistent with the science of physics.

What's fascinating for me is how quantum mechanics and its philosophical speculations about the role of the observer seems to be causing a paradigm shift, which is taking decades (almost a century) to sink in. We seem to be redefining consciousness as a fundamental property of physics, with some even theorizing that consciousness plays a role in bringing the universe into existence.

As a fan of both Indian philosophy and Western science, I'm greatly enjoying the battle of the ideas (often heated arguments and accusations of "woowoo" pseudo-scientific thinking), the struggle to understand the nature of consciousness deeply and rigorously, and the evolution of science and our worldviews.

eblanshey7• 7 years ago

Everything must be explainable as physics, and layers above like mechanics, chemistry, biology. Psychology as a field - in the "West", which is basically a global culture now - is based on that assumption.

That's right. It's pretty amazing how much is based off of that assumption which has no realistic basis. I guess it's a "convenient" assumption.

But if we start to think that hey, maybe consciousness is the root of it all, not matter, then we can see why science doesn't understand consciousness at all: it's like trying to find the screen while studying the pictures on it. You can study all the biology, physics, and matter on the screen, but you won't find the screen in the details. In this analogy, consciousness is the "screen" in which all appears. I think mainstream science will shift MASSIVELY once they start looking into as a legitimate possibility.

mensetmanusman6• 7 years ago

I wouldn’t say it is a dominant world view.

mr_toad• 7 years ago

The basic idea is that it is impossible to experience anything outside of our consciousness

Often in a crowded work environment people will be taking and yet I will have no conscious awareness of what they are saying. Yet, the second they mention my name, my attention will snap to what they are saying.

Clearly there is some unconscious (and yet intelligent and aware) part of me that is experiencing reality, just waiting for the right trigger to alert my consciousness to some important development.

sutterbomb• 7 years ago

I don't think that focus or attention is equivalent to consciousness. Subconscious != unconscious != no consciousness

eblanshey7• 7 years ago

Like sutterbomb said, focus isn't exactly the consciousness we're talking about here. Although clearly if your name hadn't entered your consciousness you wouldn't have noticed it :)

The question of focus is pretty interesting to me, though. It seems that we are consciousness that gets to "decide" where to put our attention. There are a ton of things that can attract our attention, all through the mechanisms created by the consciousness, namely the five physical senses, our thoughts, and feelings.

zvrba• 7 years ago

thus any assumption there is something outside of consciousness is just that

I've also watched the video you linked to. His argument is indeed strong, but the scientist was rather weak. They (seemed to) agree that experience is mediated by our physical bodies (brains). So did the universe (matter) exist when there was no evolved consciousness to observe it? If the matter did not exist before the mind, how did we come to be?

Yes, our whole world could be somebody's dream or we could be "brains in the vat", but then the question is only changed to "who is dreaming or maintaining the vat"? And since we cannot observe the dreamer, does he exist?

LordHumungous• 7 years ago

there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.

That makes no sense to me. What is consciousness but a mechanism for making decisions? A brain that has all of our decision making functions would be conscious by definition.

chiefalchemist• 7 years ago

"...brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue or any other color..."

Well. I operate under the idea that we can only perceive three colors. Everything else is based on the brain's interpretation of that input. That is, for example, we don't see purple, the brain invents purple.

That aside, simply put, reality is a consensus. And it exists collectiveky for those who buy into that agreement.

artur_makly3• 7 years ago

Dreams —- to me pose as the lowest hanging fruit to peeling the viscous mutable layers of ...our consciousness.

asfarley• 7 years ago

This seems so intuitively wrong to me; like postulating that Windows is necessary for assembly to exist.

Almost none of the preliminary claims in this article feel compelling to me: "no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to be conscious". Where is the proof of this? All the author does is re-state this sentence in different ways.

I imagine people have had similar conversations throughout history: "no one can really predict weather", "no-one understands economics", "no-one understands what makes people fall in love"; but would you claim that (for example) love is the trigger, or boundary condition which causes reality to coalesce?

The claims which do feel believeable are: 1) Many aspects of physical reality are relational 2) Some boundary conditions are necessary in order to make everything well-defined

But there is a real gap from the points above, to the conclusion that consciousness is the missing boundary-condition. Maybe we just haven't discovered the missing boundary-condition yet. Or maybe there is none, and reality is ill-defined.

Everyone who's going on about "we don't know enough about the brain to even START this" feels like a Sunday-school teacher telling me not to question the Greater Truths. It's a thought-killing sentiment. It's a subconscious defense mechanism for people who can't admit that they're a mostly-deterministic machine.

leafeewick• 7 years ago

I think Elon's neurolink will shed more light on the shroud of mystery that is consciousness.

Maybe not, but I think there are people who are saying "damn the nay sayers" and just trying shit that they think can give some insight into how everything functions, up there.

matiasz• 7 years ago

Two physicists and a philosopher recently published a similar article that makes this point even more cogently, in my opinion.

“The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience” https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-negl...

pippy• 7 years ago

This article highlights a massive issue with the field of philosophy in which there's a disconnect between advancements in neuroimaging analysis and metaphysics. The author claims that physical properties define "nothing at all". Yet what they tell are extremely valuable in emulating these systems and what they can teach us with the exploding fields of ML and AI. In the last decade big improvements have been made in the field neuroimaging. Trying to put the pieces together from neuroscience and emulation to lessons learnt is hard, but possible.

There's a worrying trend that's becoming more apparent in regards to the hard problem of consciousness. New neuroimaging analysis techniques indicates that when you take away individual functional elements of how the brain, we're left not much at all. At what point does a series of embedded components become a computer? At what point does a series of neural networks become conscious?

This is going to be an issue we're going to have to address now. Where is the line of conscious for an individual to make a legal choice? Think of someone wanting assisted suicide, in which they're often in a debilitated state. A call is going needed to be made if they're sentient enough. A tough call given it carries the massive burden. If we continue improving ML and AI we're going to have to make the call from the other end as well.

entwife• 7 years ago

This article reminds me of the difficulty ascribing meaning to data. The meaning of a series of bits - ASCII or Unicode, data or executable - is dependent on consciousness to give it meaning. Much like all of the physical observations of science.

otakucode3• 7 years ago

It’s as though someone created a very elaborate spreadsheet and carefully defined how the values in every cell would be related to the values in all of the other cells. However, if no one enters a definite value for at least one of these cells, then none of the cells will have values.

Does it sound to anyone else like the author would benefit tremendously from learning the Lambda Calculus? It seems to me to be a disproof of the authors contention that a 'definite value' is needed at some point.

jedharris2• 7 years ago

This is sad. We have good functional accounts of consciousness (Global Workspace theory [0], Attention Schema theory [1], recent robotics work on self-attention [2]). These explain much of the specific phenomenology of conscious experience. However Rawlette clearly is completely unfamiliar with this extensive and deeply empirical literature.

"Armchair philosophy" like this still gets published way too much, and is given way too much respect. Rawlette, typical of this genre, believes that "conceivability", thought experiments independent of empirical facts, and verbal theorizing can justify beliefs more strongly than actual research.

For good philosophy in this domain, read people like Andy Clark [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory

[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/hod-lipson-is-building-self-a...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark

idlewords2• 7 years ago

Our lack of understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness and subjective experience is so total that it's hard to even imagine what an "explanation" could sound like. The sensation of existence is primordial and weird. I'm curious what you think "research" in these conditions can consist of, other than trying to find ways to frame the problem that permit for some kind of forward progress.

jedharris2• 7 years ago

How much of the empirical cognitive science and neuroscience research have you read? Graziano (discussed in my reference [1]) SPECIFICALLY addresses how and why our brains generate the primordial and weird experiences you mention.

We know lots of ways our brains generate weird experiences, some built in (like dreams) and some produced by special context (any number of illusions). Why should consciousness have some special status?

eblanshey7• 7 years ago

I looked into the article you linked regarding self-attention. I quote:

Yes, we have a different definition that we use that is very concrete. It’s mathematical, you can measure it, you can quantify it, you can compute the error to what degree. Philosophers might say, “Well, that’s not how we see self-awareness.” Then the discussion usually becomes very vague. You can argue that our definition is not really self-awareness. But we have something that’s very grounded and easy to quantify, because we have a benchmark.

So he's redefining something in a way that merely satisfies his world view. That is not in any way consciousness. Consciousness inherently has the "knowing" quality of your experience: you know you are reading this. You can make the smartest, brightest AI robot, with the best machine learning algorithms, that functions the same as a human being, but in the end, it doesn't know it's doing that because it isn't conscious of it.

Hell you don't even need a robot for that. A person that has recently died has all the components you need for a functional human being. The only thing missing is that it isn't conscious anymore. You can fix/replace the heart, do whatever you need physically, but changing the physical building blocks, as per the materialist view, won't bring the consciousness back.

lostmsu13• 7 years ago

Your dead person example is bad. The fact, that you can't reasonably restore a shattered glass does not give glasses any special properties.

mensetmanusman6• 7 years ago

Commence with the 'there is no free will' crowd followed by argumentation that assumes free will (in order to change people's minds... which they have no control over).

carapace• 7 years ago

You can study consciousness, but not scientifically. The "trick" is that, though you can't make a scientific instrument to detect or measure consciousness, you do have one "instrument" to use: your own consciousness. For example, two people can "merge" and experience themselves as one.

lostmsu13• 7 years ago

That's unsubstantiated. Arguably, an ability of a person to play any specific multiplayer game at a specific time can be reasonably thought as a measure of consciousness. Then a simple ranking can be used to assign a number.

It is a good theory as it clearly works with drugs, sleepiness, etc

post_below4• 7 years ago

I understand the point the author wants to make, but I think they fail to make it.

As an example, the idea that "there could be a mind that eats food but doesn't taste it" is silly. We were always going to evolve a way to "scan" food for it's properties. It just makes evolutionary sense. The more information the better. Not to mention the reward aspect (there is some reward for doing everything that contributes to survivial). Of course food tastes good.

Another example the author uses "red looks red" is equally unconsidered. It's a mental representation of light. There are evolutionary reasons for being able to distinguish colors, and they have to be represented mentally somehow. Why doesn't it look like blue? Who cares? All that matters is that it has a distinct representation.

Also in the article, the "why do rotten eggs smell bad" example... Because sulfurous compounds are the result of the metabolic processes of various bacteria. Because those bacteria are present in rotting things, which can cause illness, we have evolved to find them repellent.

Why are my experiences different from others? Because that's just how biological organisms beyond a certain complexity work. No two are alike.

A similarly obvious explanation exists for every example in the article. I see no compelling case that experience cannot be described through biological processes or that consciousness didn't arise from complexity.

I'm not saying there aren't interesting mysteries where consciousness is concerned, just that this article seems to completely fail to explore them.

MrScruff2• 7 years ago

I’m not sure of the point you’re making. The point is it’s entirely possible to conceive of a complex biological agent that can take actions on the basis of sensory input data without invoking the need for a subjective experience. That would be the ‘philosophical zombie’ described by David Chalmers.

However we have a subjective experience of what it ‘feels like’ to see red. Why is that needed?

gnode5• 7 years ago

Any agent which has the ability to perceive red must have some mechanism which corresponds to that percept. The percept of red has to be different to other percepts so that it is not mistaken for something that is not red. It is subjective because the agent has no mechanism for objective experience.

I think to conceive of a philosophical zombie, you have to say that consciousness is something uniquely special in that something possessing all its describing qualities is not it.

post_below4• 7 years ago

What reason is there to believe that subjective experience doesn't arise from the complex web of perceptions, sensations, neurochemical interactions and cognition that we call "I"?

lm284694• 7 years ago

The more information the better.

Not really, our sensors are extremely limited, if taste or smell are anything like vision we're almost sensorless. [0]

[0] https://eyelighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/quality-o...

ARandomerDude• 7 years ago

I wonder if she knows this is essentially the Kalam cosmological argument for God's existence.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. (Psalm 19:1-2, ESV)

PeterStuer• 7 years ago

All models are wrong, some models are useful.

I could start by dissecting the article and detail the sloppyness in the reasoning, the strawman of ignoring emergence, the value and inevitability of referential semantics etc, but ultimately the deeper question remains:

How is the proposed model supposed to be useful?

oneiroviator2• 7 years ago

After reading this somewhat innocuous article and then going through this thread... I think the reason there is so much heated discussion here is that the simple suggestion to invert one's assumptions regarding physical reality and consciousness, also implies an inversion of responsibility.

If it really is the case that consciousness is the basis for reality, then it must also mean that only you, the reader, can find this out for yourself. Then this means you cannot fall back to preachers or scientific publications. It's up to you to do the work. From my experience, even just mentioning this idea of goal-driven contemplative practice often finds a lot of resistance if you don't approach it carefully.

TaupeRanger• 7 years ago

This thread is depressingly chock-full of people who just do not understand the argument being made here. The same tired old counterarguments of "it's just like elan vitale was before we understood biology" are being trotted out again and again, with no attempt at understanding how flawed that talking point is (and has been for years).

proc0• 7 years ago

Still doesn't explain what it is, therefore it is almost pointless to answer this. Not sure how whether it came first, second or third matters to explaining what it really is and its relationship on reality.

hi41• 7 years ago

I don’t agree that consciousness came first. Before I was born, there was a large amount of time when I and my consciousness did not exist. Yet the objective world as we know exited then.

LocalH4• 7 years ago

I personally feel that some of the answers regarding consciousness and sentience may be found when we finally destigmatize psychedelics and allow structured, ethical studies and real analysis. Anyone who has had a really profound psychedelic experience knows that there is something more to our minds than we all realize. We barely know how it works, and it can't easily even really be explained to one who hasn't had a psychedelic experience.

Note that I am not advocating reckless exploration of psychedelics. A person needs to do a lot of research and self-reflection to put themselves in the mindset to even consider tripping. But for those who can handle them, there are paths to self-growth and self-repair that are unmatched in modern medicine.

Personally, my (unfounded but by personal experience) belief is that what we know as consciousness or sentience is driven by a specific balance of psychoactive substances that are naturally metabolized in the body and brain, and many neurological disorders are due to an imbalance in those substances. DMT helped me take great steps towards fighting ADHD

garamirez• 7 years ago

From my (very) personal point of view, I think consciousness has nothing to do with sensor or motor functions...we know so little about what we (as humans) and "conscious" beings really are that we're always in the realm of conjectures. Self-awareness is a so complicated subject to define anyways.

What If Consciousness Comes First?

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