Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered

http://nautil.us/issue/82/panpsychism/consciousness-isnt-self_centered

by dnetesn • 6 years ago

47 66 6 years ago

nautil.us

bionhoward• 6 years ago

"But, as Deepak Chopra taught us, quantum physics means anything can happen at any time for no reason."

- Professor Hubert Farnsworth

nikivi3• 6 years ago

It's things like these:

https://twitter.com/rmartinledo/status/1233388613490139136

That make you wonder how vast consciousness really is.

And how self centered we are still as species. Eating other animals for 'pleasure'. It's sad.

Erlich_Bachman4• 6 years ago

Could you explain why that particular video makes you think about that? I mean, do you consider the creatures on the picture as having a consciousness? Those look far from being conscious to me, they are just small creatures with a couple of functions like moving, finding food and eating...

nikivi3• 6 years ago

I would argue humans are like this too, biologically speaking.

trevyn• 6 years ago

I only see simple biochemical machines in that video.

Here’s what they look like when you zoom in a bit more: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9RUHJhskW00&t=16

It’s literally chemical bonds breaking and forming, stochastically.

nikivi3• 6 years ago

That's fascinating. Thanks for the video.

lisper8• 6 years ago

Is it possible that alongside the conscious experience of “me,” there is a much dimmer experience of each individual neuron?

No.

babygoat4• 6 years ago

Show your work.

lisper8• 6 years ago

If everything that exists is conscious, then consciousness ceases to be a useful concept and becomes nothing more than a synonym for existence. The concept of consciousness is only useful to distinguish things that are conscious from things that are not. Humans and apes are conscious. Rocks and individual neurons are not. One can have a legitimate debate about the status of computers, great apes, dogs, rats, perhaps even fruit flies, but not rocks, transistors, or individual neurons.

robbrown4516• 6 years ago

"Rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, is it possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that it was there all along?"

Umm, really?

Sounds nice and touchy-feely new agey, but, I'm saying no.

More likely you just haven't tried to define consciousness clearly and non-circularly, and when you do, it just kind of goes away as a concept. If you can tell me, in any sort of scientific terms, why a self driving car isn't conscious but a human is, maybe we can get somewhere.

erikpukinskis4• 6 years ago

How is this circular? Physics has the notion of an observer, which is inherent to all matter. This is just saying observer effects happen everywhere all the time and your skull is just concentrating it.

Erlich_Bachman4• 6 years ago

"Observer" notion from physics (does not matter if we are talking about neutonian or QM or whatever) have nothing to do with consciousness. "Observer" in physics is just a description of a certain point of view within the system. The connection of that to consciousness is usually done by popular quasi-philosophy books loosely based on physics and using some of the same terms, they do not come from the physics itself.

robbrown4516• 6 years ago

"Physics has the notion of an observer, which is inherent to all matter."

I have no idea what you mean by this.

As for circular, I saying it is impossible to define consciousness in a way that excludes man made machines (is my computer conscious because it is aware of other similar machines on the network, as well as its own place in the network? Is a self driving car conscious because it is aware of its position in space relative to other cars?), without simply using other words that have similar meaning.

People define "conscious" using words like "aware" or "feel" or "think", while being quick to assume that all words don't apply to machines. But they won't explain why not.

This goes into detail about circularity of definitions: http://www.karmatics.com/docs/dictionary.html

visarga3• 6 years ago

More likely you just haven't tried to define consciousness clearly and non-circularly, and when you do, it just kind of goes away as a concept.

Let me try: consciousness is that which makes you get up in the morning and get something to eat. In general, it's what makes you keep being alive in the complex world, reacting to the changes, adapting for survival. As a human survival entails being part of the human society and culture. This is a concrete, non-metaphysical definition.

Why survival? It's the only self-reliant, self affirming reason.

If you think I am too reductive, maybe you haven't considered the wonderful complexities of reinforcement learning and genetic evolution. There is just as much or more to admire in them as in traditional spirituality and religion. But they have the advantage of being practical and not presupposing things that cannot be seen, including Chalmer's panpsychism and/or dualism.

PS: seems like I hit a nerve, but I am not sorry. Consciousness == eating is my way of crashing the high flying palace of consciousness philosophy into the dirt of the concrete world. Philosophers (armchair or not) need to take heed at the current scientific developments.

dilyevsky2• 6 years ago

So if i program sdc to drive itself to a charging station when it’s low on battery it’s conscious now?

robbrown4516• 6 years ago

I am ok with your definition, but I am one to say that a self driving car can indeed be conscious.

carapace6• 6 years ago

You can't define consciousness, it's not a concept. It has no qualities, no parts, no shape, no sides nor extent. The only reason it's not utterly meaningless to talk about is your own subjective awareness.

"Consciousness", "you", "here", and "now" are all synonyms.

robbrown4516• 6 years ago

Not sure what you mean by "it's not a concept."

I certainly don't see how "you", "here" and "now" are synonyms of consciousness, nor is the use of the terms indicative of consciousness.

Two simple machines that communicate with one another for some useful purpose could meaningfully and usefully use those terms (or equivalent symbols or codes), but that wouldn't make them conscious by the way most people use the word. Not seeing that at all, sorry.

And certainly the words aren't synonyms "consciousness," in that you could replace the word "consciousness" with "you" (etc)

unkulunkulu• 6 years ago

This ties quite well with what Alan Watts says about the universal consciousness, its manifestations and the role of ego in all of this. Sometimes its quite believable that two consciousnesses coming in close contact for a moment give rise to something quite new and bigger than the parts.

stevebmark• 6 years ago

Nautilus articles seem to frontpage on average once a weekend. The weird thing is the articles have very low engagement on HN in terms of comments. Given the weekly cadence and low engagement on every article this may mean Nautilus is running an internal upvote campaign.

carapace6• 6 years ago

31 pts 26 comments now.

grabbalacious6• 6 years ago

My argument against panpsychism (the principled form of animism, which is ancient) is that to perceive something you have to have a representation of it in memory. Ergo if you don't have a memory system you can't be conscious of anything. Rocks don't have RAM.

odyssey7• 6 years ago

When I think about my first-person experience, it's something that happens in the present instant. The awareness of a distant and recent past may simply be a result of memory stimuli being presented by the brain to the consciousness at the present instant.

In this model, if I went under anesthesia and the King Particle got knocked out of its orbit and got replaced by another, the new consciousness would believe it was a continuation of the earlier one, because it would receive the same stimuli that its predecessor would have, and part of that stimuli was evolved to elicit a sensation for the continuity of self.

What this gets at is, is consciousness stateless? Is its experience a pure function of what is fed into it, or is it stateful?

babygoat4• 6 years ago

Animals don’t have RAM either. An understanding of organic memory systems has never been established.

grabbalacious6• 6 years ago

You're quite right. That last sentence was intended to be a catchy and rhetorical summary.

FreeHugs3• 6 years ago

    to perceive something you have to
    have a representation of it in memory

Why? I cannot think of a definition of "perceive" that would lead to this conclusion.

grabbalacious6• 6 years ago

You have to learn to see stuff, or recognise sounds, for example.

andrewflnr2• 6 years ago

You could quite reasonably consider an excited electron to be a 1-bit memory of experiencing a photon recently. My understanding of panpsychism is that it doesn't require everything to have an equally sophisticated consciousness/experience as ours, just some. And sure, an excited electron decays, but so do your memory and bits in RAM.

grabbalacious6• 6 years ago

Well I suspect a memory system, together with stable input/output hardware, are necessary but not sufficient. To be a conscious agent, said agent's memory must include a representation of itself. Otherwise it can't truthfully say, "I see a pebble."

Edit: it can't truthfully think, "I see a pebble."

agumonkey• 6 years ago

maybe it's a wave between avatarial representations of other before us

seemslegit• 6 years ago

Consciousness is made of primordial cheese, formed by an interaction of a lactic field permeating the universe with spontaneously occuring quantum fermeons - if Nautilus is interested in this idea I'll be happy to elaborate on it in long form, complete with references to David Chalmers as well as James McIntyre.

yes_man• 6 years ago

If anyone is interested in a framework that tries to put rigor into this otherwise very open-ended problem of defining consciousness, the integrated information theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...) is one approach. Problem with a "traditional" philosophical approach to consciousness is that it's hard to prove and equally hard to disprove. And although integrated information theory starts with the assumption that "consciousness exists", and builds on top of that assumption, at least it's a step in a direction where the problem of consciousness is turned into a measurable property. After all, even the most rigorous of natural sciences rest on some axioms. And I am not claiming that integrated information theory is in any way correct (although it may be). But theorizing about consciousness without a tangible logical framework always feels like it's not going anywhere, so I welcome the pursuit for scientific advancement in said theory

carapace6• 6 years ago

I was thinking just this morning that I should write a book: Metaphysics for Computer Nerds & Computers for Metaphysicians. I am lonely in the intersection between mysticism and hard mathematical science.

And the fact that the hard problem has persisted for so many decades, despite the advances in neuroscience, has caused some scientists to wonder if we’ve been thinking about the problem backward. Rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, is it possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that it was there all along?

Why do folks present this idea like it's new and radical? It's literally thousands of years old.

Aldous Huxley wrote "The Perennial Philosophy" in 1945. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy

However, it seems to me that the obstacle one faces here isn’t a combination problem but the confusion of consciousness with the concept of a self. ... And this concept of the self is an illusion.

Recapitulate the basic finding of Buddhism, This has been known for thousands of years.

it may be more accurate to instead talk about the content and quality of conscious experience at any given location in spacetime, determined by the matter present there.

Now we're gwtting somewhere...

would two brains wired together produce a new, integrated mind?

In a word, yes. You don't even need to connect them with a corpus callosum, the bandwidth and latency of our built-in hardware is sufficient:

"Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual hypnosis." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106

- - - -

Gurdjieff presents a world system wherein (I am paraphrasing and condensing wildly and inaccurately here) the human isn't born with a soul but must construct one during it's mortal lifetime or "die like a dog" leaving nothing behind.

There are (in this world model) three kinds of matter: terrestrial matter (of the Earth), stellar matter (of the Sun and solar system) and interstellar matter (which is stable outside the Sun's heliopause.)

The process of constructing a soul proceeds in two stages. First one "coats" the physical body through and through with a stellar matter to make the "second being-body", and then again with interstellar matter to make the "third being-body" or soul. This third body is stable beyond the solar system and, importantly, beyond the death of the original physical body. The second being-body is not stable on it's own without the first or third bodies.

I bring this up because it's a fascinating (IMO) third concept besides "humans do not have souls" and "humans do have souls": "humans are born w/o souls and must make them themselves before death".

It also makes a kind of sense that, in order for your human consciousness to survive the death of the body, the material matrix within which and through which your human experience carries on, you need another nearly-identical body made out of more durable stuff.

Leary• 6 years ago

Found some interesting reading:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/

Perhaps someone well versed in this can tell us how this article's theory relates to the non-self that Buddhists have been talking about for 2,000 years.

carapace6• 6 years ago

The theory is pretty much standard Buddhism. Hinduism too for that matter (no pun intended.) "Atman is Paramatman"

LargoLasskhyfv• 6 years ago

Consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon caused by checksum errors in the filesystem/object store/younameit of the quantum foam storage of the akashic records.

There...

dimovich• 6 years ago

When it comes to consciousness, I really like the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter [0]. This article feels like a step backwards from that.

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

Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered

Related Stories