Ask HN: Where does consciousness come from?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=403147

by jmtame • 18 years ago

35 130 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've been pondering this with several other friends. If you take a psychology class, you learn all about the brain, neurons, and neurotransmitters. But at some point, do you wonder how do we feel a sense of "personality" and consciousness based on nothing more than electrical signals firing off?

For example, I know we have an amygdala and frontal lobe where our personality is formed. But what about the chemical make up of neurons? How does that cause us to feel certain ways?

Does anyone feel like the field of neurology fails to explain a lot of the low-level fundamentals?

EDIT: At birth, when does the first neuron fire, and how does it sustain itself?

eggnet• 18 years ago

If we mechanically understood how thinking or consciousness worked, we would have AI. We don't understand, and don't have AI. I hope I was helpful :)

chris_l2• 18 years ago

Intelligence != Consciousness

randallsquared5• 18 years ago

That's true, but most people really mean artificially generated consciousness when they say "AI". A few people, like Yudkowsky, really don't, but the original post here was about consciousness, not really powerful optimization processes.

chris_l2• 18 years ago

Consciousness is the brain sensing the mind of the world. But that's just my speculation :)

rms• 18 years ago

Consciousness isn't special. And neurology can't satisfactorily explain what it means to exist because English itself can't describe how a bunch of chemical reactions add up to cogito ergo sum.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/zombies.html seems a little relevant.

randomwalker• 18 years ago

"do you wonder how do we feel a sense of "personality" and consciousness based on nothing more than electrical signals firing off?"

This is one of the central questions of cognitive neuroscience today, and scientists aren't even close to a convincing answer. It is exactly the wrong question for an ask HN post -- it's like a bunch of sailors speculating about quantum mechanics. Please read the papers. Here's a great introductory video for a lay audience -- Dan Dennett's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consci...

I do sympathize with your point that the abstract scientific jargon seems to leave one wanting for a "real" answer, but since the science itself is way incomplete at this point, any attempt to pare it down will result in something that's no better than random guessing.

davidw• 18 years ago

[ I generally try and avoid frivolities, but... ]

> a bunch of sailors speculating about quantum mechanics.

Arrrr... 'tis like the waves of the ocean, but also like me musket shot - at the same time, lads!

I agree though, that outside of one or two people (robg?) , most of us aren't very knowledgeable about the subject.

jwilliams• 18 years ago

> I agree though, that outside of one or two people (robg?) , most of us aren't very knowledgeable about the subject.

The neuroscience side, yes - but I think the philosophical implications are anyone's game (that's the beauty of philosophy really - no license required).

pg• 18 years ago

The word "consciousness" doesn't mean one single thing. To the extent it means anything definite, it seems to refer to a collection of self-referential thoughts.

I'm sure everyone who studies the brain wonders very much how neuron firings correlate with these thoughts or any others. I'm equally sure everyone who studies the brain would be surprised if they weren't "based on nothing more than electrical signals firing off."

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

What I find amusing is the phrase "nothing more than electrical signals". As if electrical signals were somehow trivial to understand. As if one individual neuron didn't embody so much chemistry and physics and history (it's got your entire genome stored inside!) and complex behaviors (it's a tiny little creature!) that we can't even understand it in isolation.

I'm not sure whether to recommend Dennett's Consciousness Explained or to compel the questioner to work through The Molecular Biology of the Cell, followed by (e.g.) Hölldobler and Wilson's Journey to the Ants -- and then keep going -- before trying to dismiss the complexity of a network of neurons with the wave of one hand.

yan9• 18 years ago

I find that some people (hooray weasel words) are so driven to find that something special that can put humans in a completely different realm from other things and animals that they won't accept that the same processes that run us also run most other living things, just more progressed.

I don't know why people need a clear, binary difference of what makes one "human" to appreciate how beautiful life and the mind is.

Am I in the minority that has no problems with being categorizes as a mammal, just more progressed, not different altogether?

lisper• 18 years ago

I recommend Dennet's book. In a nutshell, his thesis is that our subjective experience of consciousness in the here-and-now is an illusion, that what's really going on is the brain is writing and re-writing its memories to build up an internal model that is consistent with all the sensory input its receiving. This crazy-sounding idea is actually consistent with experimental results. You aren't really conscious, you just think you are. :-)

You might also enjoy: http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf, especially sections 5 and 6.

niels_olson• 18 years ago

I think pg's answer is actually a pretty decent answer for everyone except the non-specialist. I suspect most people suspect the basics are a sort of super-lispy machine where the atoms are neurons and each atom can be contained in as many lists as there are synaptic combinations of neurons which include that neuron.

But there are plenty of neuroscientists who think lisp is some sort of speech impediment. I've heard lots of theories, but smart people were probably right a long time ago and we just haven't caught up.

That said, even if the lispy sort of theory works out in the end, who cares? I mean, it's like arguing about Godel's incompleteness. No matter how profound the answer, the answer just isn't going to influence your day-to-day life that much. "nothing more than electrical signals" is about all that the vast majority of people really need to understand in order to solve their particular problems.

skynomad• 18 years ago

I think this might be the wrong place to be looking for such answers. Anyway, you might like to do some research on Emergence and Chaos theory. The fundamental aspect of emergence is that individual agents (ie neurons) follow simple rules, and through interaction with other agents also following these simple rules, a system emerges which is greater than the sum of its parts, with its own goals and intelligence which is not known to any of its individual agents. There is a brilliant book on this entitled "Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software" by Steven Johnson.

Another interesting author to read is Brian Fay. He argues that the conscious 'self' does not exist as a concrete thing, but rather, it is dynamically created through interaction. He gives a very interesting analogy of an eye traveling through space, and can only become aware of itself by seeing its reflection. He then explains that we see our reflection in others, and eventually that becomes internalised.

The reality is that the brain is the most complex structure we have yet encountered, and it will be a very long time before we fully understand how it works and how the mind is thus constructed within it.

paraschopra• 18 years ago

Four to five years ago, I would have asked the same question and would have been superemly excited about being able to ponder over such questions.

Now, I simply don't bother.

tlrobinson2• 18 years ago

This is one of those questions that bothers me. Not the question itself, just the fact that we don't know, and likely can't know.

Is there some test to prove if something has "consciousness"? Without such a test I don't think we can know what it really is. You might propose having the thing explain the feeling to you, but I could just program a computer to do the same thing (theoretically).

I have no way of knowing whether or not anyone else besides myself experiences this thing called consciousness.

You all could be perfectly designed robots that are tricking me into believing you're also humans who experience consciousness.

Tichy9• 18 years ago

The funny thing about your thought experiment, as well as the infamous "chinese room", is that you could actually turn it on it's head. The conclusion is that consciousness doesn't matter.

randallsquared5• 18 years ago

If you divorce all the products of consciousness from consciousness itself, then you could say consciousness doesn't matter. Also, any particular product of consciousness is easily produced without it. Given that evolution stumbled on consciousness, I think it's plausible that within the constraints of biology, consciousness is the simplest way to produce the behavior we associate with it.

lehmannro• 18 years ago

You all could be perfectly designed robots that are tricking me into believing you're also humans who experience consciousness.

If you rebuilt humans with whatever technology (we might use transistors, nature used neurons), how would they be different from real humans then? Why would you call the robot a trickster while saying you are no doubt conscious?

tlrobinson2• 18 years ago

Maybe a robot that perfectly mimics a human does have consciousness, but we don't know that, and I don't think we can know. That's all I'm saying.

For all I know I'm the only "being" in existence who really has this thing called consciousness that I know I experience, and all the rest of you aren't really "real".

I don't know why that would be, but it's a scary thought. Kind of like "The Matrix"...

jbert• 18 years ago

As far as I know, you'll get no answers here (or anywhere).

My view of things was shaped a lot by some sections of Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. If you allow that symbols (think of a bunch of object properties + some methods) can be represented in the brain and operate on each other. (There's a good description in GEB which suggests we use a javascript-like prototype object-based system. Briefly, if someone starts talking about an individual they know called Joe, who's a football player, you basically mint a fresh new symbol which carries some of it's own data (name => Joe) but also inherits from your default 'football player' symbol. As you find out more about Joe, you add more specific data on Joe's symbol, which shadows the football player one. That, to me, explains a lot about prejudice (some people's heads overly-favour the inherited attributes. But I digress...)

Your brain models the world by creating symbols which reflect the world (evolution helps for that). An important (the biggest/most complex?) symbol in your head is the one which represents yourself.

Consciousness is then that symbol operating on itself.

All this is of course happening in a physical substrate which has it's own methods of affecting things (psychoactive substances washing through your brain etc).

mpk• 18 years ago

I doubt you're going to get any answers here. I've seen GEB mentioned already and if you're a reader I highly recommend Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Fascinating theory, but the consensus seems to be that it's probably not correct. I picked it up after encountering references to it in a diverse set of sources.

yan9• 18 years ago

While that book is fascinating and totally came out of left field when it was published, I don't think I would recommend it as an introduction to consciousness. The idea that people very similar to modern humans weren't self-aware as recent as the pharaohs is fascinating though!

yters8• 18 years ago

That is very interesting. Know of any good links about the non self-aware people?

russell• 18 years ago

I thought it was amazing when it came out. Now I think it's a crock of shit. I think mammals are conscious and self aware enough to distinguish between themselves and their environment. I doubt that even thoughts are unique to humans. I would be interesting to find out if chimps can think chimp sounds without verbalizing them.

chengmi2• 18 years ago

This question is better suited for a philosopher rather than a biologist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind

randallsquared5• 18 years ago

"better suited for a philosopher rather than a biologist" just means that not enough is known about the subject to speculate usefully.

Usually.

yan9• 18 years ago

... until biology catches up.

chengmi2• 18 years ago

So take biology out of the discussion, and consider consciousness in a computer system. If a program is self-aware, is it conscious? Or is there more to consciousness than that? Why don't conscious computer programs exist if we already understand how consciousness works? Would it be ethical to reboot that program, if it existed?

Biology can explain how neurons in the brain (computer) works. It can also potentially explain how thought and logic play out (program logic). But how do you explain consciousness in this metaphor? this.isRunning? Or does it make more sense to say that even if we understood all of biology, there are still things that we won't fully understand?

petervandijck• 18 years ago

No I'd say that the last 10 years have shown that this question is actually better answered by biology than by philosophy (who haven't come up with a decent answer in 1000s of years).

sgrove• 18 years ago

I major in cognitive neuroscience, which is exactly what you're asking: how does conscious thought arise from unconscious parts?

I think one book you may benefit from reading is http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valent.... It's a wonderful and short book with some subtle humor and amazing powers of explanation. After reading it you may very well have a better understanding of how it's possible (and how many different ways it might be possible) for what we see as complex behaviors to emerge.

I've had dozens of friends read this short book, and they've all thanked me for the recommendation and ended up buying a copy for themselves.

Tichy9• 18 years ago

Consciousness doesn't really exists, it is just an illusion.

It is both scary and amusing to me that there are entire (expensive) conferences dedicated to something the participants can't even give a definition for.

yan9• 18 years ago

I have very similar feelings toward "web 2.0" conferences.

Tichy9• 18 years ago

But at least for Web 2.0 it is possible to give a definition of what it is supposed to be. I have yet to see such a thing for consciousness.

tocomment• 18 years ago

If it's an illusion, who is it illusioning?

Tichy9• 18 years ago

people?

yters8• 18 years ago

Why do people find the "illusion" response helpful?

"How do Newtonian physics, quantum physics, and relativity work together? Don't worry about it, the physical world is just an illusion, and illusions aren't rational."

rodrigo10• 18 years ago

Conceptually, its an illusion in the sense that theres "something" doin interpretation between the "real" things and our brain; in the zen koan of the tree that fells, it migth not be doing any sound because theres no brain processing the wave and telling someone that a tree falled.

Tichy9• 18 years ago

What I mean by "consciousness is an illusion" is that consciousness does not exist. It is a non issue. Again in this thread as in any other discussion on consciousness, nobody has given a definition of consciousness. There is nothing meaningful to talk about.

On the other hand, the physical world exists, or at least out perception of it exists. You might say that you also perceive consciousness, but honestly, what is it you perceive? I don't think it is the same as perceptions of physical things.

mrtron2• 18 years ago

I don't think the world is an illusion - but rather our perception of the world is.

We only see a very limited spectrum of light, but we don't realize the massive gaps we cannot see. All of our senses are a tiny pinhole into the world, and we base our reality on them. Our sense of smell is a fraction of other mammals, we really don't notice that a dog could be smelling 20 things in a room that we don't notice.

Not that we really have any other option, but I am just trying to explain the 'illusion' of it.

Tichy9• 18 years ago

Another way to put it: if you ask "how can we build a bridge", I am not going to respond by saying "the physical world is an illusion, so building bridges is useless". On the other hand, if you ask "how can we build a conscious entity", I will say the question is meaningless. If you ask instead "how can we build an entity that can have a discussion on Hacker News", we have something to talk about.

renno• 18 years ago

http://www.boundless.org/features/a0000901.html

cool-RR• 18 years ago

I can try to answer this according to my theory. So one big "IMHO" on all the following text.

Saying that chemical activity "causes" us to feel certain emotions is not correct. A little thinking could show you how absurd this is. "Causing" would mean that there is some sort of cause and effect here, some event X that causes event Y. Like when you turn on the kettle and the water boils. So this would mean that when a chemical event X is happenning in a brain, it will cause the person to feel an emotional event Y. This is an absurd hypothesis. Where is event Y? It's actually hard for me to explain why I find that hypothesis so absurd. Maybe someone here can help.

Anyway, my opinion is that THERE IS a correspondece between chemical events and emotional events, but it's not causality. I can't lay down all of my theory here, but I would say that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the "inside" world and the "outside" world. (Like a 1-1 correspondence between sets.) And those X and Y are paired together in that correspondence.

I remember when I was in elementary school I wanted to make a conscious computer program. I was programming in Basic at the time. I thought, "Okay, the program should be able to feel pain. So I should make a variable PAIN, and when certain events happen it will cause PAIN to be equal to 1 or 0 or -1 or whatever." But I kind of got stuck there, because what do you do after you set a value to the PAIN variable? The best you can do is to have the PAIN variable determine the behavior of the creature, for example to make it scream "ouch". I believe that when it comes to emotions of creatures other than ourselves, behavior is all there is to their emotions. When it comes to our own emotions, it's more complicated and independent of our brains.

Tichy9• 18 years ago

No, all we have (perceive) is a model of the outside world. The brain is sitting in a black box (the skull) with some signal connectors to the outside. It only gets a stream of signals, and from that creates a model of the world. That it chooses to react emotionally to some of these signals is just a way of the brain to modify it's own behaviour (maybe trick itself for the good of the species, like the desire to mate and have children).

I think part of the success of the movie "The Matrix" was that we all knew that it is true, in a way. The only difference to the Matrix is that we carry the super computer that simulates our world around with us. We are not sleeping in tanks connected to the central computer - or so we think, there is no way to ever be sure...

I think you should have followed through with your "pain variable" approach.

A good read is "Braitenberg Vehicles", it shows how even very simple rules can evoke complex behaviour and the appearance of emotions.

ahoyhere3• 18 years ago

Dude, there's lots of empirical evidence that introducing certain chemicals into a human body result in certain feelings. It's not 100%, but it's pretty causal.

byrneseyeview4• 18 years ago

I think his point is that, dude, there's a lot of empirical evidence that by introducing certain electrical charges into a computing device results in certain outputs. In other words, he's saying that when you say "You change the chemical composition of the body in X way, and this causes feelings," everything after 'way' is redundant.

seejay• 18 years ago

I think Buddhism has very good explanation for such questions. I suggest you read some good Buddhist books or find someone who has a good knowledge about Lord Buddha's teachings (probably a Buddhist monk) Good Luck finding answers!

ahoyhere3• 18 years ago

No, it doesn't really. Buddhism doesn't concern itself with the question of "why." That's ego talking.

ahoyhere3• 18 years ago

I'll give you $8k and two months this summer. If you come up with an answer, we'll both get rich.

blues• 18 years ago

Um, no. I'm a "formerly autistic" (the irony should freak you) researcher in (classical) information theory and linguistics. You will hopefully get your answer at linguistics.name, when I get around to it. There is no charge to just learn the material. I do claim to own the theory itself, So you can't teach it without a license from me. Life is hard y'know?

Eliezer3• 18 years ago

I recommend either Gary Drescher's "Good and Real", or the relevant parts of Overcoming Bias (which aren't exactly collected into one place yet).

randallsquared5• 18 years ago

I don't recall seeing implementation details in OB, and the description of that book doesn't indicate there are any in there, either. Of course, that's because the real answer is "no one understands it, yet". A bunch of jargon and entertaining stories can be used to show that some proposed implementation isn't the right answer, sometimes, but it can't be the answer.

Eliezer3• 18 years ago

Well, I'm not just going to come out and tell you how to build a conscious entity. Next thing you know, people would be making conscious Java applets.

That's the real reason "no one can explain the hard problem of subjective experience". It's actually pretty simple, but as soon as someone figures it out, they realize how easy it would be to create billions of small computer programs experiencing intense suffering; so they keep it a secret.

nazgulnarsil• 18 years ago

is there an easier way of finding the relevant bits of overcoming bias? is there someplace that links to the beginning of serial posts?

Eliezer3• 18 years ago

We've got a major revamp currently underway; that's part of the plan. Meanwhile there isn't much except the Google search and Andrew Hay's indices.

ram1024• 18 years ago

consciousness is simply the state of being responsive to one's environment.

it can boil down as far as gauging the responses of one neuron, but the "environment" of that neuron is its connectivity to others, so it's far more comprehensive to total consciousness up as the whole collective.

ideally, you'd be able to single out a singular and distinct "thought" and trace the workings of all your cognitive elements involved. the result of this thought then loops back through the system and re-patterns it with a "conclusion".

the chemical nature of one's neurons is the important part whether malleable or incorrigible, allowing us to exhibit unique traits and personality.

yan9• 18 years ago

Check out "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter, he tackles that question and argues from the point of view that hard ai is possible. Check out "Emperor's new mind" by roger penrose for a conflicting viewpoint. Both books will teach you much, much more than it's central thesis and is a tour through other important topics in science.

Also, you might find the brain science podcast ( http://brainsciencpodcast.wordpress.com ) interesting. She tackles some of these questions also, summarizes current research and interviews other people in the field.

mindviews• 18 years ago

Douglas Hofstadter wrote a book after GEB called "I am a Strange Loop" that deals pretty much exclusively with the ideas of self and consciousness. This is far and away the most compelling argument for consciousness being an emergent property of the brain that I've ever seen. I strongly recomend this book for anyone interested in the topic.

gregorylent• 18 years ago

western science is barbaric, primitive, stubborn, and totally ignorant about this ... and so arrogant about their model, which says consciousness comes from meat ... yogis have nailed this so well over a few thousand years of investigation of the nature of the self and its relationship to consciousness ... you will have to learn some new vocabulary, and do some meditation ... worth every moment spent .... just as an example of the subtlety of the east, there are five words in sanskrit for aspecets of the mind, while we have only the one ..

your question is great, the motivation is wonderful, and may your search be fruitful .. it is the reason for birth, to come to understand this ...

enjoy

yan9• 18 years ago

If not meat, where? I don't mean to offend, but I am curious as to how one can separate pseudo-science, already disproven ideas (All matter is made from 5 elements) and some eastern tradition from posed hypothesis, repeatable experiments and conclusions that are up for being argued.

yters8• 18 years ago

One approach is to say consciousness is properly basic like science assumes matter and/or energy are/is.

rodrigo10• 18 years ago

We (western people) own that to the rationalist notion that anything thats spiritual, mistic, esoteric, has to be the complete opposite of rational. Theres no one or the other, both notions has to be part ot the Truth, if some theory dispises one or the other, it cannot lead to the Truth.

rodrigo10• 18 years ago

Did you just downmod without adding anything to the conversation?

sebg3• 18 years ago

Quoting Richard Feynman -- "During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas — which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked — or very little of it did."

"Yogis have nailed this...." You are saying Yogi's have nailed where consciousness comes from? Do you have any references we could look at?

Retric• 18 years ago

At birth, when does the first neuron fire, and how does it sustain itself?

The brain starts well before birth. Humans don't have a single on switch so much as a long bootstrap process that starts when the first few neurons start to link up and ends at death. Although most positive changes happen by ~25 years old.

What we think of as consciousness is basically the neuron's that stop focusing on what is going on and start considering options that we don't directly carry out. AKA when you actually catch a ball you don't really think about it but when you consider how you might do a better job in the future well that's consciousness. The brain is not a fixed entity but a constantly adapting system and consciousness is really best thought of as part of that adaptive process.

rodrigo10• 18 years ago

Also against the switch view; It well migth be a replica of the evolution process; a little being w only a couple of neurons that handle simple proceses, and by iteration grows to a more complex being. That would also correspond w the natural pattern of growth.

jmtame• 18 years ago

Sorry, I didn't mean to say at birth. Perhaps shortly after the zygote is formed.

time_management• 18 years ago

I'm philosophically a Buddhist, so I put consciousness ("mind") first and wonder more about where the physical world comes from. Experientially, the world is not much different from a dream (except the sex is more awkward) but it has certain properties of persistence, regularity, and sharedness among ~10^11-14 sapient organisms that make a convincing case for a world of cold, hard matter that exists independently of us. But that's an illusion.

The physical universe doesn't actually exist, any more than a dream world does. There are probably trillions of universes in existence-- maybe infinitely many. They can't be counted, and they don't much matter because they're physically inaccessible to us. We're lucky, though, to be in an exceedingly successful universe whose laws are set ("fine tuned") to allow for complex life. The universes that don't support complex life to observe them might be "out there", but they effectively don't exist.

Mind is eternal, but the processes it can support depend on the physical system (body/brain) to which it binds, and of course that physical system evolves and, sadly, collapses. We're extremely lucky to have our minds bound to such beautiful, powerful creatures as humans. We could've just as easily been bound to cockroaches or tapeworms (and it can happen after death in a negative rebirth, but karma's another subject entirely).

The transmigration of consciousness is taken as self-evident by Eastern religions, and there's actually a fair bit of evidence for reincarnation (refer to the work of Ian Stevenson). What's controversial is whether or not a mind-- or, at least, an unenlightened mind-- can exist independent of a physical body at all. The Theravadan perspective tends to be that it cannot, whereas Tibetan Buddhists believe in an intermediate experiential state called the bardo.

Am I butterfly dreaming I'm a man? Or a bowling ball dreaming I'm a plate of sashimi? Never assume what you see and feel is real! -- Doreen, Chrono Trigger.

yters8• 18 years ago

Can you describe the most convincing evidence for reincarnation?

rodrigo10• 18 years ago

I dont view reincarnation as "me" waking up in some other body in some other time; IMHO it has to be on a gene level, "me" is just a bunch of genes wich have learned and contribute to the general pool. Or something like that.

FlorinAndrei4• 18 years ago

Reincarnation is of secondary importance to buddhism, and indeed it gives the impression of a "bolted on" feature that was added later on to, presumably, satisfy the masses.

The most strict interpretations of the buddhist doctrine actually posit the unreality of reincarnation.

(n.b.: I am not a buddhist)

alan-crowe• 18 years ago

Things can evolve into their opposites. For example, those annoying persons who know Monty Python sketches off by heart and recite them have turned Monty Python into the kind of 1950's cozy cliche that the Pythons were rebelling against.

"Mind only" versions of Buddhism strike me as exactly the attachment to views that the Buddha is warning against in the <a href="http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.063.than.html">Cula Malunkyovada Sutta</a>. Notice the entirely mundane ontology of the <a href="http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.nyp...">Sallatha Sutta</a>. The Buddha is offering a system of mental training. His response to <a href=" http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/mustard-seed.html">Kisa Gotami</a> is compassionate, shrewd, and above all ordinary. He teaches no metaphysics beyond opening your eyes and seeing for yourself what kind of world we live in. It is clear from the parable that the world Kisa Gotami is being encouraged to see is the ordinary, mundane one.

I've had my own go at explaining what Buddhism is getting at when it says that <a href="http://www.hulver.com/scoop/comments/2008/3/10/21816/6428/19...">the world is an illusion.</a>.

That still leaves the Buddha's teaching of anatman - no self. Surely that is metaphysically extravagent? But that brings us back to the original posters question. Reponding to a thread on Overcoming Bias, I've framed the traditional Buddhist answer in a reductionist, materialistic context, and written it in the language of shock level four. Notice the ordinaryness of the ontology and metaphysics beneath the <a href="http://www.hulver.com/scoop/story/2008/12/14/10333/990">the sci-fi shiny.</a>

kirse2• 18 years ago

This is a great question, and one that will never be answered by scientific naturalism. The current worldview assumed by scientists is that the "natural" and "material" is all we have and all that can be used to explain everything.

Unfortunately, while this does form a powerful basis for truth in the empirically observable, it completely shatters and is horribly faulted when one tries to explain the unempirical and unobservable with only what you have. It is an extremely powerful assumption (based on faith in a worldview) that the domain of the metaphysical is purely explained by the physical (the laws of physics and the material)... In your case, where does this concept of mind, self, and consciousness come from? It's clearly powered by a physical entity (the brain), but the "self" is also clearly not a physical entity.

There is absolutely no proof that the system of material thinking holds water in other domains such as the metaphysical, so most of what scientists think about the mind and self come out of some seriously convincing bullshitting. They really have no clue how it arises, and it will never be explained unless we manage to re-create a conscious entity ourselves.

With that in mind (pun not intended), take anything you read about how the "self" comes about with a serious dose of common sense. This is where it's up to you to make a decision, because the scientists (while sounding smart), really have no more clue than you do =)

glenstein• 18 years ago

Well, "the metaphysical" needs to actually be there, before it can show us any shortcomings of "scientific naturalism".

How exactly does someone observe the "unobservable"? How could one come to confidently believe in a realm built up out of "unempirical" content?

If anyone can satisfactorily answer these questions, chances are they have done science, and discovered that the unempirical content everyone was talking about was scientifically describable after all, unique from other science only in its being particularly difficult to apprehend.

Until we get there, this unempirical component of consciousness being posited shares common heritage with the Luminiferous aether, the life-force, hollow earth theory, mythic gods of natural forces and any number of premature theories which hover in the closing gaps of indeterminacy before a science comes along to explain them.

nsrivast• 18 years ago

Play nice! It is the hard problem.

FlorinAndrei4• 18 years ago

Keep in mind though, a large part of modern science is a monism - it tries to explain everything starting from a single principle.

I'm not saying that's right or wrong, I'm just pointing it out. A monism works beautifully, as long as its basic assumptions are true. Unfortunately, the converse is true - a monism cannot detect whether its axioms are true or not. The more it keeps digging, the more it appears to confirm itself.

It is quite possible that the fundamental assumptions of materialist science are true. It's just that, if they are not, chances are the system will never detect its own incompletitude.

kirse2• 18 years ago

If anyone can satisfactorily answer these questions, chances are they have done science

Coming straight from a distinguished neuroscientist: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396215

... this unempirical component of consciousness being posited shares common heritage with...

Past performance is no indicator of future results, and one theory's individual case of validity has no bearing on the validity of the next one to be tested. I do like how you tried to dismiss it by grouping it in with the other theories, but as we both just examined, that is faulty logic and merely supposition.

bitdiddle• 18 years ago

Well some folks, for instance Vaughan Pratt, have taken a shot at explaining things like cartesian duality using some interesting mathematics ( http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf). It's tough sledding if you don't have the background.

JabavuAdams4• 18 years ago

> This is a great question, and one that will never be answered by scientific naturalism.

Why not? This is a very strong claim.

> It's clearly powered by a physical entity (the brain), but the "self" is also clearly not a physical entity.

A word is not a physical entity. Does that mean that we can't learn anything about words through science?

> and it will never be explained unless we manage to re-create a conscious entity ourselves.

Well, I can agree that this is probably the easiest way to explain it. Create a consciousness that you can pause and non-destructively examine (assuming that's possible).

JabavuAdams4• 18 years ago

Actually, if words are encoded similarly in different brains, then there is a physical manifestation of words (other than typography) that we can study.

I suspect you would argue that "this isn't really a word," just some physical shadow of the true word.

markessien• 18 years ago

Consciousness is just the firing of pleasure centers when external actions fit into pre-defined purposes. It's like the very highest abstraction of a functional event-triggered programming language.

yan9• 18 years ago

At birth, when does the first neuron fire, and how does it sustain itself?

Body activity doesn't start from birth, even the zygote has already processes inside it that are life processes.

tricky3• 18 years ago

Maybe a little off-topic, but something I've been thinking of for a while. Has anyone ever tried to build a mesh network of nodes that react to signals and fire outputs? I'd to build a few million of these and evolve them to see if they'd ever do anything interesting.

Does anyone know if anyone is working on something like this?

speek2• 18 years ago

IBM's BlueGene/L

tricky3• 18 years ago

bah.. i was thinking something more along the lines of "dumb" nodes that have very simple reactions to incoming signals. It would be really interesting to apply this research:

Synchronization from Disordered Driving Forces in Arrays of Coupled Oscillators

http://www.physics.wustl.edu/Fac/WesselPublications/2006Bran...

to more of a neurological model.

Shamiq• 18 years ago

Does Google count?

yan9• 18 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network

Is that what you mean?

tricky3• 18 years ago

No. Something more along the lines of interconnected signal processors that, after a while, achieve sort of a message pumping stasis. I think it would be interesting to evolve the network until it is able to "react" to changes in the outside environment (i.e. signals coming in from outside the network)

mrtron2• 18 years ago

Id recommend reading Godel Escher Bach.

It talks about how complex things can be built from simple building blocks.

There really are no answers other than it is impossible to exclude such complexity from a system.

speek2• 18 years ago

It depends on who you ask, but there are two general camps: the bottom-up approach and the top-down approach (neuroscience and psychology, respectfully).

I believe it to be a side product of response to stimulus (neurons firing off). If I'm right, we're going to have a lot of fun with interfaces in the next 20 or so years. I'm a big believer in emergent neuropsychology (the functional programming version of brain science).

I'm not going to delve into the top-down approach because you get a lot of other really cool theories, but a lot of it has to to with perception ("Is this red the same color to me as it is to you (other than just naming this color red)?").

In response to your edit, I'm pretty sure that neurons start firing before birth but neurons are interconnected in a multi-dimensional graph, so it's pretty much a chain reaction that gets influenced depending on external (or internal) stimulus.

I believe that when we take both the bottom-up and the top-down approach and meet in the middle, we will have a true AI... but I'm guessing it'll be based on a non-vonNeumann architecture.

joubert• 18 years ago

Study some ethology.

jackchristopher• 18 years ago

There are two methods for investigating consciousness; One subjective, the other objective. The first is philosophical, the second is a physical. And they should lead to the same answer.

Both sides will claim their method to be the right one. And from time to time one will seem better than the other. But ultimately, some questions will be left unanswered. And both methods will break down. And you will want to fill in the gaps.

But you'll realize that one may complement the other. And you may decide the course ... but you'll never be sure.

fawxtin• 18 years ago

Conciousness is somewhat a prevalence over instincts, you got "magically" a way to "choose". You really should read S. Freud, and M. Minsky if you want to know more about.

tsally• 18 years ago

Woah, woah, woah. What's this business of talking about consciousness like it exists? The only thing you know for sure is conscious is yourself. You simply make assumptions that other people are conscious based off of their responses to various challenges (questions, interaction, etc). But you don't know whether their 'consciousness' is even remotely related to yours or not.

This is why the Turing test does not seek to address the issue of consciousness. It simply tests the appearance of consciousness. We will _never_ know anything about the consciousness of anything else besides ourselves.

pygy2• 18 years ago

... until we plug two (or more) brains together using miroelectrode arrays.

pygy2• 18 years ago

First one has to define consciousness as subjective experience, not as being awake.

The only consciousness one is able to experience is his own. But solipsism is a point of view that is both depressing and not really explanatory of anything.

Let's assume that people around, who are similar to us, are conscious too. The problem in the last sentence is the word "similar". A few centuries ago, Black people were considered soul-less animals by their "enlighted" European peers. We recentlty came to realize that most traits that we thought made us unique, like symbolic language for example, or "theory of mind" ie realizing that other creatures have other thoughts and other beliefs than our own, are shared by other species (eg bonobos).

Even if they don't recognize themselves in the mirror, in most animal species that I know of, individuals are able to recognize their own smell.

Assuming personnal consciousness can be mapped to some part of the brain processing, can a dog, a frog, a worm be conscious? How many neurons make a conscious brain?

Let's keep on recursing.

Are plants conscious? At least, some of them seem able to compute. The opening and closing patterns of stomata (the pores that allow the gaz exchanges on leaf) are not statistically different from those of some 2d cellular automata. (Evidence for complex, collective dynamics and emergent, distributed computation in plants http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0307811100 )

Can a monocellular animal be conscious? Not only do they sense and react to their environment, but some are able to anticipate periodic variations of their surroundings, and memorize stimuli patterns. (Amoebae Anticipate Periodic Events http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.018101 )

Now please be confused :-)

I don't think that consciousness is related to the ability of having explicit self referential thoughts (how do we define thoughts, BTW? are they language related or not necessarilly?), nor to symbolic language.

From the "mapism" point of view, something that really puzzles me is the fact that identity is preserved overnignt, despite the extensive plasticity that occurs while one is sleeping.

Could identity rely on the statistical properties of a brain rather than on a strict material mapping? Cognition at least, and possibly conscious access to information relies on bayesian processing of the information (see Hakwan Lau's work).

As long as we don't have proper formal models of these concepts, we'll keep on speculating.

I really wonder whether it's possible to find a Gödel-like paradox regarding statements about consciousness pronounced by conscious beeings... :D

/rambling.

jsyedidia• 18 years ago

You should read "The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach," by Caltech professor Christof Koch, which is a book about this subject.

jogaun• 18 years ago

The unknown is vast in all disciplines, especially neuroscience.

jhp• 18 years ago

I believe that consciousness is the ability for a computing system to continually maintain and update several simultaneous contexts. These contexts may run highly detailed simulations (including the core "where I am") or more abstract thinking (including the current conversational or semantic context). For a human being, the "primary simulation" results in a powerful feeling of self, perhaps because the here and now that you are feeling is also the here and now that you are simulating.

While sustaining these contexts, the system is able to explore related information and can choose to break focus on a certain context, or to open a new context. Usually, a discarded context can be quickly restored, such as in the case of restoring an interrupted thought. Perhaps, then, contexts are continually run, stored, and restored. I don't know. What I do know is that the primary world simulation (with its continual sensory update) is rarely broken without the system electing to do so.

That would be "losing consciousness" :)

Whether received through sensory input or through memory in the form of stored simulations or related concepts, the constant exploration of related information influences the context that spawned it (and often the other contexts as well). This allows the computing system to update its assumptions as represented in simulation or conceptual frame, and then begin anticipating and exploring possible future contexts.

- JHP

KevBurnsJr• 18 years ago

The first thing a psychedelic experience will teach you is the absurdity of such a question.

Edit: Genuinely surprised to see that nobody else has mentioned the psychedelic experience in their search for a solution to satisfy this line of questioning.

Ask HN: Where does consciousness come from?

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