It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

https://www.noemamag.com/there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness/

by ahalbert4 • 2 months ago

316 767 2 months ago

noemamag.com

greygoo222• 2 months ago

Utterly asinine article that doesn't understand its own subject matter.

argee3• 2 months ago

Agreed.

Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.

This is what the article is positioned against.

We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense.

Isn't this an equivalent declaration? I understand the desire to cling to such ideas (as the article itself propounds), but if you don't understand the underlying laws to a high enough degree I consider this equivalent to ancient Greeks sitting around saying "there is a double of our soul inside the mirror, WE HAVE SEEN IT". We know today there is absolutely nothing at all "inside" that mirror. How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?

Unfortunately, this article puts forth an intriguing promise and then completely fails to deliver.

smokedetector14• 2 months ago

How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?

I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination.

What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?

(This is basically just Descartes “I think therefore I am”)

Domenic_S• 2 months ago

I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?

Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand".

The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.

skirmish7• 2 months ago

we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world

Feelings/experiences are specific patterns of specific neurons activating. Why is that hard?

vermilingua• 2 months ago

This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight.

Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.

hn_throwaway_995• 2 months ago

Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off.

That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon.

That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses the point. I know thunderstorms are incredibly complicated, but there is nothing about them that seems "mystical" to me, if you will, because of that complexity. If you have a basic understanding of the underlying principles, it's not hard to see how a thunderstorm would arise out of that complexity.

Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. My experience with ketamine therapy for mental issues only greater heightens this belief.

I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world (and indeed, my ketamine experience where a relatively simple chemical greatly affected my personal sense of self and experience is proof enough to me that it's not independent) to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.

thepasch11• 2 months ago

That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience."

And this bit:

I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.

right after

Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument.

So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"

Every time this discussion comes up, people get _irrationally_ emotional about it. Which I think is, itself, very interesting data.

amenhotep• 2 months ago

I read it as "I'm very clever and sensible. I definitely don't believe in souls."

Like so much other material produced by people who (I suspect deliberately) confuse religion with the subjective phenomenon of existence

solenoid09372• 2 months ago

Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.

aa-jv2• 2 months ago

Argue with someone who gathered evidence scientifically to demonstrate that we really, really don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the human soul:

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

EDIT: Downvote all you want, materialists, but reincarnation is the spanner in the works nobody wants to confront ..

solenoid09372• 2 months ago

Reincarnation just doesn't make sense when you consider the numbers. Why are more people being born today than yesterday?

If you believe in reincarnation, for some reason brand new souls are spawning into existence. Why? How does reincarnation work for them?

andoando2• 2 months ago

Yet the mere fact that I am conscious is a greater truth than any of my perception of the "physical" world.

Neither does pure materialism rest on falsifiable beliefs, in that I could claim nothing exists outside my conscious experience.

criddell• 2 months ago

Just as one can say the neocortex named itself, it's your brain declaring that it is conscious.

If ten years from now your phone tells you it is conscious, would you believe it? What criteria would you use to decide?

simiones9• 2 months ago

Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable.

This is an metaphysical discussion, so falsifiability is kind of irrelevant. All metaphysical positions are ultimately unfalsifiable - including materialism and physicalism just as much as dualism or monism or theism.

Borealid• 2 months ago

All metaphysical positions are ultimately unfalsifiable

This is not true, there are many metaphysical positions that are falsifiable.

For example, "anything shaped like an apple is an apple" is a metaphysical position. It defines what it means to be apple-ish. You could hold that metaphysical position and also "apples are always made of plant material" as another position you hold at the same time.

Then you could falsify the metaphysical position by presenting a stone carved into the shape of an apple. You could choose to deny reality and change your physical definition (what the definition of the word "apple" is), but if you think logically the evidence constructively falsifies the original metaphysical position.

I think what you might have been trying to say is that people tend to adopt metaphysical positions which are non-falsifiable. Yes, they do, but that doesn't mean no metaphysical arguments can be resolved through logic and experiment.

wat100002• 2 months ago

It would only be unfalsifiable if the connection was one-way, i.e. our souls receive input from the world but have no effect on the world. We would effectively be passengers in a meat puppet, and any influence we have on that puppet is purely imaginary. Certainly possible, but not usually how it's conceived, and then you have the question of how the meat puppets got the idea of consciousness and souls in the first place.

If souls can influence the world, as is the common belief for souls, then in principle that influence or its absence can be detected.

solveiga5• 2 months ago

I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?

k33n2• 2 months ago

It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.

anon2913• 2 months ago

No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.

solveiga5• 2 months ago

If we accept subjective feeling as definitive proof that something exists, that opens a Pandora’s box of entities. People have deeply held subjective beliefs about things like God, afterlife experiences, out-of-body experiences, and many others. It seems unfair to me to dismiss this kind of subjective evidence in these cases, while accepting it without question for experience of consciousness.

thepasch11• 2 months ago

This is a religious argument. If you want to go down that path, then sure; but I suspect that's not what you actually believe.

wordpad• 2 months ago

It certainly doesn't seem like consciousness exists. Although to disprove that hypothesis all we need is to find a single counter-example, which coincidentally all of us can provide via our personal experience of self.

It would be fine for an unconsciouss intelligence to maintain that hypothesis lacking any evidence to the contrary, but for us it seems we are just all gaslighting ourselves to ignore the one counter example we all have.

krzat• 2 months ago

I agree about definition confusion. I like to define consciousness as "capability to suffer".

Can cow/dog/spider suffer? - very important question, even if not answerable.

skirmish7• 2 months ago

At least mammals do show recognizable signs of pain and suffering. That is good enough for me; I don't know for sure other people can suffer, but I assume they do based on their behavior I see.

captainbland• 2 months ago

I think people focus a lot on the dangers of erasing consciousness as a moral entity, but it strikes me that something which is so loosely defined and for all intents and purposes unfalsifiable carries its own dangers too. Especially given so many of us are happy to kill and eat many creatures that pass many proposed tests of consciousness.

It's probably sensible to use more strongly defined terms like humanity, self-awareness, cognitive capability, empathy and so on. And to treat them somewhat separately rather than trying to bundle it all together.

But people want there to be something special about us which can be defined as something separate from us, in a neutral, universalist sounding way which also happens to be relatively exclusive - I think because there's this desire to make the concept of a soul have an equivalent in scientific realism for the purposes of discussing philosophy in a secular way.

dtagames3• 2 months ago

How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations.

He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event.

I highly recommend any and all of his books.

hackable_sand2• 2 months ago

The Order of Time is on my reading list

hn_throwaway_995• 2 months ago

If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article.

dtagames3• 2 months ago

One great thing about quantum physics it that is isn't solved. To paraphrase Feynman, if you think you understand it, you're wrong.

Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.

ekianjo• 2 months ago

Philosophers being philosophers and not advancing the discussion at all.

thesmtsolver22• 2 months ago

A lot of science and math and logic originated from philosophers posing questions and even coming up with answers (then those fields graduated out of philosophy)

This is the standard blub programmer but in science. The blub physicists doesn't understand anything more complex or higher-level than his daily abstractions.

https://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

zetalyrae7• 2 months ago

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove?

A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well.

And this is why illusionism is not a satisfactory explanation. "Convincing it". Who is being convinced? Who is experiencing this?

Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved: we understand the brain at every scale, from ion channels up. We can draw up a complete account, at every level of abstraction, of what goes on in the brain when you see and "apple" and say apple, and trace the signals across the optic nerve, map those signals to high-level mental representations, explain how those symbols become trees in a production rule which become words which the motor cortex coordinates into speech, etc. We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.

Now imagine you take this description and rewrite the labels consistently, and show it to an alien. And they see this very complex diagram of an information-processing machine and they're not sure what it's for. And they'd think it's as conscious as a calculator, or a water integrator, or a telephone network, or the futures market of the European Union.

Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience (since consciousness and experience is all that we have); or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).

That's the hard problem.

solveiga5• 2 months ago

I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion. And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it. The fact that it’s difficult to conceptualize doesn’t mean it’s not the answer. Similar to how we struggle to intuit general relativity, or to imagine the pre–Big Bang state of the universe (or its non-existence), or to picture what it’s like to be dead. Our intuition simply isn’t equipped for these cases, period, and it pushes back hard against them. Consciousness belongs in that same category IMO

Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it. This self-referential loop is likely what we experience as "consciousness" and it becomes central to how we understand and navigate reality.

If we accept this framing, many traditional paradoxes dissolve on their own. The problem stops being "hard" in substance and becomes hard only in terms of imagination.

thesmtsolver22• 2 months ago

The illusion framing/answer falls apart with some minor prodding.

What makes the computation in the brain special from other physical processes to give rise to this illusion?

The sewer system in NYC is complex. Does that also have the same illusion? Does the sewer in NYC have consciousness?

nofriend2• 2 months ago

I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion.

who is eluded? people absolutely love this answer and give it constantly, not realizing that it's begging the question. in order for their to be an illusion, there needs to be someone to perceive the illusion.

zetalyrae7• 2 months ago

And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it.

But why a spreadsheet simulating the brain, and not just a spreadsheet doing normal financial math? In other words: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?

Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it.

But this is A-consciousness, not P-consciousness. Which gets us back to square one: why does information processing give rise to experience at all?

selcuka11• 2 months ago

I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists.

It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our understanding of consciousness becomes clearer.

To use the same example: If there was a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in my brain, which one would be "I"? The original "I", or the spreadsheet?

Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer. There is only one "I" (since I can't be experiencing the world from two sets of eyes, one organic and one spreadsheet-eyes, simultaneously), so I have to choose one of them.

dfabulich• 2 months ago

Rovelli writes, "I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”"

Carlos Rovelli has failed to understand the arguments for dualism, and is proudly sure that they must be nonsense.

If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.

IMO, the problem is actually one of epistemological framing. If I ask what "I" know, assuming that my internal experiences are the basis of my knowledge, then I can't accept materialism. But if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers, together we find only natural material, and no evidence for dualism.

(It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's best for me is to defect. What's best for us is to cooperate.)

skirmish7• 2 months ago

If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.

Huh, evolution vs. creationism, many arguments happened over many years, yet one side was simply nonsensical.

if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers

That is how science is done; if you reject that approach a priori, no wonder your conclusions become unreliable.

randallsquared4• 2 months ago

Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved

The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.

The hard problem only really needs consideration if we get to a point as you describe, where we fully understand everything happening in the brain and cannot assign consciousness to any part of it, even though we can turn it off and on again (e.g., with anesthesia).

zetalyrae7• 2 months ago

The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation.

Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve.

But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.

nothinkjustai4• 2 months ago

Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.

Not really, it only suggests that the brain function is involved in some way. If the brain is an “antenna” anesthesia could prevent it from functioning and that would be a totally consistent theory.

thepasch11• 2 months ago

Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience

You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways:

1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?

2) "We have solved the easy problem of consciousness, we know exactly how the brain works" implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain. This, again, is not an assumption that's supported by anything than wishful thinking.

And, further:

or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).

"Some math can produce consciousness" does not mean "ALL math HAS to produce consciousness" does not mean "EVERY PART of all math has to BE conscious."

Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.

zetalyrae7• 2 months ago

Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness?

Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind?

Implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain.

The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness. Is in: what is the shape of the answer, and can a collection of material facts about the world have that shape?

Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.

This is just a tiresome ad hominem. I want to be a materialist and an eliminativist. I would like this to be simple!

suzzer99• 2 months ago

Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's?

If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no.

And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees.

I'm not sure what to draw from this. But whenever I read something that speculates on the nature of consciousness, I always try to look at it through the lens of the human-to-tube worm scale. Does the argument survive a continuum, or does it depend on human consciousness being fundamentally unique in some way?

I guess you could argue that even though there's a continuum, consciousness effectively hits zero somewhere around reptiles. Sort of like how technically I feel Alpha Centauri's gravity, but effectively it's zero. So in that case, the argument only has to survive mammals to say corvids.

satisfice• 2 months ago

The problem of consciousness is hard partly because it is objectively hard to make conscious people— all of whom are experts at the experience of living in their own bodies— agree on what consciousness is.

svara3• 2 months ago

My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?

A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error, to put it in CS terms.

A bit like asking "Have you proven that ice cream? Are you sure maths can not prove that ice cream? Do you have empirical evidence?"

Asking for empirical evidence seems beside the point, since the issue is a logical one.

didibus• 2 months ago

I suspect more things are conscious than we tend to assume. I would assume some level of intelligence requires a review/assessment process, something to evaluate what happened, what is good or bad, what should we have done instead, how can we do it better next time. This self-assessment becomes our experience of consciousness. Of course it feels incredible, unreal, like those feelings overwhelm us, because we are this function, and optimizing for those feelings is our function.

hackinthebochs10• 2 months ago

Either all the computation happens "in the dark" [...] or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets

Why exclude the option that only specific kinds of computations are conscious, e.g. recursive control systems?

zetalyrae7• 2 months ago

For two reasons:

1. This requires explaining why only some kinds of information processing are privileged to be conscious, which seems rather arbitrary.

2. There's the question of levels of abstraction. Which information processor is conscious? The physical CPU, the zeroth VM, the first VM, the second VM, etc.

3. And there's the question of interpretation. What is computation? A CPU is "just" electrons moving about. Who says the motion of these 10^12 electrons represents arithmetic, or string concatenation, or anything else? The idea of abstract information processing above the bare causality of particles and fields is in itself a kind of dualism (or n-alism, because Turing completeness lets you emulate machines inside machines).

GoblinSlayer19• 2 months ago

We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.

Map the process by which you learn that you have experience. Then determine if this process works correctly. Alien needs to learn to code; they have difficulty, because they try to learn integrals without arithmetic and algebra. Before you can solve a complex problem, you should first train on easy problems.

unparagoned5• 2 months ago

I think you are misunderstanding illusionism and the hard problem.

Illusionism does say that there is a conscious experience. So illusionism is convincing to many people who have conscious experiences.

The alien would be able to look at the computation and describe the conscious experience it has.

You could put human consciousness on an excel spreadsheet and it’ll still be conscious. Even Chalmers accepts a simulation would be conscious. So no that’s not a. Argument for p-zombies. Even people that use the pz argument don’t think that pz could actually exist.

But your conclusion is right, the simulation example does suggest that the consciousness in the hard problem doesn’t exist. Which just leaves the consciousness you experience explainable by easy problems. Which is the illusionist position.

Edit: and the hard problem isn’t just why there is consciousness. But why consciousness is impossible under physicalism. So in your post you are just actually referring to the easy problem of consciousness when suggesting it exists.

gizajob4• 2 months ago

Put human consciousness in an excel spreadsheet and get back to us.

tardedmeme• 2 months ago

The really hard problem is that your gut, having a neural network as complex as your brain, is also probably conscious. And all it's ever known and will ever know is the feeling of pushing food through it and tasting different types of food. Now that's a horror story.

gizajob4• 2 months ago

It’s only your labels in language that are splitting this system into separate parts.

ben_w3• 2 months ago

Now that's a horror story.

For us, sure; why would it be so for them?

Crows don't seem to be particularly upset by strutting around naked and eating bugs from the dirt.

The guts' idea of a horror story, if it has one, may be more like indigestion or norovirus.

rcxdude• 2 months ago

why aren't my neurons individually conscious?

How do you know that they are not? Any subjective experience they have does not have to overlap with yours. (same with your skull, skeleton, or any other subset of your body).

(for me, having slowly become more aware of the distributed nature of my brain, I'm not even really sure there's only one consciousness in my mind!)

justonceokay7• 2 months ago

I’ll bite, I think your individual neurons are “just as” conscious as your whole body/environment system. They can’t advocate for themselves in words, but they have their own goals and interactions and decisions and needs.

Your aliens don’t know what it’s like to be you. But if these aliens decide to use your blueprints to print out a human, and the human says “ouch”, is it still the hard problem? This is what I don’t get.

Of course the music is different than just reading the score. A description of a process is not the process itself. We cannot know what it is like “to be” a bat but we also don’t know what it is like “to be” a spleen cell. Or the European futures market. Or a colony of ants, or the United States. These processes are complicated and intelligent, though not generally thought of having qualia. But I think it is only our hubris that differentiates the experience of an individual organism from that of our subsystems or supersystems.

essentia04• 2 months ago

'why aren't my neurons individually conscious?' why can you assume a slide rule is but a neuron isn't? your consciousness doesnt stop at your 'skull', it extends to your fingers and "interfaces" with the world in various ways, which is effectively a weaker, slower connection. neurons in your brain are also not equally distributed to how much they affect your immediate consciousness, but they all play a part in it

d0mine• 2 months ago

“Either or” is too extreme. Both can be true at the same time even if at different levels of abstraction eg a table and atoms it consists of may exist at the same time. Depending on the task different levels of abstraction may be useful. It is ridiculous to claim that a table doesn’t exist just because we can prove it is made of atoms (or strings excitation—doesn’t matter here)

On the other hand, "consciousness" concept might be as much useful for modeling thinking as “the four elements” for describing anatomy (not useful at all)—and we create better models eventually.

d--b• 2 months ago

Where we are, it is still a matter of belief.

I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.

The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.

They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.

God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.

But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.

selcuka11• 2 months ago

This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.

It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future.

The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.

[1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".

orwin2• 2 months ago

My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be.

I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test, but I found it satisfactory enough when I heard about the hard problem of consciousness. My main argument for it is not an attack, it's simply Hanlon's razor. If you find a simpler explanation that doesn't demand new understanding, I will listen to it, if you do not, you have to show me the simplest solution is wrong, and I'll go to the second simplest.

suddenlybananas• 2 months ago

How do we experience that though?

card_zero7• 2 months ago

Hanlon's razor? That one is "never assume malice where stupidity will do". You want Occam's razor, or the word "parsimonious".

mangolie2• 2 months ago

That does not explain how it is possible for a simulation to experience itself

cgio4• 2 months ago

By saying it’s simulated you don’t make a simplification. What does it simulate? What are the mechanics of simulation and is it substrate specific or independent? Can a computer simulate these qualia? It’s easy to say something is simple but harder to prove it is any simpler than the alternatives.

unparagoned5• 2 months ago

No the hard problem is impossible to solve using science even a billion years in the future.

If science can in theory explain consciousness ever then it’s an easy problem.

justonceokay7• 2 months ago

This is the kind of religious thinking the GP is talking about. What other frontier of science do people claim will never be solved, except the existence of a god? Why are you so sure it cannot be touched?

daseiner18• 2 months ago

a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.

a) it is wrong to say definitively that it is untrue. there is no acid test for the existence of God nor of spirit.

b) religious and spiritual traditions have wrangled with this very question for at least 3000 years. it is not a 'scientific curiosity'. It is one of the most fundamental questions of human experience.

szmarczak• 2 months ago

a) there's an infinite amount of things that can't be proven/disproven and this includes all sorts of human imagination. We should focus on things that we can actually prove or disprove. The source of a god is human imagination, so you can't even prove that any god exists because you just don't know what it is (iow what exactly you're trying to prove).

b) This being a fundamental question proves scientific curiosity. We wouldn't have achieved current technology if not for scientific curiosity.

Animats2• 2 months ago

OK, dualism. Heard that before.

The new hard problem: how do biological brains get so much done on such slow hardware? That's a real physics question. We're missing something.

altmanaltman2• 2 months ago

Hey you give Nvidia a few million years to evolve their chips and just see what happens

anon2913• 2 months ago

The brain is not slow?

Animats2• 2 months ago

Measured signals seem to be at kilohertz, not gigahertz, speeds.

skirmish7• 2 months ago

Massive parallel processing.

don_esteban8• 2 months ago

a) massive parallelism (although the current AI HW is getting there) b) clever structure/organization (we are nowhere near close) c) it is still buggy as hell

djokkataja• 2 months ago

get so much done

Compared to what??

freakyhere• 2 months ago

I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.

dabadabad00• 2 months ago

Comically wrong.

Quantum holography will someday demonstrate an analog information capacity of the quantum domain far exceeding the spin disposition.

Our minds use this domain by mass entanglement within our very own neurons.

You don’t want to hear it, though our minds may entangle and an entire culture exists among us who can traverse and manipulate the consciousness of others. They are responsible for the “voices in our heads”, and these are related to a great deal of very unscientific activity in our world.

All of that occult demonology you smarties scoff at yet plagues everyone embroiled in “power” is based upon this phenomena. We are not alone in our own minds, and more than a few of you will be forced to confront this at some point in your lives.

Falsifiable? Theories, not existential reality are concerned with what minds may falsify. Science lags behind reality, not the other way around.

hn_throwaway_995• 2 months ago

As much as I disliked TFA, I disliked this comment, which is so arrogantly self-assured of its own 0-evidence theories, even more.

euroderf• 2 months ago

I was with you thru "mass entanglement". Each of us is a distributed network of quantum-interface nodes. But I'd be very careful about attributing specific describable phenomena to these networks.

hackinthebochs10• 2 months ago

I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain facts about cats given only facts about dogs, they're just different categories of description. That's really all there is to it.

Whether or not physicalism has any hope of succeeding depends on whether there is a further conceptual or explanatory insight that when added to the standard structure and function explanatory framework of science, will ultimately bridge the gap. Who knows what that might look like. It's certainly premature to render a verdict on the possibility of this. But it should be clear that a full explanation in physical terms will need some new conceptual ideas and so the problem of consciousness isn't merely a scientific problem that will dissolve in the face of more scientific data, but a philosophical problem at core.

zetalyrae7• 2 months ago

Very well explained.

__patchbit__2• 2 months ago

A stylistically different perspective from the one couched places an intrinsic function in a mathematical space.

pontus• 2 months ago

Also consider the possibility that the people who argue against the hard problem of consciousness may, in fact, not be conscious. How could they ever understand the nuance of conscious experience and how it is fundamentally different from 'structure and function' if they don't have it? To them there is only the easy problem of consciousness.

And, of course, if they disagree with me about this and want to claim that they are, in fact, conscious, I'm not sure they can do that because... well the hard problem of consciousness.

syllogism• 2 months ago

It comes up because people are mistakenly conflating consciousness with moral personhood.

People want to be talking about whether AI suffers in a morally meaningful way. In non-human animals this debate is often centered around the question of whether the animal has conscious experience, because there's little doubt that much of the emotional and experiential systems are shared.

The analogy goes wrong with AI, where definitions of "consciousness" would seem to apply in the sense that the model clearly has a category for itself in its world model, feeds back on its output, etc. However the analogy between how it works and anything we would recognise as emotion or suffering is extremely strained.

The solution is to just focus on ths question of what we really mean when we think of morally relevant suffering. It's a much clearer question than "consciousness" and it sidesteps the problem.

staticassertion3• 2 months ago

The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function

Great, I'm a physicalist so uhhhh I reject this lol. I think you can define cognitive capabilities and phenomenal experience by reducing to structure and function. You're right that it's simple though.

hackinthebochs10• 2 months ago

I'm a physicalist as well. A commitment to physicalism doesn't force you to reject the hard problem. The hard problem doesn't entail that phenomenal consciousness is not grounded in physical structure and function. The hard problem is about what is needed to explain consciousness. Science typically involves defining some phenomena precisely in terms of structure and function, then giving a precise story about how some observed behavior captures the structure and function that defines the phenomena under question. For example, we define temperature by the height of mercury in a thermometer, then we mathematically derive the height of mercury given the average speed of molecules in the environment. Thus we successfully reduce temperature to average kinetic energy of molecules.

But the process of reduction starts by precisely defining the phenomena in terms of structure and function. If we are unable to give a precise definition that uncontroversially captures the target phenomena, then we cannot in principle give a scientific explanation of said phenomena. This is where we stand with consciousness. There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness. But this is an explanatory limit only. It doesn't necessitate some non-physical phenomena is involved. What we need are new concepts that can connect the phenomenal to the physical. But conceptual innovation is not something you get from more measurements and more data. This is what makes consciousness a philosophical problem.

essentia04• 2 months ago

Do you have a verdict for whether science can ever explain the origin of the universe? I can only doubt it could answer the actual hard problem of consciousness. I find most people, especially on here, to be blindly "science-optimistic"

lioeters2• 2 months ago

origin of the universe?

Creatio ex nihilo.

consciousness?

Ditto. It's actually the same question.

GoblinSlayer19• 2 months ago

Why not. The origin of the universe is the initial state of the universe.

dgfl3• 2 months ago

I feel like this is directly addressed in the article, right? I think you are coming from the same direction, but Rovelli goes a bit further and says "how can we affirm that there is gonna be a knowledge gap when we just aren't at that level yet?". How can you say that we won't be able to describe, explain and predict your exact internal mental state from a brain scan?

To draw a parallel with physics, about which we as a society (and me as an individual) know a lot more, we are gonna define mathematical objects and laws whose behavior maps well to certain subsystems of the brain that we ourselves have defined. Physics had it easy in this sense: it turned out to be remarkably simple to describe the universe to a great degree of precision. Still, we all recognize that the physics mapping we have to this day isn't perfect; and it's even possible that it will never be perfect. It may be fundamentally impossible to reduce some systems to simpler mathematical objects which we can reason about. It does seem to be generally possible, however, to find a reasonable approximation. This again is what I think Rovelli's point is about: science is the process of finding a good approximation which has predictive power. And what is there in the brain that's fundamentally so different and that we're never gonna be able to explain? Why does everyone keep insisting that consciousness is special?

I do agree that that only when (if) we do get the accurate mathematical description, then we're gonna be able to properly discuss the hard problem. But my hunch is that once we do have all the tools it will just dissipate from scientific discussion, similarly to how the measurement problem in quantum mechanics is slowly undergoing the same transition from "this is a fundamental problem" to "we were just asking an invalid question due to misunderstanding and old ways of thinking". Obviously I have no proof of this beyond intuition, but I more or less agree with every sentence of this article, and that shapes my intuition.

deyiao• 2 months ago

Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.

In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.

Praise be to AI. In 2025, inspired by AI, I feel that I have finally built a complete and unified worldview.

Are we living in a virtual illusion? Are there higher-dimensional rulers, gods, or immortals in the universe? What exactly are the human soul and consciousness?

I feel that these questions now share a single coherent answer. What I have written here is my answer regarding the soul and consciousness.

nofriend2• 2 months ago

What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.

that's the easy problem

thin_carapace2• 2 months ago

would you care to link together 'complex IO systems inevitably degenerate to seperating self from environment as part of optimizing calculations' and your three questions? it isnt immediately clear why the concept of self answers the idea of god.

selcuka11• 2 months ago

What you explain is intelligence, which is the subject of the "easy question". Consciousness in this context is the existence of phenomenal, or first person experiences.

The hard question doesn't argue that consciousness is not a product of evolution. It probably is. It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.

krackers• 2 months ago

It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.

It's that you can't even measure it, since the way it's defined as a subjective experience, no external measure could ever capture it. This is what gives rise to the p-zombie argument.

To get rid of that you have to accept "functional qualia" as basically equivalent to qualia, which solves the p-zombie issue and resolves half of the hard problem. From there, explaining consciousness is no "harder" than explaining other scale-depedent phenomenon in complex systems like LLMs: still hard, but at least tractable with scientific measurements and experiments.

sambapa• 2 months ago

If this comment is serious, then you may have the beginnings of AI psychosis

dsign• 2 months ago

I would say "AI psychosis" is a very healthy disease to have. I mean, how should people react to seeing a clump of hardware produce coherent text at a level many actual humans cannot? The spread of reactions we are seeing in people-the disagreements, the extreme sycophancy on one end, and the abject denial on the other, is within parameters.

My life was wrecked by religious dogma, the type that is sustained on "big mysteries" and from there goes directly to imposing an odious recipe for life. So there is consolation to be had on seeing a big mystery crumble and on hearing the outcry. May another mystery crumble on my lifetime.

whackernews• 2 months ago

Haha, right? The lads talking like he’s the only one to have figured this out and it’s the truth! Philosophising with AI is so mid. This guys the general public.

autoexec• 2 months ago

"Praise be to AI" sounds like something you shouldn't reach in the beginnings of AI psychosis. Same with "I've found a simple answer to the nature of consciousness and the question of the existence of Gods". At that point you've got to in be pretty deep.

moezd• 2 months ago

No, we don't even need that. When we realise that we all project consciousness claims on each other from what we observe as zeitgeist now, just to do credit assignment, most of our circular debates will disappear. But this won't happen since many powerful entities in the world ride on the moral ambiguity, and this will hold them accountable.

gizajob4• 2 months ago

Dolphins and other creatures are likely to have similarly complex systems without “inevitably” generating a concept of “I”.

jeppester• 2 months ago

What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution
When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.

I don't see how this is different from someone saying that a concoction of random ingredients will turn into a magic potion.

The big question is how a group of cells (or potentially something else) becomes sentient. Accepting "because it would be useful" as valid explanation would be the same as accepting Darwinism as a religion rather than science.

piacos_• 2 months ago

There's no single proof that after a system do pass some complexity threshold consciousness develops itself and inevitably generates the "I".

kogasa240p2• 2 months ago

GPTbait

thin_carapace2• 2 months ago

the single part of this article i enjoyed was the question "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" things were obviously the work of god for millenia. now they are obviously the work of natural processes. i wonder what the next obvious answer will be.

one may collapse the dualism dichotomy to two distinct possibilities. in both cases this existence is a subset of some larger existence (true because self implies other). the first case involves a hard boundary between existences (externally one may only only observe, therefore our existence collapses to pure solipsism). in the second case, the boundary between existences is permeable (one may interact with our existence externally, therefore our existence collapses to solipsism with the addition of brain in a jar). in both these cases soul can mean something different, but it can still be seen to exist, unless one insists on dogmatic adherence to the rules of any one system in particular.

trane_project4• 2 months ago

There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.

Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.

You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.

thepasch11• 2 months ago

Explain psychedelics, then? Do psychedelics have access to this supposed "separate layer" that mind exists on over matter? If yes, how? If not, how can something that ostensibly only interacts with the matter have any effect on the mind?

Can you explain any of this in a way that doesn't boil down to "it's magic and you just have to believe that it's happening because it is?"

trane_project4• 2 months ago

What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind.

But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality.

Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.

mightyham3• 2 months ago

It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.

This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".

hackinthebochs10• 2 months ago

There are a lot of problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. The history of science has been one of dispatching one irreducible "essence" after another. Essence meaning some essential property of a phenomena that defines it and distinguishes it from all other phenomena. Science is in the business of reducing these once seemingly irreducible essences to more basic structure and dynamics. The last hold out is consciousness. It's reasonable to think it will also fall eventually.

mightyham3• 2 months ago

It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience.

Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, increasingly complex unanswered questions about phenomena. It is reasonable to think that if/when we reduce consciousness through science we will find that there are more increasingly complex unanswered metaphysical gaps.

Eisenstein8• 2 months ago

With consciousness and AI multiple problems are being smuggled into a single question.

1. How do we determine consciousness?

2. How should we handle moral consideration of a non-biological system?

The first question is a red herring. It cannot be answered. We need to focus on the second question.

light_hue_1• 2 months ago

There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.

We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.

grumbel4• 2 months ago

the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.

The problem with that common definition is that it doesn't make much sense. Every philosopher that ever talked or wrote about the hard problem and qualia did so with plain old physics, by moving their mouth or using their hands to move a pen or keyboard. You can, in theory, trace how those physical interactions happen, all the way down to the neurons. Meaning the reason why they talked about qualia boils down to plain old physics.

There is no scenario where the easy problems are solved and the hard problem remain. For there to be a hard problem, the easy problems must be unsolvable, but then you don't need a hard problem, since the easy problems are already hard.

enoeht• 2 months ago

Rays of Light going through a me Prism where the Brain and senses can inflict action.

robwwilliams4• 2 months ago

Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today.

Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better.

His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers.

Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli.

The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.

hackandthink2• 2 months ago

Chalmers: “It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not.”

"A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007961072...

n4r96• 2 months ago

Thanks for the reference, that looks like a pretty thorough review.

It seems to me that Chalmers already precludes the possibility of physical/materialist explanations with his claim, quoted in the first section:

There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.

This certainly doesn't feel obvious or intuitive to me. I would expect that someone with the same neuronal make-up will have the same experience.

hackandthink2• 2 months ago

It is neither obvious nor intuitive. But it is logical possible that we all are Zombies.

In my regard the weak link is our understanding of materialism. It is to simple minded. (though panpsychism sounds really crank)

Garlef• 2 months ago

I'm all in the "brains cause minds" camp. But isn't the main argument here "We accept explanation gaps already in many places, why not also for consciousness?"?

My objection would then be that actually, that's not true. The real statement would be "In everyday life (including science), we accept explanation gaps already in many places"

But this does not mean that we have to accept this particular instance of an explanation gap.

venk12• 2 months ago

Philosophers have had these rifts(an similar lines of arguments) forever.

From Plato vs Aristotle (300 to 400 BC) (idea of forms vs nicomachean), In India Adi Shankara (around 700 CE) vs Madhavacharya (1200 CE) (dualism vs non-dualism) - there is a common thread to all of these arguments.

But eventually, for me it comes down to a statement J Krishnamurti made (& it makes the most sense to me): "The self is a problem that thought cannot solve"

yashasnadigsyn• 2 months ago

Adi Shankara follows non-dualism and Madhvacharya follows dualism. It is referenced reverse in your reply.

KingFelix4• 2 months ago

I enjoyed Krishnamurti and David Bohms conversations, they were great.

jwilliams• 2 months ago

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.

So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that).

We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state - it's not special, but we've put it in a special category.

If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.

childintime• 2 months ago

Stephen Wolfram is fascinated with his discovery of computation at the heart of the universe. Life itself may be like that, emerging then noticing itself and that it is alive - has the property of life. Then when it's governed by a "soul", or perhaps better said, constrained by it, then our awareness is of what we can't otherwise see, the laws that govern us, inevitably from a 5th dimension, as we stand in the shadow of Plato's cave. When we discover "we are" we are realized and grateful, and our life ends up being worship. Then we witness the greater life around us follow a bedding of creation, a call to become one from the experience we are one. When we become we'll see Jesus' loving eyes that first saw, and called for by showing himself, what we'll then see.

exe34• 2 months ago

It's important to remember, when Stephen Wolfram says "I discovered...", he uses it in the sense that most people say "Today I learnt ...".

barrkel• 2 months ago

The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering.

If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain?

This isn't enough:

    echo "I feel pain"

Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?

trick-or-treat5• 2 months ago

I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.

RealityVoid2• 2 months ago

Qualia is tied to the nature of existence. If you... let's say... make a humanoid robot with replaceable limbs, and you magically imbue it with AGI abilities, the qualia of losing a hand will be very different than a biological entity. It can always just swap the arm. Temporary loss of autonomy might still be distressing, but impressing our own perception of experience on a being that fundamentally lives in a different medium in a different way than us leads to confusion.

altmanaltman2• 2 months ago

Before that, you need to answer whether a machine can even feel pain or not, not whether it is telling the truth or not. We feel pain because we have a nervous system that reacts to the physical world and it is an indicator that something is wrong. That doesn't translate at all to any machine I know of. If we end up building a nervous system and a basic functioning brain and hook it up to a machine then sure its an interesting question

grumbel4• 2 months ago

Pain isn't just saying the word, it's a signal that changes your behavior generation in a way that conflicts with your self model.

card_zero7• 2 months ago

Pain and suffering. In fact just suffering, right? We don't care about signals resulting from adverse conditions. We care about ideas. So we don't really care about suffering, as such, but about the harm it does to ideas and idea creation. Then consciousness is having an idea about what's going on.

kubanczyk• 2 months ago

Looking around at evidence, only the ones with somewhat cute eyes can qualify for empathy. Bad luck if someone is a grass or an amoeba, but machines will be just fine.

Philosophers may squint at the suffering-in-itself long and hard, but I doubt they'll affect waking/extinguishing empathy of the masses. Exploring the suffering that fails our empathy (e.g. suffering of a wheat plant harvested) seems a highly abstract task; more abstract than high mathematics.

H8crilA3• 2 months ago

I am pretty sure I am not conscious, and this seems to solve the entire problem that other people have.

roncesvalles2• 2 months ago

My pet theory is that I don't think all humans are conscious (in other words, some perfectly cognitively normal-seeming people are just automatons without an inner experience, like plants or LLMs). Mainly motivated by the fact that a lot of people report not having an inner monologue, and other little hints that I've picked up over the years.

The "inner experience" might be totally optional to fitness, like green eyes.

vixen992• 2 months ago

If I knew precisely which definition of consciousness you are testing against your own experience I would understand your point and I would like to. Can you say what it is that you are sure you are not?

bambax• 2 months ago

I never quite understood what we mean by "consciousness" but I find fascinating that most modern philosophers who describe themselves as materialists / non religious can argue in the same sentence that there is something special and extra-natural about the human experience.

It's one or the other: either nature is all there is, and therefore, consciousness is a purely natural phenomenon, that we can investigate, and probably eventually replicate, and can't deny to other beings or to machines upfront; OR there is something outside reality that we might as well call God.

I'm strongly in the former camp, but I don't have issues with the latter one. What upsets me is the inconsistency of those who try to support both ideas at the same time. They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.

twak• 2 months ago

I've yet to find a falsifiable definition of consciousness.

I do believe in intelligence (which is measured against a particular task) and ego (which inflates the self over the other).

energy1235• 2 months ago

I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?

Most philosophers are materialists or computational functionalists, while being monists. This means they aren't dualists, and it means they do not adopt the supernatural explanation. But they are careful not to rule out dualism.

There's this pattern I've observed in discussions about philosophy. First there's a rejection of philosophy as silly and misguided, followed by a rediscovery of the same concepts that philosophers have developed, but under a new ad-hoc and less precise language.

Congratulations, you're a philosopher.

adwn2• 2 months ago

No, there is at least one other option, which is that consciousness [1] is a phenomenon that we can't replicate in non-biological brains [2], but from which the existence of a "God"-like being, as the term is understood by major religions, still doesn't follow.

[1] Or "qualia", to be precise.

[2] For example, the existence of qualia might require certain carbon-based structures which aren't present in silicon-based devices.

XorNot2• 2 months ago

"might as well call God" is a bizzare conclusion for the latter though because "God" is far from an abstract concept - it's probably one of the most heavily loaded terms in every human culture.

NewEntryHN• 2 months ago

If the thing "outside of reality" ever reveals useful to explain anything about reality, then it becomes part of reality.

themgt• 2 months ago

The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention ... If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state

"The Moon" is a philosophical invention, and yet The Moon is a natural phenomenon.

beaker524• 2 months ago

So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness.

To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge. What’s even more interesting, is the narrative of that physical world. I am witnessing a physical world that is more often than not, trying to convince me that everything that exists has come from it - perhaps poetically in an attempt to ground (confine) me in it, grounding me in the belief that I am only alive inside the confines of what we call the physical world, where the truth is otherwise.

I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness - whatever that is.

I am not impressed with the idea that the conscious experience is special and is in need of explanation. Instead, I propose that the physical world is the more special and more interesting part, that needs an explanation. Not to describe all the physical laws and processes, but to explain why it exists at all. And that is done, not by distracting ourselves with searching the physical corners for answer, but instead by exploring the question of why anything would have given rise to a world like this in the first place.

And that, right there, is the truly difficult question, which is answered by peering over our shoulder into the abyss, from which we all had to run from to arrive here.

986aignan2• 2 months ago

There's a hard problem in either case, I think.

If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?

If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"

From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).

For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.

bonobo2• 2 months ago

I find your position quite interesting but I feel like it still suffers the same issues I've seen in other "mind-first" arguments (I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself), such as p-zombies (how do you know other people are conscious as well?) and the origin of it.

I think both positions (physicalism vs mind-first) suffer from the same issue that is to reach the bottom of it all, except physicalism seems to have reached further. In the past we wondered what the world was made of and we observed it, coming to the idea of elements such as Aether, then later developed chemistry then physics, reaching layer below layer of rules that interact to the emergence of the layer above. Lots of rules that we can (apparently) reproduce and verify, cells emerging from molecules interacting emerging from atoms interacting emerging from quantum particles emeging from quantum fields... Maybe emerging from strings or a simulation? We don't know. It seems to me we also don't know how to tell we've finally reached the bottom of it, but what we have sounds pretty solid.

In a mind-first view it seems that this stack is upside-down, with a consciousness giving rise to a brain in a world with its objects which are made of molecules coming to existence upon observation (that is, chemistry would be a top layer after conscience further inspecting it), which are ruled by physics etc. Except this cause-and-consequence relation is not clear to me. Like you said:

To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge.

How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie? Do I give rise to the world, or do you? Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way? And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us? (not throwing shade btw, I'm just interested in your point of view).

To me physicalism looks like a flame graph with physics at the bottom and minds at the tips of the flames, with less simpler things giving rise to multiple complex things, while mind-first looks like an icicle graph (assuming multiple consciousness) or an upside down triangle (assuming a single consciousness), with physics at the top (all "graphs" putting cause at the bottom and effect on top).

pixl9711• 2 months ago

I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness

Cool, I'll give you some drugs that alter the physical reactions in your brain and turn off your consciousness, then tell me all about it....

oh.

amelius2• 2 months ago

If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.

How can you say that?

It would be very interesting to know how to build robots that love their work, versus ones that hate their work. Not because it makes a practical difference to us, but because of ethics.

prmph6• 2 months ago

Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.

I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of.

So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter.

If you accept that we assume we are not in a simulation and the knowledge we have matters, then consciousness is also open to exploration, and it is not only a philosophical thing. There are several hard questions about consciousness that are meaningful in this frame:

- Why do some things appear to be conscious and other not so?

- Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple?

- Is consciousness local and embodied, or not?

- Would restoring the physical substrate of consciousness (if possible) lead to the same consciousness, or an identical one? Does this distinction between "same" and "identical" consciousnesses even make sense?

Etc

kaashif• 2 months ago

Why does whether we're in a simulation or not matter for whether anything is explorable?

You can explore how the simulation works, there's just some other layer you can't explore. Or maybe you can somehow.

When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? Does that mean you can't explore them?

mjburgess14• 2 months ago

Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.

These statements conflate, as idealists do, epistemology and ontology.

What we know "for sure" has no bearing on what's real. These are entirely separate questions.

What an ape might, or might not, feel certain (or any which way about) says nothing about where an ape finds itself. Of course, this is a great injury to our ego, and sense of power to determine the nature of the world by our mind alone -- but such is life.

The world is not human, not at all like a human, and nothing about it follows from us at all. The world is not made in our image. Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape, and whatever it manages to measure with any clarity, has no impact on the nature of that world.

Xcelerate• 2 months ago

Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.
I know for sure what I am perceiving

This reflects my view. And I’ve always found it mildly amusing that beings I cannot prove to myself are perceiving attempt to convince me that I’m not perceiving, when that’s exactly what I’m maximally sure of. Imagine arguing with an LLM designed to convince you that you’re not real. It would be weird, wouldn’t it?

vidarh2• 2 months ago

you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter

I'd consider myself a materialist (in the philosophical sense) and this is why (and I agree with the rest of your comment to)

We can not know, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary (e.g. someone metaphorically popping their head in from "outside" and revealing another layer to us), while it is important to understand that we do not know, it is more productive to assume in the absence of evidence, whether it is "real" or subjective or a simulation.

As long as it appears to us to follow consistent rules, we can explore those rules, and explore our apparent material reality.

visarga7• 2 months ago

Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.

Who invented the words "consciousness" "reality" "fundamental" that you are now using? you are using language invented elsewhere while claiming you can't be sure of its reality.

Are you also claiming you can't be sure someone had to create and raise you to get to the point of asking such questions? We are downstream from parents and society.

The whole discussion here is anchored on individual level, but we are not viable outside society. It's like extracting one cell from one organ and saying it is mysterious why it is like that, while ignoring the organism and the evolution.

If society fails, human die too. If a human makes a fatal mistake, the cells in their body die too. We depend on top level doing its job to keep the lower layers viable.

thomastjeffery2• 2 months ago

Only if we abandon reason while simultaneously claiming objectivity.

I cannot know objectively whether I am in a simulation or not. I can, however, reason about my experience, the experiences of others (as I perceive them), and the systems that facilitate perception. All of that information is logically coherent, so I can "know" it. My knowledge may not be objectively proven, but it is the most subjectively relevant conclusion.

arcastroe• 2 months ago

Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple?

This sounds similar to the "how do you know you're not dreaming?" question.

When you are in a dream, you really are the only single conciousness of that world. Any other person you interact with inside your dream is not performing any thinking of their own. Instead, dream interactions are just your single consciousness interacting with itself.

I think it is obvious there are multiple consciousness in the universe and not just one. Unless you're in a dream right now ;)

sebastianconcpt3• 2 months ago

Is not undefinable. Unless you have an incomplete model to understand the universe. Which is exactly our case.

staticassertion3• 2 months ago

That's like saying that "water" is a philosophical invention and so if you accept that water is a thing then you've put it into a special category.

You can derive consciousness as a somewhat obvious conclusion of empirical study of behaviors, we have multiple fields of study that lay out cognitive function and criteria.

freedomben• 2 months ago

I've been debating consciousness for many years as a layman, not an expert, but a layman who has read a lot of scholarly books on the subject.

In my experience, the majority of people who take the position that consciousness is something special to humans are nearly always coming from a religious background and viewing it through a religious lens. This makes sense, as if we reduce consciousness to physical reality, then the implications to free will become quite clear and devastating against it being a thing. This essentially destroys a lot of religions which are fundamentally based on humans having free will. Detailing the full chain of thought would take quite a bit of space, but the quick answer is that the ability for free will is hiding from us if it actually exists. Many people reach for quantum mechanics and its source of randomness as room for consciousness to exist that gives us free will, but the problem there is neurologically we operate at a far larger size than quantum effects would be measured. There's also no way to control the outcome of quantum events as it is truly random. So one would need to show how our neurological physiological minds could manipulate quantum space, which of course they can't. At the level our brains operate, we are well into deterministic physics.

While they absolutely deny this, the impression I get is that they are making a god of the gaps argument. Consciousness is something we don't understand yet, and can't even really define well as many people here have pointed out, so to them it doesn't feel like a classic God of the gaps.

For that reason, I find your comment above quite interesting. I personally find philosophy to be a fascinating and useful tool, but it definitely has a tendency to mislead, especially in areas where hard science can inform. Of course there's an entire debate around the philosophy of science itself, but that feels off topic here.

crdrost• 2 months ago

The thing that Rovelli is arguing against (well -- not really arguing -- more, "stubbornly sticking his head in the sand" against) is not really a position that is held by a bunch of religious people trying to create a weird "god-of-the-gaps style argument" as you characterize.

Like, that may have been your experience -- not contradicting you on who you've met and what you've talked with them about etc. ... but what he's talking about is a position argued by a lot of philosophers and including those who have no particular metaphysical commitments.

Rovelli here does a lot worse than Dennett's "quining qualia" paper where he tries to get people to be really specific about "what are these qualia like" and finds that they're so hard to embed in language, to symbolically represent, that maybe he-as-philosopher can discharge his duty to be engaged-with-phenomenalism by just kinda sticking his fingers in his ears and saying "what phenomena?! you haven't clearly defined the phenomena!"

But someone like Searle who has no bones about himself being an atheist and, while he didn't like to describe himself as "materialist" because of the history of that term[1] he would acknowledge that it was close to his basic position. And I want to be clear that he views consciousness as a scientifically solvable problem. He doesn't think we've solved it yet but he thinks the philosophical problems are ultimately tractable and if we solve them and get out of the way you'll get a fine science of consciousness someday. Nevertheless, he's very clear about agreeing with the fact that these qualia are important to the discussion and he would laugh at you for trying to leave them out -- he'd say, now you're trying to make a science of consciousness, by leaving out the consciousness. And of course you don't think there's any science left to be done at that point and "well, it's all deterministic physics, we understand it all, nothing to be done here."

So like if you want to read his take, a book is Freedom and Neurobiology, but for this comment I just want to point out that him simultaneously believing that there are phenomena of experience, and believing that there is no God, are two beliefs that are not uncommon for philosophers to hold together.

1. There's kind of no way to very briefly make the point since you kind of need to be hit in the face with a sledgehammer about it. So Searle views Descartes as erroneously trying to package up the world into two realms -- mind properties or substances on this hand, physical properties or substances on that hand -- and insisting that they can't overlap. And then Descartes' legacy was that you had camps which said 'those mind properties aren't real, only the physical properties' (materialism) and 'those physical properties aren't real, only the mind properties' (idealism) but coming from the same mistaken beginning. Searle would point to the score of a football game and say 'now is that physical because it's represented in terms of lights on the scoreboard, or is it mental because it's represented in terms of the thoughts of the referee, what about all the people on both sides who think the referee made the wrong decision -- something which, remember, by definition the actual referee cannot do; they are the final authority -- and they believe that the score is "really" some other number distinct from the score represented on the lights; and what if none of these people are "right" in the sense that if a perfectly perceptive model referee could have made all of the scoring calls in the game according to the rules on the books, then the score would have actually included an event that everyone watching thought was unambiguously non-scoring but actually it was completely legal and valid. But here I-the-philosopher come into all of this absolute mess and I want to carve out a clear boolean yes/no classification, mental vs physical, material vs ideal, which is it -- the problem, was not that I counted to two distinct possibilities, but that I thought counting those possibilities was a meaningful way to decompose the problem in the first place.

986aignan2• 2 months ago

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.

But you can view consciousness as a natural phenomenon without being reductionist. In a Hempel's Dilemma-like turn, you could say something like: "consciousness, like mass, is a property of arrangements of matter and exists wherever matter is arranged in a particular way. Disrupt the arrangement, as with anesthetics, and the consciousness goes away."

You end up with something like integrated information theory: https://iep.utm.edu/integrated-information-theory-of-conscio...

From such a perspective, the article's byline, "Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world", is true. Like mass or charge, consciousness is merely another property or feature of stuff of combinations of matter that exist in the physical universe.

But there's still a "hard problem of consciousness" with such a theory. The distinguishing feature of qualia-like consciousness remains: it can only be properly verified from the inside. Researchers may devise theories that say "if property X holds, then the lump of matter is conscious" (like Tononi is doing with IIT). And the theory they develop may be quite tight - for all actions where it predicts temporary loss of consciousness, people exposed to the experiment say "I wasn't conscious at that time". But until they can solve the hard problem - being able to detect the what-its-like from the outside, the hard problem remains.

Though, as you're saying, if you just want something that predicts observable outcomes, then consciousness theories that say "this anesthetic-like thing produces what, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from loss of consciousness", might be good enough.

tim33310• 2 months ago

consciousness is a philosophical invention

Does that mean when a boxer is knocked unconscious we should call a philosopher to fix it?

NoMoreNicksLeft• 2 months ago

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.

There is no such need. If we view the idea of consciousness as a childish delusion and suppose that no one has consciousness at all... that we are animals with behaviors that explain all the actions we take, we can model the world just as effectively as if we are the vessels of marvelous souls that are inexplicable and magical.

Theology was the traditional venue of these absurdist arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But at least they had an excuse, they never pretended that it was science or that the debate was grounded in anything other than religious belief.

markhahn3• 2 months ago

I'm mystified why you think there is anything to accept about consciousness. Or are you purely talking about it being a "thing"? Yes, that's relevant to how Rovelli is treating dualism (as a made-up, unevidenced claim).

I'm always mystified why consciousness is so often claimed to be undefinable.

fsckboy• 2 months ago

So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that)

whether or not matter was continuous and could be divided forever by repeated halving, or if there were "atoms" was a philosophical puzzle more than 2000 years before "we" found the answer. That it was "atoms" was one of the 2000y.o. hypotheses. same with dividing time and distance. It's ridiculous to dispense with good hypotheses.

we know that consciousness exists before any other thing. We don't even know that the so-called physical world actually exists, only that we we consciously think we observe it, but we can wake up believing dreams or psychotic imaginings. How can you enjoy watching The Matrix, and yet walk out so smug about you knowing the answers before they've even been found?

I personally do not believe in the material universe. All of our theories and descriptions and empricism about it proves that it is mathematical only. All that exists can be (and is) explained by math (and perhaps some computer science in the sense that there is state, and math doesn't require state) I call upon rational STEM types to reject the material universe the way you wish to dispense with consciousness. Consciousness, like math, is immaterial, and we have more evidence for immateriality than we do for materiality. When our hypothetical hands touch each other in a handshake, you would even point out that on a quantum level, nothing touches anything.

mrkeen• 2 months ago

The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body.

Or a gap between my mind and the minds of the other commuters on this bus.

There are 15 or so biological machines here, but only one of them is being experienced in bright sound and colour.

saidnooneever2• 2 months ago

consciousness is hard because it requires a special kind of belief. we humans believe a lot of things, but this one is difficult. all is one, and that one thing is all. everything contains gender. opposites are the same thing. these are all easy things that are hard to understand/believe.

Dont pretend like you dont believe anything is step 1.

Sankozi2• 2 months ago

The biggest benefit of term "consciousness" is that when I see something like "LLMs are not conscious" I immediately know that the author doesn't know what he is talking about.

mangolie2• 2 months ago

In that case the author is simply saying the LLM is a p zombie, why does he not know what he's talking about?

Sankozi2• 2 months ago

They are saying something similar to "LLM has no soul", depending on context it might something insightful or (in technical/scientific context) they are making fool of themselves.

colordrops• 2 months ago

These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".

wowoc2• 2 months ago

Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness is pretty good: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."

etiam• 2 months ago

What do you find good about that?

apex_sloth• 2 months ago

The main value of this article is this absolute gold mine of a comment section.

aledevv• 2 months ago

..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature.

Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that:

what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible.

mort96• 2 months ago

Was reasoning thought to be immaterial and intangible..? By whom? Materialism has been alive and well for a long time from what I can tell

hackinthebochs10• 2 months ago

Plato, for example

unparagoned5• 2 months ago

In the original paper about the hard problem, Chalmers does say all that stuff is explainable by science or the easy problems.

namero9995• 2 months ago

Cognition/intelligence is not consciousness. Information processing vs phenomenality. AI is intelligent (it's in the name) but not conscious.

pyaamb• 2 months ago

we are caught between an evolutionary need to know that our existence is meaningful and a universe that seems indifferent.

_under_scores_• 2 months ago

I may be misunderstanding the article but doesnt the fact that all other science and understanding sits on a continuum of which consciousness has (to my understading) to real footing mean that the problem is dualitic by definition? Thats not to say that it can't be 'brought into the fold', it may well be, but until it is it has no other place that to sit outside.

ben_w3• 2 months ago

Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own:

I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”

This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong".

We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?

We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.

If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*.

Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious

Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken.

The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do.

(At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).

4gotunameagain• 2 months ago

We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.

I believe that this is simply because of the way we train ML, with labelled data. It is quite conceivable that we could get an ML model to recognise cats just by some form of multidimensional clustering of training data.

daseiner18• 2 months ago

the quote from the article is just a contrived tautology that misunderstands the nature of the problem. the dualism problem is not about finding an explanation for why what we call a cat is what we call a cat. it's that you can measure anything you want but nevertheless despite confidently establishing the size of a cat, the appearance of a cat, the behavior of cats, a sophisticated taxonomy of related species labeled "felines", surveying people to find out what cats are to them, what a cat is to me is not what a cat is to you

ben_w3• 2 months ago

I wish I'd phrased it better, my point was more that early vision systems had weird issues, which we were able to figure out by looking at what part of the image those models paid attention to and realising it often wasn't even part of the animal in the photo, but e.g. the plants around them. We literally had to think about what made a cat a cat to make AI good at recognising cats.

This would also impact clustering.

That said, I think even for humans there's a similar issue: we spent millennia clustering things into groups and labelling those groups, which is why the Catholic church had rules about no meat on Good Friday but fish was fine and beavers counted as fish (and there is now a podcast titled around the idea there is no such thing as a fish*). For cats, I don't see it myself but the fossa is described as "cat-like".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish#Title

MrOrelliOReilly• 2 months ago

This article is pretty slim on details, but I agree with the general argument that dualism is unnecessary to explain phenomenal consciousness. The word "consciousness" has a lot of baggage, which causes us to mislabel cognition as consciousness. [1] This is why I really like using terms like "qualia" or _phenomenal_ consciousness to make explicit what we're talking about.

I still don't like this new trend of dismissing the hard problem altogether. We really don't have an explanation of phenomenal consciousness—it might even require novel physics to explain! [2]

I'd also like to point out that, though this might seem like a semantic argument, it has meaningful consequences for how we approach science and ethics. [3] For example, if we are physicalists and accept that phenomenal consciousness is a property of the world, what does this tell us about other unobservable properties of the world science may be missing? (Recall that we only know about phenomenal consciousness through our own experience of it; we cannot observe it in others)

[1] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/what-is-the-color-blue

[2] https://youtu.be/DI6Hu-DhQwE?si=RB3qkt6PZ62SVpx3&t=2493

[3] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/morality-without-consciousne...

semilin• 2 months ago

It felt very strange to me that the author construes belief in the hard problem as some sort of spiritual baggage from unempirical religious view. He seems to want to pit the "new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries" _against_ the idea of phenomenal consciousness, which is just absurd to me. As far as I understand, it is far more rooted in German idealism and its Cartesian roots than in any sort of religious spirit.

I'm almost convinced that those who deny the metaphysical (or, if you insist, the plausibly merely physical) force of qualia are philosophical zombies trying to persuade us against the existence of the most obviously true piece of knowledge we have! Or, more generously, they are so steeped in the premises of modern empirical science that they treat their fundamental phenomenal experience as so untrustworthy as to be disregarded, despite its actual necessity in employing those very premises.

Poor, disregarded qualia! Oh that the scientists could see how much they owe to you.

dcminter2• 2 months ago

can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it?

The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.

We all (presumably, although I might wonder about the author) know that consciousness is a thing, we don't have anything like a rigid definition of it. Perhaps we never will, but this kind of hot air is unlikely to ever get us closer to understanding it.

Tiresome article by someone just being contrary for the sake of having something to say.

xyzsparetimexyz2• 2 months ago

Right. Its bad science to say that consciousness doesnt exist.

don_esteban8• 2 months ago

The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.

The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.

It might as well be that philosophical zombies are mental construct that cannot physically exist, simply because building one will imbue it with 'consciousness' (as, it being the physical copy/simulation, it will be able to simulate also the 'consciousness'), in turn making it non-zombie.

dcminter2• 2 months ago

The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.

Sure, but if you're going to posit a philosophical zombie, don't posit one that has a rich inner life, experiences qualia, and is ridden with self-doubt FFS.

jincongho• 2 months ago

The author is mixing two discussions: soul/body dualism and qualia (hard problem).

It could be true that there's only physical body, but still have the qualia explanatory gap.

usernametaken29• 2 months ago

The author should read up on embodied cognition. Their arguments have been discussed at length. It’s all old stuff really. Good stuff too. I don’t see how the article succinctly describes this or contributes otherwise

jdiaz55132• 2 months ago

Fully agree, and I am mildly disappointed to see nobody has brought up Maturana and Varela in this entire thread.

The deeper layer is autopoiesis - the conceptual foundation authored by them that embodied/4E cognition builds on.

They defined cognition as a necessary property of self-referencing, self-maintaining boundaries in an information-theoretic/topological sense, not bound to any specific physical process.

This dissolves the dualism Rovelli targets in a way that pure materialist/eliminativist arguments don’t manage cleanly. Autopoiesis is fully physical (mathematically modelable, biologically grounded) but it locates consciousness in structural relationships and informational dynamics rather than a purely physical substrate.

Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007) is the contemporary version, and Varela’s later work integrates phenomenology directly.

I hold that it may be possible to use the toolkits of set/category/group/type theory to formalize these relationships.

Would be a vastly different conversation thread here if this work was more well known.

metalman2• 2 months ago

blather. another example of weak blather of the weeeeeeee! I'm so full of words variety, that fails to interesting or memorable, like someone so high on mushrooms that they are claiming to be able to see there own ears, who if asked what consiousness is will give a similar answer, unless you ask how consiousness relates to rubber bands, which will get a similar answer with rubber band anologies.

roysting• 2 months ago

Many gave that up a long time ago. Welcome to reality, “experts” and “PhDs”.

dainank• 2 months ago

I believe nature is all there is. If we could replicate a human brain several times, and make each 'human brain' receive the exact same input data (sounds, sights, smells e.t.c.) from the moment they 'exist' until the end of their lifetime, I truly think that each of these brains will make precisely the same decisions (and each of these 'brains' would think they were conscious and in control of their lives).

In my eyes, consciousness is simply a natural phenomenon that can be explained but we just lack the understanding at this moment. Time and time again we have made this mistake of assuming there is something supernatural about the things we cannot comprehend and only a few centuries later it is completely understood scientifically. I think consciousness will be a similar case but will take more time.

prynpo• 2 months ago

Nature vs. nurture is also a popular debate. This scenario you described, even with nature being all there is, doesn't imply all our actions and thoughts are shaped by our environment.

rishi_devan• 2 months ago

You’re saying it’s all 100% deterministic. But at the quantum level, things are probabilistic. The hundred brains with the same input data might make different decisions like how each ball dropped in the Galton board chooses a different route.

But I agree with your overall premise. It can be all understood scientifically. There is nothing supernatural about things we cannot comprehend.

ndriscoll• 2 months ago

Quantum theories are consistent with determinism. You just need to give up locality or... free choice.

ngruhn• 2 months ago

I think supernatural things don't exist by definition. If ghosts would exist, they would be just natural.

The real question is whether there is a two way link between consciousness and the physical world. Obviously the physical world is observed by consciousness, so that direction checks out. What about the other direction? Is the physical world at all influenced by consciousness? The mindfulness folks seem to argue: no. They argue that consciousness is like a person watching a movie, where the movie is experience. The person is so immersed that it thinks, it controls the movie, but in reality it's a fully passive observer. But this can't be true! Otherwise, the discussion of consciousness could never have come up in human history. A population of "philosophical zombies" could never initiate this discussion. So somehow consciousness must cause physical neurons to activate. The movie knows about the person watching!

pygy_7• 2 months ago

FTA:

Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.

The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like".

Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.

None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations.

Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you.

This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful.

Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.

n4r96• 2 months ago

Qualia is the term people often use to mean "what it's like". The hard problem is "why is there qualia". This of course assumes that qualia exists as a coherent thing, which some philosophers dispute.

pygy_7• 2 months ago

Indeed, I didn't remember that Chamlers was literally building his argument around the "why?"... But he does.

This reduces to the intractable mystery of existence. A more interesting question would be, as usual "how".

There are serious attempts at this, coming from both neuroscience and physics (e.g. for the latter https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/15/11/115319/3372193/Un... )

themafia• 2 months ago

Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.

I know this isn't what you wanted, but the dualism struck me:

A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.

Magenta is like when you play a D and an F# together. When you see it at sunset it's like a major D chord surrounded by the sound of babies laughing. When you see it on the battlefield it's like a minor D chord wrestling against the noise of wind and rain.

pygy_7• 2 months ago

What is it like to experience synesthesia :-)

These are very good analogies (and possibly experiences for those who are natural synesthetes), but even then, that won't make the who doesn't have the corresponding perceptual modality person experience that exact sensation.

throw_m2393392• 2 months ago

A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.

why does a major chord sounds pleasant? and why does a minor chord sounds "sad"? Why does the locrian mode sound so unsettling? is it due to our anatomy or purely cultural?

jillesvangurp2• 2 months ago

Neal Stephenson touches on this topic in several of his novels. Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch. In the book, two of the deceased digital "souls" eventually mate and produce digital offspring and the whole simulation starts consuming more and more resources.

His Baroque Cycle series also touches on this in several places. One funny side plot involves a freed African slave (Dappa) who speaks dozens of different languages and is highly intelligent and an aristocratic person who maintains that of course this former slave (who is obviously a lot smarter than this aristocrat) is just a trained monkey that naturally is not conscious even though he is quite clever with language. The same books also have a lot of side plots involving Leibniz and various attempts to build thinking/computing machines.

The Dappa plot is probably the closest to a lot of debates there will be around AGI with people likely to insist for all sorts of reasons rooted in philosophy, religion, etc. that even though the AGI walks, talks, etc. like a duck, it can't be a duck. At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.

card_zero7• 2 months ago

The clinching thing for me is how the AGI is supposed to work. If it's the same as our theory of how we work, then fine, it's one of us. It wouldn't even have to work very well.

vixen992• 2 months ago

I always like to remind myself that AI is trained on material fed to it, created and written (somewhere along the line) entirely by humans - as they perceive & interpret the universe around them.

david-gpu• 2 months ago

At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.

Is there a distinction in your mind between consciousness and intelligence? Is it possible, for example, for a machine to solve complex problems but not be conscious? Or vice versa, can an animal or a person be very unintelligent yet still conscious?

otikik4• 2 months ago

A philosophical zombie [1] is essentially a mobile, autonomous human body devoid of consciousness. Critically, still giving all of the external cues that it has in fact consciousness. It is supposed to prove that physicalism doesn't work. "The sense of consciousness" is used like a "soul, with extra steps".

In my humble opinion, which I have no way to prove or disprove, consciousness ("as a soul with extra steps") does not exist, and we are all philosophical zombies. Consciousness "as an amalgamation of complex biological signals and neural interactions that has evolved through millions of years as a successful survival strategy" does exist, and that is all that is needed.

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

jillesvangurp2• 2 months ago

The question is mainly interesting in the context of our own behavior and interactions. Because would we treat our food differently if we decided e.g. pigs were intelligent and conscious? I had some salami on my pizza yesterday. But I also believe pigs are intelligent and conscious. And they are close relatives of us genetically. Some people choose to not eat meat for this reason.

I'm of the school of thought that we are all biological computers with emergent properties like intelligence, consciousness, etc. that we might eventually succeed in replicating. Maybe at a more modest level at first. From a practical point of view, I'm more interested in intelligent agents than conscious ones. I mainly need them to do useful things for me. Too much consciousness is a double edged sword. Because then I would have to consider how my agent feels about all this. But can you really have one without the other? I don't have a good answer to this.

People have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything around them. Definitely their pets, plants, and in some cases even inanimate objects. Which doesn't help the debate because it's already happening with LLM tools. Even though they are probably still on the definitely not conscious side of the fence even when they demonstrate mildly intelligent reasoning occasionally.

At some point, people will have a hard time telling the difference with AGI. Is it all smoke and mirrors at that point or are they dealing with an intelligent/conscious thing? That's no doubt going to entertain philosophers for centuries to come. But from a practical point of view, does it really matter at that point? If we can't reliably tell the difference, is there still a difference?

lelanthran2• 2 months ago

At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.

You've already drawn your line in the sand (i.e. they are conscious). In that case, you can't also claim that we should continue producing them by the millions at the flick of a switch.

The AI-is-conscious crowd will have to choose - either they are conscious, in which case they should not be birthed, or they are not conscious in which case we can use them as tools. You can't have both and still be logically consistent.

ticulatedspline• 2 months ago

I think you mean morally consistent. though even then humans don't have any real qualms about that. Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.

essentia04• 2 months ago

You have strong assumptions for the underlying moral framework

an0malous• 2 months ago

Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch.

This is a great example for a discussion about The Hard Problem. Here is the description from the book of the inner experience of this scanned brain as it gets booted up:

What came next could not, of course, be described without using words. But that was deceptive in a way since he no longer had words. Nor did he have memories, or coherent thoughts, or any other way to describe or think about the qualia he was experiencing. And those qualia were of miserably low quality. To the extent he was seeing, he was seeing incoherent patterns of fluctuating light. For people of a certain age, the closest descriptor for this was “static”: the sheets, waves, and bands of noise that had covered the screens of malfunctioning television sets. Static, in a sense, wasn’t real. It was simply what you got out of a system when it was unable to lock on to any strong signal—“Strong” meaning actually conveying useful, or at least understandable, information. Modern computer screens were smart enough to just shut down, or put up an error message, when the signal was lost. Old analog sets had no choice but to display something. The electron beam was forever scanning, a mindless beacon, and if you fed it nothing else it would produce a visual map of whatever was contingently banging around in its circuitry: some garbled mix of electrical noise from Mom’s vacuum cleaner, Dad’s shaver, solar flares, stray transmissions caroming off the ionosphere, and whatever happened when little feedback loops on the circuit board got out of hand. Likewise, to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.

The Hard Problem asks: who is experiencing this qualia and why is there an experiencer at all? Stephenson writes how this simulated brain is experiencing static as it condenses into meaningful patterns, but he implicitly starts with someone experiencing this static qualia. If this is the very beginning of the simulated brain booting up, where did this experiencer come from?

At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.

Because you're conflating intelligence with consciousness. There is no test for consciousness. In fact, you can't even prove that other human beings are conscious, you only know that you yourself are because it's self evident to you (cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am). The whole point of the hard problem is that you can imagine something exactly like a human being that passes every test of being a human being (e.g. an AI) but still not be sure that it has any inner experience.

tim33310• 2 months ago

There is no test for consciousness

There's the Glasgow Coma Scale "the most widely used tool for measuring comas and decreases in consciousness"

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diagnostics/24848-glas...

I know it's probably not what you're thinking of but does illustrate these things are not totally beyond testing and experimentation.

modernerd• 2 months ago

There are 325+ theories of consciousness mapped here:

https://loc.closertotruth.com/map

And a good walkthrough here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5G6Oc_V3Lw

Many of these already gave up on dualism: they already rejected the idea that mind and body are separate (e.g. panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a feature of reality, that all matter possesses "experience" of some kind).

RivieraKid• 2 months ago

Science will never be able to properly even define the concept of consciousness because it's outside the scope of science.

Consciousness is something that is used to observe the outer world and science essentially describes patterns in our observations.

All scientific laws boil down to subjective perceptions, such as, when I drop an apple, I see that it falls down.

geye1234• 2 months ago

During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul.

This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of?

Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.

drooby• 2 months ago

"Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century."

.....

"...he nevertheless remained convinced that soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a body"

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#AnthGodSoulSou...

tim33310• 2 months ago

...[God says] all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.

from the book of

prophet Ezekiel, exiled in Babylon, during the 22 years from 593 to 571 BC

throw_m2393392• 2 months ago

"You can't seperate the body from the mind", Tool told me.

psychoslave2• 2 months ago

Seems like void of any substance if one takes whatever flavor of monism for granted. Just because everything is supposed to be build on the same fundamental building blocks/fluxes/whatever doesn’t mean every phenomenon is caused by constructions of equal complexities.

That is, life referring to something inherently far more complex than inert assemblies remains perfectly valid in many monist perspectives.

[edit: took life rather than consciousness as an example, but the stated argument in the article seems to be equally applicable relevant for both concept, or any concept that suppose that emergent complexity is possible]

tmvphil2• 2 months ago

It seems wild to me to write a (popular) article about consciousness in the year 2026 without addressing the elephant in the room: we are able to devise computer programs of increasing complexity that replicate more and more behaviors that were once the sole domain of humans, and at what point do we consider such computers to have experience in the sense that we have, and the sense in which calculators and thermostats do not. It seems that Rovelli is content to say that we should call experience the thing that the brain does, which is all well and good if you're a physicalist (and I am) but it does not help you at all explain which features of the brain are necessary for experience.

I think it also helps to sharpen this debate to remember that there is a moral dimension: many have adopted moral systems that widen their sphere of concern and care from the self to the community to the nation to the whole of mankind, usually under the intuitive precept that it is bad to make someone else experience suffering. Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?

sdevonoes• 2 months ago

Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?

Such an irony. Humans have has since the bery beginning inflicted pain and suffering on other human beings. We are still doing it directly (e.g., wars) or indirectly (e.g., capitalism). The idea that perhaps in the not so distant future, machines may live better “lives” or be treated better than some humans is pathetic. But here again, there are some pets that live better than a 1000 humans nowadays

tmvphil2• 2 months ago

I don't know where in my statement you saw the implication that we should not care about bad things happening to other humans, but it was a misapprehension.

acron02• 2 months ago

It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.

Why is it pernicious?

PeterWhittaker3• 2 months ago

Because it leads us down seemingly useful paths that are in fact dead wrong. There is only physics, but at some levels it more convenient to ignore the physics (what is happening in the body) and to describe our experience.

Rovelli is a reductionist, the only logically and physically defensible intellectual position, while dualism is inherently supernatural, invoking phantoms, phenomenology that is purely fictitious.

acron02• 2 months ago

Ok, but that doesn't really address "pernicious". I understand pursuits of philosophy are inherently concerned with truth, but does not truth mean pernicious? My experience of reading philosophers is limited; is Rovelli just a materialist and that's that? Is this positivism?

mooreat• 2 months ago

  Unless someone eventually finds the consciousness center in the brain I will continue to hold the position that it is just another property of "things". I know consciousness must be real because it's the first thing I have access to without any sort of reasoning attached on top of it. Its realness is more visceral than atoms or any other physical theory because it is the way in which the world is conveyed to me, but I don't think I'm unique in any way for having it.

  I feel like all systems, in a panpsychist sense, participate in consciousness, so in some way it's a property of matter or systems in our universe that we have somehow failed to account for in physics. We miss it because systems only exhibit consciousness internally like on top of having all the physical properties of rocks, rocks also have an internal state of being. That internal state of being for the most part is uninteresting cause it doesn't dictate the rocks actual form or function in the universe.

  I'd argue human consciousness is the same. My conscious experience has nothing to do with the thoughts that are actually being produced. By this I mean there is no authorship of the thoughts and actions I perform by my consciousness. To me it seems more like a stage in which elements of my experience appear for brief moments before fading away, so much like the rock's internal experience my internal experience does not have any affect on the physical world.

  Part of me then starts to worry why worry about consciousness at all if it's something that doesn't participate in the physical world because then what's the point of it all? Also, if all systems get to participate, then what stops things like basic logic gates on a PC from having consciousness as well. I tend to lean towards thinking that those feelings are similar to the same kinds of feelings humans used to have about thinking they were the center of the universe, but I'm not sure.

Sorry for the brain dump,

Austin

paulsutter• 2 months ago

"Consciousness" is a suitcase word. It has so many meanings that any individual speaker can't even keep them straight, much less a group discussion.

That's the reason it seems like a thorny topic.

hoppp• 2 months ago

To me it seems consciousness is a log file that records the results of brain activities originating from different parts of the brain.

This log file is loaded into working memory.

I have aspergers and that's sort of how I experience my own consciousness, the result of different brain processes, summarised in a log.

People are mainly subconscious and not that many things propagate to consciousness and get recorded in the log, because it's a bottleneck.

Instead of recording the whole process of emotionally tagging things, people just "feel" something without reasoning. Only the emotional tag or intuition is recorded in the log but not the process to get to it.

Non-verbal communication is emitted and processed subconsciously, which is hard for me because of the autism and I arrived to the conclusion that fundamentally human consciousness is a spectrum and how much is recorded into it depends on neurodiversity.

sebastianconcpt3• 2 months ago

This is the Let's deal with the phenomenon of Qualia by denying its existence thesis.

azan_• 2 months ago

Spot on.

PeterWhittaker3• 2 months ago

Not at all. As the fourth paragraph from the end states, we experience qualia. Rovelli is simply saying that qualia are simply physical processes described from a salient perspective, that is, at a level more abstract than the eletrochemical processes that underlie them.

It's a bit like pain: to create better analgesics, we need to work at the lower levels closer to the biology, but a patient describing pain to a doctor works at a higher, descriptive level, as does the doctor. Where is the pain, what are its qualities (dull, sharp, shallow, deep, burning, etc.).

a13o2• 2 months ago

It’s going to be a long road, but I think as LLMs and their offspring create more and more convincing arguments for silicon consciousness we will conclude that consciousness is about as real as humours, and we’ve all been p-zombies this whole time.

Maybe the literary creature shoe should have started on the other foot, and sent us in search of proof that we are or are not p-angels. That at least puts the burden of proof on the compatibilists where it belongs.

sunir• 2 months ago

Dubious. We will just see logical vs physical space once again and move on with our lives. I think we are already mostly there as a society.

I don’t know why this is a block in philosophy let alone computer science. We experience it frequently and have a fundamental theorem about it.

Plenty of movies about it as well like the Matrix.

tsss• 2 months ago

I don't think people will ever admit that they're not that special. We already know that animals are "conscious" and still treat them with disdain.

nothinkjustai4• 2 months ago

How can you even argue that we’re p-zombies? I know that I’m not. I assume others aren’t. Maybe you are?

a13o2• 2 months ago

From a non-dual perspective either nobody is a p-zombie or everybody is a p-zombie. I think the trajectory of LLMs will be that consciousness sensations are abundant and low value, and that will give all the non-dual territory over to the illusionists (who now have a tangible example to point to.) Emergence won't be disproven but it'll be about as interesting as a penny stock. Everyone else is going to go to ground as a dualist and argue for some entirely new unreachable aspect of human exceptionalism, but they'll have ceded qualia as they did for souls. If I had to guess, they'll focus on embodied cognition because building high-fidelity bodies still seems really hard.

rhubarbtree• 2 months ago

Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop.

I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with the very simple like this and recursively building more complex predictors. When they predict correctly, happy feedback reinforces the connections that are firing, when they are wrong, they weaken. Just a really simple feedback algorithm that is super robust.

So the brain is building this world model, and it's essentially gradually compressing a description of the environment into a structure made of neurons. And this is the ultimate survival tactic: model the environment explicitly in your head, then adapt your behaviour to fit it. The better you are adapating to future states (dodging that tree as you run) the better survival chance you have.

At some point (complete speculation) we then begin to do something quite strange: we develop a world model _of ourselves_. We get to a level of sophistication where we begin to predict the future states of our own brains. This might emerge naturally as a way to compress existing learnt behaviour. For example, we re-learn to follow lines in a smarter way, particularly as other parts of the brain learn useful things that we can re-use in our line following. This treats our existing model as a cost function, and we learn a model of the model. But it eventually starts to model the higher-level models the brain has, higher up the abstraction stack.

And somehow, the modelling of our brain function creates a chaotic feedback loop that leads to the sensation of consciousness. It's super handwavey, I know, but somehow this recursion feeds awareness. It's like the abilty to see yourself thinking. Consider meditating and the way words appear in consciousness... you get to a point where you can observe what you're going to say before you say them, and I conjecture that is the modelling of the model that's going on.

And this is useful for survival, as you can optimise the way you think, compressing your circuits further, but also has this weird side-effect of creating awareness.

It also explains why consciousness takes time to develop - because you need to develop a model of yourself, but before that you need a model of the world.

svnt3• 2 months ago

This is essentially where the field is going, started with predictive processing by Friston with his free energy principle, combined into Hofstadter’s “I am a strange loop” and then the continuing thrust with applying the FEP as well as Rosenthal’s higher order theories and Graziano’s attention schema theory.

bglusman• 2 months ago

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

lanstin3• 2 months ago

This theory maps very well onto (at least some parts of) modern neuroscience; how emotions are made is taking this model, that the brains MO is predicting how the body will need to be tuned in the near future, as a way to explain how emotions arise and are perceived. “How Emotions are Made” by LisaFeldman Barrett.

pardon_me3• 2 months ago

Considering the brain functioning as prediction machine, we are constantly correcting the error between sensory perception and our inner reality. This is classic (closed) control loop[1] with self-correcting characteristics updated by adaptation through learning and experience.

At first the process is subconscious, then chaos enters as our conscious awareness develops, morphing the control loop into second or third order states of "correcting corrections" as we perform inner tasks such as ruminating, or external tasks such as group discussion and logical planning.

The perfect prediction machine would be a simulation running an entire up-to-date universe model, but between our limited physical resources and available energy in reality, our evolved aim is efficiency, by creating a state of awareness and reactive patterns with minimal information (lowest entropy). We do this by making assumptions, testing the world, then processing the response and updating our control loop. The tradeoff is lack of precision, as a model without complete information has guaranteed errors.

Children who form a more realistic core worldview through guidance, opportunities and experience are best set up to create solid foundations which are more adaptable to future unexpected situations. Whether this is learning emotional response in social settings or math, the ability to integrate future conscious experience depends on early neuronal structures formed by subconscious expectations of the world. If measurement error is too great from expectations and our current loop/wavelength, our options are to discard this information or learn from it by reflecting on sources of inevitable prediction error through reasoning.

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

mmnfrdmcx2• 2 months ago

you might enjoy the first chapter of Diaspora by Greg Egan

https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html

329a8Hqag• 2 months ago

The magazine is funded by:

https://berggruen.org/projects

The investment arm for this influencer fund is:

https://www.berggruenholdings.com/

The fund is invested in AI and Berggruen pushes the AI/UBI narrative:

https://www.ft.com/content/9b93e02a-c693-4070-9094-a2f532dfa...

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasberggruen?trk=public_post...

You can already see from the glossy website that this is a well funded propaganda magazine, just like Quantaagazine is essentially funded by the Renaissance Fund, which is invested in AI.

Yes, these magazines do have interesting articles from time to time, but the overt materialistic (not monetary, but anti-idealistic) worldview that traditionally only appeared in communist countries suddenly infests all the rich people's outlets.

kogasa240p2• 2 months ago

Very good post

housecarpenter• 2 months ago

Why would it serve the interests of AI companies to promote materialism? It seems to me that idealism would be more in the interest of AI companies to promote, since my impression is idealists are more likely than materialists to believe that AI will never be conscious, and AI being perceived as conscious would be problematic for companies that want to provide AI as a product.

blamestross• 2 months ago

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.4375

I felt like this paper nailed it years a go, and nobody has followed up properly.

The metric involved is basically impossible to compute fully, but easy to approximate. Any online approximation will model everything it can see have changes until it is satisfied.

losvedir• 2 months ago

I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again.

Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the conscious experience God and went further into how we all share this sliver of godhood.

Does anyone who knows philosophical "camps" know the terms for what I'm trying to remember? I guess I've leaned "materialist" for most of my life, but what other common philosophies (as in the academic discipline) are there?

Joker_vD2• 2 months ago

This side is traditionally called "idealist", and it usually very quickly collapses into solipsism of different varieties.

There is not much you can show against the "there is a single existing soul that has many different persons (as opposed to each person having a different, personal soul) that dreams about the 'physical' reality" hypothesis except "I don't think my imagination is that good", really.

visarga7• 2 months ago

What I reject most about idealism is that it is free. Life is hard and expensive, but soul is free. How come? Is our soul understood like a spherical cow?

mjburgess14• 2 months ago

Yes, it's called idealism. And the whole field of it is a pile of fallacies of ambiguity that can take years to see and treat with caution.

StackBPoppin• 2 months ago

I don't think I've shared my thoughts on here, but this sounds a lot like my thought process: what if you start with nothing but consciousness, then find a path to a physical universe?

Consciousness is inherently about awareness, so at some point the consciousness would be aware of itself. Now it has the concepts of before/after, and from that opposites, incrementing, subtracting, 1 dimensional space etc. Eventually through this process you could "spawn up" other consciousnesses each expanding their individual bubbles of experience and understanding, eventually getting complex enough to create an entire universe with physical matter that can be experienced by other consciousnesses.

squidbeak3• 2 months ago

The problem with this line of thought is that consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged. A piece of falling masonry can be enough to shear off large parts or all of it. If consciousness was fundamentally distinct, this wouldn't be the case, would it?

hnfong4• 2 months ago

There are a lot of similar ideas in various ancient/traditional spiritual/esoteric teachings. "Consciousness first" is actually the more typical assumption among the traditions that have something we'd label as a philosophy.

amelius2• 2 months ago

One thing is certain: we are talking about consciousness. This means that the world does not work like this: there is physics, and above it there is consciousness which is merely monitoring the physics. This cannot be true (or is unlikely), since we are discussing consciousness and therefore the physical act of talking is driven by something that knows that consciousness exists. There must be a link back from consciousness to physics. A simpler way is to assume that physics IS consciousness. Physics as a science is a kind of introspective activity.

mjburgess14• 2 months ago

The link is called causation, and it is not simpler to assume its absence. It seems simpler only because no one ever works through the full consequences, because the project of doing so always fails very quickly or terminates in an inexplicable bag called "god" (or the trasncendental ego) or similar which serves to do all the work of things which cannot be explained.

This kind of simplicity is a very deceitful on, because it offers to seem to explain everything with nothing, and having phrased nothing in pleasant-sounding ways, concludes that this simplicity is a virtue.

visarga7• 2 months ago

There must be a link back from consciousness to physics.

Yes, and it is trivial to prove. One second lapse of attention and you could get bitten by a snake, or run over by a car. If the top level (consciousness) fails, the neurons die too. Cells depend on this centralized decision point to exist. There is no way to have humans without consciousness because ... they would not be able even to put the thing into the other thing to make more of us without it ... excuse the language, but the argument is solid.

svnt3• 2 months ago

Closest thing is probably Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism.

namero9995• 2 months ago

This is at the same time one of the most solid metaphysics and one of the least known or studied. At least for now.

bobson381• 2 months ago

Advaita Vedanta or Alan Watts style looking - essentially the idea that there are no separate things or events, sort of like Whitehead's process philosophy. Trippy stuff and a little bit out there, but consistent with some other ways of looking at things. What is real by Adam Becker goes into some underpinnings here too.

vidarh2• 2 months ago

What you describe sounds like variation of Berkeley's subjective idealism:

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

PyWoody• 2 months ago

In case anyone is wondering, yes, the town of Berkeley, California is named after him. Also, it's pronounced BARK-Lee.

qsera18• 2 months ago

Basically it flipped the problem on its head.

I thought it was me[1], but I don't remember making the "shared godhood" argument

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999867

erythro• 2 months ago

Panpsychism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

karol• 2 months ago

Get familiar with Donald Hoffman - plenty of good podcasts with him.

dwd4• 2 months ago

I feel like Hoffman's core idea really tries to pull string theory into our understanding of reality. If reality has 10, 11, or 26 dimensions and we can only perceive 4 of them then there are dimensions where other things could exist.

I like his interface theory and the idea that our perception is an evolutionary fitness for purpose, but his conscious agents is straight out pseudo-religious/panpsychism.

dwd4• 2 months ago

Another "camp" is panpsychism, which is often seen as a polar opposite of materialism. David Chalmers and Philip Goff are the two most prominent people pushing it.

They espouse consciousness or subjective experience is fundamental and contained in all matter.

There's a long history of anti-dualism in Kabbalist traditions, Christian Mysticism and Gnosticism.

For example, the Gospel of Thomas sayings #3, #77 and #113.

qarl• 2 months ago

Personally I think the quantum immortality/suicide argument points directly at the trouble with the "duality".

It's a perfectly physical/mechanical argument that demonstrates that consciousness is much much more bizarre than we expect.

essentia04• 2 months ago

What is the argument?

zjbt• 2 months ago

I think these philosophical arguments boil down to answering the question "what is real?". Contemporary science is presented as an objective theory of reality, but our experiences form the actual starting point for everything that we can ever know about reality, so they ought to be considered real in some sense. The tension begins because, while a physical theory of reality will say that the signals in a brain are real signals, that does not imply the reality of any concepts that those signals may represent. If I imagine something, that does not make it real. But then the same can be argued for all experiences: there are real brain signals associated with them, but that does not imply the reality of those experiences. This lead to a gap in that the physical theory fails to imply, and thus fails to explain, the reality of experience. So, if I believe in the reality of my own experience, then I am left to ask "why is my experience real?", as that is not required or implied by the physical theory of reality.

It sounds like Rovelli's resolution is to acknowledge the centrality of subjective experiences to the formulation of scientific theories, and thus also to any theory of reality. Experiences are the starting point, with the rest being built up from them. Therefore, experiences should also be the first thing added into the bucket of things that one believes to be real. Meanwhile, any physical model of objective reality has a far more tenuous spot in that bucket. We may suspect it to be real through various deductions, but the further away we get from experiences, the more assumptions have to be made to get there. Anyway, I agree that there is no explanatory gap when reality is viewed in this manner. And this is a relatively palatable way to approach the question of reality (compared to, e.g., the mathematical universe hypothesis, which most find unacceptable). But as long as there is debate about what makes up reality and where experiences fit into that, the debate around the hard consciousness problem will continue, and I regard this problem to be of a different character (being far more philosophical) than, say, spiritualism or anti-Darwinism.

axus• 2 months ago

Is it time to give up on the value of (other) human beings? Time will tell.

storus• 2 months ago

This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflammatory environment, making one feel detached from their own body, feeling like they control a videogame character instead. Yet that still doesn't tell where does the "self" come from.

trollbridge• 2 months ago

Agreed. The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. So it’s hard to deny.

tim33310• 2 months ago

But the debate isn't whether consciousness exists. It's largely whether it's the product of normal neurons doing their thing or something more. Also the details of how it works of course.

ordu• 2 months ago

Your arguments reminds me of logical loop. A implies B, B implies A. It doesn't mean that A and B are true. You have to be conscious to experience and to be conscious means to to experience. Maybe we are not conscious after all and do not experience? Maybe it is just a lie we are telling ourselves?

n4r96• 2 months ago

I think the article has an interesting argument here. We also "experience" the sun going up and down in the sky. But actually this is an illusion of our vantage point on a spinning rock.

phkahler• 2 months ago

> The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it.

What about the NPC meme? LLMs behave like NPCs, and some people seem no more conscious than an NPC (I didn't invent that meme).

kevin42• 2 months ago

“We experience it, therefore it exists” proves less than it seems. It proves there is an experience to explain. It does not prove that consciousness is what it appears to be from the inside. A mirage is still seen, but the thing it seems to show is not really there. Consciousness might be real in that same limited sense, while our folk model of it could be deeply wrong.

olalonde• 2 months ago

As a philosophical zombie, I have to disagree here.

nemomarx2• 2 months ago

I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We assemble a self by keeping those memories and experience in a very particular way.

visarga7• 2 months ago

There is a very good explanation here - not what brains do, but what brains MUST do. Can we walk left and right at the same time? Can we drink coffee before brewing it? No. There is a bottleneck, a serial action bottleneck on the body. So the parallel brain activity must serialize on the output channel. It has to, or face ruin. If action is serialized in time by physical necessity, then information processing must also unify before action in order to support it. We must act as one -> we must cognize as one -> or perish. There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.

dwd4• 2 months ago

Anil Seth calls the "hard problem" at best a distraction, or hand-waving to avoid answering what he calls the real problem: linking what we experience to the physical brain mechanisms.

In his theory, consciousness is a "controlled hallucination" about what is outside of us. Our senses serve to reinforce or correct the predictions our brains are making. (we have a serious latency issue)

You'll find he's saying a lot of the same things you just wrote.

mordymoop• 2 months ago

Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason.

This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.

lanstin3• 2 months ago

Certainty would definitely appear to be premature when we don’t understand the physical characteristics or causes of consciousness. Hell, we don’t quite yet understand a cell in good mechanical detail, much less the full body/mind of a primate. Don’t know is a reasonable posture, but of course the investigators get enthused with hypothesis generation and testing. That is their job and their karma is to over generalize each useful model.

GoblinSlayer19• 2 months ago

Naturalistic theories tend to work better, and science is inching in towards the problem, so far it was naturalistic.

Nasrudith• 2 months ago

My best contribution to that sort of debate is experience with general anesthesia. I recall being in a disconnected state wondering idly if I had died of complications without any fear as I could not feel my heartbeat or embodied emotions. That implies a heavily embodied component to consciousness. It is all body so not quite dualism but it does provide some limited observational evidence of distinct components. Combine that with what I have heard about the mechanism of anesthesia working by disabling nerve transmission that suggests that a disembodied but supported brain which does not have neural access to sensory feedbacks would be rather stoic to emotionless.

HarHarVeryFunny7• 2 months ago

The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.

There are of course other reasons too, with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.

Finally, everyone is conscious and has an opinion, but only a tiny fraction are actually knowledgeable about the brain and have spent any large amount of time thinking about things like evolution and brain development .. they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it!

If you break down all the different things that people are referring to when they talk about "consciousness", and define them individually with as little wiggle room as the english language and underlying taxonomy of concepts allows, then I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all, but of course those with an agenda who want there to be a mystery will still argue about every part of it including the definitions that remove all the wiggle room.

The nature of consciousness has long been a contentious subject, and one of interest, but it seems that the rise of AI has intensified the discussion with the new question being whether AI is or could be conscious. I do think this can be answered in a principled way (=yes), but in the end you can only PROVE that something, or someone else, is conscious if you accept a functional/testable definition of it in the first place.

alexashka• 2 months ago

They know because of the algorithm:

Hear a thing and store it and the associated vibe - yay/nay.

Step 2:

Mindlessly repeat stored information and vibe when it feels appropriate.

Step 3:

Wait for somebody else to do the work of refuting/verifying your info + vibe.

Step 4:

Go to step 1.

When you realize this is what all people are doing almost all of the time (and many, all of the time), you are liberated.

mannanj• 2 months ago

That's nice. Do you have a go to for conversations with less mindful people or people without a training in meditation/mindfulness? For example, for people who have no experience and yet speak from a frame of strong identity and identification to their thoughts as though they are them, I like to ask "Who's the one who witnesses the thoughts?" and it kind of ties a brain-knot in their head.

Funny enough most people who don't want to meditate or practice mindfulness, also get dissuaded from the dissonance this brings up, and like the old me, just move on to more comfortable conversation.

bluejay2387• 2 months ago

"It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try."

It's 'one' of the few places? That behaviorism seems to be define almost all modern discourse from politics to health care including about 95% of Hacker News posts as far as I can tell...

saidnooneever2• 2 months ago

the proof of our lack of understanding is the countless things we can measure but cannot explain.

Good on point response in my opinion. A lot of people want to close doors because those doors being open makes them uncomfortable. This is a mistake. If you want to be rigorous about what is then you need to be equally rigorous about what is not.

thomastjeffery2• 2 months ago

You are asking for evidence of absence, and that is the entire point. We don't understand brains, therefore this one specific theoretical feature (consciousness) must exist. Why should we stubbornly endorse a tautology for which there is no evidence?

Experience is subjective. That's why we need science in the first place.

hallole• 2 months ago

And for that reason, we'll never discover the soul. It will perpetually be that "something" that we are missing in our understanding of things. Assume for a minute that we have the basic picture correct, that there is no non-physical soul: your belief would have us searching for the rest of time! Isn't it best to suspend the question?

There probably isn't any simple causative explanation (as in the example you provide). The brain is the most complex structure we know of and "self" arises from that deep complexity; this is an answer that I'm content with, as anything more in-depth / closer to the "metal" would quickly exceed my ability to understand it.

rusk2• 2 months ago

we'll never discover the soul

What if it reveals itself to us?

robmccoll• 2 months ago

Maybe - let's assume that we could simulate a human brain to a high level of fidelity starting from a known good state and emulate its input and output. Do you think we could poke at it enough and ask the simulated person about their experience enough to discover the mechanisms behind what we experience as a soul? It's logistically and computationally insanely complex to pull off, but if we could build such a system, I don't see why we couldn't eventually figure it out in another thousand years' time (assuming we don't destroy ourselves or do something that sets back the evolution of technology massively between now and then).

germandiago• 2 months ago

My comment was going to say something similar. It starts like: hey, think this, it is time to think this full stop I say so.

KingFelix4• 2 months ago

Come to Consciousness conference, its where the hard problem started. https://cs2026.org/

klik99• 2 months ago

This is why the comparison to people’s reactions to Darwin/evolution is just wrong - people had thought experimented things that looked like evolution, but when we were able to measure it we could start linking it to the real physical world. AFAIK consciousness is the only thing that we know for certain is real, but have no way of measuring it. People are still conscious when they lose sense of self, and blacking out or surgical sedatives might be related to memory more than losing consciousness, these affect qualities of consciousness but aren’t consciousness itself. This article reads like “I f’ing love science” level thinking, saying people are ignorant for thinking consciousness is not just a physical process, but zero understanding of scientific process.

dboreham3• 2 months ago

For anyone interested in this subject, I found this paper to be quite helpful: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545

svnt3• 2 months ago

This argument sounds nice at a surface level, but seems deeply incoherent and wrong in a way I haven’t yet put my finger on precisely. How can you say this:

We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics.

followed by this:

The reason why this picture is more credible than any dualism is not that “science explains everything” — it doesn’t — or because “physics explains everything” — it does so even less. It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.

followed by this:

Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.

So it isn’t describable by physics but it is only physics? And there are no closures or gaps? Ok sure in one sense we can say everything is connected, but this article seems to me to demonstrate effectively that without these divisions, pursuing understanding of it is essentially intractable.

He seems to be describing the dissolution of some construct in his worldview that I am having a difficult time relating to. Anyone have a different take?

visarga7• 2 months ago

I think there is a gap, but it's not what they think it is - it is the gap between description and execution. Chalmers wants a description level explanation for the properties of execution, which is not possible. He wants to get for free what is an irreducible recursion between cost and action. The gap is not ontological, it is epistemic.

It just means we can't know without paying the price, walking the path of the process, step by step. No jumping ahead. We can't even predict a 3 body system far ahead. We can't tell the properties of a code without executing it. We can't compress most processes, their execution is the shortest description. Chalmers wants 3p to eat for free at the table of 1p.

fssys6• 2 months ago

exactly

whack• 2 months ago

There is a problem with the thesis that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. It implies that someone writing the "wrong" sequence of 0s and 1s, by hand, on a completely private journal, has committed a moral crime on par with slavery and genocide.

Full proof: https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-th...

tim33310• 2 months ago

Only for a rather weird definition of moral crime.

sethev• 2 months ago

The Hard Problem strikes me as a "why" question and humans have a poor track record of ever answering a "why" for a foundational question (at least in a way that we can demonstrate to others). Our most successful explanations build up from simpler things to explain more complex things. But at some point, the explanation bottoms out on things we can't further explain - like the fields in quantum theory. There's currently no further thing below those that explain "why a field theory?"

If we solved the Easy Problems of consciousness, i think we would find ourselves in a similar position where most people would simply accept that we had an explanation and move on but some people with a more philosophical bent would continue to search for underlying explanations.

morpheos1372• 2 months ago

Mention "consciousness" get a slew of incoherent responses. There is no "hard problem." the burden of proof has always been on those who claim there is. whats it like is what it is what it is is what it is like. the question has the innanity of a circle asking "why do I have an interior?"

farthest• 2 months ago

tl;dr "I disagree."

throwpoaster• 2 months ago

“Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.”

arcwhite• 2 months ago

Mu.

lioeters2• 2 months ago

Slow-clap with one hand.

lo_zamoyski2• 2 months ago

Some good reminders in this article. However, while I, too, reject Cartesian dualism, some of the claims of the author need correction...

"Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. [...] Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. [...] The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves"

Whose fear? Don't generalize, Carlo. These may be fears rooted in the modernist and Cartesian legacy, but they are only "traditional" if you think the world came into being during the 17th-18th century. Look back further and you find an Aristotelian and Thomistic view that also rejects metaphysical dualism. The soul here is the form of the body, which is to say, its formal cause. It isn't some ghost haunting a corpse or a puddle of ectoplasm. It is a principle. In this view, everything that is alive has a soul, which, again, is the name we give to the form of a living thing. Soul is just a class of form, and everything that exists has form.

What makes human beings different from other animals is, at the very least, that we possess intellects (and so, ontologically speaking, any embodied being with an intellect is human). The human intellect, according to this view, cannot be purely material, even if it relies on matter and even though it is united with bodily operations. The reason for this is that abstraction cannot occur in matter alone, as abstraction involves a mental operation of conceptual separation of the form of a thing as given in the senses. Matter (specifically what's called prime matter) is merely the principle of instantiation, and so it cannot "host" forms without instantiating that form. In other words, form + matter = thing.

"During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul."

No that is not how people viewed the body and the soul in the Middle Ages (or in, say, Catholicism). That is a very Cartesian view of human beings, that we are two things, not one.

"The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter."

Matter wasn't vile, unless you were some kind of Gnostic or Cathar heretic or whatever. The physical was seen as good, as created by God, and human beings were understood as spiritual-corporeal unities that are by one nature both spiritual and physical. (The "spiritual" here has to do with the intellectual and free nature of man; again, not ectoplasm or ghosts). Indeed, if anything, Christianity elevated the dignity of the physical. Why bother with a resurrection after death if matter sucks? Why would the body and blood of Christ be so precious to Catholics if matter is evil? It is Gnostic dualism and similar movements that construed the physical as evil, but these were heretical movements, not views characteristic of the Middle Ages.

All that being said, I think the author would benefit greatly from a rigorous study of Aristotelian metaphysics, both to avoid these sorts of caricatures (as well as any misconceptions of science), but also to deepen his understanding. I think his rejection of dualism is on the right track, but he is missing out on a rich and robust intellectual tradition that has been sidelined by exactly those sorts of modernists that perpetuated this whole intellectual muddle in the first place.

lo_zamoyski2• 2 months ago

I failed to mention a great recent English language resource on the topic, namely, Ed Feser's "Immortal Souls" [0]. For broader philosophy of science context, his recent "Aristotle's Revenge" [1] will serve as a good companion read.

[0] https://a.co/d/03xoxiaY

[1] https://a.co/d/00oSQ64j

b-man• 2 months ago

Great refs. I think one can find more accessible sources for this knowledge, for instance this course:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoYRQl2t0w0EjRIb9Jr1y...

or Feser's articles such as

- https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/04/kurzweils-phanta...

- https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intellig...

Mikhail_K• 2 months ago

"But scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely about experience."

Let us hear about your experience of a wavefunction, Carlo.

pasta67• 2 months ago

But there is dualism in our minds - we have two spheres of brains and one of those is in master position over other and synchronize both parts. As a result the enslaved part of our brains is silent watcher. But sometimes brains get damaged and these mechanisms malfunction.

maclombardi• 2 months ago

Something worth reading alongside this.

https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/already-burning/

catigula• 2 months ago

Making confident, sweeping claims about consciousness is proof that someone hasn't thought about it very deeply or just doesn't know very much.

leephillips• 2 months ago

Why the complete rewriting of the title?

tim33310• 2 months ago

That's always been a puzzle to me with HN. A lot of articles have perfectly good titles and for some reason they get modified to something less accurate.

nakedneuron2• 2 months ago

Boom.. there we go again..

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40554217 > Philosophy seems to be concerned with furniture a lot)

If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is also a collection of atoms.

throw7• 2 months ago

Just stating that consciousness is natural phenomenon is begging the question. We get it... you're a materialist.

namero9995• 2 months ago

Naturalism and materialism are not married together. Materialism can't claim naturalism just for itself. There are coherent ontologies that are naturalists and not materialists.

jallasprit• 2 months ago

This entire thread is just «I am a strange loop» by Douglas Hofstadter

kajaktum• 2 months ago

Reading Ashtavakra Gita gives me more insight into this than any other literature that I have read. The ultimate reality is that: There's nothing else other than this. This is all there is.

To anyone discussing whether or not consciousness exist, tell me do you have proof that other people have consciousness? There's simply no credible answer to this question other than "well they have to be...cause we share the same material". But that is a experiment with a sample of 1. The weird thing is, if you are able to proof someone else's consciousness, that is just an extension of your own consciousness.

Next question, how do you prove that you are not sleeping right now? What proof do you have that you are not living inside an illusion? You have surely experienced the illusion of understanding i.e. you realized that you "understanding" or the feeling of "understanding" was wrong. What is to say that this is not happening now?

In reality, there is nothing to discover. There is just this and that is all there is.

SKILNER• 2 months ago

It is time to give up arguments without evidence.

snowwrestler• 2 months ago

I think what is needed, and what will happen, is to pull apart concepts like intelligence, consciousness, and language use, and create narrower and more rigorous definitions of what those are.

My go-to analogy is the concept of heat and warmth, which was the subject of philosophical speculation and inquiry for centuries. But ultimately it was not useful or predictive until it was redefined very narrowly by scientists as a specific measurable attribute of a collection of molecules. Arguably this redefinition itself was an important component of the establishment of “science” as a discipline distinct from philosophy.

This let scientists work with heat rigorously, even though non-scientists still have a largely colloquial vocabulary about it, e.g. “this coat is warmer than my last one.” On matters like consciousness, we’re all still smashed together into colloquial land, arguing about definitions when we think we are arguing about concepts.

I do think the current advancements in AI may help us develop the new vocabulary we need to quantitatively reason about intelligence and language, and in doing so, help better define / constrain what the we mean by consciousness. We think of LLMs now as a tool we can use to do work, but another view is that they are a sensor that directly correlates physical inputs to intelligent outputs. Sort of like how burning can be used to measure the energy contained in various materials, in addition to keeping us warm.

bartjekwartje• 2 months ago

My take is that we are all living an illusion which is the continuous perception of a ‘self’. All people are inside the bubble of the self as it is part and parcel of the human condition and baked into the neural pathways that are created while still in the womb. It is like an operating system that is locked down to running only one application ‘self’. It is only when there is glitch in the system that the self relinquishes its stranglehold over our consciousness and it becomes just another background process alongside other mental processes. The ghost in the system disappears.

sleepyams• 2 months ago

I think that whether we think of consciousness in terms of dualism, or if we think of it as emergent from natural behavior, it really doesn't matter functionally. Either way we are positioning it as something inaccessible from our realm or control.

I believe that we can at least posit some kind of mechanism through which emergence can happen. In my opinion we should look at language and how language evolved. However, i also believe we should expand our study of natural language to things like network protocols, and observe the "protocol hourglass" structure that has emerged from the internet protocol stack.

In my mind, the concepts of control and autonomy are what need to be revisited. We conflate the two: we are autonomous IF we are able to exert control on the environment. However, I think the reality might be that autonomous systems are more similar to an API in the sense that we can interact along the boundary but through the API we cannot exert control over the internal structure of the system (through knowledge or physical control).

everdrive• 2 months ago

I've actually been waiting for this. All you need to do is ask the rhetorical "But if there's something that it's like to _be_ [thing / animal / whatever]"

Once you ask that, you never need to explain anything. This is a magical process that can never be touched by observation or explanation.

pardon_me3• 2 months ago

I've been wondering if imagination is the closest thing to free will we have.

nakedneuron2• 2 months ago

As soon as we'll have sufficiently advanced BMIs the so called hard problem will go away by itself.

Consider probing a midlevel mobile phone at some hundred contacts. You might be convinced to have a thorough account of the physical reality yet still no idea of (and no way to know) whats going on.

To the problem of qualia.. I think it's the mechanism of the brain to default-name recurring patterns, being part of a simplification/compression process, without which reasoning (computing) or reasonably storing experiences would be impossible. I guess visual qualia like color and shape have to be the first things the brain learns and attaches "default" symbols to. Consider other basic qualia too, like to be saturated, to feel warm and then higher qualia that build on these like to feel loved or accepted in a social community.

It's difficult to argue how there could be a fundamental truth to qualia. But consider that there'd be no difference in our communication, even if your red is attached to a symbol signified by 8NCYUW6D0H5C (lets just assume this) while my red is encoded as being GAUTP1P6YUUZ (those patterns obviously have to be encoded as frequency patterns as we perceive close colors as similar without computational overhead). Eventually it will turn out, qualia from person to person are encoded quite similar, as we are genetically so similar. But consider also synaesthetia. Wrt animals, it WOULD feel strange to be a bat or any other animal as some of their sensory apparatus is so different.

To this, author makes a good point: "Today, we do not have an exhaustive external account, but this is not the same as having proof that no such account is possible."

I imagine consciousness as 'theater mode' of the perceiving mind. As such it seems to be one part of the brain that integrates all sensory inputs into one Multimodal Experience Stream™.

As to TFA.. - I'm by no means up to date to the current affairs of the consciousness debate, but - is there really a "fierce debate [...] raging"?

Check out Joscha Bach who argues consciousness is an illusion. Looking for some material to back up, I hit on this text. Flying over it I already find it more enlightening than the posted article, so I post it here (without guarantee):

https://medium.com/@mbonsign/consciousness-as-illusion-explo...

Some (citated) citations from it:

"The simulation becomes “more real than real” in our experience because it constitutes the entirety of our conscious access to ourselves and the world (Metzinger, 2003; Seth, 2021)."

"This perspective doesn’t diminish the richness or importance of conscious experience. On the contrary, it highlights the remarkable complexity and sophistication of the processes that generate our subjective experience. The constructed nature of consciousness isn’t a defect or limitation but a remarkable achievement — a way of making an unimaginably complex reality manageable for finite cognitive systems (Clark, 2016; Dennett, 2017)."

Please also note https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180487 and consider joining my cult.

jamesalvarez• 2 months ago

Articles like these just make me think that's its a real possibility that not everyone has consciousness. Like some people are no conscious of their own visual imagery, maybe some people are not conscious at all.

wat100002• 2 months ago

I came here to comment this same thing. I had this idea as a laugh, but I'm taking it more and more seriously as time goes on. There are very confident statements made here that I don't think a conscious human could sincerely claim. If the author isn't taking the piss (and no indication they are) then I strongly suspect they don't have consciousness.

Kind of ironic given the bit of the article that focuses on P-Zombies and how they don't work because they have to be indistinguishable. Well, what if P-Zombies are real, and they are distinguishable, it's just not obvious because the P-Zombies grew up in a world where people talk about consciousness and lots of people around them have it.

sigbottle• 2 months ago

I've been working through the American pragmatist tradition - James, Pierce, Sellars, Rorty, Brandom.

Something about that background, all the discussions about definitions and representation, the original article talking about dualisms.... It's certainly an experience.

KingFelix4• 2 months ago

I'll add a comment that hopefully won't get buried. The hard problem that Rovelli is talking was, I think, the first time someone said something in the field of consciousness that people could (at the time) agree on. Not many people were openly discussing in the 90's in academic settings.

It was proposed by Chalmers as a young undergrad at the Science of Consciousness conference. I have been attending for awhile and really enjoy it. There are so many opinions and thoughts on this post, if you are really into thinking about consciousness, this year the conference will be in San Diego. It's a long day of lectures, followed by evenings of great conversations. https://cs2026.org/

metalman2• 2 months ago

anyone who is atempting to define consiousness, probably isn't. and in there blind greed are trying to turn that definition into marketable property.

rbanffy• 2 months ago

It seems that, until we have a falsifiable test for consciousness, these exercises are pointless. All we have is the ability to externally observe behavior and we can't judge what happens inside someone (or something's) mind. BTW, we don't have a good definition of mind either.

That there's nothing magical or supernatural in our minds and our consciousness is a given, otherwise, this becomes a very silly debate where everyone will have a strong position that can be neither proven nor disproven.

Maybe we are able to constrain what consciousness (or a mind, or a soul) is by figuring out everything it isn't. Does it have a mass? Can we measure its entropy?

We can, to a certain degree, identify images from the visual cortex. What else about the internal state of a brain can we extract? We did that to a fly's brain the other day - a very confused simulated fly that must have been wondering why its world had so low a resolution.

otakucode• 2 months ago

I mean, I would argue that they are right, but there is still a hard problem of consciousness. What properties must a system hold in order to exhibit consciousness? Personally, I think I could fairly capably argue that consciousness is an emergent property of any feedback loop composed of a large enough collection of highly interconnected adaptive components embedded within a sufficiently pattern-rich environment. Every feedback loop which meets these requirements is conscious, and removing any single one of those elements causes consciousness to disappear. I believe the property emerges in a similar manner to how 'heat' emerges from electromagnetic interactions of atoms. This definition has implications, and all that I have thought of are real. Total sensory deprivation results in loss of consciousness, for example.

mistidoi• 2 months ago

I found this article really frustrating.

The author takes a blurry position between non-dualist naturalists like John Searle and eliminativists like Dennett and the Churchlands and doesn't seem to engage with them at all, much less probing into the issues with those views that might motivate people like Chalmers and Nagel.

It crescendos with a hand-wave:

The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary[.]

A number of views about consciousness are compatible with statements like that (like the ones above and many others), each with their own philosophical tradeoffs and bullets to bite. The author seems generally unaware of them yet somehow confident that they've solved the matter.

dreamlayers2• 2 months ago

I find this subject frustrating. People actually know very little about it, yet they end up telling and debating complex stories about it.

tim33310• 2 months ago

Yeah. There's something to be said for sticking to the little known as far as possible.

sbdaman2• 2 months ago

It's because he's not a philosopher and is wading into a long-standing philosophical debate and hand-waving away all the actual issues in contention.

bigbuppo• 2 months ago

So if I read that right, there's no difference between myself and my desk, ergo my desk is conscious and that Buddhists are probably right.

dannyfritz07• 2 months ago

You can affect your consciousness by hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. Pretty good argument for me to believe it is a physical phenomenon.

kevlxd• 2 months ago

Let's say you have a dream where you hit yourself in the head with a hammer and pass out. Surely that won't lead you to believe that your consciousness arises from your dream brain.

dreamlayers2• 2 months ago

To me, the hard problem of consciousness is the link between observable physical activity of matter in the brain, and conscious experience. Science has found correlations between brain activity and experiences. But nothing is known about a mechanism of cause and effect which connects them.

Dualism is probably mistaken. The only evidence we have for anything about physical reality comes from experiences. It does not seem logical to believe that there is a physical reality which is separate from conscious experience. Quantum theory hints at this, with how the observer becomes significant. But this does not make understanding how it all works much easier.

Zufriedenheit• 2 months ago

I am consciousness.

Balgair• 2 months ago

I was watching someone doing a really deep dive into speculative biology [0], and they finally got to the sentience/sapience/intelligence/sophont episode [1]. I'm not an expert in this area, but there was a discussion about obligative sapience and facultative sapience that i found fascinating.

Obligative sapience is only know to have evolved in humans. Obligative means we cannot survive without sapience. We must learn and use tools and whatever to live and continue evolution.

While facultative sapience seems to be a broadly used survival strategy across the animal kingdom - from crows to spiders to cuttlefish. Facultative sapients are able to survive without their learned behaviors, using them instead to augment their evolution.

Viewing these issues from the point of evolution and actually having a comparison, I feel, helps ground the discussion better.

Even more so from the very strange point of view of speculative biology. The creator of the 'Neotectons' gives a very strange viewpoint on the debate too, with good reasoning though not bulletproof by any means. As with any model, you can make it tapdance if you mess with the parameters enough. But I think that more efforts into speculative arenas would be helpful. Gedankenexperiments for sophonts and not just elevators and cosmology.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Biblaridion

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dGZju583QA

juanre• 2 months ago

So the hard problem of consciousness is no more once you accept that we have souls. Which is essentially giving the problem a new name and burdening it with more historical baggage.

Michael Pollan's "A World Appears" is a much more interesting and nuanced take. Very much recommended.

yourbestcrab• 2 months ago

I enjoyed the article, and I'm actually, surprisingly, fairly convinced by his idea there is something off about things like the imaginary philosophical zombie[1].

I think that the idea of a soul or spirit could be both interesting and also self evident though, so it's odd to read these being thrown out in the same bath water.

I.e if we imagine our simplified brains as points of matter with signals being sent between; then the kind of experience we have as human beings is more about the relationships between the matter. I don't see that as a harmful duality as if it were the case, it would shed light on what we understand and how. We're still physical but exist in "spirit of matter", different but bound. No magic required.

I'd see this as fairly separate from the question of why we witness ourselves, which seems more prone to mental trickery.

Rovelli also has some fun popsci book on how Time might be constructed. Mostly a fun read but the theories, when he gets to them, are an interesting take. Highly recommend.

[1] However if Carlo Rovelli were a philosophical zombie, are these exactly the responses he would give - as it wouldn't "see" the moment of awareness and be confused by implied significance? I think so.

iamalizard• 2 months ago

If qualia is just an emergent property, it should follow that ethics exists just as a means to achieve a practical end like order or societal stability. What would be the answer to "in an isolated universe, would torturing a being capable of experiencing qualia be good, bad or neither?". I can't accept it would be neither. Pain is negative and that's obvious to me even though I'm a masochist. Suffering is negative if you want to get more precise.

I don't know what qualia is, but it IS something. Some people don't seem to get any arguments and debates about it, at all. Others do. I doubt the people that don't get it are zombies but it's weird that someone can't even comprehend what the issue is about. When I say "red" or "pain", they talk about neurons and whatnot. Of course that's true, but don't they feel the redness and the pain subjectively in a way that makes them question how that feeling relates to the atoms, neurons and other levels of abstraction could be used to describe the physical reality?

And I think, having read a bunch of philosophy years ago that solved nothing, dualism or not is not the right question right now, in our level of understanding. It's not even the right answer because what's "physical" is not well defined either. If we can explain qualia, why would that explanation not count as a "physical" one? If there's some logic to it, it's as physical as anything else.

Lots of ill-defined questions and assumptions. I think we should accept qualia is not understood and won't be for some time. We should realize we can suffer and so can beings similar to us. Where do we draw the line - we'll have to base that on what we know about biology. To me it's obvious many animals are capable of suffering. I think that's a good place to start with our ethics. Suffering is shit, let's reduce it as much as possible.

Kim_Bruning• 2 months ago

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

The answer to whether a submarine can swim tells you more about the person the about the submarine. Meanwhile submarines propel themselves under the waves just fine[1] , and stalk their prey with silent impunity.

Perhaps we should call these discussions "swimming submarine debates"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine could hit 41 kts(47 mph; 76 km/h) ... which is pretty good for something that couldn't swim ;)

api• 2 months ago

I think part of the answer is that AI shows that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. Humans happen to be both.

I think this has been obvious from the other side of the argument forever. Animals obviously have consciousness and emotional responses and they are made of the same living matter we are, but my pet bunnies can’t do natural language or math.

nothinkjustai4• 2 months ago

From a non-dual perspective either nobody is a p-zombie or everybody is a p-zombie.

Why? It’s perfectly sane to just treat claims as is. You claim you’re a p-zombie, than you are. Claim you are conscious, than you are same as me. Claim you aren’t and you get no moral affordances, let’s see how long you last with that tactic.

Clankers are not conscious, good luck convincing me otherwise idiot.

fs_tab• 2 months ago

I think that having a point of view (having an "inside") has a great deal to do with survival. You probably don't need a brain to have a subject. You probably just need dynamics with the right causal structure.

When you look at a cell, you can clearly see how the dynamics are existential and already do the work of classifying inputs as "good" or "bad" (eg: paramecium encounters acid, this triggers an electro chemical cascade in the membrane cortex which results in the organism quickly changing direction away from the bad gradient). There's no mind obviously in the human sense, but the fact remains that this system has developed into something that can discriminate between good and bad for itself, because without this integration, it wouldn't exist.

The cell is as close to a machine as possible. But it's not a machine because people make machines to have specific purposes. Each part is already labeled and designed. You can shut down a machine that's running, and start it back up with very predictable behavior (since you designed it).

The cell is a process that uses physical matter to keep its own possible futures available. Machines also support processes and goals, but these are externally imposed. The cell's ultimate goal is to continue being the reason for its own existence. Maybe this is where all goals come from.

So I guess experience is what happens when you have enough layers above this machinery that you you are no longer connected directly to the world, "you" can only meet the world through internally generated/classified electrochemical states from the body. These states have valence because the system is already organized around maintaining these states within metabolic limits. Think...hunger. You don't feel hungry. You ARE hungry. Hunger is a part of how "you" are constituted.

felixmeziere• 2 months ago

I followed and was very interested until:

But the argument is weak. A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well. If this is true, can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The argument is self-defeating.

My reaction here: it seems to me that the p-zombie by construction doesn't have a "me" to be convinced, so "physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well." doesn't make sense.

Therefore the demonstration that the argument is self-defeating fell appart, and I stopped finding the article insightful.

Can someone help me see what I'm missing?

tim33310• 2 months ago

I'm not sure the article really adds up. The hard problem of consciousness in a normal definition is:

to explain how and why organisms have qualia or subjective experience. (from Wikipedia)

(or "why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all" in the article)

He then supposes this "assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body". But there probably isn't so he jumps to:

So, there is no “hard problem of consciousness.”

But that doesn't explain how/why there are qualia and the like.

I personally think how/why qualia it a real hard question but scientifically tractable.

A little guessing. You can assume we evolved - much evidence - and so consciousness has survival / reproductive functionality. The brain has billions of sensory, memory and other neurons and they have to compress that data down to something a creature can act on - should it feed of run away etc. So conscious awareness is probably something like a situation summary you can act on.

One interesting thing is there is a lot of unconscious awareness and actions going on - when you walk across a room the nervous system has to process all sorts of stuff about your body position and coordinate dozens of muscles but you are normally not consciously aware of it, so presumably the conscious bit of you brain is some small portion linked to the thinking talking and remembering bits.

I think much of the subtlety of conscious experience is because there is a lot of unconscious things underlying it. You see say a red apple and it's linked to memories of apples, instincts for food, evolved associations with red, your mood and the like. It all gets reduced in something like a lossy compression to what you are aware of.

chimpanzee2• 2 months ago

scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely about experience

Not true: Science is precisely about finding truths that hold even if our conscious experience of them vanished the very next moment.

Empiricism, the grounding of knowledge in experience

Another false equivalency: by "experience" here he means "observation", not consciousness. Observations are data points, consciousness is not.

silent_cal2• 2 months ago

The author demonstrates a common misunderstanding about medieval philosophy. The medieval Scholastic tradition does not maintain that the body and the soul were "distinct entities", or that matter was "vile". In fact that kind of thinking was the position of gnostic groups that Christian thinkers were resolutely opposed to. Read St Augustine's "Confessions" if you don't believe me.

Scholastic philosophers taught that body and soul were two components of the SAME entity, the human being, and that both were good because they were created by God. One good essence with two components, in other words. And while they claimed that the soul component was immaterial, that absolutely did NOT mean that the soul was not part of the natural world. To claim this is to seriously misunderstand their view of the physical world. To them, matter was only one component of creation.

The strict mind/body dualism was not introduced by medieval Scholastics, but rather by the advent of modernity in Descartes, and developed further by Kant and other enlightenment philosophers. In other words, this is very far from being a medieval problem - on the contrary, it a problem created by modern philosophy.

As for the author's equation between subjective experience and qualities of things, or his equation of processes in the brain with the mind itself, this just ignores the facts. Qualities we observe in nature are obviously distinct from the feelings they produce in us in many cases (beauty, sublimity, injustice, etc. produce distinct feelings like reverence, humility, anger), and if the mind were equivalent to brain processes, then certain powers of the mind that we obviously have would be impossible (such as our ability to reflect on those very same brain processes in ourselves).

sbdaman2• 2 months ago

Physicist writing on the hard problem of consciousness. It's like a caricature of annoying physicists.

silent_cal2• 2 months ago

Yes, the same type of confusion we are used to hearing from pop physicists like Lawrence Krauss, Neil Tyson, etc.

mock-possum• 2 months ago

Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist.

Oh I hate this.

We ‘still’ can’t do any of those things yet. Science provides a framework for discovering and coming to understand and yes eventually accurately predict the motions of the underlying systems that give rise to these phenomenons.

And getting a mechanic to fix your bike is a matter of specialization, not some failure of science.

Does anyone actually enjoy hearing other people talk this way? Who is this for?

xtiansimon• 2 months ago

Among other philosophical conundrums such as…

Why God Cannot Have Parts https://youtu.be/EZKADOYv-oc

It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

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