Consciousness Is Not Mysterious | Hacker News Reader

Consciousness Is Not Mysterious

theatlantic.com

16 pointscallumlocke11 comments

Don't waste your time. This article is deeply confused. Even if consciousness is just a brain-created illusion, who is experiencing the illusion? That experience is what we mean by consciousness in the first place, so this explains nothing.

The argument of the article is that no one is experiencing the illusion. The entirety of the experience is the illusion itself.

Essentially: consciousness does not exist. We only think it does because the thing we think with is wrong. But because we think with it, we can't tell the difference. So asking "who is experiencing the illusion" is begging the question.

Look at it this way: what evidence can you use to distinguish between an object that is actually conscious, and an object that is merely faking consciousness? This is commonly known as the Chinese Room problem.

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

But whereas the Chinese Room has been used to argue that computers can never be fully conscious, this article reverses the equivalence: maybe the Chinese Room proves that nothing is fully conscious, and it is our concept of consciousness that is mistaken, not the rest of the observable world.

This is conceptually similar to the mental leap behind General Relativity: since we can't find any way to distinguish between gravitational and inertial acceleration, maybe they are in fact physically equivalent and indistinguishable--then build the theory from there.

Starting with the concept that all consciousness is an illusion allows us to side-step a lot metaphysical conversation and just try to figure out the mechanics of the illusion--how it works, not whether it exists.

An actual Chinese Room would be unimaginably vast - whole planets, solar systems, devoted to the knowledge we hold implicitly.

To illustrate - imagine you give the room (in Chinese) the text of Lord of the Rings, and then ask it which member of the fellowship corresponds to the "Wise Old Man" archetype. Any reasonably smart human will give the answer, "Gandalf". But the room would need to (in Chinese) make systematic notes of the characters, their relationships, their actions, and then somehow integrate all this into a categorisation under the appropriate archetype.

I'm actually agnostic as to the question of whether such a room could be built -- as I'm agnostic towards the possibility of AI -- but assuming the room would not be inconceivably complex masks the complexity of the ordinary workings of human consciousness.

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  Essentially: consciousness does not exist. We only think it does because the thing we think with is wrong. But because we think with it, we can't tell the difference. So asking "who is experiencing the illusion" is begging the question.

As for your essential point, I hold that words like "think", "experience", "illusion" all rest on the more fundamental concept of "consciousness".

What if the Chinese Room already exists, and we call it a brain? It's the most complex object we know of in the universe and it collects and processes input for decades. That's a pretty vast amount of stored information from which to produce an answer to your question.

We wouldn't expect a 3-year-old to provide the correct answer, but we would expect a 30-year-old. This is a big hint that the brain does in fact collect and store information for later use. This would be analogous to filling in the books in the Chinese Room. If there hasn't been enough time for all the books to get filled in, we won't expect the room to give correct answers.

In addition, if someone has never heard of Lord of the Rings, we would not expect to get a correct answer either. That page of that book in the Room would be blank.

As for which concepts rest on which, we have to be careful, when discussing consciousness, not to mistake grammar for reality. There is no way in English to express the concept of an illusory "I" in the first person. That doesn't mean it is an impossible concept.

Whether the mind is equivalent to the brain is an open question. If someone built an artificial mind, that would massively raise my belief in the possibility that the mind is purely physical. But I hold that this is vastly more difficult than assumed.

My point with the Lord of the Rings was precisely that you give the books to a person who hasn't read them, and give them a few weeks to work through them. A Chinese Room would take vastly longer to "process" the book and it's "understanding" (represented symbolically) would take up vastly more room than the book itself. Even to understand simple word problems (to do with arranging blocks, for example), the algorithm used by the Room would have to explicitly encode our implicit knowledge of spatial relationships, and be able to apply this knowledge to arbitrary problems. To understand literature at a human level, the algorithm would have to encode standard knowledge of human psychology, society, physics, etc.

In principle this could all be performed with a giant lookup table -- but such a table would be the size of several solar systems' worth of matter. So I don't hold that a Chinese Room is impossible in principle, but I do hold that building a practical AI would require great advances in the understanding of our own consciousness.

I know as certainly as I know anything that I'm conscious. You know the same fact with the same certainty about yourself. The problem of whether I can know that about you is a different problem altogether.

Edit: Or to put it another way which might be clearer: If it's possible for you to doubt whether you yourself are conscious then you define "consciousness" differently than I do, and so we are talking past each other.

Indeed.

  That’s the content of consciousness, and it’s no longer a
  fundamental mystery. It’s information, and we know how to build 
  computers that process information.

The fundamental error here is trying to explain consciousness through the concept of information. The thing is, information can't be explained except by reference to consciousness. A physical entity X (e.g., a radio signal) might hold information for a conscious agent Y, but X doesn't intrinsically hold information in the absence of an agent.

I know there's a growing trend in modern physics to treat information as a real physical property, akin to matter or energy, but I hold that this is a category error, akin to treating "risk" as something you measure in the world, rather than a measurement of your own uncertainty about a situation. They're both examples of the Mind Projection Fallacy, projecting properties properly belonging to the mind out into the world.

Dualism gets a bad rap, but you can posit a non-religious form of dualism, whereby matter & consciousness are both natural elements of the universe, but possessing different properties. Perhaps future science will be able to explain their relationship in more detail.

Attempting to dismiss consciousness, on the other hand, by taking monist reductionism as axiomatic (everything is matter, consciousness isn't real), end up with the proponents attributing properties of consciousness to matter, and ultimately flopping back over into monist idealism (everything is consciousness) and precisely the mysticism they were trying to avoid.

So DNA didn't store any information until a conscious human learned how to read it?

Information is indeed a physical property that is independent of consciousness. Otherwise, how could consciousness have evolved in the first place?

  So DNA didn't store any information until a conscious human learned how to read it?

It didn't. DNA is simply a complex structure, which, placed within another complex structure (a cell, containing appropriate amino acids), creates further complex structures (proteins).

  Otherwise, how could consciousness have evolved in the first place?

I don't know. However, I disagree that information needs to be an independent physical property for consciousness to evolve.

The steelman [1] version of your view, I guess, would be that "information" is equivalent to "complexity". Certainly consciousness relies on complexity, but it's not equivalent. Hurricanes are very complex, but certainly not conscious. Some say that complex systems like waterfalls and hurricanes perform complex information processing, but I think this is wrong.

There's a fundamental difference between a human processing information (say, a bronze age man reading about metallurgy from a wax tablet and using the knowledge to craft a sword) and the actions of DNA, or hurricanes, or waterfalls.

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

Information is a state--a given pattern of matter and energy--that is characterized by its statistical likelihood.

There are a vast number of states that a few picograms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous can be in. There are far fewer states that can qualify as the DNA molecules that encode your particular genome. Therefore, your DNA encodes information.

Now, no one called that "information" until we came along, but that doesn't mean it did not exist before humans. Gravity didn't have a name either until we came along.

Physically, there is no difference at all between what humans do and what hurricanes and waterfalls do. All physical systems are governed by the same physical laws, i.e. quantum mechanics and general relativity. Information does not violate either one.

Please explain how all forms of energy (especially potential, but also kinetic) is a real physical property, and not virtual "information".

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