Consciousness: The Mind Messing with the Mind | Hacker News Reader

Consciousness: The Mind Messing with the Mind

nytimes.com

115 pointspavs91 comments

> It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this property that is nonphysical.”

There are plenty of real, non-physical things. Evolution is real, and non-physical, you can describe it using mathematical formulas. Math decides how the real world happens.

Think about, oh, say, a road. What's the difference between a road and a random patch of asphalt? Collect the differences in your mind and those are the definition of a road. That something is a road and not just a patch of asphalt has real consequences for the world around us.

There is the world of ideas. Things held in the mind, in the consciousness of people have real-world effects on the physical world around us.

Ideas can have properties, all of these properties are themselves non-physical. You can compare ideas to each other.

One could place on a continuum things that are wholly physical, and things that are wholly non-physical. Road properties and evolution closer to the physical, story themes and potential political platforms closer to the non-physical. The non-physical would seem to be infinite, whereas the physical would be finite. So many, many, many more things in existence are non-physical than physical.

If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it would lose none of its potency. People who argue this think they are arguing over reality, but are only debating semantics.

>many more things in existence are non-physical than physical.

What does non-physical existence even mean? This isn't an idle question. Surely we know what physical existence is: some capacity to interact; be causally affected or causally affect other physical things. This definition is a bit circular in some sense, but it has closure which is important.

The word "exist" has a foundational importance in all of human intellectual activity. What is the analogous notion of non-physical existence that supports it sharing this term?

>If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it would lose none of its potency.

When we say consciousness exists, we're not saying something of similar importance of how a child might say giant pink elephants exist. They're both ideas, but we mean something very different.

> They're both ideas, but we mean something very different.

are you sure about that?. words are a social convention adopted to provide a vehicle for transferring meanings from one mind to another. what are the meanings underlying the words though? why do you agree that the conventional word "idea" can be used to signify both meanings, but then claim that the meaning is somehow very different.

>why do you agree that the conventional word "idea" can be used to signify both meanings, but then claim that the meaning is somehow very different.

Well I can only go by how the words are used. But when we're speaking rigorously, such ambiguities matter. The issue is that there are multiple ways these words are used. But when we try to use the casual meaning in more rigorous contexts, the discrepancies are important. When it comes to existence, people are purporting that there is an existence completely unlike physical existence, yet retains its centrality in our conception of the world and its constituents. I'm looking for clarity here. If we can't flesh out the nature of non-physical existence, we should refrain from using the term "exists" in those contexts.

ambiguity is an inescapable consequence of systems of communication based on social convention. That's really the fundamental reason why physicists have such a strong preference for mathematics. The convention there is of logic and notation rather than social preference and personal idiosyncrasy as with natural language.

but we don't have the means to use a rigorous system of communication when discussing consciousness. there is no calculus of mind. its not even clear that there could be, in principle.

so we need to re-calibrate our notion of rigor and precision to deal with the domain we're working in here. we shouldn't just wring our hands and lament that our communication tools fail us. we can still use them, we simply need to be more disciplined and avoid devolving into arguments about language semantics and conventions and try to focus on the actual content, ambiguous as it may seem.

here's a simple working definition of "existence" that may be ambiguous but should hopefully not be controversial. a thing exists if it is experienced by a conscious mind. this includes material things which are experienced via the conventional senses (sight, hearing, etc.). it also includes immaterial things, such as thoughts and ideas, which are experienced internally within a conscious mind.

this definition does not resolve the ambiguity regarding the point-of-origin of immaterial things, but that is not particularly relevant in my opinion. we don't need to answer that question in order to engage with the material, so let's just leave it unanswered.

> What does non-physical existence even mean? This isn't an idle question

Much of modern life exists by convention only (by agreement among people) and has no physical existence. Bank balances, ownership of property, no-parking zones, national borders, having a college degree, the prestige level of a school, friendship, being a Seahawks fan, agreements, the law, political affiliation, religion, etc.

But all those things have an "ontology" (mode of existence) owing to being constituted by or supervening on things we know to exist (carbon, hydrogen, electrons, etc). These things are abstractions, but ultimately are grounded in physical existence either by the instantiating substance or substances that operate on the abstraction (e.g. brains). But those who argue for non-physical existence of things such as numbers are going further than this by saying that these non-physical entities are independently members of the constitutive fabric of the universe. This seems entirely unsupported and unnecessary.

The concept of existence seems to require conscious observers.

Sure, inasmuch as concepts require conscious minds. But surely the universe would exist if it had never spawned conscious observers. So I don't see that the question of existence begins and ends with conscious observers.

It has to begin and end with conscious observers, because they are the only ones that can consider the question. The universe does not need your answer, you do. The question quite literally ends when you do.

Why? Did universe not exist before the first life appeared?

The meaning of the word "exist" implies that it has some way to be detected by conscious observers.

Consider this: if I tell you there about a parallel universe you can never detect or discover, how does saying "BUT IT EXISTS" differ from saying "GOT YOU, IT DOESNT EXIST"?

I get your hypothetical example, however, will the universe cease to exist after the last conscious observer dies? For that observer, one minute before their death, would/should they suppose that universe will cease to exist or continue existing?

If we humans manage to wipe out ourselves next year in a nuclear holocaust, then is the continued existence of our planet conditional on some other conscious life arising in the future? Obviously it continues to exist even in your definition because they would be able to observe it, but how could such life arise if the universe doesn't exist?

I'd rather define "exist" as having an effect on our physical reality, which would obviously be detectable by "observers" in e.g. the quantum mechanic meaning of "observation" that has no relation to consciousness.

You're focusing too hard on the "existence" part and not hard enough on the "thing" part.

If humanity died tomorrow, nobody would be around to call the planet "Earth". Earth is merely a concept held in the minds of people. The concept consists of properties, only some of which involve the physical aspects. For example, lots of other planets are physically present, but only one we call Earth, because we live on it. Should we not live on it anymore, why would anyone bother to call it by a name.

In that sense, sure, Earth would cease to exist if we stopped living on it.

The problem with defining existence as only involving the physical is that it yields a world in which nobody can make sense of anything. You can't simply boil everything down like that and actually live in that world. The very second you started thinking, you'd start ascribing properties to objects that aren't merely physical, recreating the entire debate.

Before you consider existence, think about what "thing" means.

You said it yourself: "having an effect on our physical reality". It is a binary relation: something exists because we can experience it or deduce it from other things we experience.

In your hypothetical example, the existence a planet after it has eg exited our visible universe (because of the rapid expansion of the universe) is only relevant to us because we were able to deduce it from previous observations. Same with things in the past. So to answer your question, since we observe the Earth now, we can deduce its continued existence even after a cataclysm that would wipe out all life on Earth. We could be wrong in our extrapolation. Maybe the Earth would be hit by an asteroid later and things would be different in a way no one imagined. But, without conscious observers at that point, that state of affairs would be not unlike physics in that parallel universe. In that case, according to your definition, it wouldn't exist.

All of these are implemented in specific patterns that actually exist in reality and are detected by the brain.

Your definition of physical existence above is not circular in some sense, it is circular in any sense since you define physical existence in terms of interacting with other physical existence. Just to test your definition, are colour or sound physically existent in your definition?

It's "in some sense" because we're defining the physical in terms of causal closure, rather than explaining the true nature of the physical (i.e. what physical matter supervenes on).

>are colour or sound physically existent in your definition?

Hard to answer without first having some kind of theory of mind. If we take the mind to be solely comprised of physical matter then mental states are particular organizations of that matter. Color and sound being mental states/percepts, they would be particular abstractions of physical matter. The abstraction itself would have no physical existence.

I am not sure I get your definition of causal closure. Would "black is what looks the same colour when put next to a black item" qualify as a causal closure, and if yes how can that be a non purely self referential definition in any sense? On colour and sound, how do you separate between the physical representation of the abstraction and the abstraction itself? You seem to be approaching a causal closure of non-physical existence, though one I am not sure is right.

The purpose of a definition is to pick out only those instances of a set you're attempting to refer to. The set of objects subject to causal influence by members of the set is well-defined and unique. Your example with black doesn't work because there are multiple non-intersecting sets that satisfy the critera, so we need some further conceptual machinery to distinguish them.

>You seem to be approaching a causal closure of non-physical existence, though one I am not sure is right.

I'm not sure I follow. To be clear, the "causal closure" was referring to the fact that the physical is subject to causation, rather than a generic term describing a set of self-similar items.

> What does non physical existence even mean?

It's a faulty concept. Everything is physical. But I think it refers to non-material aspects of the physical, especially patterns of cause and effect.

> The word "exist" has a foundational importance in all of human intellectual activity.

Are you sure about that? I have a personal mental exercise / thought experiment where I try to iterate on my understanding of what it means to exist. But I wouldn't call that foundational. I maybe run through it once a month or so. Certainly it's attained a great deal of importance, but really, iterating on my understanding is never going to really get me anywhere.

Anything can be said to "exist". If you are thinking about it, it's currently existing in your mind as thought. If you're not thinking about it, but have thought about it in the past, then it exists in your memory. If you've never thought about it, then it's a potential that you could experience someday. It could also exist as a potential quantum state that nothing living could ever consider.

I'm reminded of the "library" where every possible grouping of characters is tied together with a math function and you can search for whatever you want. Considering whether everything ever written 'exists' or not just kinda lost its thunder to me. If everything meets some criteria, then it's the criteria that needs to be examined, not the everything. Archimedes wanted to move the world with his lever, but really, it's way more interesting to just move half.

You'd have to somehow escape your own mind before you could truly consider something that doesn't exist somewhere.

I don't think existence, in that sense, is as big of an idea as people seem to think. The way I usually use it is to get at the fundamental quality of being human. I think about agency, goals, limitations, purpose. These things seem way more interesting than trying to drive at the fundamentals of everything.

What it means for me to exist is way cooler to think about than what it means for my bed to exist.

I'm perfectly fine with this deflationary concept of existence, and leave the "foundational importance" to particular kinds of existence that actually warrant it. Once its articulated like this I have no problem. But my problem is with those who want to speak of existence of abstract objects in terms that claim such entities are independently members of the constitutive fabric of the universe. I just have no idea what this kind of existence means.

The thing that consciousness has that is not simply an idea is sensation. At a certain point, it becomes indescribable.

> There are plenty of real, non-physical things. ... Think about, oh, say, a road. What's the difference between a road and a random patch of asphalt? ... There is the world of ideas. Things held in the mind, in the consciousness of people have real-world effects on the physical world around us. ...

Indeed, and Music may be the most prominent example of that!

It's basically a bunch of things inducing vibrations in a physical medium. To other beings that noise may very well be no more meaningful than static on our television screens, if they can even hear in those frequencies, let alone be able to pick out the different instruments used in a piece.

We have built an entire industry and a sub-universe of knowledge around it. Rules, notation, tools, a system of writing it down, and recording it and sharing it. People gain celebrity through it and are remembered for their achievements in it.

Music is one of the best example of things that exist only in our heads and still profoundly effect OUR world.

Now just imagine an alien species that, for example, can sense their planet's magnetic fields in the same detail that we sense sound waves. Imagine them making their "music" by manipulating those fields. They could have an entire culture and industry around it, a sub-universe that would be practically meaningless if not completely invisible to us.

> just imagine an alien species that, for example, can sense their planet's magnetic fields

Radio?

It's amusing to think about, really. A person getting rich and fame for finding creative ways to manipulate air vibrations in certain patterns, because these patterns give some special sorts of mental tingles to people who experience them.

Oh don't stop there. He's rich because of these little pieces of paper that, for some reason, are so valuable you can remove the physical artifact of pieces of paper and represent them solely with bits in a computer system.

And fame? How in the world would you connect that to the physical?

> There are plenty of real, non-physical things. Evolution is real, and non-physical, you can describe it using mathematical formulas. Math decides how the real world happens.

Math is an invention of man it doesn't exist in the real world. There is matter and energy and they interact. Quantities of stuff exist but there are no numbers. That is extrapolation and modeling with man-made tools. Math decides nothing as it is not a fundamental aspect of reality.

> Math is an invention of man it doesn't exist in the real world

I see this from time to time, and certainly opinions can differ, but I tend to cringe when I see this idea pushed. From my perspective, math is not an invention of man, but a discovery. Math is an intrinsic part of the universe, that we continue to discover and piece together. Certainly we have invented the symbols and the terminology, but the underlying concepts...these laws, these truths exist whether we discover them or not, whether we give them names or not.

Amen. Well-stated.

Right, but there are things like surreal numbers that feel more like constructs- useful, interesting and so forth, but not discovered in the real world so much as a tool built out of available materials.

Math dances along the edge between discovery and invention.

> there are things like surreal numbers that feel more like constructs

The fabric of the physical realm usually doesn't care about anyone's feelings.

> but not discovered in the real world so much as a tool built out of available materials

The fallacy here is that you assign different valuation between discovering a thing through observation, and discovery through thinking.

For example, the Higgs boson was conjectured many years before it was first observed. Following your argument, I could argue that the Higgs boson was invented by us.

What's true is that we made up the Higgs boson, but that didn't change the unobserved existence of it. In the same way, we may have made up surreal numbers, but that doesn't discard the possibility of their unobserved existence out there somewhere.

The Higgs fell out of math that was originally designed to model the world. It was a testable prediction of a physical theory. The math could have been wrong. The math probably is wrong, except about other things than the Higgs.

I'm not valuing anything. I'm saying that if I build a toy axiomatic system, there's no reason a priori to believe that it resembles anything in the physical world. Such a system (say, Peano arithmetic) doesn't actually make any predictions about the real world at all, and cannot be falsified scientifically.

It's like saying, I painted a picture of a dog, therefore I have discovered a dog, by proving that it could exist. Except your depiction is of a 100-foot-tall mecha-dog that definitely doesn't exist. Mathematics is sometimes (though by no means all or most of the time) more like painting than it is like science.

Ex: the Banach-Tarski paradox is almost certainly not describing anything physical.

I'd say that's debatable. My admittedly limited understanding of mathematics is that the underlying truths that emerge depend on the axioms in play. My understanding of axioms is that of 'rules' to the mathematical games we play, and you can change which rules you follow and get different results.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_axioms

If we accept that in mathematics we're finding out about the outcomes of the rules we choose to follow, then I have no problem in thinking of mathematical discoveries as truths, but I'd say they are conditional truths rather than absolute truths. What are your thoughts on this?

Are there non-physical things? I doubt it.

Let's take the road. Obviously the mass of the road itself (the object) is physical and has physical characteristics like its components, the chemical composition of its components, the elements in the chemicals, the particles and forces in the atoms of the elements, etc.

Now let's take the idea of a road. Where does that idea actually reside? In the brains of living beings, which are themselves physical.

Ideas are information, and information is physical. You need energy to create and maintain it, and it can be quantified in terms of the entropy spent to create it. It is a persistent pattern of mass/energy.

The "world of information" only seems infinite to us because we are so inefficient at working with it outside each of our own minds. Think of the incredible amount of mass and energy that must be expended to create a road, or even a book, or even an SD card. By contrast, our 8 lb. lump of brain stores and returns vast quantities of information with seemingly no effort on our part.

But of course thinking does require physical effort. An inert human, thinking in a chair, still requires food.

The problem with this line of thought is that it completely upends classical cause and effect. Things have effects in proportion to their size. The sun has a way bigger effect on us than Jupiter does.

But when you get to the scale of ideas, the logic upends. The pen should not be mightier than the sword, but is because ideas have outsized effects on the world compared to their physical size as merely electrons moving in brains.

But logic can be maintained by extending existence out to the non-physical. Ideas can be bigger than other ideas, and you can logically evaluate them. You just have to figure out the rules first.

The pen is mightier than the sword only because the pen can create ideas that inspire and guide a lot of swords.

Ideas without physical actions don't cause any effect. Ideas only outweigh actions to the extent that they result in larger actions.

If you start with any historically impactful idea and carefully trace its impact, you will see quite a lot of mass and energy moving around along the way.

And what is a sword without an idea? It lies there, inert, no threat to anyone. So when people talk about "the pen vs. the sword," what they're really talking about is a competition of ideas. Behind every sword there is thought--and pens can help change thought.

But none of this means that thought and ideas are non-physical. The relative impact of competing ideas might be non-linear and unpredictable, but physical systems can be non-linear and unpredictable.

> “the body is made of things, and things don’t have thoughts.”

Ha! I could say the opposite. The body is not made of magical stuff, just plain matter. And it has consciousness, it feels like something to be alive. So, consciousness cannot be but the result of matter arranged in space.

Let's make an analogy. Say you have a car on the road. It is free to move. Then come many more cars. Suddenly, the road is gridlocked. Is "being gridlocked" a property of the single car? Is it a property that only appears when multiple cars are in a certain relationship? Where does "being gridlocked" reside, in the car, in the road, in the other cars? http://biser3a.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gridlock.jpg

I believe that emergent properties can and do occur. The new properties emerge from the complex structure of causal relations that exists between simpler elements. This complex web is "stuff" that adds to, and changes, the simple elements of which the system is formed. In other words, the emergent system is made of its constituent parts plus the internal structure, and this internal structure is a property of space and time. Similarly, matter itself might be insentient, but matter arranged in special patterns in space and time is conscious, thus consciousness comes from the properties of space-time, not just from the constituent matter of the body. The space-time arrangement is the software, the atoms of the body are the hardware. They work together to generate consciousness.

Of course "being gridlocked" is a property residing in the individual cars. It just becomes measurable only when you pile up a lot of them in one place. ;)

I've spent a lot of time thinking on the 'hard problem.' My current stance is that it works like this:

Imagine you are a sphere. Got it? Wait—hold on now! You didn't really imagine that you /are/ the sphere, you imagined you were a sort of disembodied human spirit residing within the sphere. Now, really imagine your total existence is /being/ the material constituting the sphere. Can you imagine that being the sphere in this way is very, very different than interacting with it externally as a human?

The hard problem is trying to explain how our total experience at any moment could be as it is, when we also know that it is in some sense created by the neurons in our brains. How can a clump of twisted neurons be the same thing as the feeling of warmth or the perception of the color blue?

My solution is that our experience (in the above sense) is how it is to actually /be/ a neuron aggregate.

Additionally, I think the problem is so hard because it doesn't involve a system that exists /within/ the material universe; instead it's an aspect of the whole thing itself. This is analogous to how we shouldn't expect the rules of Monopoly to be useful in describing the physical constituents of, e.g., paper Monopoly money. We shouldn't expect the notions of 'system,' 'consistency,' 'causality,' 'time,' etc. to apply to the nature of the universe itself just because they are good for describing things within it.

Very nice reasoning. It still doesn't explain how a paramesium, without neurons (so no neuron aggregate there), can experience (a sub-human) consciousness.

Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU

Sure it does: the sub-human conscious experience of a paramecium is what it's like to /be/ the part of the universe comprising the paramecium. Although that part of the universe is as much a paramecium as the part that's human is human, so I don't think what's going on there is 'sub' human. That said, there's less complexity there, so it seems like being that part of the universe would be less 'interesting'--but then again, that's just a human value judgement and probably similarly irrelevant to the universe and paramecia. Neurons aren't central to what I'm talking about; I'm just applying something like a variant of the panpsychic hypothesis to the human situation.

DNA is a complex language, it's words are chemical signals and it exists in a soup formed of mineral and organic stuff. I think even a paramecium has quite a lot more complexity than we give it credit for. We also know that cells talk to each other by electrical and chemical signaling, so there is that external language besides the internal one.

The article starts out noting that talk therapy combats depression. It contrasts this with the fact that prozac and other SSRIs also combat depression.

SSRI's being chemicals added to the human brain, are "physical." But somehow, talk therapy is "non-physical".

That's where the article lost me.

Isn't two people talking a physical activity? There are two physical people, sound waves moving between them, neurons firing in their brains. It's even observable by outsiders.

I think the difficulty the author is pointing out is that it seems odd we would could obtain similar modifications to brain state by chemicals and speech. The issue is highlighted if you consider a hypothetical analogous situation that we never observe: imagine if we could become literally drunk just by hearing a certain sequence of words.

But plenty of words can have huge impacts on mental state. Is that odd?

"Your significant other was just involved in a serious car accident and is in critical condition."

Or consider attending a (good) stand-up comedy act. That situation can put you in a very different mental state even without the use of alcohol or other drugs (although people do often combine the two).

Right. The tricky thing is having words and chemicals lead you to precisely the SAME state.

Sure, but "combats depression" is probably a broad enough effect that they wouldn't necessarily be the SAME state in this case either, right? They could both treat depression in different ways.

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

Well, how about "I love you.", for starters?

I've been thinking lately that electrochemical modifications could enhance or add senses or experiences, say by tapping into the olfactory bulb in the nose or via the tongue / facial nerve (which already exist, actually - tongue cameras for the blind)

Not literally drunk, but there are many other ways to modify brain chemistry and but you absolutely can have significant measurable changes that result from non-chemical stimuli. You can't tell me "you won the lotto" or "I'm breaking up with you" wouldn't result in massive spikes in various hormones and neurotransmitters.

We once fed a friend alcohol-free beer while convincing him it was in fact really strong. He got drunk.

Anecdotal evidence: A friend of mine managed to get high by just imagining himself smoking weed. He believes, though, that this would not have been possible if he hadn't smoked actual weed before.

For anyone interested in this, I can highly recommend Giulio Tononi's book "phi". Part fictional, part art, part science. Pleasure to read while being an informative introduction to his findings about consciousness

Seemingly the only relevant reply in this comment section. That said, the article is kind of vague and has a few big misunderstandings unrelated to Tononi's Phi and Information Integration Theory.

Phi is basically a complexity metric that tries to put a number on the effect of memory in a system. I'm unsure wether this has any relation to 'consciousness', but it's at least interesting to measure effects of having a low or high Phi.

For example functional programming languages favor a low Phi. Everything is defined by the input, memoization is possible (sort of what you call 'mocks' in other programming languages). There are no side-effects (memory of past events elsewhere), or at least they have to be invoked explicitly as 'unsafe' operations.

Also, code that calculates Phi: https://github.com/wmayner/pyphi/blob/develop/pyphi/examples...

Regarding how talk therapy and meditation could have similar effects on the human brain to medication: we have cognitive subsystems whose behavior is is partially determined by our 'schemas' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)), and partially determined by something like coefficients that scale chemical responses to certain mental states arising.

Talk therapy (and cognitive behavioral therapy) work by modifying a patient's schemas. For example, suppose you have a schema for human relationships that effectively says "in any relationship there is a winner and a loser"; holding that belief is going to direct the patient's behavior (and interpretation of events) in ways that probably lead to unhappiness. So, by modifying the patient's view on that point (i.e. altering a schema of theirs), this cognitive subsystem that uses schemas to interpret events and decide behavior ends up behaving differently. Drugs (e.g. SSRIs) seem to effect something like the 'coefficients' I mention above—but potentially you could have similar net changes by modifying this cognitive subsystem's coefficients or the schema input it operates on.

The importance of schemas in this kind of dynamic seems under-appreciated, though there's evidence of thinkers honing in on it from way back (William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience", for example, is basically a study of this cognitive subsystem I mention. More recently I noticed Carol Dweck discussing schemas as foundational to the theory behind her work on learning styles.)

(P.S. I believe learning meditation is essentially non-discursive, totally experiential/empirical schema modification [your beliefs can be modified by arguments or new observations; CBT uses arguments, meditation observations], so that's how I see it relating to the rest of this.)

Learning Meditation is related to this, not because it brings new Schemas or modify existing ones but rather, because it trains to be more detached from them. After all, the very goal of the practice is to identify those schemas forming and letting them go.

I agree with that, but the process of /learning/ meditation specifically (which is largely done by practicing) works at least partially through schema modification.

For instance, you probably have schemas relating to the importance of addressing thoughts as they come up. If you believe your thoughts are super important, you are very attached to them; if you take a view that they are these wispy non-essential things that one may delve into or not, you are more detached.

The mind is not Consciousness.

Mind is behavior. A Philosophical Zombie has behavior and a mind. An AI will have some sort of automata mind.

But that's not Qualia. Consciousness is necessarily something else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo

How can a mind have the intelligence of a human and not be aware of itself? I never liked the philosophical zombie argument. I haven't yet been able to realistically imagine such an entity.

The funniest part is that, since his behavior is indistinguishable from his non-zombie variant, Philosophical Zombie will write long papers about how they have qualia but Philosophical Zombies don't.

Indeed, that's mind-boggling. The only alternative is to start valuing more self-experience.

You know you are experiencing qualia and that you are not a philosophical zombie but you can't prove that others aren't. At least not so far.

How can a mind have the intelligence of a human and not be aware of itself? It's a great question that still mixes the idea of intelligence with Consciousness.

A Paramecium can discern where's the food, how to run away from an unpleasant spot and stop all activity when anesthetics are present and resuming while its effect is gone.

It can do all that and it does not have brain-cells, nor a lot of intelligence and still the experiment shows that it can stop and re-start like all other conscious beings.

Is not self aware, but we cannot prove that it isn't experiencing its own little qualia.

The article discusses a professor who hypothesises that consciousness is simply an illusion the brain creates for itself. But you can't explain the concept 'illusion' without reference to 'consciousness', so this explanation is meaningless.

https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry-Binswanger/dp/09856...

This is the book I recommend to anyone genuinely interested in the nature of consciousness.

I don't think Ayn Rand's Objectivism is useful for knowing anything about consciousness.

Or for any other purpose, actually.

"But you can't explain the concept 'illusion' without reference to 'consciousness'"

Of course you can. What you see is just a model the brain constructs based on visual input. The brain squares up corners, sees depth in converging lines. You can hardly see at all outside your focus point, but the brain makes you think you do. You have a blind spot in each of your eyes but the brain fills in the spaces based on the surrounding images so you don't notice it. None of these effects are the least bit dependent upon consciousness. It is conceivable that consciousness is just the brain's model of itself, and since the brain can construct these models without the need for consciousness, the argument is not circular.

This is one case of the larger issue of the limits of human knowledge. According to some versions of mysticism, it is possible to unify completely with the universe so nothing in it is beyond our knowledge.

However, if you stick with the methods of the natural sciences, it seems there must be limits. For instance, if you explain an observed phenomena in terms of an underlying law, then you have the question of why that law is so. If you explain the law as due to a deeper law, then you in turn must ask why that law is so. It seems pretty clear that, going down in levels like this, eventually you would have to reach a point where you would say "That's just the way it is, we don't know why"

Now with respect to consciousness, the question is whether we can explain it through some more fundamental, knowable features of reality. Many think you can, and are striving to do so.

Others, like the noted philosopher Colin McGinn, say no, this is a question we will never be able to answer. In particular, he argues the human mind was designed to understand many sorts of things, but this is beyond its abilities. I tend to think he is right.

The truth is the opposite, and always has proven to be: the natural sciences are the only way to acquire real understanding, while every form of mysticism by which "nothing is beyond us" ends up being us fooling ourselves again.

I think you misunderstood my comment. I was not saying that mysticism is correct, but that there are matters that are beyond the understanding of the human mind, including natural science.

As to natural science being the only road to truth, natural science is itself founded on human experience, and human experience is also the basis forms of truth, such as ethical and mathematical.

One thing I've been wondering about lately is whether our brains have more than one consciousness arising from it and we are just one of them. In split-brain experiments, it's shown that two independent consciousnesses can exist in the same skull, since they have been physically cut from each other. The predominant assumption is that when both hemispheres are connected, only a unified consciousness arises. Tononi says that in any composite system of consciousness, the component consciousnesses are suppressed and only the highest-level one is active. But what if they're still active and have their own subjective experiences? We won't necessarily see it in other people just as split-brain patients seem like one person until you scrutinize them. And that all consciousnesses will have access to the same memories sort of muddies it up a bit, but it still accounts for different phenomena, including unconscious thoughts, desires, and behaviours; and changes in personality.

Here is a perfect read for you then: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

Thanks! Apparently, there's a subreddit for cultivating these other sentient agents in a way that you are conscious of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/

The most interesting problem out there :)

Would it help to perhaps, instead of philosophizing, guessing and mathing, to try and look at things that definitely do influence consciousness (birth, death, alcohol, sleep, others) and experiment from there?

No matter how far removed it is from answers, at least you can get some arguably measurable datapoints, compared to guesswork that's a big win!

> alcohol

Alcohol has an effect on the brain, which then results in effects on consciousness. It might seem like a pedantic difference, but we don't really have a solid grasp on how the brain results in consciousness, so I would imagine that investigating alcohol>consciousness has so many confounding variables involved is so complicated that we might not benefit from it.

Of course I'm certainly not under the impression that my college psych 101 class makes me any sort of expert, and I might be being far too pessimistic.

Seeing you took one psychology 101 class that makes you more of an expert than me :p

I'm more of a consciousness enthousiast..

I'm less interested in the question of "can computers be conscious?", and more interested in "what is consciousness". I believe taking the direction of the first question leads to a dead end, because even /if/ you build a consciousness computer, you still wouldn't have a way to prove it.

Experiment with your own consciousness, it's the only one that's provably observable to you. Based on this assumed truth, you can ask others to do the same.

Following the alternative path of experimenting with our own consciousness, I come up with questions like these, very fun to think about.. but I don't know what I can do with it. I'm no neuroscientist, or even a scientist at all. Are any of them actionable?

What would it take to add another qualia space to our every-day experience (and with qualia spaces I mean the range of qualia experienced that are linked to any sensory experience, all possible observed images fall into one qualia space.) Would it take another sensor attached to our body? Adaptations to our brain? Are the ones we have (vision, sound, smell, touch, internal feelings, emotions, heat, thought) all the qualia spaces there are?

Imagine a volume slider for your hearing. You know that louder sounds in the outside world means a louder experience of sound in your mind. What is the mind's volume limit? Is there even a volume limit? Can we reach it with by producing sound waves? Assuming the limit is far higher than whatever we have ever experienced in our every-day lives, what would it do to a person to hear a sound that is so much louder?

So much to think about!

> I'm less interested in the question of "can computers be conscious?", and more interested in "what is consciousness". I believe taking the direction of the first question leads to a dead end, because even /if/ you build a consciousness computer, you still wouldn't have a way to prove it.

I agree with you, but I don't think the first question is a dead end... suppose you devise and install a computer chip that can replace a tiny portion of your brain by interfacing with neurons around it, and over time it learns to perform the same function as the piece of brain tissue it replaced. If you think this is physically possible (even if not feasible with current technology), then by extension, over a long enough period of time you could replace every bit of biological nervous tissue with synthetic components. Assuming the synthetic components were able to wholly serve the same functions as the biological ones that they replaced, you would have a computer which was conscious, and you would have an inside perspective on it. :)

On the other hand, in theory it might be possible to do that complete nervous system replacement without actually understanding what consciousness is. So I agree that "what is consciousness?" is still a more interesting question. I found The Ego Tunnel[0] to be a good jumping off point for defining consciousness.

At this point I think the problem of consciousness is one of scope: any description of consciousness that fits into the the mental capacity allocated to our intuition will lack explanations for aspects of our conscious experience that we can easily identify with a few moments of introspection, and any more comprehensive description of consciousness will exceed our ability to intuitively grasp as a whole. I don't think this is a fundamental limitation; I think it's just a reflection of how much base knowledge is necessary to build up adequate intuitions because of the complexity of the system.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097DHVGW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

I've never found that argument convincing.

It seems to suppose that consciousness is an either/or phenomenon. Either you're conscious or you're not. But what if consciousness is more of a continuum and the intensity of your conscious experiences can increase or decrease. Further let's suppose that the source of consciousness is somehow distributed throughout the brain. When the first small set of circuits is replaced your conscious experiences became ever so slightly less intense, by such a small amount that you didn't even notice. This continues every time another small brain region is replaced until at the end you no longer have any conscious experiences at all.

Yeah but that's still considering the epiphenomenon hypothesis and not other possibilities. What if the only thing you can explain with the epiphenomenon idea is the Philosophical Zombie (mind) but you still didn't explained a bit about consciousness.

Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo

My intent was actually not to take any firm position on the nature of consciousness but rather to present one possible model, that I think many would find plausible, as a counterexample to the progressive replacement argument (ie. the argument that a machine can be conscious because you can gradually turn a human brain into a machine).

Take a look at Stuart Hameroff's research. He is definitively doing that

> try and look at things that definitely do influence consciousness

Ambien.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/can-ambien-wake-m...

People who "wake up" using it are, to the best of my understanding, not conscious. They are like reactive robots instead.

Even people not in a coma who have used it simply to sleep, occasionally experience this sort of half awake state.

So compare people awake via Ambien, to those who are actually conscious, and try to see what's different.

It would be especially interesting to try in animals - to see if they have less of a change compared to humans (under the assumption that animals are not conscious).

>> The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes.

Oooh. That's a little problematic. Because you have to wonder how far that sort of simulation has to go to be of any use. If they mind has an image of itself, then wont' the image have an image of itself, and so on ad infinitum? Is that physically possible? If it isn't and so the mind doesn't have that infinitely recursive image of itself, won't then its perception of itself be inaccurate? And if it's inaccurate, how useful is it after all? Specifically, how well can the mind use its image of itself to influence itself if it doesn't know itself very well?

I mean, we're in angel-dancing on pin-heads territory here. Maybe not state facts about how the mind works with such absolutely conviction when all we have is speculation? Just a thought, like.

Interesting, but I'm not sure how you can summarize the cutting edge of ideas about consciousness without mentioning Daniel Dennett

> Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes.

Hoffstadter argues that there are multiple levels of simulation.

> The discussion, broadcast online, reminded me of Tom Stoppard’s newest play, “The Hard Problem,” in which a troubled young psychology researcher named Hilary suffers a severe case of the very affliction Dr. Graziano described. Surely there is more to the brain than biology, she insists to her boyfriend, a hard-core materialist named Spike. There must be “mind stuff that doesn’t show up in a scan.”

Understanding what this instance of Firefox is doing from imaging and signal tapping would arguably be nontrivial. Especially without very much about the software. Right?

The argument that we are machines made of meat and so machines made of any other substance may be conscious too is a remarkably weak one to me (a lay person, not a consciousness or AI researcher).

Isn't any arbitrary region in space a machine? Because it has physical inputs, physical outputs can some kind of physical computation within? An elevator is a machine but so is the building with many elevators. A city with many buildings, cars, people etc. (all the physical space and things in it withing the bounds of the city) is another machine. Is a city conscious? Clearly it is more complex than an individual brain?

From a slightly different angle - why does my consciousness stop at the limits of my body while the physical chain of reactions extends smoothly well beyond it, and infinitely into the universe?

Michael Graziano's Attention Schemata Theory is in my opinion a pretty convincing way of thinking about consciousness. Here's a talk he gave about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE.

(warning: includes wacky ventriloquist act)

The article mentions the brilliant Scott Aaronson, who's written a couple of articles on the subject:

1. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 2. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951

I'll admit that 85% of what he said flew way over my head, but the 15% I did grok was quite interesting.

This article lost me at David Chalmers

That's just cognitive dissonance kicking in. I had no problem with Chalmers, but had my own dissonant moments beginning with panpsychism. Why anyone would give credence to such ludicrous, unfalsifiable theories is beyond me.

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