Comment by ozy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ozy | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe this thread is not yet dead, seeing a reply a few hours ago. I did intent to reply, but life happened I suppose.

I am curious about your thoughts. Here is why I think it does address the so called hard problem:

The goals of these plans are evaluated by simulating the world and the body and future mental states. So the brain can measure, or "feel", the response, and thus judge the plans and compare them.

This constant self reflection and self prediction is what feels like something to the thing doing it. Why would it not?

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But in general I have some objection to the "hard problem".

We cannot proof something to be conscious. Probably we never can. The best we can do is find good proxies indicators of consciousness and good lower bounds for what can potentially be conscious, and what cannot.

But the opposite is also true, we cannot proof there is such a thing as the hard problem of consciousness. For all we know every program we have every written has had some kind of experience as it was running.

I agree it is reasonable to assume this is not the case. But I don't think you can proof this is not the case. Therefor the hard problem might, or might not, actually, be a problem.

To predict no 'feeling' need to be involved. You can have prediction without consciousness (any program that simulates some environment to check whether some condition will be met, eg. collision detection in 3d games) and consciousness without prediction (there probably are people with brain damages that are conscious, but have limited imagination capacities).

You can see color of red and don't predict anything at all, while still being consciouss. Predicting is just a narrow part of our conscious activities, however all of them are conscious.

So cosciousness is something much much more basic and fundamental than any high order cognitive function.

> We cannot proof something to be conscious. Probably we never can. The best we can do is find good proxies indicators of consciousness and good lower bounds for what can potentially be conscious, and what cannot.

We can't prove it because we have no idea what consciousness is, even on a philosophical level. Moreover if consciousness is basic property of reality, in a way parallel and coexisting with another property - matter, as panpsychists suggest, than it indeed would be impossible, as this dimension would be completely 'invisible' from the matter point of view.

When you're talking about 'proving' most likely you assume existence of some reproducible causal chain in the material, 'intersubjective' space. So you can't 'prove' consciousness in this paradigm by its very definition.

Of course one can insist to throw away any theory that's not provable in our paradigm, but does it bring us any closer to the understanding of consciousness? Also, is there anything inherently wrong with neutral monism or naturalistic dualism? These theories are not internally inconsistent, moreover they are also not inconsistent with anything current physics states - they just provide a wider view that at least somehow addresses the notion of consciousness.

It think you took predicting a bit too far and singular. It is not just predicting that is conscious, and it is more simulating or considering or even pattern matching.

This is what I think: Consciousness is continuously self observing past actions, past plans, actual outcomes, planning new actions and predicting future outcomes. That feels like something to the thing doing such a process, because practically all of those steps involve simulating/predicting/checking what something means to itself. Our brains do this because it is a self correcting mechanism.

> You can see color of red and don't predict anything at all, while still being consciouss.

I don't think so, when you see that color, you cannot help observing its context, what it means, check if something needs to be done, etc. All that is what I meant with predicting. Maybe the color is of no significance, but the only way you figured that out was by "predicting".

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Even if consciousness is 100% material (as I suggest), we can not prove it exists in others. We don't need consciousness as another dimension for it to be improvable.

As a matter of fact, if it is another dimension, then our brains are "interacting" with that dimension. So the hypothesis predicts that certain configuration of matter can have some kind of interaction with that dimension. That should not be hard to proof.

But since we have no such proof, and more mundane hypotheses, we must conclude that the other dimension hypothesis is extremely unlikely.

Another line of thinking on the dimension hypothesis is this: we have brains as small as from C. Elegance with 300 neurons, to ants, 0.25 million neurons, to mice, 70 million neurons, to humans, 86 billion neurons. At which neuron count does consciousness come in? What if we simulate the full neurons of any of these, will it behave the same? Will it be conscious the same?

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