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Comment by md224 | Hacker News Reader

"Put another way, this is the premise that the mind arises out of ordinary physics... If you are very religious, you might believe that a brain is not possible without a soul. But for most of us, this is an easy premise to accept."

The thing that irks me about this is how it reinforces a common (and in my opinion, false) dichotomy: either you believe the mind is explicable in terms of ordinary physics or you believe in a soul and are therefore religious. I feel like there should be a third way, one that admits something vital is missing from the physicalist picture but doesn't make up a story about what that thing is. There is a huge question mark at the heart of neuroscience -- the famed Explanatory Gap -- and I think we should be able to recognize that question mark without being labeled a Supernaturalist. Consciousness is weird!

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I don't understand why people have such a weird problem reconciling the brain with the mind.

It IS all physical. It's also an unimaginably complex fucking shitload of tiny physical objects working incredibly quickly. If your brain was big enough to see the parts working like little gears of a clock, it would probably be planet sized, or something like that. Huge.

I would EVEN say it doesn't raise any interesting philosophical questions. Are computers silicon, or magic? Is a book paper, or magic? Is the economy magic, or a bunch of people buying shit everywhere?

Knowing that the brain is physical doesn't make me question myself or doubt control over my life or any silly shit like that. Yes all of my actions are technically "predetermined" by the Big Bang, but not in an interesting way, at all.

Semi-related, if you made a giant brainlike calculator out of water pipes and valves and shit, and asked it a question, then turned all its pipes and valves for a while... it would probably just say "please kill me."

I don't think there's a problem reconciling the brain with the mind, if by 'mind' one means problem-solving ability. The problem is in reconciling the brain with consciousness. There is, as far as I know, no theory that explains how consciousness can arise from matter.

There is: the attention schema theory, and I find it quite compelling.

I've come to think that the great consciousness mystery is a psychological one: why are human beings so obsessed with the consciousness mystery? Why do we need so much to believe that we are special?

Should this super AI come to be, I expect it to give the problem of consciousness the same amount of thought we usually give to other people's bowel movements.

I don't know that they're really different. It's just a first-person frame of reference.

When something else is conscious, or something else has a mind, that's the same thing.

"Just" — but why should there be any "perspective" at all?

> I don't understand why people have such a weird problem reconciling the brain with the mind.

You do understand, you said it yourself! Because they have no free will to not have the problem!

I can't blame you though. You had no choice.

BTW,you are the first person I know who admits being a Compatibilist. I don't understand how you can rationally take that position.

>BTW,you are the first person I know who admits being a Compatibilist.

Not really - I'm determinist, but I just know the difference between "Things are technically predetermined" and "I'm being forced to do something, like at gunpoint." As in, it's not demoralizing because that makes no sense.

I like it when my brain makes a decision, and I don't care that my brain isn't pulling decisions magically from a mysterious dimension full of floaty ghosts.

> Semi-related, if you made a giant brainlike calculator out of water pipes and valves and shit, and asked it a question, then turned all its pipes and valves for a while... it would probably just say "please kill me."

Um why? Most humans don't do that.

Well it would kind of be a brain trapped in sensory deprived hell.

The point is I think people would expect pretty mundane things from a giant "mechanical" brain, but as described, it would be very unpredictable and complex. It would do things that instantly make the experimenters uneasy.

The roundworm (c. elegans) only has 302 neurons, and about 7,000 synapses, but is capable of social behavior, movement, and reproduction. The entire connectome has been mapped, and we understand how many of these behaviors work without having to resort to additional ontological entities like your "third way".

If this complex behavior can be explained using only 302 neurons, I have no doubt that the complexity of human behavior and consciousness can be explained using 100,000,000,000 neurons.

Behavior? Yes. Consciousness? Maybe not. As far as I know, no-one has ever come up with an explanation of how matter can give rise to consciousness. Obviously consciousness is affected by changes in matter — if I take certain drugs, I feel different, etc. — but there is no explanation at all for what mechanisms may give rise to consciousness in the first place, and the very idea of the material giving rise to consciousness might actually not make sense.

This line of thinking begs the question of whether consciousness is some special thing in nature. You only have to look for an explanation if you think there is something to explain.

If I start from the assumption that I am mistaken about what I think consciousness is--that maybe it doesn't exist at all the way I think it does--then I don't have to worry about how matter gives rise to it. I can focus instead on trying to understand where my definition went wrong.

Humans have never lacked for opinions or explanations about what natural things are, or how they got that way. But in the practice of science, these must yield before empirical evidence.

As you note, there is a huge amount of evidence that consciousness is physical. But there is no objective evidence that I experience consciousness as you define it. You just have to take my word for it--and so do I. But maybe I'm wrong.

There is an implicit assumption there that scale is colinear with sophistication. It could be that only 5 neurons give rise to the complexity of consciousness, it could be that the number of neurons is irrelevant but rather their configuration is important. Also, there is a problem there if it explains only some of the behaviors. What happens with the rest, where are they coming from, if we have fully mapped the connectome?

Are you sure? My understanding is that this connectome has been rather unfruitful in explaining its behavior.

We can't explain everything completely right now. However, for example, we can model behaviors like klinotaxis and movement toward chemical gradients using only 10 neurons [0]! I find it completely fascinating — we don't have the full picture, but we can isolate different behaviors and examine how the neurons contribute to that action.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3_BjL20Roc

But it can't all be explained just using neurons. Those neurons exist as part of a body. That body lives in an environment. Those environments include other people. You can't understand the totality human behavior without including bodies and environments. It can't all be reduced to neuroscience.

It's true for the worm as well. You can't understand everything about the worm without emulating the other 600 or so cells, and putting it into environments similar to what biological worms occupy. The lego mindstorm worm is interesting, but it's hardly the natural state of the worm.

Yet we can't simulate one that behaves like a real one, for any value of 'like'.

One thing I rarely see discussed is the possibility that the brain is just too complex to practically reproduce. That is to say, that it is technically possible, but not practical. Evolution had billions of years, working in a massively parallel way to work this out after all. It's possible that the brain is a huge tangled mess of rules and special cases that we will never be able to fully understand and reproduce. Also, even if we are able to produce a basic intelligence, why do we assume it will ever get to the point where it can understand itself well enough to self improve? It's possible there is a threshold we won't be able to get past for self improvement to be possible.

It's possible that the brain is a huge tangled mess of rules and special cases that we will never be able to fully understand and reproduce.

It doesn't seem possible. Our brain, like the rest of our bodies, develops from a single cell. It's DNA (maybe also some other markers) that directs the differentiation of every part. So DNA is where the blueprints of that huge mess would be.

I believe that self-organization is a better way to explain how mind emerges. There's a basic try and error mechanism with strong rewards. The rest is the result of a life of learning.

> Evolution had billions of years, working in a massively parallel way to work this out after all.

And it also got to work on it with a hundred billion stars with earth-like planets, in each of a hundred billion galaxies, and (maybe) in a basically infinite space of universes. All in parallel with infinite time to play with.

Is it so far-fetched to postulate that humans will hit our limits before getting this far?

Great point, the anthropic principle dictates we only see the successful outcome. Evolution is working across the entire universe (or even multiverse) so we really don't know how long it could take for human (or greater) level intelligence to emerge.

It doesn't seem like a false dichotomy. It's about whether you believe there are things that are fundamentally not comprehensible in the universe. Things that are magic in the sense of "fuck it, that doesn't make sense, let's go get drunk instead". If you believe that all phenomena can in principle be understood given enough time and effort (including even building a better intelligence to figure it out), then you have materialistic belief.

You could say that that 3rd way IS part of the physicalist picture already I think. As you say, there are such gaps in our understanding at this point we cannot say we've probed the depths of our brains and still found nothing.

It is like searching the ocean for something that by all accounts should be in the ocean, and deciding that perhaps the thing cannot be found, despite having large portions of the ocean still to search. It is too early to make that claim.

I'm not saying that there are not smug philosophers or scientists or just internet nerds that will declare the problem solved, clearly it is all in the brain and there is nothing magical to it but I think they would be incorrect. Modern physics is incredibly esoteric and shares more with meta-physics than what we tend to observe (which classical physics can explain satisfactorily for the most part). I don't think being physicalist is any impediment to having spirituality and and a sense of wonder about the universe and our place in it - the main difference to me is that we can't just accept a deus ex machina and call it a day. That may sound condescending but it isn't a choice for me personally.

That's just vitalism:

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

Either everything exists in the material world, or it doesn't. There's really no way of avoiding that binary. If you think there's something else, that is by definition supernatural.

Also see, at least, Phenomenology[1] and Heidegger[2].[3] Neither of them are Vitalism or religious.[4]

[1] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/

[2] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

[3] - Wikipedia tends to be a pretty horrible source for reading about philosophy, so I don't like to link to it for this. The plato.stanford.edu site is better, at least for Analytics, not so much for Continentals. So I hesitate to link to it for this either. Better to just go to the primary source material, or take a course at one of the rare schools which focus on Continental thought, so you don't get the wrong idea by learing about Continental philosophy from Analytics who all too often see Continentals contemptuously as "not philosophy" or as just some version of Analytics, both of which miss the point.

[4] - Though some, particularly some Christian Existentialist thinkers have in fact interpreted Heidegger's thought from a Christian perspective. But that view, as most any other about Heidegger, really depends on who you ask. Many others interpret Heidegger's thought strictly non-theistically.

It's not at all binary. Read some more philosophy. Materialism hardly encompasses all the non-supernatural views. First of all, the world could be mathematical, informational, computational, or a simulation. It could have universals in addition to material particulars.

Consciousness might not be reducible to the material, or the material could all have a conscious component. There might be other things, like societies or biology, which are strongly emergent. Or maybe there is no material world. Maybe it's all mental. Perhaps there is a third substance, a neutral monism giving rise to mind and matter.

Maybe the noumena is beyond human categorization and perception. Perhaps our experience of the world is such because we are the animals we are, and not because we have access to reality in itself. Man is the measure and all that.

And on and on. There are various anti-realists debates. There is Humean skepticism of causality. None of these issues need invoke the supernatural, although they don't necessarily rule it out. David Chalmers can propose consciousness as an additional feature of nature which is nonphysical (tied to informationally rich processes like certain mental or computational states), without proposing any supernatural element.

There's really just one question - either it works in a way we can figure out, or it doesn't. The former is "materialism", the other (for now) is "supernatural", with the possible caveat that we may one day prove that some laws governing the universe are fundamentally not comprehensible for human minds, and all other minds humans could ever create (in a Gödel's incompleteness theorem style).

> If you think there's something else, that is by definition supernatural.

First, how others perceive your words usually matters more than the precise definitions you have in mind. If I describe myself as believing in the supernatural, it has a lot of connotations I don't want.

Second, the possibility that consciousness (in some sense) could be built into physics themselves. So it doesn't contradict that the brain is made of subatomic particles, but the workings of the universe have more correlations built in that could work at different levels. Something I think is comparable is that many cosmologists think that the arrow of time, which events come before which, can be explained by a universe with initial conditions of extreme low entropy. So there's nothing within the universe that explains why the initial conditions were like that, but it's a real property of our universe.

Maybe consciousness could be an end state that the universe is progressing toward. Is that really so much weirder than working from an initial state of extremely low entropy?

There's no reason that something else can't exist in the material world, I think the parent is just pointing out the third way is thinking there's something else material outside our current understanding.

If God exists, there's no reason there couldn't be new phyisics describing how his world works.

If the something else is physical but outside of our current understanding, then it doesn't prevent us from creating AI by simply simulating a biological brain. Thus, that is the same as the physicalist view in the context of the argument in question.

You need to know what tovsimulate though. But we could imagine to create an "ai" from pure meat. Grey matter linked to sensor and ouput systems. Kinda nightmarish

But doesn't our understanding of what is natural and what is supernatural - where the line between them lies - evolving constantly? Is it vitalism (or some other investment in the supernatural) to believe that what constitutes the material world is not yet fully explored or understood, and that the answers to some of our questions on humanity and consciousness will be found there?

Any recommendations on decent pop-sci books that explore the latest understanding of the origin and mechanism of consciousness?

Is anyone exploring this third way at all?

Pop-sci is useless in this area. There is plenty of good research on the topic, but pop-sci on the brain is just as bad as pop-sci on quantum mechanics or computers.

EX: People making decisions based on eye tracking not matching up with the subjective experiences. Or the classic you chose not to do something, but your arm is already in motion and you can't stop it fast enough.

Maybe I'm miscalibrated on what's considered "pop sci" - but anything sensationalizing those EEG experiments or debunking "free will" shouldn't count IMO. That garbage nobody should be reading.

> or debunking "free will"

Interesting. I thought that "free will" was utterly debunked by the economy :). Not to mention the advertising industry, which is basically applied exploitation of the limits of human "free will" :).

I will probably be down voted for this.. But I enjoyed Kurzweil's "How to create a mind" and "on intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins . Even though these books aren't super scientific i really like how these guys think about consciousness and intelligence.

Thanks, "On Intelligence" has been on my reading list for a while after seeing him give a keynote a few years ago.

I read theory-of-mind pop sci constantly, I'd say Penrose has the vitalist perspective and Kurzweil has the physicalist perspective. Hofstadter is a lovely read too (physicalist).

Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained.

Well, if you believe that despite having no evidence of something unexplained by physics happening in the brain, it's still a religious myth, it doesn't matter the name you give it.

And if you have any piece of evidence, you can be sure the people at the nearest physics dept will love to hear it.

Explanatory Gap is BS. This is what happens. Then why does it not describe how it feels?

You are not wired up to understand the low level effects, it's simply not a useful. At the same time it does describe how it feels, if we started using firing of C fibers instead of Pain people would assume they understood what was going on.

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