Is Consciousness an Illusion?
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We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (with memory) who simulate a reality not the reality.
This simulation happen to be calibrated in such a way that it allow us to navigate the reality with some success by proxy of our simulation of it.
your education is showing.. perhaps you have a different definition of mathematics
among many definitions you can define mathematics as an abstract science or as what those abstractions are studying
but holding the first definition is insufficient evidence for the inexistence of the second
i'm unclear what you think intractable equations.. whether easy or difficult to form and what the definitions of easy and hard are or why they are of consequence.. say of mathematics
a computer is a system literally built as an electrical manifestation of mathematics, albeit a subset, and in its case suffers limitations of intractability but the mathematics underlying its structure still remain
can you defend the position that the limitations of a nand gate somehow disproves quantity(o)?
also, I think Godel would be distressed to have heard the incompleteness theorems being used to deny the existence of mathematics
incompleteness is intended to show mathematics exists beyond the scope of proof
for me incompleteness does go beyond its intentions but as proof of paradox such as the existence mathematics
I mentioned the incompleteness theorems because they suggest a universe that was a consistent logical system would be arbitrarily constrained from valid portions of its state space - a testable hypothesis with no evidence. Of course, if you toss out consistency then all bets are off.
that was where this whole conversation started, 'what is reality[anything]?'
you are working from an incomplete definition of the full scale of, even recognised, mathematics which is clear in that you define it as being 'built on top of axiomatic set theory' when godel used mathematics to show axioms are limited in scope
but you, stead Godel, consider that all of mathematics, and now I'm repeating myself
In my original comment I was referring to the theory that the universe is entirely mathematics. I'm not talking about modeling with mathematics, rather that the universe is mathematics. There are no things.
still, i hold it would be more 'hard to defend' abstract concepts fail to exist.. regardless of 'where'
beyond the scope of humanity or human curiosity, look at chemistry
the universe is rather predicated on relations to the abstract concept of quantity
and those distinguishing identities exist within a hadron and in far flung galaxies
To you point about quantity. There are grains of sand. Does that mean that there are also numbers? I obviously argue no. You have to take some of the grains and set them aside to count them. You have to split your pile into two and recombine the two piles to add them. You have to line the grains up in order to number them.
By itself there are only grains of sand, mathematics only emerges when you impose additional structure on them and perform operations with them. There is no addition in a thousand grains of sand, it is the act of separating and combining them. Or at least imagining to do so.
You can build a huge part of mathematics on top of set theory but that does not mean that all of mathematics is already contained in every large enough set of things, at least not in any meaningful way. Only when you decide what to with the things in the set, what kind of manipulations you are willing to consider, that the structures mathematics describes emerge.
And while physics looks very mathematically, I see no problem with this. The most simple rules can give rise to staggering complex math. I find it much more reasonable to think - gross oversimplification ahead - that photons travel in straight lines in a three-dimensional space and therefore the electric field follows an inverse-square law instead of assuming that the universe already contained the mathematics needed to deal with electric fields.
There are just photons moving around, only after deciding how to measure distances and to look at spherical shells around charges we find a particularly simple way to describe electrical fields. But we could have made a lot of different choices leading to wildly different descriptions.
numbers exist without sand, sand needs numbers to exist
you can count apples instead of sand
yet physical phenomena, such as the formation of sand or apples, depends on quantity
chemistry shows that how many particles in what structure determine how it interacts physically with its environment
a hadron with three quarks is a baryon, a hadron with a different number is fundamentally different
There is an infinite number between 0.1 and 0.00000000000000000000000001
The only reason we can grable with these things in mathematics is because we are conscious minds who create symbolic meaning.
There aren't any numbers "out there".
"Out there" there are no perspectives only everything at once.
..edit.. I'm unable to reply again so I'll clarify what I mean here: for me physics is behavior, mathematics is existence
Only when you reduce reality (like humans do) and you start manipulating with symbols do you get mathematics.
This manipulation with symbols (and it's foundation of a quantifiable universe on top of a quantum universe) is the foundation of math, not the other way around.
Math is simply a way this underlying reality gets expressed, it is not what the reality is.
Why would sand need numbers to exist? I can pile up sand without ever knowing how many grains of sand are in the piles. I can not see how combining several things requires numbers, it only requires several things, i.e. you have to define what the different things are, where the boundaries between them are.
you can count apples instead of sand
Obviously, that was just an example. You need several objects.
yet physical phenomena, such as the formation of sand or apples, depends on quantity
It does only insofar as you need several distinct objects, it does not depend on numbers. Also note that you have to arbitrarily decide to count apples or grains of sand. Why apples or grains, why not atoms or quarks? There is a bunch of stuff and you have to divide into several distinct objects before you can even start to count them. The fact that you decide to divide all the quarks and electrons into things you call apples is an arbitrary decision and imposes a structure on top of the things that are there by itself. Only with this imposed structure and your [imagined] action of dividing and combining subsets of the things does something like counting, and numbers and addition emerge.
a hadron with three quarks is a baryon, a hadron with a different number is fundamentally different
Arbitrary definition. There are quarks, calling collections of them baryons or mesons or tetraquarks is an arbitrary definition made by humans, albeit a useful one.
But those grains of sand you are piling already exist ;P
In a universe where quarks only collect in groups of four sand would fail to exist
it needs baryons.. or whatever name you want to ascribe, yes it is scientifically known and recognised that naming conventions are arbitrary and often localised but naming stems from consistent behaviour
In a universe without baryons to claim sand exists would be making up a new substance that uses 3 quarked particles
Or if you add a fourth quark to one proton in a grain of sand it would cease to be sand
So the number of quarks that collect and how they structure determines the existence of sand
Similar to how a beach is formed based on the number of grains of sand
anyway the root of the issue is confounding to me.. how often has physics been disproven and replaced by implementing mathematics?
for me physics is behavior, mathematics is existence
if you are sincerely asking.. i suppose i'd answer: well the same as the state of the universe: empty; now what would be the meaning of the concept that the term, or symbol, seven refers to? well, still 7, but such a universe would lack the necessary representations to express it
my mathematical research begins in an 'empty universe' and questions the most base of assumptions necessary to get to a representation of, for instance, 7
an empty universe actually contains enough information to express all information utilising mathematics: the current empty 0, and the potential any state replacing the empty state 1; if time.. when emptiness begins and ends.. is allowed to be considered
(o) http://materlakes.enschool.org/ourpages/auto/2013/2/25/50973...
> "Someone just dumped a whole garbage can of orange peels out the window." ... "They float very nicely," he said without turning around. "That's interesting." ... "I don't mean it's interesting that they float," Teddy said. "It's interesting that I know about them being there. If I hadn't seen them, then I wouldn't know they were there, and if I didn't know they were there, I wouldn't be able to say that they even exist. That's a very nice, perfect example of the way--"
I want to argue that whenever you think that there is some math already contained in the universe, it is actually you accidentally introducing it without noticing it. Look, trees! One, two, three, ... See? There are numbers in the universe. And look, I can add the number of trees in this wood and that wood.
It is of course tempting to conclude that the math was already there. But I argue that it was not, that it is you inventing it. It is your concept of object identity that defines what a tree is and when two trees are the same or different trees, you divide the world into different objects. It is your concept of grouping objects into sets. It is your concept of pairing the elements of two different sets to compare their cardinalities. It is your concept of including one more element in a set that defines what counting means. It is your concept of combining two sets that defines what addition is.
That are all things you can do with objects in the universe, but nothing of that is inherent. If you look carefully enough, all the things that look like math already exists in the universe actually require you making use of a lot of abstract man-made concepts. Many of them, like object identity and counting, are just so deeply ingrained in us that you don't notice that you are using them if you don't pay careful attention.
That is I asked for the empty universe, I wanted to take away all the objects on which you could accidentally impose structure. If math were truly fundamental, if Platonism were true, then seven should still exist in an empty universe. I don't see how this would be true in any meaningful way.
If we added a mathematician to our empty universe, he could invent math. He could come up with the idea of objects and identity and set of objects and he could think about operations with those objects and consequences of the definitions he made. But it would all have no relation to the otherwise empty universe, it would be a game of formal rules, mostly manipulating strings of symbols. If the mathematician had great imagination, maybe he could imagine actual things existing in the universe, how he could label them with those numbers he invented, and how he could visualize addition by moving things around.
It ultimately comes down to questions like why is there anything at all. But those seem way out of reach at the moment and maybe they will remain forever. Being part of what you are trying to study may obstruct your view in an unsurmountable way.
It's so annoying not knowing. Where did all this matter come from, and if it's always been here, then how the hell has it always been here, and why is it like it is. What caused the nature of nature?
I bet God doesn't have the answers either. Why would God know the source of God? It wouldn't.
This is why I kind of like that recent movie called "Arrival" or the proper name "Story of your life". A new language delivered from Aliens would be great to tackle the big questions.
We essentially just decided to ignore most of such possibilities most of the time, from solipsism as you mentioned over Last Thursdayism [1] to living in a simulation or the Matrix. They may seem interesting to ponder about at times but in the end they just prevent you from learning anything at all. You can always come up with a strange scenario in which anything you might believe turns out to be falls.
That certainly sounds kind of arbitrary and unscientific, but without some founding assumptions about reality you get nowhere and that is of course not helpful at all. We should certainly keep an eye on those assumption and we do, living in a simulation for example pops up quite frequently, but for the moment our success seems to justify our assumptions.
[1] The world came into existence last Thursday in precisely the state of last Thursday with all the memories and evidence of the time before last Thursday just to fool us.
i explain why i feel that way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13792787
On the other hand, if consciousness is the property of having a subjective experience of existence, it is silly to call consciousness an illusion. An illusion is something that appears to exist, but actually does not. The very fact that we are able to perceive the "illusion" contradicts the implication of the statement.
This then comes back to things like AI where you could ask yourself if there are other forms of feedback loops which could be "conscious" in some form or another.
I find this question, like whether we have 'free will' in a deterministic universe, to be meaningless. You are simply stretching a naive interpretation of the concept until it's breaking point, and then claiming reality doesn't fit with that concept. One should at the very least consider if the original definition used was perhaps too naive.
Free will is obviously an extremely important subject since its the assumption behind most of our moral and legal system. You can of course ignore it and just assume, however I am unconvinced that does anything good to our understanding of other people.
In that sense, a world where someone could have made a different choice is a world with less free will. After all, the choice they made was random, it wasn't inherent in their character. What matters here is agency. Did you act of your own volition, with your own agency? Or did someone else use their agency to manipulate you (threats, etc.).
In this perspective, free will means that your choice depend on who you are (i.e. in the causal chain that lead to your decisions, your 'character' was of very large influence). In a materialist view, your character would be a property of your body. There is a gray area, as alluded to in the aricle, for those properties of your body you are not aware of, that play a large role in the decision process. (e.g. being cranky because of some indigestion)
You don't need to be manipulated by anyone else it might just be that you simply don't make the choices you think you do but that they are spread out over a much longer timeline.
Specifically, I was arguing against the definition of free will where someone has a choice in the sense of 'they could have done something else'. This gets into a harry discussion about what 'could' means.
The way I look at it is basically and to oversimplify:
We learn from our past never our present.
As long as we survive the present that information gets used to update our reaction in the future.
Sometimes large updates (once scorned, twice shy) other times incremental improvement (practice).
Perhaps one could say that we dont have free will but things are not 10% deterministic either it's just not our consciousness who is running the show but the entire system.
This statement can be argued. It seems sufficient to rationalize the current state of the legal system using principles that do not require free will. For example, we may consider it a systematic form of distribution to satisfy an instinctive need for vengeance and retribution, or for deterrence from acts that deprive us from our instinctive need to feel happy and safe.
From this perspective, it seems like the legal system is perfectly tailored for a rational agent maximizing for these instinctive needs. On the contrary, it seems like a person having Schoenpauerian free will would do poorly by such a system, since a person with such free will wouldn't really care about satisfying their own need for vengeance or retribution, and should they find themselves on the wrong side of the law, would probably welcome their suffering as a demonstration of their freedom of will.
This could also hold for a philosophical zombie, so this doesn't say anything about consciousness. Or perhaps we're talking about different kinds of consciousness here (unfortunately, good standard terminology seems missing).
Not sure if I can follow. Isn't that a contradiction?
What makes us different is that we seem to be able to reflect on this loop, not in the driver seat but as a passenger making notes about future drives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H9ul7pqezs&list=PLKy-B3Qf_R...
And The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth is really great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI
Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0
One interesting note he makes is that (according to metrics they developed) the hallucinogens really do help you achieve higher level of consciousness. All those self-reports of reaching "awakening" and "enlightenment" could actually be supported by neuroscience. Unfortunately it's too hard to get proper funding for any research on subject.
Imho Douglas Hofstadter comes closest to trying to explain it without all that kind of pitfalls in "I Am a Strange Loop". Not that it actually truly explains it, but at least it acknowledges those things that make me normally dismiss theories that could explain consciousness.
Dennett's explanation basically uses Hofstadter's conception.
There is a small problem with this claim. Or, at least there is a problem if you happen to believe in popperian philosophy of science that says that claims that are not falsifiable are non-scientific.
Obviously, from popperian point of view that claim is about as unfalsifiable as is the claim that God created earth and everything on it. Which may be true or may be not, but the claim is not a claim in the scientific realm but in religious realm, and I would be a bit vary to consider claims in religious (or non-scientific if that is a bit less sensitive word) realm "facts".
I mean, it feels obvious that I have conscience, but how do you prove or disprove that claim? I have no idea. It feels obvious that earth is flat, but there are ways to prove that wrong.
Self-awareness/consciousness can verify its own falsifiability by using periods of unconsciousness such as dreamless sleep, fainting, etc. as evidence.
Why do you need to prove the obvious?
It feels obvious that earth is flat
It doesn't if you climb a mountain or see a ship under the horizon. It's a very thin layer of "obviousness" that disappears with very little reasoning.
There's nothing similar for consciousness, on the contrary every argument that has been tried against it feels terribly clumsy and artificial.
Of course, consciousness could be generated by physics alone, but then we would not be aware of it, so alternatively, consciousness could be generated by physics AND exist separately from it (as an observer), but this seems much more contrived.
Illusion presupposes consciousness.
Besides, the idea that: "The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology."
That's again a certain, centuries old, epistemology. And not a very good one. I would be better if he would have said "is best approximated" rather than "accurately represented".
Illusion of WHO?
Anything that can have illusions is a consciousness.
An algorithmic error is not the same as an illusion.
To take it to be so, is to presuppose what you're supposed to prove.
If aliens exist, they will have existed a priori, or before thought or knowledge. Granted, they wouldn't have existed a priori from their standpoint, but the logical conclusion, once you've found some aliens, is that there are always more aliens.
i.e. If life is a "thing" in the universe, it is a "thing" because of a priori knowledge.
If aliens don't exist, then that fact would also be a priori, given you could do an exhaustive search for aliens in the universe. As you probably can't do an exhaustive search because of size/energy constraints, you can look at the claim "there are no aliens" as one which is unprovable, and thus irrational.
i.e. If we never find aliens in the universe, it is a "thing" that can not be a priori (or a posteriori for that matter).
This "alternate fact" itself may be a priori, inasmuch as the state of being of some things may not be proved while being limited to observations (and perhaps perception) within the search scope.
Edited for logic errors. Also, the last statement here takes a stab at why the current administration's use of alternate facts can be considered a "tactic" in which the scope of observation and perception of others is greatly limited.
Related to "final state" is the assumption that there will be no successor beings. Surely evolution will continue to create beings (bio or silicon) that are more competent than humans -- perhaps it already has. Cattle can observe humans and their actions, but the cattle do not comprehend that they are captive and food. I'm not sure why it would be any different between humans and successors.
This book makes a compelling argument that scientific progress is currently blocked on major questions by the "Taboo of Subjectivity":
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1144208.The_Taboo_of_Subj...
Also any deep dive into how hard it is to say anything objective is making it very clearly that the only thing fhat block objectivity is the lack of its existence.
I don't think the first sentence follows from the second one and I doubt that the second sentence is as strong as you may think. Look at any modern physical experiment, the observations are made by apparatuses and transformed many times before a human sees the result on a screen.
How would you argue that you subjectively experiencing numbers on a screen can introduce any [significant] subjectivity into the observed? There is just so much between the observed and the observer.
And even if observations would necessarily be subjective, you would have to explain the consistency of observations between different observers across space and time. But I just realize that I am here more arguing for an objective observer-independent reality than for objective observers but I will keep it anyway.
I also think the somewhat temporary nature of physics has no large bearing on objectivity. We are well aware of measurement errors and the fact that theories are often just approximations. Better measurements or theories rarely make previous results objectively wrong. But I will acknowledge that especially theories with a lot of interpretations in them have a real risk to turn out wrong.
I can see 2 ways for this model to come about. The first is directly, where being able to anticipate your own reactions is advantageous. The second is socially. That is, you need to model others to better anticipate their reactions. When those others are similar enough to yourself, those same modeling procedures also start working on yourself.
This kind of modeling can get started by very simple correlations. Say you accidentally get some photo-sensitive cells. Over time, if their output starts affecting what direction you move (say away from the cells when less light falls on them) and all of a sudden you are capable of fleeing from predators.
You build a human-like robot with cameras, and microphones and actuators. You also build a gigantic mechanical computer out of gears and hook up the sensors and actuators of the robot to the mechanical computer. Finally you run a quantum mechanical simulation of a human brain and nerve system on the mechanical computer.
Shouldn't the whole thing now be equivalent to a human? Shouldn't it be conscious and self-aware? This then raises the question, when and how did the gears stop to just turn according to simple rules and became a mind capable of exploring and thinking about the world? There seems to be some kind of large jump between mindless rotating gears and becoming aware of you own existence. I have a hard time making really precise what I mean, but I hope you get the idea.
As for how it arose, I'd posit a theory: As an animal starts modeling others, at some point it's model includes the others are also modeling others. Now, combine this with that animal (and the others) also modeling themselves. At some point, probably during collaboration, it starts becoming useful to start reconciling these models with each other by communicating about them.
Now, reconciling models about a third party is already a big step, but essentially speculation. At some point though, someone might want to reconcile their model of you with your own model of yourself. After all, your model is probably a better source of truth. This requires phrases like: "I think that", "I wanted", perhaps even "I wondered".
Interestingly, this account of consciousness is rooted very deeply in the 'second-person'. It is very much a social construct. I'd also like to point out this is naught but a hypothesis.
I'd say that such a 'philosophical' zombie would indeed be conscious. In fact, I'd call it human.
I don't think those two are compatible. A philosophical zombie lacks consciousness, sentience, and qualia, a human does not. And I don't see why this collection of gears should lack any of them, why it should be a philosophical zombie. Those gear should feel pain, and not in the sense that the positions of some of those gears indicate that there is pain, like a bit in a computer memory, but just like you and me experience pain.
And that seems, at least to me, a gigantic leap. I can perfectly understand how you could evaluate different sensor inputs, calculate a pain level, and store it somewhere in memory. And then you could easily create reactions, try to get away from whatever causes you pain, you could make the robot scream.
But that seems nothing like how I experience pain, I really feel it. Humans don't even need external sources of pain, we can experience pain from memories and thoughts alone. Admittedly that may be an artificial distinction, one could certainly imagine a kind of internal sensor input that does not sense external stimuli but the state of other parts of your brain.
But all that doesn't help, at least me, at all understanding why I can feel pain and what it means to feel pain in the first place. I can not make the jump from a physical and inanimate picture of a human made out of particles to how it feels to be a human. I can not understand how a collection of gears could possibly feel pain.
And when I say not understand I mean it in the most powerful way. It's not that I can not understand the details, it's not that I don't understand anything about it but know how I could learn about it, it's much worse, I can not even imagine how I could possibly try to understand it.
This is then taken to mean that it is so far divorced from the material world so as to merely be an illusion.
The article says that abstract concepts representing whole classes of perceptions are user-illusions. They are just patterns, and the concepts they represent are the best explainers of the data. The patterns exist in the data, they are not made-up as the article might imply. They are patterns discovered by experience, and learned.
Even if consciousness and abstract concepts were all "illusions", that would expand the meaning of illusion, they would become equal to the concepts of mind and soul of the past.
My position on consciousness is that we don't need the concept of consciousness. We should use the concepts of Reinforcement Learning instead. Instead of consciousness, we're concerned with an agent. The agent is just an entity embedded in a world, an external environment. It can sense the environment and act, trying to maximize its rewards. For humans, the ultimate reward is survival and reproduction (which is another kind of survival). So it's a loop of perception-judgement-action-reward.
We don't need the often mystical and imprecise concept of consciousness because it generates useless debates. It's too loaded, everyone means something else by it, the experts can't even define it in a way they can all agree upon. It's a legacy from the past, one step above the concept of soul, but one step behind that of autonomous agent optimizing actions and learning from rewards. The concept of agent is much more parsimonious, it can be easily defined, measured, simulated and studied from the 3rd person perspective, unlike consciousness.
Dennett's work is much better than this review, and I recommend reading the book rather than the review.
"Nor do we have to understand the mechanisms that underlie those competencies. In an illuminating metaphor, Dennett asserts that the manifest image that depicts the world in which we live our everyday lives is composed of a set of user-illusions,
'like the ingenious user-illusion of click-and-drag icons, little tan folders into which files may be dropped, and the rest of the ever more familiar items on your computer’s desktop. What is actually going on behind the desktop is mind-numbingly complicated, but users don’t need to know about it, so intelligent interface designers have simplified the affordances, making them particularly salient for human eyes, and adding sound effects to help direct attention. Nothing compact and salient inside the computer corresponds to that little tan file-folder on the desktop screen.'
He says that the manifest image of each species is 'a user-illusion brilliantly designed by evolution to fit the needs of its users.' In spite of the word 'illusion' he doesn’t wish simply to deny the reality of the things that compose the manifest image; the things we see and hear and interact with are 'not mere fictions but different versions of what actually exists: real patterns.' The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology."
They are also mediated by consciousness. Unconscious scientists rarely do experiments or interpret their results.
This is epistemology 101.
Edit: typo has been fixed.
Oops, yes, fixed that. I always make tons of typos on my HN comments.
Dennett does end up explaining a lot of epistemology 101 because his audience isn't philosophy academia.
Dennett's innovation, which isn't described well by this book review, is to assert that epistemology is driven by reproductive pressure (both genetic and memetic).
and, being a conscious human who can only rely on data inferred through his sense organs: who are _you_ to say?
Materialists have been asserting since forever that consciousness arises from the brain and that the brain evolved according to Darwin's laws. What is new in Dennett's viewpoint?
How does anybody even know that, or anything else, except through their, wait for it..., human consciousness?
1. My subjective experience makes predictions which are wrong within my subjective experience in ways which my subjective experience does not explain. Or put another way, I experience cognitive dissonance.
2. When I attempt to align my subjective experience with a hypothetical objective reality (that is, when I attempt to learn) the predictions made from my subjective experience are wrong less frequently. Or put another way, learning decreases cognitive dissonance.
Of course, these subjective experiences could be explained by a self-flagellating subjective experience that inflicts me with cognitive dissonance and then rewards me for attempting to align my subjective experience with a nonexistent objective reality. But that is (subjectively!) too convoluted an explanation to be satisfactory.
That's from the future!