Hacker News Reader

Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness.

I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece of the universe developed into beings that believe themselves to be conscious, believe they in some sense have the power of mind-over-matter, and in fact have constructed a globe-spanning civilization that appears to demonstrate the ability of billions of minds to understand to some degree themselves, each other and the universe, and to willfully bend matter to suit its purposes. aka Hofstadter's "who pushes whom around inside this cranium?" question.

We have not come anywhere close to constructing an artificial system with similar capabilities nor to understand how or why they arise in our own brains. It's presumptuous in the extreme to hand-wave away this conundrum with an "information processing" metaphor.

You're mobilizing a different argument here - since we can't construct it, there must be some transcendent property.

I can't see how that evokes any of the paradoxes of consciousness.

I mean, 200 years ago, humans didn't have a plausible idea how the sun work, should they have assumed God was behind it?

Edit: and humans certainly broadly have a decent idea of the physics and chemistry that gave rise to life even if the function of the brain is so far beyond us. So we're certainly not confronting life as something wholly unexplained. Some parts are still beyond us, some things we don't know yet. But un-knowledge usually isn't evidence for any specific thing.

The sun is a physical body, so a physical explanation makes sense. The problem is, our subjective experience isn't actually physical so the same logic doesn't apply. Our subjective experience has no mass, no shape, no size, and can't be measured. It may correspond to movements in the brain, but the experience itself is not material. For all we know we could be in the matrix, and our subjective experpence could be just as real. In fact Elon musk thinks it's a very high probability that we are in the matrix. Since our experience of the world is not material it doesn't seem to follow that there must be a material explanation for it.

I doubt that the subjective experience of the world is as immaterial as some want to believe.

Our subjective experience of the outside world can be quantified in terms of our ability to make predictions about the world and use them. All of us make and use predictions about the perceived reality as part of our conscious experience. However, if you have accurate enough representation of the outside world in your mind, it puts physical limits on the minimum amount of entropy your brain can have. And entropy is a completely physical quantity.

There is an article [1] I found to be interesting that explains why entropy, as defined in Physics, of the same physical system can be different in eyes of different observers with different prior knowledge/reasoning abilities/etc. In a nutshell, it makes perfect physical sense because if one would take into account that all these observers can't exist without physical medium and that their mediums should also be considered to be parts of the physical system of interest.

But then it becomes clear that accuracy of the subjective representation or experiences of the outside world has a direct effect on the entropy of the underlying physical medium because this is what the second law of thermodynamics, applied to the whole system of an observer and the system it interacts with, says.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/o5/the_second_law_of_thermodynamics_...

Ponder this: the number 15 exists but isn't material. It is an extrapolated common property of physical systems. The number $2^789 - 53$ exists but isn't material; and you've never seen a physical system which embodies that number, but there could plausibly be one.

Why could your consciousness not similarly be an extrapolated property of a physical system, without being physical itself?

That's a good question and the answer is that both the sun and the number 15 are concepts created by the mind because creating concepts has great survival value. You are conscious of these concepts. "Consciousness" itself is also a concept you are conscious of. We tend to confuse the map with the territory - perhaps because believing the reality of the map makes us more real and gives a sense of control over things - I wouldn't know. What I am convinced of is that consciousness (and I'm not referring to the concept of it) is not a product of the mind, but vice versa.

The sun is a physical body that exists despite us, 15 exists only on the mind.

Perhaps investigate what physicality is beyond the awareness of it. The only reason something objective exists is that there's a separate subject to say so. And no, this doesn't mean that nothing existed prior to human beings, it does mean however that the division of the world into "physical" vs "mental", "objective" vs. "subjective", "me" vs. "not me" was created by the human mind.

The why I think is quite clear from an evolutionary standpoint. Whithout self consciousness all our actions would only be triggered by surrounding events, hungry - eat, tired - sleep and so on. But with the ability to reason about our self we can for example find and cure diseases long before we feel any pain which is an evolutionary benefit.

Is it so clear? For one thing consciousness is not necessarily synonymous with the ability to reason.

Observe your own consciousness; observe the generation of each individual thought and experience. Are you conscious of their origin or do they simply arise in a stream from the darkness of your subconscious?

If the later is true (IE if your subconscious is doing the real work), then is consciousness essential to reason or merely coincidental?

> But with the ability to reason about our self

The ability to reason about ourselves does not automatically imply consciousness. Programs can be written that reason about themselves, but we have very little reason to believe they are conscious.

You seek an explanation from physics which should have better been sought from psychology, neurology or AI.

I prefer to see consciousness as the ability of agents to adapt in relation to the external world. In the end, what matters is not consciousness, but the whole "game" the agent is playing. Humans play the game called "life" where reward is to exist and reproduce. Other agents play other games with other rewards - the concept is general, agents can be people, animals, AIs and other complex systems.

So, it feels like something to see a sunset because you have eyes connected to a visual area that creates a model of the external world. This image has a meaning to you because it represents a certain probability of getting rewards. Rewards matter because they guide your actions.

That's the root of why it feels like something to see a sunset. People who don't have the right reward/values structure don't get to reproduce and enjoy sunsets. So it's not so much a brain thing, but an "agent vs the world" thing.

>Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece of the universe developed into beings that believe themselves to be conscious

Look, the theories aren't definitive yet, but we've definitely got them: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/2013047... https://www.umsu.de/wo/2013/600

>believe they in some sense have the power of mind-over-matter

Any reasonably embodied mind is going to rightly believe that it has a measure of control over its body.

Maybe the fact that these opinions exist is evidence that p-zombies walk amongst us?

I know one exists, and it is pretty well-known: Daniel Dennett.

He lacks p-consciousness (logical construct, which is used to guess existence of p-zombies), not a phenomenal one.

> " Why do not these processes take place "in the dark," without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness."

> -- Because each information processing system only processes its own information? It only "sees" its input, not some other system's input.

That's not the issue. The issue is why experiences are associated with the processing of input. A computer program represents "green" as some combination of bits, but most people don't believe it has an experience of greenness beyond the mechanistic processing of some bit sequence through its predefined rules.

Even if our minds are "merely" a set of rules processing information, there's still an extra element we experience that we currently can't satisfactorily explain.

> A sophisticated information processing system could be expected to have observations on its internal processes too - just a server might have logs, processed logs and what-not.

Good example - do you believe that a computer program that produces and analyzes logs of its internal processes has a conscious experience, analogous to ours?

A process that analyzes logs is still a process like any other. There's nothing special about it that would lead us to believe that suddenly experience arises in that process, where it hasn't arisen in all the lower-level processes.

This is why one "solution" to the problem of consciousness is to claim that even e.g. thermostats have some degree of consciousness. By claiming all processes are conscious to some degree, you don't have to explain the leap to consciousness.

But if you don't accept that solution, then the information processing model only underscores the problem.

> I'm not getting why this is suppose to be "hard".

Because that's not what's hard. Explaining the physical processes of the brain is very, very difficult for the brain is an extremely complex machine (one could say, bar aliens, it is probably the most complex object in the universe). But it's surely not "hard" in a fundamental level. We know the rules of physics applicable to physical systems like the brain. Technically we were able to image it at a very high resolution, and if we had massive computers to solve the equations, we could explain everything going on in the brain. It's difficult, but not "hard".

Yet this would bring us no closer to explaining the subjective conscious experience. Despite the fact that we know it exists, because we experience it, we have no idea how to measure it, how to explain, and why on earth it arises in this specific physical arrangement of atoms called the brain. A computer chip is also very complex, and integrates information. Is it conscious? We don't know and we will never know because any other consciousness other than ours is fundamentally inaccessible. In other words, this is a "hard" problem.

I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind's I").

Is it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and its own neural states, its train of reasoning should frequently include itself, its focus will drift forward and backwards in time... this is just how a system like this would work. If the system communicates about its state then its language should have referents to these internal states, referents like "experience", and "feels like", and "I understand". Is that surprising? Wouldn't it be surprising if it wasn't like that?

I think that Tononi's approach is a good approximation, but it can't be a full solution because the word 'consciousness' is too anthropocentric. One criticism of IIT showed that a seemingly uninteresting complex artificial system could have a very high IIT complexity quotient. The problem is that the things we use to define the term 'consciousness' are things that can be approximated to varying degrees by chimps or dolphins or generative adversarial networks or antfarms or thermometers. But behind our use of the word 'consciousness' there is still almost always a very slightly disguised dualism that uses it as a substitute for the word 'soul'.

RE: second paragraph. But that explains, for example, the physical phenomenon of language. A complex system has reference points to itself, and structures in the brain organize to speak about things, including about itself, using terms like "experience" and "feels like, etc". But it does not explain the conscious "internal" phenomenon of language, of preparing a speech, of grasping for words, etc. See what I mean? Like p-zombies. Someone else describes their stream-of-consciousness. But that speech, those patterns in the brain, etc, are but a physical phenomenon. They tell us nothing about the subjective conscious experience. We could have a robot not have consciousness and replicate that speech the same.

I don't see at all. You're just putting the word 'conscious' in italics. What I said was not only about language, language the reason we have words like 'conscious' and 'experience'. Why do we have the experience? It doesn't make sense to me to suggest that we wouldn't. Dynamic processing of internal representations and input is what intelligent systems do, ants, bats, chimps, and deep neural networks do it. Those processes obviously exist, and you call your own process your subjective conscious experience.

>Technically we were able to image it at a very high resolution, and if we had massive computers to solve the equations, we could explain everything going on in the brain.

That wouldn't explain the brain any more than simulating a car's engine at a molecular level explains the Carnot Cycle.

Subjective perception is "hard" because everything we know about physics works exactly the same without it, so at this point we have literally no idea where it fits.

But this is kind of a predestined result because the way we approach most science is to filter out subjective phenomena as much as possible and examine only so-called objective phenomena.

I don't think that's it. The real problem is that no science (whether physics, chemistry, biology, or even psychology -- if you deign to call the latter a science) describe what it's like to experience anything. Certainly there are measurements (like the wavelength of light), or even observations (ex: that a certain light was in the red spectrum), but the actual subjective experience of any phenomena seems to be completely out of reach. No one and no scientific theory can tell you what any experience is going to be like for you. For instance, no scientific theory can tell you what seeing the color red is like.

This actually goes far beyond the lack of a way for science to grapple with subjective experience, and goes to the root of communicating that experience or even communicating about that experience. It's hard, if not impossible, to communicate what any subjective experience is like. Poets, musicians, or artists might arguably be able to get at it, through some indirect means. But until telepathy comes along, there's really no way to know if what one person describes as their experience really is that way or can even be properly understood by their audience.

The ideal that many scientists aim for creates an additional burden of trying to be "objective" and of distrusting reporting on individual's own subjective experiences. Nevertheless, at least in psychology, neurology, and cognitive science, self-reporting on personal experiences is still quite common and is at least tacitly accepted. Researchers may ask, for instance, if the subject feels pain, or about their emotional state, and so forth. That is not completely out of bounds. I'm not aware of so-called "hard sciences" being very interested in what personal experience is like, or in attempting to bring them under their theoretical rubric.

"Poets, musicians, or artists might arguably be able to get at it, through some indirect means."

It's worth being explicit that poets can only even attempt to communicate these things to other humans, since human consciousnesses share a very large common base of properties. Similarly, affection is something most mammals [seem to] experience, but only because we've had a common number of millions of years of evolution, meaning that our brains are built to follow the same patterns; affection is not logically entailed by consciousness any more than the sensation of "red" is.

> For instance, no scientific theory can tell you what seeing the color red is like.

Science doesn't stand out here. Nothing can tell you what it is like to see infrared.

Modifying your retinal cells and waiting, while your brain teaches itself to process new information, is a way to know how it will look like for you. But you still will be unable to convey this information, which raises a question: is it still an information if it cannot be conveyed.

I think it is information if it can not be conveyed. The other day I was sitting at a table and reading, and my attention happened to be drawn to the table top as I tried to think of the name for its color, but I was momentarily stumped. I couldn't think of a name for the color, as it wasn't a primary color but was kind of a mix of colors.

I spent a few seconds in this state, where I was clearly aware of the color and consciously thinking of it, and was in no sense puzzled by the color itself but only lacking a name for it. Then I decided it was a mix of colors that was kind of blue-green. To me it seems the pre-linguistic, conscious awareness that I had of the color of the table was information that I had, but information that I could at least momentarily not communicate.

Is there any proof that we are not only philosophical zombies, i.e. a loosely defined bunch of atoms?

It goes right back to 'I think, therefore I am. I think.

Pzombies are so cute. They "believe" that they believe that they can think.

"Subjective perception is "hard" because everything we know about physics works exactly the same without it, so at this point we have literally no idea where it fits."

- Something defined as magically, unexplainably different indeed tautologically can't be explained by physics.

- But internal representation of phenomena by the brains of humans certainly seems like it can be explained by biology, physics and general common sense. That the brain produces internal processes when it receives external stimuli - how hard is that?

> - But internal representation of phenomena by the brains of humans certainly seems like it can be explained by biology, physics and general common sense.

Yes, it can. Computer programs have internal representation of phenomena, and so do brains/minds. This doesn't address the problem of consciousness, though.

> That the brain produces internal processes when it receives external stimuli - how hard is that?

Again, no mystery there - we make machines that produce internal processes when they receive external stimuli, and we understand pretty well how they work.

But that's the problem, because that understanding doesn't imply anything that resembles consciousness, and no-one knows how to make that leap other than either claiming consciousness is just a property of all processes, or claiming that the problem doesn't exist.

What stops you from writing a conscious computer program?

"But that's the problem, because that understanding doesn't imply anything that resembles consciousness.."

- For any given information processing system, it is reasonable to expect that the thing could distinguish kinds of memory. A cpu can read main memory or it can read. Whether data originates internally is almost certainly going to be a "big deal" for any such system. Thus if an information system is self-representing, "reading from a port is different from reading from main memory" and reasonably other distinctions are possible. Humans are social beings, we use language socially but an equivalent statement "internal experience is different sensory input" also seems clearly true.

Human share language, take inputs of language and process these internally apparently creating internal representations and possibly comparing these representation to their non-linguistic experiences. A fox in the world, a sensation of a fox, a memory of a fox, and someone's description of a fox or use of the word "fox" are different but we OK with combining them most of the time (seen a fox in the wild once in my life but I feel OK with the concept, expecting this would an instance of the category/species fox).

Human language of course, allows ambiguity and violation of selectional restriction - you can ask for the color of ideas and so-forth. In this context, creating a thing that "resembles consciousness" is elided to "mean" creating an internal sensation that resembles the sensation distinguishing internal and external input. But it is easy to imagine any given system naturally reject creating such an sensation unless it was "real".

So it's easy to imagine a person who takes in input and claims "none of this resembles consciousness".

But the internal representation is not the issue. It can almost surely be completely explained by low-level physical laws, if we just had a hypothetical way to accurately image it to a very high resolution. The issue is the subjective experience that accompanies it. We each are sure it exists, for we experience it, yet we don't know how to measure it, indeed it doesn't seem to be conceivable to do so.

I don't think your comments really answer the questions that are being asked. The question, as far as I understand it, is why humans can't operate exactly as they do now, but without the sensation of consciousness.

I don't think the question is "hard", I think it simply does not have a good solution. Science can explain how things work, but not why. One day, we may even be able to have an empirical theory of consciousness, e.g., how manipulating various parts of the brain affect how we are conscious, what physical structures are needed to generate consciousness (or at least, beings that act as if they are conscious), etc., but we can never explain why we are conscious, i.e., why we have experience.

It's all begging the question that there's something special about some of those states, because we feel that they're special. That there's a 'subjective experience' attached which is more than just the information flow through the self-monitoring feedback loop that is our brain.