Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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_...

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.

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