I myself am fond of Bernardo Kastrup's work on Idealism: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/41gb0j/bernardo...
Basically (don't want to spend much time on this so it's not the best way summarize it):
- Consciousness is defined as my current feelings, perceptions, thoughts.
- In a way, consciousness (or experience) is the only thing that exists.
- The idea that the physical world is everything is ridiculously wrong. Physics is just a way to summarize patterns observed through our consciousness. The physical world is just a mental model.
- Physical state of the brain clearly affects consciousness but there could very well be an opposite casual link - consciousness affecting the brain by "pushing atoms" or making supposedly random quantum phenomena not-so-random. Why? Because I wouldn't be typing this otherwise - my brain would never realize it affects some consciousness in "parallel universe" (metaphorically speaking).
- Other people (or computers) don't have consciousness as defined above. But we could define a separate term, say "consciousness2", to describe some physical processes typical for brains. If the "consciousness pushing atoms in brain" hypothesis is correct, we could say that all brains with this kind of fishy activity are "conscious2".
You might find it interesting to read about various forms: http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_idealism.html. Kastrup's work will probably interest you too.
Kant for example, might be said to have believed that "reality" was "mentally constructed", and he used a really similar language in describing how we perceive the world. But he also wrote quite clearly that Berkeley's idealism was absurd and that we can never perceive anything which violates physical laws. And together with denying the possibility that we might ever come to real knowledge of the world by thinking alone, that was the whole point of his "transcendental idealism".
Perhaps my main disagreement is that he puts other people's minds on the same level as one's subjective consciousness (but this is just after quickly skimming the paper).
I think the best alternative is Reinforcement Learning. In RL, there is an agent which exists inside an environment. It can perceive the world around, move about and perform actions. The agent has a goal to achieve and receives reward signals from time to time. Such an agent can learn behavior that maximizes rewards.
That's what consciousness is. It is not an experience, it is a whole loop "perception -> judgement -> action -> reward" that defines life moment by moment. This also explains the role of consciousness - it is to choose actions that lead to survival of the individual and of its genes (reproduction). It is all a self replicating loop, in the end. The purpose of life is life, the purpose of consciousness is to guard life.
Consciousness is a set of four functions (perception, evaluating actions, acting, learning from reward signals) that work together to select the next action, to protect the body, on which consciousness depends - yep, full circle.
This whole "RL agent inside environment = consciousness" theory has the advantage that it is concrete and not supernatural in any way, and has promising applications (such as AlphaGo and self driving car).
By the way, to understand what you mean by consciousness, do you consider yourself conscious when sleeping?
Consciousness is that thing that allows me to make a sandwich when I get up in the morning, so as not to die of hunger. How do you like this short and concrete definition?
The magic of consciousness happens when there are: 1- an agent, 2- the world around it, 3- self replication and evolution, that give the main thrust of purpose to the agent, the purpose of self replication being recurrent, it is just more self replication.
For example:
1. Why loop in RL produces consciousness and other kids of loops don't?
2. In the "perception -> judgement -> action -> reward" loop, how these different parts are qualitatively different. If you remove action, does consciousness stop?
4. Following that definition even the simplest LR robot of few hundred lines would be conscious and more complex industrial robot with advanced machine vision would not be.
Because it helps in selecting and carrying out actions, that are necessary for maximizing rewards. In real life, reward == more life, so, by natural selection, consciousness is that function that preserves the body.
> If you remove action, does consciousness stop?
If you remove actions, there would be no purpose to be learned by the agent, so it would not form values, so it would not have emotion. It would be just a feed-forward perception system that does not develop any response to anything.
> Following that definition even the simplest LR robot of few hundred lines would be conscious and more complex industrial robot with advanced machine vision would not be.
I'd say consciousness depends on the game the agent is playing, but there is always a kind of consciousness as long as the agent can answer adaptively to changing situations and learn to act better with time.
Would plants be conscious under that definition?
In complex organisms, gene regulatory networks coordinate the development of the body and internal organs. So it has the complexity necessary for consciousness, it's just a small size chemical-based consciousness, but the main ingredients are present - sensing, acting, learning and a goal - to maximize its own life and replicate, and let's not forget the most essential one - it is part of the world, which guides its evolution.
(2) does anyone in epigenetics share this view?
If your position is that those questions are meaningless, that's fine, but since they are a well-accepted part of the 'problem', you have to call that out explicitly rather than just ignore them.
You can't. Information is physical. Matter irreducibly contains information: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3327
What you need to do is get over the prejudice that information processing is undesirable as an explanation for consciousness.
There seems little need to posit consciousness as some irreducible property of matter, except for those who are mysteriously uncomfortable with the idea of being purely physical beings. Most arguments against physicalism are smoke and mirrors.
As for specifically what physical process produces consciousness, it's an open question that's being studied. We're currently like Ada Lovelace studying a web browser and marvelling at what it does, having little idea how it actually works, yet we're mostly convinced it's not magic. I think you'd be more forgiving if Miss Lovelace took some time trying to reverse engineer the operation of a computer and it's program.
Personally, I think [1] is a great starting point on this journey. The problem of apparent subjectivity was a huge stumbling block, and I think that paper is a great stab at it.
[1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
I can't answer the ultimate skeptic except to say that not only do skeptical arguments against knowledge depend on that very same knowledge, and so undermine themselves, but even if that were not so, abstract musings will never be more plausible than the concrete reality staring you in the face.
The point is that subjective phenomena are the most basic facts of my existence, so it's not even meaningful for me to explain (or worse, deny) them with respect to (in favor of) things I extrapolated from them.
I think last time you didn't agree that subjective phenomena were the most immediate facts of my experience. If that's still the case, perhaps I can try to be more precise.
The question is whether human subjectivity actually is true first person, irreducible subjectivity, or just an illusion of it.
Consider the analogy to sight: seeing is believing right? And yet, at some point you'll see an optical illusion whose logical properties are simply inconsistent with other properties you've seen. Like how water appears to break pencils [1]. So how do you reconcile this? Clearly seeing can't always entail believing.
Enter science. As I linked elsewhere in this thread, science can explain fake subjectivity quite well. So your choice would seem to be throwing away our best tool for objective knowledge just to preserve some special property of human minds that ultimately makes no real difference.
When you're having a dream, it is all an illusion (of the first kind), but to conclude that you are therefore not experiencing anything whatsoever and thus there's nothing to explain would be a grave mistake. You're not blacked out, and no amount of reasoning would make it so.
The same holds here, no matter how much more consistent this reality appears to be.
> When you're having a dream, it is all an illusion (of the first kind)
How would you characterize a dream in which friends or family members are present? Are these not "facts about an external reality"? Presumably, you aren't dreaming about my family members, as you have never met them.
Yet here I am, dreaming about them for some reason. I would argue this is due to the "external reality" where my family members exist and I have interacted with them.
From these sorts of examples, we can conclude that whatever we think we are experiencing might not be what we are actually experiencing -- but crucially, not that we are therefore not experiencing anything whatsoever. The visual experience of a broken pencil doesn't stop happening just because you know it's not really a broken pencil. It keeps happening but means something else.
If you are dead honest with yourself, and drop all your metaphysics for a moment, you will discover that various things certainly seem to be happening (sights, sounds, thoughts, etc.). Try it right now! This "sheer fact" deserves an explanation, and though logical and metaphysical games can produce the explanation "there's nothing there to explain," many people don't consider that any kind of explanation. (Furthermore, I hypothesize that for those that do consider it a valid explanation, spending more time in that "dead honest" state, where there's minimal conceptualization of one's experience, will slowly eat away at their confidence in the usefulness of the "explanation." Conversely, thinking harder and harder about it may indeed bolster it.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15245740
I'm curious what you think of it.
The trouble I have is that "modeling" can happen in the absence of what I'm calling "experience." Given that one can happen without the other, they cannot be equivalent.
So the trouble always seems to come back to giving a formal definition for "experience." I admit that I can't, but I can give a procedure (roughly, meditation) that seems to get other people to a point where they say "oh, that."
For a particular reason that I seem unable to communicate, at that point it becomes less meaningful to say that experience is "caused by" physical things as opposed to merely correlated with them. The more clearly I see what it is I'm trying to explain, the more clear it becomes why there's an "explanatory gap."
I'm sure this is terribly unsatisfying and sounds like hand-waving woo, and I'm sorry I can't do better right now.
This is the big claim. I'm highly skeptical.
The way I see it, the self-modeling that occurs in biological organisms _is_ the conscious experience. They are one and the same. Each momentary, instantaneous experience is the latest output of the self-modeling process.
As another angle, this seems closely related to identity. I see identity as being intertwined with, perhaps even stemming from, the accumulated impact and memory of these models. At least, the portions that refer to us. The boundaries can be quite fuzzy -- we are partially defined by our friends, etc.
Each instantaneous model changes the brain a bit, and over time this process constructs one's identity (starting with a tiny kernel at birth)
In summary, maybe we can say that "I" is simply the brain's current best guess at what the entity that houses it actually is, and that conscious experience is the brain's best guess at what this "I" is currently experiencing (caveat: these guesses are biased towards survival -- accuracy is not the only concern).
> but I can give a procedure (roughly, meditation) that seems to get other people to a point where they say "oh, that."
Meditation is very interesting. I've done some, and I'd like to dig into it more. However, I interpret the experience differently.
> I'm sure this is terribly unsatisfying and sounds like hand-waving woo, and I'm sorry I can't do better right now.
Not at all! I'm enjoying the discussion. Thanks for being frank.
>> The trouble I have is that "modeling" can happen in the absence of what I'm calling "experience."
> This is the big claim. I'm highly skeptical.
Sure, it depends on what the word "modeling" means. The way I've always used it, it applies to lots of existing systems, including robots. Are they conscious? Maybe. I don't know. It seems easy to build a very simple system that trivially "models" itself. Does that mean it's conscious?
> As another angle, this seems closely related to identity.
As it happens, (lack of) identity is a critical realization on the Buddhist path (among others). If we look carefully enough, we can't find one. Instead, we find something like this. Take a perception like sound. Instead of discovering a self that hears it, it's more like the sound itself is made of the sheer fact of subjectivity; i.e., "made of" consciousness. There is no "I" that is conscious (though of course the concept still remains useful). Instead, consciousness is that property which [everything I could possibly call or think of as] the world is "made of."
> Meditation is very interesting. I've done some, and I'd like to dig into it more. However, I interpret the experience differently.
That's fair. There are different ways and degrees of doing it.
Ultimately, I think the distinction comes down to whether we treat "consciousness" as an abstract, objective property (that I assume others have), or this "sheer fact of subjectivity" that seems impossible to communicate (that I can know I have). One of these I'm happy to reduce to other objective properties, and the other I am not.
No, it would not be. I think everyone agrees what humans can do is fairly distinct (and many animals, to a much lesser degree). If it wasn't clear, I'm arguing it can be understood as an incredibly sophisticated form of modeling. A toy system can have a model of itself, but it will be a very weak and limited model with essentially no broader context. The models that the human brain constructs are immensely richer, with many orders of magnitude more complexity. I would argue that significant awareness requires this depth and richness.
> Take a perception like sound. Instead of discovering a self that hears it, it's more like the sound itself is made of the sheer fact of subjectivity; i.e., "made of" consciousness.
We are now getting into territory that feels more difficult to address. I don't know how to meaningfully interpret this claim that sound itself is made of consciousness. Do you mean to say that the phenomenon going on in the human brain is the actually same thing that is occurring in a wave of air molecules? I'd be curious to see what evidence you believe there is for this idea, beyond your personal meditation sessions.
As for the "made of" stuff, let me try a different tack. Sorry, wall of text coming.
For a moment, I want you to be as profoundly skeptical as you can. For example, you cannot be certain that matter, space, etc. exist. This could all be a dream, or illusion, or simulation, etc.
But notice that there is something you can be certain of. For example, if you close your eyes and listen to a sound (ideally a continuous one), you can be certain that sound is happening. But of course, we're being skeptical, so we better reduce that to "something is happening." Or if that's not skeptical enough, "it seems like something is happening." Be as skeptical as you can, and notice that there is still "something" that you simply cannot meaningfully doubt.
(At this point, sometimes people think "oh, well maybe it's not really happening," and in a certain philosophical sense, that's useful. But no matter how much philosophizing you do, still, there that [something/nothing/whatever-you-feel-like-naming-it] is. I don't know how better to put this.)
What is it I'm certain of? It's the happening-ness of it. Put another way, my conscious experience of it. To say "it is happening" is to say "I am conscious of it." Somehow, its very "existence" is inseparable from "my consciousness of it." Two descriptions of the same "sheer subjective fact." In this sense, "sound" refers to a particular modulation of this property called "consciousness," almost as though (get ready for woo!) consciousness were an energetic property that manifests as sight, sound, smells, thoughts, emotions, memories, etc.
This property is literally the only thing I've ever encountered. I'm willing to entertain various metaphysical explanations for the patterns it makes (generally known as "physical reality") but those hypothetical constructs are forever secondary for me. I can never know if they really exist, and find myself unable to reduce a certain phenomenon to uncertain phenomena.
I realize how nonsensical this sounds. Why couldn't the whole above story be some nonsense my (real, physical) brain is concocting? I don't have a good answer.
Totally with you on this.
> What is it I'm certain of? It's the happening-ness of it. Put another way, my conscious experience of it. To say "it is happening" is to say "I am conscious of it."
Still with you. Although being skeptical, I would say we should be quite careful in how much we are implying with a phrase like "I am conscious of it".
> In this sense, "sound" refers to a particular modulation of this property called "consciousness," almost as though (get ready for woo!) consciousness were an energetic property that manifests as sight, sound, smells, thoughts, emotions, memories, etc.
Thanks for the "woo" warning :). This is definitely where you lose me! I can't find any reason to make that jump. I don't see how that conclusion follows, or what reason there is to think that is the case.
For me, it is much simpler to assume (with some fundamental caveats) that what we see is what we get, especially if we are able to test it from many different angles and with many different tools of measurement. I understand that these tools are limited, but they can still tell us a great deal. In the domains where science can't make strong statements, I willingly lean back on accumulated human wisdom (but with a skeptical eye).
At the end of the day, I try to discard as many unsupported assumptions or beliefs as I can when constructing my worldview , to the best of my ability.
> Why couldn't the whole above story be some nonsense my (real, physical) brain is concocting?
This is a very good question. Cheers!
Sure. I'm more or less defining what I mean by "consciousness" in that statement. It is the indisputable fact that (put colloquially) "something seems to be happening." Since we're being skeptical, there's really no phrasing that cannot be disputed, so I can only ask you to do the experiment to see what I might be pointing at. Something definitely seems to be happening, even if in some other sense we might say it is not "actually" happening.
I no longer consider it meaningful to "explain" that definite property in terms of fundamentally uncertain metaphysical concepts like time and space, no matter how likely they appear to be. I appreciate that others may differ here. Thanks for the dialogue!
Almost all of my daily life involves some sort of modeling and planning, which I think is why so many models of consciousness take that as a starting point. But I think it's important to incorporate non-ordinary states if we want to capture the entirety of the concept. (I'm not saying that the brain isn't doing some sort of modeling even when I'm in non-ordinary states, including contentless ones, but it fails to capture the interesting aspects of the phenomenon under question.)
I think it does. Unless you seriously think you dream before you've ever had a single experience? Dreams are memory mashups.
> When you're having a dream, it is all an illusion (of the first kind), but to conclude that you are therefore not experiencing anything whatsoever and thus there's nothing to explain would be a grave mistake.
I've already acknowledged that humans "experience" things, in a colloquial sense.
What's left to explain is whether it's possible to capture what we term "experience" using third-person objective facts. We still need an account of how this happens, so there's plenty left to explain.
Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps we don't disagree in the way I thought. Let me see if I understand our divergence.
Because my experiences have a certain consistency, I infer an objective cause. Because this continues to happen, I become increasingly certain about this model (e.g., materialism). In brief, the way I model reality is the result of a particular configuration of experiences. I then use this model to explain the existence of experience itself. So far I hope we're on the same page.
Where I think the divergence happens is in whether a person considers the inferred model (materialism) or the "sheer phenomenon" (colloquially, "experience") to be more fundamental. I think I understand (and respect) why you and others feel it should be the former. Being the sort of person who spends time relaxing my inferences about reality (i.e., "meditating"), I feel it's the latter.
Anyway, I should probably go spend time doing something else. Apologies if I've mischaracterized your views.
As for closing gaps, do we really expect science to be able to explain everything in terms of some fundamental theory, from quarks to societies? Or maybe in terms of emerging complexity going from chemistry all the way up to social organization?
Certainly consciousness appears to be subjective experience. That doesn't make it so. See: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
> As for closing gaps, do we really expect science to be able to explain everything in terms of some fundamental theory, from quarks to societies?
That certainly seems to be the trend. Every step forward in some field sheds light on other fields, and cross-disciplinary work is becoming ever more relevant.
That's an intriguing article, but it doesn't quite go far enough. It never really explains the experience of red or the smell of a rose, it just posits an attention model for having conscious awareness. It leaves the notion of qualia untouched.
Similar criticisms of Dennett have been made. But it does look promising. What needs to happens is an accompanying mechanistic explanation for the color experience itself.
Baby steps! Consciousness is an onion we'll have to peel apart one layer at a time.
There is no experiment we can construct which will tell us if a particular physical system experiences consciousness, be that a computer, a human brain, or a seemingly inert rock.
Only if you assume the conclusion in thinking consciousness is magic by making first-person subjective experience some irreducible fact of reality.
Your exact same argument would apply to "living matter" too. What distinguishes living matter from non-living matter? Some philosophers made a big stink about how living matter cannot be created from non-living matter, and they invented philosophies to address this question, like vitalism. Where is vitalism now? The same thing will happen with dualistic philosophies of mind.
If experience is irreducible, then something else is. In physics, that would probably be fields. Irreducible doesn't mean magic. It means we can't find anything to reduce it to.
Light is a physical thing. Physical light is interesting/useful because it interacts with physical objects.
Intelligence (or "intelligent behavior"; going to just talk about that and not exclusively-human-level for this comparison before touching "consciousness" here) is usually characterized by the way people/things choose to act. By the information (such as the information encoded in a series of nerve impulses by a brain, or the purchase and sell orders by a trading bot) produced in response to the inputs. A simulation of intelligence that produces the same information in reaction to the same inputs as a different physical implementation shares certain essential qualities that make the simulation of intelligence as interesting as other implementations, as long as you can translate the I/O into physical/worldly interactions. As compared to the much less usefulness (or restricted usefulness) of a simulation of a light bulb (unless you can translate its output into physical form, but the main way we know to do that is with a physical lightbulb or something even more expensive).
Now it's possible that maybe consciousness doesn't share this same substrate-independence as intelligence; I just think there's a likely connection between intelligence and consciousness and that extends to qualities like this.
>Could consciousness gather around local "concentrations" of hyper-connected networks with a lot of feedback circuits in them?
Does it influence then influence the particles to act physically (or virtually) different then? The rules it uses to identify particles to manipulate and the ways it manipulates them would then just be considered a part of physics. (It could be that such a "consciousness field" could enable higher classes of computation that Turing machines are capable of. The natural thing would be to then try to figure out if a computer could be built that takes advantage of the consciousness field. But then... would an algorithm that uses the consciousness field to calculate a specific value and then complete be considered conscious or to have the moral-standing like a human just by virtue of interacting with the consciousness field? What about a computer that produces intelligent behavior and interacts with the consciousness field? I feel like people uncomfortable with this would then propose the existence of an undetected consciousness² field that gives humans something that makes them unique that the computer doesn't interact with, because it seems like that's the main reason to propose a regular consciousness field to begin with.)
If the consciousness field doesn't manipulate the particles but just passively exists near them... Then it can't have anything to do with why we talk about consciousness. Some chain of thought occurs in our brains that results in nerve impulses that makes us open our mouths to talk about "consciousness", and a non-interacting field doesn't have to do with that process by definition. Maybe it could exist separately, but it doesn't provide any answers in conversations we have.
Donald Hoffman also has interesting ideas: https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+hoffman&source=lnms&t...
"There is subjective experience. This is the primary and incontrovertible."
This statement is a fine way of starting a conversation and far from a silly thing to assume as a first pass.
But what happens if we try to square his claim that what he is presenting "avoids any a priori metaphysical assumption or bias" with the need to clarify what he means by "subjective"? Is subjectivity a means of knowing (from the inside)? The phenomenal aspect of consciousness (a rug appearing redly)? A way of categorizing facts (the domain of what can be seen from a perspective)? All that matters for now is that any of these responses will result in his first Grand Fact being completely different. And, further, that any answer will involve theoretical machinery, however implicit it is to most people.
What if we then step to the next word and argue that the concept of "experience" is both dispensable (we can do all explanatory work without it) and adds to confusion (by muddling causal and justificatory dimensions of our behavior) and that we should replace it with a family of more restricted concepts? So much for incontrovertible.
And what if we keep going with the second clause of the statement and counter that nothing, in general, can be primary and incontrovertible (that all concepts must earn their keep in explanation)?
It would be tedious---but easy---to do this for every one of the "facts of nature" which ground his pretty pompous exposition. It's easy to think this sort of response is just being clever, but being comfortable with everything being up for grabs and being more modest about what we are actually doing is really the only way an issue as hazy and messy as consciousness can be seriously approached. The playfulness used by Dennett or Hofstader, for example, is not just superfluous or "mere rhetoric", but essential for the stage of understanding we're at.
An aside: I was only scanning for modest evidence that the author was aware of and responsive to the complexity of the issue to see if it was worth my time to read further, not that he actually explicitly addresses every possible move! Also, his substantive position, as far as I glean it, can still be interesting. FWIW I personally have idealist sympathies (appropriately construed) and think both subjectivity and experience do earn their keep...so far.
This seems to be the only claim I can make that doesn't assume anything. Of course, for that to really be true, I shouldn't even try to formulate it in language (or thought) but then it's hard to communicate.
I suppose the problem is that, without precision, it's impossible to know if we're talking about the same thing, and so we can't make progress. And yet the rest of his argument seems to make sense to me.