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Comment by danidiaz | Hacker News Reader

I find the wording "detecting consciousness" problematic. They are not detecting consciousness as if they were detecting subatomic particles in a cloud chamber, or pollutants in the water; they are just measuring some neural fireworks that they believe coincide in time with the reported subjective experiences of the patients.

Then there's this:

> The current most promising scientific theory of consciousness [...] is Integrated Information Theory (IIT). [...] IIT emphasizes the differentiated and integrated aspect of any subjective experience and postulates that the mechanism supporting conscious experience in the human brain’s neocortex must likewise incorporate these two attributes.

I don't see any reason why the presumed features of our subjective experience should be "reflected" in the physical working of our brains.

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There are two very different things both commonly referred to as consciousness. The first can easily be seen as a 'system' like any other one might study—it's basically the part of our brain that does self-awareness (monitors and reacts to 'lower-level' brain activity). The second usage is about accounting for the existence of qualia/immediate experience (the 'hard problem' of consciousness is reconciling what immediate experience is like with the fact that when we look in brains we only find neurons [basically a restatement of the classic mind-body problem in philosophy, but now with a more narrow/specific aspect of mind deemed problematic]).

I assume the authors are aware of both definitions, but 'consciousness' sounds even more impressive than self-awareness, so...

> I don't see any reason why the presumed features of our subjective experience should be "reflected" in the physical working of our brains.

If subjective experience has absolutely no physical correlates then wouldn't that make it strictly supernatural?

It's a coherent position, but it turns consciousness into an article of religious faith.

Forget religion and consider that the only thing you know for sure is that you exist, because your subjective experience is occurring right now.

The tendency of science is towards naturalism, to the point that anything else is considered nonsense, but who knows what's really happening?

Consciousness connects the symbols with real world, it’s the awareness by understanding abstract concepts and maintaining some model of reality. Without that you wouldn’t be more conscious than a thermometer. So maybe it’s just some self-referring logical model that is totally independent of physical world but at the same time needs the physical world to provide some hosting hardware

You’re describing solipsism.

Consciousness is supernatural and metaphysical by virtue of it existing outside the natural and physical world. This is true even if we could prove that some formations of matter correlated or even had a one-to-one relationship to consciousness. It's easy to see that the experience of, say, reading this post exists nowhere in this physical universe. In fact, consciousness is the only supernatural phenomenon that we know of, and we even have first-hand, moment-to-moment proof of it.

>It's easy to see that the experience of, say, reading this post exists nowhere in this physical universe.

Never mind easy, I can't see the truth of your proposition at all. Why wouldn't my experience exist in this physical universe? Everything else does and we've never found evidence of a single thing that doesn't. That I experience a feeling of existing in no way at all implies it's not based in physics.

> Everything else does and we've never found evidence of a single thing that doesn't.

Right, consciousness seems to be in its own, unique realm in some way.

> That I experience a feeling of existing in no way at all implies it's not based in physics.

That must be some trippy physics. It's probably safest to be agnostic about it, but it just seems absurd to me to imply that a mathematical formula can produce feeling or experience. How can you describe the experience of qualia mathematically? I think this is the Materialist view gone a step too far. Still, can't rule out any possibility if we're searching for the truth.

They said the same thing about flesh. It cannot simply be made of the same material the makes up rocks and sand. But it is. They said the same thing about thoughts, that they are the domain of the soul. But we've now seen that they're entirely physical and measurable constructs. Same was said about mental disorders. Turns out they're physical deficiencies.

Wouldn't we learn at some point to stop presuming complicated things to be non-physical?

Let’s assume it is a physical process. We can then recreate it away from a body. We run the experiment. Something is now experienced. Who is it that experiences?

Either this is begging the question, or you're defining consciousness explicitly as something that doesn't actually exist.

Of course it exists, I am conscious right now and I presume you are, too. But where are our experiences located? Clearly nowhere in the physical universe. It's a really simple thing to grasp if you're not a dogmatic Materialist.

Consciousness is as supernatural as natural numbers. Have you heard about philosophical zombie calculator? It looks and operates exactly like a calculator, but it doesn't perform operations on a subset of natural numbers. Your usual calculator experiences natural numbers and tells you about it by displaying them. In zombie calculator there's darkness inside, it doesn't experience anything.

Yes, I'm mocking some philosophers' views. But I haven't seen strong rebuttals.

To be precise I'm mocking the idea that existence of consciousness can depend on some non-physical condition.

I was thinking in a naturalist way, it's just that the hypothesis seems naive to me. As I read it, it says more than simply "minds are products of brains": it says that certain characteristics of our subjective conscious experience must have "implementations" that mirror those characteristics quite directly.

I suppose computer analogies are cliché, but consider virtual memory: it gives the illusion of a huge contiguous memory space, when in reality the machine has nothing of the sort. Our brains are much more complex than computers and I suspect extrapolating between "abstraction levels" will be even more risky there.

I also don't see why "Integrated Information Theory" with its "formal calculus" is really required for the methodology of studying patterns of neural activity and trying to match them with self-reported states of consciousness.

> I don't see any reason why the presumed features of our subjective experience should be "reflected" in the physical working of our brains.

Except for our entire body of scientific knowledge, and the long, long history of presumption of human uniqueness that were repeatedly refuted. In 50 years, the specialness of human consciousness will join vitalism in the history of quaint ideas.

> I find the wording "detecting light" problematic. They are not detecting light, they are just measuring some pigment changes on a metal plate that they believe coincide in time with the reported subjective experiences of light.

But in the case of light, we are detecting a physical thing that is related by causal chains to the change in pigments.

The relationship between the subjective feeling of consciousness and the measured neural patterns doesn't seem to be of the same nature. When I see the color blue, does that "cause" anything in my brain?

Light is not physical, it is a subjective experience. It doesn't exist except in the mind.

Photons, other various kinds of radiation, do seem to exist outside of minds.

For those who missed it, erikpukinskis is demonstrating that danidiaz's argument proves too much: that is, it works just as well to prove that we can't detect light as consciousness.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/

Should it be reflected in our soul?

Our what now? How would you tell?

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