Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind? | Hacker News Reader

Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind?

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116 pointsHooke276 comments

I find it interesting that Noam Chomsky rejects the mind–body problem as it’s often presented, given that Newton demolished the concept of body, not mind. Below is a relevant passage from the book Optimism Over Despair, in which Chomsky explains his position. I’d appreciate any references that elaborate on this line of thought.

[Interviewer:] The well-known University College London linguist Neil Smith argued in his book Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (Cambridge University Press, 1999) that you put to rest the mind-body problem not by showing that we have a limited understanding of the mind but that we cannot define what the body is. What can he possibly mean by this?

[Chomsky:] I wasn’t the person who put it to rest. Far from it. Isaac Newton did. Early modern science, from Galileo and his contemporaries, was based on the principle that the world is a machine, a much more complex version of the remarkable automata then being constructed by skilled craftsmen, which excited the scientific imagination of the day, much as computers and information processing do today. The great scientists of the time, including Newton, accepted this “mechanical philosophy” (meaning the science of mechanics) as the foundation of their enterprise. Descartes believed he had pretty much established the mechanical philosophy, including all the phenomena of body, though he recognized that some phenomena lay beyond its reach, including, crucially, the “creative aspect of language use” described above. He therefore, plausibly, postulated a new principle—in the metaphysics of the day, a new substance, res cogitans, “thinking substance, mind.” His followers devised experimental techniques to try to determine whether other creatures had this property, and like Descartes, were concerned to discover how the two substances interacted.

Newton demolished the picture. He demonstrated that the Cartesian account of body was incorrect and, furthermore, that there could be no mechanical account of the physical world: the world is not a machine. Newton regarded this conclusion as so “absurd” that no one of sound scientific understanding could possibly entertain it—though it was true. Accordingly, Newton demolished the concept of body (material, physical, and so on), in the form that it was then understood, and there really is nothing to replace it, beyond “whatever we more or less understand.” The Cartesian concept of mind remained unaffected. It has become conventional to say that we have rid ourselves of the mysticism of “the ghost in the machine.” Quite the contrary: Newton exorcised the machine while leaving the ghost intact, a consequence understood very well by the great philosophers of the period, like John Locke.

Locke went on to speculate (in the accepted theological idiom) that just as God had added to matter properties of attraction and repulsion that are inconceivable to us (as demonstrated by “the judicious Mr. Newton”), so he might have “superadded” to matter the capacity of thought. The suggestion (known as “Locke’s suggestion”) in the history of philosophy was pursued extensively in the eighteenth century, particularly by philosopher and chemist Joseph Priestley, adopted by Darwin, and rediscovered (apparently without awareness of the earlier origins) in contemporary neuroscience and philosophy.

There is much more to say about these matters, but that, in essence, is what Smith was referring to. Newton eliminated the mind-body problem in its classic Cartesian form (it is not clear that there is any other coherent version), by eliminating body, leaving mind intact. (191–192)

That's fascinating. How did Newton "eliminate body" and demonstrate that "the world is not a machine"? Chomsky must be referring to specific texts here. Anybody know what they are?

I think Chomsky is referring to gravity’s action at a distance, which Newton regarded to be absurd. I’ve heard Chomsky say that, after Newton, “physical” has come to mean “what we more or less understand” — that is, the physical is no longer identical to the material (body), in the sense of a world filled with nothing but billiard ball–like atoms bumping into each other. In the quotation above, Chomsky says that John Locke understood these points, so it may be worth looking at his work.

Chomsky defends monism in regards to the mind-body problem. For him there is no coherent distinction between a physical body and a non-physical mind, there is no clear boundary between what is physical and what is not physical.

He takes Newton's gravity as an example. In the traditional mechanistic worldview 'bodies' or objects interact like cogs in a machine by direct contact with each other. With the discovery of gravity the material realm was expanded to forces like gravity which operate at distances, or electromagnetism which doesn't describe things in terms of physical objects but rather immaterial rules.

So according to Chomsky the definition of what is 'physical' kept expanding and became more and more abstract, and our view of the world has very little to do with the mechanical clockwork world of earlier centuries.

I'd have to agree with Chomsky. It would be tremendously difficult to contort ones thinking greatly enough to be able to explain things like why those who suffer total facial paralysis lose the ability to feel anger, then the ability to recall what feeling anger was like, then the ability to recognize anger in other people and other similar body-mind interactions while still holding on to some idea of there being a "non-physical mind" in the manner usually proposed. In my own opinion, 'mind' is a property, not a thing. You need a thing to exhibit the property, just like you can't simply have a box full of "hot" without some material exhibiting it, and consciousness is a property we're sure human brains can have (by definition if nothing else). Going beyond that is difficult, and you're guaranteed to fail if the first thing you do is seek to eliminate all the material while trying to retain the property.

I am unaware of what Newton wrote to 'demolish the body', but I wonder if it is related to chaos theory, complexity, and similar intractable interconnections that limit pure reductionist mechanical understandings of things. We don't quite know how to bridge the gap from "we know we can not discount even the smallest detail without predictions deviating" to "yet we can predict complex systems with reductionist views and attain great accuracy if we restrict how much accuracy we want." Those two things are both true, and seem to be in direct conflict with one another. Should we ever be able to bridge that gap, it would probably herald a new golden age and be a far more important development than anything that has come before.

"to be able to explain things like why those who suffer total facial paralysis lose the ability to feel anger, then the ability to recall what feeling anger was like, then the ability to recognize anger in other people"

I have never heard of this before and I can find no information about this on the internet. I know people who have had facial paralysis (my uncle had MND and lost everything) and they were really really angry (at times) and I do not remembering that they lost empathy when I was interacting with them. My uncle struggled to express himself when using the eye tracker, but the last time I saw him he made jokes and asked me about my daughter, I think that that's empathic.

I originally read about the phenomenon years ago in a (audio)book, but I cannot recall which one. It may have been one of Oliver Sacks' books, or part of a course from The Teaching Company or the Great Courses Plus. They discussed related research that claimed to have found strong evidence for depression in patients paralyzed from the neck down which was greater than the life changes and such could account for. I was never clear on how they could possibly manage to separate the things to be able to make such a claim and the facial paralysis emotional involvement seemed to make much more sense. There is a great deal of evidence already linking facial involvement to emotion, such as the classic study where participants held a pencil in their teeth, which causes an involuntary 'smile', lessening the negative emotional response when watching sad videos, so it seemed to be reasonable.

It's not that the people become un-empathetic, but literally when shown a photograph of a face expressing the emotion of anger, they can not identify that it is the emotion being displayed. That is the most extreme extent that takes the longest to manifest as I understand it. If a person told them "I am angry" or there were other outward displays (raised voice, etc), I don't doubt they would deal with it appropriately. Issues with recognizing emotions in others based on facial expressions are not all that rare. It is very commonly found in men who abuse others that they are incapable of recognizing the expression of fear in the face of those they are abusing.

I managed to find one related study that you might find interesting reading, though I hope to find better resources eventually: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamafacialplasticsurgery/fu...

My personal view is that this paper is probably closest to being correct about the nature of emotion and the body: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S136...

I feel the same way....after reading that, I feel like I have no idea what was demolished, or how. (Not meant as a criticism btw, just saying.)

Old school materialism was demolished in which the world is basically made up of the substances we perceive. Instead, we find out that solid objects are mostly empty space, forces are fields acting over a distance, Relativity has counter intuitive results for time, space and mass, and QM demonstrates that matter and energy behave in spooky ways.

The material world went from something solid we could touch, see, smell, etc. to something ghostly and mathematically abstract. Scientists call it physical.

The old material world turns out to be largely an illusion of our senses and minds, replaced by physical theories. Plato's cave is inverted. The scientist wonders outside the cave of the solid objects to find ghostly forms instead.

Chomsky discusses this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aydw2neS1W8&feature=youtu.be...

Mechanical: the contact theory, that one thing can only affect another by being in contact with it e.g. the teeth of gears.

Unfortunately, gravity ("spooky action at a distance") does not require contact, so the mechanical theory fails. Which can be stated figuratively as "the world is not a machine".

"The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding: Newton's contributions to the study of mind" at the University of Oslo, September 2011 https://youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0

I've read Chomsky's opinion on this before in his essay ""Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding", and I think he misunderstands the physics.

He seems to think Newton accidentally disproved the concept of locality through his theory of gravity. It's true that philosophers largely gave up on locality in the 18th century because of Newton, but that was only temporary: In the 19th century the principle of locality came back with a vengance after Maxwell.

Today the principle of locality is a key component of the Standard model: The Hamiltonian of the standard model is local, meaning you can compute what happens at a point in spacetime knowing only what is going on in an infinitesimal region around it. Even outside the standard model, LIGO proved that graviational waves exist, and therefore gravity is a local phenomenon.

Einstein was famously prepared to give up on quantum mechanics because it seemed to violate the principle of locality, which he thought was more important. That is still debated sometimes, though whether quantum nonlocality exists seems to be a matter of interpretation and is also different from the kind of locality chomsky is talking about. Locality is still a key principle in physics.

> what is going on in an infinitesimal region around it

A "field" is just a name for spooky action at a distance. It's a description, not an explanation. There is no mechanical contact, only "locality" of a field.

Or are you saying that fields are really mediated by particles... so there is mechanical contact?

People call these thing gravitons but they are particles in the sense that light and electricity are particle based - which is to say that in the limit it turns out that a discrete particle doesn't describe everything that's happening and some wave like properties in space and time are a good fit too. The particles are sort of like a manifestation or a partial mathematical description of the thing that's underneath. The particle is an excitation of a field - all particles are, so mechanical interactions reduce to fields. The thing to remember is that your intuitive and perceptual apparatus was largely evolved to help you get fruit in a forest, and later to help you catch rabbits and shell fish. The ideas that are obvious are approximations that allow you to navigate the world of the past - but they are not "right".

Yes, forces transmitted through fields act "at a distance", but is that really "spooky"? Do you think it is "spooky" that if you make a wave at one end of a pond, the wave reaches the other end? I don't. I consider the propagation of waves to be a "local" non-spooky phenomenon.

Disturbances in a field propagate through space similarly. A disturbance of the field at a point only affects the value of the field in the immediate spacetime surroundings, just like a water wave. I would call that "local" and non-spooky. Whether or not there is "mechanical contact", whatever that means, is irrelevant.

This is in contrast to Newton's theory of gravity, where the force of gravity was spookily felt instantaneously across space.

> A disturbance of the field at a point only affects the value of the field in the immediate spacetime surroundings, just like a water wave.

Ok, I see that's local (though not mechanical, as you say).

I think a magnetic field (as from a magnet, not a wave) is not local though? So, the transmissiin of modulation is "local", but the field itself is "at a distance"?

When you move the magnet, the field change takes a while to propogate outwards. So, yes also local

Non-locality in QM is directly implied by Bell’s inequality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

No it isn't. There is still plenty of debate about the philosophical implications of Bells' inequality.

See for example this 2014 PNAS article "Quantum nonlocality does not exist": http://www.pnas.org/content/111/31/11281

You can find plenty more if you google. I personally agree with the ideas of that paper in a broad sense if not in detail, as do many people.

Second, if you are trying to argue that locality is no longer a guiding principle, note how the standard model is quantum-mechanical so obeys bell's inequality, yet we still call it "local". Locality was a key guiding principle of the standard model.

Gravity is not spooky action at a distance, Einstein showed us how the fabric of space time implements Gravity in a mechanistic way. Some quantum processes (I don't dare to elaborate - read Wikipedia and then do 6 years of physics to find out more!) are referred to as "spooky action as a distance" or non locality. This is simply not understood - hence the bloody bloody Copenhagen interpretation and the bloody bloody people who chant "look at my sums it's all fine and I have no responsibility to understand and because I can't I will try and stop anyone who wants to".

I feel bad about all of this. And ignorant, but I am confident that Gravity is a mechanistic force. And I think that the jury is out about the world as a machine, but as far as I know everything that we understand about it is mechanistic. The other bits may be non-mechanistic, but we may never understand that.

I think one question here is to ask where are the machines in the universe that are not equivalent to a (near) Turing machine? As far as I know all physical processes that are understood are equivalent to a UTM, the ones that aren't understood may or may not turn out to be, but I don't know of any examples.

Another question is to ask what calculations / inferences are intractable when implemented on a UTM and yet can be performed by humans - I mean exact calculations, not guesses that are mostly right (I'm happy that humans are allowed to make errors, but the process must be transparently able to produce exact correct results). Some people claim that mathematicians can create insights that could not be done on a machine, but I have never heard of a specific example and I think that things are running backwards here. Now machines are creating proofs that humans don't understand.

The conference sounds like a nightmare for serious scientists and philosophers. Consciousness is a broad term with lots of nuances - (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/consciou... presents a good summary). Following unconventional and novel approaches to understanding consciousness are fine, but the Deepak Chopra style dancing on the linguistic vagueness is infuriating. I am glad I did not attend this conference and instead opted to present some ideas at ASSC conference later this month.

Wondering if you might offer some advice:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274812

Thanks for the link. It reminded me of an idea I'd heard before, that some speculate there was no consciousness until Hellenic times. I find that idea absurd and even offensive. I believe and we have evidence to support that we are really not that different than people in ancient times, with the same drives for violence, happiness, children, nurturing, trying to understand the universe. To think that until that time people didn't wonder about their place, or try to figure out what the world might mean and ponder the self. It has just struck me as the most amazing, unfair world view that we are better in the modern world, smarter, etc.

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 don't think you need to invoke an essentially mysterious "conscious" property of the mind to explain that.

People used to make this same argument about why things fall to the ground when you let go of them. "Is it really surprising? Why wouldn't they just fall down? What kind of answer do you want?". You have to allow yourself to be puzzled by things.

So yes, it is surprising. You don't seem to understand the most basic principles underlying the so-called hard problem. Nowhere in your description about "complex things" and "integrating" and "complicated external stimuli" and "communicating about its state" have you even attempted to point out why it actually DOES feel like something to be that system. Why does all this stuff actually lead to the feeling of pain, or intense grief, or pleasure, or anything at all. That is the fundamental mystery - why does it feel like anything at all when this "stuff" happens, and what is the nature of the feelings themselves. There are tons of mysteries here that you can't gloss over by saying "well why wouldn't it??".

I am very familiar with the literature on the hard problem. It's remarkable how often people respond to this line of argument by putting the words "feeling" or "understanding" in italics. I don't know what kind of causal explanation you want for pain or grief. They are processes in an organism, and we construct models of the self to help us get through the day, as Dennett has elucidated many teams.

To answer your first question: I believe in puzzles, not mysteries. When we don't know how something works (like a spray bottle), we call it a puzzle, unless it challenges some sacred theological or humanist tenets, in which case we call it a mystery. I don't agree with the comparison to gravity --- mechanics has well defined and refined concepts that allow us to create more general and parsimonious models with precision. "Consciousness" and "feeling" and "experience" are folk terms with neither a precise definition nor a clear process for arriving at a precise definition.

> To answer your first question: I believe in puzzles, not mysteries. When we don't know how something works (like a spray bottle), we call it a puzzle, unless it challenges some sacred theological or humanist tenets, in which case we call it a mystery.

Rather than the boundary between the biological and "non-biological" brain, I am interested in the notion or aspect of consciousness that relates to why people behave the way they do, think the way they think, and are not only largely oblivious to it (the idea of examining behavior and the ~motivations behind it) but commonly hostile to it, sometimes extremely so. Or even more interestingly, the ability to easily notice the behavior in others, but utterly incapable of seeing the same thing in oneself.

For someone that has no background in the subject, would Dennett be a good place to start, or could you suggest any other names?

> "Consciousness" and "feeling" and "experience" are folk terms with neither a precise definition nor a clear process for arriving at a precise definition.

I agree, but I "feel" like this is where progress can be made (unless, it already has and I'm simply not aware of it).

An attempt to give a hint at the aspects that I'm thinking of: reality, at least as far as humans perceive it, consists of observations of physical events, or at least we know that much for sure. One thing that the layman overlooks is that there are far more observable dimensions involved in reality than are commonly discussed, some of which I suspect are easily observable to some people, but practically invisible to others (a terrible analogy might be how humans can see one segment of the light spectrum, while other mammals can see others, and machines can see more). Similar to the formerly "invisible" portions of the light spectrum, are there other "dimensions" (for lack of not knowing a more proper term) that we can't currently observe, but with the proper experiments, consistently and with decent accuracy "detect", which might lead us in more specific directions when studying the mind? For example, if we can identify a highly reproducible but currently completely unexplained phenomenon (behavior, reaction, etc) common across large quantities of people (but perhaps not among other groups), might ML algorithms run on brain scans of subjects under these conditions find anything interesting? (Possibly relevant: Moran Cerf: "Decoding Thoughts and Dreams Using In-Brain Electrodes" | Talks at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVj3sU37gdI)

I also realize this may very well be a very stupid idea, so anything substantiating that possibility is also welcome.

EDIT: Or, another different way of thinking about it is, an attempt to form an aggregate (across all people & cultures) definition/enumeration of self-awareness.

> I am interested in the notion or aspect of consciousness that relates to why people behave the way they do, think the way they think, and are not only largely oblivious to it (the idea of examining behavior and the ~motivations behind it) but commonly hostile to it, sometimes extremely so. Or even more interestingly, the ability to easily notice the behavior in others, but utterly incapable of seeing the same thing in oneself.

I completely agree that this is maybe the most interesting general field of inquiry out there, I just think that the consciousness literature/debate has almost nothing of interest to say on it. I think the fields of interest are evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, and at a higher level the interface between sociology and behavioural psychology.

>a terrible analogy might be how humans can see one segment of the light spectrum, while other mammals can see others, and machines can see more

I like analogies like this and am totally on board with you here. But again, things like 'Mary's Room' are not at all interesting or detailed addresses to this when we know so much about how brains and bodies and artificial neural networks can hold and use so many kinds of knowledge at different levels.

You're getting kind of towards Penrose territory at the end there with suggesting that there could be senses or phenomenologies that we currently know nothing of the mechanisms of. I agree that this is true in principle but I think that the evidence that we have from biology and from artificial intelligence suggests that we could probably explain all of our abilities just with physical properties that we already understand. I wouldn't rule out some quantum component though. I think that it's likely the problem is one of scale and complexity rather than a qualitatively new kind of process. The brain is not only huge but is designed by a messy ad-hoc evolutionary process that is hostile to interpretation by our own reflexive symbolic investigation, and I'd say that's where the difficulty lies. I completely agree with your line of thinking though.

> I like analogies like this and am totally on board with you here. But again, things like 'Mary's Room' are not at all interesting or detailed addresses to this when we know so much about how brains and bodies and artificial neural networks can hold and use so many kinds of knowledge at different levels.

Mary's Room demonstrates that's there's more to knowing the world than just third person descriptions. There's also experience.

Whether you want to call experience a form of knowledge, or something else like an ability is the crux of whether that particular argument works or not, since it's based on whether knowing all the physical facts leaves some knowledge out (experiential).

But I think it works to show that our physical theories of the world can't capture our experience of the world, because one is abstract and mathematical, and the other is how we perceive and feel. So nothing about biology, physics or ANNs bridges that gap, I don't think, since they're expressed in third person terminology. That's the hard problem.

> I completely agree that this is maybe the most interesting general field of inquiry out there, I just think that the consciousness literature/debate has almost nothing of interest to say on it. I think the fields of interest are evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, and at a higher level the interface between sociology and behavioural psychology.

Based on what little I know, I would agree, but lots of obviously knowledgeable people in the thread so thought I'd throw a line out there.

> Mary's room

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

"Roughly thirty years later, Feigl expresses a similar notion. He concerns himself with a Martian, studying human behavior, but lacking human sentiments. Feigl says: "...the Martian would be lacking completely in the sort of imagery and empathy which depends on familiarity (direct acquaintance) with the kinds of qualia to be imaged or empathized" "

Yes, this is exactly the "neighborhood" I'm thinking of (whether or not Mary's room is useful to me or not).

"Nagel takes a slightly different approach. In an effort to make his argument more adaptable and relatable, he takes the stand of humans attempting to understand the sonar capabilities of bats. Even with the entire physical database at one's fingertips, humans would not be able to fully perceive or understand a bat's sonar system, namely what it is like to perceive something with a bat's sonar."

This is another good example, although again not very useful in and of itself. This is the "type" of thing I'm thinking about though, one might comparing it to Human "feelings". Now, it's easy for a "math minded" person to casually discount or handwave away an individual person's "feelings" as some sort of a delusion, mental flaw, lack of education, etc. This is my natural tendency as well. But the older I get, the more I am beginning to think that this thinking will eventually be discovered to be incorrect. Something seems missing to me.

> but I think that the evidence that we have from biology and from artificial intelligence suggests that we could probably explain all of our abilities just with physical properties that we already understand

Oh sure, that's fine. I see that as the underlying mechanism, which is also important, but I'm not interested in that aspect of it. The resulting consequences, the nature and classification/understanding/deconstruction of consciousness, or more specifically quantifying human behavior, is all I'm interested in gaining a better understanding of.

I can't imagine the specific idea I have in mind is novel in any way, but whether anyone has considered it interesting enough to pursue (among all the other competing interesting ideas in this space) is what I'm trying to figure out.

This Mary's Room discussion may not be the exact topic I'm looking for, but it references the sorts of things I'm interested in.

So, it seems our choices are:

Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkʷaːlɪs]) meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in a specific instance like "what it is like to taste a specific orange, this particular orange now". Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to "propositional attitudes",[1] where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that qualia was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us"

Physicalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism

In philosophy, physicalism is the ontological thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical,[1] or that everything supervenes on the physical.[2] Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality as opposed to a "two-substance" (dualism) or "many-substance" (pluralism) view. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.

Epiphenomenalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism

Physicalism x -1 -->

Pluralism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(philosophy)

Pluralism is a term used in philosophy, meaning "doctrine of multiplicity", often used in opposition to Monism ("doctrine of unity") and Dualism ("doctrine of duality"). The term has different meanings in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and logic. In metaphysics, Pluralism is the doctrine that - contrary to the assertions of Monism and Dualism - there are in fact many different substances in Nature that constitute Reality.

--> Substance Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_theory

Substance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears.[1]

--> Thing-in-itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing-in-itself

Kant argued the sum of all objects, the empirical world, is a complex of appearances whose existence and connection occur only in our representations.[2] Kant introduces the thing-in-itself as follows: And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something.

It's very easy for someone in no background in philosophy to get lost in a rabbit hole of interesting definitions, and then along the way you completely forget why you're doing this in the first place.

So, let's start over from a different angle...

Love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love

Love encompasses a variety of different emotional and mental states, typically strongly and positively experienced, ranging from the most sublime virtue or good habit, the deepest interpersonal affection and to the simplest pleasure.[1][2] An example of this range of meanings is that the love of a mother differs from the love of a spouse differs from the love of food. Most commonly, love refers to a feeling of strong attraction and emotional attachment.[3] Love can also be a virtue representing human kindness, compassion, and affection, as "the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another".[4] It may also describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, one's self or animals.[5]

Alexithymia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia

Alexithymia /ˌeɪlɛksəˈθaɪmiə/ is a personality construct characterized by the subclinical inability to identify and describe emotions in the self.[1] The core characteristics of alexithymia are marked dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relating.[2] Furthermore, people with alexithymia have difficulty in distinguishing and appreciating the emotions of others, which is thought to lead to unempathic and ineffective emotional responding.[2] Alexithymia occurs in approximately 10% of the population and can occur with a number of psychiatric conditions.[3]

Frisson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson

Frisson (French for 'shiver') is a sensation somewhat like shivering, usually caused by stimuli other than cold. It is typically expressed as an overwhelming emotional response combined with piloerection (goosebumps). Stimuli that produce a response are specific to the individual.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

Listening to emotionally moving music is the most common trigger of frisson, but some feel it while looking at beautiful artwork, watching a particularly moving scene in a movie, or having physical contact with another person. Studies have shown that roughly two-thirds of the population feels frisson.

Where I'm going from here is basically, "So what?".

Roughly, the important idea I'm trying to get at is: what is the significance of all these ideas. Frisson is a particularly interesting phenomenon, in that different people feel it in response to very different things, and some people literally can't feel it at all!

Now take love....very similar phenomenon, but even more powerful, by far. Also, it is experienced vastly differently by (and, like Frisson, not felt by everyone).

So what?

Well, I think all of this is fundamental to the human experience, but more importantly, it is a fundamental root cause of why people can't get along (and recently, really really really can't get along).

So what?

Well, I wonder if maybe we can go a long way to fixing this problem of societal disunity if these ideas could somehow be summarized and effectively communicated to people. I think lots of people would be understanding/accepting of the premise, and lots wouldn't. Some would be hostile in various ways, and for various reasons (some honest and understandable, some evil). Of those who understand and appreciate the principle though, how many would "really get it". Sure, they could appreciate on an intellectual level, but "really getting it" is on the level of frisson and love. Is there a way to get people to that higher level? Why yes....yes there is.

I am going to push save now in case someone is still here and sees where I'm going with all this, and may know of any resources along this same theme.

To be continued....

"reality, at least as far as humans perceive it, consists of observations of physical events, or at least we know that much for sure."

Curious: would you say that your dreams are observations of physical events? Can you be sure that this isn't a dream? All we know is that we have experiences, and that it's a reasonable guess that something called "physical reality" is behind those experiences.

> would you say that your dreams are observations of physical events?

Current understanding is that dreams are a side effect of variational model selection. See Hobson, J. A., & Friston, K. J. (2012). Waking and dreaming consciousness: Neurobiological and functional considerations. Progress in Neurobiology, 98(1), 82–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2012.05.003

> brain scans of subjects under these conditions find anything interesting

It is certainly possible, but currently not practical. Imaging technologies have limited spatiotemporal resolutions and coverage areas. Direct electrode reading are too intrusive, and so on. There is limited understanding of which brain areas might contribute to certain complex behavior so we might have to measure entire brain's activity. We don't know what resolution is useful - each spike or firing frequency or only dynamics (changes), etc. If we assume the availability of whole brain scan at spike resolution over extended time periods, theoretically a regression type algorithm could figure out relationship between brain activity and behavior. Firmly out of currently technology's reach though.

> definition/enumeration of self-awareness

Philosophers have been working on that for a long time. Some terms are well settled now, even though a term might cover a range of concepts. See that for "consciousness" here - https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/consciou.... This addresses mostly the western thought process and leaves out the eastern concepts. Most eastern concepts are too vague to pin down, though some are concrete enough to provide some insights (e.g. http://heavenmeetsearthyoga.com/news-features/the-meaning-of... matches reasonably well with modern understanding).

Is this based on common sense or intuition, or are you actually familiar enough with the current state of the art AI to say for certain that we actually do need the level of precision you refer to to get anywhere? Of course, the higher the precision the better, but do you know we can't get anywhere without it?

Current state of the art precision has yielded insights at the sensory-motor (e.g. precise understanding of what sensory inputs cause what neural activity) and at subsystem level (e.g. what mental activity "uses" what brain subsystems). I am sure more can be done with existing technology, but a grand unified theory would probably need more precision. It is somewhat akin to attempts at finding the grand unified theory of Physics that works both at quantum and cosmological scales.

I wonder if I did a poor job asking the question. What I'm getting at is, I wonder if common & reproducible brain patterns that might not formerly have been noticeable (perhaps due to a lack of precision when observing them in isolation) might reveal themselves when running assisted deep learning on a large number of subjects' results across a broad but "strictly defined" set of mental experiences that are known to produce "extreme psychological reactions". Might we discover associations (at the brain wave level) between experiences where our current understanding of the brain would not suggest there might be any? Would this type of analysis even need high precision?

Out of curiosity, was it you that downvoted my question? I'm struggling to understand what has changed on HN lately, where purely unopinionated and relevant questions are now very commonly downvoted. It's this type of thing that has caused my curiosity in this area, I'm interested in finding an underlying reason why people increasingly seem to be offended or disagree so strongly with things that only a few years ago were generally considered completely innocuous?

Perhaps it was the tone of the question? But again, I don't think that would have garnered any downvotes on HN 5 years ago - what's changed? Might we be able to detect something in brain activity that could lead us to some new paths to study to explain this widespread behavior?

Possibly related, but not necessarily:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting

https://www.quora.com/In-machine-learning-is-more-data-alway...

The book The Elephant In The Brain touches on this. Short version: effective self-deception is the only way to effectively deceive others, as we as a species have developed very finely tuned bullshit detectors. To recognize and acknowledge your own hidden motives is to ensure that you won't accomplish your evolutionary goals (survival/reproduction), so evolution has generally limited people's ability to gain insight into themselves.

It is entirely unremarkable that people should put "feeling" in italics in order to emphasize it, because it is precisely the thing gets handwavy non-explanations (like yours) from people who refuse to acknowledge the deep mystery (or "puzzle", if you want).

What is remarkable, to the point of comedy, is the reliability with which this refusal is accompanied by one or two sentence explanations that imply a miraculous end to the long, complex philosophical exploration of the mind-body problem that humanity has struggled with for millennia.

"They are processes in an organism, and we construct models of the self to help us get through the day" is one such meaningless explanation. You've answered nothing. You've done nothing. The problem of qualia? The unity problem? The knowledge problem?

The comparison with gravity was indeed unfair, but not in the way you think. It is unfair in that the problems of phenomenology and consciousness are much harder (see Knowledge Problem) because of their resistance to modeling (or any other kind of study that doesn't involve introspection).

To call "consciousness" and "feeling" folk terms and use that to dismiss incredibly simple and clear questions is the intellectual equivalent of tapping out. It's so simple: "what is the nature of the feelings themselves, apart from the dynamics of the system they are correlated with?"

Ok, can you explain if my laptop has consciousness?

Does it like to work for me, or hate it?

At what point will the first question be true?

And how can we construct machines that find working for us pleasurable?

Any reasonable definition of consciousness should IMO be a continuum, so your laptop has some consciousness (not very much).

I don't think concepts of like or hate are meaningful for the consciousness of your laptop. These kinds of responses probably arise from the kinds of goals that are created for agents by processes of natural selection.

We evolve them. We already have, they're called dogs.

> These kinds of responses probably arise from the kinds of goals that are created for agents by processes of natural selection.

You're speaking of "response", but it is supposed to be a concept internal to the laptop. Please be more clear, as the topic demands it.

Anyway, how do I create a laptop that finds pleasure in its work? Do I throw away the ones that don't work, and keep the ones that work? Is that enough selection?

And once I have a laptop that experiences some pleasure, why does it experience that amount of pleasure and not, say, ten times that amount?

I meant that the internal state of like/hate would be a response to something that the laptop experienced.

>Please be more clear, as the topic demands it.

You are using terms like 'pleasure' and 'experience' that have no scientific definition. I find your entire line of thinking unclear, but it doesn't help the tone of the argument to demand clarity.

>Anyway, how do I create a laptop that finds pleasure in its work? Do I throw away the ones that don't work, and keep the ones that work? Is that enough selection?

As with dogs, the internal state of the laptop would need to be malleable per generation, with generations of reproduction under adaptive pressures that favour the human owner. We currently don't have laptops of this kind.

> You are using terms like 'pleasure' and 'experience' that have no scientific definition.

We are not in the domain of science, but in the domain of philosophy ...

Also, don't you understand what I mean by "pleasure" or "experience"? Are you a bot? :)

> As with dogs, the internal state of the laptop would need to be malleable per generation, with generations of reproduction under adaptive pressures that favour the human owner. We currently don't have laptops of this kind.

We have genetic algorithms, so I'm sure we could come up with such laptops.

> We have genetic algorithms, so I'm sure we could come up with such laptops.

It is almost certain that we someday will. I doubt I'll still be alive to see it, though.

> Any reasonable definition of consciousness should IMO be a continuum, so your laptop has some consciousness (not very much).

That doesn't seem much different from the theory of consciousness Chalmers put forward in the second part of his 1996 book, where some law of nature connects consciousness to rich streams of information. That way, any physical system which creates a complex enough flow of information would be conscious to some degree.

The difference is that Chalmers recognizes that information and subjective experience are not equivalent, and thus you need a law of nature connecting the too. That was his proposal for expanding science.

I'm not saying whether he's write or wrong, only that Chalmers recognizes the hard problem can't be waved away by making an equivalence claim.

> The difference is that Chalmers recognizes that information and subjective experience are not equivalent,

"recognizes" seems to assume that he's right.

AFAICT there's absolutely no reason a priori to think that it's true, so I think the burden of proof is on those making the claim that the subjective is somehow not just the result of physical processes -- which is what the claim seems to amount to, at least to me.

Say we had a very detailed world simulation running on a massive server farm, like you see in some SciFi stories. Would the characters inhabiting this world have conscious experiences? They consist of complex bit patterns, or more accurately, electricity.

If you think they would, then let's take it one step further. A billion Chinese people are tasked with writing out the 1s and 0s on paper to implement the world simulation. This may take generations and the felling of forests, but it's done.

Would the process of writing down that program result conscious experiences the same as if the program was run on digital computers?

What about when the task is done? Would the paper be conscious or the ink on it? What if all the papers were separated by thousands of miles?

If you've read Greg Egan's Permutation City, then a similar sort of questioning was explored with the uploaded brain copies. The author ends up with his own weird "dust theory of consciousness", because there really isn't a good explanation for why any physical state would be conscious.

>Say we had a very detailed world simulation running on a massive server farm, like you see in some SciFi stories. Would the characters inhabiting this world have conscious experiences? They consist of complex bit patterns, or more accurately, electricity.

I think yes. I find the arguments for functionalism convincing.

After this you're rehashing Searle's Chinese room. As I've said, 'conscious experience' is not a properly defined concept, so I can only answer for what my own impressionistic judgement of its meaning is. For me, the entire system of people writing could maybe be described as having an experience if it directly encoded causally connected perceptions and actions of an agent in the virtual world. The whole thing is so far from how we use the word 'experience' that it is, as Dijkstra said, as interesting as asking whether a submarine can swim --- that is, not interesting at all.

Of all thought experiments, I've found the billion workers communicating with 1 and 0's to be the strongest illustration of the mind/body problem. It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there.

I've wondered, too, whether there is a connection between the mind/body problem and the problem of existence (why is there something rather than nothing). These two problems seem to be fundamentally insurmountable.

> It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there.

You’re just begging the question. ‘It sounds absurd’, is not a cogent argument.

I gave my intuition. There is no argument here.

"It is just absurd at that point to believe consciousness could reside there."

At the risk of losing my junior philosopher's secret decoder ring, I feel the need to point out that most philosophical writing is an elaborate logical ediface erected in support of the writer's previously existing, unreasoned prejudices.

Not only that, but as social creatures we have evolved mental models of other people, what we expect them to do, and say, and how we expect them to react to us, which in turn means we need to have models of our own behaviour in relation to theirs.

Do plants have a sense of self or references to its own "body" (my instinct tells me no, but honestly I have no idea). They interact with the world and stimuli around them much like animals do, albeit on a slower time frame.

The main difference I've identified between Eastern (Indian, Vedantic) thought and the Western paradigm is as follows:

The western minds starts with a body/brain existing before a mind/consciousness and his enquiry is conditioned from this starting pointing. He seeks the cause of consciousness in some material phenomenon.

In contrast, the Eastern (again, Vedantic) paradigm is inverted. Consciousness, mind, is given a priori and matter (body, brain) emerges therefrom. I'd be interested to see any Western minds taking this approach.

For further reading, would recommend researching the three states of Consciousness, "waking" "dream" & "deep-sleep"

I haven't read enough about consciousness, but I think the most important modern thinker with "eastern paradigm" is Bernardo Kastrup: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coming-to-...

I'm not that well versed in continental philosophy, but there is a whole (and somewhat diverse) program called phenomenology which originally planned to explain everything started from the basic fact of experience.

"Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)

I'm not sure if they discovered anything that belongs to mainstream science now. (But, for example, I frequently see references to "Phenomenology of Perception: Maurice Merleau-Ponty" here and there, in modern discussions.)

I have not really read anything from these authors, (only some Heidegger) so I can't have any respectable opinion on the subject (also my strongest impression about continental philosophy is from Sokal;), just pointing to the field...

Have you looked at any of the early Christian philosophers? The "Western", "body-first" approach was a response to them.

The whole thing is hopelessly bogged down in linguistic vaguery to the point of making the key questions quite meaningless.

What is 'consciousness'?

Is it "the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings" as the first hit on Google suggests? If so, can we then define 'awake', 'aware', or even 'one' without circular reasoning?

Why isn't it acceptable to define consciousness as the operating instructions of the mind?

This quickly leads to another linguistic quagmire called 'free will'. If we agree that everything in our heads is governed by the laws of nature, we can agree that there are one of two possible reasons for any 'decision' we make: it was facilitated by a direct cause or it was random. There can be no other actor.

Assuming a direct cause following our operating instructions, does this mean that there is no free will? To answer that we have to open up the word 'choice'.

Choice: "an act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities."

We loop around to the beginning.

You define 'decide' or 'choose' any way you want to. Tell me free will is real or fake. I don't care. All I know it there are no external actors in my head and things are either 100% predictable or random. Everything else here is a very roundabout argument about the way we use English. Boring.

The philosophical distinction between deterministic and random is not that clear as the randomness itself could be determined by a hidden process, as in "god is rolling the dices".

Likewise the distinction between deterministic and predictable is not that clear either, as you can have a fully deterministic process that is not replicable or predictable. (Think of chaotic systems)

In the end I think that the question of free will is not a scientific one but a moral one, as it is from the basis of free will that we can derive concepts such as personal responsibility.

God rolling the dice would seem to be a rather confined manipulation since the rules of the dice are bound to be consistent over time. If God is a random number generator, that seems like a pretty pointless thing to be preoccupied by.

> What is 'consciousness'?

It could be just experience, and different synonyms for that word (sensing, feeling, measuring, knowing etc.). if we analyze things, we tend to categorize, but reality seems to be fluid like analog signals, you can't really tell were the boundaries are, maybe because they don't really exist. our minds are similar to digital aliasing, or steps (categories).

> Why isn't it acceptable to define consciousness as the operating instructions of the mind?

Maybe because consciousness isn't the right word, because in reality it would include "unconsciousness", or non awareness too. Your brain is an interpreter of "reality", and this might include stuff that isn't considered real. It might be just an extrapolation of reality, an intuition.

> This quickly leads to another linguistic quagmire called 'free will'. If we agree that everything in our heads is governed by the laws of nature, we can agree that there are one of two possible reasons for any 'decision' we make: it was facilitated by a direct cause or it was random. There can be no other actor.

I'd say experience and expectation based on experience. Experience is another of those words that can mean many related things. It could be something you have heard or seen, something like famliarity, or something that isn't based on your immediate interaction with the world. You could call it inputs.

> Assuming a direct cause following our operating instructions, does this mean that there is no free will? To answer that we have to open up the word 'choice'.

>Choice: "an act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities."

You can relate this to experience (and it's synonyms). You can't choose something you're not aware of, or what you haven't sensed or measured in a way. If you jump straight ahead and make a choice quickly, or take your time to analyze is also based on "experience".

> You define 'decide' or 'choose' any way you want to. Tell me free will is real or fake. I don't care. All I know it there are no external actors in my head and things are either 100% predictable or random. Everything else here is a very roundabout argument about the way we use English. Boring.

It's all relative, free will is reducible based on experience and situation, position, options etc.

You act or choose based on what you think is best, and this could just mean what's best for you based on your experience, or just what feels comfortable and easy and is the nearest thing you can grab.

> Why isn't it acceptable to define consciousness as the operating instructions of the mind?

Because that's not what's being debated. You can use words any way you want, if you don't care about communicating, or you just want to dismiss an argument. But philosophically, consciousness means subjective experience. When I experience seeing red or being in pain, that has nothing to do with the abstract concept of "operating instructions".

Now there might be the functional equivalent for that concept implemented by the brain when we have subjective experiences, at least on a computational view of the mind. But that's not equivalent to the experience itself. A red experience is not an operating instruction, because you can't write a red experience down, nor can you program the algorithm for that, or put it into an equation, but you can do so with an instruction.

It's a category mistake to conflate an experience with a functional concept.

> But that's not equivalent to the experience itself.

How do you know that? What would be different, if it is not the case?

Forget for a moment about category errors, and take that at face value. Informational processes are the experience. What would be different?

External factors created your head.

Key quote: "There’s something about the topic of consciousness that, unlike other scientific fields of inquiry, inspires an unearned feeling of expertise."

Yes.

Perhaps the fact that it's a subject that everyone has experience with?

I see what you did there.

"New Age": rhymes with "Sewage".

>Oh, by the way, attendees could also take a gong bath, during which you’re bathed in the musical vibrations of a gong being struck. Or lie down in a curiously unsupervised and unstable-looking sensory-deprivation chamber. Or take a black-light yoga class, which involves — as the name suggests — doing yoga in a room illuminated by black light accompanied by a DJ pumping out frenetic techno beats. Meanwhile, a company offered demos of a brain-stimulation device that had to be inserted way too far up one nostril. And an enthusiastic fellow demonstrated his Spontaneous Postural Alignment technique, in which a misaligned subject’s elbow is tapped with a gold medallion while the healer intones, "boy-yoi-yoing."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoS1MCF8AeI

About 20 years ago I read and enjoyed a book by Roger Penrose (a theoretical physicist who worked w/ Stephen Hawking) titled something like "Consciousness and the Universe" (sorry no link avlbl, from memory). It was more interesting than persuasive, but worthwhile.

I think you may be referring to “The Emperor’s New Mind” [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind

Yes! Thank you, @hackpert :)

Thomas Metzinger’s ‘The Ego tunnel’ is a very good book picking apart the phenomenon of consciousness.

On a Metzinger-related note: he also edited and curated the OpenMIND project, which features a number of (mostly philosophical?) papers on consciousness and the mind, as well as corresponding commentaries and replies - including papers by Daniel Dennett, Ned Block, and Andy Clark.

https://open-mind.net/

Has anyone tried to explain consciousness starting from absolute nothingness, i.e. without even physics?

IANAP, but it might make more sense to do it like that, instead of describing physics and then bolting consciousness on top.

Of course, many and many philosophers did. And we have a multitude of explanations.

Examples?

Such approach is called arguments a priori.

Descartes. He can conceive non-existence of material world, but cannot conceive non-existence of self, therefore his consciousness doesn't belong to the physical realm.

Chalmers. He can conceive non-existence of his own consciousness, while physical world stays the same, therefore consciousness doesn't supervene on physical properties and physicalism is false.

R. Brown. [0] He argues that it is equally possible to conceive non-existence of one's own non-physical consciousness, while physical and non-physical parts of the world stay exactly the same. Therefore a priory arguments can't be a basis for deciding the truth of physicalism or dualism.

Dennett thinks that what we perceive as ourselves and the world around us are illusions and do not deserve the title of "hard problem". And so on.

[0] https://philpapers.org/archive/BRODTA.pdf

Related are Boltzmann Brains:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

The problem could be that we lump different layers of the mind into one mash-up concept, while in reality there is a complete "software stack" hierarchy of layers.

Consciousness has no qualities so it can't be studied scientifically. Chalmers is doing the next best thing: investigating precisely what "gray-matter activity" engenders a noticeable change in qualia.

I want to point out that it is possible for two conscious systems to merge and share consciousness. It is a very intimate process, so you don't hear a lot about it, even at places like Science of Consciousness conference, but it's one way to approach the study of consciousness.

Consciousness must arise out of something, and that something ought to have qualities than can be studied.

The idea that consciousness must arise out of "something" also needs to be demonstrated, even though it looks obvious on the surface. The best analogy I can give is a dream. If you see a red flower in the dream, you will assume that the experience of redness is caused by something in the dream, whereas its real cause lies beyond any "somethings" in the dream. It is possible to know this by waking up from the dream.

I could try and convince you that it's possible to know the same thing about this particular dream, but without being able to offer you evidence it might not be very useful.

Ok, but if you keep digging, eventually you are going to stumble into the concept of the dream itself, and then the question then becomes what properties and qualities of the process of dreaming gave birth to a red flower in the mind.

I will concede that how consciousness really arises may look nothing like what we can imagine or picture today, but we have yet to come across something that is both real and escapes scientific observation, and I don't think we should approach consciousness as such.

The idea here would be that consciousness isn't a "thing" at all, and so doesn't abide by the same constraints as things. Instead, consciousness is the very luminosity that arises as the experience called "seeing a red flower" (as well as all sights, sounds, thoughts, etc. that constitute your experience of the world). Space, matter, energy, etc. are then mental categories convenient for describing the shape and behavior of consciousness.

The two questions are then (1) what is the cause of this luminosity itself, and (2) why is it taking this particular form (red flower).

The mystical claim is that it is possible to know firsthand that time, space, etc. are illusions constrained to this dream, and that the luminosity itself is beyond them (and therefore not meaningfully "caused"). And the answer to why the dream is taking this particular shape can be known because "you" are, ultimately, the luminosity itself (aka "God").

Proving this to others is a different matter. In fact, in general the problem of intersubjectivity (to avoid the whole thing collapsing into solipsism) is the hardest aspect to communicate.

For those who are interested, I add that the idea that monktastic1 shares is present in different mystical traditions. I find it at least curious. I copy some quotes I once found in the web about this.

---------------------------------

He is the Eternal among things that pass away, pure Consciousness of conscious beings. —Upanishads (Hindu)

All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, besides which nothing exists. —Huang Po (Buddhist)

The light by which the soul is illumined, in order that it may see and truly understand everything...is God himself. —St. Augustine (Christian)

He is the spirit of the cosmos, its hearing, its sight, and its hand. Through Him the cosmos hears, through Him it sees, through Him it speaks, through Him it grasps, through Him it runs. —Ibn 'Arabi (Muslim)

Mind comes from this sublime and completely unified source above; it is divided only as it enters into the universe of distinctions. —Menahem Nahum (Jewish)

---------------------------------

The quotes are from https://www.centerforsacredsciences.org/index.php/Articles/t...

I've come to believe that that isn't the case, but that's a position which isn't scientific. In any event, it's a reasonable theory on which to proceed with a scientific investigation of consciousness.

- - - -

Time is subordinate to consciousness, in the sense that "now" is a synonym for "you".

This is a really subtle point, and not easy to convey. I've deleted a half a dozen elaborations before posting this.

Whenever we are conscious it's always now. (You were conscious five minutes ago, but the only reason you know that is because you are aware of memories of it now.) It's never not now, or if it is you're not there.

Since it's never now without you, and you're never there except now, there's nothing to distinguish between "now" and "you". It is literally impossible to separate "you" and "now".

I think this must have some sort of physical (as in Physics) meaning or significance.

Hi there. I once read a post by you[1] that I vibed with. It reminded me of an interesting forum post that you might like, and I wanted to share[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13026758 [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20141010211838/http://forums.phil...

Ohai! I recall your username from somewhere as well. Cheers!

That discussion was interesting, it even included the observation, quite correct, that [the concept of] consciousness is useless.

> If the concept is so vague as to be completely devoid of utility, then it is hard to understand how discourse about it amounts to anything more than a form of poetic or mystical expression.

That's the unnerving thing about it: it's useless yet the most significant "thing" in the world...

I have deliberately adopted the habit of mentioning the possibility of merging consciousness when the subject comes up, because it's one way of breaking the stalemate around the Hard Problem.

You can't make a consciousness-o-meter but you can know the consciousness of some "other" person. Whether that counts as empirical is beyond me. :-)

Or maybe consciousness exists a priori and things arise out of it.

> What is it that makes us more than just information processors with feet?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Seems like a reasonable question to beg. Unless you want to claim that CPUs are conscious or that humans are not, something is different.

That's a false dichotomy. CPUs can run all sorts of programs, some of which can be self-aware agents for all we know.

Name one program that is a self-aware agent.

How would you know? ;)

A fair point.

Does it work that way? I think you need to prove that self-awareness requires super-Turing computations or is computationally intractable on classical computers to assert that no such program can ever exist.

> Name one program that is a self-aware agent.

Name one program that is written in the programming language that eventually displaces C/C++ as the system language of choice.

Don't you see how inane this question is? On balance of evidence, consciousness is reducible to an algorithm unless you want to actually allow consciousness into your ontology.

What's the evidence that consciousness is reducible to an algorithm again?

Known physics is computible, and consciousness appears to be a physical phenomenon (it changes or stops when various physical things are done to the brain).

Consciousness does not appear to be a physical phenomenon because physics cannot explain it.

Show me this proof that physics cannot explain consciousness.

If it's not a physical phenomenon, how does it inform the actions of our physical selves?

"Name me one X" is not a proper counter to "X might be possible, we haven't ruled it out."

There are tons of things that have been created/observed/proven only in the last 100 years. The fact that Bob from the year 1700 wasn't able to put on a demonstration didn't make them false.

> "Name me one X" is not a proper counter to "X might be possible, we haven't ruled it out."

Is there a term for this (is it simply one of the items in the list of logical fallacies), because holy cow I find the need to point this out several times a day, and it seems to be becoming much more common recently.

There might be a term for it, but I didn't say there wasn't one, only I was curious what program was self-aware as I wasn't aware that one existed!

If one does exist, then that would be truly remarkable.

Not unless we can reduce self-awareness to an algorithm, which I don't think we can. We can, however, reduce the appearance of self-awareness down to an algorithm.

I think there's nothing in self-awareness beyond specifically structured information processing, and such processing is self-awareness. But this position is hard to argue for or against, so I'll leave it at that.

The fascinating thing is that complex information processing in the brain doesn't cease when you're unconscious.

It changes though, and significantly so. Even EEG (which isn't neuron level precise) shows the changes.

There's no evidence that we cannot reduce self-awareness to an algorithm.

> Not unless we can reduce self-awareness to an algorithm, which I don't think we can.

By the Bekenstein Bound, the human brain is at best a finite state automoton. Unless you wish to appeal to some supernatural element in consciousness, like dualism, consciousness is reducible to an algorithm.

a. I don't think the Bekenstein Bound is relevant here.

b. The commenter below has a point. We don't know whether consciousness is theoretically reducible to an algorithm or not. All we know is that we can't at the moment, and we don't even know where to begin. So the answer is unknown.

> a. I don't think the Bekenstein Bound is relevant here.

Yes it is. A system with finite volume can only contain finite information. A system with finite information can be encoded as a finite state automoton. Our brain is contained within a finite volume, ergo, our brain is at best a finite state automoton.

> We don't know whether consciousness is theoretically reducible to an algorithm or not.

We do unless you want to rewrite physics. Which some people do with panpsychism. There seems little compelling reason to though.

> by Bekenstein Bound

Can you explain why this would be the case? (Or point me in the right direction.)

Given that a brain can be perfectly described by a limited amount of information, you can write an algorithm which perfectly simulates a brain. Consciousness needs to be supernatural to not be present in this simulation.

ETA: Algorithm will require quantum computations to be feasible though.

This only proves that behaving identically to a human is reducible to an algorithm. The actual experience of consciousness is something secondary to behaviour.

It's possible that an algorithm which behaves as a human experiences consciousness identically to a human, as some fundamental property of reality, or it's possible that it does not. We cannot know, because consciousness is not something that we can observe.

How is the experience of consciousness secondary to behaviour when the concept of consciousness emerged from and influenced our behaviour ?

It seems as strange to me to imagine that we could have two identically behaving beings, one with consciousness, and one without; as imagining that we could have identically behaving beings, one with eyesight and one without.

When I think of my mother (e.g. how she would react when I tell her something), that's basically a simulation of her running in my head. Is this simulation self-aware? If not, then that's one way to imagine two identically behaving beings, one with consciousness (my actual mother) and one without (my brain's simulation of her).

(For the sake of argument, I assume that I know my mother so well that her behavior will be indistinguishable for all intents and purposes from my simulation of her in my head.)

Or maybe you substitute her consciousness with your own.

If your model of your mother is aware of her own existence as a model in your brain, wouldn't she beg you to continue modelling her, or mention the fact at least?

> I assume that I know my mother so well that her behavior will be indistinguishable for all intents and purposes from my simulation of her in my head.

Then you are running perfect simulation of your mother and some parts of her environment (such that she'll not freak out finding herself in nothingness) in your brain, so yes, she'll be conscious.

You're not simulating your mother, you've built a simple predictive model of your mother's behaviour. These aren't the same. It's like the difference between my actual social network, and the model of my social network that Facebook has. My actual social network contain considerable nuance that isn't captured by Facebook's data model.

That. Chalmers claims that he can easily imagine p-zombie, which doesn't experience anything, and it doesn't feel like a big stretch on a first glance. But if you try to imagine a being, which is physically identical to you, but with no experience of, say, red color, you'll have a hard time arguing that you can.

No. I have absolutely no difficulty imagining such a thing.

You might suppose that any physically identical entity must necessarily experience consciousness, and that may even be true, but this does not preclude imagining a p-zombie, any more than a knowledge of anatomy and aerodynamics precludes imagining a dragon.

How? You look at red apple, you think "such a nice red apple, but one side is a bit yellow". But "red" doesn't mean anything to you, you don't experience it. If you can imagine that, explain why red-p-zombie-you insist on being able to experience red color, while in fact he/she doesn't experience it.

I can only suppose that you imagine someone like you with a textual annotation above his/her head "I don't experience red color", and not trying to imagine what it is like to be such a person.

Doesn't it defy the purpose of a thought experiment? You don't imagine conscious experiences, but imagine descriptions of presence or absence of conscious experiences.

ETA: Using your analogy it is like imagining pigeon with a label "Dragon" above its head, and then concluding that there's no logical reasons that dragons can't fly or exist.

When you imagine a "real" dragon and then ponders on this imagination, you have to conclude that your imagined physics must be different for it to work.

>You look at red apple, you think "such a nice red apple, but one side is a bit yellow". But "red" doesn't mean anything to you, you don't experience it. If you can imagine that

Of course I can't imagine being a p-zombie, because there is no experience of being a p-zombie, that's the point. When I imagine a p-zombie, it is someone else.

>explain why red-p-zombie-you insist on being able to experience red color, while in fact he/she doesn't experience it.

They would say they experience it for the exact same reasons a non-p-zombie does. A chemical process in their brain produces that reaction. The difference is that they never actually have that experience, they just act as if they did.

I wasn't talking about p-zombie. I was talking about partial p-zombie, which doesn't experience red color only. But I think I get your answer, and it is exactly as I described. You can't imagine p-zombie, you imagine someone with attached label "There's darkness inside" (as Chalmers had put it).

I say that your label is incorrect and your "p-zombie" experiences everything as we do. Prove me wrong. Imagine being nothing.

Otherwise you are just attaching label "dragon" to a pigeon.

ETA: Have you noticed circularity of the argument? You need to accept that physicalism isn't true to be sure that your label "There's darkness inside" can be true, as you can't really imagine p-zombie. Partial p-zombie just makes it obvious. And physicalism requires less epicycles.

>I was talking about partial p-zombie, which doesn't experience red color only.

Ah sorry I missed that part of the argument. Yes, I agree that I can't imagine such a thing, because I don't think experience can be subdivided in that way. Anything a consciousness can perceive, it must experience.

I could however imagine a person whose brain perceived and reacted to the colour red in certain ways, but never became conscious of that perception, and merely experiences vision with all red things having the same qualia as another colour. It's quite a weird thing to imagine, but if you're trying to assert that it's impossible, I will do so to disagree.

> You can't imagine p-zombie, you imagine someone with attached label "There's darkness inside" (as Chalmers had put it).

Can you imagine a non-conscious rock? Or does the rock just have a similar label attached? If you believe one can imagine such a rock, then I can imagine such a human in the same way.

If not, then your imagination must be teeming with errant consciousnesses.

> I don't think experience can be subdivided in that way.

So you are adding more epicycles.

> merely experiences vision with all red things having the same qualia as another colour.

Swapped qualia qualia argument. I can answer that, but I think I already know how you will answer.

ETA: Or do you mean you see all greens as greens and all reds as greens? Will it not change your behavior when you'll notice that you are confidently calling very similar colors by very different names and cannot say why are you doing that?

> Can you imagine a non-conscious rock?

I can imagine a rock. I can guess that the rock is not conscious because it doesn't demonstrate any signs of consciousness, unlike you and me. I am pretty sure I can't change whether the rock is conscious or not by the power of my imagination.

Thank you for conversation.

>So you are adding more epicycles.

Not really? I don't conceive of consciousness experience as something that can be meaningfully separated from the perception of that consciousness. For a consciousness, perception is experience.

However, I can imagine a perceiving system which does not have any consciousness, and thus experiences nothing.

> Will it not change your behavior when you'll notice that you are confidently calling very similar colors by very different names and cannot say why are you doing that?

In this hypothetical, the "partial p-zombie" cannot distinguish them consciously, so they would not do that. This is the closest thing I can conceive of to what you described.

>I am pretty sure I can't change whether the rock is conscious or not by the power of my imagination.

But the rock exists within your imagination, you have total power over it?

> I can imagine a perceiving system which does not have any consciousness, and thus experiences nothing.

I can imagine a system which is presumably too simple to have any conscious experiences. But the only thing that really matters is the lack of first person experience of such a system. I can't imagine being such system, and that is what matters, if we are talking about consciousness and not about some words which are used as a substitute for a real conscious experiences.

> In this hypothetical, the "partial p-zombie" cannot distinguish them consciously, so they would not do that.

Let's suppose, for simplicity, that I don't experience color differences at all. All I experience is brightness. But my brain works exactly the same as yours. I see two grey cups and hear myself saying "Do you prefer red or green?" Am I not conscious of this discrepancy too? Am I also not conscious of the lack of any clues when I'm asked to select one of the things which looks exactly the same to me? Sorry, sounds like complete bullshit to me. I will prefer physical consciousness over such brain-damaged metaphysical one.

BTW, are you sure you are experiencing colors? You will not notice if your point of view is true.

> But the rock exists within your imagination, you have total power over it?

Sure, I can image a rock which has supernatural soul and conscious experiences. Why all the p-zombie fuss, when it clearly shows that dualism is true? That's sarcasm of course. But why p-zombie argument is any better? You can't even conceive what is really matters in p-zombie - the lack of first person experience. You can only conceive some images like "dark inside" or a textual description of that.

I'm sorry for "bullshit". It is totally logically consistent, but requires explanation why such volatile substance as metaphysical consciousness has anything in common with our experiences.

To clarify things a bit. I am not trying to prove falsehood of dualism. I'm trying to show that arguments for dualism are inconclusive and sometimes are plain and simple circular, but circularity is masked by intuition pumps. So it's all mostly intuition and I've no expectations of changing yours.

Physicalism is based on intuition too, but as I said it requires less epicycles.

First person experiences exist. First person experiences are uniquely determined by physical processes. The end.

> but this does not preclude imagining a p-zombie, any more than a knowledge of anatomy and aerodynamics precludes imagining a dragon.

It kind of does. The argument goes: if you can imagine a p-zombie, then in your mind it's possible that consciousness is not tied to physical qualities. Therefore, physicalism would necessarily be false.

It took me awhile to accept this, but the solution is simple: p-zombies can't exist because I can't imagine them. And this is because consciousness must serve a functional purpose, and so p-zombies would be distinguishable from humans.

>in your mind it's possible that consciousness is not tied to physical qualities. Therefore, physicalism would necessarily be false.

I mean, yes? I tend to assume physicalism, but I don't take it as axiomatic.

>And this is because consciousness must serve a functional purpose

I don't see why that has to be true?

> I don't see why that has to be true?

It must be true if you accept physicalism.

Why is the ability to imagine something at all relevant?

I can imagine a world where there are no physical laws, everything is entirely random, and by an astonishing coincidence it just so happens to behave exactly like the world we observe in every single way.

Does that mean it's possible that there are no physical laws and everything is completely random? Strictly speaking yes, it is possible, but the odds are indescribably remote, and it's a completely useless hypothesis anyway.

I can imagine a p-zombie which somehow comes up with the idea of consciousness and starts discussing it despite having no experience of it, but it would have to be some bizarre random occurrence, and is not really useful to consider.

> Why is the ability to imagine something at all relevant?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/#3

How do we know the experience itself influences behaviour?

Just because we experience something that feels like a decision-making process does not mean that experience is part of the process itself.

For all we know, our consciousness is just a spectator along for the ride.

This can seem plausible until you ask yourself how we can be talking about consciousness and experience if these things don't influence our behaviour.

It certainly seems implausible that our physical brains would behave as if they experienced things without ever having any kind of input from that process, but not impossible.

But the point of the idea of p-zombies isn't to describe something that plausibly exists. It's thought experiment to highlight the hard problem of consciousness, by demonstrating how the notion of experience is separable in our conception from any physical process we can imagine. That is, regardless of how our brain physically comes to behave as if it were conscious, we can still conceive of a version of it that does not actually experience consciousness.

This is because, at least to me, conscious experience is something entirely unlike any physical process. I can conceive of it being the result of a physical process, but nonetheless, my conception of that experience is still of a separate thing which happens as a result of that process. And as such, I can always imagine any such physical process occurring without the corresponding experience.

To say that conscious experience "is" a physical process, is to my conception, a category error.

> It's thought experiment to highlight the hard problem of consciousness, by demonstrating how the notion of experience is separable in our conception from any physical process we can imagine.

Except it isn't. The p-zombie thought experiment entails the p-zombie world thought experiment, where a universe evolved with nothing but p-zombies, and this world is identical to our own. How do you suppose our p-zombie equivalents would be here debating consciousness in this very moment in a universe in which such a thing doesn't actually exist?

> That is, regardless of how our brain physically comes to behave as if it were conscious, we can still conceive of a version of it that does not actually experience consciousness.

I certainly can't without allowing what seems to be absurdity or inconsistency. I'm not sure how you manage to do it.

> To say that conscious experience "is" a physical process, is to my conception, a category error.

Why?

> The p-zombie thought experiment entails the p-zombie world thought experiment, where a universe evolved with nothing but p-zombies, and this world is identical to our own.

No? I don't see I need to imagine a parallel universe. I can just imagine a p-zombie existing in our own world.

>I certainly can't without allowing what seems to be absurdity or inconsistency. I'm not sure how you manage to do it.

"absurdity or inconsistency" do not limit my imagination. I do not think such things are realistic, but that doesn't mean I can't imagine them. For a similar example, most ideas of time travel end up inconsistent if you inspect them closely, and yet nonetheless I can imagine them.

> No? I don't see I need to imagine a parallel universe. I can just imagine a p-zombie existing in our own world.

I don't think you understand the issue. If the p-zombie thought experiment entails something about consciousness, then the p-zombie world thought experiment does too. And what it demonstrates is that the intuitions that the p-zombie thought experiment seems to entail are absurd, therefore the p-zombie thought experiment is either ill-conceived or missing some crucial element that would explain this dissonance.

> "absurdity or inconsistency" do not limit my imagination.

Except it must if the p-zombie conceivability argument is to have any weight. If we can allow ourselves imagine any inconsistent proposition, then any inconsistent proposition is conceivable, and any inconsistent proposition is possibly true. Which is obviously absurd, because inconsistent propositions are necessarily false if logic is to mean anything.

The only possible resolutions are to invalidate the conceivability argument entirely as an inference rule, or to constrain that which is conceivable so the logical inference holds true.

You seem to be implying that consciousness has no influence on behaviour.

It might influence it, or it might not. It's entirely plausible to me that the conclusions reached by the processes of ones mind, are completely separate from the experience of reaching those conclusions.

> This only proves that behaving identically to a human is reducible to an algorithm. The actual experience of consciousness is something secondary to behaviour.

We've started a conversation in other threads below, but I just wanted to point out that your claim here is actually conjecture. We don't actually know that the experience of consciousness is separate from behaviour. I further conjecture that this claim is outright false because it requires a non-trivial expansion of our ontology for what seems to amount to special pleading that consciousness is special when compared to every other phenomenon that has fallen to scientific inquiry.

Ask yourself why consciousness is really all that different from vitalism which was felled by biology. The same will happen to dualism in good time.

It's worse than conjecture, it's contrary to the available evidence. The actual experience of consciousness clearly influences human behavior, otherwise we wouldn't talk about it.

> The actual experience of consciousness clearly influences human behavior, otherwise we wouldn't talk about it.

The argument that epiphenominalists put forth is that zombies can also talk "as if" they had consciousness, with all the same arguments that we put forth that they are conscious, that qualia are important, etc. The difference is that they simply aren't conscious, they are just acting out a play, and what they mean by consciousness is not the same thing as what we mean.

If you think then that the concept of consciousness then becomes virtually vacuous, amounting merely to your first person, passive observation of an automoton that is your body moving through space and time, then you're not alone.

Turing-completeness might be a sufficient framework for consciousness. (Meaning it would be possible to distill it into an algorithm, even if we have not sufficiently advanced to do so, and even if the slowness of current hardware might make it slow beyond belief.) It might also prove wholly insufficient some day; too constrained to express what we'd call consciousness.

The problem, I think, is that we're still so unbelievably far removed from that point (of being able to model and completely probe apart consciousness) that assuming either is just random conjecture.

We don't even know if the appearance of self-awareness is all that other humans have. We only know for sure of our own self-awareness, since that is precisely the definition of self-awareness.

For all we can prove, the appearance of self-awareness is all that is necessary for consciousness. I could be that if you point a webcam at a computer, then that computer gains some rudimentary self-awareness like an insect might have, or not have, we can't really prove it either way. Sentience is not necessarily sapience.

It could also be that computer sentience is absurd and rendered impossible by some as of yet unknown mechanic. In either case we have no reason to make assumptions about it.

Presented with an example of an algorithm having the appearance of self-awareness, how can you tell that it is not self-aware, yet when you apply the same criteria to humans, you conclude they are self-aware?

If you are thinking of Chalmers' p-zombie argument, that does not do the job, because it is, at most, a claim that Chalmers sees the logical possibility of p-zombies as plausible, which, even if one agrees, is a long way from an argument that apparently self-aware algorithms must therefore be faking it.

Not that I have an actual example to try this on, which is why the issue is a source of endless debate...

> how can you tell that it is not self-aware ?

Let the algorithm run for a while and see if it starts asking itself existential questions on the nature of consciousness.

So a dog is not self-aware because it's not pondering its own existence? (For all we know.)

It is hard to know for dogs since they lack the language necessary to ponder. But if we have an intelligence with the necessary language to ponder, and we see that it doesn't, then I think it is reasonable to assume that it doesn't.

There's an interesting book that uses this argument to advance the idea that consciousness as we understand it now emerged 3000 years ago, as it was only then that humans started to make artworks about pondering on consciousness. (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)

P-zombies do appear to ponder, though. They are in every way externally indistinguishable from normal people. That's the whole point of the thought experiment.

P-Zombies are a logical impossibility; For p-zombies to be indistinguishable, you would need consciousness to have no effect on behaviour, which is clearly contradicted by the discussion we are having.

Exactly my thinking. I have no problem with intelligent, thinking, reasoning beings that aren't conscious and don't have qualia. But it's highly contrived that such beings would go around talking about consciousness and qualia.

If it were actually as simple as that, don't you think this would have occurred to the greatest philosophical minds of our generation, and don't you think therefore that P-zombies would not be discussed? I'm all for bagging on philosophy as navel-gazing and generally unproductive, but you've taken it a step too far.

That is a reasonable response to fdvessen's one-sentence rebuttal, but with regard to the significance of p-zombies in general, an appeal to authority is much more effective when all the authorities agree, but this is not the case here, with Dennett being just the most visible counter-example. From popular articles on the issue of consciousness, you might think that most philosophers are opposed to physicalism or anything like it, but that is apparently not the case.

It does not help that these same popular articles exaggerate and simplify - they make claims about the philosophical arguments that cannot be sustained by the arguments themselves. As I mentioned above, it is a misrepresentation to state that Chalmers' highly conditioned claim about the plausibility of p-zombies proves that no machine can have consciousness.

But that's where we end up at Dennett's zimboes (or even the Systems reply to the Chinese room, if you wanna go there :) ) - if they are completely indistinguishable, isn't our postulate "they don't have consciousness" completely meaningless and the conclusion simply begging the question?

The fundamental problem is that I know I'm conscious because I feel conscious, but I have, by definition, no way of being sure you are conscious.

That line of thinking is essentially just solipsism. The only way to move on in knowing anything about the world is to make the methodological assumption that solipsism is false, without demanding proof. Faced with a computer program giving every appearance of self-aware consciousness, a neuroscientist can reasonably make the methodological assumption known as Occam's Razor to assume it is not somehow faking it until there is some evidence that it is. Note that the claim that it might somehow be faking it is not even a well-formed scientific hypothesis, and Chalmers offers no insight into how such a hypothesis might be formed.

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> Not that I have an actual example to try this on, which is why the issue is a source of endless debate...

This is the core of the issue. Until we can build an apparently conscious entity, there will still be people claiming there's something ineffable and magical about consciousness. Probably even after we've done it once, there will still be folks who so claim. But eventually, people will stop wondering about it once it becomes commonplace.

> which I don't think we can

This is also begging the question.

That just means the difference is what software it runs.

The hidden assumption is that the difference is fundamental rather than circunstancial — maybe a sufficiently powerful computer running a sufficiently sophisticated program can be conscious.

There is no such "hidden assumption" - the question is just literally asking what the difference is between the non-conscious program and the conscious one (in your case).

>maybe a sufficiently powerful computer running a sufficiently sophisticated program can be conscious.

Maybe it can. People presenting the hard problem of consciousness do not usually exclude such a thing. The question is, what causes human qualia? The actual experience of stimulus, rather than merely being a system reacting to them in a certain way.

The only way I can understand someone rejecting this assumption is if they somehow do not actually experience qualia.

I don’t think that’s the case at all. No assumption is made as to the nature of the difference. All sorts of explanations are offered, from “emergent behavior” to supernatural phenomena.

You can't claim that CPUs or humans have or do not have consciousness. You can only prove that you yourself have consciousness--every other instance of consciousness is essentially an unfalsifiable assumption on your part. This might seem pedantic but if you want to be scientific it's absolutely crucial to ruthlessly separate conjecture from evidence.

It may seem solipsist, but if you want to make a rigorous reproducible experiment with empirical observations, we have just as much reason to assume a CPU has some form of animal sentience as we do with an insect or a bird which reacts in simple ways to external stimuli. As of yet there's no compelling reason to believe this is either correct or incorrect.

Occam's razor doesn't even work very well here. Does it require fewer assumptions to say that a machine that reacts to external stimuli is less conscious than an equivalent animal, or does it require fewer assumptions to say that this behavior indicates consciousness regardless of the media it operates on?

We have no idea if something is really different. We only have assumptions.

I disagree. The fact that humans other than myself came up with the idea of qualia is solid proof that they experience it.

Warning: solipsism ahead!

Are you sure? Perhaps you came up with the idea of qualia?

“What if the whole world is just inside your mind?” is logically possible but essentially useless to consider. It can explain literally anything, which means it explains nothing.

I think Qualia is a similar concept, inherently unquantifiable and useless when it comes to making actionable predictions.

Qualia is essentially what it feels like to experience data. When we see 700nm light, we experience red. When a computer sees 700nm light through a CCD or CMOS, it experiences #FF0000. Does this mean it has qualia? How do we make this distinction? Just from how convincing it sounds when they put it to words?

If it's merely self-reporting, does that mean people weren't conscious until vocabulary for qualia existed? Because that was about 200,000 years for anatomically modern humans. How about animals? They can't report qualia. We essentially are no closer to explaining or defining consciousness at all thanks to qualia.

If I may hazard a baseless conjecture, I'd bet qualia is an illusion. It's still only data. Just like when a thermistor measures some temperature, it's not really communicating the essence of Kelvin to a microprocessor. It's not communicating the frequency of the movement of molecules which is temperature. It's reporting a difference in voltage, which is read by an ADC, which gets assigned a hexadecimal value, which gets interpreted by all kinds of software in all sorts of ways. This sounds suspiciously like qualia, but of course we can't prove or disprove it any more than we can prove or disprove if other consciousness exists besides our own.

Qualia is just data wearing intangible, spiritual clothes. This is just like the classic stoned college freshmen discussion of whether the colors I see are the colors you see, or if the way you perceive red is my green, or whatever. It produced nothing useful then and it produces nothing useful now. All impossible to prove either way, just like solipsism.

Self-reporting demonstrates that qualia is real, but a lack doesn't demonstrate its absence. People may not have had qualia back then, we don't know. I am confident that at least some people have it now, and it makes more sense that everyone (with a reasonably functioning brain, at least) does than that it's somehow piecemeal.

I don't think the notion that qualia is an illusion makes any sense. If it's an illusion, that means that we somehow have the perception of it without it actually happening. But that very perception is qualia. It's like saying that we don't really perceive red, it's just an illusion, we just think we perceive it. But the thinking is the act.

It's different from your stoned college discussion because we know that something is going on. I have the sensation of being me, in a way that known physics can't even address. I'm fairly certain other people have this as well, based on how they talk and behave. I can't quantify it and I can't even really describe it, but it's clearly real. In fact, my own sensation of being me is the thing I know with the most certainty. Everything else could potentially be faked, but not this.

Agreed. Which is the simpler proposition: That human minds aren't special and are just physical phenomena playing out, the same as everything else we see? Or that they're special and there's some magic woo going on?

To a human, that's a very loaded question. There are some emotionally compelling arguments for human exceptionalism, such as everything we've "accomplished" (space flight, global warming).

Magic is remarkably simple, in its own way, sadly.

> Magic is remarkably simple, in its own way, sadly.

This reminds me of the discussion about why Occam's Razor doesn't just always favour the explanation of "a wizard did it". It only seems simple until you have to explain exactly what a wizard is, and what they did.

Huh. A lot of mind-body dualists in the HN community. I genuinely never would have guessed.

Actually losing the mind or making the mind irrelevant is important for consciousness.

Why is Deepak there?

Because the point is to make the organizer feel important and having a large number of people attending does that. Deepak is a draw.

I know I know! Aliens... it's the best explanation.

Is there a basis for quantum cognition beyond “I want my brain to be different from my cell phone.”?

Probably not. Do neurons use some quantum mechanism to do work in a way we might not have figured out yet. Maybe. (But not in a "magical" way)

That is pretty much what Hameroff's preoccupation with microtubules claims. Whether it avoids your definition of "magical" is for you to decide.

Ah I didn't know about his argument.

My definition of "magical" would be that neurons use some non-obvious/non-linear quantum effect that is required for mammalian(?) levels of brain function. (Neurotransmitters probably do use some quantum effects because of their nature)

Now I think consciousness happens at a higher abstraction level and is not necessarily dependant on lower-level implementation up to a point.

> Neurotransmitters probably do use some quantum effects because of their nature

What does that even mean? Ice "uses" quantum effects when melting, but that does not mean that we cannot accurately explain the behavior of melting ice without taking these quantum effects into account.

Correct, that's what I mean.

Then, if we can't explain its behaviour without the usage of QM then I'd say it is essencial.

There is some thinking that the quantum effects at the neuron level makes the brain a non-deterministic computing device (i.e. its outputs are not solely governed by its inputs). This opens up the possibility that human brain, unlike computers, are driven by something more than just the sum total of its structure and inputs (without which, we could rightly be considered machines with no free will).

Whether that "something" is just a collection of randomness, or something more, is unknown and currently there is no scientific basis to think it is something more.

FWIW, most computers today have builtin non deterministic hardware rng. They do bot seem qualitatively different from computers lacking them.

Yes, but those are explicitly invokable random functions, and not random fluctuations built into the entire functionality of the CPU.

You can do that by overclocking everything and turning off error correction codes. This doesn’t seem like a powerful argument in favour of randomness or non-determination.

> Yes, but those are explicitly invokable random functions, and not random fluctuations built into the entire functionality of the CPU.

There's no logical difference. If the CPU's have any correlation to its inputs, then it's equivalent to a deterministic function+random input.

The brain is random all over because it depends on liquid chemical reactions and diffusion and concentrates, etc. And those do not have fixed time courses, just probability distributions of reaction times. The brain is also ultra parallel with massive noise in all of its signals.

You do not need quantumness in the brain to introduce randomness, it is filled to the brim with randomness already.

The devil in detail here is that you are probably want to use term "stochastic" rather than "random". While hardware model of the brain can fluctuate slightly, from a higher level all processes are pretty deterministic.

Every transistor in every computer on this planet relies on the aggregation of nondeterministic processes to function. Computers are quantum mechanical devices just as much as the brain is.

...quantum effects at the neuron level makes the brain a non-deterministic computing device (i.e. its outputs are not solely governed by its inputs)

This kind of definition is the root cause of what saalweachter pointed to: Do you consider a program an input? If not, you are actually willing that it works randomly. If it is, the mind seems to be an empty box that still has opinions.

The free will discussion is a relic of religious thinking. And, while someone produces some new compelling argument, IMHO all the discussion about "qualia" is noise.

Are you suggesting that "qualia" does not exist, or that it should not be considered in the inquiry? Same for "free will" -- are you suggesting that it does not exist, or that it should not be considered in the inquiry? Is it simply because you feel the term is tainted by religion?

The existence of free will is still a highly controversial topic. It is by no means settled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

Not sure about Qualia, but for free will it seems like everyone with an opinion on this defines free and will differently.

For example from my point of view, for a decision to be mine it absolutely has to depend on my own mental state prior to and while making it. If it doesn’t it might be free, but it isn’t mine. The less deterministic my decisions are and the less determined by my mental state (memories, opinions, etc) a decision is, the less it’s mine.

So at that level I’m really not worried by determinism or theoretical predictability, in fact I embrace them, because without them there is no responsibility or agency or self. This seems fundamentally at odds with some other people’s definition of free will which to me seem perplexingly ephemeral and indistinct.

The "qualia" is a vague enough concept to be used as an argument ad ignorantiam. "Free will" is a totally irrelevant concept that's presented as a fundamental problem.

And no, it's not that's tainted by religion, it's that it makes no sense at all without religious thinking.

Dualism is the belief that there is a material body and a inmaterial soul that controls the body. As the knowledge of mind expanded, the soul retreated. That's just how things happened historically, but the logic is to ditch the soul concept altogether, not reducing it to an entelechy. The problem with doing the later is you end up inventing fake problems like "free will".

Will is not free in a vacuum. People are born with things that we like and some other things that we dislike, not the same for every person. Then family, society and circumstances, including sheer luck, shape our wills to a point. There is also the possibility of changing our own likes, acquiring what we consider desirable tastes.

We're not free to completely bootstrap ourselves. But that is not the same at saying we've not free will at all. Determinism is alike to saying that it's impossible that heavier than air machines can fly. You take a general concept that seems obvious, ignore all intermediate steps and reach an unwarranted conclusion. The intermediate steps in this case is the fact that our mind is in a material world, generated by a material brain and that our wills, our memories and everything else is part of the material world also. So saying that material laws prevent us from being free is absurd. We are made of matter, we are not "trapped in matter", that's a relic.

Not to push, (but I'm gonna push...)

That's a lot of declarative statements!

And yet I am left uninformed as to whether you are saying that Free-Will (the 'non-problem') exists? Or not? Or that the question itself is meaningless? (I'm guessing the last?)

If you need to guess, I'm afraid there weren't enough declarative statements :) Of course it's meaningless.

We make decisions all the time, you can only say that free will doesn't exist if you define free will in a way that's impossible to exist, ignoring the intuitive, inmediate reality of freedom.

Edit: in other words, what's a definition of free will that's possible to exist? If there's none, we're talking about nothing, aren't we? If there's one, that would be useful. Why bother with the useless ones?

What I'm trying to say is there are a number of discussions that match the same pattern: We know very little about a something but still try to make general rules about it. We don't know in enoug detail how the brain works but there are a number of experts that run to assert that computers will never think because they're different. How do they know? Do they know every kind of computer that's not invented yet?

It sounds like you've been vigorously trained in attacking a specific version of this inquiry: consciousness in the religious/spiritual sense, which is not what we're talking about here. No one here is suggesting a soul. At best, it may be a new physics; at worst, it may be nothing at all. Your borderline condescending tone doesn't help matters either.

No one here is suggesting a soul. At best, it may be a new physics; at worst, it may be nothing at all.

You are implying that I said that somebody here is suggesting a soul, aren't you? If you are, you're wrong. I suggested that historical reasons (people believing in a soul time ago) caused the debate.

Now please explain to me how you think new physics can alter the approach to this debate.

My tone is just assertive: that's what I believe and I make no apologies for it. If you dislike what I say, please be more specifical about what exactly troubles you instead of making a vague criticism in my general direction.

Edit: oh, and one more thing. Your last comment qualifies my argumentation but you don't answer a single point of what I wrote.

> There is some thinking that the quantum effects at the neuron level makes the brain a non-deterministic computing device

Which is silly, because there are equally valid deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, so irreducible non-determinism may not even exist.

But why is there a thinking like that?

Have we observed quantum effects or non-deterministic behavior in neurons? People have spent a lot of time poking at neurons in a lot of different organisms.

"its outputs are not solely governed by its inputs"

Philosophically, is this actually better?

This seems like a god of the gaps kind of argument. As we learn more about biology and neuroscience people who believe consciousness and the mind exist outside of the brain will be forced to make increasingly specific claims. They will eventually have to explain the physical process that allows the mind to not be some reflection of the brain. Over time I expect the scope of “and something magic-like happens here” to be reduced.

It is highly likely that aspects of cells exploit quantum effects as they exploit tons of advanced and amazing molecular chemistry techniques already.

Whether brains exploit quantum effects on a larger scale than just locally within cells is harder to know. It is possible for sure as we have evolved complex macro structures like eye balls as long as there were viable and useful intermediate stages.

Thus to me it is theoretically possible that large scale quantum effects could be possible in the brain.

One cool thing is that if this does in fact exist in the brain, there is likely a lot that we could learn from it. It would be stable at room temperature, robust under moderate vibrations, and made from non-exotic materials.

Large scale quantum effects does not make the brain special in a mystical way, I just view them as an meaningful optimization over non-quantum consciousness. Given that we know that the results of quantum effects can be simulated on non-quantum computers, then quantum consciousness isn't unique to quantum capable devices, it is just more efficient on those devices than others.

And given that biology always seems to surprise with its ingenuity, it seems likely that those brains who use more efficient methods of computation would have evolutionary advantages over those that do not. It would then follow that if quantum consciousness (AKA large scale quantum effects in the brain) existed, it would be widespread, and likely not restricted to just humans.

Just because something is using "quantum effects" does not make it a "quantum computer".

Regular old transistors use "quantum effects" left and right, but they're ultimately just classical computing devices.

Few things hurt science more than people who put their desire for their ideas to be true, over experimental evidence. Unfortunately, the more difficult it is to gather experimental evidence (as it is psychology), the more this desire takes over, I think.

Currently, we have no choice but to relegate everything we think we know about consciousness to the realm of hypothesis, because the only form of evidence we have (first hand experience) cannot be shared or analyzed. I don't have a huge problem with people hypothesizing that consciousness (or perhaps more aptly, free will) has quantum properties, but they should clearly label them as such -- hypotheses.

I 100% agree that science is held back by that desire, but there are some parts of consciousness we can test. Giving sight to the blind, for example, and getting them to see a cube and sphere for the first time. Giving someone varying amounts of LSD. I would argue even talking about consciousness with individuals in a lab-like setting. If most individuals use the same type of language to describe certain behaviours at the very least it bounds the range of what could be collective delusion.

We had a debate at office about this. We had a lot of trouble untangling perception (or awareness) from qualia (which is basically a thing as experienced by a person). For example, a cat may be aware of its reflection in the mirror, and may eventually map points on the mirror to points on its own body, but is there something inside the cats brain that is doing the observing? Or is it just a computing device that operates on a continuous input-processing-output loop that learns from previous loops?

I think the riddle is in the language.

When someone talks of oceans they don't question if it is just a bunch of quarks. The information processing system is intelligible to us because we live in a universe of consequence. Perception, awareness, and qualia seem to be all possible from neural activity.

> is there something inside the cats brain that is doing the observing? Or is it just a computing device that operates on a continuous input-processing-output loop that learns from previous loops?

The big question is, is there a difference? We haven't really established whether a sufficiently complex input-processing-output algorithm could also be a self-aware thing inside the cat's brain doing the observing. To posit that both things are separate mechanisms is a dangerous assumption, I think, when we don't really know what that "thing inside the cat's brain that observes" is.

Interesting. Would you say there is a "thing inside the brain that observes" in the case of humans, or more specifically, in your case personally? Much of my argument rests on the flimsy pillar that I personally perceive myself as an observer in a way that is different from inanimate objects.

Perhaps the only difference is in the level of complexity?

We can only speculate, but in my mind, to "be" the one that observes does not preclude from there being something in my brain that observes, which in turn, unconsciously, becomes part of what I call my identity and self. At the end of the day, to the best of our knowledge, living beings are made of the same atoms and chemical reactions as inanimate objects. So, yes, I would speculate that it's all a question of complexity.

When I pet my cat and it begins to purr and stretch out its paws, I know there is qualia involved.

But a cat's brain is scarcely larger than a walnut.

> Is there something inside the cats brain that is doing the observing?

That would be the homunculus fallacy, the idea that an agent must have an agent within itself to account for its agency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

I don't think this is what he meant. Asking whether there is an observer in the cat is asking whether there is any mental life in the cat, i.e. whether there is anything it is like to be the cat. This is different from the homunculus fallacy that posits an inner observer to explain how mental representations of sensory information are consumed (e.g. the cartesian theater).

> We had a debate at office about this. We had a lot of trouble untangling perception (or awareness) from qualia (which is basically a thing as experienced by a person).

This is the essence of the hard problem of consciousness: do qualia actually exist such that they are different than the perceptions that lead to them? Dennett thinks not, and that like all of our mental faculties, "qualia" are simply another cognitive trick to help us shift or maintain focus on important stimuli (or serve some other functional purpose).

An analogy I like to use is that qualia would be similar to how single-CPU computers can give the illusion of parallelism by rapid context switching.

> put their desire for their ideas to be true, over experimental evidence

Welcome to social sciences, psychology etc. Sadly.

> Unfortunately, the more difficult it is to gather experimental evidence (as it is psychology), the more this desire takes over, I think.

And doubly unfortunately, even the gathering of experimental evidence is subject to this problem: funding is denied for politically incorrect studies, the methodological problems found in all real world experiments are emphasized in the studies we dislike, ignored in studies that confirm our biases, etc.

What if I consider my feelings of free(ish) will observational evidence? This argument is hashed out in detail here: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/Searle

In particular:

> I observe that I choose freely, at least sometimes; and if you introspect, you will see it too. There is no reason to assume that these observations are illusory, any more than there is reason to assume that vision or hearing is illusory. I frequently hear scientists declare that real science (as opposed to bogus Aristotelian science) rests on observation; that is, they take the observed facts as a given, and work from there. The insistence that free will does not exist has more in common with the worst a priori scholasticism than with modern science. The latter demanded that the facts fit the theory, while the essence of science is supposed to be that we make our theories fit the observed facts. […] Any argument for doubting our observations of our mental states would ipso facto be an argument to doubt the observations that confirmed atomic theory. […]

> This doesn’t mean that I am sure that no explanation is possible; maybe one day someone will show that this “brute fact” is not a brute fact at all, but one capable of a simple explanation. The point is that we don’t need to wait for this explanation before we can accept my view. We can gather all of the needed evidence for that if we merely turn inwards and observe.

I've found the necessary condition of assuming atheism in a lot of cog.sci discussions can become a kind of "the floor is lava," constraint, where it seems like a game where you can reason about these things credibly so long as you don't fall into a deist trap.

Hopping from island to island of logical consistency is fun and drives material innovation, which even perhaps provides a kind of moral teleology you can backfit to political problems - but viewed from outside, it can seem like a bit of a game.

It would be really interesting to read a theologians view of AI, maybe a question for Google's Vatican office (if there were one)?

It would be really interesting to read a theologians view of AI, maybe a question for Google's Vatican office (if there were one)?

The problem with that view is that when you dig into it, it’s always a permutation of, “God did it,” or “Because God said so.” There isn’t much to work with there, and you can use it to justify literally anything at all because it’s free from the constraints of logic. You could equally argue that a machine can never have a soul, and no consciousness, or that god could just decree it does, and who’s to really say otherwise? There is no there, there.

They're implying that when you involve God you'll also pick up the Roman Catholic catechism. The real problem with trying to bring religion in to these debates comes from trying to pick the religion! Nonspecific God is actually the same as atheism for the reason you point out - you can't make any prior statements about what God will do, which is the same as not being able to make any prior statements about what Nature will do. Physicists have historically interchanged God and Nature (casually, they aren't trying to say anything) when they're talking, and it works for this reason.

Exactly. At the end of the day science is all about “How” although some scientists being human, understandably do sometimes wade into the “Why” end of it. Science is great at delving into how something works, without bothering with a “why” and nowhere is that better expressed than in Langrangian formulations.

When people try to inject Why into science, they’re missing the point, and the same is true of trying to inject How into religion.

It's also possible that there is a meaningful "why." From the perspective of mystical traditions, apparently physical reality is an expression of God's mind. Why God is having this particular dream can then be answered meaningfully, by entering into direct gnosis -- because you are, after all, Him.

The hard part is testing this objectively. In a lucid dream, you might understand why the Dreamer is generating this particular setup, but until you can demonstrate it to the satisfaction of others in the dream, it's not very useful to them.

It’s possible that there is a god or something similar, but it’s not possible, as you say, to test it (at least not in the foreseeable future) in a meaningful way. We just don’t know, and have no way or knowing. Anyone can float a view from dreaming gods, through gnostic concepts, to simulated reality, and we have no evidence for or against and no real hope of finding such evidence.

I have had extensive conversations with a theologian, my father (he has a doctorate in theology). I finally decided that I don’t have to change his mind, he has faith and that’s all there is to it. He’s well read, believes in science, evolution, etc. However, he accepts that there is an all powerful god so practically no argument can change that belief.

With respect to cognition, when I asked him about the possibility that computer thought might be indistinguishable from human or at least higher level animal thought some day, his reply was that such would be a kind of an illusion of consciousness but that “real” consciousness is by definition not a mechanical thing and only possible in a living organism.

I feel like most religious people are like my father in that they have unexamined categories that allow religious ideas to coexist with modern science in their personal metaphysics.

I love my father so we simply don’t talk about religion (or politics) anymore.

How did a perfectly reasonable conversation and disagreement cause you to decide that you can't talk to him about religion anymore?

Because you can reach a perfectly amicable point where you realize that one person's belief is a decision - you understand their arguments, they understand yours, but nothing that either of you say will change the other person's mind. We tend to think that people think through the options and go for the most salient one, but sometimes they say, "I'm going to believe this" and then they do. In that case, you'd have to unseat their will to change their mind.

You can also reach a point where, as you said, they’re not fanatical or cut off from science and objectivity, they just have a lens through which they view it all. It’s a tough life, and a belief in a higher purpose or underlying cause must be very comforting to some, and if they can still accept reality as it exists, what’s the harm? If they’re not out to convert you, or argue that Earth is 6000 years old, then there are probably better things to discuss than their faith.

it also exposes confirmation/cognitive biases apparently even if you don't even know you had one or still deny it

Maybe approach the discussion as not requiring the outcome of one person convincing another but simply gaining a deeper understanding of each other to increase intimacy.

It's like trying to change prior probability of one, using Bayesian updates. You can try it, but it is pointless and causes frustration.

It works other way around too. You can't Bayesian update prior probability in (0, 1) range into 0 or 1.

> he has faith

Like you

> he accepts that there is (not) an all powerful god so practically no argument can change that belief

Like you.

Atheist is a belief system. Inflexible and closed-minded.

Is not way around that. You can't take a position and at the same time claim to be open to all positions. Any change of side requiere some extraordinary event.

---

If God build the brain, part of the "materials" and "formula" are OUTSIDE our reality. How can a Super Mario Bros character build a human-like brain if in his realm not exist biologic material, and their natural laws are a snapshot of the full ones?

Its interesting how some react to the idea, as if it were a insult. Is not. The problem is not be self-aware of it.

Yes, I've heard this argument before (from my father), but I don't buy it. First, I'm not, perhaps, what you are claiming, a close minded inflexible atheist. I am perfectly willing to consider claims backed by evidence. So far, most religious claims don't seem to persuade me, the gods I've heard of don't seem to be consistent with what I observe in the real world.

The idea of an omnipotent omnipresent and omniscient perfect god seems quite fantastic. Where is the evidence? I've seen with my own eyes manuscripts in a museum describing dragons and there have been many such descriptions over centuries[1], but would you believe that I had one in my back yard? What would it take for you to believe that I had one there? You might want to see it, for example, but I have to say that it's invisible. Well, you might ask me how I know its there if nobody can see it. Would you simply believe me if I said that I know it's there because I can talk to it in my head and that sometimes it even answers my wishes (but not always). I think that fantastic claims like the dragon in my backyard can reasonably be dismissed until there is solid evidence.

Perhaps I don't believe in your God, but you likely don't believe is a hundred others that humans have believed in either. I simply don't believe in one hundred and one. However, I am open to the possibility of an explanation for the universe's big questions, I just haven't seen it yet.

[1] https://www.genesispark.com/exhibits/evidence/historical/dra...

What would be interesting to me is whether someone working from the faith presumption might yield useful ideas for what we're concluding from a material view. Ethically in particular.

It's not so much discussing whether (a given) religion is true, but what the consequences of a religious premise may be, and whether they provide useful tools. We've been studying it for millennia, surely there is something helpful in there. If we necessarily exclude it, asking what the consequences of that negative definition are is also worth considering.

There are things we believe today that mean persons have political rights, but personhood itself is a pretty rough consensus with some big ethical arguments around the edges (animals, cells, chimeras, corporations, lab specimens, bladerunners, etc.) Does it suffer, should it, and how might that change us if it does, or doesn't?

Of course we can sound these things out for ourselves, but the silliness around consciousness studies seemed rooted in that very effort, and to me its worth asking if it's an artifact of the constraints we've imposed.

The interesting question is, what is it about consciousness that gives rise to religious beliefs?

It's not "unexamined" (I'm referring to why intelligent people maintain religious belief). It's more about where one stands on the chicken-or-the-egg question. Did God endow us with consciousness, or does consciousness endow us with this temptation to believe, which is itself a form of qualia, one that's untethered from anything external (i.e. the sky being blue because of wavelengths of light).

There must be a reason why humans are burdened by this but my dog and cat are not.

Oddly, it would be interesting why evolution would select for a tendency toward having beliefs. If dogs and cats had "it," but were simply unburdened by needing to reconcile it with their facility to act through others (language), it could be seen to exist in them.

Fish returning to spawning grounds could be an expression of belief, just as ritual fighting among deer during the rut, bees doing mating dances, etc. There is an underlying urge to continue life, and rituals for efficient, relatively non-destructive sorting for collective survival emerge across species.

That our sorting uses our unique facility (language) kind of makes sense.

> It would be really interesting to read a theologians view of AI,

Best I can do, is this guy. Paper in the middle of the page, not without a lot of controversy

http://www.ctmu.net/

also on a side note, in my opinion all AI will inherently be bad and psychopathic. You got Teslas killing about one person a week, evil laughing Echo's, microsoft chatbots going full racist/pro-Hitler, AI creating flash crashes, etc, etc. When ever I read an article framing AI positively, I am aware that they are aware that they know this and preemptively dictate a counternarrative.

Normally I think that Chopra is a complete tool, but every one of his quotes and actions here seem lucid, if extremely guru-like. Nonetheless his Twitter feed and presentations still seem batty, and he still sells the supplements and other trash. Perhaps he can turn it on and off?

There's a reason why he's famous. That reason is not that he's actually insightful or correct with his cut-up dadaist nonsense quotes. It's because he's very good at acting like a guru.

"Whatever you tell Deepak Chopra, he responds as if he knew in advance what you were going to say." I love how he thinks he's smart for predicting people will treat him like a nut after he acts like a total nut for decades.

When a field is largely pre-scientific like consciousness, lots of "gurus" are drawn in who try to substitute flashy language and bold, general statements for actual rigor and reproducible predictions. The state of the study of consciousness today almost guarantees by definition that there is no objective observation or falsifiable claims, and reproduction of someone's experiment is very difficult in any way that proves anything meaningful.

Chopra just excels in saying some unnecessarily terse and ambiguous statement that will naturally appeal to one's pareidolia, causing people to think it's some incredibly deep and multifaceted wisdom when in fact it can be replicated with a random word bank: http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/

The whole quantum woo crowd is really saddening. I mean obviously quantum effects have something to do with it, in as much as quantum effects have something to do with everything. But when you take some barely-understood, bleeding-edge physics and apply it to a horrifically complex and almost completely unknown field like the origin of consciousness, stating that this is where your soul or free will or whatever comes from, you can be ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED that this person is so full of shit their eyes are turning brown. Quantum weirdness™ does not exist solely to prop up people's baseless spiritual beliefs. Be very wary of people who twist physics in to such convenient and anthro-centric ways.

>Chopra just excels in saying some unnecessarily terse and ambiguous statement that will naturally appeal to one's pareidolia, causing people to think it's some incredibly deep and multifaceted wisdom when in fact it can be replicated with a random word bank: http://www.wisdomofchopra.com

This is a very astute observation and very true of similar “guru” types like Jordan Peterson. They use tricks of language and presentation to exploit how people parse ambiguity and make themselves seem “wise.”

Can you give an example?

Somebody even did a hilarious study about it: http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf

I doubt anyone will read this, as I'm somewhat late to the party.

I'd like to get in touch with a serious research group, because the barrier to scientific and social advances is the recognition of ESP (Extrasensory Experience) as the mechanism the mind works with.

I'm sure I can prove ESP and I'm not a telepath. Seriously, it is so common, that the big question is why I was blind to it. In simple experiments, with hardly any effort, I see ESP confirmed, daily. That is: mind to mind contact without relying on sound, vision, or a chemical channel.

I have a hard time theorizing the mechanism, but as distance doesn't seem to be much of an obstacle (and effects are immediate), the processes seem to involve entanglement and superposition, as concepts. Not radiowaves ;)

As the article never once mentions ESP, I think the title of the article is very apt. A reflection of the underlying scientific poverty.

A poor scientific state of mind leads to a society which doesn't know how to properly nurture itself, thus going of on a tangent. Thus it engages in madness (as opposed to doing the mentally healthy thing), and tends to terrorize, abandon and sacrifice the individual in its pursuit.

>I'm sure I can prove ESP and I'm not a telepath. Seriously, it is so common, that the big question is why I was blind to it. In simple experiments, with hardly any effort, I see ESP confirmed, daily. That is: mind to mind contact without relying on sound, vision, or a chemical channel.

Can you write more about this here? What were your simple experiments, and why haven't people looking for it found it out already, if they are simple?

> Can you write more about this here? What were your simple experiments.

It suffices to say I am not the listening party in my experiments. The subject doesn't even know he is the subject, initially. That, I presume, makes the experiment reproducible. It is also easy to find new subjects. See also the reply above.

> why haven't people looking for it found it out already, if they are simple?

Really, what people are looking?? The main purpose of my post is to get to know the field. Among common people ESP seems well known, but they have no wish to live under a scientific blessing/curse.

Second, ESP is literally part of how people, including scientists, work. Telepathy in particular seems to be science performed at life speed, with the model seeing a theory-space collapsing under evidence. Science is the result of this process.

Third, cultural violence decides who can (be permitted to) have a voice and who can't. Evidence by non-scientists is commonly discredited.

You should contact Jeffrey Mishlove or anyone who works in the field of Parapsychology.

Thanks very much for your recommendation.

If you look at the Wikipedia entries for ESP, telepathy, etc, the field is called out harshly for being "pseudo-science", because of bad methodology. Surely methodology would have been better if "money" had shown an interest. I need good methodology and that surely has costs.

I listened to a podcast from Kristen Truempy with Jeffrey (103). He reaches similar conclusions, notably the benefit for society and the blind eye of big-S-science.

He gets emotional when dealing with blatant denial of "150 years of documented empirical evidence" (as he should). He mentions that polls suggest 2/3rd of the population recognizes the existence of some form of ESP.

Jeffrey also mentioned (but not recommend) the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. Indeed its setup resembles a freak show, not science.

I didn't know of any of the competitions in TV-shows, nor of the $100.000 reward by the Australian Skeptics (seemingly discontinued), which "is open to any contender who can state exactly what their paranormal claim is, and the claim can give a definite yes or no result".

In my view, in psychology, a definite yes or no result, doesn't exist, and no one should be asked to provide one. Not even climate scientists can convince 100% of the population of climate change despite overwhelming evidence. Nor can an advertiser force all clients to buy the intended products. Yet advertising definitely works.

Note that, as should be obvious, I have no prior at all in parapsychology. Even when I was writing down my original post, I felt the need for a reality check (and repeated the experiment).

Hi, a couple of questions:

1. Could you describe the experiments you mentioned to prove ESP? What would be your experiment context? What would you measure? How would you measure it? Which precision would you be satisfied with to say you've proven ESP? (Precision should be a quantity related to the way you're gonna measure).

2. It seems that you have actually measured this phenomenon, since you actually say: "effects are immediate" and independent of distance. That's a big statement. Could you provide us with the measures of this phenomenon and show us their independence of distance? Actually, the most interesting part would be: what equipment did you use to measure such small amounts of time? You said "effects are immediate", but "immediate" cannot be actually measures, because every equipment has its precision (so you would be only sure that two numbers are equal (which means immediate effect) until a certain point). What is your precision to measure this? What equipment did you use to do measures faster than the speed of light? (Since, you're saying that definitely radiowaves are ruled out, so that means you actually have a measure with a precision faster than the speed of light, the speed in which radiowaves communicate).

If you don't have measures, then it wouldn't make sense to rule out radiowaves. Actually, if you don't have measures, it would also seem that your analysis is highly biased by what you think is true, even selecting the "cooler" laws of physics to explain the supposed phenomenon that you can measure, the quantum freaky world of "entanglement and superposition", as opposed to the good and old "radiowaves".

You said it yourself, "A poor scientific state of mind leads to...", and I think a poor scientific mind is the one that pre-decides about the results of a subject in question before he can precisely say how he has (or will) measured that phenomenon. Science is not about "accepting any idea in", but more about: let's test all the ideas by measuring them in the actual world before we make a decision over it, or even if there is something to be discovered at all. Science is about a battle of ideas: all ideas should be fought and only those who present respectable evidence will raise. That's also the reason science is so effective, because it's hard to invent stuff and make scientists believe it. You would need to have actual proof that you are on the right track. So, a rich scientific mind would actually take your claims and beliefs with a very high dose of scientific scepticism.

Christopher Hitchens said it better: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

> Hi, a couple of questions: > 1. Could you describe the experiments you mentioned to prove ESP?

I decided it's better to not yet describe them yet. Though I believe anyone can easily do the experiment and get confirmation, maybe there is a component that makes the pendulum swing wider in my case (no pendulum involved :). So that would deviate the discussion.

I discovered the phenomenon privately while lowering a stimulus, until there was no stimulus left, but the same mind exercise. And I was left in disbelief. That was a little over a year ago.

Looking back I believe I got best in class notes on science, in part because I read the mind of my professors. Now the mind-reading part is sort of an exaggeration, but I do remember understanding the professor (and by proxy the thinking in the field) was key to finding the solution. So, really, was I good in math? Or was this half some sort of disguised ESP testing taking place?

> You said "effects are immediate", but "immediate" cannot be actually measures, because every equipment has its precision (so you would be only sure that two numbers are equal (which means immediate effect) until a certain point). > What is your precision to measure this? What equipment did you use to do measures faster than the speed of light?

You're going overboard. We are talking human dimensions here. "Immediate" rules out chemical channels and delays as in audio. "Immediate" also refers to not implying use of the senses, so mind to mind.

But you captured correctly that I spoke of proof. As in demonstration and in court. Yes, that kind of frightens me and that could derail experiments.

> Actually, if you don't have measures, it would also seem that your analysis is highly biased by what you think is true, even selecting the "cooler" laws of physics to explain the supposed phenomenon that you can measure, the quantum freaky world of "entanglement and superposition", as opposed to the good and old "radiowaves".

Correct. Of course. You didn't measure correctly the dimension of my words. So you come across as someone proven wrong many times, so you have to start with a reality check. But hey, hello, I'm am 55, an engineer.

> You said it yourself, "A poor scientific state of mind leads to...", and I think a poor scientific mind is the one that pre-decides about the results of a subject in question before he can precisely say how he has (or will) measured that phenomenon.

Exactly. I mean no disrespect to scientists. No individual is directly responsible. And where money flows scientists don't have much of a vote anyway.. Science may have been blind, but society shouldn't be.

> So, a rich scientific mind would actually take your claims and beliefs with a very high dose of scientific scepticism.

Agreed, within professional realms. But in the social domain, when science is one eye open, another closed, it's missing the big picture, and that creates a false testimony society feeds back to all. That's a feedback loop and a bias. You might think science knows it all.

> Christopher Hitchens said it better: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

Well, to be accurate, this isn't exactly cold-fusion, nor something new or specific to me. It's common sense among swaths of fellow citizens, maybe your wife, thinking with the other side of their brain, having to sustain being told, _socially_, that they are wrong. No equal-rights movement talking about the underlying problem though, which may be termed inequality through science.

Anyway, thanks for allowing me to clarify. In addition I got fewer downvotes than I expected despite calling out a "poor state of mind".

I believe Hameroff is on the right track, but the track can be extended much further.

Every cell (and every bacteria) is a conscious, intelligent being. Nothing else is conscious. Our sense of "I" comes from a single cell in our body, getting inputs from other cells. We are products of the self-modification of cells. We need to find a way to talk with our cells - they will tell us a lot about physics and life.

Whether the cell consciousness is due to quantum effects or not is of secondary importance at this stage IMO.

I think you're on the right track, but the track can be extended much further. All energy is conscious because by the laws of physics, it does computation/work when flowing along energy gradients. The whole entire thing is an electric light disco of conscious entities on every scale. Every single body of matter absorbs and emits a characteristic spectrum of electromagnetic energy solely dependent on its construction. Yet my neighbors say we don't interact... :-)

> Every cell (and every bacteria) is a conscious, intelligent being.

Then why isn't inanimate matter conscious?

Your question contains the answer. If it were conscious, it would be animate matter :) Seriously, I don't know , maybe everything is conscious, but for bacteria/cells - we can be sure. This realization is already a big step forward :)

I'm not certain we can be sure that's where we draw the line for consciousness, actually, but to each his own.

Seriously, on what basis are you making these claims?

Several reasons: 1. Explanatory power

2. Reduction

3. Simplicity

4. Occam's razor

5. Crazy enough (necessary condition for any new theory)

There's much more to be said, but not here, sorry.

EDIT: whoever wants to discuss the idea further, please send me a personal message to resource0x at gmail. I was thinking on this idea for quite a while, pretty sure it makes much more sense than "emergence" and other mystic voodoo.

Those are not great reasons. For instance, 2-4 are essentially the same, and are not explained at all. 5 is a joke of some kind, and 1 is not reason enough to believe anything. Might be reason enough to form a hypothesis, but how would you even go about testing such a hypothesis?

After all you can cook up multiple self-consistent ideas of how a machine works in your imagination, but until you actually examine the machine you can't say that your idea actually explains how it works. It's a way it might work.

Usually you want to have at least some cursory observation to form a hypothesis, but admittedly it's inherently very difficult to observe something like the nature of how you are able to observe things. That's why I'm so hesitant to believe anyone who says they have objective knowledge about it.

Normally, 1) is enough. Explanatory power. E.g., evolution driven not by random mutations, but by self-modification of bacteria/cells, based on same engineering principles as we use in programming. There's a rational goal behind all this endeavor, we will get it sooner or later. The alternative is the admission of meaninglessness of everything and total depression (recurrent topic on HN)

Evolution does not require consciousness, so I have no idea why you think the hypothesis that bacteria are conscious has any "explanatory power".

Thank you for letting me know :)

Don't you see that you're projecting your own needs on the world around you? Physics isn't required to make you comfortable or happy. You aren't finding truth, you're just inventing reassuring delusions.

What is delusion and what is not is in the eye of the beholder until proven experimentally. Randomness is impossible to prove in principle, even for a sequence of 0 and 1, and you know it. But I see you are really interested in the topic :) There are things discovered in recent years that challenge the dogma. E.g. each neuron has its own DNA (like hardware that can rewire itself - not randomly, but for a purpose). Cells communicate using complex language through more than one communication channel. Look for "plant intelligence" on youtube (TED talks). BTW, the idea of single-cell consciousness is not mine - it's Hameroff's idea (derived from his practice of anesthesiology). Bacterial intelligence is an active area of research. The picture gradually emerges. But don't expect anyone to publish a coherent theory anytime soon - simply for fear, b/c for some reason, in US and western countries, any mention of intelligence is perceived as religious belief. But in fact, belief in human exceptionalism and intellectual superiority is a religious belief. My view is that humans are not that smart - we are just average among other species.

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