Hacker News Reader

Comment by bencollier49 | Hacker News Reader

This is the latest approach to science's complete inability to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Just declare that it doesn't exist. I think it's rather pitiful, to be honest.

View on HN

I was pretty riled up too when I read the headline, but after reading the article, I think the interviewee actually has a much more benign view that it seems. He does not appear to deny the hard problem and indeed the domain of his claims appear to not even intersect with the hard problem in any real sense.

It appears to me (correct me if I'm wrong), that he is simply claiming that we believe we are having much more rich conscious experiences than we actually are, and that we are often mislead or mistaken about the character of our experience. As a meditator, I can corroborate these claims.

None of these claims deny the existence of subjective experience itself which is the basis of the hard problem. He's merely saying that our conscious experiences are much more disconnected, less informationally dense and less orderly than we believe.

>He's merely saying that our conscious experiences are much more disconnected, less informationally dense and less orderly than we believe.

If there was only one particle in the universe, it wouldn't have a height. I disagree that the average person has the capacity to be wrong about their consciousness, because without another one to compare it against they have no way to form opinions about it.

A person can't be wrong that they have consciousness, but they can be mistaken about about the character of their conscious experiences.

We tend to think that we have a very continuous constant stream of attention and thought but in reality if you learn to pay attention, you'll see that your mind is pretty erratic and experience is not at all like your memories tend to represent.

I don't think most people have a belief about how continuous or erratic their consciousness is, because the only time words are used to describe things is when you are distinguishing between more than one thing.

Nicely put!

Thank you, you made me smile.

I think it’s more of a misleading title, combined with the usual meandering style that philosophers have. What he’s basically saying is that we consciously experience the outputs of a number of expert systems: those responsible for seeing, hearing, selecting what should be attended to, and that even thought is a kind of expert system to which we have no internal access. We know that we think, that we see and hear, but we don’t know the details of how it happens, nor do we experience the details of this processing.

It’s not really very revolutionary, we already know this and it seems obvious when pointed out, it also does nothing to explain how experience of those outputs arises, or what it is.

Sounds to me more like they've redefined the words "thought" and "conscious" such that what most people think of as "thoughts" don't count.

Yep, there are various flavours of it doing the rounds, as far as I can tell. We could call this one the semantic approach.

any thought that we encounter are simply internal reactions to stimuli of various sorts encountering information we have previously processed/learned. what this article is saying is that we do not control these as is normally believed, we are more of a bystander than anything.

This really feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the article's headline instead of any sort of argument as to why you think it may be wrong or what pieces of the interview you disagree with.

That's fair. There's not really room to deconstruct the various arguments here. I want to blog about it later.

Just because you don't agree with it, or it offends you somehow, doesn't mean it's wrong.

Oh, it mildly offends me because I think it's wrong. And a cop-out.

You can’t explain something in terms of itself. Obviously at some point any process has to be explained in terms of lower level processes that don’t share the characteristics of the higher level process. The cop-out is in refusing to accept that, which results in circular arguments. Like any magic trick (or computer system), once you explain how it works, you’re saying the “magic” doesn’t exist. Consciousness is no exception.

But that's not what's going on here. This is like saying Microsoft Word doesn't exist because I can't see it if I look at the electrons in the computer. Or can't abstract it from there. Or possibly even who wrote the program. No, just "It doesn't exist", or "It's an illusion".

The concept of conscious thought was only created with subjective observation, people had simply assumed what their experience was. We still don't have solid evidence one way or the other but the evidence we do have seems to be pointing towards it being an illusion.

Most scientific methodology tries very hard to exclude subjective experience by design. Well, if you do that then of course there will be a lack of evidence for subjective phenomena!

Just in case you're tempted to downplay science's blind spot here, consider that this also means science has next to nothing to say about 99+% of your life.

If you take a reductionist stance in this domain you actually have to philosophically ground it in a way that you don't have to worry about too much in other fields of study. Otherwise you'll end up with an embarrassing phlogistic theory of consciousness.

So why is it wrong then? Can you provide empirical evidence to back up your claim?

If by consciousness you mean what everybody means by consciousness there are no well-founded claims about it because it's not observable. If you want to redefine consciousness to mean desk lamps, then I strongly disagree with the conclusion that consciousness doesn't exist because I have a desk lamp right here.

> If by consciousness you mean what everybody means by consciousness there are no well-founded claims about it because it's not observable.

It is observable, but not externally verifiable; it literally encompasses the entirety of the category of things for which that is true.

The author admits that what he's really doing is playing games with definitions, and more interestingly, exploring the question of what conciousness is. To try and exploit shock value via tabloid-style meaning twisting is unworthy of the subject matter.

I'll write a blog post on it later, it'll take more than a few sentences.

That isn't what this conversation is actually saying imho.

Although I think what it is saying is poorly explained and too simple.

This isn't about science, this is an interview with a philosopher.

Unfortunately the vast majority of Academic Philosophers disagree with you. Thoughts obviously exist but the idea that you are in control of what you think about is patently false. Take a look at modern stances on Free Will if you doubt that.

If I'm not in control of what I think, then I am not in control of what I do... In which case, we're all just robots.

Free will in this interpretation is making binary choices to manifest thought forms or not, and consciousness would be having the machinery to interpret thought and exercise free will.

Not sure I agree with this. I think most people imagine that they have a landscape of possible choices or thoughts in front of them and they have some agency to maneuver through that landscape and modern research and even simple meditation will reveal that this is simply an illusion. I don't really want to chime in on the nature of Consciousness though.

My thought is that the binary “do not manifest” decision could request delivery of a new set of similar thought forms which could then be manifest. There could be several types of thought forms that let us have the illusion that we are willing in related thoughts. Like an old iPod, perhaps. Consciousness is the most fun topic to speculate about, says the Buddha!

Or ants. Perhaps the human species is a big robot, made up of replaceable parts, individually blessed with belief in free will.

Yes.

But complex and interesting ones.

in a very simplistic view, yes we are

Indeed, that's certainly one way to interpret the lack of free will. You might be inclined to join the Compatibilist camp, which I find intellectually lacking but many people are more comfortable with than raw determinism. Whichever stance you take its virtually certain that Libertarian Free Will, the kind of free will 99% of people imagine when they think about the idea, does not exist.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

There is something divine about this.

A gaggle of Academic Philosophers all nodding in agreement that they have no control over their thoughts or publications.

I agree, just don't make the mistake of thinking that Reason and Logic are meaningless if free will doesn't exist. They are still critical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com