What If Consciousness Comes First?
psychologytoday.com
psychologytoday.com
We may get there. Read something about how vision works from a century ago, when nobody had a clue. The first real progress came from "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959).[1] That was the beginning of understanding visual perception, and the very early days of neural network technology. Now we have lots of systems doing visual perception moderately well. There's been real progress.
(I went through Stanford CS at the peak of the 1980s expert system boom. Back then, people there were way too much into asking questions like this. "Does a rock have intentions?" was an exam question. The "AI winter" followed. AI finally got unstuck 20 years later when the machine learning people and their "shut up and calculate" approach started working.)
I realize this could be true for a lot of other schools of thought, but it seemed especially prominent when arguments about what makes a person seem to rely on a lower-level assumption of how the brain works.
What's left as "philosophy" is always the stuff where we don't even really know what questions to ask. So we kick them around for a few centuries, or millennia, in the hopes that something will eventually take on a shape that can be pursued in a better-defined fashion.
This process has a name : The Great Conversation [0]. Bit presumputious to me to think Plato would have any clue as to what we're saying, but it is a good name for a thing.
EDIT: Some links to the new tools mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb07TLkJ3Ww (optogenetics)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKbrwPL3wXE (crispr-cas9)
> The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works...
I don't think the "problem of consciousness" is one of missing empirical evidence so much as simply a fuzzy (ill-posed?) question. Though enough evidence might be sufficient to forcefully dissolve an irreal question. On the flipside, a lot of the current ML research does a good job at addressing consciousness by breaking it into concrete, communicable actions.
Instead of asking, "What is consciousness?" try asking, "What actions could XYZ take that would convince me it's conscious?" A related question is "What actions (in minute detail) are involved as I believe/think/feel I'm conscious?" Those two questions are similar, but tend to evoke quite different sets of "external" experiences and actions.
It might turn out that there is some mathematically invariant property of things that are capable of acting as convincing conscious agents, a la the physically precise definition of heat turning out to behave kind of like a phlogiston. In such a case, we might in fact find a "thing" that deserves the label "consciousness"---such as Hofstadter's idea of a strange loop---but for now I think the term is used pretty much used in a way that's synonymous with "magic".
I think we can define a generalized version of what we call a "conscious thought" as a thought that can be "consciously reflected" about. With "conscious reflection" I mean using some representation of the thought as an input for another thought in such a way that the new thought, including the usage of the original thought, can be used as an input for another thought in the same way. The representation doesn't have to correspond particularly closely to the execution. (We remember to think in natural language, but maybe the thought process is just converted into natural language after the fact for the purpose of saving and reflecting.)
Computer programs can also be conscious according to this generalized definition if the process of executing it is saved in some way and can, depending on the circumstances, be used in some way, which is saved in the same way.
That different "ways" of using a thought as an input for another thought are possible means that there can be different consciousnesses in our brain. One of them (if there are multiple), which is the one responsible for our output, at least on a higher level, or does at least significantly inform the output, is what we call "my consciousness". The reason why we don't know whether "my consciousness" is responsible for the output, despite having the appearance, is that it may be mostly a "post-hoc rationalization engine" for decisions made on another level, possibly for other reasons. But it does at least inform the output, since thoughts of "my consciousness" in the past inform our later output. For example, if we are asked about our past thoughts, we talk about the ones that are remembered in "my consciousness". This is the thing that puts it in such a special position compared to other hypothetical consciousnesses, which don't inform our output in this way, and are therefore invisible to other people, and obviously also to "my consciousness".
(Answer since edit doesn't seem to work.)
I wasn't aware ML had anything to do with consciousness.
> In such a case, we might in fact find a "thing" that deserves the label "consciousness"---such as Hofstadter's idea of a strange loop---but for now I think the term is used pretty much used in a way that's synonymous with "magic".
So you consider your experiences of color, taste, pleasure, etc. to be akin to "magic"? Because those sensations are what make up our conscious experiences.
What does a good answer to this question look like in this context? Genuinely curious what they were looking for.
Imo the real question is whether humans have intentions. It seems like if you look at it rationally, we're just collections of chemicals reacting with each other. Set the initial conditions and then the whole thing is deterministic. It's pretty uncomfortable to think this though, so I think it's best if we avoid the subject.
Imagine you are on a rollercoaster: you know your course is pre-determined, but you can't see too far ahead, and it sure is a fun and surprising ride along the way.
If quantum physics theories are correct than there's always some amount of pure randomness in the game, making it impossible to create perfectly deterministic and repeatable system of any significant complexity.
The real answer is that decisions exist in a different frame of reference. Some philosophers are stuck in a model in which decisions were taken by the soul, an inmaterial entity. So if decisions are generated by physical processes, they're an ilusion.
But that's as idiotic as it can be. Our brain is a material system and of course decisions are generated by physical processes inside it. The interesting question is how much of us is malleable and how we can make our decisions to change ourselves and our own decision making process.
Good level design is basically when a player traverses a predetermined path while not feeling that he is on rails...
Example og good level design, Half Life games. A player Traverse the world as if they can go anywhere but they always pick the right way.
Other example is Dark souls. Keeps you in a loops so you never hit a "dead end"
This reminds me of Sam Harris' book "Freewill", I recommend it to the people who believe in freewill.
By the way, what determines the whole chain of deterministic events?
Also Elbow Room, or, better, Freedom Evolves.
But there's just nothing that I recall in that book that suggests or even hints at any reason for this to result in a subjective experience. And I don't believe it rules out an electron having a nano-unit of subjective experience, for example.
The book suggests that something is a subjective experience if an organism can report it as one, and goes to great detail about what's going on in the brain when an organism is able to report a subjective experience, and makes the very reasonable suggestion that something is probably a subjective experience in a brained organism that can't report it as one so long as it exhibits all the same patterns in that organism's brain (infants, other animals).
But I don't think it does any work at all to show that there is no subjective experience in plants, or rocks, or even nano-units of subjective experience in individual electrons. It can't do this, because, as far as I recall, there is simply no progress on the problem of why this global activation in the brain would produce a subjective experience.
If we imagine there's a God and I could ask any 1 question about the brain and get an anaswer, all I would need to ask is:
"Hey God: w.r.t. the human brain, are there any special shenanigans like is connected to a soul that's responsible for consciousness, or is it WYSIWYG, just a bunch of cells and that's it?"
Luckily for you, there is no God and I can answer definitively: no, there are no shenanigans. It's just some cells and that's it. I am telling you this definitively. There are no metaphysical shenanigans going on in the human brain.
Note: you might wonder why, for this answer, I decided to phrase it in terms of asking God. The answer is in order to activate the natural scientist's reaction "that's silly, God can't tell you there's no God like that". Well, brain metaphysics is exactly and equally silly. It's just some cells, that's all.
There isn't any evidence that there is anything happening that's not biological despite 1000's of years of searching for that evidence.
And there is all kinds of evidence that biological processes can explain our experience. More all the time.
It's not definitive in the sense that we're anywhere near completely understanding our biology.
But it's the most likely explanation, given what we do know, but such a huge margin that there is no real alternative explanation outside of mythology.
see how silly that sounds.
so on one level sure you're right, on the other hand it's obvious. no, there's obviously no super transparent cord going off to soul land. it's just a bunch of sell-contained cells. It's not wireless. It's not even networked. It's just limited to within your body. You can literally plunge yourself in water and still think.
you have no cord going off into ether. you are nnot a networked component. you are just a bunch of cells in one little package and that's it. That's you. your output is what your body does robotically (move, make sounds) your input is sensory. and your consciousnes is whatever your braincells are doing.
Isn't it the other way round, though?
They were twiddling their thumbs back then because they had no other option. There was no way to do machine learning back then. I've played with perceptrons on '90s hardware and it was basically just a toy.
And then Moore's law opened the flood gates some decades later.
It wasn't so much "thumb twiddling" though, there was a lot of work being done on systems which were more focused on knowledge representation (like Cyc [1], which still exists). Also a lot of work was being done from a more Psychological direction (mental models, scripts etc) and from a physical/neuro-science direction (brainz!).
These were all happening simultaneously and it wasn't clear (partly because of the MIPS issue you mention) that ML was the winning pony (for now) and I still appreciate the broad spectrum of knowledge covered in my particular Cognitive Science program.
And don't forget Minsky's decimation of neural network research at the start of the 1970s [1], which led to major research centers like MIT ignoring them completely.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200033859_Parallel_...
My first thought: Depends on if the rock is magnetized.
It's equally clear that most of what we associate with consciousness, such as thinking, awareness of the body and the moment and time and decision making and ... doesn't exist either. Because time and time again studies prove that when a decision is made (this is well studied in traffic for instance) there are no conscious reasons. Reasons only happen afterwards.
Is it therefore such a stretch to say that consciousness simply doesn't exist until long after the fact, and it is only once we ask one of these bags of mostly water to explain themselves (or ... well when we ask them something) that any trace of consciousness, at least the way humans understand it, is actually forthcoming ?
Consciousness is a trick. A learned trick. Human minds are not conscious and it is most definitely not a certainty that they, even when born fully formed and healthy that they will become conscious (read the reports on children raised by animals. They are old, sometimes 20 years old and they most definitely aren't conscious, not even on the level that a primate is conscious. The 12 year old boy they found in the wild in France never learned to speak only to articulate 2 words).
This is weird, because this is not most humans experience. Everyone around them always had consciousness. But let's compare. Everybody who has kids realizes that memory, firstly, isn't actually memory. We are very much not storing events when they happen in our brain. We learn a trick, because our parents keep referring to our past and "what we've done". We learn to calculate back from our current state of mind to what happened before.
That and of course philosophers have a millennium or 3 of history of ... philosophers getting consciousness wrong. Consciousness has been accepted in history to be being religious, to being able to rhyme, to composing music, to being able to talk and explain ourselves, to being able to love, to convince a professor (via chat) that you are conscious, to solve problems (all kinds), to walk around, to play chess, to ... all of these are now of course considered wrong. Why ? Mostly because things that definitely aren't conscious, from little dumb tricks, even mechanical contraptions in some cases, to rule based engines, to deep learning and now reinforcement learning algorithms can do this.
So can we please just conclude that whatever this article claims is ... wrong ? Just wrong. Nothing of value, other than perhaps interest a few people for stories with enough alcohol present. The current consensus seems to be that more details will be forthcoming the first time a reinforcement learning algorithm gets far enough to explain it's actions. So you want to know more ? Start there.
However, I think the article is simply suggesting to invert this assumption about physical reality. It proposes that for something to be "out there", you first need an "in here" (rather than afterwards), i.e. an experiencing of forms. This would be consciousness. At this point we are not even talking about decision making, thinking, memory, intellectual pursuits... Just subjective experience. So everything you're taking into the discussion regarding how thinking and decision making and memory happens is really a bridge further; not immediately relevant to the point the author is making.
I understand if this line of reasoning feels uncomfortable. You were literally pleading people to think that this is wrong. I think that is a mistake. There is value in challenging your assumptions, even if only philosophical with ethical/moral ramifications.
Since a person can tell what they experience and what they do not, the distinction between conscious experience and unconscious processing must have a base in physical reality (brain activity). With sufficiently advanced technology, one could analyze the brain processes and see which processes are associated with the reported conscious experience.
The fact that not all brain activity is associated with conscious experience in no way implies that conscious experience does not exist.
Conscience is not present during the physical exercise. Upon completion, when conscience describes it, it injects itself into it. This is the trick.
And how exactly does that back calculation happen?
Didn't all organic life arise from inorganic molecular structures like rocks?
As a result of the theory of the big bang, molecular structures have progressively evolved in complexity, eventually becoming so complex that the boundaries of physics and chemistry are transcended into biology, life, and consciousness.
This suggests that "rocks" -- inorganic molecular structures -- indeed have "intentions" to the extent that they are primordial building blocks of consciousness
There are entirely separate theories to explain how that matter, after it arose, interacts with itself to give rise to chemistry. Then there is the origin of life, which is another problem. And then we get to evolution, which is how the initial life modified itself to become the species we have today. And then we have a bunch of other theories that explain how the brain operates.
Any one of these theories could be wrong, but that wouldn't invalidate any of the other ones. Some of them we have much more data and certainty on then others. But the only people that talk as if they were the same thing are creationists, not scientists.
Just because it's hard to define the lines between inorganic life, simple life, and sentient life, it doesn't mean there's no distinction.
The real question is not consciousness, but why the laws of physics are perfectly tuned for its existence.
I'd like to share Rupert Spira, a modern non-dualist teacher that holds this view-point. Here is one video in which he explains the consciousness-first approach to someone, a scientist, who holds to the materialist approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgcfa0LFKXc
Perhaps someone will find it interesting and peruse some of his other videos, which I find very enlightening.
A major assumption of the currently dominant worldview is that there's no God, spirit, and even "mind" is questionable. Everything must be explainable as physics, and layers above like mechanics, chemistry, biology. Psychology as a field - in the "West", which is basically a global culture now - is based on that assumption.
The word "consciousness" is so ill-defined and the concept so misunderstood, mainly because it's mixed up with ideas of free will, mind, spirit - the animating principle. It's just the most modern term for categorizing and trying to understand a class of phenomena.
Seeing how "consciousness studies" is widely considered a pseudo-science, I suspect that it's actually related to some critical "flaw" in the fundamentals of the modern worldview, the assumption of a completely physical universe - "physical" meaning consistent with the science of physics.
What's fascinating for me is how quantum mechanics and its philosophical speculations about the role of the observer seems to be causing a paradigm shift, which is taking decades (almost a century) to sink in. We seem to be redefining consciousness as a fundamental property of physics, with some even theorizing that consciousness plays a role in bringing the universe into existence.
As a fan of both Indian philosophy and Western science, I'm greatly enjoying the battle of the ideas (often heated arguments and accusations of "woowoo" pseudo-scientific thinking), the struggle to understand the nature of consciousness deeply and rigorously, and the evolution of science and our worldviews.
That's right. It's pretty amazing how much is based off of that assumption which has no realistic basis. I guess it's a "convenient" assumption.
But if we start to think that hey, maybe consciousness is the root of it all, not matter, then we can see why science doesn't understand consciousness at all: it's like trying to find the screen while studying the pictures on it. You can study all the biology, physics, and matter on the screen, but you won't find the screen in the details. In this analogy, consciousness is the "screen" in which all appears. I think mainstream science will shift MASSIVELY once they start looking into as a legitimate possibility.
Beliefs and speculations also have no realistic basis. We can't prove, reproduce or properly model them in an objective manner.
One definition of science states that it is "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment."
I hold the view that philosophy precedes science, i.e., not all branches of philosophy can be regarded as science.
> But if we start to think that hey, maybe consciousness is the root of it all, not matter (...)
From your statement, there's nothing wrong going that way, but you'll have a hard time trying to defend it as science if it's based on beliefs.
Remember, we are to the best of our knowledge beings that have evolved from simple cellular organisms obeying the laws of physics. The idea that through that process of evolution we have somehow broken out of the sandbox is extraordinary enough that it would need pretty compelling evidence, no matter how attractive the idea might be.
I've also watched the video you linked to. His argument is indeed strong, but the scientist was rather weak. They (seemed to) agree that experience is mediated by our physical bodies (brains). So did the universe (matter) exist when there was no evolved consciousness to observe it? If the matter did not exist before the mind, how did we come to be?
Yes, our whole world could be somebody's dream or we could be "brains in the vat", but then the question is only changed to "who is dreaming or maintaining the vat"? And since we cannot observe the dreamer, does he exist?
Often in a crowded work environment people will be taking and yet I will have no conscious awareness of what they are saying. Yet, the second they mention my name, my attention will snap to what they are saying.
Clearly there is some unconscious (and yet intelligent and aware) part of me that is experiencing reality, just waiting for the right trigger to alert my consciousness to some important development.
The question of focus is pretty interesting to me, though. It seems that we are consciousness that gets to "decide" where to put our attention. There are a ton of things that can attract our attention, all through the mechanisms created by the consciousness, namely the five physical senses, our thoughts, and feelings.
Interesting enough, the grandfather of the modern Left, Michel Foucault, spent a considerable amount of his career trying to dislodge Kant's claim before coming upon the realization that power informs our perceptions.
The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (I forget which year) is also highly recommended though I haven't looked into that myself.
For example, public educators have near-absolute power over K-12 students in the U.S. Many students rebel against this (I certainly did), and do things like argue about homework or refuse to go to class. But that accepts the educators' power as legitimate; if it weren't, you wouldn't bother to rebel against it! Someone truly intent on seizing power for themselves would devote the minimum amount of effort and attention to pleasing his teachers, and then go off and write a machine-learning based MP3 player that he can go sell to Microsoft for a million dollars.
On the contrary, it only accepts that their power exists. That is not the same as accepting its legitimacy. If you accepted their power as legitimate then you wouldn't be rebelling! The rebellion occurs because of the this discrepancy between what is and what ought to be, as the student perceives it.
Imagine trying to have a conversation in a loud room. You struggle to hear the person you're conversing with. The loudness of the room informs your perception of the conversation. You might not enjoy the loud room, but it's nonetheless there. And your frustration with the loud room is probably affecting your responses to the conversation.
The problem is that all scientific results around the consciousness question derive from what people report about their personal experience. There's no other known way to answer any questions about consciousness, and science hasn't discovered any way to answer questions about the immaterial.
Hence, from a scientific perspective, it's not a question for which an answer can be deduced from observation -- so questions about it are left to philosophical inquiry (reasoning inductively from first principles, instead of deductively from observation) or religion-based worldviews (which can be coherently accepted/rejected based on their correspondence to reality and internal consistency).
So, let's assume that consciousness is only physical. What would be the implications of that? It would imply that other physical objects can interact with it. We see plenty of evidence of that, with victims of brain damage, or when using drugs.
Now, to assume that consciousness is not physical, not only you need a mechanism for it to interact with our physical world (since it can order our bodies to do stuff) but also for the physical world to act on it.
Hence, from a scientific perspective, it seems pretty clear that consciousness is physical.
If you consider sleeping or fainting as loss of consciouness, I wouldn't be sure that's the case. Perhaps what happens then is that we lose the perception of the objects of consciousness and we are conscious of a blank state, and as we have no point of reference and nothing to know we mistakenly think that we were 'unconscious', while we were conscious of nothing.
And our senses. Another personal favourite example: being bludgeoned into temporary unconsciousness.
> to assume that consciousness is not physical, not only you need a mechanism for it to interact with our physical world (since it can order our bodies to do stuff) but also for the physical world to act on it
I've seen this argument before - a variation of it ties in the physical principle of conservation of energy - but I'm not sure it really holds. It assumes a pretty 'strong' dualistic model.
Even if we take the starting assumption that the mind arises from the physical world, we could say that the mind exists in a mind space, rather than a physical one. I believe David Chalmers' theory of mind takes a similar line (disclaimer: I haven't read it). [0]
If a dualistic model really does propose a suspension of the physical order, well, they've already lost.
Related: I like the way Dan Dennett answers the question of Is the mind physical?: it's physical the way a center of gravity is physical. It's not a particle, or something you can touch, but it arises from the physical world.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers#Philosophy_of_m...
Indirect observations involve forming a testable (and falsifiable) hypothesis. What you're doing above is more like an attempt at proof by contradiction...
But I can assume the contrary viewpoint and deduce as well. Suppose human consciousness is non-physical. From observation (as you said) we know it can be affected by physical things -- brain damage, drugs, etc. So it must have a physical/nonphysical interface, probably in our brains.
You might say Occam's razor rules non-physicality out, since such an interface is a bit much to assume. But given that we don't have a meaningful way forward assuming physical-only, perhaps admitting one further assumption can help our inquiry - perhaps physical-only is too simple an explanation. As Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
The problem is a hard problem which may or may not be ill defined.
There are also correspondence tests between experience and behaviour.
> There's no other known way to answer any questions about consciousness, and science hasn't discovered any way to answer questions about the immaterial.
Because there's no such thing in science. If it's observable, then it will be absorbed into a scientific explanation. If it's not observable, then it must obtain by logical necessity, or it might as well not exist.
What does it mean for consciousness to be non-physical? If it is non-physical then it cannot have any impact on the physical world by definition.
Well, that depends on your definition.
If non-physical things have no interface with physical things, then they might as well not exist -- their non-existence is tautological and the hypothesis is meaningless. So the only meaningful "non-physical" hypothesis is one that allows an interface with the physical.
Instead of "shut up it's magic" we have "shut up it's quantum physics", the experts in the field are the first ones to admit that they don't understand what they're doing/finding. "See that thing here, that's black matter", 10 years later: "Well actually that's some dark matter mixed with black matter, what is black matter your ask ? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯".
Science is too busy describing and analyzing every minute details that it doesn't offer anything useable in the real world / daily life (on a personal level), that's where beliefs/philosophy intervene imho.
From this, we know that the physical world affects consciousness in many ways. You can change its perceptions with alcohol. You can make it hallucinate with LSD. You can stop it entirely by applying force to the brain.
So either consciousness is physical or it is non-physical but somehow connected bidirectionally to the physical world. If it’s the latter, in what way is it actually non-physical? If there is some way in which it’s non-physical, shouldn’t that manifest as something that makes it act differently from physical objects? Some force that doesn’t perturb it or some attribute that remains constant when you’d expect it to change?
It doesn't count as objective evidence
We don't currently have a clear direction to go to get answers. That's normal, and it doesn't at all imply that there is no direction. And while we investigate the physical, we get more side benefits, like better and better medications / treatments / tools / etc.
If consciousness is "something else", how do we make progress towards understanding it? What can we do with that information?
Another assumption. Throughout history, again and again, science has discovered ways to answer questions, and when science finally arrives, it brings the "final" answer since no other method can compete. Haven't we learned this lesson yet? Why is consciousness the final bastion ?
Of course, philosophizing on issues like the OP article is incredibly valuable. After all, science is just philosophy with extra steps.
Consciousnesses as we experiment it is exactly what would appear if you were to instruct an intelligent system into thinking it had a subjective "I".
My theory is that consciousness is what appears when your mind theories (your model of other people's mind) become elaborate enough that you need to embed in them a model of your own mind into the model of their mind (aka "how do they see me" ?).
Once you reach that point, you have the ability of having a model of your own mind superimposed on your own perceptions. You also have your animal brain shouting to you that survival is essential and that you are unique (which are obvious beneficial traits to have) and lets your rational mind rationalize as it can.
Consciousness is just the (limited) ability to introspect your thoughts and model an "I". There is nothing happening there that can't be explained through information processing.
You're very likely right that the functional characteristics of introspection and self-identification can be solved without anything "immaterial", but that still leaves open the question of how experience itself arises.
Lets call that Scientism. Beliefs about what may be discovered later are just beliefs, something that should be considered anathema to science itself. (Of course these beliefs may or may not come true, and curiosity about them may indeed provide insight that allows their eventual discovery.) But in the meantime unfounded beliefs may indeed hamper further scientific insight and discoveries. Ironic, given the history of science & faith, that science might be stymied by limitations of its own faith.
Sure, but that's a largely useless belief.
People don't put enough value on the usefulness of a belief. They seem to think it is all about what is true from a data perspective, but truth is only valuable as both thought AND action, with emphasis on action over thought. Example:
- If you think gravity exists but don't behave as if it exists, you're gonna have a bad time because you will probably fall off a cliff, even though you're right about gravity in theory.
- If you don't think that gravity exists, but still behave as if gravity exists, you'll be alright because you won't fall off a cliff, even though you're wrong about gravity in theory.
If dualist thinking helps someone achieve the goals of a psychologist or therapist, then dualist thinking is more valuable than just waiting around for science to fill a gap it may never fill. And just because someone adopts a dualist perspective today doesn't mean they can't reject it tomorrow. There's no rule saying you have to believe the same thing your entire life. So if science comes up with a better explanation, the dualists can adapt then.
Not really. It could be just a more fundamental kind of physical thing.
It's not like a physicist looking at an amoeba. That's a very complicated physical system, but it seems obvious that each of the parts can be progressively broken down into the fundamental physical forces and particles.
Consciousness....we can't even begin to talk about that in a fundamental physical way. The operation of the brain? Sure. But as far as we know, you could have an otherwise identical brain/computer firing circuits, producing actions, etc without consciousness. Which gets to the heart of the issue: we have no way to observe consciousness outside our own.
We don't know that at all. Can you describe how that would be like? Would a person with no consciousness not talk about their own consciousness? But talking about the self is an action. It seems pretty clear that the reason brains talk about their consciousness is their consciousness.
You're assuming without evidence that consciousness is, and is only, an epiphenomenon of a sufficiently complex neural net, which you are of course welcome to do. But attempting to cloak that assumption in positive language, as you do here and elsewhere, is a bit of linguistic chicanery that doesn't deserve to pass entirely without comment.
Consciousness is a very tricky problem. I often question what happens when a man loses his "mind". Is the being now just a machine with stored memory which responds to stimuli?
What happens when a person loses his memory? What role does consciousness play in this scenario?
How do we let split personality disorder and consciousness to play together?
Also, I look around and see the geometry of flowers and seeds. Geometry that emanates from the universe. Everything that looks chaotic at one level becomes extremely beautiful and organized at another.
Also, I see that everything is terribly interconnected. If we think deeply enough we can easily see that a stone lying outside and us are all the same as far as building blocks are concerned. The stone is not an unnecessary object, but our existence and the stone's existence are inextricable.
The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it.
I do not know.
Not much intelligent about gravity coalescing matter.
But that had the side effect of releasing atomic energy in the form of stars. The rubble attracted by these stars, orbited till it coalesced itself into planets.
Those planets are bombarded by atomic energy by stars. Chemical reactions happened to break down this energy. Life, aka chemical reactions that are able to persist, started happening as a side effect.
The more robust and more intelligent reactions were able to persist through fluctuations in environment. ie. ice ages, meteors, etc.
We are nothing more than a persistent, stubborn reaction. A fungus on a hot rock. Maybe someday we can send some spores to another hot rock, and continue our fungal infestation. Provided that we don't consume all the resources here before that happens and fizzle out. In any case, I'm sure there is a fungus, perhaps a more evolved one, somewhere else in the universe that will.
The meaning of life, explained (in ten words or less).
I think everyone can appreciate this viewpoint, but it's an emotional, visceral reaction to size- and timescales that are literally incomprehensible to the human mind. The complexities of nature engage one's sense of awe and strongly suggest the existence of an intelligent agent in some people, but this belief says nothing about whether that's actually true.
People used to think that about, say, the origin of a lightning bolt. (Now we know for sure there is no "intelligence" behind it.)
As an example, the idea that "there could be a mind that eats food but doesn't taste it" is silly. We were always going to evolve a way to "scan" food for it's properties. It just makes evolutionary sense. The more information the better. Not to mention the reward aspect (there is some reward for doing everything that contributes to survivial). Of course food tastes good.
Another example the author uses "red looks red" is equally unconsidered. It's a mental representation of light. There are evolutionary reasons for being able to distinguish colors, and they have to be represented mentally somehow. Why doesn't it look like blue? Who cares? All that matters is that it has a distinct representation.
Also in the article, the "why do rotten eggs smell bad" example... Because sulfurous compounds are the result of the metabolic processes of various bacteria. Because those bacteria are present in rotting things, which can cause illness, we have evolved to find them repellent.
Why are my experiences different from others? Because that's just how biological organisms beyond a certain complexity work. No two are alike.
A similarly obvious explanation exists for every example in the article. I see no compelling case that experience cannot be described through biological processes or that consciousness didn't arise from complexity.
I'm not saying there aren't interesting mysteries where consciousness is concerned, just that this article seems to completely fail to explore them.
However we have a subjective experience of what it ‘feels like’ to see red. Why is that needed?
I think to conceive of a philosophical zombie, you have to say that consciousness is something uniquely special in that something possessing all its describing qualities is not it.
Not really, our sensors are extremely limited, if taste or smell are anything like vision we're almost sensorless. [0]
[0] https://eyelighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/quality-o...
> The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.
I think before this can be said to be a problem, it should be explained how such a brain (with human-like intelligence) can exist without mechanisms corresponding to the properties of consciousness.
But I would even argue that most living things above a certain neuron count are conscious. I think it's really flawed to assume that only we as humans have an awareness of self and are "conscious".
I don't see the distinction between my awareness of myself and my environment, and that of my dog for example. He is aware of himself, has ideas and acts on them, interacts with his world consciously. It's as if humans are grasping for some sort of uniqueness in nature. If you were a robot with sensors and cameras fed into a generally intelligent neural network. You wouldn't see a display of the data on a hud. You would be consciously immersed in the data. You would be the neural network. You would have an awareness of your environment, and you would be conscious of your existence in it.
I think consciousness is evolutionary. It allows living things to want to survive and preserve what they are. I think without consciousness a creature wouldn't have the strong drive for survival. In my opinion, it's what makes you long to continue your existence.
Why assume that they are conscious, over the simpler hypothesis (fewer assumptions) that they aren’t?
What evidence do you have that that other animals don't experience life in the same way we do? Why would we be any different from them?
Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine?
The atoms in one pocket of the sun's chaotic fusion reaction might randomly and momentarily behave like an intelligent quantum computer - does that mean the sun is momentarily conscious from time to time?
Growing up, my vocabulary advanced waaay faster than my experience. I learned what the word "nostalgia" was well before I first felt nostalgic. In fact, I remember feeling it a few times about summers with friends that had moved before connecting the feeling with the word. It was a slap on forehead moment. I concluded that nostalgia was an inbuilt "thing", everyone else probably experienced it in the same way. It's easy for me to consider nostalgia as just an inbuilt reaction to a certain kind of signal. (Something periodic that makes you feel good, then it stops. Recalling the period creates a bittersweet feeling).
The space between consciousness and inanimate intuitively feels to me like a gradient. Various levels of brain damage might yield someone unresponsive to speech but responsive to pain. Then there are people who feel no pain, but otherwise are completely normal.
Therefore, I'd put on the lower end of the consciousness scale "reacting to changes" the more changes something reacts to, and the more varied their reactions, the more conscious it is. We're talking things between the sun and single celled organisms. Single cells don't seem to do much rumination, but they get hungry.
Advanced consciousness seems to require heritable lessons and skills. A feral human that somehow survived alone on an island from birth wouldn't be conscious like the rest of us are, but I bet it would still feel nostalgia if its favorite berry went extinct.
I'm comfortable ascribing feelings to things with full knowledge they aren't feeling it like we are. I bet red giant stars feel fat and old.
This is just defamiliarization. It's an excessively common belief that a computer with the right inputs, outputs, and software could realize that it is itself a computer program. The same software on a marble machine would be a lot harder to hook up to useful sensors, and would be too large to be at all practical, but it's the same thing.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop [2]https://philosophyandpsychology.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/the...
The thing would have to have correlates of consciousness; mechanisms which perform the properties which constitute conscious thought. I see no reason why such a mechanism could not be created by such general machinery as a marble run, albeit a very large one. The sun however is a chaotic ball of plasma, so I can't see how it could play home to an arbitrary complex mechanism.
See panpsychism and integrated information theory.
When you write a program to determine a pseudo-random number, I doubt there's any person that would seriously indulge the possibility that in that moment some entity puffs into existence, imagines itself picking a number, and then puffs back out of existence. But if this is true it makes any path towards artificial consciousness require some rather extensive handwaving and speculation that is not logically justifiable based on what we currently know.
edit: see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518623
Where is the rational thought behind this consciousness discussion? If all of you "critical thinkers" are really responding with "You just don't want to accept that consciousness can't be explained with science" then I have lost my last remaining bit of hope in humanity's intelligence.
Of course, in future we might understand things like consciousness and qualia, and it's likely that people who do it will be scientists. It won't be "science" though as we understand it today, it will necessarily have to be something bigger. Let's call it "science+".
And, of course, just because science can't explain consciousness doesn't mean that religion can. It can certainly claim to be able to do it, but will be as convincing as the religion is at explaining everything else.
If it cannot be so defined, then it cannot be explained within an empirical framework, or "science" if you insist, by definition. Empiricism requires objective measurement. The kind of consciousness people are talking about, the experience of being, cannot be objectively measured because it is a purely subjective concept.
If you want to talk purely about ideas that exist within an empirical framework, then you're talking about things like minds and brains, complexity of interactions, etc. All objectively measurable and perfectly scientific things.
But that isn't what people are talking about, because it isn't interesting. Because when you get right down to it what people really want to know is how badly we're allowed to treat things. If it isn't "conscious", then we need not concern ourselves over its apparent suffering need we?
I do think that "consciousness likely can't be explained by science" if you take science to mean the scientific method and models produced by it, and not just "rational thought" which I would argue is not the same thing.
Science at its core is a series of predictive models and they don't tell you how things "are" (whatever that means), but rather how things behave within some error bound. On the one hand I can see how it's dangerous to cast any sort of criticism in scientific results and theorems especially when they've been well established, but that doesn't mean they are "facts" or universal, only that they've withstood repeated criticism quite well.
The problem that this article is talking about is that you can't observe experience (consciousness) like you can observe "physical" phenomena, so you can't use the same sort of tools like you would use for conducting other sorts of science.
You obviously approach any intelligent discussion in consciousness with rational thought, and the people you can take seriously in this field do just that.
If you're interested in reading more about this I can point you to resources, which should probably start with Chalmer's "Hard problem of consciousness".
(You should have realized that HN has been infiltrated a long time ago)
Not precisely consciousness, but scientifically way better, than this BS article and many comments supporting it, because it is:
- measurable
- gives verifiable predictions, that actually hold true
- actually has some relation to real world which is also a multiplayer game of sorts
- shows you can reproduce the phenomenon in other forms (classical state enumerating programs, neural nets)
I too am disappointed in the low comment quality here
Geez, one spelling mistake ruined your day? I hope the rest of your week treats you better.
I think people delude themselves that science, at least as currently practised, is always objective.
The flow of time may be a subjective illusion.
The big bang, the time that has passed since them, even the concept of time, are not in fact reality but rather the interpretation of reality made by our consciousness.
There is no argument that there is a fundamental reality that predates consciousness, but our problem is that everything that we view as 'reality' is just the subset of that true reality that is filtered through our consciousness.
What we perceive as reality starts with consciousness as its fundamental building block, because everything we have discovered has been built upon that foundation.
I'm not sure that statement must be true. There seems to be no reason that consciousness wasn't possible before or during the big bang.
This view neglects that matter responds to magnetic fields which surely existed prior to the big bang and could have been vibrating until a resonance or similar event triggered the matter to expand. There is an idea that expansion and contraction are an oscillation of their own; seems logical, but I can’t prove it.
"Armchair philosophy" like this still gets published way too much, and is given way too much respect. Rawlette, typical of this genre, believes that "conceivability", thought experiments independent of empirical facts, and verbal theorizing can justify beliefs more strongly than actual research.
For good philosophy in this domain, read people like Andy Clark [3].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/hod-lipson-is-building-self-a...
> Yes, we have a different definition that we use that is very concrete. It’s mathematical, you can measure it, you can quantify it, you can compute the error to what degree. Philosophers might say, “Well, that’s not how we see self-awareness.” Then the discussion usually becomes very vague. You can argue that our definition is not really self-awareness. But we have something that’s very grounded and easy to quantify, because we have a benchmark.
So he's redefining something in a way that merely satisfies his world view. That is not in any way consciousness. Consciousness inherently has the "knowing" quality of your experience: you know you are reading this. You can make the smartest, brightest AI robot, with the best machine learning algorithms, that functions the same as a human being, but in the end, it doesn't know it's doing that because it isn't conscious of it.
Hell you don't even need a robot for that. A person that has recently died has all the components you need for a functional human being. The only thing missing is that it isn't conscious anymore. You can fix/replace the heart, do whatever you need physically, but changing the physical building blocks, as per the materialist view, won't bring the consciousness back.
We know lots of ways our brains generate weird experiences, some built in (like dreams) and some produced by special context (any number of illusions). Why should consciousness have some special status?
In this case, you're begging the question by saying "our brains." Why is there a 'we' at all? Why is there subjective experience? I don't expect to find the answer in a Hacker News thread, but I think waving off the question the way you do is ridiculous. We've had some of our best people on it for millennia for a reason!
We have an agent-based model to understand the behavior of certain things in the world. When we see a cat chase a mouse we assume that the cat as an agent which has a goal which is to catch the mouse. That is we imagine the intentions of the cat (and the mouse) to better predict what will happen next. This is just a mental model, but it's different than the causal model we use to predict where a baseball will land when you throw it.
We apply this model to all sorts of things because it is useful to help predict behavior. That is we imagine conscious intention as a tool to understand things in our world.
The catch is that when we observer our own mind at work... we apply this same model. This is a weird moment where we try to imagine that we have conscious intentions, but since it is own on selves we are watching this creates the illusion of conscious will.
Whether or not Wegner really nails it, I become increasingly suspicious that consciousness is far less special and much more of a trick than we believe it is. But because that illusion is tied to who we "are" we have a very hard time letting go (of course this idea goes back to Buddha and earlier)
I don't think so. What even is this "conscious experience"? I hypothesize that it's an illusion. A sufficiently complex robot would indeed have the same "conscious experience". Qualia is nothing more than complex arrangements of molecules in our brains, it's an abstraction, not something fundamental to the universe. Maybe stars and planets too have some sort of rudimentary "conscious experience".
I can't prove this, but you can't prove that you have "conscious experience" either.
> that no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to be conscious.
I think that it can be explained but we just don't have enough knowledge of the internal workings of the brain yet.
For some reason I get really exalted when people such as the author disagree with me on this, of all topics. I don't know what it is, maybe it makes me angry that people don't realize it. I know that sounds really arrogant (specially when author has a phd in philosophy), and I might be wrong and look like an idiot, but I can't control this feeling. I feel the same way a teenage atheist feels when he hears a religious person speak about god (I know this because I was that teenage atheist).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism
> "In philosophy, idealism is the group of metaphysical philosophies that assert that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In contrast to materialism, idealism asserts the primacy of consciousness as the origin and prerequisite of material phenomena. According to this view, consciousness exists before and is the pre-condition of material existence. Consciousness creates and determines the material and not vice versa."
Lacan thought that consciousness is triggered by looking in a mirror (or something equivalent to a mirror). If someone was carefully raised without the ability to look in a mirror, see their own shadow, hear their own voice, etc., would they never become conscious? How could you tell?
What if consciousness is triggered by something totally unexpected, like: circumcision; submersion baptism; chicken pox; or some particular bacteria in my gut? I can find someone who never had chicken pox and ask them if they're conscious, but how do I know if they're answering truthfully?
Everyone has a big incentive to profess consciousness, because anyone who professed non-consciousness would be in danger of losing the privileges and protections which society grants to conscious people.
To your point: how do we know that all people posses consciousness? We don't. We make that assumption because other people are like us. The less like us something is, the less likely we are to assume it has consciousness. For most of human history animals were not afforded this assumption and that is only now starting to change because, as it turns out, animals are a lot more like us than we like to admit.
In other words, it's speciesism. The whole discussion about what does and doesn't have conscious is a desperate attempt to justify human exceptionalism.
Yes, and I think this is a mistake, because it shuts down any hope of isolating what it is about us that makes us conscious. Perhaps this will change as human-lookalike-robot technology gets better, breaking down the "looks like me, must be conscious like me" argument.
People are starting to grant animals the rights of consciousness, but let me ask, what about sperm? I myself was sperm once, and over time I became a full-grown human being. If consciousness is a boolean, then at what exact moment did I become conscious? Was it when I reached the egg? When the first neuron in my brain formed? When my umbilical cord was severed? When I first recognized myself in a mirror [Lacan]?
Then how do we know that we ourselves are conscious?
In other words, we think we're this thing called "conscious", but that thing isn't what we think it is!
When you look a bunch of different things: the left brain/right brain separation and the prefrontal cortex - you realize that you're not even just one brain, but many? Which one is you? And I seem to recall an article recently that challenged the existence of an unconscious. How does that relate to this?
Imagine you write a program to determine a pseudorandom number. You obviously don't imagine some entity puffs into existence, imagines itself picking the random number which our RNG already independently chose, and then puffs out of existence afterwards. Yet why would this somehow suddenly become true as the program became more complex? It requires extensive handwaving and speculation. Even if you somehow wrote similar pointless inner dialog mechanics into it, would something puff into existence and perceive itself then running those mechanics? I don't see any way you can answer yes to this question without, again, resorting to handwaving and speculation.
Likewise if they fear the loss of priviledge that implies some degree of consciousness /somewhere/. If some absurd set of state and pseudorandom random number generator capable of passing every metric of consciousness in response to inputs then it is a consciousness even if it is made of a bizzare set of equations and state.
Anyway for the consciousness somewhere - take a hypothetical hyperintelligence or supercomputer capable of simulating a human brain completely calculation by calculation in various events like say being flayed alive. It isn't torturing anybody because the actions are simply calculations that it itself is running. The victim may not be real but there is a real intelligence somewhere behind it - and it may or may not care about the simulated suffering. Where it is "run" is material like the difference between acting out a murder and actually murdering someone.
That's a very strange argument. If you hold your nose and you taste a piece of potato and then a piece of apple, you can't tell the difference. So now suddenly the difference is meaningless because the sense required to tell the difference is removed from the equation? The apple is still (in a, to you, non-observable reality) an apple, regardless of how your perception changed.
It's an example of "Chronostasis", which is very much like you describe, only perhaps at a much smaller granularity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronostasis.
This gif alone speaks a trillion words if you study it closely: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Ch...
It seems to me like discussions of "consciousness" here on HN seem to frequently devolve into arguments over the semantics of that particular word. That feels more philosophical than scientific to me.
What do you mean by "consciousness", if it includes humans but excludes dogs? And if it includes dogs, does it include insects? Plants?
We need to be reasonably specific when discussing these things.
The second kind of consciousness is being aware of your awareness - being able to watch your mind work. To our knowledge, dogs don't have that. Nobody does but humans, so far as we know. The problem is, my definition here is a purely internal, subjective one. I can't prove to you that I am conscious in the second sense; I can't prove to you that anyone else is or is not. All I know is that this is something my own mind can do, and maybe I can describe a bit of what it's like to have my mind do it. That's not much to go on for further investigations.
If I'm capable of fooling everyone else, can I be fooling myself?
> how do I know if they're answering truthfully?
> anyone who professed non-consciousness
The ability to lie seems to me to imply at least some level of consciousness. How could/why would you deceive others if you have no concept of your own existence?
The Turing Test is a good tool to roll out in these sorts of arguments. People often mention the Turing Test, but have you ever stopped to think how good a conversation would need to be to _convincingly_ pass it?
Dennett gives an imaginary example of a Turing Test conversation in his book Consciousness Explained:
Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. “Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.”
CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss.
J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me.
CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes.
J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke “works”?
CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough?
Dennett goes on to say:
"The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all."
That puppet can't tell you how to behave in life. Unless it is embodied in a human body that is relevant to the speaker and has a life context that is similar (requiring to eat, sleep, ect). The physical actions of the mind required to have a conversation are only part of our greater identity and awareness of ourselves in the world.
The puppet's existence in the world would be meaningless, though very intelligent. Why is there a puppet that can talk? What is it's purpose? Only a conscious being can answer that. The irishman's joke is funny because he chose Guinness as his reason to live, his highest value, his god, his philosophy.
What is the reason for a robot to be?
If I told a time traveling Newton how I’m replying to this on my phone, he might conclude the phone is conscious.
I think the only thing we discover with this line of reasoning is that humans tend to ascribe consciousness to complex behavior.
This could be because complex behavior implies consciousness, but that’s generous. Humans have probably just been programmed to ascribe because it’s a good heuristic esp. in the Paleolithic world.
I think that there is no hard divide between conscious and unconscious, more like a continuum. All sentient beings are conscious, but maybe not about themselves if the information about themselves doesn't get fed back to them in some way. But they're certainly conscious about their environment to be able to find food.
Consciousness is essential for actions within an environment. Self consciousness isn't essential for learning though, you can learn by doing, like animals. But it's essential for betterment, expanding your options and not relying on the first best thing you've found that worked by doing.
“The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience” https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-negl...
That's really not true. In Neural Correlates of Consciousness research there are two very important things people can only do for experiences that they're consciously aware of: remember then and communicate about them. Someone with blindsight can pick up and apple in front of them as well as a sighted person. But give them a blindfold and they won't be able to reach for the spot their eyes once knew the apple was located in. And they can't tell anyone what is in front of them either.
Although I'd agree that otherwise functional non-conscious brains would probably be unable to communicate coherently about personal experiences/thoughts/memories/etc.
There's no reason this functional behaviour requires the subjective quality of conscious experience. The recorded movement of a robotic arm doesn't, and it can replicate this feat, for example.
Note that I am not advocating reckless exploration of psychedelics. A person needs to do a lot of research and self-reflection to put themselves in the mindset to even consider tripping. But for those who can handle them, there are paths to self-growth and self-repair that are unmatched in modern medicine.
Personally, my (unfounded but by personal experience) belief is that what we know as consciousness or sentience is driven by a specific balance of psychoactive substances that are naturally metabolized in the body and brain, and many neurological disorders are due to an imbalance in those substances. DMT helped me take great steps towards fighting ADHD
He talks about consciousness as an epiphenomenon, where the pattern itself is what makes something conscious, rather than some magical property that some matter has and other matter doesn't. With mathematical precision, he describes how consciousness relates to the ability to self-reference and how this relates to fundamental paradoxes in various fields such as the Halting Problem, Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, Russel's Paradox, and the works of Escher and Bach.
This line of thinking brings up some very interesting moral questions: What is it about life that makes us want to value it? Why do we have the notion of "higher" and "lower" life forms and value some species more highly than others? If we created a sufficiently advanced AI, that gave all the appearances of having feelings, a sense of self preservation, an identity, and desires, would it be immoral to unplug it or control its freedoms? What if it felt and understood even more than a human? Would its needs supersede our own?
Anyway, I highly recommend that book, GEB. It has made most other philosophizing about consciousness seem flat to me.
That's an excellent question. All the questions about consciousness are probably an attempt to better understand (and avoid?) death.
However I still have a hard time imagining a scenario where we can scientifically understand consciousness. Eventually we will understand all about how the mind works. All the various processes and how they lead to higher functions like thinking consciously in natural language etc. We'll be able to manipulate and alter our conscious experience. But even if there was a neural switch to turn consciousness on and off, we would still fail to convince ourselves of the physical nature of it, as we could never experience a state without consciousness.
My personal belief is that although we are painfully physical, we will never explain why we're actually here, experiencing those calculations, or in fact being them. Being calculations of a meat sack. Why would this happen?
I'm a strong proponent of the "what acts like a duck is a duck" principle. If in the future we manage to create machines which will be, for a very large statistical value, indistinguishable from a human in terms of behavior (that is, make the Turing test seem like a childish joke), is it fair then to say that those are just machines made to emulate our behavior and don't really reflect "real" consciousness? Why is it fair to define consciousness just as something that humans and personal human experience can decide?
Yes, machines may never have human consciousness, but if for all intends and purposes they behave as having one, then they have one, in my opinion.
Also, saying that humans are more than biochemical machines is the same like saying that my home gaming PC is more than wires and electrons. Yes, the experience enabled by the software running on those wires and electrons goes beyond just the physical support for it but that doesn't mean, that at the end of the day it isn't just wires and electrons.
Does it sound to anyone else like the author would benefit tremendously from learning the Lambda Calculus? It seems to me to be a disproof of the authors contention that a 'definite value' is needed at some point.
That's an assertion I believe to not be so obvious it can be assumed to be correct with no argument to the contrary. If you can't define consciousness why do you believe it exists independent of these other systems and that these other systems exist independent of it? The study of consciousness is absolutely full of non-falsifiable claims like this. We decide apes and dogs and frogs and ants are not sapient but that is an outside observation. It may be as erroneous as looking at Specimen A and its great to the five hundredth generation ancestor and deciding that because they should count as two separate species there must have been some momentous leap in the middle to make Specimen A possible. Consciousness could easily be a smooth spectrum from human to insect and we wouldn't know it because everything next to our level is extinct.
Otherwise for me it all looks like words juggling continuing for many centuries. They really should implement a programming language for philosophy and outsource the hard parts to Ukraine.
They haven't made a ton of progress (I mean that as a statement of fact, not disrespect), and tend to tackle much more primitive, foundational problems than what the Continental philosophers like to deal in ("what is the meaning of everything" and all that).
Turns out it's a pretty hard problem to even pin down exactly what a word means, or what a name is, much less what the meaning of everything is. The trick is, those questions are the axioms. And so the act of asserting them is a philosophical act in and of themselves. The rest is just moving stones around.
> They haven't made a ton of progress
But they progress is what should be provable and repeatable, like the real science requires? So probably, this kind of progress is the only real one in the field?
If it really is the case that consciousness is the basis for reality, then it must also mean that only you, the reader, can find this out for yourself. Then this means you cannot fall back to preachers or scientific publications. It's up to you to do the work. From my experience, even just mentioning this idea of goal-driven contemplative practice often finds a lot of resistance if you don't approach it carefully.
> While physical properties cannot explain consciousness, consciousness is needed to explain physical properties.
If consciousness is (and, yes, qualia are) how we perceive reality, how can we define consciousness based on observation? It would be like trying to use a telescope to capture an image of itself.
If "consciousness comes first" that means that consciousness contains reality, not visa-versa.
It's like when we learned to fly, we needn't understand how birds' wings work. We had to understand the principles of aerodynamics or what is flying itself.
That's why I think imitating the brain won't work, (deep learning etc.) just like the early attempts to fly didn't, even if we'll know the function of every single neuron.
Well. I operate under the idea that we can only perceive three colors. Everything else is based on the brain's interpretation of that input. That is, for example, we don't see purple, the brain invents purple.
That aside, simply put, reality is a consensus. And it exists collectiveky for those who buy into that agreement.
If so, it also creates great need to ponder how consciousness(es) are made to respond to their effects on others. If consciousness IS as wisdom traditions state, also what is needed is not empiricism, but plain commitment to respecting each other.
After all, saying "okay - if I exist regardless, what gives?" Others do too, and might also some reason or actual thing which makes this possible - and to honor that possibility is actually to behave safer, have more pleasant dealings, and ultimately concern ourselves with best practices in getting the most of what we get in addition to our bare consciousness.
If it can exist without any particular structure, it can be placed in other circumstances less desireable.
I.e. every cultural tradition regarding virtue and karma, and G-d.
I see evidence that the scientifically minded would be thrilled to know the makings of this, even if it would be n=1 revelation. I feel like the traditions given us are sensibly concerned with preserving awareness of these lately-arriving observations of upper dimensional/physics-derived approximations of how our selves are maintained in this projection by [previously unseen/ allegorically hinted in tradition] structures which are indeed real.
yadda yadda.. the wisest people always say this, and they themselves often got there the hard way, and yet report good and thankful circumstances from choosing respectful behavior.
So its somewhat able to be "controlled-for." The least-empirical and most curious, agenda-less, all say: do right, there is a supporting element that deserves respect, and since we do exist "hereafter" by some model in many different ways, its always worth not EXCLUDING this.
If we ARE, then what currently we are is only a portion. That creates curiosity and investigation - I do it. I discover what I didn't expect. Now I hope others do, and do better at getting this idea to those who refuse its possibility.
If so - if we are - that is to say, we exist regardless - it also means there's much to concern regarding not combating factors that will otherwise never preserve us. Instead, preserving mutual respect is greatest beneath whatever preserves all - because there would be no way free of the "other" if forever allowed for any result.
There's a worrying trend that's becoming more apparent in regards to the hard problem of consciousness. New neuroimaging analysis techniques indicates that when you take away individual functional elements of how the brain, we're left not much at all. At what point does a series of embedded components become a computer? At what point does a series of neural networks become conscious?
This is going to be an issue we're going to have to address now. Where is the line of conscious for an individual to make a legal choice? Think of someone wanting assisted suicide, in which they're often in a debilitated state. A call is going needed to be made if they're sentient enough. A tough call given it carries the massive burden. If we continue improving ML and AI we're going to have to make the call from the other end as well.
That makes no sense to me. What is consciousness but a mechanism for making decisions? A brain that has all of our decision making functions would be conscious by definition.
Maybe because being conscious rather than say knocked unconscious is an advantage for survival and reproduction?
While that is semi joking, consciousness quite likely arose as a functional, being aware of what's going on, thing with qualia (what it feels like) a kind of side effect.
I could start by dissecting the article and detail the sloppyness in the reasoning, the strawman of ignoring emergence, the value and inevitability of referential semantics etc, but ultimately the deeper question remains:
How is the proposed model supposed to be useful?
Chalmers can keep saying this until he’s blue in the face, but it doesn’t make it true.
Many people much smarter than you and I have been exploring this problem since forever, with both ancient thought experiments and modern science. They've not found what you assume is there.
"Rather than trying to reduce consciousness to fit into the box of relational/dispositional properties, it is time that we begin to explore it for what it is—and for the answers that studying it on its own terms, in its full splendor and variety, stands to provide."
What are you supposed to do with that? What does recognizing the ontological primacy of consciousness actually entail?
A lot of this sounds like the kind of "center of what's known" fallacies that plagued human thought in the pre-scientific era. The sun isn't central to anything, the Earth isn't central to anything, human consciousness is probably not central to anything either. Why wouldn't that pattern hold here. Why wouldn't we just be wrong about how unique consciousness is?
Why? Because I read a book on consciousness that came like a bolt out of the blue and I understood that we do not understand.
I don't buy this "emergent property of the mind" thing because while I understand evolutionary theory I am not sure how you bridge that gap to subjective experience.
I have absolutely no clue what this "god" is that I accepted, but I know I'm not going to be punished for leaving this comment.
EDIT: just read the comments. I've been to BNL and CERN.
As a side-note, there are some radical, fascinating attacks on the hard problem of consciousness, such as dual-aspect monism.[1] I'd love to hear y'alls thoughts.
[1] http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious
So you don't know, or aren't aware of any existing scientific theory, therefore it's magic?
The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050...
There are many things we don't understand, and as time pass we gradually understand more and more of them. What does this have to do with the existence or not of God? Do you go back and forth between atheist/theist every time a new answer is discovered and a new question is asked?
I’m convinced the ability to form short and long-term memories is crucial to our consciousness. Take that away and a human being is little more than a fruit fly, mentally.
There was a noticeable trend. You may want to believe you're not "sheople". Studies suggest otherwise.
Author neglects to mention that this may apply to everything except the universe itself.
>Something in the universe has to have some kind of quality in and of itself to give all the other relational/dispositional properties any meaning. Something has to get the ball rolling.
The "something" may be the universe, i.e. its total wave function. Occam's Razor suggests looking for simple explanations rather than assuming the existence of things not detectable.
Could the universe itself be conscious? Making such a claim would seem to make the author's argument a tautology.
It is a good theory as it clearly works with drugs, sleepiness, etc
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. (Psalm 19:1-2, ESV)
There, see how easy that was?
In my 20s I broke my leg fairly badly. It damaged the nerve, but luckily left the sheath of the nerve undamaged. The end result was that half my foot was paralysed. What I never realised is that if the nerve sheath is undamaged, the nerve will regrow! So slowly over time I started to get feeling back in my foot. I don't know exactly what goes on, but I'd get this sharp shooting pain, like a needle in my foot and slowly after each time, I'd regain a little bit of feeling (I don't know... is that just the nerve endings "reattaching"???)
Eventually, I got pretty much all the feeling back... except it wasn't mapped properly. The space between my toes felt like the sole of my foot and various other strangeness. Slowly I got used to it. A few years later, my brain had completely translated everything and the space between my toes felt like the space between my toes. Even though I know it's mapped differently I can't consciously distinguish between the feelings I have now and the feelings before I broke my leg.
So a rose smells like a rose because the receptors that are activated when you smell a rose are different from the receptors that are activated when you smell a rotten egg. It's just like the nerve endings between my toes are different than the nerve endings on the sole of my foot. But it's just input for your brain, nothing more. Of course we have an aversion to the smell of rotten eggs, but that's just hard wired -- more input for the brain. There are lots of people who have aversion to smells that other people like.
In terms of "consciousness", I think it's likely an illusion of sorts. We experience a kind of continuum of consciousness. In reality, though, there is only an instant. Our awareness is an artefact of our memory.
Behaviour couldn't exist without a feedback loop. For those of us who are programmers, this is pretty obvious. In order to have a state machine, the new output needs to not only look at new input, but also its current state. Every instant we exist we are processing new input and also our current state (which seems to prioritise recent inputs). We exist instantaneously, but because we are processing previous data along with new data, it creates an illusion of having existed over a continuum. Additionally, the only reason we have an ego is simply because our data networks are isolated. If I could access the data of another brain in the same way I can access data in my own brain, there would be no way to distinguish between the "two of us". There would be no way to distinguish between "my thoughts" and "somebody else's thoughts". "I" would not exist... or rather "I" would be the "two of us". It's just an artificial distinction based on a lack of ability to access the data.
Or at least that's the way I look at it. There is no way to know for sure. It might just be the FSM manipulating me like a puppet.
There's the symmetry theory of valence which proposes that symmetric (in some strict mathematical sense) processes feel good, and vice versa with bad qualia.
But this is only one of many subproblems: https://opentheory.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Eight-Prob...
As a question that's dogged us for thousands of years, maybe its time to accept its just a shitty question.
Pragmatic philosophers, such as Thomas Metzinger, have already accepted the failure of philosophy in this regard, and support the neuroscience approach.
I can refer you to Thomas Metzinger's book, "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self". He went through great efforts to make it accessible to laypersons, such as myself. It's well worth the time.
Side note, I got to Thomas Metzinger from Peter Watts' Firefall. He says something along the lines "Metzinger is THE man" (will try to find the exact text and come back with an edit at some point).
Consciousness is that which makes us go take something to eat in the morning so we don't die of hunger, keeps us from running into cars or falling off a high place, allows us to work and be intelligent in our actions so that we cover our needs, guides us to form relations and make babies (thus replicate consciousness further).
I think we are agents with the purpose of survival and reproduction. That is only possible by adaptation to the environment, including society and nature. While we're busy at keeping ourselves alive, we have to act intelligently and learn from our mistakes. There is nothing outside the realm of physics and nature, just plain old agent+environment+learning+self-replication.
It feels like something to see blue (or to be a bat) because it is linked to survival, because we have senses and brains to create models of the world, because we have positive and negative signals (rewards) that guide our present and future actions and the value we attach to all life situations, and ultimately because life depends on it and self-replication would eliminate inefficient agents and leave those who are fit.
In short, consciousness is an adaptation mechanism in service of self replication in an environment with limited resources and competition.
I think all this dualist incredulity towards science is bullshit. Instead, the evolutionary process and the reinforcement learning process are sufficient to explain it. If we want to learn about consciousness we should not look only at the brain but at the environment and its limitations. It is the environment that shaped consciousness into existence.
I know it's not as poetic as souls and hard-problems, but it is the simplest explanation that fits.
Yet our universe seems nothing like this. There is an experiential flavour to it which everyone has access to from a first person perspective.
A thermostat does essentially the same thing for your room's temperature, and yet it's not conscious.
Almost none of the preliminary claims in this article feel compelling to me: "no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to be conscious". Where is the proof of this? All the author does is re-state this sentence in different ways.
I imagine people have had similar conversations throughout history: "no one can really predict weather", "no-one understands economics", "no-one understands what makes people fall in love"; but would you claim that (for example) love is the trigger, or boundary condition which causes reality to coalesce?
The claims which do feel believeable are: 1) Many aspects of physical reality are relational 2) Some boundary conditions are necessary in order to make everything well-defined
But there is a real gap from the points above, to the conclusion that consciousness is the missing boundary-condition. Maybe we just haven't discovered the missing boundary-condition yet. Or maybe there is none, and reality is ill-defined.
Everyone who's going on about "we don't know enough about the brain to even START this" feels like a Sunday-school teacher telling me not to question the Greater Truths. It's a thought-killing sentiment. It's a subconscious defense mechanism for people who can't admit that they're a mostly-deterministic machine.
Maybe not, but I think there are people who are saying "damn the nay sayers" and just trying shit that they think can give some insight into how everything functions, up there.
Consciousness is not an impossible problem. It only becomes absurd if it's tinted of mysticism and dipped into a half-digested understanding of the current scientific consensus.
First, let's demystify conscience. Scientifically, there's no soul - it's a religious concept that has no meaning outside of it. What's left of conscience is its shell, its interface.
If we can model something that behaves like conscience, well, we created a genuine conscience.
There are two sides to the shell of conscience. One is the outer shell: the problem is to build something that appears to be conscient. This is a reasonably hard CS or neurobiology problem but by no means impossible. We are getting reasonably close to generating seemingly conscious automata. Surely it's possible to see specific parts of the brain connected to this function: for example, the speech center, and so on. So: hard to do, but doable.
The other part is the inner shell, or "self-conscience." This has to do with perception, mostly, and abstraction. We have already created expert systems that can perceive and give meaning to a lot of inputs.
The trick is creating a system that can perceive itself, its state like it sees the world. This will require a general AI or strong AI, which is currently believed by many experts to be possible although super hard to do. Again though, this is a CS problem, it's addressable by science, and I have no doubt it's a matter of time until we can settle it.
A machine with both characteristics would be just as alive as you or me. It would perceive the world semantically. It would understand to be conscious, and we would recognize it to be conscious too.
At that point, the question of consciousness will become once more only attractive to philosophers and priests. The rest of us will have less problem accepting one of these machines as "alive and conscious."