Comment by manifestsilence | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manifestsilence | Hacker News Reader

manifestsilence

The only sane and productive model of consciousness I've encountered (and I've been around a bunch through growing up in the Transcendental Meditation movement) has been the one described in Hofstadter's works, such as Godel, Escher, Bach.

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.

>What is it about life that makes us want to value it?

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?

Yeah, I agree with the sense of mystery you talk about. To me the two great, and linked, mysteries are why matter, space, time, etc. exists at all, and why some part of it experiences it in a self-aware way. They're both meta-questions to me, that probably can't be answered from within the universe by observing it, just like how one of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems says arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency from within. I know that's playing fast and loose with math metaphors, but it's an analogy not a rigorous proof.

I found "the ego tunnel" was nice.

Thanks for the recommendation!

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