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Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

Your assumption that consciousness is only physical is merely that - another assumption. It proves nothing, and claiming otherwise begs the question.

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).

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Science is better then this. We don't need to directly observe something, it's OK to be able to just indirectly observe.

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.

> Science is better then this. We don't need to directly observe something, it's OK to be able to just indirectly observe.

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."

What do you mean we have no meaningful way forward? If anything, recent advances in deep learning (and even the older neural networks) show, that we have a pretty good mathematical explanation of what consciousness could be. O-o

> 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.

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...

You are thinking about consciousness as it's contents. Drugs or brain damage change its contents, but don't change the presence of consciousness. Therefore that only proves that the contents are 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.

What if you are dead?

Your consciousness separates from the body. https://magiscenter.com/nde/

But that’s all based on people’s reported perceptions... it’s not a direct observation. It’s not a conclusion from philosophy or religion either.

So regardless of what camp you’re in, it doesn’t look reasonable to me to trust stories like that.

Good point. It may be another case of "consciousness of nothing", as during sleep or maybe before birth.

Imagine, if you will that the brain is an antenna, and consciousness is a soulful radio wave. If you destroy/make inert the brain, consciousness is lost, what have you shown? You may be tempted to claim that you demonstrated the fact consciousness arises from the brain, but this isn't the case here: The consciousness radio-wave still exists, but it is not being received.

The problem is a hard problem which may or may not be ill defined.

That argument does not pass neither the Occams Razor, nor Popper criteria.

Popper concerns itself with test-ability, not truth. Something can be both untestable and true.

Occams razor says more about human psychology and beliefs than it does about reality.

In any case I was not arguing that this scenario represents the true state of the universe, but am arguing against grand parent's argument that we can conclude consciousness is physical without making certain assumptions about the nature and design of the universe, even if empirically it is our best guess.

I am not sure I'd care about the definition of "true", that does not fulfill the Popper criteria. That is the whole point of it.

Occams Razor is a tool people use to pick the best theory (in terms of size) among theories otherwise describing the same universe. These theories are otherwise identical.

The same applies to your last point: we simply pick the best theory at hand, and that argument does exactly that.

> The consciousness radio-wave still exists, but it is not being received.

So when someone dies, their consciousness continues, but is unseated from their body?

Presumably temporary unconsciousness is explained the same way?

How do you explain population increases or population decreases? Is there an infinite pool of consciousnesses, and only an infinitesimal proportion of them are being received at any given time?

Do drugs affect the receiver, or the consciousness (transmitter) itself? If it's the former, you've just conceded that some fundamental aspects of our consciousness are contingent on the receiver, and are independent of the transmitter. You can't very well answer the latter, as drugs exist firmly in the physical domain.

You'll also need to account for wildly different forms of consciousness (animals), the split-brain phenomenon, and why certain arrangements of molecules and their associated processes (i.e. living brains) can act as receivers but other closely related arrangements do not (dead brains, and living brains subject to general anesthesia). To steal a word from Dawkins, the whole thing seems unparsimonious in the extreme.

To mirror lostmsu's comment, this is a truly extraordinary claim, made in the total absence of supporting evidence. I'm not convinced it's even a coherent model.

You are defining a new type of science.

> The problem is that all scientific results around the consciousness question derive from what people report about their personal experience.

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.

> assumption that consciousness is only physical is merely that - another assumption

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.

This is exactly why I prefer to use the term 'real' rather than '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.

> the only meaningful "non-physical" hypothesis is one that allows an interface with the physical.

I don't think that's meaningful, it sounds to me like a contradiction of terms. If it is non-physical but it can interact with physical objects as if it were physical, what is the label "non-physical" actually describing? In a world where there are physical entities but also non-physical entities with physical interactions, how is the non-physical entity distinct from the physical one in terms of observable reality?

> what is the label "non-physical" actually describing

In this case, it would be describing the consciousness phenomenon -- which we can't get at using normal, scientific, physical observations of the world.

If X exists, we all know it exists and can talk about it, but we have no way to observe it (in fact, all our observations are restricted to being through it) - then I'd venture we're on an edge of reality itself. In my opinion, a non-physical hypothesis here is allowable if it has more explanatory power than the alternative.

> which we can't get at using normal, scientific, physical observations of the world

Why? This would make it unusual compared to every other process in biology and everything we actually do know about consciousness. We know that most of the faculties we subjectively attribute to the conscious experience are rooted in physical biology (reasoning, instinct, emotion, memory etc), so I am not sure what the possibility of a non-physical component adds to the model.

The problem with the religion-based worldviews is that it opens us up to a vast amount of made up believes and leads to a huge variety of different axioms that become undebatable and completely mess up or public discourse. I think it's vastly preferable to just accept that we don't know the answer to some questions, rather than making something up.

The problem with non-religion-based worldviews is that you still have to bridge the fact-value gap somehow, which necessarily entails "a huge variety of different axioms that become undebatable and completely mess up our public discourse". In fact it's worse: some religious worldviews are moored to truth claims, but secular-materialist moral philosophy fundamentally can't be.

>you still have to bridge the fact-value gap

Why?

With those as well, it's important to go for small axioms. For example Peter Singer's avoidance of suffering is a great example, much better for building a shared moral system than giant assertions like "abortion is evil".

I mean, the current state of science isn't that far from your description either.

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.

> Science is too busy describing and analyzing every minute details

But that's what science is. It's the iterative process of observation and deduction -- a bottom-up ontology built from observation, experimentation, and interpretation. It's built on the philosophical assumption that reality is orderly, fundamental physical laws (and constants/quantities) are the same everywhere, and that they were the same in the past and will be the same in the future. Those are just working assumptions - we have no reason to assume they're universally true, but they've been very helpful in a practical sense.

Philosophy and religion, on the other hand, offer first principles and a system of inductive logic and reasoning based on them (well, those that are coherent - many are not). It's a top-down reasoning system based on (hopefully) just a few axioms, that (hopefully) provides coherent answers on questions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny -- the sorts of answers the human heart needs to have a sense of context in life.

Personal experience still counts as evidence. If you get a lot of different people reporting the same stuff then that’s a pretty solid indication that there’s some common basis for it.

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?

>Personal experience still counts as evidence.

It doesn't count as objective evidence

How to do you define "objective" when objectivity depends on the very phenomenon studied?

Objectivity cannot be achieved without a control group.

So when we attempt to objectively study consciousness with consciousness, we have reached a point of recursion.

>objective: Existing independent of or external to the mind; actual or real.

Sure it does. Imagine there’s a cave you can’t enter. You can send other people in, though. You send someone in and they tell you there’s a lion in there. You send someone else, they also say there’s a lion. You send a thousand people in and they all say there’s a lion. You send in people you’re certain have never met each other and they say there’s a lion. You send in people from cultures that haven’t contacted each other and they still say there’s a lion. You send in people who have no idea what a lion is and they say there’s a strange animal in there and the description matches a lion.

Put it all together and you have objective evidence that there is, in fact, a lion in that cave.

Without genetic testing you could not objectively know for sure if that was a lion or some other species.

Just because a lot of people agree on something based on shallow observations does not make it objective science. Thats moreso the realm of subjective "soft sciences" like sociology.

Are you implying that nobody anywhere was ever objectively certain of the presence of a lion before the past few decades?

And how does genetic testing objectively tell you that it’s a lion? Genetic testing tells you that its DNA is similar to something else you’ve previously identified as a lion, but if there’s no way to be sure if that identification then you’re just moving the problem.

Yes, up until the recent advent of genetic sequencing, we humans have often mistakenly considered two organisms that look the same to the naked eye as being the same.

The same in what sense? Sameness is not an objective property of organisms.

You didn’t address my second point: how does genetic testing give you an objective measure of lionness when it’s still ultimately based on observations and subjective assessments?

Genetic testing is far more scientifically revealing than just eyeballing something because it's based on actual objective tests, data, and math.

Just like radio astrology is far more scientifically revealing than just looking up at the night sky and declaring theres nothing more to the universe than meets the eye.

Typically a genetic variance of >2% indicates a different species

So, you test this animal and it’s within 2% of a known lion. How do you know the known lion is a lion?

Classification

> Just because a lot of people agree on something based on shallow observations does not make it objective science. Thats moreso the realm of subjective "soft sciences" like sociology.

What if the people entering the cave make non-shallow observations and report it back to you?

If that's still not enough, then sadly science is not enough either since it relies heavily on cooperation (you can't test everything yourself).

One reason to prefer the physical-causes-consciousness route is that it gives a fairly clear way to try to answer the question: investigate the physical. We'll know if we have useful answers when we can manipulate it / create a consciousness.

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?

> it's not a question for which an answer can be deduced from observation

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.

I challenge the assertion that something immaterial (other than information) is at play here.

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.

This article is talking about the question of consciousness as "experience" itself, not necessarily as the state of having some sort of intelligent subject (the "I").

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.

Experience is even less mysterious than consciousness.

A recording is experience. Information you recall and inspect is experience. Experience of consciousness is recollection of mental states.

I'm talking about experience as in "what it is like to be something"[1] which is different than learning or memory.

[1] This is the most well known paper on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

Well, I am arguing that no, it is not. And I don't see what makes qualia mysterious and different from raw sensor values.

"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism". I would argue that something that has a memory that can contain representations of its own internal states exhibits conscious mental states.

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