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Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity.

Consciousness :trollface:

I actually do think that to some extent, studying physics is studying the mind — specifically studying exactly how ‘reality’ differs from our intuition about it. A new discovery in physics is often also a discovery about psychology — for example — relativity exposed our intuition about time and space as incorrect.

Go read some a Daniel Dennett and/or Max Tengmark.

Consciousness is a conceptual problem, not a physical one. It merely goes away once you start asking the right questions.

Aka "Consciousness Explained Away"

Consciousness is still an extant and very unexplained phenomenon.

That's a bit like saying phlogiston is an unexplained part of physical theory. Once you understand the underlying mechanics of thought, it stops being mysterious and really stops being a problem at all.

Not at all.

A quick Google of the subject will demonstrate it is still an (maybe, the) outstanding subject of philosophy and perhaps ultimately physics.

Check any online encyclopedia, but if you have any respectable references that disagree, I'd be genuinely interested.

Eg:

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

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

I never said there was broad consensus among all philosophers and physicists, etc. It takes generations for these ideas to truly die, just as it did with other widely believed falsehoods. No one really attacked consciousness from a mechanistic perspective until Turing, and that work wasn't followed up on outside of the AI community until the 70's and 80's, and it wouldn't be until very recent advances in AI that others took these philosophical ideas originating from computer science seriously.

So in the philosophy of physics and the mind, there are whole departments filled with tenured professors who came of age in their thinking at a time when consciousness was a Hard Problem, and have focused their mental tools on a class of solutions (qualia, observer-triggered wave collapse, etc.) which are irreconcilable with mechanistic physical reality, making the problem even more intractable and mysterious. It'll take another generation or two before the ideas of Dennett, Dawkins, Tegmark, etc. get more widely recognized and consciousness finally goes the way of phlogiston.

For references, I recommend Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and really anything by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins--materialistic explanations of consciousness pervade their work. For a compatible (hah!) physical perspective, I suggest Max Tegmark:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219

I feel like this is a bit of an oversimplification of a complicated topic. For example, qualia is not a solution, it's a problem! And while Dennett does present an interesting picture (especially in the way he resolves qualia), there is a reason his book is nicknamed "Consciousness Explained Away" -- he simply defines away many of the interesting parts of the problem.

Also, I don't really like the way you're describing these professors of philosophy. These people have spent their lives studying this problem and adjacent topics. Sure you may be absolutely convinced that "things that conflict with our understanding of mechanistic physical reality must be untrue," others believe "what almost all people perceive to be true about their internal experience cannot be dismissed when discussing the nature of that experience." I think this topic is much more debatable than you are making it out to be.

The phlogiston is an elegant argument in this context that regresses the discussion. The use of the phlogiston as a criticism is elegant because it allows you to think of consciousness as an element that inhabits the brain and then proclaim that to be wrong, leaving at the end of the story only the physical brain and no room for imagining anything else in that space, without having proven the case.

A phlogiston is not the correct analogy for grounding consciousness in science. An easier fit would be the software/hardware split you find in computing, where the abstractions and meaning we perceive to be real is a set of built layers of computational or logical abstraction.

I am on the side of not thinking you can scientifically ground consciousness with the understanding we have. I don't think either analogy fits and the argument will forever be pinned in debate between characters that prefer their own worldview.

We don't yet understand the "underlying mechanics of thought" though.

It depends on what you mean. We understand that it is a mechanical, computational process. As opposed to, say, the reigning theory of mind in philosophical circles which is dualist. (Spiritualism in academia in the 21st century... sigh.)

We have not yet mapped out the wiring diagrams of our brains which result in the human experience of consciousness. But that's a technological limitation in brain scanning and simulation. We also haven't yet created AI machines that exhibit what we would call consciousness, but we have good ideas of how to do so and are making progress. In both cases we know there is no need to invoke dualist answers, whether it be souls, ghosts in the machine, or 'qualia.'

It is qualitatively untrue to say that most academic philosophers are dualists.

https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

(Also modern dualism is much better than spiritualism! There are some good reasons why people believe it.)

>> We also haven't yet created AI machines that exhibit what we would call consciousness, but we have good ideas of how to do so and are making progress.

That's news to me. What do you mean? What are those good ideas that we have and that we are making progress towards, that will lead us to conscious machines?

Actually: conscious software. Presumably, if we can get to strong AI from where we are right now, then we already have the hardware and we just need to figure out how to write the software?

Weird, because if I were to create a list of everything ranked by how confident I am that the listed item exists, consciousness would be at the very top by a wide margin. Everything else could just be a nice illusion (e.g., brain in a vat).

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