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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.

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I think this is a good question. Though we have some tools.

Did you ever faint? I did, definitely wasn’t conscious. Or whenever they dozed me under in thr hospital, not conscious.

In parts of my sleep, I’m not conscious. I now know this because recently my tinnitus became worse and I now here it in my dreams, based on the sound and frequency, I can infer time because of it (my tinnitus, although annoying has a regular multiphonic modulated sine wave quality to it, I could recreate it on a synthesizer, it’s quite beautiful but not 24/7). Also since it is a new development I get really conscious when I hear my tinnitus while I dream. I am conscious for 10 minutes per night.

This has only lasted 3 nights so far, so not much data.

Whenever my dreams do not have tinnitus, I am less conscious. I also notice this in dreams by my tinnitus ebbing away and me losing consciousness. There’s a similar process of losing some consciousness when I become too stoned.

Based on my experience, memory is a crucial part for my conscious experience.

'We ‘may’ have discovered a potential remedy for tinnitus – by accident.' - https://www.linkedin.com/content-guest/article/we-may-have-d...

> There’s a similar process of losing some consciousness when I become too stoned

Hey could you please check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia and tell me if this is this is similar to the too stoned/not sleeping state (except the paralysis, I assume you can move with enough willpower)? Did you ever take psychedelics? What's your meditation experience?

Then we can apply that definition to all sorts of awkward and upsetting cases like "person in dissociative state", "person with plural-psyche", "person in persistent vegetative state", "newborn baby", etc.

Or even currently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21720761 - revivals of ""dead"" people are gradually getting better.

I find it reasonable to assume that for thought processes to occur, there must be some processing, so rocks are out.

A more interesting example would be, say, trees, which do communicate with each other to some degree. Is that accompanied by some form of awareness? What's the lower bound of complexity at which consciousness kicks in? What about supraorganisms such as insect hives? Human cities? An ecosystem as a whole?

Information could be encoded in molecule oscillations and therefore 2 rocks of different temperatures would communicate it when touching (heat transfer would occur). Can this be considered processing?

It's doubtful you'll be able to make such a scheme work: Information processing tends to involve storage and retrieval of data. That's not really possible in the thermodynamic regime. You'd have to do all your processing before the information gets lost to thermalization.

Image recognition needs no storage or retrieval of data: it's a single pass thru a series of matrix multiplications. Yet, image recognition is the very definition of data processing.

How do you propose to perform calculations without data storage (think registers)?

Like this for example https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/neural-network-in-glass-requ... though I'm not sure that you can really count this as calculation. But I guess that's the point of this discussion.

Heat is entropy, but entropy is basically a measure of disorder/randomness. So when two substances transfer heat, they necessarily are not communicating information, except perhaps that there exists a temperature differential.

See this paper: “If Materialism is True, the United States is Probably Conscious”

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.ht...

This builds on a basic fallacy:

1. According to materialism, consciousness is purely a result of physical processes.

2. Our consciousness is complex.

3. Therefore, materialism says that any physical entity with a complexity comparable to us is probably conscious.

At best, going from the two premises to the conclusion involves a tendentious and useless definition of 'consciousness' that equivocates over the specific features of the consciousness of genus Homo that make it distinctly interesting. Tononi's IIT makes the same mistake.

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823

So: Consciousness = Complexity + X

X = what?

And how can we be sure that, whatever the X is, that the United States does not have it?

Firstly, consciousness is probably not well-modeled as arbitrary complexity plus X, as the complexity is likely inherent to X, and have a quite specific form. For example, it seems unlikely, on basic information-theoretic grounds, that the notoriously complex turbulent flow of a fluid in a pipe is materially closer to consciousness than laminar flow in that pipe.

Secondly, the burden of proof (or just of showing evidence) rests squarely on the person making the claim that the United States probably has it (whatever 'it' happens to be.) It is hard to do that whan you cannot say, with any specificity at all, what X is.

If your latest post is intended to be a defense of Schwitzgebel's paper, I think you are missing his point. I think he regards the consciousness of the United States counterfactually, and is attempting to show that materialism leads to an implausible conclusion, but he fails to do so, partly on account of the problem I raised in my original post.

> What's the lower bound of complexity at which consciousness kicks in? What about supraorganisms such as insect hives? Human cities? An ecosystem as a whole?

There's also the question of the nodes and edges of the graph; does the complexity (or processing capability) of these have any effect on the complexity bounds?

That is - compare a neuron as the node (and the dendrites as the "edges") in the larger graph of the neural network that is the human brain. Each node and edge are relatively simple compared to the entire brain.

Now - what happens when that brain becomes the node (via a human) and the edges of the graph of interaction in society becomes the internet (social networking, email, etc)? Both are much more complex than the former - so do we need fewer nodes/edges to "kickstart consciousness"?

The problem of course is how can we (as individual nodes) perceive this consciousness? How could we ever query it? And - if we could query it - and it perceived us querying it - what would it do?

If for instance - you perceived one or more of your neurons suddenly say "Hey - I'm a neuron - can you talk to me? I want to know what you are thinking? Helloooo?" - what would you do?

Well - more than a few of us would probably head to the doctor in an attempt to either shut that neuron up or remove it or kill it or...you get the idea.

So - if we were to do the same thing...?

If it can influence how the wave collapses, it is conscious.

That is an interesting starting point.

How do you set the bounds of a conscious entity though? Does the concept make sense in QM?

How would it explain the persistance of identity across lapses of consciousness?

>How do you set the bounds of a conscious entity though?

Honestly, I believe there is a closed system inside us that is kept "alive" by bodily functions and kept safe from decoherence - somehow. I can't explain why. Some claim it's inside microtubules, but I'm currently lacking knowledge in biology/physics combo to trust the papers enough without diving more into the matter.

The concept itself does make sense and it's been a point of discussion of many physicists, I'd refer you too look at quantum consciousness theories, there are a few familiar names there that suggest it and the explanations will be far more detailed and accurate then I can provide. I'd say that the ability to influence a wave collapse is "free will" and it's related to intelligence, consciousness of the subject and current state of mind/body. And I'd say it's distributed, so even tho one might have a strong pull on the wave, the decision is ultimately made by summing the vectors of all beings focused on that particular result.

>How would it explain the persistance of identity across lapses of consciousness?

Now, that's a good question - especially if someone is 100% completely dead and comes back to life. I'd say your "soul/consciousness" know wheres to return when you lapse but on one hand, that's astral mumbo jumbo. Possibly brain patterns? My theory is that when you're born, the soul comes in and is "hashed" by current state of the universe (check out Jyotish, I know it's astrology but damn that shit got me wondering a lot of times), this effects your brain patterns and it keeps this unique "hash" until you die, then the next life is your soul being rehashed again (so karma still applies, hashes change but they're like a blockchain let's say - the next one is the result of the previous ones and their work).

So I'd say that activating the human body - biologically bringing it back to "conscious" state - starts a process that creates specific patterns which match the signature of your current conscious soul (consciousness, whatever) and entangles them. Complete comeback of someone who is really dead isn't possible because the system is so damaged and you cannot activate it to create that pattern again (could possibly be linked to DMT being released/bound and activated, which opens a port for your consciousness to detach.

Tried to keep it as short and understandable, so sorry about the non-scientific mumbo jumbo, but it provides great metaphors and shortens my thoughts - and I assume a lot of it is true, but boilerplated and snake oiled for generic masses.

How do you tell whether something can do that?

That's circular logic with a dubious interpretation of quantum physics. The idea that consciousness could somehow be the cause of the collapse of the wave function is anthropocentrism and shows a poor understanding of what measurement is.

I think Neumann would quite agree with it. Wigner too. Oh wait, I think Penrose does too.

I didn't say cause, I said influence.

You calling it anthropocentric is actually, ironically, pretty anthropocentric of you - assuming humans are the only consciousness in the universe.

Not sure its hard to come up with a definition that does that. eg consciousness is awareness of stuff as in the internal state changing in a way that corresponds. So when humans see stuff you get neurons firing, with the rock less so. A problem is everyone has different definitions though.

How do you know that the rock is not aware of stuff? if you say consciousness is just neurons firing in certain patterns you have also given an answer to the traditional "hard" problem of consciousness, with hundreds of pages of philosophical thought that refutes your answer.

If you're not a dualist, thoughts necessarily have to be accompanied by some change of state of the material substrate.

Don't underestimate the complexity of a rock's internal state. There is a unfathomable number of atoms in complex crystal lattices in there. Defects in that lattice alone can encode a ton of information. Then you have a bunch of quantum state for each elementary particle. All of that reacts to external stimuli like temperature, pressure, or the occasional cosmic ray.

Thoughts are a process, so if they were supported by a crystal lattice, that lattice would have to go through changes.

As to your other point, the ergodicity of the system at the very least places a limit on the timescales over which consciousness may persist. I'm fairly confident in my belief that a rock cannot be conscious in any appreciable way.

You assume that dualism and materialism are the only options. You ignore other possibilities, such as idealism and neutral monism.

You're right. The dividing line is whether or not you think the physical and the mental necessarily coincide, which is in principle an orthogonal issue.

Right. And if the rock had some suitably complex structure, its internal state would be changing with awareness of stuff.

I've recently been reading Galileo's Error by Philip Goff which covers a lot of this ground (he's a proponent of panpsychism). Quite an interesting look into the various arguments though I thought (I previously had no background in this type of thing).

There are theories that equate information processing (integration/differentiation) with consciousness.

It maps well with what happens in your brain, where too little or too much functional connectivity maps to loss of consciousness (think anesthesia and epilepsy).

Rocks also have complex internal structure that responds to external influence, e.g. atoms vibrating in their crystal lattices depending on heat and pressure. Maybe there is a Boltzmann consciousness inside the rock when you're picking it up. What is "information" and what is noise is a matter of interpretation.

There may be some consciousness in the rock.

The gist of these theories is that consciousness is isomorphic to specific aspects of information processing that can be quantified.

The levels of complexity involved are hardly comparable...

Rocks have random structure, not complex structure. Randomness does not entail consciousness. A feature of consciousness is that it is informative: it informs you about the external state of the world or about internal processes. But a random configuration of molecules carry no information. (A random string is information but it doesn't carry information, i.e. mutual information with another structure.)

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