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Comment by xamuel | Hacker News Reader

This is the exact wrong direction we should take if we want to have any hope of understanding consciousness. Rather than pass a bong around and declare the whole universe is conscious, we should question the consciousness even of entities whose consciousness we currently take for granted. We should ask: is it really true that all humans are conscious[1], or is there something specific that triggers consciousness? For example, maybe consciousness is caused by a certain benevolent bacteria living in our guts, and anyone without that bacteria isn't conscious. If we refuse to even question these things, then of course we'll never come up with any answer.

[1] Of course, it goes without saying that for ethical purposes we should act under the assumption that all humans are conscious.

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Here is an interesting opinion of an AI researcher on consciousness. He basically claims that it is inevitable for an agent that can not store all information that it encounters and therefore needs to compress it. One of the most important things that needs to be represented is the agent itself, leading to self-symbols as he calls them. Correct me please if I summarized the comment incorrectly.

https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2xcyrl/i_a...

You might be interested in philosophical zombies by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

Discussing consciousness can be really difficult because the word is used in different ways in everyday language.

Consciousness defined as the intrinsically subjective quality of experience (Qualia [0]) is what is considered impossibly difficult to explain (maybe even necessarily outside of the scopy of natural science) by some. It's also what makes some people consider the crazy out-there ideas seriously...

Anyway, my point is, explaining self-symbols that an agent uses to model its own role in the world is a completely different problem. Some people use the term "hard problem of consciousness" [1] to distinguish the former from the latter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

I think it's more about the approach taken for researching the hard problem of consciousness (what you basically pointed out; what explains the phenomenon of subjective experience for conscious entities?).

Most researchers are doing exactly what you said, looking at it from the angle of "what arrangement of matter" gives rise to consciousness?. This model follows our intuitions and should definitely be explored; I don't think anyone is arguing the contrary.

But there are others, like the cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman, who are doing research from the complete opposite side of this problem: what if consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe? He explains this far better than I can (pre-caffeinated) in his book The Case Against Reality[1], which I'd recommend you read if you're interested in this topic (he's also done quite a few interviews which can be found on youtube et al[2]).

Perhaps similar to you, I (a materialist) used to have what I can only call a "gut reaction" to this idea - panpsychism just seemed like "new age bullshit" that was impossibly wrong. But I'm becoming more open, and honestly the science being done is really fascinating[3].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Reality-Evolution-Truth/... [2] https://youtu.be/4HFFr0-ybg0 [3] http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/Chapter17Hoffman.pdf

I also very much recommend reading Hoffman and watching his talks if you want precise wording and not new-age woo.

Bernardo Kastrup is also interesting in that field.

Passing a bong around?

This is a trite dismissal of a genuinely interesting attempt to get to grips with what the nature of consciousness might be.

It would be more convincing if you offered intelligent counters to the arguments of panpsychism rather than silly clichés intended to derail discussion.

> This is the exact wrong direction we should take if we want to have any hope of understanding consciousness.

Can you expand on what direction that is and why exactly it's wrong? I didn't see bongs mentioned in the article.

> We should ask: is it really true that all humans are conscious, or is there something specific that triggers consciousness?

How can that question possibly be answered without knowing what consciousness is?

> If we refuse to even question these things, then of course we'll never come up with any answer.

I didn't see this article as refusing to question those things. Very much the opposite. It's questioning the consciousness of everything, not just assuming that nothing is conscious because, well, you don't know...

>Can you expand on what direction that is and why exactly it's wrong?

It makes the word "conscious" meaningless: if I coin a new term, "baffy", and define it as "Everything in the entire universe is baffy", then this doesn't help us understand anything at all. It pushes bubbles around under wallpaper: ok, if rocks are conscious, then all the hard questions of consciousness just change into hard questions of human consciousness.

>How can that question possibly be answered without knowing what consciousness is?

Similar to how questions about the nature of light were answered. Originally no-one knew what light is, and questions about what it is were just as hopeless as questions about what consciousness is. Perhaps there's some quirk of consciousness we just haven't noticed yet, and once we do notice it, suddenly consciousness will be testable.

Or we could pass the bong around and say that Dust is responsible.

I think this is a situation where Newton's Flaming Laser Sword comes into play. The whole point of a p-zombie as a thought experiment is that they are outwardly indistinguishable from normal conscious humans.

Spoken like the stereotypical materialist.

Was Jesus Christ a materialist? "Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead." (Matthew 8:22)

No, but some use what people say are his teachings as reasons to prop up their extraction of resources,materials/creating materialist things from the earth; as according to interpretations of their versions of that teachings their god has given them dominion to use all the resources. Dominion of all things:

"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."" King James, Genesis 1:28

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology

Actually, he was, and Abrahamic religions are probably the reason for materialism in science.

It all starts with the distinction between heaven and the earth, the spirit and the flesh… Abrahamic religions are fundamentally dualistic, by contrast with eastern religions like hinduism or buddhism wich have had the concept of non-duality for long.

My understanding is that the only places you find a form of non-duality in Abrahamic religions is in their mystical variants.

There's tons of non-duality in Christ's teachings, but it's subtler and doesn't smash you over the head as much.

"Do not judge, or you will be judged. For with the same judgment you pronounce, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." (Matthew 7:1-2)

"For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother." (Matthew 12:50)

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me." (Matthew 25:40)

You could just as well interpret that "dually" though.

That's not quite materialism - is more like primordial consciousness; Consciousness is additive.

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