Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

Another point to make on panpsychism: how do people who reject the theory explain hierarchical life? To what level is a human conscious if its component cells aren't? Are ant colonies "conscious" due to the complexity of the behavior of the ants? Does that make ants less conscious? To an alien visitor, ant colonies can be considered single organisms, because they act with intent toward a specific goal and react to specific stimuli in semi-predictable ways. Extend this to human nation-states: is the USA "conscious"? It certainly has motivations, and a drive for self-preservation, and exerts directed will. Even if the component humans are not explicitly "aware" of the "thoughts" of the USA, can you disqualify consciousness?

Honestly, to me, this perspective demotes consciousness to obscurity. There's nothing special about it because it's everywhere. What is interesting is an explicit awareness and accurate internal model of reality. But this is a completely separate problem to that of consciousness.

>> To what level is a human conscious if its component cells aren't?

That is like asking "how can a car be a vehicle if its component parts aren't vehicles?". But we know that we can make things with new properties by combining things that do not have those properties. E.g. dough is sticky, but neither water now flour are. Whiskey is alcoholic, but rye is not. etc etc.

The hierarchical question is answersed by this intuition: that combining things in herarchies yields new things that didn't exist before, and with properties that none of the original components had.

Dough is not "sticky"; that is your subjective experience of the thing you subjectively experience as "dough". Whiskey is not alcoholic, it contains alcohol in addition to other components. These distinctions are borne entirely of a human's interpretation of the world. These things are not in any sense "whole and separate objects" until a human determines what is a "whole object". This is necessarily subjective and thus out of scope.

Intuition fails here because intuition is necessarily a human reflex. We are trapped in our bodies and the historical context of our species's evolution, which means we interpret certain things in ways that are advantageous to us and our society. It's to our benefit to conceptualize whole objects because it is a cognitive shortcut to do so, which saves on precious energy, regardless of how physics dictates the arrangement of atoms.

That's a good point. One things aliens have that we don't is the ability to merge and divide consciousnesses (like Vulcans do). This has been explored in science fiction but not so much in the real world. Although some siamese twins share a consciousness:

https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-hogan-twins-share...

Within the next 10 or 20 years, we'll have the technology to connect brains to computers, and eventually join brains together and separate them. That will at least give us a theory of how the basic building blocks of consciousness work, perhaps along the lines of how people can lose an entire hemisphere of their brain and still be conscious. Maybe we'll find that only a tiny golfball-sized portion of the brain is required for consciousness. Maybe something smaller.

For example, the twins obviously have their own personalities, but how much of that overlaps into a single definition of self? It could be that there are always two entities. But my gut feeling is that we'll find that consciousness can merge and divide fairly effortlessly, working like a fractal to retain full memories from both halves. It will be a strange experience (a bit like psychedelics) but within a century will be commonplace.

> One things aliens have that we don't is the ability to merge and divide consciousnesses (like Vulcans do).

We should ask them to teach us. Or maybe they could license their technology to us for a small price.

At what point in development does a child become capable of hearing and interpreting sounds? Can a human hear sounds even if the cells in it cannot? Do ant colonies contain a primitive hearing because they react to vibrations in the air? Does the USA, when it ‘reacts’ to hurricanes?

Not knowing where definitions land is tough, but it's wrong to think that ground reality gives a damn that you find it hard. I don't know precisely where consciousness starts when a human develops. I don't know what point its heart start beating either. None of this has any clear bearing on what the objective truth is, or how it's implemented.

It's not like we don't know anything about consciousness. We know consciousness is not metaphysics, because we can talk about it and affect it with physical actions. We know consciousness is a property of the brain, for similar reasons. The only sensible way of satisfying the prior two points is that consciousness exists at program-level (aka. it's not some opaque oracle hiding in protons), so we know that too.

I think the superorganism perspective is more reasonable than it seems on its face. We manage to digest our food and regulate our endocrine sysyems with almost no conscious intention, and likewise its unlikely our autonomic processes have much knowledge of what we believe ourselves to be thinking about. Most of our cells arent even human. An individual ant doesnt need to grasp what the colony is doing any more than a particular neuron needs to grasp what a person is doing. It seems that the components do have their own awereness, its just much more limited in scope than that of the whole system.

The best case against panpsychism I believe was advanced by complexity theorist Joe Norman: it's not unreasonable to believe that "consciousness" emerges at some levels of a complex system and not at others. No, we can't explain _why_ this is - since we hardly understand complex systems - but we do understand that phenomena exists (emergence) at some scales and not at others. Consciousness could be one of them.

A binary distinction requires a binary definition, and thus a threshold. Without a threshold, the spectrum is continuous. The assertion of panpsychism is that it is impossible and therefore improper to set a threshold at all.

> A binary distinction requires a binary definition

No it doesn't. See absolute value of x on real numbers - it is usually defined as:

   abs(x) = x if x >= 0, else -x

but it can also be defined as sqrt(x * x).

You can use this trick to define arbitrarily complex "binary" f(x) as a combination of these. And there are many other tricks of course.

But math is one thing, we see spectrums everywhere in reality and yet quantum mechanics is discrete (quantized :) ).

x * x has two 2nd roots, namely, x and -x, and the result of this "function" (in quotes because it doesn't obey the definition thereof) requires you to choose arbitrarily between them, thus creating a dichotomy.

> on real numbers

Only your pedantry cornered us here.

:)

Thought experiment 1

We all start as a single cell. What biological event starts consciousness? Keep in mind you can't be half conscious — that's still conscious.

Thought experiment 2

Look at this random symbol: #. What are you conscious of? Chances are, conscious of things, of objects, of elements, of concepts. Things that have some unity to them. But, things are mental constructs, typically socially shared. So, much of the content of consciousness arrived after birth, once we could learn these mental constructs.

Thought experiment 3

What is more complex: a single neuron (with thousands of mitochondria and other organelles, thousands of synapses) or a worm, with only a few hundred synapses? Similarly, what is more complex, your own body or the company you work for?

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