Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered
nautil.us
nautil.us
In this model, if I went under anesthesia and the King Particle got knocked out of its orbit and got replaced by another, the new consciousness would believe it was a continuation of the earlier one, because it would receive the same stimuli that its predecessor would have, and part of that stimuli was evolved to elicit a sensation for the continuity of self.
What this gets at is, is consciousness stateless? Is its experience a pure function of what is fed into it, or is it stateful?
to perceive something you have to
have a representation of it in memory
Is a computer running voice recognicion software a conscious being in your book?
No, unless the software included a representation of the computer itself. Then it might be capable of consciousness, IDK. But being so capable it would then be a person rather than just an app.
1) awareness of objects, events and other stimuli and the ability to respond to those inputs with some output. This is the world acting upon a conscious agent and the agent acting upon the world.
2) awareness of oneself and one's inner experience and self reflection and the ability to cause changes in oneself. This is the conscious agent acting on itself.
1 is generally agreed upon as the required part of the definition. 2 is subject to some argument. If you accept 1 alone then you leave open the question of the zombie problem usually given as every conscious agent except for yourself is just acting as if they have an inner life but really are just responding to outside stimulus by some unknown mechanism. This is really just behaviorism and I argue that it would also apply to an individual in that their inner experience may very well just be an illusion. This seems absurd (and I think it is) and that is why 2 is brought on as a further distinguishing factor, perhaps the distinguishing factor since you can now imagine a consciousness existing with only reference to itself. This seems to be where your argument kicks in since you would need some state in order to build such an inner world but I think the point of the article is that you could suppose that there is some aspect of consciousness that underpins the whole thing. We've removed the requirement of outside stimulus, so now remove the inner stimulus of memory. What remains? Is there some other source of a priori stimulus? A generative factor from which perturbations in consciousness arise? Is there nothing but consciousness of being conscious? Absent that, is there simply a feeling of existence? This is the root at which we strike.
We can imagine and create new things but their attributes are always recombinations of the attributes of old things we already know about.
>you would need some state in order to build such an inner world
This feels a bit like essentialism to me. As far as I'm concerned I just am that inner world. It is built from my memories and experiences.
It is true that the inner world is in a particular state at any given time. But it's not made out of some kind of 'state-iness' stuff, any more than a brick is built out of 'brickiness'. Please correct me here if I'm wrong.
>is there simply a feeling of existence?
I don't think there's a feeling of existence per se. However one does with experience become aware of subtle sensations from the body at rest, for example noise in the optical system (static or 'snow'). One can then dream or imagine or think about these things too.
Edit: it can't truthfully think, "I see a pebble."
There...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/
Perhaps someone well versed in this can tell us how this article's theory relates to the non-self that Buddhists have been talking about for 2,000 years.
No.
One can have a legitimate debate about 48, 70 and 99 being big numbers. But not 30, 28 or 19.
In common parlance, "big" and "small" are often used in context where the thing being related is implied, and usually taken to be a human being. Mountains are big (relative to humans) and ants are small (relative to humans). But ants are big relative to atoms and mountains are small relative to planets.
But "conscious" isn't a relation, it's a property. Normal humans are conscious. Rocks are not. This is not to say that consciousness might not be a continuous property rather than a dichotomy; it almost certainly is. Nonetheless, there is a point at which the degree of consciousness in a system is indistinguishable from zero, at which point it is no longer useful to say that the thing is conscious.
It would make "unconscious" a synonym for "non-existent".
> If a fertilized egg is not conscious, when precisely does it emerge, and what does that transition entail?
No one knows the answer to that. But it's pretty clear to me that consciousness supervenes on brains, so having a brain (or functional equivalent) is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for being conscious.
Maybe a synonym for “non-physical”, conceptual, or abstract. Why do you say that like it’s some kind of paradox?
> No one knows the answer to that.
Then how does one know it to be true?
> But it's pretty clear to me that consciousness supervenes on brains
Why? No one has ever borne that out.
I'm not. I'm just saying it robs the word "conscious" of most of its utility. It no longer makes sense to say, for example, "That person is unconscious."
> Then how does one know it to be true?
How does one know what to be true?
> Why? No one has ever borne that out.
Then I propose we do the following experiment: let's surgically remove your brain and see if afterwards you still profess to be conscious.
Consciousness is a matter of degree, and there's no hard evidence about how low the scale goes.
No, I'm not. Consciousness is a continuum, not a dichotomy. There are nonetheless systems whose degree of consciousness is indistinguishable from zero.
> there's no hard evidence about how low the scale goes.
Of course there is. It goes down to zero. Rocks are not conscious. Dead people are not conscious. Even humans under general anesthesia are not conscious.
Yes.
> If so, how can you be certain?
I can't be absolutely certain of that nor of anything else. The philosophical-zombie hypothesis cannot be ruled out by evidence. But I observe others producing complex I/O behavior that is qualitatively similar to that which I produce and that I attribute to my own consciousness. I also see evidence that my consciousness supervenes on the operation of my brain, and I observe that other people have brains. The most parsimonious explanation for all that is that other humans are also conscious.
Nope.
> Can we construct one from legos in an aircraft hangar?
Almost certainly not. We can't even construct one on a silicon chip (yet).
- Professor Hubert Farnsworth
Umm, really?
Sounds nice and touchy-feely new agey, but, I'm saying no.
More likely you just haven't tried to define consciousness clearly and non-circularly, and when you do, it just kind of goes away as a concept. If you can tell me, in any sort of scientific terms, why a self driving car isn't conscious but a human is, maybe we can get somewhere.
The people who make these claims are usually woo-woo writers who make money by writing popular culture books related to a subset of quantum mechanics phenomena and to a limited understanding thereof.
This shouldn't be too hard to see either when you understand that consciousness is not well-defined yet by mainstream science, and so why would it study it using the well-defined methods like physics? That if anything would lead to unfalsifiable hypotheses, and mainstream physics luckily doesn't indulge in that so often.
I have no idea what you mean by this.
As for circular, I saying it is impossible to define consciousness in a way that excludes man made machines (is my computer conscious because it is aware of other similar machines on the network, as well as its own place in the network? Is a self driving car conscious because it is aware of its position in space relative to other cars?), without simply using other words that have similar meaning.
People define "conscious" using words like "aware" or "feel" or "think", while being quick to assume that all words don't apply to machines. But they won't explain why not.
This goes into detail about circularity of definitions: http://www.karmatics.com/docs/dictionary.html
Let me try: consciousness is that which makes you get up in the morning and get something to eat. In general, it's what makes you keep being alive in the complex world, reacting to the changes, adapting for survival. As a human survival entails being part of the human society and culture. This is a concrete, non-metaphysical definition.
Why survival? It's the only self-reliant, self affirming reason.
If you think I am too reductive, maybe you haven't considered the wonderful complexities of reinforcement learning and genetic evolution. There is just as much or more to admire in them as in traditional spirituality and religion. But they have the advantage of being practical and not presupposing things that cannot be seen, including Chalmer's panpsychism and/or dualism.
PS: seems like I hit a nerve, but I am not sorry. Consciousness == eating is my way of crashing the high flying palace of consciousness philosophy into the dirt of the concrete world. Philosophers (armchair or not) need to take heed at the current scientific developments.
The reproductive organs of technology are us, people.
I'm not saying it is conscious, btw, I'm more likely to simply say that consciousness is a poorly defined term, unless you are simply using it to describe a "non-sleeping" state where input from the environment is actively being taken in and processed in a meaningful way. And for that, yeah, a self driving car can be conscious.
"Consciousness", "you", "here", and "now" are all synonyms.
I certainly don't see how "you", "here" and "now" are synonyms of consciousness, nor is the use of the terms indicative of consciousness.
Two simple machines that communicate with one another for some useful purpose could meaningfully and usefully use those terms (or equivalent symbols or codes), but that wouldn't make them conscious by the way most people use the word. Not seeing that at all, sorry.
And certainly the words aren't synonyms "consciousness," in that you could replace the word "consciousness" with "you" (etc)
You said it yourself above, when you try to define consciousness clearly and non-circularly it just kind of goes away as a concept. That's because it's the inconceivable medium of concepts. Conceptualizing consciousness is like trying to play silence on an instrument. You can't do it except by leaving it alone.
> I certainly don't see how "you", "here" and "now" are synonyms of consciousness, nor is the use of the terms indicative of consciousness.
Well, work on it for a while.
You are that which is conscious. Everything else is content. You are always "here" and it is always "now". Subjective awareness. Even in dreams "you" are always "here" and it is always "now". Have you ever not been here? Or existed at a time that isn't now?
It's not something you can think out or solve, it's a matter of perception.
If you are going to say it's "not a concept" you probably shouldn't then say it is synonomous with these other things. I would argue that it IS a concept, but it becomes an incoherent concept when analyzed closely. Or it becomes a very generalizable concept, one that applies perfectly well to manmade things like self driving cars and maybe even thermostats.
It seems likely that something like this happened with humans: we evolved language including pronouns and time and place markers, etc.
However, the phenomenon of self awareness that those symbols "point to" is unitary.
Subjective awareness is you and you are always here and now.
That's the "one weird trick" that humans do: we are capable of noticing and meta-commenting on our own self-awareness, even though that's technically impossible.
You know how if you repeat a word over and over again it temporarily looses it's meaning as you become aware of the bizarre and arbitrary nature of the sounds you're making, yeah?
Try that with the word "I" and see what happens. YMMV good luck.
> And the fact that the hard problem has persisted for so many decades, despite the advances in neuroscience, has caused some scientists to wonder if we’ve been thinking about the problem backward. Rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, is it possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that it was there all along?
Why do folks present this idea like it's new and radical? It's literally thousands of years old.
Aldous Huxley wrote "The Perennial Philosophy" in 1945. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy
> However, it seems to me that the obstacle one faces here isn’t a combination problem but the confusion of consciousness with the concept of a self. ... And this concept of the self is an illusion.
Recapitulate the basic finding of Buddhism, This has been known for thousands of years.
> it may be more accurate to instead talk about the content and quality of conscious experience at any given location in spacetime, determined by the matter present there.
Now we're gwtting somewhere...
> would two brains wired together produce a new, integrated mind?
In a word, yes. You don't even need to connect them with a corpus callosum, the bandwidth and latency of our built-in hardware is sufficient:
"Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual hypnosis." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106
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Gurdjieff presents a world system wherein (I am paraphrasing and condensing wildly and inaccurately here) the human isn't born with a soul but must construct one during it's mortal lifetime or "die like a dog" leaving nothing behind.
There are (in this world model) three kinds of matter: terrestrial matter (of the Earth), stellar matter (of the Sun and solar system) and interstellar matter (which is stable outside the Sun's heliopause.)
The process of constructing a soul proceeds in two stages. First one "coats" the physical body through and through with a stellar matter to make the "second being-body", and then again with interstellar matter to make the "third being-body" or soul. This third body is stable beyond the solar system and, importantly, beyond the death of the original physical body. The second being-body is not stable on it's own without the first or third bodies.
I bring this up because it's a fascinating (IMO) third concept besides "humans do not have souls" and "humans do have souls": "humans are born w/o souls and must make them themselves before death".
It also makes a kind of sense that, in order for your human consciousness to survive the death of the body, the material matrix within which and through which your human experience carries on, you need another nearly-identical body made out of more durable stuff.
https://twitter.com/rmartinledo/status/1233388613490139136
That make you wonder how vast consciousness really is.
And how self centered we are still as species. Eating other animals for 'pleasure'. It's sad.
Here’s what they look like when you zoom in a bit more: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9RUHJhskW00&t=16
It’s literally chemical bonds breaking and forming, stochastically.