You can intellectually extend that to everyone else about our bodies, so why not consciousness?
Consider the following thought experiment: suppose that we had a complete understanding of how neurons work (as well as the brain more broadly). I think this is totally reasonable. Then suppose that we created artificial neurons that acted identically to biological neurons. If we replaced the neurons of a brain with these manufactured neurons, I would imagine that the resulting brain would still be conscious. Now imagine taking some of these neurons and removing their interior structure instead routing the inputs / outputs to a machine somewhere else where the correct computation takes place in order to determine the output from the neuron. From the rest of the brain's perspective nothing has changed so presumably it's still conscious.
Now take this to the extreme: replace all of these neurons with empty shells and route the computation to a billion people in the world to perform on pen and paper. Is it still conscious? If so, what if you removed the brain altogether and just performed the computations directly on paper, is the paper conscious?
The paper would definiy still be intelligent, it would possibly come up with interesting inventions, claim that it was sad or happy etc, but would it actually be sad?
I have a brain, you have a brain, billions of others do, it seems like there is a reasonable amount of symmetry, but "I" look out of my eyes and not anyone else's. Replacing you with an AI is much more feasible from my perspective than replacing me with a program.
To the fullest extent that you are capable of being sad. There is no even remotely plausible alternative to this physicalist argument.
I would argue that you aren't nearly as conscious as you think you are. That's the conclusion I've come to after many hours and years on the meditation cushion cultivating awareness of my own cognition. Any thought, choice, or action that you make doesn't actually happen in your conscious brain. You just become aware of it after it's happened. That's all there is.
Take something else less...emotionally laden. A black hole. Could we model a black hole on paper? If so, we ought to just be able to drop a computational particle in and see exactly what happens at the singularity. Except we can't -- the whole reason we call it a singularity is because we get divide by reality errors if we try to compute it.
But I would argue there's a different problem. A black hole is the most computationally efficient method of calculating itself. Any method of accurately emulating the black hole on the Planck level is going to take more energy (and mass) than the actual black hole. As a result, those pieces of paper would literally collapse into an actual black hole long before they could properly emulate the black hole they were modeling.
Which isn't to say that the brain is anything like that but the point is, it's not a foregone conclusion that we can construct a completely accurate emulator of a physical object.
Finally there's something of a category error in making the claim that pieces of paper can be sad. A paper emulation of a bar magnet would not itself be magnetic. In the world of the emulation it would produce an output that would model magnetism, yes, but that's the extent of it. Our paper brain emulator, if it were constructible, would produce output that would be a model of sadness in the emulation, but it would not actually be sad.
>It's premature to take for granted that a paper brain emulator can exist in principle.
I think it is premature to say we could simulate all of quantum mechanics with sheets of paper, so on that technicality, I totally agree. However, I think it's quite unlikely to be the case that we couldn't in principle simulate the requisite components required for a faithful replication of consciousness. But you're correct that it's probably not a given.
>Finally there's something of a category error in making the claim that pieces of paper can be sad. A paper emulation of a bar magnet would not itself be magnetic. In the world of the emulation it would produce an output that would model magnetism, yes, but that's the extent of it. Our paper brain emulator, if it were constructible, would produce output that would be a model of sadness in the emulation, but it would not actually be sad.
I think I disagree with almost all of this. The bar magnet is a bit of a bait and switch because the system, the input, and the output weren't well defined. In consciousness, you need to define the system, system input and system output properly. If the system has persistence of thought/computation, and the inputs and outputs can be defined in a way identically to those of your own consciousness, then it would actually be sad, in every way that you are. In particular, if you replace bits of paper with "neurons", your argument should absolutely still hold. So the logical extension of this argument is that either YOU also aren't capable of being sad, or your consciousness does not originate in your brain. Both of those I think are pretty close to sufficiently absurd that we can accept them as givens.
That is wrong. Any method of emulating the black hole within a volume less-than or equal to the Schwarzchild radius of the black hole would collapse, but you could do the calculation over a larger volume and avoid that. The most massive stars are far more massive than the least massive black holes.
The smallest black hole known that I could find from a quick search is XTE J1650-500, at about 3.8 solar masses with a "15 mile"[1] diameter. There are a lot of stars more massive than that.[2]
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/smal...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_stars
...This was my intuition as well, but I'm far from certain about it. It's not uncommon for the universe to find sneaky ways to prevent us from "cheating" so to speak. These often result from deep symmetries/conservation laws and fundamental limits on information.
I'm actually a big opponent of the simulation argument for that reason. I don't think you can accurately simulate the universe without having a universe to simulate it in. Otherwise, you could just 'turtles-all-the-way-down' the simulation. The information density would have to be unbounded, and this seems to be in disagreement with fundamental laws of the universe.
We don't have a theory of quantum gravity... it's definitely possible that to simulate the blackhole in a more spread out manner would be impossible. I could envision a fundamental tradeoff where to replicate the information exchanges between the microscopic constituents requires that either you satisfy the hoop conjecture, or you keep increasing the size of your model without bound, whereby for any finite size you still satisfy the hoop conjecture. (Particularly since the required mass/energy density goes down significantly as the radius increases.) I know that's wild speculation, but I feel like it's not quite crazy enough to take for granted.
I think the fact that people ('s brains) are so sure that they are conscious, is pretty clear evidence that for some reason your brain is getting messages back from this consciousness thing. Either that, or brains are consistently are built so they can't shake the idea that they have an observer (see: how many comments are on every HN article about consciousness, including this one).
I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand either your question or the following paragraph. However, I feel like it could be an interesting line of discussion if you can explain it to me better.
I'm a bit lost, it sounds like you're suggesting consciousness and your brain are too different things? Is that right?
Random assumptions/observations that might be relevant:
- The universe seems to generally work under "simple" principles that can be explained with a few mathematical equations.
- The brain is made of the same stuff as everything else.
- You are only aware of a very very small amount of things that actually happen in your body: You are not aware of what happens in your visual cortex, just what comes out of it. You are not usually aware of the sound waves themselves, just the conceptual "sound". I would call all that stuff "processed data". Sound, images, touch, all that stuff, generally get blended together into one cohesive experience.
- All that looks like a flow chart when I think about it. The photons go into your eye, stimulating nerves, electrons flying everywhere. That cascade of nerve stimulations goes into the visual cortex where stuff is processed into actual stuff that you care about, but the data is still just essentially electrical signals at that point. But then suddenly, you are aware of that processed data. Sounds like it explicitly got that processed visual data and sent it out a transmitter, to be listened to by none other than my "self".
- I guess I would then relate my consciousness to a radio receiver that's waiting on the other end. And in some specific part of my brain is a transmitter.
- A radio station can't possibly know if anyone is listening to the signal they sent, unless the listener communicates back that they are listening. In the same way, it doesn't make much sense to talk about how aware you are if the "aware part" (the radio receiver) doesn't talk back.
- Random final observations if this model were true: To maintain conservation of energy, the receiver would likely have to act like a capacitor, storing energy that was used to send the message to it, and using that energy to send a message back. Either that or it communicates back by collapsing wavefunctions (okay now it's getting a little out of hand). Also, maybe using this model, you could say that your sense of the progression of time is proportional to the amount of information sent. Which is why time goes so quickly while you are asleep, because your brain stops sending stuff out the antenna (also getting out of hand).
Hopefully you find this idea at least a little interesting. I feel like there's a world of possibilities here that haven't properly been considered.
I would love to hear your take on it.
There is feedback from the attention centers. In particular, when you pay attention to things, those connections get reinforced. So the real feedback occurs on a bit of a different timescale than the rest of your cognition, though there's probably some shorter term feedback too if I had to guess.
In a sense, I think there's a center of attention/awareness that consists of almost all of what we usually call consciousness largely because it's contents also get fed back in as an input. There's the self-awareness component.
I think this is true, when we talk about consciousness we talk about it as if consciousness has the ability to control the body and speak and that our thoughts are controlled by our consciousness. I think illusionist arguments are very strong here against that. We can change how someone thinks or acts based off of physical stuff (like lead poisoning someone) therefore those things must mostly be physical.
I have come to the conclusion that conciseness probably is only an experiential thing. It might not be able to control anything but there is something fundamental there experiencing something. We cant know that the world is real: we could a brain in a jar, or in the matrix, or on a massive DMT trip right now. But we can know "I think therefore I am", probably better written I experience therefore I am. It seems very strange to throw out the one thing we know to be true, that we are having a conscious experience, in favour of something we don't know to be true, that the world is real and causing that experience.
Doesn't it cause us to at least have these kinds of conversations?
There must be fundamental difference between the subjective experience I have of vision and that of a computer with a camera and processing software, I can't imagine that it has a similar experience.
How come there _is_ a subjective "me" that experiences things and can pay attention to them? Given that we are clearly bags full of extremely fancy chemical reactions.
In contrast, you have many, many layers of very sophisticated and interconnected abstraction and reality modeling between that visual stream and other forms of processing. Typically, the higher the level of abstraction, the more "aware" of it you are as it gets filtered and dumped into your attention centers.
In short, even our most sophisticated state of the art "deep" learning algorithms are but puddles compared to the ocean of depth available in your brain. ...and almost none have any form of attentive aggregation and selection.
"Being me" is an experience or feeling. We have lots of other feelings both from within and outside our bodies. Could it be that consciousness is simply how it feels to have a focus of thoughts and attention in our brains?
First, I have to clarify concepts. There is a consciousness created by the mind. It's the place where sensory input is experienced. It's also the place where thoughts are experienced. It's basically the screen that allows the different parts of the mind system to communicate.
Then, there's the consciousness talked about in this article. It's a more primordial quality.
Now, that model of the mind system says that attention and awareness are the two modes of the mind. Consciousness as the screen of experience is created by the mind. Perception is created by the mind as well.
Actually that's just hand waving, and taking for granted what needs to be proved.
And yet, I think that statement stands pretty strong on the basis of what we do and what we can know.
For one example he considers information processing to be consciousnes, then asks about random patterns in cosmic dust that by chance encode another steps in a conscious process every 3 million years. Is that a conscious thing? What if it is?
It goes very abstract very fast, and I disagree with some conclusions, but I still recommend it.
> is the paper conscious?
Not paper, but the person implemented in such a way - yes. You don't say "my proteins are conscious", you say "I am conscious". The substrate only needs to ensure the process works correctly and the inputs and outputs are matched.
In your example it's like virtualization in IT - you can run a game on the computer, or run a virtual machine on the computer and run the game on that virtual machine. The game is running either way, it even runs on these same transistors, but it's a different process.
Besides, I think consciousness is very handweavy, and if I had to bet I would bet: - consciousness isn't a thing, it's just a bad abstraction (70%) - consciousness is emergent in a fully physical universe (25%) - consciousness is fundamental, and part of the laws of universe (5%)
Step 1: point out that any number of wacky scenarios can be isomorphic to a human brain - a person in a room transcribing symbols, an unlikely cloud of dust in space
Step 2: Note that the fantastically implausible scenario you've constructed is fantastically implausible. Redirect the implausibility into the thing you want to claim is impossible.
Step 3: Wave hands, make argument about consciousness/AI
I don't think it's any more implausible (that this is a conscious proccess) than saying both personalities of people with split personality are conscious.
Yes, absolutely consciousness would exist in all of those scenarios — but you couldn’t claim that any one “thing” such as the paper itself, would “be” conscious. The notion of a separate self is still fundamentally an abstraction placed on top of billions of neurons interlinked with a musculoskeletal system, through which quadrillions of new atoms are constantly cycling through. On a long enough scale you only have the psychological “gestalt“ of a human.
Even the sensation of “self” is still ultimately just another internal cognitive model, because ultimately everything else we perceive is also just an internal model of reality.
In your example, that internal “self” model would continue to exist within the abstract computationally-mediated consciousness-generating process.
Each conscious process exists in its own fully separate ontological space—because it is inherently subjective.
That "internal model of reality" is capable of some very interesting things if you're prepared to read past the first few chapter or two of the manual.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Systems_and_virtu...
Do you feel bad every time you have a beer and potentially kill off a few brain cells?
But it's not that the scribbles on paper are conscious; scribbles on paper have no causal powers for example. The scribbles on paper are the volatile storage of this causal chain: the causal cascade flowing through the actions of the person reading the symbols, manipulating them, then writing out new symbols. The bait-and-switch is that when you adjust the thought experiment, the focus shifts from the unified casual process performing certain computations to the inert substrates of the paper (or in the case of the Chinese room, the man performing the computations). But no matter the medium of computation, the causal chains are still instantiated and so there's no reason to think this process is not conscious.
So the case which makes people really uncomfortable - are cows conscious (because we eat them) has the very unsatisfying answer of "yes, not in the same way we are most likely, but in some way".
It would be like a pre-Archimedean philosopher asserting that iron boats are impossible, because how could they float?
Scribbles of paper serving as a part of a conscious system is indeed an implausible scenario. You'd need a huge number of pieces of paper, interacting in very interesting ways. It's an example specifically designed to be implausible, and so is a very poor guide for intuition.
That's the hard problem.
As far as I know, if you turn off someone's brain functions you also turn off their consciousness. Moreover, consciousness can be manipulated by manipulating the brain. It stands to reason that consciousness is a subset of brain function (and body, sure). But I concede that this is not a rigorous proof of anything. Perhaps the consciousness treats the brain like a comfortable chair, and when it is destroyed gets huffy and leaves to go somewhere else. Seems unlikely though.
> But it's part of the hard problem. Why and how is anything conscious in the physical world? What does that mean for other physical arrangements? How would we know?
Hard to state, perhaps. Hard to answer? I suppose we'll find out once stated whether the question is actually hard to answer.
Can you imagine a billion people, none of whom who have never even heard of chess, writing out 1s and 0s, and thereby beating a grand master at the game? (in an appropriately slowed-down game, of course.)
There’s a short story from 1981 by Vernor Vinge titled “True Names”. Recommended reading.
Emotion is an especially odd angle as we can so easily manipulate it with chemicals. Why would that be relevant to consciousness?
My take on it, is that my consciousness is not the one I was born with, or the one I had a few years ago -- instead, it just thinks it is that same one, but the only link to previous versions is just memories.
So if all people in the world try to create consciousness by calculating on paper their would have to carefully watch their timing in each step.
What do you get if a lot of people synchronize their actions? Like in synchronized swimming? dancing? a concert? maybe some primitive form of consciousness?
/edit: Try combine this synchronization with a feedback loop, ie. the swimmers or piano player not following previously determined steps of a sequence but determining the next step based on the input from other systems around them and their own output.
I don't think that this is practically possible though. Even a single brain cell is fantastically complicated and attempts to simply model neuronal behaviour from gross chemical simulations have failed. We can't even reliable model the behaviour of a single neuron yet. That's biological systems for you they are insanely complex with mind bendingly subtle feedback loops and cross-talk effects between seemingly unrelated systems that produce the macroscopic behaviour. That doesn't change the basic principle though, yes I think we're physical systems.
Emotions aren't anything special to humans. Other behaviors too. The "being special" is what humans just want to believe. Most of those promoting "consciousness" as "something special, that can't be explained by physical interactions of electrons, atoms and molecules or above that by biological interactions of cells etc, are simply in some way still hanging on their religious beliefs and projecting them there. The rest just have a new book or whatever else to sell.
As in Searle's "Chinese Room" (and also, though to rather different effect, in Jackson's "Mary the Neuroscientist"), you have proposed a wildly infeasible thought experiment, and then decided dismiss your rational conclusions about the outcome because... because it does not accord with your intuitions about normal situations? because it is infeasible? This simply is not the way to get to the truth of any matter.
One might argue that it would be sad, the way a human is sad, but lack the ability to immediately experience it in real time, while we can.
It’s the same situation as people playing a game of poker or go fish. The cards in their hands might be identical, but the game is what gives those cards meaning.
Are you a solipsist or not? If you don't believe in the consciousness of other beings, I can hardly argue with that on rational grounds, but you can't disbelieve in your own consciousness.
It's also basis for humanism, since if nobody has consciousness, there's no reason to keep humans around.
So it is existential, untestable and unprovable.
I think that the closest we have to an explanation for something capable of thinking are CPUs and we're just not sure what the right software is to create independent thought.
This might imply that traits like universal computation are necessary (but not sufficient) for thought.
We can design synthetic chemical painkillers that work, suggesting at for this we actually know what’s going on. You can actually look up how these neurotransmitters etc work.
If you somehow want to suggest something else is going on you really need to support that argument extensively.
Which doesn't explain having an experience of pain, only that certain neurotransmitters are involved which can be suppressed.
I did a bunch of research on pain some years ago, and in order to "standardize" it, one would apply a treatment when the person said pain was greater than 7 out of 10 on a scale.
If pain were measurable "objectively", this wouldn't be necessary.
As to measurement, we can design and build modern CPU’s but can’t inspect them in full speed operation. Similarly, mechanics often need to take something apart to test it. Living organisms present a more complex challenge, but the similarities are obvious.
We have plenty of ways of directly measuring people‘s brains and CPU’s energy use etc. The issue is speed and resolution which is hardly a philosophical limitation.
Different signal sources and also differently configured/trained systems receiving and interpreting those signals.
But practically, it makes more sense to use the instrument already evolved and trained by their own experience to measure their pain: the person themselves.
I think that this is a little too general a statement, given that it could be used to describe almost any human variability.
You're conflating the knowledge surgeons have with the subjective experience of a pounding heart. Surgeons study the heart qua plumbing, not as object of awareness related to primal feelings. Noting that physical changes in the brain cause changes in consciousness does not explain subjective experience.
No, I did not argue that at all. I said that there are multiple types of knowledge regarding hearts. Surgeons know one type in depth. The subjective experience of a racing heart is different from physical knowledge about how the heart pumps, and even if you know in depth the chemical/physical reactions that lead to and accompany a pounding heart, you do not thereby know that subjective experience.
Except that not quite true, the subjective experience tells you there are pulses which increase in frequency under stress etc. It’s just the surgeon understands what that means where subjective experience is less useful. Further, the subjective experience fails to separate the causes of a fast heart rate with the response of a fast heart rate.
This should suggest that the experience of consciousness is of minimal value when trying to understand it.
No, that's a reductionist assumption. When I say "subjective experience" I am explicitly not indicating its quantifiable aspects. I am indicating what Nagel talks about in "What It Is Like to Be a Bat," the what-it-is-likeness, the phenomenological aspect. Not the increased pulse, not the hormones being released, not the neurons firing in the brain that correspond to a feeling of anger--the anger itself. An idealized observer enumerating all of anger's physical correlates does not give that observer the experience of that anger as it is felt by the person experiencing it. There is a difference between understanding something and living something.