Comment by Stupulous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stupulous | Hacker News Reader

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This is a question I've considered for a long while. As programmers we can easily see that no set of behaviours require consciousness.

I touched on this in my previous comment, it is my belief that consciousness is not the only way that intelligence can be made, but that it is somehow efficient for the purposes of evolution. Using consciousness may consume the least energy (the brain uses a lot of energy), take the least genetic material to describe, have the safest learning curve (so that children are more intelligent and more likely to survive), or any combination of these and other features.

I think of experience as a sophisticated mathematical object with useful functionality. We have a disconnect with physical reality, and a strong connection with informational reality. I can assert that I exist, and the abstract model of my phone I keep in my head exists, but I can't assert that the phone exists and in reality its existence is very different from how I perceive it. It certainly seems like I am an information construct that was formed within a physical reality.

Beyond that I'm mostly in the dark though. You can see that consciousness is involved in learning and adapting- you are highly conscious of new skills and change, but old skills sink into the subconscious and you gradually ignore repeated stimulus. You can see that consciousness integrates much of our intelligent functionality (perception, memory, executive function) and you can feel that your role is to run things. How is experience related to all of this? I do not know.

In your first comment you proposed that, "Either consciousness is something composed of information processing, or it is something inherent to the universe that has some evolutionarily efficient use towards information processing."

Sometimes I try to imagine the later case, and it really flips reality on its head. The limit and most extreme case is that reality is fundamentally experiential -- that is, what comes first is "being", "feeling", "embodiment", and through this lens is found structure, objects, form, etc. Obviously this is just the reverse of the idea that consciousness emerges from an underlying physical substrate performing complex processes.

Either way, there is a definite correlation between the two -- feelings have their correlate molecular, biochemical basis, and molecules working together through processes have their transcendent embodiment as feelings experienced.

The question of "what is real?" can boil down to this: are things external to consciousness fundamentally real and consciousness an ephemeral, emergent flourish floating "on top", or is consciousness real and everything observed by it a kind of flourishing of it?

This is a bit of a rabbit hole with many different paths to fall down, as I'm sure you know. Scientific knowledge is rooted in observation and the dusting away of uncertainty to reveal an objective reality we all share. From this standpoint, the objective substrate being revealed and it's complex processes is taken as fundamental, and we have all the great successes of scientific knowledge to show as justification for this to be true. The only hole seems to be, why the hell am I embodied, then? -- why am I conscious at all? Life would probably be easier if I didn't see that hole and want to search for more satisfying answers!

I wrote out my thoughts on my answers to the two questions, and they wound up being long and a little tangential to the bulk of your comment, so I figured I'd throw in a thanks for the thought-provoking reply. I am enjoying this conversation.

What is real?

Consciousness self-asserts: (1a) 'I think, therefore I am' (or else, 'thought is occurring, so thought must exist'). If you accept the reasoning there, you can also grapple in (1b) 'I see blue, therefore blue exists', etc.

In that sense, our consciousness is a rare example of something that definitively exists. A statement like 'there is a rock in space called Earth' would be false if we lived in a computer simulation. The correct statement becomes 'there are a bunch of numbers representing a rock in space called Earth, in this computer'. Consciousness doesn't answer to the abstraction in the same way. 'I see a rock in space that I think of as Earth' is true regardless of whether you're inside of the simulation.

We can also assert that reality exists, as far as (2) 'there is a thing that my experience interacts with which I do not consciously control and which exhibits complex behavior', and also, (3) 'I exist (per 1a), therefore I am somewhere. I can perform computations, therefore the place I am in must allow for computations to occur. I have experience (per 1b) therefore there I am somewhere in which experience can exist. Reality exists (per 2) therefore there must be something sophisticated enough to produce it.'

But that's strictly an informational definition, again equally true whether or not you're in your own dream- it only addresses the complexity of the mind producing the dream.

So to conclude: information is quintessentially real. Our consciousness and reality are real at least to the extents that they are information, which are 'very much so' and 'a lot, maybe more', respectively. Physical reality as we know it might be real, Occam's Razor says 'probably', Simulation Hypothesis says 'probably not'. Anyone's game. I think that a physical reality of some form must exist in order to perform computations and produce information, but I'm open to a rebuttal.

And then why the hell am I conscious? This seems to be the crux of the matter. It is my opinion that the answer is of the form 'consciousness solves problem X efficiently along dimensions Y and Z' where X is some fundamental component of intelligence, and Y and Z are environmental constraints. I think it's unlikely that the answer is related to the fundamental makeup of the universe. Evolution follows the path of least resistance, and entangling our minds with some innate property of quanta, from the scale of proteins seems more challenging than other conceivable non-conscious solutions to general intelligence.

This is such a monumental subject lol. I keep returning to this trying to come up with some kind of adequate response but it's like I'm standing at the base of a mountain and I can't find much to grab hold of that doesn't just crumble away after I apply a little pressure.

I definitely follow you up to your last paragraph and it all rings true to me, however I don't quite understand, "It is my opinion that the answer is of the form 'consciousness solves problem X efficiently along dimensions Y and Z' where X is some fundamental component of intelligence, and Y and Z are environmental constraints." Maybe the rest of what I have to say is just because I don't understand the fundamental component or constrains very well.

To me mathematics is the limit of description. I can assign a word to some observable thing and distinguish it from all other observable things. I can draw a picture of it to distinguish it even more precisely. I can use various mathematical techniques to describe it even better, perhaps even to arbitrary degrees of precision. But I fail to see how any mathematical technique can capture --the feeling of-- happiness, pain, etc.. These embodiments can not be fully realized by description alone. They can be pointed to, hinted at, and I think great artists can stir echos of them in other people, but actually experiencing them is beyond the capacity of description. That's why I wonder if experience/consciousness is something fundamental. A subsequent worldview would have as its central concern 'beings' instead of 'objects'; it would not exclude any current or future science, it would just shift it's focus away from abstractions and toward experiential beings -- with conscious beings, which we are, perhaps a special case of a much larger set. The gains would not be material, but perhaps there would be some improvements in the ways we interact with ourselves, each other, and our surroundings.

>consciousness solves problem X efficiently along dimensions Y and Z' where X is some fundamental component of intelligence, and Y and Z are environmental constraints

There are two criteria I'm addressing here. Consciousness is either physical (produced in the universe) or informational (produced in the mind). Consciousness is either important to intelligence or incidental to intelligence. My position, which I'll justify below, is informational/important. If you accept that consciousness is manufactured in the mind and important to intelligence, that means we evolved it. Because it is a widespread evolved trait, it very probably is an effective solution to a problem against environmental constraints, towards the larger goal of reproduction.

Constraints might include the amount of genetic data needed to produce a useful output, how well it deals with failure cases, how well it responds to genetic mutations or how well it withstands viruses or cancer. The kind of stuff that is irrelevant from the perspective of an intelligent designer like us with access to basically limitless indestructable computational resources.

Physical/important I responded to previously, but briefly: the big issue is scale. Humans run on proteins and large organic molecules. If there was something nonmathematical at that size and in our bodies, we would very probably know about it by now.

Both informational/ and physical/ irrelevant are 'side effect' models. They have at least two flaws. Consciousness follows attention, not brain activity. If I do something subconsciously, I am engaging the same neurons but not producing the same side effects. Consciousness is not a disconnected afterimage of intelligence because I am aware of it and can perform reason on it. It affects and is affected by my brain. If it's a side effect, it's one that has been knitted into me, presumably to some benefit.

So what does that make consciousness? Taking it as an informational tool to some end, we can probe some interesting questions. Self-assertion, which I referred to earlier, is an interesting mathematical property. A set of rules that allow the system within them to prove its own existence? And it's a global property across all conscious experience, that's certainly of note. The benefit of consciousness seems to be related to awareness of self and environment (that's all experience seems to be) as well as executive function- we experience a sense of free will, presumably because evolution wants us to help run things from here. There's a remote possibility that free will is real, and consciousness is somehow an non-deterministic process. That and beyond are all speculation, though.

The belief system you describe is how I got out of nihilism and escaped what was an agonizing conflict between romanticism and realism (I like the song Imitosis by Andrew Bird for depicting that conflict). There's a cold, meaningless reality out there, but somehow there's meaning that is made of it. We matter even though (or because) if we didn't, nothing would.

Enjoyed reading you two in the thread above.

I agree with most of what you guys are saying. Here's a wiki post I wrote, outlining a kind of theory for what consciousness actually is, that attempts to explain some of the 'mechanics' of it, or a description of what memory itself actually is.

https://quanta.wiki/u/WClayFerguson/theory-of-consciousness

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