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Comment by csantini | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I've been repeating around "Consciousness is just a feeling" for a while. My question is also "why has it evolved at all" ? Keep reading for a hint.

Hunger, for example, is just a feeling. Thirstiness is just a feeling. But we don't build complex theories of the world around Thirstiness. Somehow we do with Consciousness, because I suspect it tricks us, playing recursively with our thinking.

Consciousness, which nobody really ever defines clearly, it's probably just a name around a bunch of feelings we have.

It's clear why Thirstiness has evolved: to get us to find water. Not salty one.

Probably Consciousness does something like that. For example, it might be just a feeling of oneness to keep us intact, across peripherals (legs, arms) and time (now is really a continuation or whatever we were doing before, you need a feeling to enforce that).

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>Consciousness, which nobody really ever defines clearly,

I think this is really the core of the problem. My non-scientific belief is that when learn enough about the brain, we'll learn that "consciousness" is a good descriptor for the human experience of having a mind, but not really a meaningful word scientifically.

> playing recursively with our thinking

I think this is key. The idea that we can not only feel thirst, or think about thirst, but also think about thinking about thirst!

And for maximum weirdness: consciousness contains itself!

And the body contains the brain. Not sure why this is as weird as people make it out to be. Where else is it supposed to be?

It's not weird because where you expect it to be is where it is, if it were somewhere else (some distant ansible transmission) you would be used to that and think it weird to imagine it being in the body.

That analogy doesn't work at all, since "the body contains the brain" does not describe a recursive relationship.

By contrast, you see people trying to "explain consciousness" by telling a story that assumes consciousness. When someone makes a statement like "Consciousness emerges from mechanism X in the brain.", every observation that lead to this statement originated in someone's consciousness.

It's less obvious than, but completely analogous to, how it's impossible to decide whether we live in a "base reality" or some sort of simulation - everything you could say about this reality that we perceive is contingent on that very reality.

Stack depth is finite. If consciousness is cognitive recursion, we only can get so far down before the results are garbage. My working theory is that "max cognitive stack depth" is a measure of consciousness.

The scarier concern is that consciousness is a useful intelligent behavior bootstrapping tool, but once we encode everything it has helped generate into cultural DNA or literal DNA it becomes an evolutionary redundant appendix-like organ that will atrophy in the coming generations (See Blindsight by peter watts)

Although I understand what you're pointing at, I think you have focused too specifically on feeling or reason (i.e. thought). I am willing to go as far as to say that all our actions, thoughts and feelings are mechanical/predetermined - but this all doesn't cover "existence". That's where I believe consciousness truly lies. It doesn't think or decide what to think, nor does it decide how to feel and it does not plan or take actions. It does, however, experience it all. Your life-story is a roller-coaster and consciousness is that thing going on for the ride.

IMO, the true nature of consciousness sits at the same level as the nature of the universe. It touches on what it means to simply "exist".

Having said that, I'd be happy to know what others think.

I see what you mean. The "existence" part I suspect is a trick. I think "That thing going on for the ride", is actually just a feeling evolved for a bodily purpose.

The body is doing the ride, with all its chemical gradients pulling the levers, and the thing we call Consciousness it's just "the feeling of the ride" which has evolved to keep some temporal/spatial unity. You could have legs, and memories, without being able to connect them to you.

For example, without that feeling of unity, the brain wouldn't not know which subject all the things are related to.

Something would be thirsty or hungry, but it wouldn't know that is the same thing with those legs and memories that it was referring to a just a moment ago.

True, but that ability to relate a certain feeling to an internal issue (e.g. thirst or hunger) is somewhat of a learnt behavior. It was part of the childhood ride that has now long been forgotten.

This still, however, doesn't solve the issue that those signals "exist" somewhere from a certain point of perspective. I think sight highlights this to me the most clearly. Although vision serves a purpose in deciding motor function, it also simply exists. I don't "feel" that I see - I simply "see".

Going back to how you phrase it - who or what is "feeling"? Everything we do or think may be mechanical, but there is a distinction between I and my dog. I am not riding the dog-life roller-coaster, I am riding my own human-life roller-coaster.

If I cloned myself, I'd be happy to state that both versions would think and behave as me, but I would only exist in one of them.

I wouldn't describe thirst as a feeling, but maybe it's because we can obviously tie a physiological state to it. If consciousness was a signal/feeling too, what process would this be entertaining ? the need for the brain to keep chunking the world and produce new memories, ideas ?

This seems like a very accurate description, especially the observation about temporal continuity, which we take for granted, but on occasions it can feel like a fragile illusion.

> Consciousness, which nobody really ever defines clearly

"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism -— something it is like for the organism." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

Also see this response/critique by Hofstadter and Dennett (OCRed so a bit mangled, you have to jump around a little bit.

http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l...

Consciousness improves adaptability which has second order effects towards solving hunger and thirst

We don't know what consciousness is OR what it's for. There is no theory of what a brain is capable of with consciousness vs without or if this is even a valid question.

I don't think this is an accurate statement, and I also do personally have my own theory. I would be quite shocked if NO ONE had a theory of what consciousness is for.

You can claim non-cognizance on just about anything. The ability to reflect on first order sensory inputs has clear evolutionary advantages. Either that is part of what you're calling consciousness, or it is not. If you fall into the latter camp then you're just debating semantics of an english word.

The ability to reflect on inputs (or even on internal processes) doesn’t necessarily imply a subjective experience—which is what most people mean by consciousness even if they’re unclear about it. Taken generously, it would be appropriate to replace “consciousness” in the GP’s argument with “the subjective experience”. In so doing I think I’d be hard-pressed to argue with his claims.

I'm talking about the hard problem, which is nothing to do with whether a system can analyse/reflect on inputs. Non concious computers can do this. The truth may be that analog computation in physical systems like the brain results in conciousoness. I.e you get conciousoness but it doesn't do anything, it's the result of something. The other option is that it enables functions that are not possible without it. We just don't have answers to these questions.

Consciousness allows us to make decisions outside of our animal instincts. Why is religious fasting a widespread practice?

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