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Comment by morpheos137 | Hacker News Reader

Before we can ask intelligent, falsifiable questions about consciousness we need a rigorous definition of what consciousness is. Personally I think the word is a vague term and that a rigorous definition is impossible. Therefore, if my hypothesis is true, we can not not scientifically investigate "consciousness" any more than we can scientifically investigate "divinity" or "spookiness." If you disagree with my hypothesis then I challenge you to define the term in a non-circular, objective way. My hypothesis is that consciousness is not an objective thing. It is merely an experience of the mind, thus it is an amorphous amalgam of feeling, memory, sensation, thought, embodiment.

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There can be no rigorous definition of what consciousness is, just names (experience, subjectivity, awareness, self, you) because it has no qualities.

Consciousness is impossible to describe. It is neither hot nor cold, it has no size, and it experiences no passage of time as it is always now, eternal. There are no sides to it and no parts. It has no extent. It cannot be pointed to.

It is beyond all possible signification, yet it is the significance of all acts and events and things.

The closest thing you can get to a physical referent for consciousness is to notice that "consciousness" is a synonym for "now". (To spell it out: you have never once in all your life been conscious at a time other than now.)

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From my POV a very common mistake (TFA makes it, and you seem to as well) is to insist that the contents of consciousness are the thing itself. It's like mistaking the television program for the screen itself. The problem with that mistake is that there's no argument that can counter it. Reality of consciousness is an experiential thing that, once grokked, changes the nature of one's being, not a formula or measurement.

There is a quality often associated with conscious consciousness. The ancients called it light, ie. the inner light of perception, reasoning, voice, etc.

Meditation is focus/defocus from even that.

As beings, humans are mostly preoccupied with the changing phenomena however.

Ok I actually understand what you mean. You are defining "consciousness" to be the "essence of being" in that case I agree it exists but as you mention

>[Essence of being] is impossible to describe. It is neither hot nor cold, it has no size, and it experiences no passage of time as it is always now, eternal. There are no sides to it and no parts. It has no extent. It cannot be pointed to.

Therefore it is not amenable to scientific or logical study. Study of essence of being is a spiritual quest for the individual and the Universe as a whole.

Maybe some "enlightened" or "adept" can use their insight or gifts but it is not a general technology that can be studied, measured, classified, boxed, etc.

Yes, exactly. Broadly speaking we can't study awareness with the same Scientific Method that works for physical systems.

To be sure, there are some neuroscientists who are doing some very interesting and useful work studying things like "What's the least stimulus that causes a noticeable percept?"

Agreed.

And because consciousness is not physical, I can't fathom where it comes from.

Like...I can grasp the idea of abiogenesis [0], the concept that organic molecules started self-replicating through chemical reactions that over millions of years started forming single-celled life that after a couple billion years turned into complex multi-cellular life and evolution has put us into the form we (and all other life) is today.

But this understanding just makes life look like nothing more than a very specific set of chemical and electrical reactions. To a naive external observer, the human brain is essentially nothing more than a highly complex electrical circuit, and yet, it is conscious.

We know what consciousness is, but it is very hard to define, because as you basically said, it is not physical. It exists, but can't be seen or even measured. You can see evidence of it by interacting with other life that appears conscious, but you can't prove it. If you could assemble a brain atom-by-atom, it could appear to be conscious, but would it? You won't know, and won't be able to know.

Even if we created "perfect" AI and put it into a "perfect" artificial body that was indistinguishable from an actual human (I'm imagining the hosts in the Westworld TV series), most people would say it wasn't conscious, but you couldn't prove it either way.

EDIT: In addition, we think about "conscious" decisions, but are your decisions truly made by consciousness? Think about how drugs will chemically affect the brain and can change behaviors. It makes me believe that free will is an illusion. Your consciousness doesn't make decisions, your physical brain does, and your brain can be altered. You're just a few million altered neurons away from an entirely different personality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

Well, FWIW, the old mystics all say that consciousness comes first, and the physical universe is something that happens "within" consciousness.

We are meat robots. Brains scans have shown that we do not "make decisions". Your brain makes the decision and then a few tens of milliseconds later you have the subjective experience of "I decide". Free will is an illusion. The neuroscientists discovered this but the philosophers and public haven't gotten the memo yet.

The fascinating thing is that the automatic meat robots become sophisticated enough to notice that they are conscious. This should technically be impossible but it does happen.

TBF: I'm sure people felt the same way about space and time before good descriptions came around. There are plenty of things that seem way too abstract to allow for a precise description, but I think we should be relatively open to the possibility that there is a good description of consciousness, as it turned out there is for space and time. However, I'm pretty sure IIT is not it.

"TBF"?

> I think we should be relatively open to the possibility that there is a good description of consciousness

I agree but what could that possibly be?

The only reason we know subjective awareness exists is that we "have" or "are" it ourselves.

It's not like electricity where we don't (and can't) know what it "is" but we can describe its behavior and effects mathematically with extraordinary precision because we have instruments to measure it.

We have no instruments that can measure subjective awareness, only self-reports.

Now it's often overlooked that you can investigate consciousness by means of your own consciousness. However, the information evolved that way always remains subjective, and so is of no avail to create objective descriptions of consciousness.

Well, remember, we can't even rigorously define something like "life". Doesn't mean we can't scientifically investigate it.

Sure we can. Biological life is something that replicates autonomously using DNA contained inside the apparatus of at least one cell. Viruses are not alive because they can not replicate on their own and do not produce their own cells. More abstractly life is something that follows the Darwinian program as demonstrated on Earth. If you had competing, replicating programs in a virtualised Earth-like environment I would say they were alive too if they could fully reproduce and establish resource economising ecosystems on their own.

You seem to be able to, but it doesn't seem to generalize to scientists in general: https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-life-its-vast-diversi...

I was creating an operational definition. Of course others disagree. That is how words work. They have narrower and broader meanings to different people or in different contexts. The fact the others disagree with my operational definition does not invalidate my operational definition which stands on its own.

Gp asserted "We don't know how to define life." I put forth a closed definition of life that makes sense. Others may have a less restrictive definition...my definition demonstrated that sufficient conditions exist to define life.

The difficulty I think is not in proposing a coherent definition, but in capturing precisely the shared understanding of what people mean when they say something is "alive".

There isn't a shared understanding, people's intuitions disagree.

There's probably an argument that can be made along those lines, but it's not self-evident.

> Personally I think the word is a vague term and the a rigorous definition is impossible.

I don't think its just you, there isn't a good scientific definition of consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Definitions

How are we supposed to define consciousness without first investigating it?

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