Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there's any need to invoke as "magical" an idea as consciousness being a "fundamental property of matter" to reach the conclusion that many more things than we think are conscious.

A 10,000 ft view of the human brain includes: memory, emotional state, sensory input, ability to monitor and control internal processes including memory and emotion, motor control, and a logical system to tie these together as a system that attempts to achieve internal goals guided by memory and emotional state. Other mammalian and animal brains generally are presumably very similar.

What I don't understand is the need to invoke a je ne sais quoi -- a soul, quantum mechanics, whatever pseudo-matter the article is talking about -- to explain consciousness. Why should the above processes themselves not be sufficient to give rise to what we experience as consciousness, as an emergent phenomenon? It's not in everything, but it's in everything that has more-or-less all the pieces above. We could even make a crude consciousness, with today's technology.

It's like if, in trying to understand the essence of language, after analyzing lexical and grammatical structure and successfully describing all the visible parts of a language, linguists just shrugged and said "well this is how English works but don't know what makes it a language... there must be something invisible that is key". Well no, it turns out it is just the parts we can see and describe that are sufficient. We can even make one by putting those parts together (Esperanto... despite some linguists who do -- bizarrely, to me -- claim it lacks a "je ne sais quoi"...) and it acts just like a real "language".

I guess what's tricky is, unlike language, there's no way to "inhabit" an artificial consciousness to try it out and see if it really is "real". Many humans don't believe animals are conscious despite overwhelming biological and behavioral similarities. What sort of test of an artificial consciousness would not be hand-waved away as merely a simulacrum? One might even say the only falsifiable definition of a conscious entity -- other humans included -- is whether it has similar enough brain-parts as yourself.

People can't stand the idea that they are just part of a casual chain with no more free agency than a pebble buffeted by waves on a beach so they cling to the idea that they are special.

Can you blame them?

Not at all.

That's sort of the catch-22 of consciousness. Awareness without agency is pretty pointless.

Nah, the fun is that you get to be aware of what your body will do before others experience it. Being conscious is like being your body's own Patreon supporter.

> What I don't understand is the need to invoke a je ne sais quoi -- a soul, quantum mechanics, whatever pseudo-matter the article is talking about -- to explain consciousness. Why should the above processes themselves not be sufficient to give rise to what we experience as consciousness, as an emergent phenomenon?

Because consciousness, my experience of it at least, is a fundamentally different type of stuff to anything that constitutes a brain. It's certainly possible to arrange brain-stuff (or silicon chips) to enact motor control and logic. But the jump from that to qualia, to there being something that it is like to be that brain-stuff, is certainly nontrivial. The analogy that occurs to me is that you're assembling a really complex jigsaw puzzle and expecting it to fly.

I agree that it's basically impossible to test an artificial consciousness to distinguish it from a Philsophical Zombie... but to me that's a limitation with the scientific method, not with the concept of consciousness, given that "I am conscious" is the thing I am most certain of in the world (given my experience of it).

I'm a materialist and on balance I don't think there is anything supernatural about consciousness. But that's not an easy position to hold.

> Because consciousness, my experience of it at least, is a fundamentally different type of stuff to anything that constitutes a brain.

Isn't a heart a fundamentally different type of stuff from the chemistry that comprises it?

What is actually so special about consciousness that it seems like it's different from any other emergent property?

> What is actually so special about consciousness

Nothing, but if there's one thing I've learned discussing this at length with philosophers and AI students it's that once you get down to it and all the argumentation is gone it will boil down to "I'm special because I want to be". In that sense, discussing these matters with most people is just not a productive use of your time. Unless perhaps you've never done it before and you want to find out what that's like :)

I guess the way I see it, given that we don't currently have a way to test for consciousness, inventing invisible "consciousness-stuff" is just a solution in search of a problem. We are supposing that it is necessary with no evidence.

> The analogy that occurs to me is that you're assembling a really complex jigsaw puzzle and expecting it to fly.

I would though. More precisely -- if I looked at a real airplane and modeled it with, say, balsa wood and a rubber-band propeller, even with no understanding of why airplanes fly, I would expect it to fly, and I think that would be reasonable. I don't think that I would think, because flight is so fundamentally different than what wood and rubber bands normally do, that a "real" airplane must be also composed of some invisible "flight-stuff" that I cannot harness for my model. Even if I say, neglected to angle the propeller blades or wings correctly, so it did not fly or even move on its first attempt, supposing a new branch of physics would not be my go-to explanation.

I do see your point though about consciousness being a qualia and philosophical zombies (thanks for introducing me to that term). It's supremely challenging to conceptualize who is the "me" who is experiencing consciousness.

I find the most difficult question of consciousness is why am I inside my brain and not someone else’s.

Out of the billions of people somehow I control only my brain.

It’s a common experience of people who try meditation the first time to discover that they don’t control their brain at all.

I was ruminating on this on a long walk recently and it occurred to me that I'm probably not "only inside my brain", as you put it.

"You" aren't only inside your brain at all. Imagine that at every timestep, there's a single consciousness that experiences qualia all at once, across all matter - and the feeling of being "inside your brain" is just that the qualia happening there have a large number of causal relationships to your recent brain activity, your working memory, longer-term memories, inputs from your senses, etc - but at that same instant, "you" are also the person sitting across from you - there just isn't the same level of cross-chatter and so "you" can't experience both brains simultaneously.

Kind of like context switching in an OS or something. This would enable a panpsychic view where consciousness was field-like, taking on large values where matter is densely causally connected, such as in the brain, and low values where it isn't, such as in the empty space between two people.

Anyway, as Hicks said, "we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively ... here's Tom with the weather."

I actually wrote a longer comment but deleted it because i didn’t think it was fully formed:

> Maybe it’s like an operating system context switch. I feel like I am in one mind because I have memories of what came before even microseconds ago. But how do I know that my memories were not just loaded right now for processing...I guess simulation theory stuff. We don’t really have any proof that we were actually in control of the moment that just happened a microsecond ago - that could all be an illusion.

Just a funny coincidence that on such a topic as a global consciousness we had such a similar idea ;)

Ha, that's a lovely coincidence, thanks for sharing.

FWIW I went down this train of thought while listening to an audiobook of Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop", which doesn't quite go down the same road but triggered the idea well enough in my own brain.

Because your brain is physically inside your body just like water is physically inside a bottle.

Speaking of sci-fi maybe in the future you will get a brain implant and someone could remotely control you or manipulate, transfer or observe your consciousness.

Btw notion of mind uploading is very feasible imo.

Strange Days film explores some interesting stuff like this.

> brain inside body

But why is your experience tied to one brain and not another.

>But why is your experience tied to one brain and not another.

Because of the evolution. Life evolved from single-celled organism to multicellular organism building on top of individuals. Individuals which lived and cooperated in one community and one habitat evolved individually while living and reproducing together as one specie spreading genes to their offspring. There is no shared brain or shared consciousness in living beings, brain and consciousness are individual properties.

Something that is somewhat close to shared brain or shared consciousness is collective intelligence.

Because the above processes are too slow. Our society has a slow framework to move physical goods around and a layer above where we move information around at a much higher pace. That upper layer can be called a soul of our society.

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