Making the hard problem of consciousness easier | Hacker News Reader

Making the hard problem of consciousness easier

science.sciencemag.org

62 pointshheikinh107 comments

The problem of consciousness (or the quality of something being able to experience itself and things around it), may never be solved. Even if the reductionist approach reveals some fundamental field or particle that gives rise to consciousness (which is very unlikely), it just shifts the problem from the brain's neural network and into that phenomenon.

An old Julian Jaynes analogy comes to mind: if you're a flashlight, you will never be able to understand light, because wherever you look, light will be there. By definition you're unable to look at something that is dark. You perceive the world as being bathed in perpetual light.

The closest we might get may be a hand-wavy form of panpsychism, with some probable connection to quantum fluctuations.

The less hand-wavy form of panpsychism is called IIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

Interesting! So basically: the basic unit of consciousness (whatever you may call it) is an intrinsic property of matter (or energy or particles?) and the more complex information systems matter forms, a more detailed model of the physical world emerges with that system, and the system experiences said model? I only did a quick reading so I may be misinterpreting the theory.

You are the universe experiencing itself.

Part of the universe. There are vast parts of it that I am not experiencing.

What if everyone living or has lived is but a subconscious of the universe, and so you are experiencing them, you just aren't aware of it - in the moment?

Discussed in the article itself.

I don't see a problem to solve there. Every conscious creation has a limited number of sensors and limited processing capacity to work with, as such they can be recreated with enough research and resources.

The flashlight in that example will never experience darkness, just like we will never experience lower or higher dimensions. Or dare I say, a different galaxy. But we could simulate them, so that's also experience, even if not accurate.

Imo, an autonomous robot/car would be no less conscious than a cow. The experience is simply limited by the hardware/software available.

It's so strange to read comments from people who think there's nothing to explain. It must be just as strange for those people to hear from the other side of the debate.

To me it seems so obvious that there's an explanatory gap between any functional explanation of behaviour and information processing - and the feeling of experiencing something. The various thought experiments around p-zombies crystalises this for me.

What gap are you speaking of though? Do you suspect there is some as yet undiscovered fundamental quantity of the universe which lay dormant for billions of years until the human form evolved to make use of it?

> Do you suspect there is some as yet undiscovered fundamental quantity of the universe which lay dormant for billions of years until the human form evolved to make use of it?

No idea. That's not what I'm discussing here.

The gap is the fact that I indisputably experience things that happen to me. I feel them. There is an "I" to talk about that has genuine meaning in a way that it wouldn't do if a fictional character or a computer programming used the word.

It's possible to imagine a form of life as complex as ours with functioning societies where non of the lifeforms experienced the world as an "I". Maybe ants don't have an "I". NPCs in a video game or GPT3 almost certainly don't. At some point GPTx or video game NPCs might become as complex or behaviourly rich as a real person but still lack an "I".

This is a p-zombie. The "gap" I'm referring to is the difference beween similar entities, one of which experiences qualia when the other doesn't.

You seem to extrapolate from a single sample that the probabilities of an “I” experience differs between individuals based on how similar they are to you.

I would say that if you can imagine other complex life forms without that experience it must be equally valid to assume the same can be true for everyone around you. Perhaps it’s only you.

> Perhaps it’s only you.

And thus solipsism rears it's slightly unsightly head once again.

Solipsism has always had the virtue of being coherent - unlike many other theories in this area. I think pan-psychism also has this quality.

The issue is they are both lead you to some bizarre conclusions. In some ways it's an analogue to the role Many Worlds plays in the philosophy of Quantum Theory. "cheap on assumptions, expensive on universes"...

I do lean towards some form of pan-psychism. Or at least I'm not sure you can get to "I" from a strictly materialist starting point.

However I think it's also likely that we're missing a fundemental part of the problem and these conversations will one day look like the babblings of children.

I think its not only analogue to the many worlds, I quite suspect it’s the same problem actually.

Or rather it seems we’re basically asking the wrong questions and therefore ending up with seemingly bizarre or contradicting things like particle/wave duality or the concept of time.

How can we have consciousness when there is no objective “now”?

To me the question of which processes experience consciousness is akin to asking if a sound wave is a crescendo or how many image frames in a movie is required to make a scene.

Well, it depends... you might say, and the follow up question “depends on what?” is much more interesting.

Some physicists say the world is fully determined. That there are at least four fully existing dimensions of space time, or even more than that given some interpretations of quantum mechanics.

So we are given a static structure with certain patterns following specific laws of how the structure may be formed. Like if you made a 3D-print of a play of conways game of life.

Now in that static structure we have this interesting phenomenon called consciousness that at first approximation looks like paths of focus tracing specific patterns.

There might be just a single path, or many, or even a single connected path through them all as you say. I’m a compaibilist here, I don’t think it’s a difference with more substance to it than the particle/wave duality. It’s mostly a matter of perspective.

I see what you mean, however in my opinion this "I" you are talking about is just an evolution of the human brain, most likely for the purpose of social cohesiveness/activity/integration/interaction. Everything we do beyond maintaining our own body is for society.

Every action taken is rooted in social hierarchy, social undertakings, social interaction. Better clothes, better cars, better phones for better social status, more knowledge, more money, more research to advance society.

Someone who lives alone in the woods will not take care of themselves much (just like ants, btw), and everyone who has discovered/learned something has an almost compulsive need to share it with others. If they didn't share, they'd be an outcast, considered broken by everyone else. A lot of similarities with an ant or bee hive there, except we're more autonomous as individuals.

Our species is not just about the individual, and as society grew, it required more and more advanced individual hardware and software, which our primitive brains did not have. So it was evolving. Evolving likely by cooperative/social individuals/groups being superior to less cooperative/social ones in survival and warfare. And what it has evolved into is the "I" we experience today.

It adds a whole new layer of complexity, but it's still just "software" running on the same brain as everything else and using the same resources.

There is that theory of the bicameral mind, not sure how accepted it is, but it does seem like a good description of an earlier version of our current minds.

And yes, I believe other social animals also have this sense of "I", even if primitive.

Just one of my (possibly insane) theories, since I find myself thinking about this quite often, in the context of artificial intelligence based on the human one.

I agree with most of this but all that adaptation and behavioral complexity could also happen to a race of p-zombies. And I still struggle to see how "I" (as distinct from behavioral patterns mostly indistinguishable from "I"-hood) can emerge in a materialist univere without some substrate that has properties beyond the mechanical.

I'm veering dangerously close to mysticism and the non-falsifiable here. But it seems inescapable for the same reason Descartes clearly stated. My "I"-ness is the only indisputable fact about reality and the one from which all other beliefs follow.

One can readily find persuasive critiques of Chalmers' theories by professional philosophers. Book length even.

The GP comment was specifically talking about the "hard problem." That's hardly "Chalmer's theory," although he did name it.

There are critiques of the hard problem, like eliminativism. I'm not aware of any that are "persuasive," though. Do you have any recommendations?

There's an obvious explanation for the differences in perspective, which is covered by the title of this paper:

https://philarchive.org/archive/KEACDD

That's wonderful. I'm going to read it full later but I've been looking for some writing on this topic.

The paper isn't quite as directly about what the title says as I might have liked, but since it's a mostly serious academic paper it probably can't be.

It does contain some gems though, like:

> In spite of his claim to have "long claimed" that the conceivability of zombies is only apparent, one suspects that it is non-zombic humans that Dennett finds if not inconceivable, then unendurable. [...] Zombies are perfect for Dennett! If the human world turned out to be populated only by them, his troubles would be over. Non-zombic humans, by contrast, are a nightmare for Dennett.

It's also a serious but short look at the topic, which I found useful.

I'm firmly on the other side: I don't think there's anything special about consciousness. Consciousness is merely the capacity of the brain to keep track of everything that's happening and adapting behaviour. The I is merely a thought structure, we're just a very complicated deterministic script with lots of inputs.

I score quite high for psychopathy and I didn't understand emotions for a long time (as a kid I imagined that people just pretended to have emotions), so the lack of that emotion processing capability, may influence my view in that topic.

Either my brain is defective or it's this century version of geocentrism.

It's interesting that you mention psychopathy. I wonder if there's a correlation between these traits and the dismissal of the "hard problem".

Maybe you don't experience selfhood in the same way that I do? Or maybe you just find it easier to disregard that aspect than I do.

> Consciousness is merely the capacity of the brain to keep track of everything that's happening and adapting behaviour.

Problem comes in when you take into account color, sound, pain, etc. How does the brain keeping track of itself produce conscious sensations? They're not coming in as such from the outside world. It's just EM radiation, vibrations in the air, molecular motion on the skin, etc. Our nervous system turns that noise into sensations.

It's easy to see this problem when you think of how you might go about making a conscious robot. A sophisticated robot can keep track of its sensory inputs and adapt its behavior. But what would you add to turn that into colors and sounds and feels?

> A sophisticated robot can keep track of its sensory inputs and adapt its behavior. But what would you add to turn that into colors and sounds and feels?

The common thinking along those lines is that you would add introspection and nothing more. That is, "red" is the brain's interpretation of the brain processes that happen when light of some wavelength is hitting the retina (or perhaps we need a few more layers - the brain's interpretation of the brain processing the information that the brain is processing the information that [...]).

Under this general idea, emotions would be similarly explained as analysis of other brain processes, ultimately reacting to even older (evolutionarily speaking) mechanisms for motivation and goal-seeking.

It's my comment he's responding to, and even though I may not agree with his formulation, I'm sensing he has a point. What if this is a bias that we've acquired while growing up? Perhaps we've conflated consciousness with intent and reactivity (another term introduced by Jaynes 40 years ago). We've gotten used to thinking that a chair, for example, is not conscious by our definition because it reacts in a purely non-intentional way. But does that mean it doesn't have some rudimentary level of "experience" (sans pain, pleasure, a sense of self or other things that come with higher intelligence)?

I agree "consciousness" is a hodgepotch of different things, some of which are easier to fit into a materialist world view than others.

But that doesn't detract from my belief that there's an irreducible nub that remains once you've removed all the easy bits. That nub is what I regard as the "hard problem"

Yes, a lot of naturalist seem to think it's just about the ability to process information, but that's not it at all.

The "feeling of experiencing" is just a perception. That became obvious to me after dabbling in meditation/mindfulness exercises. My mental model of this is that in addition to regular sensory perception, the brain also perceives some of its own internal processing. That is, part of the further processing of the sensory data (or more generally of any cognitive processing) becomes itself subject to an internal perception (a bit like a debugger or profiler applied to its own execution). That recursion may even go one or two levels deeper. Or rather, there is no clean separation between the recursion levels, which somewhat obfuscates to the internal observer what is going on. Furthermore, it only perceives parts of its internal processing, so it doesn’t get the whole picture (probably far from it).

This is why consciousness seems magic and confusing. But when you think about it, everything we mean when we talk about consciousness is something we perceive ("feel", "experience", "qualia"), so clearly it’s something having a representation in the brain that is being perceived by another part of the brain (or partially the same part). What makes it confusing is that at that level there’s no clear separation between subject and object of the perception. But that fits nicely with the general messiness and staggering complexity of biological systems.

With roughly a 100 billion neurons and a 100 trillion synapses in a brain, it shouldn’t be surprising that the internal self-perception can be very detailed, complex, multifaceted, nuanced, subtle, and subject to itself.

Wow, that idea about internal perception recursion is making things much clearer for me and quite enlightening. Thank you for this :)

> The "feeling of experiencing" is just a perception.

That's exactly the phenomenon we're trying to explain. You've just said "feeling is just feeling".

The question is - why is there someone experiencing a feeling. A machine or algorithm can be self-referential. Is there some magical "amount of recursion" that suddenly results in consciousness? That seems strange to me.

In my view, consciousness is a gradual thing, not a binary property. In addition, it's also not really "a thing", as in not "something extra". By that I mean, when you make it a habit to probe into your consciousness/awareness, you will find that all there is are perceptions. You may think that you have a qualia about a particular perception (e.g. of a color, a scent, a mood, a memory, an insight, etc.), but then the qualia is only there by virtue of you perceiving the qualia. There is nothing that is pure subject. When you perceive yourself as being a subject (an "I"), it thereby becomes an object of perception. It can't exist without being an object of perception. (E.g. it isn't there when you're unconscious.) That raises the question whether it is really anything more than an object (as opposed to a subject).

Now, a perception in that sense only requires that the thing perceived (the object of perception) has a representation in the brain, plus that some information processing of that representation is occuring in the brain (the act of perceiving). Our objects of perception, including qualia and e.g. the awareness of being conscious, can be very rich and complex, but it's certainly not implausible that they are fully represented in the brain with all their richness — and there is nothing more to it than that representation. (In fact, my personal experience is that the range of qualia is not that large, when you observe it over a longer term and for example compare it to our memory capabilites.)

So, when I introspect my consciousness, I cannot pinpoint anything that doesn't fit that model of "information processing (perceiving) of representations (objects, including qualia)". Even what I think of as "I", in the end, is just one of those objects (or probably more a cluster of those). The confusion, I believe, stems from the fact that we can only introspect a fraction of the information processing that is really going on, and that the "I" as an independent subject is a very strong illusion. But when you try to look closely for it, there is arguably nothing really there. (The Buddhists do have a point with their concept of non-self.)

I think there is a definite distinction between perceptions and models. For example, we don't consciously perceive the edge and motion detection of our vision system but instead the aggregate interpretation of modelling those perceptions. Similarly we don't seem to be conscious of some internal organs, but conscious of others under different circumstances. Usually we aren't conscious of our breath but by focusing we can both raise conscious awareness and control of it. So it seems like we have a "consciousness" module in the brain that can be directed and connected to different other parts of our nervous system, but not all, in order to "do the perceiving". With practice it seems possible to become conscious of more autonomous parts of the body, but not all.

And still the question remains of how the brain produces the conscious experience and expands or contracts it, while not being fully conscious of the whole brain or of its own operation (in which case we would understand consciousness much better). Is it the chemical activity? The electrical? A combination? Is it in the energy transfers between matter or in the relationships that get established?

It just seems magic because of time maybe. Which would imply the “answer” to the “hard” non-question of consciousness probably lies in time series data. The idea gravity is tied to consciousness through time and space may be related through the assertion space is a dimension similar to a search index using an array of timestamps.

Being hungry is just my stomach being empty, over time. A feeling emerges, which is then synthesized into a perception. Similar to how the world model emerges inside us from sound and imagery, imagery and sound bites which are themselves built from sensors and post processing, which aren’t necessarily made aware to the user in and of themselves (the image from the left half of the right eye only, for example).

Imagine an apple, if you can. Where does the image of the apple come from? Can you, like many, see the apple for what it is (an iconic image) projected into your perception? If you want some esoteric text on this, read up on Theosophy. They present the idea the image comes from a “mind body”, made from alternate types of matter. This is relevant when looking at older schools of philosophical thought, which used to encompass the sciences.

In Tibetan Buddhism this internal model or map of the world is presented no different than someone having a full immersion PTSD episode...a “broken” model run “on the side”, in mind, which appears to be “real”, occluding the “reality” model most of us agree is “here”.

> For me I say God, y'all can see me now 'Cos you don't see with your eyes You perceive with your mind That's the end of it So I'mma stick around with Russ and be a mentor -The Gorillaz

I think you are confusing science with philosophy. In science, solving a problem amounts to building a (quantitative) theory that allows us to predict phenomena and outcomes in the real world. We say that we have understood a phenomenon when we have a self-consistent theory that makes predictions validated in experiments.

The ultimate question of "why" reality behaves in a way that is congruent with a given theory is left to philosophers.

Your claim that a theory of consciousness would simply "shift the problem" is only true with respect to these philosophic (arguably unscientific) types of questions.

Consider the problem of gravity. Very coarsely, we have moved from Aristotle's theory of gravity: the natural place of things is on the ground and things like to stay in their natural place, to Newtonian gravity: objects are attracted with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses, to general relativity: objects follow geodesics in curved spacetime, with the curvature determined by the energy content of space.

Our grasp on gravity has certainly improved greatly, but the "why" questions have simply been shifted.

Consciousness is a natural phenomenon and as such can be subject to scientific study. The ultimate question of why the laws of nature are as they are is not part of this project and is best entertained after closing time.

Consciousness is not observable. Gravity is.

We observe our own consciousness all the time. It's just that your consciousness is closed to all but you.

That’s not what we call an ‘observation’ in science.

Experience is a more accurate word. Meditation asks you to observe the experience.

Yes, but that ‘observing’ is not the same as what science calls ‘observing’.

Any reasonable definition of "observing" presupposes a conscious observer and it is possible for you to observe yourself being conscious (I assume). Indeed, consciousness is observable in a much more direct sense than gravity.

Yes, but you can't observer other people's consciousness, only infer it. This is a problem when it comes to animals, infants, intelligent machines and coma patients. Or aliens if we ever made contact.

You can observe, in principle, other people consciousness.

Brain conjoined-twins can do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniopagus_twins

For example, there are twins that can see with each other eyes or feel each other body.

You could try, in principle, to create a chimera from your brain and a brain of some other animal.

> there are twins that can see with each other eyes or feel each other body

That's not the same as directly observing someone else's consciousness. That's just two people sharing some I/O devices.

In fact, one could argue that the inability to directly observe another consciousness is a necessary condition for being an individual: the limits of your direct observation is the definition of where "you" stop and the rest of the universe (including other people) begins.

It is not just sharing I/O devices. Brain conjoined twins can also share their mental states. They do experience each other qualia [0].

> Though Krista and Tatiana Hogan share a brain, the two girls showed distinct personalities and behavior. One example was when Krista started drinking her juice Tatiana felt it physically going through her body. In any other set of twins the natural conclusion about the two events would be that Krista's drinking and Tatiana's reaction would be coincidental. But because Krista and Tatiana are connected at their heads, whatever the girls do they do it together.

I also recall examples where one girl does not like eating something and so the other girl can not eat it because the other can feel it.

Concept of an individual is not a fundamental property of the universe. It is an emergent, fluid and complex concept.

There are people with multiple personality disorders. There are brain conjoined twins. There are people with severed corpus callosum.

E.g. here is report about one person [1]:

> After the right and left brain are separated, each hemisphere will have its own separate perception, concepts, and impulses to act. Having two "brains" in one body can create some interesting dilemmas. When one split-brain patient dressed himself, he sometimes pulled his pants up with one hand (that side of his brain wanted to get dressed) and down with the other (this side did not). He also reported to have grabbed his wife with his left hand and shaken her violently, at which point his right hand came to her aid and grabbed the aggressive left hand. However, such conflicts are very rare. If a conflict arises, one hemisphere usually overrides the other.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniopagus_twins#Media [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

> They do experience each other qualia.

How do you know? How could you possibly know?

I don't dispute that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between consciousnesses and bodies. Multiple consciousnesses could inhabit the same body (multiple personality, split brain, conjoined twins) and a single consciousness could be distributed across multiple bodies (I don't know of any examples but I can't think of any reason this should be impossible in principle). But there's a difference between receiving input from someone else's sensors and experiencing their qualia. It's the difference between, "This ice cream tastes like pistachio", and "This ice cream (which tastes like pistachio) tastes good." To demonstrate someone experiencing someone else's qualia you'd have to find an example where the two individuals had different preferences about something (like pistachio ice cream) and having one of them simultaneously experience liking it and not liking it. I don't see how that could be possible even in principle.

I use the same standard of knowing as I do for qualia in general. I listen to what other people report.

> there's a difference between receiving input from someone else's sensors and experiencing their qualia.

There can not be clear difference if you are not able to even fully separate two different personalities.

If distinction between personalities is fluid, then distinction between personalities qualia also has to be fluid.

But that's exactly what I'm asking: what does a report of shared qualia actually look like?

> If distinction between personalities is fluid

But it isn't. It might be vague but it isn't fluid. If two personalities are distinct then they remain distinct. It might be difficult to decide whether two different kinds of behavior are manifestations of two different personalities, or the same personality behaving differently from one moment to the next. But whatever criterion you apply, the situation is not going to change from one moment to the next. This is one of the defining characteristics of personalities. It is what allows you to say that a person is the same person as they were yesterday, despite their behavior today being different in some respects from what it was yesterday.

There can be one personality that can be split into two personalities. People with multiple personality disorders are not born with the disorder. The same with people whose corpus callosum is severed. It is fluid. The amount of damage to the brain will determine how distinct the personalities will be. If you could transplant brain it possible that one personality could create two fully distinct personalities. The process could be in principle also reverted back again leading to one personality.

Additionally, the process of separating parts of a brain is also continuous in time. People could be experiencing qualia when then brain is being damaged and the process could take long enough for them to register the states in between.

With regard to reports, here:

> He also reported to have grabbed his wife with his left hand and shaken her violently, at which point his right hand came to her aid and grabbed the aggressive left hand.

And here: https://youtu.be/N1Mac4FeKXg?t=124

With regard to definition of personalities - definitions created for an average case are often not sufficient to describe the reality. Quantum physics is a perfect example how reality can break old definitions.

> He also reported to have grabbed his wife with his left hand and shaken her violently, at which point his right hand came to her aid and grabbed the aggressive left hand.

I see that as evidence of two consciousnesses/personalities sharing one body (i.e. one set of I/O devices), not two personalities sharing qualia.

> Multiple consciousnesses could inhabit the same body (multiple personality, split brain, conjoined twins) and a single consciousness could be distributed across multiple bodies (I don't know of any examples but I can't think of any reason this should be impossible in principle).

When you go to a large event such as a concert, there is an "atmosphere". Do you think this could be considered a collective consciousness? You might dismiss it straight away, but this would be like a single neuron assuming that there isn't a higher level of consciousness built on top of it (assuming that the neuron is responsible for part of the consciousness).

No. The only reason I have to believe that any entity other than myself is conscious is by observing its I/O behavior and comparing it to my own behavior that is produced by my own consciousness. Crowds do not exhibit conscious behavior. I can't have a conversation with a crowd, only with the individuals in the crowd.

What if you're freddie mercury? I'm pretty sure he could converse with the crowd, he could speak to their "souls" and move them to do things like sing along, or stomp their feet.

Sure, but crowds actually don't behave like conscious entities. Getting a crowd to stomp its feet is not at all like having a conversation with a crowd. To have a conversation with something, that thing has to be able to somehow "talk back" and provide evidence that it has thoughts and ideas of its own. Crowds don't do that. To the contrary, crowds behave according to fairly simple dynamics, often the detriment of their constituents. There is no evidence at all of consciousness there.

> where "you" stop and the rest of the universe (including other people) begins

If you bother to delve into this idea you will see that there is no real boundary. Is the oxygen I breathe in part of "me"? If it gets used in a metabolic process, I would say yes. If it gets breathed straight out again less so. Are my gut bacteria part of me or not? There is more and more research that implies that they have an important effect of my well-being.

First, we're talking here about mental boundaries, not physical ones.

Second, I used to believe that there is no real boundary, but upon reflection realized that this is completely wrong. Not only is there a physical boundary, this boundary is essential because living systems must distinguish between themselves and the things in the universe that are potentially available to be used as resources to stay alive.

In fact, there are multiple physical boundaries in living systems at various levels of hierarchy, starting with the defining characteristic of most life on earth (by number of species, not total number of individuals or percentage of biomass) which is that it is eukaryotic and so has a boundary around the cell nucleus. Then there are cell walls, the segregation of cells into organs, and finally, your skin, which delineates a physical boundary around you. Yes, some of these boundaries are a little bit fuzzy. But that doesn't mean they don't exist.

The notion of boundary is just not helpful in explaining some phenomena.

A virus RNA in nucleus of neurons in your brain is part of you or not? Is that alive or not? Conscious or not?

The same way as an idea of a point particle breaks down in quantum physics, the idea of binary "you" and "not you" breaks down due to nature of reality.

> A virus RNA in nucleus of neurons in your brain is part of you or not?

Depends on the virus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus

> Is that lump of physical matter conscious or not?

Depends on the lump. The only lump of physical matter that I know with 100% certainty is conscious is me. But my consciousness produces behavior in me that is similar to behavior I observe in other lumps of physical matter. Furthermore, there's a lot of evidence that my consciousness is somehow bound to a particular physical structure, namely, my brain. So it seems reasonable to suppose that other lumps of physical matter that have brains and exhibit the kinds of behavior that I associate with my own consciousness also possess consciousness, and that lumps of physical matter that lack these things don't.

So, how does it depend on the virus? When it is when it is not?

Because some viruses are ERVs and some are not. Those that are are "part of me" and those that aren't aren't. (Isn't that obvious?)

So it becomes part of you by integrating into your DNA? It's only going to be a fraction of your cells that contain that DNA. I don't see how that makes it any more you than a virus that doesn't integrate. Herpes stays in your system for life, and doesn't incorporate into DNA.

> It's only going to be a fraction of your cells that contain that DNA.

No. ERVs are part of your genome.

OK, that's an interesting case that I didn't know about, but it just shows how blurred the lines between genes, virus and transposons are. This is a virus that you can pass on to your children, but not others around you, correct? It's not what I was considering when taking about viruses, because of the infectious element. You have shifted my mental boundary about what is considered a virus.

It looks like think something that is part of your genome is part of "you" - I won't argue that it isn't, it certainly is from one point of view. I don't plan to have children, so I have a different perspective on things.

You can observe your own consciousness.

Science answers "why" questions all the time.

We know the answer to why uniform radiation propagates due to an inverse square law. We know when and why conservation laws exist. The are many, many examples of this.

Examples like these refute your claim about the limits of science.

Claims like yours are common, though - you're probably just repeating what someone else has told you, perhaps without thinking very deeply about it.

This position seems to have arisen as a result of some of the limits of science that were encountered last century. The "shut up and calculate" mentality was a kind of reaction to the philosophical problems with quantum mechanics. But the defensive reaction that "science is just about theories that make predictions" is incoherent.

If it were really true, then science would be utterly dependent on philosophy to come up with new theories, because a prediction-generating machine isn't going to help you with that.

Ironically, the very people who make these claims would be the last to accept that progress in science is utterly dependent on philosophy - but that's the consequence of their own attempt to make a sharp delineation between, essentially, thinking and just crunching numbers.

I'm having a hard time understanding your post -- my depth of thinking may well not be on par with yours. Its obvious that science as a whole explains a hierarchy of phenomenona, with a given phenomenon (like radiation propagation) often being explained ("why does it happen in this specific way") by a more fundamental theory that provides an overarching account of a set of phenomena.

The point is that every update of a scientific theory shifts old "why" questions to new ones. Science will not ever and does not aim to provide an answer to the ultimate question of why anything exists at all or why a given theory of everything applies rather than another (indeed, string theory for example posits a possible, if not actual theory of everything).

In this sense, in the scientific study of consciousness, we do not aim for an ultimate account of why the laws of nature give rise to consciousness. Instead, it is about explaining a natural phenomenon within a theoretical framework that allows us to make predictions with respect to experimental outcomes.

There is a logical answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, but interpretations of it are varied. If you accept that consciousness (hard) is a natural phenomena then it is much less of a leap. However, you do lose the ability to conclude with certainty that your individual consciuosness did _not_ instantiate the entire universe, which tends to lead to a very self-centered path of inquiry which often only skirts around the main issue. If you are further attached to the logic of the Law of the Excluded Middle, then megalomania is always close at hand and probably the reason why this knowledge isn't shouted from the rooftops.

This idea has been around for thousands of years and is similar to the central teaching of Advaita Vedanta. Indeed, we are continuing a truly great tradition of inquiry in our natural philosophy of science.

> The point is that every update of a scientific theory shifts old "why" questions to new ones. Science will not ever and does not aim to provide an answer to the ultimate question of why anything exists at all

I don't see how any of that is relevant.

The examples I gave are so definitively answered that we can derive the relevant laws mathematically, and prove that they must apply in all universes with the necessary properties. I've provided such a derivation in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27336901

There are many other examples along these lines in science.

Even if scientists tomorrow decided that some variant of string theory is a more accurate model of the world than quantum field theory, it wouldn't affect these answers.

There's no aspect of the explanations of inverse square laws or conservation laws that have had their answer undermined by updates to a theory, or are less explanatory because we e.g. don't know the origin of all existence.

Science has definitively answered "why" questions in those cases, and many others.

> Science answers "why" questions all the time.

Nope, science is just shifting the perspective.

There is a nice video of Feynman about it, appropriately titled "Why":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA

> Nope, science is just shifting the perspective.

That's an incorrect assertion based on cherry-picked evidence.

The Feynman video is a perfect example of this. He gives examples of cases where deep "why" answers aren't easily found. But those examples don't cover the entire field of science.

All you need to refute cherry-picked examples is a single counterexample. I've provided two counterexamples. I've also provided a derivation for one of them, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27336901

The point is that science can and does answer "why" questions, and in many cases does so very definitively - so much so that we can predict behavior in other universes that we've never seen.

"We know the answer to why uniform radiation propagates due to an inverse square law."

This is an answer to a "how" question rephrased (incorrectly) as an answer to a "why" question.

First, the "inverse square law" isn't a law in the colloquial sense (like a maximum speed limit law) where the universe is forced to obey it. Instead, "law" is just a conventional phrase indicating what the consensus among scientists is regarding certain observations.

So it's really an answer to the question of "how does [our current observations of how] radiation propagate?": "according to the inverse square law".

Future observations of radiation propagation might run completely contrary to those we've had up to now, and it is scientific explanations that will have to be modified to accommodate those observations.

But the inverse square law does not explain why radiation has been observed to propagate in this way.

For such an answer you'd have to resort to a much grander explanation of the universe, involving all sorts of other theories involving many other observations, back to the big bang, which is not yet fully understood and may never be (even if we assume that the big bang theory itself won't be replaced by some other origin theory in the future, and not to mention what happened "before" the big bang, which may be even more impenetrable still).

But even were there to be some comprehensive "theory of everything" (in the larger sense), that doesn't mean the why of it has been explained, as there'll still be open questions like: "why something rather than nothing?" or "why this universe and not another?"

"But," some may object, "I just wanted to know why radiation propagates as it does, not why there's something instead of nothing." Well, I'm afraid that science can't answer your little question without answering the big questions. Religion or philosophy might, but they're also seen as unsatisfactory to many, so such why questions might never be answerable to everyone's satisfaction.

Harder questions, like those about consciousness, are even less likely to be satisfactorily answered, as touching them immediately lands one in to the morass of assumptions, definitions, points of view, and perspectives.

Half the time people are completely speaking past each other because they've never agreed on or even stated what their definitions or assumptions are, so are going off about two or more completely different things. Consciousness itself is notoriously difficult to define, so when two or more people are talking about something that they "know it when they see it," they're bound to talk past each other half the time, whether they agree or disagree.

Some philosophers are better at setting the ground rules and making their fundamental assumptions and defintions explicit, but they're usually pretty balkanized, and you'll find plenty of other philosophers disagreeing with their assumptions and definitions.

I personally see little hope of this thorny problem ever being resolved to everyone's satisfaction, but there'll surely be plenty of arguing about it until the end of time.

> First, the "inverse square law" isn't a law in the colloquial sense (like a maximum speed limit law) where the universe is forced to obey it. Instead, "law" is just a conventional phrase indicating what the consensus among scientists is regarding certain observations.

That's incorrect in this case. It's a hard requirement that can easily be mathematically derived, so easily that I'll do it here:

1. The surface area of a 3D sphere, 4πr^2, is proportional to the square of the radius.

2. Radiation from a point source that is evenly radiating outward is therefore spread out over an area that increases in proportion to the square of the distance from the source.

3. Therefore, such radiation must obey an inverse square law, in any universe in which the preconditions -even radiation from a point source through 3D space - are true.

> Future observations of radiation propagation might run completely contrary to those we've had up to now

That's provably not the case, and I've just proved it beyond doubt. From this proof, we know what kind of situations are subject to this law, and can even determine what kinds of situations might not be subject to it.

A similar point applies to conservation laws, such as conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. Noether's theorem shows us that such conservation laws must hold, again in any universe where the preconditions around differentiable symmetries hold.

With that in mind, I don't think the rest of your comment makes much sense. Not only does science answer "why" questions in many cases, it can answer them so definitively that we can apply that knowledge to other universes.

You just shifted the question from "Why do we have an inverse square law for radiation" to "Why do we live in a 3d universe".

Same goes for the Noether theorem. It shifts the question from "why do we have certain conservation laws" to "why do we have certain symmetries".

> You just shifted the question from "Why do we have an inverse square law for radiation" to "Why do we live in a 3d universe".

That's not "shifting the question", that's a different question.

The point is that there is a meaningful sense, discovered by scientific study, in which we understand why there is an inverse square law for radiation.

If the examples I've given are not answers to "why" questions, how would you characterize them?

In any case, the idea that we can never know the answer to any "why" question because there's a causal chain that goes back to the creation of the universe is silly. We can understand the connection between parts of a chain without knowing where the chain came from, and that's exactly what science has done, so successfully that some people are now complaining that we don't know how the universe began.

Besides, the question of why we live in a 3D universe has a similar answer - see Max Tegmark's "On the dimensionality of spacetime": https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/dimensions.pdf

Given that, where do you think "I've shifted the question" now? At some point, do you not recognize that the question being asked really has no meaningful relevance to the original question?

In fact, examples like these go beyond just answering "why" questions - they tell us that this universe, and even other universes with similar properties, couldn't be any other way!

Another problem is that many of the people arguing about this don't agree on what it means to "understand" or "explain" something.

Is it enough to get a majority of scientists, researchers, and/or philosophers to agree on something, or have it published in some prestigious journals for us to pat ourselves on the back and consider the subject "understood"?

I have no doubt that such agreement on this subject could be attained, as people are good at convincing themselves and each other of stuff, and it's not inconceivable that it'll happen again regarding consciousness at some point.

However, will that mean that we've really understood it, or merely convinced ourselves that we did?

The same goes for explanations. What counts as an adequate explanation? Are a certain number of successful predictions enough? Is an elegant equation that accounts for all of the data enough? Or do we require something more?

This is where the disagreements come in, as when it comes to experience equations, journal articles, and scientists patting each other on the back as having "understood" it doesn't seem to be enough for many participants in this controversy, and some argue it'll never be enough because there is something special about experience that transcends all that.

That's why articles that point to some new discovery about neuron function or results of experiments on the brain can be seen as laughable before even reading them. On this view no fruit of the scientific enterprise, or even philosophy, can touch what it's like to experience the world.

It sounds premature to me. "Big" science (CERN, Human Genome, etc.) were only possible and sensible because the subject matter was well understood, and getting more and more information about it required apparatus and manual labor beyond the reach of a normal lab.

The consciousness problem, however, is very poorly understood. The article contains some hand-waiving pointing at extremely large groups of neurons, jumping to irrelevant details such as its "anatomical footprint." But even the function of small groups of neurons is not understood, nor the interaction between them. How "big science" can get meaningful results then is not clear to me.

> and change the sociology of scientific practice in general

Right then.

adversarial collaboration rests on identifying the most diagnostic points of divergence between competing theories, reaching agreement on precisely what they predict, and then designing experiments that directly test those diverging predictions.

omg why has no-one thought of doing this before

The “hard problem of consciousness” is not essentially about consciousness. It’s just the most obvious form of the problem to conscious beings.

The “hard problem of applesauce” is the same essential problem. While it is true that we will one day fully understand the molecular, atomic, and quantum composition of applesauce, and thus be able to create artificial applesauce without a single apple, we still won’t be able to explain the existence of existence.

Consciousness, applesauce, electrons, and existence itself have no reason to exist, and yet they do. That’s the hard problem.

Consciousness is simply the closest we get to that mystery, insofar as we only get close to anything through consciousness itself.

Donald Hoffman, theorizes we're in a simulation and has math backing it, but that's not the point I'm trying to make...

He mentions a mathematical concept that the more theorems you solve, the more there are. As in - you never really grasp the end of math.

In his sim theory, we're perceiving life in a VR, there's the ego, the many receptors like visual that detect colors, etc and understanding everything we take in, each of those is a "unit"...

the gist of what I'm getting at, the physics we perceive are natural ONLY to our sim, or our VR headset, outside it could be totally different, but MATH is constant in all the universe, something that doesn't change, but that we're also always going to have new discoveries for.

Consciousness could be the same, once we discover how to take the VR headset off (without death), we then discover a new reality, with new physics, etc... and a new VR headset to take off, maybe ad infinitum...

It's like how there's the big bang, many think that there was nothing now there's something, when in reality there was always something just a much more compact something... miles across, a few light years? who knows how big, but it began expanding super fast for unknown reasons...

It wasn't just nothingness, or one particle that exploded into everything else...

I think the closest we'll ever get is finding ways to create consciousness inside simulations of our own, unfortunately that itself will prove (99%) that we're likely not base reality.

Consciousness has multiple levels. At a quantal level it is referred to as the nonphysical 3rd form of reality besides mass and energy, in relationship volumetrically based on the normalization of the electron characteristics. Neurologically Psychologically Higher Consciousness.

Consciousness is that which draws distinctions to distinguish reality and is aware of itself.

There is that which is Distinguished, that From which it is distinguished, and the Consciousness that distinguishes. This is Perceptual, Conceptual, and Existential, and uses the variables of Intent (Atomic stability, organic life and conscious awareness), Content(Mass of subatomic/atomic/universe, Energy (photonic electric magnetic) and Consciousness (Individual Group and Cosmic) and Extent (Space Time and Consciousness-awareness)

There is ebook called Reality Begins with Consciousness from brainvoyage.com by authors Ed Close and Vernon Neppe that is interesting. Here is a shorter introduction: https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Primary-Perspectives-Ad...

It's probably easier to think of consciousness as "learned". That is, we have these brains that can extract patterns from noisy or sparse inputs, and the notion of a "self" is just something it learned to recognize. The rest of the "common sense" that guides our course through the world is basically just adaptation and learnings of how to preserve that self in a given environment.

It's interesting to think of situations where the self becomes subordinate... family, sex, certain types of anger, etc. There are some old and deep patterns in the brain that can override the control of "self"... and they roughly correspond to very primitive parts of the brain that govern simpler and essential fight or flight mechanisms.

While arguably unfalsifiable.

To me Joshua Bach’s explanation of consciousness covers all the bases.

It is a logical explanation that explains consciousness without the need for magic. Whether or not it covers what you want from a consciousness explanation I can’t tell.

That it is not more accepted seams strange, but it is fairly new and people in philosophy are famously slow when it comes to change. So I guess it makes sense.

The problem I have with these definitions (and the accompanying theories) is that they are not practical. At best fun abstractions to wrap your head around with, at worst pretentious and misguided.

To advance the field of consciousness, I believe at the current stage we should always treat consciousness as a blackbox, and ask questions around it with practical engineering implications. Perhaps two categories of questions:

Category 1: qualia/perception

These would be human-centric questions related to experimenations with altered states of mind. Here is one for example:

Why is it that under the effect of THC, certain stimuli and actions [1] can reliably slow down the perception of time, while certain stimuli (e.g. the soft humming of the aircon) tend to normalize time perception for some individual?

[1]: e.g. start the stopwatch app, have the phone at arm's length, stare at the millisecond digit and slowly moving your phone closer to you.

What can we say about the neural activations (and subsequently, oscillations) of individuals who are able to alter the time perception more easily (even at the presence of normalizing-stimuli) and how can this ability be learnt or unlearnt?

Understanding of the above phenomenon could be used to design the calibration phrase of a BCI device so preprocessing, signal processing, etc, can be customized to deliver a smoother user experience.

Category 2: data/computation

One of the key charactistics of biological systems that invoke consciousness appears to be a cybernetics-oriented ability that involves orchestrating (often-function-specific) modules (e.g. in human brains) to accomplish (often-highly-abstracted(?)) tasks.

Perhaps we can take inspirations from mindful practises (and other consciousness-centric activities) and study the brain and how its modules work together to come up with architectures, models, etc, that (going one step above spiking neural network?) mimic the cybernetic nature of consciousness for the integration of loosely-coupled things e.g. in transfer learning, etc, as well as systems that involve a lot of feedback loops.

Perchance such biomimetics would help us to get a better idea how type (and category)-theoretical aspects of things can be introduced to engineer highly fault-torelent and energy-efficient systems that employ millions of pretrained models like GPT3 at the lower level and are constantly self-learning for general purpose tasks.

Not strictly related to the article, but I’ve yet to be convinced that most of the talk around this supposed “hard problem” is anything more than an attempt to reintroduce Cartesian dualism in more scientific sounding terms. “Quantum consciousness” and whatnot.

but Cartesian dualism (an the notion of souls) has its roots in the very real subjective experience. You feel, how do you probe others feels too? The hard problem is real.

A lot of philosophical work has been done explicitly against Cartesian Dualism. Wittgenstein's, extremely influential, "Philosophical Investigations" is probably the biggest example. The entire book is dedicated to dissolving the problem posed by dualism, and presents a conceptual approach that makes the "hard" problem of consciousness, or the problem of understanding someones feelings, effectively not really a problem at all. Much of the problem is more a result of conceptual confusion than anything else. The [Private Language Argument](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language) is probably the most famous. Its result can also be extended to pain, feelings, and vision. Fundamentally private subjectivity is largely a misconception. It's like trying to use a currency that has no purchasing power. Insistence on subjectivity and subjective experience is more productively understood as "personal" rather than as "private".

The hard part of consciousness is drawing the line left by the dissolution of Cartesian dualism. Some matter is not conscious, other matter is. How finely can we draw the boundaries between the two? Dualism drew a metaphysical line between matter and spirit but we have to draw a manifold around and through a physical brain to locate conscious experience.

https://www.susanblackmore.uk/consciousness-an-introduction/

I never quite understood what Qualia are.

Is it hard though? Or is the hard part ethics i.e. personhood, and because the terms are conflated that makes consciousness hard, since it means you cannot accept what consciousness is without needing to also define ethics. Drop the idea that consciousness is sufficient or required for personhood in favor for something more behaviourally consistent like cuteness or power, and things become clearer.

There is a part of you which simulates social interaction by learning models of various other agents it has inferred the existence of. As can be expected from something which is looking for agents based on indirect clues, we know this part does struggle with accidentally assigning agency to things which clearly lack consciousness i.e that damned sharp rock you stepped on twice. This part of you is capable of simulating a finite number of simultaneous such agents at a time, meaning it will focus on, as a whole, being able to predict the actions of the agents most often observed. It is also why we would expect it to replace groups of people you only interact with as a group as a "them". It is also very common that the most significant agent to simulate would be you. Hence one of the models being simulated is you. This is what generates the perception of consciousness, why it is you yet separate. It predicts the cognitive bias of the mind body duality, yet maintains the perception of consciousness. A part of you is constantly trying to explain your own actions, but critically, while we would expect it to be good at providing a socially acceptable explanation, we do not expect it to be all that good at predicting what you will actually do, or even explaining why you did something. See Split brain examples, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8&ab_channel=CGPGr.... It also makes the prediction that it should be possible to damage this part of the brain and lose the sensation of consciousness yet retain primary function as a human. Which raises no ethical problems as the person still remains cute.

Further, when predicting/explaining the actions of the modelled this social simulator is fairly robust, but it can have chaotic points, i.e. points where imperceptibly tiny differences in the inputs result in drastically different outcomes, specifically, the model/language has a name for these. When the social simulator concludes that such a point exists, we call these points choices, we do so regardless of our awareness that the agent is a machine or not, as in deep blue chose to move his knight instead of the queen, or you chose to accept/disbelieve this. Specifically we call these points choices, or once made decisions, when the model expects its there. This is the reason why one person will call what they did a choice others may or may not. It is why one person can know that person X will do y and be right, while person X thinks they are choosing between y,z and chose y. You may not be the best predictor of your own actions, and if you have/had kids you know this.

In our case, the social simulator is strongly connected to language, and it will use language to perform simulations, providing predictions and explanations, and social manipulations. However, our ability to simulate the actions of animals shows that consciousness is not limited by language.

Remember whenever we reason using language, we generally get far worse results compared to when we do not restrict ourselves to reason using language. If you have ever experienced the Zone when programming or doing math, or anything really, then you know the deeply disturbing feeling of the social simulator suddenly starting to chatter and try to weigh in to problems it has jack shit ability in and in practice going from smart and non conscious/ego dissolution (mostly ignoring the output of the social simulator/putting it in a sleep mode if you will) to conscious and retarded. Programming and math highlights this, because you cant argue with a compiler.

This model of consciousness and free will isn't perfect by any means, but its the best one I know, mostly because it does not try to add magic into things while explaining the perceptions of it, and most of the contradictions between perception and physical reality as we know it.

It predicts the cognitive bias towards mind body duality, and the cognitive bias towards free will. We needed words to communicate these. It resolves the paradoxes around free will in their entirety, while predicting the perception of free will, notably including the "thinking I will do x" then doing y problem. It predicts that it might be the case that we have "decided" on something before we are consciously aware of the decision, consciousness only being a weak input to choices, not the decision maker after all. And as if another's model of you does not put you in a chaotic point, then that does not mean your model of you, i.e. your consciousness wasn't. It predicts that we would be constantly simulating ourselves, yet can be surprisingly bad at predicting our own actions, and even worse that trying to subvocally reason yourself into changing behaviour by thinking " I will do this instead" would be utterly useless. The social simulator is expected to provide the outcome of actions in social context, decisions are then taken based on them. But when you are having hypothetical discussions that does not make a prediction it will use, that's just practice. Meaning, if you want to convince yourself not to have another slice of pizza, thinking i chose to be on a diet is useless, but imagining meeting a nice girl flirting then looking disgusted at your waistline might be strong enough to want to hurl. In short it predicts how to strengthen the influence of what you perceive as conscious will. It makes it possible that the output from the social simulator could be severed and that we could create people who live in the Zone, while being socially oblivious. (Not autism)

It predicts that if you want to build a consciousness from scratch what you need is a system designed to infer the existence of and predict the interactions with other agents and having a very limited output bandwidth and whose input is direct environment observation and time delayed/ no feedback on the agents internal state. Trained on the feedback signal of some other system/agent using its predictions to optimize some score in an environment with multiple agents not all of whom are interacting. The consciousness so made wont feel like a person deserving of rights, but that isn't necessary, as we didnt tie ethical personhood to consciousness.

Why is it always the same people who expound the "hard problem" of conciousness. It is tiring to see authors like koch on everything.

I agree. This quasi-mystical framing seems unlikely to bear scientific fruits.

Is consciousnesses a clearly defined term?

Who or what is asking that question?

Well I typed it, obviously. But my existence doesn’t say anything about whether a ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is a useful way to think about the human mind.

Is it that obvious? Who is this “I” you speak of?

The history of Western philosophy has amply demonstrated that investigating the grammar of language is not a useful way to find out how the world works.

That isn't about grammar. Presumably, this "I" is real. Can you find it in the world? If you say it's the brain, there's only elementary particles there, same as everything else. We see no such "I" there. So where is this "I"?

By the same logic, you could claim that a computer that is calculating Pi is not actually calculating Pi: Presumably, this computation is real, but where is it in the world? If you claim that it's in the micro processor, there's only elementary particles there, same as everything else. There's no computation there. So where is the computation?

Of course, the rebuttal is very simple: the computation is actually in the microprocessor; and consciousness is actually in the brain. They are of course made of particles (or strings or fields or whatever the ultimate building block may be) just as everything else is, or are one interpretation/structure of those particles.

And note that the fact that interpretation entails an interpreter does not make my argument circular: just as you can write a computation that detects computation in a microprocessor, you can have one consciousness interpreting the same sort of thing as another consciousness. Similarly to how the von Neuman numeral 2 is an interpretation of the set {{}, {{}}} and vice versa (that is, the physical process would be isomorphic to consciousness).

I don't think that's the point parent was making. Of course in a processor there are only particles, and we can easily detect computation by analyzing how registers and in turn potentials change. The point being made is that this description of computation does not leave behind anything else to be described. In other words, my analysis of the process fully describe the process. I can even simulate my description and obtain the same result (say, 1+1=2 obtained by running a program on silicon or by shifting registers with pen and paper). With consciousness is not so trivial. I can fully describe the neural correlates of you experiencing joy, or recalling a memory, or whatever, and there would be still plenty not captured by my description, which is the endogenous phenomenal experience of it. This is why it's hard. There is no epistemic bridge to cross (or burn).

‘Where’ is it? Where is homeostasis? Where is the immune system?

As tsimionescu suggested, a spatial metaphor is not the only way to understand phenomena.

I would say it "is" more like Western philosophy suggests this, or you could also say they have not yet discovered a way that it is useful.

This "quasi-mystical framing" by Chalmers was a major contributor to recharging and refocusing the contemporary philosophical and scientific attack on the problem of consciousness.

Great. Could you tell us what scientific fruits have resulted?

I just have.

Philosophy isn't science.

The article we are both commenting on is in a scientific journal and is concerned with scientific research into consciousness.

I think it’s appropriate to talk about scientific results here.

Fine, but this is all I got:

f(a,a)

f(a,b)

It's called 'hard' for a reason. :p

Reply on news.ycombinator.com