Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? (2015)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
There is no purpose for humanity. No grand design. We are just replicating lifeforms that have gone self aware. Accept it, it's particularly freeing.
This distinction of self from the universe is also talked about in Buddhism as being a massive flaw of human understanding. In reality, all of us are one with the universe and arise from it.
Paradoxically, at the same time our minds are so limited they can accept only two possibilities: (1) everything was created by a god, (2) everything happened by accident. My pet peeve is that there is a third option, but our minds are unable to grasp it.
So it is sad to see so many view this question as impossible to solve, or just give out hand wavy explanations like "computation" etc, rather than try to think about what would actually be required to understand what consciousness is.
If this were the case, wouldn't drugs that temporarily inhibit the access of long term memory and the ability to predict the future also inhibit consciousness? This doesn't appear to be the case, because high doses of psychedelics and dissociatives do this, but consciousness definitely continues, just in a very odd, altered state.
We can also look at chimpanzees. They have a prefrontal cortex, future prediction and long term memory. While their prefrontal cortex is smaller, it is also the most human like. Yet, they too seemingly lack capacity for that human style of conscious being. There is alas, something more your definition has failed to touch upon.
If you will, the wiring between cells, not so much the cells themselves.
while the cells are just switches with memory, i.e. the hardware
This statement surprised me. If evolution could have created zombies, and equally possibly could have not created zombies, then consciousness would be a weird and unexplained chance occurrence. Despite having evolution to explain how we came to exist as complex information-processing organism, we would need an additional and entirely different explanation for why we happen to be conscious.
We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. Which feels no less strange and magical, even if it is simpler, and took me straight to panpsychism, and the question of whether the machines we create might be conscious, and whether we are creating them to have pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral experiences. Equally, since we can see how machines are made of smaller machines and so on, we can wonder if parts of us have consciousness and whether it is the same consciousness as our own, or if a group of people has a consciousness that experiences our world in some way but is unable to make its presence known because it exists at a level unconnected from the consciousnesses that direct human speech and action. Or maybe it has an illusion of agency just like we do.
That's the thesis in Blindsight (well, more 'interesting evolutionary incident' than 'necessary') . There might be other intelligent creatures that are unlike us and that are not conscious.
Agreed. I never understood the zombie distinction. It seems ridiculous that some thinking machines are “zombies” and some are not.
Huge swathes of the cognitive load on these very sophisticated tasks is subconscious, so clearly those tasks must in principle be doable by entities not capable of consciousness. We don't yet know where the boundaries are between tasks that do and don't involve consciousness, if there are any.
I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it implies consciousness is binary. There are various levels of awareness and experience.
We are concious, so creatures like us must be concious, otherwise they're not 'like' us. This is a conceptual pit trap.
I'm sorry but I don't see this as at all elegant, it's the usual hierarchical inversion error somewhat disguised. A is a kind of B, therefore B is a kind of A. Phrased like that it's obviously false, but we see people doing this all the time. In this case the most common manifestation is conscious systems are complex systems (A is a kind of B where A=conciousness, B=complex), therefore complex systems are conscious (B is a kind of A). Therefore panpsychism.
I suppose the argument is that consciousness might be a generalised attribute of complexity, or slightly more plausibly of information processing systems, but I see no evidence for this, and frankly no reason to believe it might be true. I am very wary of these kinds of hierarchical inversion though, they must be approached an examined extremely carefully because it's a very seductive intellectual failure mode.
Not everyone agrees with using the term qualia for sensation. There's various debates over the nature of perception. Some see sensation as just being directly aware of properties in the world, such as color. Doesn't work for all sensation (pain for example), and color realism has its own problems.
What does it mean to experience consciousness?
Until we have some way of doing that, I think it's more rational to assume all humans in a non catatonic state have some level of consciousness.
I read GP's comment that in this case that someone wouldn't have a concept of consciousness in his consciousness.
I think it's a massive, massive stretch to make the claim that any of them weren't conscious.
This preprint my co-authors and I are working on might offer something of a babystep, not toward consciousness itself but toward the simpler problem of self-reflection, and more specifically of measuring self-reflection in reinforcement learning agents: https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEEET-3.pdf
1- can't study it,in details, live with 0 risk of damage
2- can't test injecting data without risk of damage
3- the live data that we can extract/record (while monitoring input) with current tech is limited. I'm thinking that we're still at the stage comparable with using a multimeter to test a 8 layer pcb, with no schematics, while it's powered on.
I, personally, think science will get there at some point, but we'll need some serious tech advancements to do that.
In the words of Alan Watts: You can't touch the tip of your finger with the tip of the same finger, you can't bite your own teeth.
It's an irreducible problem. Lest there is some social way we can achieve it...
In practice, it is only implemented in one type of animal, or maybe a few types, depending on how it is defined. And we do not have a practical answer for how and why. Partial at best. And not in a way that would enable enough understanding about what kind of computation it is to implement similar-enough computation in a machine.
It feels like the scale of computation needed is now, or soon will be, available. The 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections seem daunting until you look at the connection and neuron (and sensory) data rates. It was clearly never going to happen in a Symbolics 3600. It is not clear it could not happen in a modern data center.
OK, but what is "computation"?
If you perform the computation with a lot of pencils and a lot of paper, is it conscious?
The two answers are roughly on the same side of the argument, but subtly different in important ways.
The other side of the coin is that we are asked to believe that what happens in an animal brain turns into magic when the animal is human. That is even harder to imagine.
Nobody is saying that animals aren't conscious. Or maybe a few are, and maybe human brains have some unique properties, we can't tell since we don't know what we are looking for. But animals display many of the same things as humans, and we know for a fact that humans are conscious so it isn't a stretch to imagine animals being as well.
> magic
Yes, we have no formula to describe consciousness, so as far as we know today it is magic. But if we manage to properly map that out in the future then consciousness will be science.
But it remains the case that there is exactly no evidence at all for the belief that consciousness is an emergent property of computation. Not some evidence -- no evidence.
Edit: I should put that differently. Your sense of the criteria by which the problem may be considered solved does not preclude thermostat consciousness. And if that is allowed, then yes: the problem is solved. But I sense, again, the assumption of physicalism (or ontological naturalism), and I don't know why that premise admits of no dissent or argument.
I'm not setting a trap. I'm just trying to clarify your position.
Biologists used to talk about a "vital force". Alive things had it, dead things didn't. Now biology is mature enough to recognize that there is no such force. People chasing consciousness are in the position of the biologists who insisted, in the face of biochemistry, that there was still a vital force.
There is a physical phenomenon: we observe people insisting there is such a thing as consciousness. Why do they do this? That is something an explanation could address. Not everybody insists. Are people who don't not conscious? What is common to everybody who insists, and also everybody they insist it about? They all observe themselves experiencing, and act on those observations. So, if there is anything to be defined, it is probably defined by that.
We could make a machine that perceives, and perceives itself perceiving. If that machine would not be described by insisters as conscious, I would expect a reason why not.
Or in another way, if you say "it is an inherent property of computation", then I'd counter "define computation in terms of laws of physics". You can't. Computation is as ill defined as consciousness from the laws of physics perspective.
The problem of "being" (why there is something rather than nothing) is similar. It's not just that we don't have a physics explanation for why anything exists in the first place; it's that physics may not be able to answer that kind of question at all.
None of that is necessarily "pseudoscience" or necessarily bullshit (though it's easy enough to find examples of both).
I am skeptical of the circularity of the argument, though. There must be a "physics explanation" because physics explains everything. And we know that, because if physics can't explain it, it doesn't exist. And we know that, because physics explains everything.
(Not accusing you in particular of making that argument . . .)
But now I'm actually not so sure. You seem to not admit of a category of things that physics can't explain. There are things it does not currently explain, things it has not yet explained, things it has explained wrongly, and things it may never explain as an historical matter. But not things it can't explain ("can't" in the sense of "is incapable of").
Do I have you right on that?
If there is a separate world outside of this world etc, then that would get incorporated into physics. I don't see how any scientific explanation for consciousness wouldn't become a part of physics.
Basically, physics describes all the rules of this world. Consciousness exists and is a part of the world, so it is a part of the rules of the world, so it is a part of physics.
How would you define an operation that doesn't just makes every process in the entire world a computation?
Nature doesn't distinguish. But we do, for practical reasons.
If what you imagine to be consciousness is a recognizably interesting computation, the details that make it recognizable are objective, but your interest in it as a topic to talk about is purely subjective.
That is, it falls back to the anthropic principle. If we didn't exist, we wouldn't even be able to consider this question. Or in other words: it is hard to formulate the opposite.
I can be wrong, of course. For long decades scientists considered the hidden variable theory of quantum mechanics ("God does not play dice" - as summarised by Einstein) a philosophical challenge. John Bell was not able to publish his research as it was considered "not even physics". It was surprising that a seemingly philosophical challenge turned into a testable one.
Consciousness comes first, theories about "reality" come after. Expecting of "solving" the "mystery of consciousness" is futile. Existence is mystical and unknowable.
Still, it's very useful to strive for understanding and explanations, we just have to accept our limitations.
The modern philosophical term for this is qualia. Chalmers, Block, Nagel, etc. have discussed this at length. Even philosophers who disagree with them like Dennett and Keith Frankish do so by engaging with the definition above.
It's unanswerable to date because there is no consensus on what the nature of subjectivity is. How are some brain states conscious? Is it a cognitive illusion? Is it weakly emergent? Is consciousness a property of everything or perhaps rich information streams? Is it functional or biological? Are we cognitively closed to the answer?
I don’t know this doesn’t seem like a great definition to me. It lists a dozen distinct properties, most very complicated in their own right, and then kind of collapses into “we all know what it is anyway”
What you mean might be that you'd prefer a definition that you can use to measure objects around the world to detect consciousness? Well, as I said we don't have any laws or explanation for it so you wont get that. But you and everyone else knows that consciousness is a thing and you can prod at your consciousness yourself to see how it responds to stimuli etc, but that is as far as human knowledge go with respect to consciousness so far.
Well this is certainly a better definition IMO, however, what does a "mindless automaton" mean? If the automaton is intelligent then it's not mindless.
> What you mean might be that you'd prefer a definition that you can use to measure objects around the world to detect consciousness?
That's not what I mean. I actually think Turing created a decent method of detecting consciousness. What I mean is that someone on this thread said the problem with consciousness is that it is not well-defined, and I happen to agree in the sense that when people talking about consciousness they are often talking about different things. Just in this one thread 2 different definitions were proposed, and the article uses a 3rd: "the feeling of being inside your head"
Does the automation have conscious experiences? Take a simulation of a city populated with characters. Do those characters experience the city? Do they feel the warmth of the digital sun on their digital face?
> I actually think Turing created a decent method of detecting consciousness.
Would the turing machine feel anything during its conversation? Is there anything it's like to be code? All of these kinds of phrases are ways of specifying subjectivity.
yes. Consciousness does not need to be a binary phenomenon, there are certainly different levels of consciousness.
> Take a simulation of a city populated with characters. Do those characters experience the city?
yes.
>Do they feel the warmth of the digital sun on their digital face?
No probably not, unless the simulation includes that level of perception for the characters.
> Would the turing machine feel anything during its conversation? Is there anything it's like to be code?
Consistent with my answers above: yes and yes.
Being the subject of experience is not enough. A camera experience color, but almost everybody would agree it is not conscious.
There is a similarity to using the Turing test to detect intelligence. At the present, this is just another such useless rabbit hole.
Dealt with exactly this.