What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
nautil.us
nautil.us
I've lost consciousness twice after being put into a blood choke. The experience of regaining consciousness is visceral. For those that haven't experienced it, it's very much like a turning on a computer.
Initially, your brain does not (or cannot) process input like vision, sound, touch, etc. Slowly, over about 30-60 seconds, you begin to see and hear but they don't make any sense. You've completely lost the context of who and where you are. Then you begin to recognize colors and shapes, sounds of voices, etc. Eventually, you see and hear everything but still haven't built a concept of the context. Lastly, your brain seems to begin making sense of all the inputs and you regain full conscious awareness.
If you think it's just like waking up from a dream or from a nap, you're wrong. It's a completely different experience, one that's so profound that I distinctly remember the entire episode even years later (and I have poor memory recall generally).
Waking from sleep feels very fast, but I've been put under for surgery more than once now, and coming around from surgery doesn't feel like waking up. It feels like something else completely.
Turns out his cross collar choke was tighter than I thought. It was not unpleasant and I had a mild buzzy/headache-y feel for the rest of the day. It all felt a little dreamy and is one of the strongest memories I have had in recent years. Definitely something I remember clearly.
Also: if anyone is in the Denver area we have mats at our office :)
It's not happened since. A one-time event. The confusion I woke up with so profound and complete and slow... I think about it often. I think about how the brain, and its consciousness, can have a bug or a crash.
Basically, when you have hypoglycemia, you lose "fine" things first, and you sort of lose things in order, from "fine" (picking things up, balancing, seeing small details) towards "coarse" (talking, walking) and then of course to very "coarse" things, like being able to wake up/see.
And the physical symptoms are exactly mirrored by the mental symptoms. "fine" mental things are like the ability to formulate a complex thought with a lot of abstraction: do a math problem, talk about the future or the past, etc. "Coarser things" are like being able to think verbally or interpret the basic meaning of things -- like, what is that thing over there called? Then, you lose extremely "course" things, like being able to reason at all about what is going on in the world around you.
Oddly enough, the last thing that goes is emotion. Emotion is the baseline of how every piece of context is categorized. Things feel good or they feel bad at a level far below anything resembling what they are. At a level below speaking, having distinct thoughts about distinct objects or people, having any sense of time, place, or meaning. Emotion is always there.
It really is impossible to articulate, because words are a complete fiction.
I wish everyone could go through that, because it really makes you realize the fiction of your own "self" as a real thing.
struct EmotionalState {
int happiness;
int angriness;
int hungriness;
};This primal good-or-bad feeling is known as Vedana in classical Buddhism. On an at-home meditation retreat two months ago I had begun to see this arise in every interaction with almost everything. So much so that someone set off a firecracker outside my house (pretty normal in my neighbourhood but at an unexpected time) and I first noted that something unpleasant had happened, then noted that my eyes had flinched, then heard the sound, then recognised the sound as a firecracker. (I was in the shower at the time, wide awake.) The first glimmer of almost every experience was this vedana.
The way I understand it as the blood pressure drops your brain stops to function properly but it might still somewhat function. As blood pressure goes back up more parts of the brain resume normal function but the "functional" state of the brain might still be abnormal. The current state is unstable, especially when new functionality starts to come back online and resume normal behavior, and the state of the brain quickly moves from a unstable state to a more stable normal state.
When I woke up when the ski patrol started talking to me I did not have a profound experience like you, it was simply like waking up a little tired, but I was “there” instantaneously.
Did not remember the falling though, so it must have been quick.
I guess the mechanics of “turning off” matter.
A different scary thought: how can you verify you are still “you” when you go to sleep and wake up tomorrow?
Edit: I also remember when I had surgery and they injected the sleeping drug, I felt my body disappearing as the drug circulated in my bloodstream, and I lost consciousness instantly as it reached my head. It was a weird experience.
But it is not the same question as: how is it possible that we have any experience at all?
_How_ do we have any experience will be more easily answered the more we know about _what_ we actually experience. And _what_ we experience is predicated upon _how_ we experience it. I agree both need investigating.
The _bigger_ question I see the coin representing is _who or what_ is experiencing in the first place? The way I see it, it's not really _a thing_ experiencing _something_ but instead _things_ experiencing _things_ at _times_.
I agree with you about the "things experiencing things at times".
But that isn't the question. The question it possible that a sufficiently complex program could ever be able to have the experiences in the same way that humans have them (AKA "qualia").
Present and future anger, present and future pain, predicting whether future social cohesion will be maintained based on how a response is made to someone within a social graph. Understanding and assuming that nodes (other people) within a social graph can communicate to each other to update the state of a social interaction that they weren't present for.
I think it is possible.
If pleasure was just a variable on a scale from 0 to 10, and not its own co-processor, and an assumption that some forms of pleasure can influence parts of the social graph, it maybe isn't even that complicated anymore.
I think it would become less distinguishable from consciousness.
It's telling that science has made incredible progress (e.g. in the last 100 years) but on questions such as these above, we know little more than people knew then. Although we do know a lot more about the mechanics of what and how we experiences things.
The answer to "who" just becomes "a specific instance of X" that perhaps has some low probability combination of minor characteristics compared to other Xs.
I think much of what we think is human intelligence is actually crystalized intelligence in the form of language and tools. We got them by default, as citizens of our city.
You're right, it's not the same question. Dennett answers that question too though: you don't have conscious experience, you only think you do.
Thus, the questions he and these authors address are the only ones worth investigating. In time, exploring these questions will reveal the illusion behind consciousness, just like the progressive elaboration of the biochemistry of life revealed the fiction people tried to spin around how living matter simply had to have something different than non-living matter ("elan vital" in vitalism).
That's what illusionism, the position of Keith Frankish, asserts. Dennett mostly seems to support it, as you note, but more equivocally than Frankish.
For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and are aware of it: SE is the thing, which we know must exist (as noted by Descartes).
Anyone doubting the existence of SE, either is not having SE (i.e. is a "phenomenological zombie"), or (more likely, IMO) has not identified his own SE.
I believe Dennett is an eliminative materialist, so he would consider qualia to be an illusion.
> For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and are aware of it: SE is the thing, which we know must exist (as noted by Descsartes).
Descartes begged the question. Just deconstruct it: "I think therefore I am" presupposes the existence of "I" right at the very start. Except everybody knows there is no "I", you're just a bundle of atoms, and a bundle that's changing from moment to moment. Where are "you" exactly? The argument is fallacious and implies fallacious conclusions which led to mind/body dualism.
The non-fallacious version is "this is a thought, therefore thoughts exist". This is undeniably true, and yet it does not imply the existence of an "I" or any kind of dualism between mind and matter. A thought would then simply be a specific material structure (edit: or rather, it's a particular logical structure that can be embodied as a material structure).
> Anyone doubting the existence of SE, either is not having SE (i.e. is a "phenomenological zombie"), or (more likely, IMO) has not identified his own SE.
Anyone doubting subjective experience has simply recognized that every prior claim to human specialness has failed spectacularly, that science has repeatedly shown that our obvious and intuitive grasp of perception and truth is fatally flawed in numerous ways, and therefore that we should not in a million years trust anything that we immediately perceive as completely obvious when it can be demonstrated quite easily that these perceptions are vague and often false.
For christ's sake, your senses are telling you that water breaks pencils [1], and that you're burning up when you're dying of cold [2], and you're telling me that your internal perceptions of your subjective experience, arguably the most sophisticated part of your brain, is some kind factual oracle? Sorry, that's just nonsense. You should be immensely skeptical of your perceptions, looking both for justification that they are true or explanations for why you think they are true, you should not be treating them as simply a priori true.
[1] https://scienceathomekids.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG...
[2] https://psichologyanswers.com/library/lecture/read/76624-do-...
> Except everybody knows there is no "I", you're just a bundle of atoms, and a bundle that's changing from moment to moment.
This is begging the question in the other direction.
Perceptions are not experience. Nobody denies the existence of perceptions, the question is whether perceptions carry something "extra", something "ineffable" that we call "qualitative experience", something that cannot even in principle be captured by a third person objective description.
Algorithms and machines arguably have perceptions but not experience. Eliminativism is the position that we don't have experience either, we're only a collection of perceptions arranged in such a way that it leads us to the conclusion that our experience is real.
> This is begging the question in the other direction.
I'm not begging the question because I'm not saying eliminativism is true because matter is all we can measure. I'm simply saying that it's demonstrably true that by every measure currently available, we are just a bundle of atoms changing from moment to moment. The only people who claim otherwise and are given any kind of credibility, are people who cite fallacious thought experiments like Mary's room as "evidence". Not very compelling frankly.
That's correct, mostly, but it also means this position is nonsensical.
What is notable about qualia is that it is possible to have them at all. An illusion is definitionally a qualia. You cannot have an illusion without qualia existing.
Dennett tries to finesse this, but in my opinion fails. I think he wants it to be possible that you can somehow experience things in a non-mysterious way, and this this non-mysterious experience explains the mysterious experience stuff. I think he's wrong.
However, I don't think Dennett (or any human) is actually a zombie. The difficulty, is getting people to recognize their own SE. Our vocabulary, all about material and mechanisms, can't actually define SE. Instead, we have a few ostensions by which an attentive experiencer might recognize his own SE:
[Descartes] SE is that one thing, which absolutely must exist.
[Nagel] SE is "what it's like, to be...". He adds, that all our science is fully consistent with SE not existing. That's why it makes perfect sense for a zombie to believe it doesn't exist.
[Jackson]: Mary knows what seeing red is like, only when she has seen red.
Dennett, however, requires that the mysterious part of his own SE must be explainable by a non-mysterious aspect of SE. He just doesn't have any proposal for what or how that could be. He wants to wave his hands and say, "well, we have detectors for this and that and these predictive capabilities and these modelling systems, and so ... ta-da, we're conscious!"
I don't think this gives Dennett enough credit, because what our instruments are all telling us is that there no single, indivisible "self" at all; we are all made up of constituent parts either none of which have consciousness themselves (eliminativism), or all of which must have consciousness (pansychism), because ineffable qualia cannot simply appear from nothing. This reddit post does a great job breaking down Dennett's position sensibly:
https://reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/shneug/can_someo...
> There's no one thing, not even a collection of things, that can be identified with what we think of as the conscious mind. Instead, we've got a whole bunch of different things, none of which has "consciousness" in a traditional sense, and these come together in a way that makes it seem as though we're conscious.
I just don't buy this at all. This seems precisely as I described it:
> "well, we have detectors for this and that and these predictive capabilities and these modelling systems, and so ... ta-da, we're conscious!"
Also, note the heavy lifting being done by "makes it seem" from the Reddit quote. This goes back to the basic problem: Dennett (and the authors in TFA) are describing what we are conscious of, what makes up our consciousness, but he and they are not addressing how it possible for there to be any subjective experience at all.
I would go a little further, even: the whole reason why there is a sense of self is precisely because there is a singular subjective experience. You can figure out what drives that experience, and even note that it isn't rooted in any kind of singular and/or stable physical system, and that's actually really interesting. But that's not addressing how subjective experience is possible at all.
No, it's actually, "ta-da, we're not conscious! but here's why we think we are!"
> but he and they are not addressing how it possible for there to be any subjective experience at all.
Because neuroscience will do this by elaborating the mechanisms. Like in this paper:
The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness, http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
An analogy for tech nerds would be how the illusion of multitasking on a single CPU machine arises from imperceptibly fast context switching. Something similar happens in that theory, where our perceptual faculties are constantly switching between signals from our internal representations and our senses, thus producing a simplified but false conclusion that subjectivity is present.
> I would go a little further, even: the whole reason why there is a sense of self is precisely because there is a singular subjective experience.
And I'd say you're just telling yourself a retroactively edited story that there is a singular subjective experience in order to make sense of our own thoughts and behaviours. In fact, this sort of retroactive editing has been demonstrated multiple times.
So look, "The Intentional Stance" is for me one of the most important books I've ever read in this general area, and I totally buy all the stuff Dennett and others have built up around the idea that what we are conscious of is an edited, self-created, intention-injected model of our own selves (to whatever extent there is a unitary self to be a model of).
But I don't think that any of that addresses "how can we be conscious of anything at all".
In the quote I included above, who is the "you" that is telling and who is the "yourself" that is being told? But more importantly, what does "being told" mean? How does one have an experience (whether it is being told, or being cold, or being old)? It's not enough to say "we're not conscious, we just think we are" - the conundrum of consciousness is not about how humans think, but the fact that we have subjective experience (which may includes lies told to ourselves by ourselves).
This is still begging the question by the use of "who". There is no "who", there is no self, there are only thoughts that refer to a "self", but the referrant does not actually exist in the way that's implied by these thoughts; there's no spirit or homunculus in your mind to which "self" actually refers.
> the conundrum of consciousness is not about how humans think, but the fact that we have subjective experience (which may includes lies told to ourselves by ourselves).
I think the paper I linked is a good start on answering this question. Per my other reply to you, whether this kind of answer is satisfactory depends on what you take "subjective experience" to mean.
If you buy the thought experiments (p-zombies, Mary's room) that suggest some sort of "ineffability", then this explanation will not be satisfactory. Personally, none of those thought experiments are remotely convincing.
> We argue that the attention schema theory provides a possible answer to the puzzle of subjective experience. The core claim of the theory is that the brain computes a simplified model of the process and current state of attention, and that the content of this model is the basis of subjective reports.
Sure, that's all fine. Subjective reports are interesting. But they are not the same as subjective experience. What we say about what we experience is no doubt complex, and has a complex relationship with actual brain behavior. But consciousness, at its heart, is not about what we report, it's about the experience of being something.
And of course the "think" has a quality to it that the hard problem is about. It's interesting how illusionists and eliminativists explain away aspects of SE by invoking (other) aspects of SE. "You merely have an illusion of being conscious" - that illusion is the hard problem, so now explain that illusion. I could be having an illusion of an illusion of consciousness.
Imagine something that doesn't exist in the usual physical sense e.g. a dinner table on the Moon. Does that table exist? Not in the usual physical sense. Your thought or imagination of it does, though. What is that thought or image in your mind's eye "made of"? Sure, you might be able to correlate it precisely with certain neurons and yet you've not answered the question. You might call the mind's eye table an illusion, but you're not gonna deny that the picture of it exists in some sense. Three things exist: the physical table, your neurons and, separately, although not entirely independently from the neurons, (the picture of) the mind's eye table. Hence, the latter is part of the universe and the fundamental substrate of the universe must support if somehow, in a way that's different from the usual physical matter tables and neurons. Is your visual brain circuitry involved in the imagination, perhaps even generating the image in your mind's eye? Perhaps, but this doesn't answer the question. If we're nothing but our perceptions, then what the heck is that imaginary table that I'm visualizing quite well while there's no perception of an actual table? What are the physical laws characterizing such mind's eye objects, somehow coupled to ordinary physical matter and yet not of the same "stuff"?
Models like the one linked don't explain why SE exists in the universe. They posit certain physical/mathematical strucutures and claim that if this or that structure is present, then ta-da there is SE (or the illusion of it, which is the same thing). People in the stone age had a model of that kind: "this piece of matter, structured with two arms and legs - it's conscious". At some point we developed language and the model got a bit more precise by demanding the piece of matter emit certain sounds from a specific location on their body. What we have today is no different in kind. We've just become more precise at locating the pieces of human matter to verify the presence of conciousness (or illusions). None of that says why that configuration of neurons experiences or has illusions, only that it does. Science tells us that experience is in the nature of certain pieces of matter and we just have to accept that without further explanation, like the fact that electric charge exists and follows certain rules. Deeper "why" answers are out of the scope of current science.
I've explained this elsewhere, but will repeat here: this argument relies on a definition of "illusion" that begs the question on the existence of a subject, just like Descartes. Define illusion as "a perception that directly entails a false conclusion", and there is no subject needed, and no hard problem remains.
It's like you're asking me to explain the dinosaur you saw while you were hallucinating. Sure, I agree we should explore the biochemistry and neurology involved in dream-like states that yield distorted perceptions that imply false conclusions about reality. Let's not go so far as to posit that those distorted perceptions are real if there's no corroborating evidence of their existence.
No, it's not like that at all. We're not discussing the dinosaur. We're discussing the existence of hallucinations (and SE in general). The dinosaur is irrelevant; the fact that it was possible to have the experience is the central question.
Again, this comes back to my fundamental argument with Dennett (and one that he graciously conceded in an email back in the 90s; not sure he would do so now): trying to figure out what it is that we are conscious of, rather than how we are conscious of anything at all. I'm 110% ready to concede that everything we are conscious of is an illusion, an error, a projection, an intent-laden stance etc. I'm 110% ready to concede that everything we think we experience as a "self" is wrong.
None of that helps to explain how experience is possible. So you're either denying that SE exists, or like Dennett insisting that mysterious SE can be explained by non-mysterious stuff.
I think that's incorrect, as it relies on a definition of "illusion" that begs the question on the existence of a subject, just like Descartes. Define illusion as "a perception that directly entails a false conclusion", and there is no subject needed.
> I think he wants it to be possible that you can somehow experience things in a non-mysterious way, and this this non-mysterious experience explains the mysterious experience stuff. I think he's wrong.
No, what he's saying is that there is no "you" to experience anything, there are only scattered but correlated thoughts that are stitched together in a way that produces a false conclusion that there is a "you".
There is no "conclusion" here in the sense of "2+2=4". What is at stake is not a reasoned, or evidential analysis of how the world is. It is, rather, that subjective experience exists (we know it exists because we have subjective experience, and whether the experience is of something invented and false does not change the fact that the experience exists).
Regardless of whether there is a singular "you" or, in Minsky's term, a "society of mind" (or self, to line up with Dennett a little more), something enjoys subjective experience, and you call that that "you". It doesn't really matter how it arises, whether it accurately reflects the operations of the brain/body: the existence of subjective experience creates a self.
What is in dispute here is what "subjective experience" means. If we both agree that "subjective experience" is a phenomenon that can in principle be captured by a third person objective description, then we can agree that it exists and that our observations are actually evidence of its existence.
But this is not what most people mean by this term, and it is that term that is a fiction on the eliminativist view.
Now we get to the heart of it (and the reason why consciousness is and has been such a difficult problem): I do not agree that this is true.
> Some of them — Dennett is a prime example — are so in thrall to the fundamental intuition of dualism, the intuition that the experiential and the physical are utterly and irreconcilably different, that they are prepared to deny the existence of experience, more or less (c)overtly, because they are committed to physicalism, i.e. physicSalism.
> "‘They are prepared to deny the existence of experience.’ At this we should stop and wonder. I think we should feel very sober, and a little afraid, at the power of human credulity, the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith. For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy. It falls, unfortunately, to philosophy, not religion, to reveal the deepest woo-woo of the human mind. I find this grievous, but, next to this denial, every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.
[1]: https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Reali...
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
I don't think SE is exclusive to humans, but only humans talk about it, as far as we know.
This view is a bit closed-minded, if you ask me. You may also find that exploring those questions reveals something that you could never have imagined beforehand. You may end up finding out that consciousness is not the illusion, but everything else we perceive is.
Let me send this ball straight back to you.
In the morning when you wake up what happens? You might take something to eat. How would you find the kitchen, how would you recognise the food, or even know you need it? Of course, you are conscious. That's how.
It is possible to be conscious because otherwise your body wouldn't be able to survive. It's essential for avoiding death. We are self replicators in a limited resource environment, after all. This balance between self replication and death evolved consciousness as an evolutionary advantage.
Being exposed to your internal and external environment is the source of consciousness. Even a single cell can seek nutrients or avoid bad places, or decide when to replicate, it has a rudiment of consciousness. But panpsychism? It's one step away from new age babble. Stones are just stones.
This is why I think the hard problem of consciousness is silly and only exists because language is so imperfect that philosophers have invented a problem which they can't even decide is actually a problem or not. Can any of us even agree on what an "experience" is?
You can tell this is so because every conversation about the hard problem of consciousness starts off by trying to convince people there is a problem to talk about and use the same tired examples. We can "experience" red. There is an "experience" of being a bat.
A piece of material is not conscious because it doesn't need to. You see, bacterias are self replicators, humans too. And self replication is resource intensive, while resources are limited. So life becomes a competition. That is why agents need to become more attuned to their state and possible actions and outcomes.
Is that good enough to be called consciousness? Taking sensory inputs, representing your state, taking actions, observing effect, learning from it. Your goal - to exist, to make copies of yourself. If you're not aware of essential information, or don't understand your situation, you die. If you live, it's because you are aware.
It's not interacting with anything else to make those decisions, it's completely autonomous.
> observing effect, learning from it
If something is meaningfully doing that, then we're getting to consciousness. But I'll note that I don't count natural selection as "learning" here.
And observing the results of decisions and learning is not mandatory to survive and reproduce.
It is about having subjective experience aka "qualia". It is about "it being like something to be you", contrasted with, e.g. being a rock (which most people agree, it is not like anything to be).
You are assuming “you” is a unique, atomic thing here.
When your fingers curl due to being immersed in water (which is a neurological thing, not a physical thing!), your conscious mind does not experience the humidity, the finger curling system does. You just experience the effect of the skin curling through sight and touch, afterwards.
There are several other systems in our body that react to an environment that we are barely conscious of, and “barely” is being generous. Those seems like a counterexample of your “we can't not be conscious if we experience”.
The problem is yet again w/ the definition of having an experience, as I said in my reply to the parent. It's just language, and the reason why we find ourselves in some kind of linguistic paradox trying to explain it.
ps. interesting user name.
What makes my experience of seeing red any more special than the experience of a plant reacting to light? The fact that I can type about it on hackernews and the plant can't?
You are apparently a believer in some degree of panpyschism. That's fine. Conscious is like gravity - it's just a part of the universe and there's no explanation for it other than that it is experienced by anything with (mass, for gravity ; ??? for consciousness).
I'm not opposed to this explanation, I'm just not (yet) convinced that it's the right one.
I agree philosophical zombies are impossible, but only because they wouldn't be able to reliably talk about consciousness without a conscious "zombie master". See https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/zombies-sequence
Besides having a way to copy what it learns into the future, self replication also provides a goal, a guiding force - of course, the goal is to avoid death before replication. Another great quality of self replication is its open-endedness. It can become anything as long as it keeps replicating.
For these three qualities I consider self replication the basic process behind consciousness. They create the means by which open ended learning can evolve.
False, we can program a roomba to seek out electricity to ‘survive’. E.g. zombies
I say that because of that's what I best understand the neocortex doing (it does that and probably something more). If you buy in what the Numenta people are talking about, then certain neurons in your neocortex configure themselves to be able to predict their inputs better, so they start to form a model of their input. In aggregate, these neurons probably start to learn multiple sequential models of their input.
My guess it that these models in the brain interact with each other. I think some of the larger models that the brain models is us (individually), the environment we find ourselves in, our mind, how we relate to it, the 3D space that we find ourselves in, and such.
This is a simulation to explain what is going on "out there" (the physical world) so that the physical organism can successfully navigate "out there".
This simulated world, body, and such, is what is "real" to us.
This is debatable. If you subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, then it makes sense as an avenue to the answer.
At this point, I'm not willing to regard consciousness as something like gravity or the weak force, though I concede that it could turn out that way.
Information might be a small piece, and it might be the thing itself, but it's the only tangible avenue we have to pursue, so I don't think it's a matter of them answering or discussing a different question, I think it's them framing the same question with slightly different assumptions.
I don't see how we can be said to know this, certainly not at this point in human investigation of consciousness.
It is only through direct inspection of one's own internal experience that it becomes apparent consciousness is not an illusion. Therefore those who claim consciousness is an illusion are not in fact conscious.
Those who say it is emergent are perhaps conscious but have not looked carefully enough to understand that consciousness is an entirely different category of thing to physical reality.
The problem here is that science as a system of thought operates in a kind of space separate from the space of conscious experience. The intelligence born of that scientific process which is a kind of entity that exists in it's own right - is not itself conscious and hence cannot introspect correctly about consciousness.
So when a person is operating in the mode of scientific thinking they are in a sense embodying that disembodied intelligence that is not aware. Or at least it is not able to introspect about it's own awareness. And so they draw incorrect and non-sensical conclusions that fly in the face of everyone's direct visceral experience.
It really is quite a phenomena.
To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. This is not a scientifically rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the other side seriously.
As a younger guy, I read Dennet and mistook him for a serious thinker. Then I read his rebuttals of his opponents and all he did was accuse them of 'residual christianity' and make profane acrostic poems. These guys just aren't taking the other side seriously and it's kinda silly honestly.
Yeah. IIRC, some people say the passage of time is an illusion too. It's pretty hard for me to take seriously anyone who defends their favored theory or interpretation by hand-waving away contrary but fundamental observations as illusions.
Well, as the article says, the brain makes top-down predictions about our future. So the experience of time is a controlled illusion updated frequently with sense data.
At best, this is doing nothing to actually explain - it has no value. 'Well yes, consciousness is difficult to understand because of an error in our reasoning' . It's almost circular reasoning ... you're explaining mental phenomena with mental phenomena.
Dennett doesn't dismiss the difficulty of the problem, he just dismisses that the difficulty is where people think it is. For instance, he would fully agree that the brain is insanely complex and just elaborating how information processing works will be very, very challenging. His opponents then say from this position of ignorance on how this works, "but even if you explain all of this, there's still something left to explain!"
Is there really though? How could they possibly know this? It's a classic god of the gaps argument/argument from ignorance that theists use to cling to their deities or support intelligent design, hence "residual christianity". After all of this time debating consciousness, the very best arguments we have for qualia that cannot be captured mechanistically are thought experiments that are easily dismissed as circular (and which Dennett has ably deconstructed to show their vacuousness).
Frankly, I find Dennett's rebuttals are brutally logical and pragmatic.
Those of us who do have SE, and have recognized it, know something the zombies cannot know: that SE must exist.
Because subjective awareness is not a perception, they're two entirely different kinds of of concepts. Equating the two would seems stranger to me than equating say the feeling of pain with the concept of a needle. You could convince me both the needle and the pain are illusionary, but not that my experience is. That you seem to be genuinely convinced that subjective experience and our flawed sensory apparatuses are even in the same ballpark implies to me that you probably either do not have that experience, or that unlike in my case, your experience is somehow not connected to the output that typing fingers can produce
Not under eliminative materialism.
> You could convince me both the needle and the pain are illusionary, but not that my experience is.
The ineffability of the experience of the pain is the qualia that needs explanation, the rest are all compatible with mechanistic explanations. It is the ineffable quality that disappears under any serious scrutiny.
Edit: if you want to understand how eliminativism can work scientifically, I suggested reading this paper:
The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness, http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
An analogy for tech nerds would be how the illusion of multitasking on a single CPU machine arises from imperceptibly fast context switching. Something similar happens in that theory, where our perceptual faculties are constantly switching between perceptual signals from our internal representation of the world, and the perceptual signals from our senses.
That true statement is definitely not an argument in favor SE; it would be of no evidentiary value to a zombie, for example.
If and when you, naasking, have SE and recognize it: it's existence will then be impossible to doubt.
Of course the zombie would pretend they experience SE and some will even loudly disagree with the referenced article.
Overall, He does dismiss the hard problem, calling it stage magic. This is exactly the tactic you might imagine an intelligent man would use after having spent a lifetime to fail to explain anything meaningful.
Because it is stage magic given his theory of mind, which he elaborated 30 years ago. I would certainly like to see these insults though if you could provide a citation.
Sometimes I think people have some intuitive sense of how things ought to work but but they can't reconcile it with physics description of the world. For example, how is it possible that a physical system such as a brain can have experiences, such as colors, love, objects, music, etc.
I think the simplest answer to that conundrum is that, yes, physical systems can not have these sorts of experiences, they do not follow from the theories or descriptions. But what you can do instead is simulate a world with such magical qualities. This is what I think some parts of the brain do, is to simulate the world that we personally find ourselves in.
Then the real question is how does the brain do that? How does it work? What are its learning rules? What does it end up learning?
My guess is that it ends up describing this universe (including ourselves) that we find ourselves in.
Why? You could imagine that the signals coming into the brain from the rest of the body are just a bit array that is changing all the time. What does it mean? That's for the brain to find out, so it's always in the process of making and updating predictive models of its input. Why? So that the biological robot that you are in control of navigate successfully in the physical world and meet the needs of the organism, e.g. eat food, drink water, keep itself in the right temperature, keep itself from being harmed, and such.
1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific when scrutinized closely.
2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist. These arguments often feel like semantic nitpicking, and employ the word "illusion" as though it's somehow useful for explaining why you experience.
My pet criteria for whether a statement about consciousness is useful is: "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else?" To me, this feels like a tangible measurement for how materially useful a claim about consciousness might be. An example is literature on "Split-Brain" patients (such as https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a).
edit: Another category to be wary of is:
3) Claims that we cannot understand consciousness. Usually these boil down to "how can consciousness understand itself?". Poetic and poignant, but not particularly useful or scientifically grounded.
Then again claiming something is an illusion is usually less than helpful. Colour is an illusion of sorts (or a qualia if we're being technical), but 'colour is an illusion' is an unhelpful answer to the question 'why is the sky blue?'.
Wait, what? Why do you suppose that you can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else, can you elaborate on that? The split-brain patients are cases with presumably separate consciousnesses that are not merged and AFAIK never get merged, especially after corpus callosotomy which would make it physically impossible, wouldn't it?
According to the literature, when the corpus callosum is severed, it appears that the verbal part of the patient loses conscious access to parts of their body. However, those lost parts continue functioning independently, and are able to communicate non-verbally.
Put another way, it seems plausible that a conscious system is split into two conscious systems. This could imply the corpus callosum is involved in unifying conscious systems.
This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious decision-making. When you're hurting, your body doesn't want you to start weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action, it wants you to deal with the injury right now. That is the reason that pain feels very different -- much more urgent and harder to ignore -- than (say) getting a text message informing you that you have been hurt.
This is why it takes effort to do something like ignore pain, say no to candy bars, etc.
Just as an example... Imagine somebody with PTSD. Let's say they get a text message that suggests to them, even indirectly, that their trauma is about to repeat. They may feel pretty intense physical danger and an urgency to intervene that makes no logical sense.
This is called instinct. It is evolutionary mechanism so you don't have to think what to do when you are getting hurt and your life is in danger. You react instantaneously.
That quote is not about conscious decision making, it's about how the experience of pain motivates action that is adaptive to survival. If pain didn't feel like anything, but was instead just some light bulb that went off in your head, your ancestors could easily ignore it to their evolutionary detriment.
Therefore it makes sense that pain feels like something you want to avoid so it's not something you can just ignore without considerable effort.
But parts of your body might be sending pain signals into the brain for which there are no automatic actions for, e.g. you are in a sauna and it's too much.
The state of the simulation that you are in is updated with this pain signal. So, now, you might experience discomfort in the sauna and it is repellent so you might want to construct an action plan to move away from the source that is causing the pain (the fact you're in a sauna). But you might want to resist that for a moment and ignore the pain, maybe you have another conflicting goal which is to try to stay longer in the sauna than you're used to. Eventually the discomfort and pain might become overwhelming so you move out of the sauna.
The article poses this question, but leaves it unanswered.
For me it begs the question: If conscousness is bound to a location, is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? Is there some kind of thing we did not yet detect? What happens when you die or someone is born?
Or maybe, we all (humans, animals and things) share a single consciousness and for each Planck time duration switch through all of them without knowing?
I love to think about stuff like this, but are those questions even answerable?
Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull.
Why are you inside your body and not someone else's? Because your brain is inside your body and not someone else's.
Is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? transfer, no, because consciousness is inextricably linked to the brain. There's no separation between the hardware and the "software."
What happens when you die or someone is born? Nothing. No afterlife, to karma, no reincarnation, no bardo, nothing.
And finally, are those questions even answerable?
Yes, I believe they are, but many people are uncomfortable with the ramifications of the answer as best supported by available evidence - we are purely physical beings existing within a purely physical universe. Despite all of the evidence from biology, neurology, chemistry, physics, etc. failing to show any credible evidence of a supernatural or non-biological component of consciousness apart from the brain, many people keep hoping someone will discover the soul someday and be free of the prison of material reality.
Still, you and I can probably agree to some extent, that there is an inner eye inside of our heads looking outside. It also makes sense to me, that those processes could spawn from a feedback loop inside of a brain. Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this head we are in? There are 8 billion heads, why this one?
I'm not arguing for a soul or something. But I find it intruiging, that there had to be a mechanism which made your inner eye spawn at the place, where it now is. Only, what mechanism? Can it be explained physically? In my opinion it has to be, but maybe we missed it up to now
I get what you are saying, but honestly that question doesn't make sense. You are this one because that is how your brain developed.. just like you physically look how you are because of how your body developed. To say "why am I how I am" to me is no different than "why do I look this way?"
>Can it be explained physically?
Well.. if I smash you in the head with a hammer, your "consciousness" would most likely be affected because I damaged your brain, right? Seems pretty straightforward that we can indirectly say that yes it can be explained physically. We may not be able to explain the details.. but seems like we can say it's just simply what our brain evolved to do. Just like how our physical looks evolved for various reasons / chance.
I guess it would be interesting to look at why it persists through sleep. And whether there were ever instances of people who wake up with different personalities. Also edge cases around coma/near-death restarts.
Or maybe things work like coroutines, and no matter which thread you get assigned to the state is all in the context. I mean it looks like that is 99.9% the case given what we know about memory formation, physical brain structures etc.
You're asking questions equivalent to "why does the interior of a box happen to bind to that particular piece of folded cardboard? And why is the same interior there when the box is closed and reopened?"
If each brain has a consciousness, and each is uniquely generated by that brain, the 'binding' and 'sticking' questions go away.
to me, the answer is because you were born with that one.
Maybe it's better to think about how your FPV consciousness didn't exist prior to your birth. It came into being when you came into being. I don't think there's a separation between your FPV consciousness and physical brain. If your metabolism stops your FPV consciousness stops
That is unknowable though. You may just not remember it. Is memory what makes consciousness?
I don't mean to be rude, but you are flat out wrong here.. you are not accepting the "simplicity" of what is actually happening- you want to make it something complicated and metaphysical, which is why the explanation doesn't do it for you.
>me, because there is only one brain that has my FPV consciousness. Why this particular one?
Well.. why do you look the way you do? Why doesn't everyone look exactly the same? Because there are tiny bits of random evolution/changes in our biological bodies. The same is happening in the brain- no one has exactly the same functioning brain. You have your FPV consciousness because that's the one you have.
If you are looking for some other answer.. then it's just philosophical nonsense at some point. It's like saying "Why does Uranus look the way it does, while Neptune looks different?". It's just what happened.. if Uranus and Neptune switched how they looked to us from the beginning, you would never know and be asking the same question that doesn't make sense.
Look, the bottom line is we need to understand how the phenomenon works so we can replicate it and harness it. My thinking may or may not be wrong, but what's certain is that it's not testable. Can't wait for an explanation that is :-)
If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way.
We... need it be said... cannot. We can't even describe what consciousness is in a way it can be measured or analyzed. We can make things that do things, sure. We can even impart some of our own "consciousness" into these doer machines like robots. But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat, or a bat, or whatever.
> Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull.
We might as well ask: why is software in a robot the way it is? Because the software is on that CPU in that physical case over there. It's a non-answer and a diversion. Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there are many questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and also what the nature of that consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s) different than the material reality of the electrons pumping through silicon.
I wasn't claiming the problem of consciousness as a whole was trivial, rather the specific questions being asked in the above comment become trivial when a biological origin of consciousness is assumed.
> But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat, or a bat, or whatever.
This isn't entirely true. We've studied the brain and the relationship between the brain and consciousness for decades. We may not understand exactly how consciousness arises in the brain, or even why it exists, but there is absolutely a pile of evidence that consciousness is something the brain creates and that it doesn't exist apart from the brain.
>Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there are many questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and also what the nature of that consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s) different than the material reality of the electrons pumping through silicon.
If you want to be pedantic, software isn't ever transferred, only copied.
Also, while the "brain as computer" metaphor is tempting, I think it's also misleading. Decades of failure to produce a general AI demonstrate how alien one architecture is from another. Brains just don't operate enough like computers for comparisons of biological consciousness to software to be meaningful.
And that 'layer of representation' is an illusion. There are no 1s and 0s separate from the material reality of electrons and silicon, that's an entirely human abstraction that doesn't exist in the hardware, certainly not at the physical level where quantum effects become relevant and everything is just a charge that does or doesn't meet a tolerance.
But unless there are complementary answers, they're trivial in the "useless" sense. They (1) don't provide any explanatory power, and (2) may very well be wrong--because as we've established--we have no clue.
It's of the same argumentative caliber as the anthropic principle: "Well, we're here because that's just the way we do things here in UniverseCorp."
I too could assume that consciousness is due to a particularly fascinating arrangement of angels dancing on physical atomic pins. I could say that every person is localized to a certain angel, or maybe a soul, and vociferously call it trivial because if you assume this thing then it naturally follows. But I don't want to assume that thing because that thing is totally useless at describing anything. Which is still where we are with consciousness, and the history of science is filled with whiplash and disappointment at finding older more primitive beliefs were more "true."
> There are no 1s and 0s separate from the material reality of electrons and silicon, that's an entirely human abstraction that doesn't exist in the hardware
There are 1s and 0s that are going across the world right now from you to me, and they're being transferred into electrons and photons and who knows what else afterwards. They may be emergent phenomena, but they exist, just like molecules exist as combinations of atoms: they have rules, those rules are exact and can be understood. Those rules are also not materially real, and yet they can be made immanent. We as tiny humans have built a real system where we have separated representation from reality, and we have not yet determined whether The Universe (TM) has made a comparable innovation.
It's easy to say, that believing in a soul or something like it is hogwash, but just closing your eyes and telling yourself "I think and therefore I am" does not bring us any closer to an answer.
We have to assume that all unfalsifiable arguments could be true until we have proof, that they are incorrect. That is the only scientific approach.
What if we can transplant the brain itself? The consciousness is still contained in and created by the same brain, but every other part of the experience (sensory input) are from another body effectively transferring consciousness between bodies.
A similar feeling is present when flying FPV drones. A good pilot typically feels like they are the drone. Your mind immediately separates the drone from the rest of the environment because it responds to your control input and matches visual perception.
Obviously it does make people uncomfortable talking like this.. I don't understand why, I guess they are scared of the simple truth that we are simply the most evolved animals on our planet- but still animals. There is nothing special about our brain (compared to other species), it's just a bit more advanced. And we have physical features that have basically allowed us to take advantage of our brain power and continue to grow.
We are animals. So anyone who wants to talk about consciousness being on something like a 'soul' or whatever better be just as prepared to talk about how my cat also has a soul.. and dolphins have a soul.. and why is this dolphin's consciousness in dolphin A instead of dolphin B.
I think the truth is a lot less interesting than people want to believe..
This is funny because the reason why I cannot prove you that I am conscious _in_ _addition_ _to_ being a body governed by the rules of physics, is the same reason why I believe consciousness is metaphysical.
Qed :)
Technically, the burden of proof lies with the one making an assertion.
> Obviously it does make people uncomfortable talking like this
And people talking like this often get uncomfortable if someone doesn't accept their opinions as fact. People are weird in the most wonderful ways!
> I think the truth is a lot less interesting than people want to believe.
And also a lot more difficult to find than it seems, the nature of consciousness being what it is.
That's a failure to appreciate the beauty, complexity and wonders of our brains, bodies and environment. No effort on appreciating, but still wanting to feel special. Thus, consciousness simply has to have a supernatural element. It wouldn't be fun otherwise.
The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside of the order of nature, not that which is only explicitly tangible. Natural laws are human-created abstractions which explain the observed behaviors of the natural world, which by definition makes them natural, not supernatural.
Natural laws exist without humans, unless one believes the universe disappears without the human to collapse the wave function.
Nature follows these laws, so the laws are abstractly outside of nature.
Natural laws are observed within nature, which makes them a part of nature. To claim that natural laws are supernatural simply because they're abstractions, and that consciousness is therefore supernatural regardless of its nature, is absurd. It's a rhetorical cheat, not an argument.
Sure enough, we know consciousness is tied mainly to the body (and the brain in particular, but not only). It starts and ends with it, it changes with every small change of it. They are just one "thing", two sides of the same coin, it seems.
The problem is, and it's very not a trivial one, that we can know the physical world and our body that is part of it, but for all we know about that physical world, consciousness is not required. It's like it's added on top for no good reason. We can feel the world and make sense of it, up to a point where we have a good understanding of how the whole observable universe kind of works, but we couldn't do better, if we had to describe consciousness to a distant relative from another universe, than to say "so around here we have matter and space and time, and they act like this and that, according to those equations, and when this kind of particule enter the vincinity of that one then this happens, etc, oh and by the way, every time you have a piece of matter organized in such a way that it can somehow represents itself and its environment, then this thing feels that it exists independently, and I'm afraid I can't explain what feeling feels like, you have to be conscious to understand, sorry".
You could say that we know how physics works but not why, and similarly we know how consciousness works but not why. But that would be inaccurate, because what we know about the "how" of consciousness is actually the "how" of behavior. We know nothing about the "how" of conscious experience; for instance we know how pain works at the level of individual neurons and how it leads to some macroscopic behavior, but we have no clue how this relates to (not using "cause" because it's certainly not causal) an experience of pain, and what the subject of that experience is, or if there is only one or many such subjects, or how independent these subjects are from each others, etc...
They're also fairly trivial if you imagine God created and controls everything and that's just the way it is.
> What happens when you die or someone is born? Nothing. No afterlife, to karma, no reincarnation, no bardo, nothing.
It's certainly plausible. But is it true?
> And finally, are those questions even answerable?
> Yes, I believe they are, but many people are uncomfortable with the ramifications of the answer as best supported by available evidence - we are purely physical beings existing within a purely physical universe. Despite all of the evidence from biology, neurology, chemistry, physics, etc. failing to show any credible evidence of a supernatural or non-biological component of consciousness apart from the brain, many people keep hoping someone will discover the soul someday and be free of the prison of material reality.
Similarly, many people are uncomfortable with acknowledging that what is actually true about these matters. There seem to be certain ideas that make all people fundamentally nervous, and the question of consciousness seems to be one of the most powerful ones.
With meditation, you can get a clearer sense of what is really 'you', and what is just being observed/experienced by 'you'. But 'you' are not your body, or your thoughts, or your memories, or your feelings. Distilled, the 'you' of all living things could well be exactly the same - it is just what is fed to them by the hardware differs.
But I'm not very trained in this topic, so I'm not sure what I am saying its coherent, but I like and agree with Antonio Damasio's perspective and I find it refreshing. That is where my comment is coming from.
Ha ha, without eyes, ears, tactile, and the rest of senses what would be left? Brain a in vat, is THAT the real you?
The self is an actor in a game, you are your game, not the "observer", a weird concept if I may say so. As if it is not related to the game it observes. Its very existence is on the line, though, one missed observation and it could be dead. You are the actor, not the observer, because you got skin in the game.
Set an alarm on your phone for 10 minutes. Sit down in a quiet room. Close your eyes. Your goal is to observe the physical sensations produced by natural breathing in your nose for the 10 minutes. Give it your full attention and not miss a single breath, and really feel how each breath in and out feels at the tip of your nose as the air passes it. Easy, right?
Except you will probably find that before long, instead of having your attention on the breath like you fully intended, your attention will be on some thoughts. Where did the thoughts come from? Were 'you' thinking them? Or did the thoughts just arise and steal your attention, despite YOU fully intending to be paying attention to the breath for the 10 minutes? What is then your relationship to 'your' thoughts?
When you meditate you let your generator run free and unrestricted or try to quiet it, while the critic should stop from interfering. By lacking its interference you just sit without an explicit goal. You're not achieving anything, you have no purpose. Just being.
That is nice to do sometimes, I think it's a very artistic perception, but insufficient for the requirements of life. In life you need to engage the critic, you need to construct your solutions. The meditation experience is like some kinds of music, sports and art, a nice thing to cultivate, but not the pinnacle of consciousness.
Consciousness has a really important job to do, it fights for its own existence, it creates consciousness. Nobody else is going to help it if it doesn't help itself.
edit: i suppose a counter point would be sensory deprivation tanks should reduce your consciousness however most report it to be enhanced during the experience.
This seems no more puzzling or interesting than asking why your web browser is running on your computer rather than mine. Of course the computation must be contained within the computational system that's running it.
This seems definitionally incoherent, on the level of "if I had been Shakespeare, who would he have been?"
If "you" were "in" "someone else's" body... you'd be them, not you.
From what I can best tell, consciousness is a property or a set of simulated properties, I don't really know what it is and I guess we won't have good answers for it until we will be able to properly simulate something like a brain and have better brain theories to explain it.
But the world you find yourself is a simulation, and your body is simulated. Everything you consciously experience is simulated. This simulation is running inside your brain. Part of your brain is trying to explain its input so it makes models to predict its inputs. I think it learns a model of your body, and your mind, and how these thing relate to each other and how they relate to what you experience "out there".
> I love to think about stuff like this, but are those questions even answerable?
Yes. (I think so)
It probably is but I wouldn't be so sure it is. I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an intuitive guess.
> we have the ineffable experience of being alive in this world
The experience of being, and the experience of attributes like "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separate things. AFAIK the latter even is attributed to specific parts of the brain scientifically and it's known these can be broken. I certainly feel like "I am" but I have no idea of whether I am alive and in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm clock rings. I feel my being and also have visual perception but judgement/semantics in what I see emerges 0.5-10 seconds later.
>> in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm clock rings.
Do you actually believe those are real, other worlds? I'm tempted to, sometimes. But if they are, it's more an argument that consciousness is real and something even grander than we acknowledge, if it can flip states and universes like that.
Logically this depends of how do you define a world. Even if you imagine them as parallel universes with physics similar or mindboggingly dissimilar to that of our world, you can still say there is just one world in which all these sub-worlds exist. So, talking seriously I wouldn't say there are other worlds or there are not. I would just say "observable world" and assume there are many things beyond what we can comprehend or imagine. Even if we agree, just for the sake of argument, that the very consciousness itself is not a product of the material brain, our abilities to perceive, memorize and reason surely are and this way have limitations. Believing these limitations don't render us futile in trying to understand all the phenomena of existing universe and their nature seems absurdly naïve to me.
Practically I just mean I have no idea (or even question) about the world or anything the moment I wake up. As soon as I wake up I feel like "I am" but not "I am in this world". The idea of where I am comes after a variable non-zero delay.
>> Believing these limitations don't render us futile in trying to understand all the phenomena of existing universe and their nature seems absurdly naïve to me.
I don't so much agree. Yes, "all the phenomena" may never be understandable. But if I think about the cognitive ability we have now (to look at a star and understand it's plasma; what plasma is; to see that the sun rises and know we are rotating on an axis while orbiting it; to be able to visualize where we are on that axis and plane; to move electrons around tiny circuits, create images and sound by controlling these things we can't see) it seems to me that you could have looked at humans 10,000 years ago and thought they would never be able to understand these things, but we're not very different from them. I'm less pessimistic on it. I think if we have another 10,000 years we'll probably be quite good at understanding the universe. Maybe even the universe of dreams?
Yes, you can have the former without the latter - it's a key component of attaining "enlightenment" or "stream entry", which is perhaps most feasibly achieved through vipassana meditation. This gives you a reasonably direct experience of anatta or "non-self" (where 'self' actually means something like personal identity and the attributes thereof, not phenomenological experience per se).
My best guess is qualia and consciousness are like an EM field, something that exists and has some relationship with known physical entities but is distinct at the same time. It may be amplified by, say, some computational structure, but exists independent of it.
At one time I had convinced myself that qualia were related to time, in the sense that it was the "substantive" manifestation of time as a dimension, but now I'm not sure what I was thinking.
I suspect in the end consciousness will end up in the domain of physics rather than neurobiology and psychology alone.
"what one might term the scientific world view" is great and very practical but not perfect. There certainly are legitimate questions it probably has no way to address.
I feel pretty skeptical about exploring the nature of consciousness without employing techniques available in Buddhism, psychonetics[1] or something like that. These are fundamentally unscientific (although not imaginary - execution of the practices can be easily detected with EEG) but can at least let us observe the object of the study with at least some basic degree of objectivity, reason about it and do something useful with it.
This intuition, that there is something special and unique about what 'we' are, is baked into our brains by many thousands of years of evolution, and this makes it so extremely difficult for us to believe that there's nothing more to us then a bunch of molecules. This is why people have invented theories about souls, reincarnation, collective consciousness and what not.
We may be relying too heavily on the basis that our experience and our sense of being are a combination that begets consciousness; when they may just as likely be separate systems.
What do you mean by still "me"? If I lose an arm, I would definitely say I have lost a part of "me".
> What's the difference between me and a perfect imitation?
As far as I can tell, there is no difference until you begin to interact with the outside world, at which point the "yous" are no longer the same. Your body is constantly replacing itself with new parts and molecules to keep your brain and body functioning. This effectively means you are building a new copy of yourself all the time.
Why does it bother you if another process does it all at once? Does gradually replacing all of what is "you" make you feel better about "you" versus some ability to make it all at once and see it happening?
> I believe I am going to remain where I was if someone just makes an atom-perfect copy of mine and puts it near so the copy will probably have exactly the same memories I have and believe it is me but will not be me actually.
The other argument is that the "clone" you will very vigorously also try to defend it's "me" status since you are perfect copies, and it will claim that it is it's own "me" brought about not by birth, but by artificial means and claim it has the exact same rights as you would. It didn't choose the path of "birth", but if you are perfect clones, why does it have any less right to the life it believes it has that you do? Because you were "born naturally"? What if you made the clone for spare body parts and through a misstep, the clone woke up. I would argue the clone has the right to your life now for gross human rights violations if it so chooses while you would head off to prison hopefully wihtout parole.
Still, if you take the set H of properties of humans and the set B of the properties of all other Earth creatures, you'll find that H is a proper subset of B. What makes humans 'unique' in the regard you mean isn't kind, but scale and combination.
To me, embodiment such and such seems pseudoscientific. How is it possible at this point in time that anything inside your pinky toe might be influencing the activity of your brain without sending nerve signals to the brain or secreting something into its surrounding which might eventually signal the brain? By some spooky magic?
If you think of Consciousness as the thing that is first and which creates all the rest, it answers a lot of hard questions - questions like why is it so hard to even define Consciousness?
Or weird paradoxes in QM.
Or things like: why do we all share the present moment?
Once you start to see Consciousness as the foundation of everything, it all makes a lot more sense. Everything fits together much more easily.
A lot of religions have also come to this conclusion.
There is a book called Biocentrism by Robert Lanza, which I thought was really good and went into details about this.
I think it's much more likely that consciousness is a result of brain activity. For example, if consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe, why don't I have any reliable access to what is going on except partially in my immediate vicinity? Also, how can it create such a wonderfully consistent world out there and I can not reliably drive to store because my mind is preoccupied and the rest of me goes on autopilot.
I think you would require fewer bits to explain it the other way around.
Also, in humans, I'd presume that consciousness, being introspectable, relates to our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors, and those of others, in symbolic terms and express them with language. It's how we close the circle between thinking and "I think".
(I agree with the article that people vastly overestimate the mystery of consciousness.)
PS: I think consciousness being introspectable is very underrated. We can perceive memories of perception, we can feel nostalgic for having felt a certain way in the past, and we can realize and name that we are doing this. The "reentrancy" of consciousness is a core aspect of our cognitive and strategic flexibility.
This is maybe just a matter of definition, but I find it highly unlikely that that scenario exists. "Seeing" a predator already requires so much higher-level processing (not just the visual cues, but the analysis and classification) that I find it unlikely the animal does not have a working distinction between intra-body and outside-world sensations.
The problem with defining "consciousness" is that we do not have reliable inter-species communication to compare notes between species, so our definition of consciousness itself is hampered by the ability to communicate that sense of consciousness to each other. Already in your post, there's seven different interpretations of what "consciousness" could actually mean:
- ability to recall past experiences ("emotions", "memory")
- awareness of the self ("impulses", "selfhood")
- ability to conceive experiences that do not correspond with sensory inputs ("imagination")
- meta-awareness of instinctual reactions ("if it knows that it's scared because of the predator")
- introspection ("our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors")
- empathy ("and those of others")
- communicating our sense of self to others ("express them with language")
Personally, I think we should assume that all animal species possess the first four, all large mammals can do the first five, and many species have the ability to do the sixth (it's been proven in dogs, apes, parrots, crows, and dolphins -- and probably others).
To be able to have a hallucination or an illusion, you still need the consciousness experiencing that. Explain that consciousness.
> I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't.
You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik), and it's behavior that makes organisms more capable
Replace "illusion" with "perception" and it will make a lot more sense.
Consciousness does obviously exist in one form or another, but when people think intuitively about consciousness they imagine it as an actor. A little guy in your head that looks at the world and makes decisions.
That's the illusion. That "little guy", that "self", isn't the one doing the work, your brain is the one doing the work. The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself.
Just like photons hitting your eyeballs might be interpreted as cats and dogs out there in the world, the brain interprets or perceives whatever it is doing internally as a "self".
> You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik)
Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world.
That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Though I think there are many different interpretations and definitions for the word consciousness so we might be talking about a different one.
> Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world.
A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do
Well, which part doesn't it explain? It's pretty conclusive as far as I am concerned. As among other things, you can explain why philosophers would even ask that question in the first place.
> A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do
And transistors just go on and off, yet people still spend years studying computer science. The existence of simple mechanism at one level doesn't prevent higher order mechanism at another, quite the opposite. Those cells aren't going to do much replicating when you get killed by a tiger, some awareness of yourself and the environment helps prevent that.
It doesn't explain how consciousness emerges from this. Brains/computers/processes can self-reference or self-explain all they want, that still doesn't say how doing so results in having the actual consciousness you experience.
It's not a trivial thing we're talking about here: there could be a brain just executing logic and making decisions, or there could be that same brain but it's actually aware of that fact, not just aware in the sense that it's processing inputs including the inputs from which it can derive that it itself exists, but aware like you are there and the one in that brain.
The only one that you can know for sure has consciousness is yourself, but can you explain why you have it?
If the brain is an electromechanical process that works on its own, and consciousness is just observing it, then it doesn't need this observer, the process already does the same on its own.
But here is the thing: You are not aware of any of this! You are only aware of the world around you and yourself in the form of a high level description. You are aware of cats, dogs, your arms and legs, etc. But that's perception, not processes being magically self aware. You have no clue what your brain is actually doing, that's completely invisible to you.
And that's the illusion. The process you are trying to explain doesn't exist. Consciousness is not processes being self aware. Consciousness is a process that tries to model the world in a way your brain can use to make sense of the world. And just like it does it with cats and dogs, so does it with itself. The thing you call "yourself" is a perception generated by the brain, it's not a thing that exist and does stuff.
The problem with this model is that it's regarding the brain as a whole as if it's a single processing entity, since that's how we experience it, but physically that's far from the truth: the brain is a highly segmented parallel processing machine and (for as far as I know) there is no clear control hierarchy within the brain to point at a single location to say "this is where [thought/sensation/self] originates".
So my theory is that consciousness is the emergent property of many separate specialized brain areas responding to and interacting with each other: either directly (neuronal links), via the body (flexing a muscle tightens the skin, creating a sensory feedback loop), and through the world (turning your head changes what your eyes perceive).
So speaking in terms of functionality, there is no "brain" as a single entity. The brain is like an ant colony, using hormones and electrical impulses to keep its disparate parts acting in unity. Under this model, consciousness can be defined as the push and pull between these parts, and self-awareness as the consensus model under which the separate parts reached some equilibrium. You won't have problems defining which parts do the observing and which parts are observed: what we "experience" as our mind is the tug-of-war between the processing areas, not the processor activities themselves. And similarly, what we experience as consciousness is the ability of our "mind" to drown out that cacophony and purposefully cede control ("focus") to different brain areas at different times.
Of course, there's no evidence that any of this is true, and there's still plenty of questions about the mechanism through which this would happen, but for me personally this model has allowed me to move on from the vicious cycle of having to first define "brain" in order to define "thought" in order to define "awareness" in order to define "mind" in order to define "self" in order to define "brain".
This is my feeling too. Since the brain is just physical matter arranged a certain way, doing a certain type of processing, I really think it possible that some computer programs we use today are also doing the right kind of processing to grant them a simple subjective inner experience. Of course most programs don’t have a way to tell us if that’s the case, except maybe GPT-3 :)
> are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out
I have evidence for it being the latter: our higher brain functions let us rationalize, to ourselves, the decisions that were deterministically made by our subconscious, so it feels like “you” made the decisions “because you wanted to”. People who have the connection between their brain hemispheres severed can unconsciously reach a decision in one hemisphere, but then consciously rationalize it in the other hemisphere, without having experienced the making of the decision [0]:
>In one example of this kind of test, a picture of a chicken claw was flashed to the left hemisphere and a picture of a snow scene to the right hemisphere. Of the array of pictures placed in front of the subject, the obviously correct association is a chicken for the chicken claw and a shovel for the snow scene. Patient P.S. responded by choosing the shovel with the left hand and the chicken with the right. When asked why he chose these items, his left hemisphere replied `Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed'. Here the left brain, observing the left hand's response, interprets that response in a context consistent with its sphere of knowledge—one that does not include information about the left hemifield snow scene.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106
There's something to making things really "personal" to an individual system having sensations that make it act in its best interest.
Sensations are also very flexible biochemical abstractions and solutions to problems across aeons.
It would have been quite hard for organisms to evolve without such abstractions -- like a worm recoiling in pain and a human quickly rettacting his burnt hand or avoiding certain kinds of people who have hurt him before.
That muddies the water, IMO. We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. The next step is processing, which is somewhat mediated by low-level expectations. This takes place at sub-conscious levels. Conscious perception comes much later, and is obviously more filtered. To call it a hallucination is word play.
Depending on how you define "reality" we only experience a tiny subset of it. We can only see/hear/touch/smell/taste a very restricted universe, only what our "antennas" can detect. In fact I would argue that we experience close to 0% of all of reality. On top of this extremely restricted input our processing of it is imperfect which means some of what we experience has nothing to do with reality.
And in the context of hallucination, what we can't experience doesn't matter.
Additional examples of this include the non-perception of the visual blind spot, how the brain fills in details in the middle of saccades, and how task-specific training causes perceptual differences (eg, thrown baseballs look bigger to professional batters).
Occasionalists believe that in order for cause and effect to work, God has to intercede. This rather elegantly deals with a whole load of theoretical problems around causal realism.
If you were an occasionalist, you might think, if such a thing as a 'god-of-the-gaps' exist, it should be possible to build a device that mimics its powers, a 'god machine'. Such a device would be very useful.
Except, if occasionalism is wrong, and the universe simply doesn't work like that, it's obviously going to be totally impossible to build a machine that replicates the effect, or to understand how the effect could function.
What if consciousness is just another 'god-of-the-gaps', and we can't replicate it or understand it, because it's fundamentally a nonsensical concept?
Then that occasionalist god might interfere and break your machine and maybe break you too for trying to emulate a god.
You can at least scientifically model and test this.
The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world.
There really is only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others.
The above remark gives the key for deciding the way in which solipsism is a truth. (Wittgenstein 1961: 49)
The I makes its appearance in philosophy through the world’s being my world. (Wittgenstein 1961: 80)
Here we can see that solipsism coincides with pure realism, if it is strictly thought out.
The I of solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and what remains is the reality co-ordinate with it.
. . .
I have to judge the world, to measure things.
The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world. (Wittgenstein 1961: 82)
This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out. (Wittgenstein 1961: 85)It's the same kind of hard that stands in the way of programs debugging themselves.
If you zone out, are you still conscious? Or if you are watching a movie and not thinking about yourself, are you still conscious?
Go back a couple billion years before we had life on Earth. There was no life until abiogenesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis) occurred. Somehow, over the course of a couple billion years, self-replicating molecules turns into single-celled life, then multicellular life, and eventually the complex lifeforms we see today.
But...that still doesn't explain consciousness.
To an external observer, a brain is just a very complex set of electrical and chemical reactions. But to that person, there's a consciousness behind it all. But that consciousness can be altered by drugs and physical injury. It calls into question if anybody actually truly has free will, or if a sufficiently advanced computer could perfectly simulate exactly how a person would react to anything given a perfect snapshot of the wiring of their neurons and states of synapses.
I don't know how to define consciousness in a way that couldn't also be applied to a sufficiently advanced AI/AGI.
For sure there isn't one agreed upon definition of consciousness. On the odd occasion I get in a discussion about it, the first thing I say is: what is your definition of consciousness.
I think given a definition of consciousness, it can be discussed and progress can be made explaining that particular definition. But if the two parties don't agree to a definition up front, then it is likely to result in a trainwreck.
And if so, would that simulation still create the subjective experience? Or would it act exactly the same as the real person except the subjective experience never occurs?
On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
PS: I like your P-Zombie joke :D
To answer the hard part.... To be completely honest, I think qualia are dualistic emanations of the One Source of Truth and understanding, and describable as convex optimizations in the kinds of spaces that Incompleteness deals with. I think love and honor are hyperparameters for the hypercomputers that we refer to as our hearts and that simulation is much more likely than material because of dichotomy / reality gap.
I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview.
Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but at the expense of forcibly ignoring the essence of what constitutes material reality. In the case of QM, the "just run the equations" view of the world has been dominant since Einstein reluctantly ceded ground on this issue. To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial world.
(fwiw, I am something of a materialist, which is why I have thought of this problem beforehand.)
In fact, complex entangled states made of many interrelated "qubits" or degrees of freedom are one of the most promising candidates for the physical correlate of similarly-complex phenomenological experience. Complex-enough quantum computers might just feel stuff, as a matter of basic reality.
Yes, but what is material reality?
The current understanding of entanglement in QM is indistinguishable from math. And then we need to ask: are the equations real? Seriously, are they? Or are they just an approximate description of something we don't understand that well?
Because if entanglement is part of material reality as defined by the good ol' gauge theorists and the equations, then we really do live in a math equation, and it's not clear how or why that math equation runs the way it does. Or what it runs on for that matter. Or if it exists at all and our senses are just hallucinating this. This is fundamentally different from the understanding of philosophical, physical materialism.
The main alternative viewpoint to materialism, dualism, posits some further 'external' influence that acts on the world to account for phenomena we poorly understand like consciousness, and for some people psychic or religious phenomena. I think that's just fuzzy thinking, and I don't even really know what they mean. How can something not 'of the world' interact with the world? Surely 'the world' is everything that can act on or influence each other, right? I'm not sure how else to define it.
I really have no access to that. I've just taken a couple of extreme positions, and hope that one day somebody can come up with some way to reduce or test them materially, although I accept that I can't even speculate about a way to do it.
One is a panpsychism. The material world exists within a substrate of perspectives, and as material objects pass through them, the perspectives momentarily attach to those objects, and whatever is mechanically connected to them. This happens at an arbitrary rate (depending on the density of the perspective substrate and the relative speed of the material passing through it.) If we call the amount of time that a perspective is located "centrally" enough in a human nervous system to have access to it a "moment," then for a moment, that perspective thinks it is me. This assumes that perspectives are distinct for purposes of explanation, but they don't have to be - maybe an infinite number of perspectives think that they are me at any particular moment, and in the next moment, an entirely different set.
The other is that there's a particular geometry of electromagnetic activity that captures perspectives, and minds happen to conform to that geometry.
I don't think these are any more insightful than "the soul talks to bodies through the pineal gland." I can only hold onto them as more abstract and generalized. There's no material way to tell when you've captured a perspective, and we each only know of the existence of one with certainty. We could be Buddhist and say that the universe is one fragmented confused perspective, or say that we're a bunch of islands; either way, we have no material basis for those beliefs. The only thing we know is that we're not P-Zombies. We don't know that others aren't P-Zombies, just us.
Well, they predict what we observe, which is not a property of math in general.
Even so, accepting non-determinism from QM does not cause me as much cognitive dissonance than the problem of conscioussness.
I think it's deeper than non-determinism. We can imagine an extraordinarily precise "random" number generator that is software, more than capable of fooling all measurements we as humans make of it. It would also be non-deterministic. It would also, importantly, not be real.
Until we can confidently say that the equations of physics are not actually themselves reality, we can't say materialism is even a thing. To be a materialist requires belief that what we know is a description of reality and not reality itself, and that would be true even if we had a deterministic "Newtonian" pre-QM view of the world coupled with advanced theory.
Maybe the lesson of physics is that the material world is not like how we might imagine it, based on our everyday intuitions. If you accept that the world is not moving and not flat, that bodies continue in motion unless acted on by a force, and that Lorentz transformations represent the relationship between different inertial frames, then you already accept things that are counter to everyday intuitions. Hopes for explanations that are not ultimately grounded in "that, as far as we know, is just how things are" might be wishful thinking.
Consciousness is a hard problem until you realize that most of it is an illusion. Which is the very reason that it is so hard to understand: there's nothing to understand, because it's not real.
That's my take, maybe not exactly the same as Damasio and Seth's, but compatible with theirs.
But I do believe in Wolfram's "principle of computational equivalence", and thus that anything that can implement a turing machine can also implement any other complex system, including consciousness.
Finally, I don't know if I can make a meaningful distinction between feeling and experiencing. I believe a feeling is an experience.
After all, if my decisions do not flow from my state, including my experience, memories, preferences, etc, how can we say they are meaningfully mine? I fully accept a degree of randomness in the process, quantum mechanics is a thing, but randomness is just noise. No determinism, no agency.
The real problem is locality. Why am I located in me instead of in you? Why is it so much easier for me to see out of my eyes than it is for me to see out of yours? What's the connection between my perspective and my body?
The idea that self-awareness/consciousness ("I am me") is the big problem is weird. I have no problem locating that in the material world. If I program a computer to poll all of its peripherals, report on its RAM and processors, and adjust how it runs its programs based on that, that's as much self-awareness as I have, if not more.
Your body is doing the experiencing. It is what's perceiving.
Your mind is just your body's UI for the world and your body is the user.
The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those sensors and experiences them and where is the location of that thing?
It's like we're sitting with a VR headset in our brain, playing that game we call life. But, where exactly are we and how is that headset connected to our sensors?
Again, your body.
Think about it. Your body is experiencing what your brain has generated out of your sensory input.
You don't need a homunculus, you are a body. You are your body and there's nothing else to you.
It's like you're asking why is this computer that I generated this data visualization from this data on this computer displaying this data visualization on this computer. Umm, because that's what you asked it to do and that's the default? For anything else to have happened, you would have had to redirect the output to a network and then go receive it on a different computer.
> What does it mean for a body to be "mine?"
You are your body.
> So - does water flowing down a hill have a perspective? Where is it located?
Why would it? Does it sense and produce a mind? Not that I'm aware of. You could go the pansychism route if you want though. See David Chalmers or something.
> can I say that I'm any less the water as I am my hands, even though I'm controlling the water, getting feedback from the water, subjecting the water as much to my nervous system as I am subjecting my hand itself?
According to enactivism, no. [1] In general, see embodied minds theory. [2]
> Why would it? Does it sense and produce a mind?
I don't know what a mind is supposed to be in this context, or its importance. I don't identify my perspective with my thoughts. My thoughts are something a body does. My perspective is just my location. After death, my thoughts will cease. My location will not change.
If you are going to ask questions, you should at least be able to justify their relevance, if asked.
You're obliterated, then perfectly reassembled on the other side. Is that still "you", "subjectively"? Should you or others even care about that question? And, if not, damn, that's ego-killing af.
But you go to sleep every night. Is the person who wakes up "you"? Many of the atoms in the person who woke up were in that person's stomach, and many of the atoms in the person who went to sleep are in the air. Does the difference from the transporter thing matter? No reason it should. The person who went to sleep is not here. The one who woke up can spend that person's money, wear that person's clothes, remember passwords. Close enough is close enough.
You might choose not to spend that person's money, next day. But they won't be needing it, and you do. So, no problem.
If you perceive a problem, you are just tying yourself in knots, and are guaranteed to make no progress.
Of course, I, the original, will not be the copy, but if I go in knowing I'm not the copy, the the copy will come out knowing he's not the copy. Thus, you should go in believing there's a 50% chance you are the copy, and then both the original and the copy will come out with a logically consistent belief.
edit: I can use a computer to remind me to use a computer to remind me about something. I can lose the use of my hands and eyes by severing biological wires. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and the computer. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and you, other than distance and mechanical connection (which we currently have, with some latency and signal distortion.)
No, you cannot deduce dualism from what I said. You filled in assumptions that aren't present and which I don't assert. It's just physicalism (materialism is an outdated term[1]) but would also work for neutral monism[2].
> I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and the computer. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and you, other than distance and mechanical connection (which we currently have, with some latency and signal distortion.)
What? Maybe you need a psychiatrist now? This sounds like dpersonalization or derealization.
The car is a thing, like your body. The speed is what the car is doing, like your mind is something your brain is doing. No problem, nothing to accept.
My own mind is something I am doing, just as I am typing just now. It should be obvious enough that neither is something you are doing.
"Causation" is purely interpretation; the universe has nothing to do with that. People invented causation to help understand the universe, but there is nothing fundamental about it. So long as you think you need causation of any kind to understand consciousness, you will get nowhere.
Because it expresses your thoughts. Your mind has access to them in a way that it does not have access to anyone else's thoughts.
In particular, that access includes memories of having them and taking the actions necessary to post them. If you lost those memories, and your words were not identified as being yours, you would no longer regard them any differently than you do anyone else's (it is not even certain that you would agree with them.)
Note that the above statements involve no presupposition of materialism, but they are consistent with it. In particular, from a physical point of view, it is obvious why one would only have privileged access to one's own thoughts and experiences.
To be honest, I don’t get what you are really trying to understand or find out here.
I've come to the same conclusion. Meaning no disrespect or insult to them, it seems to me that it must be the case that some folks just haven't noticed themselves.
P.D. Ouspensky talks about learning to "remember myself" in "In Search of the Miraculous" and describes how it was for him to practice changing from thinking one is self-aware to actually becoming self-aware moment-to-moment. There's a passage...
> Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep.
I suspect people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem must be still "asleep" in this sense, effectively P-Zombies, although the potential is there to become self-aware beings.
- - - -
> as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically.
Okay, fair enough, but then you have the infinite regress problem. How do you explain material itself materialistically?
Some folks don't enjoy tying themselves in knots. You are absolutely welcome to spend your precious seconds of limited life on it, but it doesn't make you superior, however much you would like to think it does. It's just a choice, like between working and playing.
Is being a "P-Zombie" inferior to being self-aware? By what metric could such a comparison be made? Is the water inferior to the wave?
Also, "tying themselves in knots" != "noticed themselves", if anything it's the opposite: all knots untie.
"Noticing yourself" is something literally everyone does. Not everyone ties themselves in knots. The alternative to tying yourself in knots is to think clearly without inventing falsehoods.
"P-zombies" is just another word for solipsism. The moment somebody proposes either, you know there will be no more clear thought.
You could also choose not to tie yourself in knots, and then you would not be blocked, and could begin to make sense.
Like for instance, the experience a human would have when relaxing in a hot tub with their friends, is "better" in some important, real sense compared to the experience of dying in a trench in WWI?
If not, I probably can't convince you that there is a hard problem having to do with consciousness where we'd benefit from knowing all the answers. But if so, I could give it a try.
A system for understanding consciousness that depends on objective merit will face very stiff competition from those that don't.
Maybe “you like the experience of drinking tea” is a totally compatible statement with “I don’t like the experience of drinking tea” in an objective sense.
I would say it’s not that consciousness depends on objective merit, but that it could be the other way around.
I frankly have zero evidence that anyone else but me is experiencing consciousness. And there’s nothing you can utter that can change that.
This can also be probed with science. If we know how the brain wires itself, what it is computing and representing then I think we'll find these patterns in the brain.
This is how I best understand these things. I can also go into more detail how I came to think about this this way and how I got to this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue#Absence_of_...
I now worry about some form of future cyborg racism where those without the gift are considered untouched by god or subhuman
By the way, there is a whole line of debate on the sense or nonsense of the ever-present "what it is like" phrasing:
>‘What it is like’ talk (‘WIL-talk’) — the use of phrases such as ‘what it is like’ — is ubiquitous in discussions of phenomenal consciousness. It is used to define, make claims about, and to offer arguments concerning consciousness. But what this talk means is unclear, as is how it means what it does: how, by putting these words in this order, we communicate something about consciousness. Without a good account of WIL-talk, we cannot be sure this talk sheds light, rather than casts shadows, on our investigations of consciousness.
(Jonathan Farrell - ‘What it is Like’ Talk is not Technical Talk)
Start instead with SE, and then any sort of material universe can be the contents of it.
All this philosophical labyrinth of words seems futile. We need to have a right system level model of the cortex and subcortical structures to progress. I feel like we are trying to resolve this problem looking at the quantum effects in the transistors (using the previously cited analogy) [neuroscience] and looking to a datacenter [cognitive science]. We need to choose the right level of abstraction. We haven't figured out what is the right one in the last 100 year. We will do... and perhaps discover that Cortico-thalamic pathway in the von Neumman base of our OS...
Recently I bought a telescope and took some pictures of the moon. Then I searched for a map of the moon, and to my surprise the orientation didn't match my photos. I imagined myself stading on the right side of the planet, looking at the moon which was also at the right. I realized that my "up" is actually the "side", and my photos and the map made sense. That was like the reorientation feeling, but softer.
That made me think whether one thing is having a theory of this world, and another very different when a theory is deep in our consciousness.
Imagination is also a part in probabilistic decision making, an unhinged prediction machine.
The experiencer is the sum of your body's processes. It's what it feels like to be your body. To be connected to all your parts. To have been raised and taught to react, to have instincts and decision making circuits based on these. It's a material thing. Vision is the sense of eye, thought is the speculative sense of sensing, etc.
He's a philosopher who has spent a lifetime thinking about this problem, informed by the latest science of the day. Plus he's an excellent, lucid writer. He is a materialist, optimistic about being able to have as-satisfactory of an explanation of consciousness in the future as we do for life (no "élan vital" needed).
https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denn...
Put in another way: if you somehow claim to be able to observe or measure consciousness as an object, then what is it that is doing the observing?
Similarly, consciousness is unchanging and without beginning or end, for noticing and knowing any change you need consciousness.
There are legitimate questions to ask about consciousness, but nobody asks them. How does the perception of being conscious aid in survival and/or reproduction? It's kind of like wondering about what good being beautiful does for a blind, microscopic worm: not necessarily answerable, but anyway worth asking.
Language is mostly usage. For example we don't have a good definition of what intelligence is, on the scientific level. It might be the same thing for consciousness.
We only understand intelligence or consciousness as what we see as a soul or ghost, but nothing much.
To give an example, during my episode I had what is usually described as an out-of-body experience. I felt myself walking around my bedroom as if I were awake, only to find out that my body never left the bed. Now if the sense of being "out of the body" is an illusion, how can we be sure that being "in the body" is not just the same illusion? (I'm tempted to think we are not anywhere and that space itself is the illusion, but that is beside the point)
(sleep paralysis is a good example though)
This opinion is almost certainly wrong, but it’s helped me while thinking about my own mind and experiences.
I am building a platform for online interviews (https://taaalk.co/) so am curious to know your experience of reading discussions vs. reading an article.
Certainly the hard problem goes away when you define it to be simpler.
We won’t solve how the mind works untill then.
There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.
> Would you say that these more complicated states of emotion represent higher or more complex “levels” of consciousness?
> Seth: I’m personally very skeptical of this kind of labeling, of higher and lower levels of consciousness. There is a little truth to it, of course. Unless we can agree that human beings are in some sense, more conscious than, say, an ant, we’re missing some very important things about the nature of consciousness.
But from our daily experiences actually reality is an emergent property from our consciousness (or awareness).
What we do feel, smell, hear, forms into concept, meaning, experiences forms our "reality".
There might be a theoretical other "reality" or it might be a bit different many think it is now, but it doesn't make it more or less real, in the sense of actual experience it's less real.
Unless you believe in supranatural explanations for it, yes, it does. The beliefs you mention, like a flat Earth, were/are real and also false. So in this analogy, consciousness is real, but many of the explanations for it or powers ascribed to it are false.