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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

How to approach loss of consciousness is one of the problems I have with non-materialist theories of consciousness like dualism and panpsychism. If consciousness is not generated by my physical brain, how come physical chemicals can manipulate my conscious state? If the brain is a receiver for consciousness, surely my consciousness should exist independently of my brain? Interfering with a radio doesn’t change what’s happening in the recording studio. Why does the state of my brain affect my conscious state at all? If consciousness is fundamental, how can it ever stop?

It just seems that the brain is a physical system, and consciousness is a result of its physical processes. If you change the operation of those processes then you change states of consciousness. All the attempts to explain it otherwise seem inconsistent with the behaviour we observe.

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Pick 3 random stones and arrange them so that they form a straight line. Does the line "exist"?

If you consider that only the atoms "count" for existing, then the line does not exist. (Neither do the stones, by the way - since they are constantly exchanging minor quantities of atoms and electrons with the rest of the environment, the set that defines what each stone is is constantly changing. But let's ignore that bit). The line is a "mathematical abstraction", layered on top of the "real" world.

Now consider that you measure and define exactly where that line is, according to the system of coordinates that you prefer.

Now imagine that you remove the three stones. Now there's no atoms "sustaining" that the line any more. But in a sense the line is "still there", it's defined by the coordinates you wrote. It can be argued that it has always "existed" - before you put the stones there, before Earth existed, that particular line in space already "was", in the same sense that numbers "are" - that the line has existed in some way or another since Space itself started existing.

You now pick 3 bottle caps and put them on top of the line again. Now the line is again defined by 3 clumps of matter. Does it "exist" any more than it existed in the previous two cases?

It all comes down to how we use the verb "exist" - it means several things depending on the context. "Exist" in the atoms world, or "exist" as information.

I believe that mind and consciousness is a bit of the same thing, just many orders of magnitude bigger. Instead of 3 stones what defines a mind is trillions of neurons arranged in a certain way. I am materialistic, but I believe in the be encoding of information. To me this means that each mind, at some point in time, can absolutely be "encoded" into a big enough number (huge, billions of trillions of digits). So in that sense minds are "defined by atoms" but also "exist independently of atoms, and are eternal".

It's an interesting way to view these things for sure. Marvin Minsky believed that it doesn't make sense to talk about the physical reality of our world, he thought it was a possible world and that's all that matters.

I take my cue from the physics of information theory and computation. In that view a computation is a process physically performed by a system. The same applies to mathematical calculations. The result exist independently in some transcendent sense, but in order to actually obtain a result a physical system has to perform the process. That physical system exists independently of the abstract mathematics, and independently of any other system performing the same calculation, or computation.

In the same way my brain can have a thought. I can perceive a colour. The pattern of activity might be extremely close to the activity associated with you perceiving the same colour. It might be identical with the pattern of an identical clone or twin of mine experiencing the same perception. Nevertheless they are separate, unconnected, completely independent activities that just happen to have similar interpretations.

That's a strict physicalist view, and it's one I subscribe to as being the most plausible. Nevertheless I'm a human being, I have children, I care about my family and friends, and humanity generally. So clearly patterns matter to me as a person, but that's just in my nature. I don't see any reason to think it's fundamental to anything, because thinking that way IMHO leads to some very wooly thinking. just because gold is shiny and pretty, that doesn't mean I think there's something cosmically magical or special about those wavelengths of light. The experience and appreciation of things is important to us, but it doesn't define reality.

You are conflating abstract reasoning with consciousness. Your invisible line has no effect on the substrate, because the line does not exists. Consciousness effects the mind/brain/body complex.

The lines you describe are placed by your intuition. Most math is intuitive as such, and exists outside of mind, which is why anybody can "discover" axioms, ratios, etc.

If your notion was correct, only a perfect atomic ordering inside the brain would create a precise and useful thought, such as how to find the ratio of radius to diameter.

Thank you for your comment.

I think abstract reasoning can be done by machines (up to a point) and I have also spent enough time online to know that we humans are not always capable of exercising it, even if we seem conscious. I don’t understand why you say I mistake the two.

The invisible line can very well be a line on a map that defines where a highway gets build.

The last part about perfect atomic ordering, I didn’t understand, sorry.

> Consciousness effects the mind/brain/body complex.

Or so it seems. It's entirely possible that consciousness is just post-factum rationalization of what the body did.

Have you noticed that sometimes you make a decision but don't do it, and sometimes you make a decision and do it?

> If your notion was correct, only a perfect atomic ordering inside the brain would create a precise and useful thought, such as how to find the ratio of radius to diameter.

Does not follow.

> Have you noticed that sometimes you make a decision but don't do it, and sometimes you make a decision and do it?

Absolutely. Sometimes I'll notice in my meditation practice that something will arise and then I'll watch it get labeled by my brain and brought into cognition, but there is a gap between it. It's like watching the brain/body work something out and then present it to your awareness.

> It's entirely possible that consciousness is just post-factum rationalization of what the body did.

If that were the sole reality my case would still stand, for you then become aware of something you did, and react; ergo consciousness does effect the body, etc. This is basic physics.

Nor does your argument exclude mine. Why would you need consciousness if it was merely "post-factum rationalization" with no feedback effect? By your logic, we could live exactly the same without the consciousness.

> you then become aware of something you did, and react; ergo consciousness does effect the body

consciousness can be a side effect, like log files. Every time you send an email you get a line in log files, but the email wasn't sent BECAUSE of log files.

> Why would you need consciousness if it was merely "post-factum rationalization" with no feedback effect?

This is a good argument. It could be like the concept of color. We needed a way to distinguish good and bad food, so we have color vision and we created the concept of colors (which are simplifications and abstractions of real world, but useful ones).

And when we have these abstractions we use them sometimes in ways that have no relation to reality, like talking about feeling "blue".

Similarly we needed a way to know where to stop when searching for root cause on cause-effect tree. When somebody hits you with a stick it's useful to attack that person and not the stick (too early termination) or their mother (too late). So our models of the world had to have the concept of agency and consciousness. It doesn't matter that the concept is correct, it just needs to be useful. Just like naive understanding of physics like "everything thrown falls down and everything slows to a halt if not pushed" is wrong, but useful so we have it built-in.

These calculations don't need to be conscious, consciousness can still be an illusion, but the distinction remains useful.

If you insist we learn from our memories that are constructed around the concept of consciousness - therefore consciousness have effect on our lives - I can grant you that, but that doesn't mean consciousness is real any more than kids behaving well to get presents prove the existence of Santa Claus.

You might like to look into papers/books on Integrated Information Theory by Tononi et al. IIT essentially explores the consequences and math of this type of emergence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...

Thank you, friend, very interesting, I will give it a look!

You can play with the meaning of words, but in the end I don't care how you call things or how you define existence. You get funny results like dragons and elves existing, whatever, suit yourself. I just care about how the world actually works and not what labels we put on it.

So if consciousness exists in the same manner that imaginary lines you draw between stars - fine. Why does it matter?

I think you missed the context in which the conversation was taking place. The OP was asking how a mind can be defined by atoms and still be transcendent or eternal in any way. I just offered my view.

It doesn't need to matter to you, it only needs to matter to them.

You're close to the fundamental problem here but don't go far enough.

All one needs to do is look at Oliver Sack's books to understand that either of these must be true:

1. Consciousness is a physical system. This is the simplest explanation and accounts for all observed phenomenon.

2. Consciousness (or "soul") is metaphysical but is such a blank slate or so dependent on the physical state of the brain that we can exclude all consideration of it. Memory is clearly physical otherwise brain damage wouldn't ruin only some memories or the ability to comprehend certain things (such as right-left agnosias where someone loses the concept of the left side of the world both currently and in recalled memories). Brain chemistry very _obviously_ influences mood. Mind-altering drugs can induce temporary personality changes. It goes way beyond simple "radio receiver" analogies like alcohol inducing distortions. Your ability to understand anything at all, your ability to remember anything at all, even your personality can be dramatically affected by brain chemistry and physical state.

There are just so very many examples of real situations involving the brain that require extremely complicated hoop-jumping to maintain the idea that "you" are anything beyond the physical process happening in your brain. They all devolve into claims that the metaphysical essence is so dependent on and influenced by physical brain processes you can just cut out the metaphysical part with no loss.

If a stroke or dementia can make me a much angrier or violent person then what need is there for a soul?

Isn't there some rule that we should usually go with the simplest explanation that covers all bases?

Why even go beyond 1? It feels like people want there to be something more

Occam's razor. In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions. In essence, they provide guardrails to keep discussions centered within the realm of reason when venturing to the edge of our knowledge and beyond.

Except it fails the deeper you go in understanding physical phenomena.

We should not exist per Occam.

If you can hold on your awareness that the atoms of your body are not 'matter' but signatures of energy bound in a field, then the physical brain is much harder to consider the real and constructing element of reality.

I think many of these discussions are just measuring the difference in what we each perceive as the lowest building block.

Everything we are is wavelengths of energy. This isn't something metaphysical. Electron, proton, nuetron are all combinations of quarks which only exist independently as a discrete quantized energy in a field. The orderliness of the field is dependent on how much energy is exchanged for (converted to) mass. What is mass? Voltage - per modern understanding of physics. So the defining characteristic of reality is potential.

If we exist in this way as a consciousness then there is every reason to believe consciousness is pervasive in the universe

Yeah, it's interesting to think about. I've often wondered what would happen if a structurally identical configuration of matter and energy representing "me" manifested somewhere.

Taking it further, is the atomic world the only medium where this "me" could be represented? What if there were a perfect digital model of "me"? Would that be conscious?

What other mediums might be able to support something similar to our notion of consciousness?

> What if there were a perfect digital model of "me"? Would that be conscious?

If it is a perfect digital model of you, yes. Since you feel consciousness, the digital copy must also feel it. Otherwise it would not be "perfect".

In the case of the model, "feeling" means that some bits (probably a big number - billions or trillions) inside the model would flip their state.

> What other mediums might be able to support something similar to our notion of consciousness?

I believe that the mind is sustained by a particular set of physical atoms. A human brain is ~1.5 liters of water plus ~0.5 kgs of other stuff.

In theory you could represent consciousness using whatever else physical objects you wanted. In practice, the mind-bogglingly big numbers and processes involved that make it difficult. If you used grains of sand to represent atoms, each neuron would take ~450 liters / 16 cubic feet of sand to model, assuming that you can make each individual grain of sand act as an atom.

There's also the fact that modeling how atoms behave exactly seems to be extremely computationally expensive. Apparently Quantum Mechanics don't like being modeled on a non-quantum computer, and you rapidly reach the "you would need a computer the size of the whole universe in order to model that" limit very quickly. So your grains of sand would need to be Quantum-aware Grains of Sand.

You might end up needing a Jupiter-worth of grains of Quantum sand. I don't recommend using this approach. Definitely don't try to model the human brain using pebbles.

> We should not exist per Occam.

Good point

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

> We should not exist per Occam.

We barely exist. Our history spans only a brief part of the Universe's history, we are confined to an infinitesimal bubble of all the space that is available. When we consider the Universe as a whole, Occam is correct. We are not even a rounding error.

But also: the Universe itself should not exist, per Occam. Yet it does. And we do. So let's work with that.

If environmental conditions can lead to an unhealthy plant, what need is there for a seed?

Mind-body dualism strikes me as possibly the least elegant and magic-leap-proof alternative to physicalism, so it’s unfortunate that people who explore this question get stuck on it.

In fact, non-material monist views exist! See, for example, Kant and Schrödinger. Some of Wolfram’s ideas[0] at first approach seem to be interpretable from this angle.

I’m not going to do the entirety of monism justice in a paragraph, but as one take: perhaps interacting with other conscious entities involves changes in yours and tends to manifest itself as physical changes within time-space, a lossy map constructed as a shortcut/interface to the otherwise overwhelming underlying territory? This does not require conjuring an entire universe, with its arbitrary laws and constants, to explain perception supplied by consciousness (the only thing we have direct access to, that physicalists nevertheless tend to treat as a magic side-effect of magically existing reality).

[0] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2022/06/alien-intelligen...

> In fact, non-material monist views exist!

Also see Buddhist philosophy such as Yogacara

> the only thing we have direct access to, that physicalists nevertheless tend to treat as a magic side-effect of magically existing reality

Doesn't that perspective require a magically existing mind, which happens to magically discover an entire universe with consistent laws and constants as a side-effect of its experimental enquiries? Not much gained by the change of perspective, then?

It’s probably safe to assume that consciousness exists, as it’s what carries out this line of reasoning in the first place.

And no, I don’t think an elegant explanation is one that magically conjures up the existence of an entire universe that’s not directly accessible except as a representation within said consciousness.

Some forms of panpsychism (such as panprotopsychism) aren't much different from emergent materialism. Emergent materialism states human consciousness originates from the state of a physical brain, while the constituent parts of the human brain (and its physical interactions) have nothing resembling consciousness. Some forms of panpsychism would argue the physical interactions between the parts are already proto-conscious, and your brain is simply in a state that aggregates these phenomena into human consciousness.

The difference is purely ontological in this case. Both emergent materialism and this form of panpsychism would claim your aggregate consciousness has its origin in your brain and would stop if the parts of your brain were separated: both are compatible with physical reality. The difference is that the former would interpret this as a complete disappearance of such consciousness, while the latter would interpret it as a dis-aggregation of this consciousness into proto-conscious parts.

There are also some versions of eliminative materialism that claim consciousness doesn't exist in the first place, and myriads of other positions.

The problem of panpsychism is that it doesn’t explain anything. It postulates some sort of mechanism that builds up our consciousness based on what amounts to a dual realm of psychic mechanics, but it doesn’t explain at all how this nonphysical mechanism is supposed to be able to account for consciousness in a way that the known laws of physics allegedly can’t.

That's a problem that affects all theories about the metaphysics of consciousness. All of them share the burden of explaining how a world where "consciousness" exists would be different from a world without it. The ones which claim a distinct consciousness does exist then also have to explain how this consciousness either originates from physical parts with limited or non-existent consciousness(emergent theories like panprotopsychism and emergent materialism), exists outside physical matter (dualism), or exists fully in the smaller parts, somehow getting combined into one (traditional panpsychism).

That's part of why it can be attractive to leave aside concerns about metaphysical consciousness altogether.

If brains are information processing systems, and that consciousness emerges from that activity, I don’t have to worry about the parts having consciousness. They don’t, they just contain and process information.

Panpsychists are committing a hierarchy inversion error. Horses are a kind of animal, but that doesn’t mean all animals are a kind of horse. Just because consciousness is a result of information processing, that doesn’t mean all information processing systems are conscious. Heck, as we are discussing here, I’m not always conscious.

How do you define "consciousness", though?

If we define it to be just a human interpretation of an observed physical process, and we believe subjective experience to be an illusion, then the hard problem is not a problem at all. That's comparable to calling an animal a horse: we define "horse" to be a category of animal, but we don't expect it to have any "special" properties for being a horse, and we can relate to lower-level processes all the properties that lead us to define it as a horse. Such properties are empirically measurable and don't behave in any way that would be expected from the laws of physics.

But if we assume subjective experience to be real and to be more than just a description of the physical system, then we do have a problem: we have the burden of explaining where it comes from (which is why theories like emergentism, panpsychism, etc. were created). We can't test such theories empirically, as the only subjective experience we can perceive is that of a fully conscious (in the medical sense) human brain, and we cannot share such experience. That's why the metaphysics of consciousness is not considered science.

> Just because consciousness is a result of information processing, that doesn’t mean all information processing systems are conscious.

Indeed. But if consciousness is anything more than a label to describe a specific sort of system, and subjective experience is real, then we have to show such special "consciousness" (with subjective experience) exists in the first place, and how it can emerge from parts without any form of consciousness. As we're unable to do that in a way that can be empirically tested, such theories are not scientific. Panpsychism is of course no exception to this, as we cannot test whether lower levels of information processing are or are not conscious either.

Not taking one position or the other, but you can't make any conclusions about whether a separate consciousness exists from anesthesia, only that no memories were formed that can be accessed by that consciousness (even if it did experience qualia during that time).

If qualia are not remembered, do they make a sound?

Consciousness trying to make up reasons why consciousness can survive death. That's what religion is all about.

How about unconsciousness trying to make up reasons for consciousness? I see it in the comments, and it even looks like a religious belief.

The sound of one hand clapping.

Understood, but I don't think that view is consistent with the evidence we have of brain activity during conscious and unconscious states, and memory formation.

Maybe you actually have a thousand consciousnesses, but only remember one, and the other 999 consciousnesses are just helplessly experiencing your physical body? You can’t disprove that, but why entertain any such notion?

I'm not arguing for or against anything here, but regarding your comparison:

> If the brain is a receiver for consciousness, surely my consciousness should exist independently of my brain? Interfering with a radio doesn’t change what’s happening in the recording studio.

Interfering with a radio distorts the transmitted, outcoming sound. You could say your perceived consciousness is just that: something transmitted from an origin. The state of the brain could then very well mess with conciousness. It could add or remove harmonics, delay, EQ, filters, etc.

Yeah, the radio is silent when it's off. The radio is needed to turn the signal into something.

I totally agree with the parent post but was coming here to say the same thing - the best argument I've heard along these lines is that the signal is still transmitting but "you" aren't receiving it. This kinda makes goes against the idea of consciousness where you're aware of stuff, so in this case it should be more like an out-of-body experience that you do remember, but I could easily see someone arguing that it's some sort of soul-plane thing where you can't form memories but do have experiences.

There are crazier theories out there.

> There is only one reality per person. It is set up by the soul specifically to obtain experiences from. We do not share our reality with anyone. It only looks that way.

> To facilitate educational growth, Souls create “Realities”. Realities are a classroom that Souls can grow through a surrogate “human”

> Soul places an “interface” within the constructed “reality”. This is known as “consciousness”.

> The universal template consists of every single human, and every possible action that they were involved in, from the earliest dates to the end of humanity. The soul selects individual realities out of this universal template.

> Once the experiences, and the lessons, are finished the consciousness leaves the physical reality. It returns home to soul.

> There are a (near) infinite number of world-lines that a consciousness (person) can experience.

> Consciousness can migrate from one reality to another reality. This is commonly known as world-line travel. As such, these changes help to bring about desired experiences and lessons

... and so on

https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/consciousness-migration-...

This reminded me of a short story I read by the guy that wrote "The Martian" - it's different from what you're describing but in this model there's only one person and they're living every life through reincarnation, with the goal being that you experience all human lives and then you're fully matured and able to move on to whatever the next step is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story)

It's a sensitive topic for a lot of people (mainly because it contradicts world views they might have) but I don't think you are wrong. Consciousness, in so far it is definable at all, seems just an emergent property of our brain.

We're pretty sure it resides in our brain and not for example your toes or other parts of your body since there are plenty of nasty accidents where people lose various parts of their body; or receive replacements for certain things without that really changing who they are or how they think. Also, doctors mess with it intentionally once in a while which definitely has all sorts of effects.

As for anesthesia, that's just using chemicals to knock you out. I once had a mild anesthesia that messed with my short term memory while some unpleasant procedure was taking place. When I asked them when they were starting they informed me it was already done. I have no memory of the whole thing and was apparently "conscious" throughout. Great stuff; would have that again if the need arises.

So, the medically correct answer is of course that a deep coma is virtually indistinguishable from being dead in the sense that there is not a lot going on in terms of brain activity. That kind of is the point of inducing such a level of unconsciousness. It frees up the doctors to mess with out bodies without creating a lot of psychological trauma that excruciating pain might otherwise cause.

> I have no memory of the whole thing and was apparently "conscious" throughout. Great stuff; would have that again if the need arises.

"Twilight anesthesia"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_anesthesia

If the brain is a receiver for consciousness, it does not imply that consciousness exists independently of your brain. The consciousness would require inputs, which come from the brain. You could assume that the consciousness is paused when those inputs stop. Our perception of time is after all subjective. Although this all kind of defeats the purpose of believing in a non-materialist theory of consciousness.

Right, looking at it that way just leaves it without any job to do, with nothing to explain. At that point it's just wishing.

The radio-receiver metaphor doesn't go far enough as it still assumes a somewhat physical brain, but it helps at first untangeling yourself from materialism. If reality is nothing but a dream it would be no problem to dream up a brain that modulates the dream-content if it is manipulated.

- Taking red paint and spraying it over your wall will modulate the dream in such that the wall appears red.

- Taking a hammer and hitting your head will modulate the dream in more unpredicatable ways.

What if these processes are the same? It's nothing but stuff made out of consciousness affecting consciousness.

I think it's fair to say we do know that we have a somewhat physical brain. Even if it's part of a dream then our definition of "physical" would be scoped to that dream and still be accurate

It's really not the same thing, its the complete opposite. It's brain->consciousness vs. consciousness->brain

I was just talking about the physicality of the brain, so it'd be (physical brain)->consciousness vs. consciousness->("physical" brain). Either way in all ways that matter to us the brain is physical.

I think of it similarly to how atoms are mostly empty space - we can know that's true but the main thing that matters most of the time is that you don't fall through the floor, so we reason about the world as if solid objects are actually solid

What is this adding to the physical laws though? The simplest explanation is that your dream physics is actually the same as our hard-science physics, and you’re effectively just relabeling things.

It's adding nothing to the physical laws - it's metaphysics.

Isn't panpsychism orthogonal to materialism?

Isn't the trivial solution in the non-material case just regular mumbo jumbo? Ie. the connection between the consciousness and the body is severed by propofol while it's active, and so memories are not formed to keep you sane, or whatever? It stops when it gets to Nirvana, etc?

All the attempts to explain it with non-materialism seems to very bluntly fail Ockham's razor. Sure, before fMRI and anesthesia it was a lot easier to compare the two theories and not see the huge extra burden for proof of any kind of non-materialism.

there was same problem earlier as well with deep sleep.

Occam's razor = the theory with the fewest parameters should be preferred, or often interpreted as the simplest theory.

Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one? I don't think so

I think you speak from an already materialist perspective, in that you accept the physical world as something that really exists out there, and that your own subjective being is less tangible or somehow illusory compared to that. That is the opposite way round from how Buddhists felt it obvious to consider it, which was to always frame everything from the first person, human experience (the five skandhas, the eight consciousnesses, etc.)

Personally, I think it's simpler and more obvious to have that first person explanation from the point of view of where I actually seem to be, rather than an explanation that everything I see is real but somehow I am not. Why would I see my immediate experience of reality as less real than the objects that I perceive to be external to me?

> Occam's razor = the theory with the fewest parameters should be preferred, or often interpreted as the simplest theory.

> Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one? I don't think so

Backtracking a bit from that little word "theory", it's foremost about being able to formulate predictions about the real world. So, designing a suspension bridge over there, how much steel do use per cable? 1 ton? 2 tons? 42? Use the eight consciousnesses, sure, but get the answer, build the bridge, and be the first one to cross it.

If you don't have two competing theories that offer a prediction, there is nothing to apply the Occam's razor to.

A theory which is a mix of physics (for steel bridges, etc.) and Buddhism (for this or that domain) does work for many predictions. It is also inherently much more complex than "only use physics".

I think you are getting confused between the word theory and the word model, which are often interchanged in physics unfortunately.

A "model" is predictive, but a "theory" explains. A theory of consciousness has no need to predict the future. A model of consciousness would. This word has just been mixed up a lot in science. The reason is that theories in physics are almost always also predictive models. However, this is not usually explicitly the case in philosophy.

> A theory of consciousness has no need to predict the future.

If you don't feel the need to predict anything about consciousness in the real world, I'd say I won't be interested in such a "theory" (or "explanation"). But glad to see your take on the definition of the term.

Going back to Occam's razor, if you only apply it to get the simplest map (in some sense of "the simplest"), and abandon verifying whether it predicts the territory or not, it seems a blank map always wins.

>Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one?

To be fair with humans, the simpler theory is almost always "my neighbour is a witch, she did it"

Hand waving complexity as that thing you feel in your gut instead of having some proper definition for it was and still is the standard human experience

> To be fair with humans, the simpler theory is almost always "my neighbour is a witch, she did it"

Then why appeal to Occam’s razor?

When some physicalists talk about consciousness being an illusion, they're generally talking about the experience of being the centre of reality, they don't mean we don't have these experiences. They're addressing the fact that the brain isn't always conscious, that consciousness seems to go away completely in some situations, so for them it's not a permanent aspect of ourselves. That's all.

I prefer not to use the 'illusion' terminology because I think it's misleading. We do have a real experience of consciousness, just not always. For me Buddhism and panpsychism, and the idea of consciousness as being fundamental is a hierarchy inversion error.

If consciousness is a computation or an emergent phenomenon of brain activity processing information, then we are a kind of information system. It doesn't therefore follow that all information systems are in some way conscious. That's like saying horses are all animals, therefore in some way animals are all horses. Yes we have some things in common with all information processing systems, so we have some of the same features like persistent memory and such because we're members of the same conceptual category, but that doesn't make us the same thing.

I think consciousness is the more fundamental thing, because it’s the only thing I ever have experience of, and that everything else arises from that (including the physical world). To me that’s the simplest explanation

Taking a step further, I think neither consciousness nor physical reality really exists, it’s all emptiness (see Heart sutra)

I don’t see how that’s a simple explanation. We know we lose consciousness, totally, on a regular basis yet when we awake the world is still there. It’s always consistent and doesn’t radically change as our consciousness changes. We can set devices to record activity in the world while we are unconscious, and their recordings seem consistent. The simplest explanation seems to be that the world is real and persistent, but our consciousness is transient.

If the world arises from consciousness, we would expect that changes in conscious states would persistently alter consensus reality. But we never see that happen.

Again see the Heart sutra

Occam's razor specifies that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." Materialism cannot be true, despite it's seeming simplicity. Therefore one must multiply the entities until one can arrive at a true, simple explanation with the fewest number of extant entities.

The mind is not a physical thing, despite it being connected with and informed by the brain. Consciousness and the body cannot be separated, because consciousness is not physical and thus no separation can take place. Consciousness 'winks out' when the mind is anesthetized. This is not possible for a physical object but eminently possible for an non-physical (abstract) one. Physical objects are subject to state change, while abstract entities exist, well, differently. It may involve state change, but it also may simply be there/not there.

Abstract things can still exist, when you learn things, it is an abstract thing, the mind, interacting with other abstract things, learnings. These abstract things interact with the physical world through the instrument that evolved to allow them to do so, the human body and mind.

There's another example I can use. When we model a system using state machines, the diagrams of those machines provide a representation of the workings of the model. We can point, on the state diagram, what the underlying system running the state machine is doing. But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.

Did you catch the invocation of the law of parsimony in the last paragraph? The very existence and usefulness of Ockham's Razor invalidates materialism. Entities are not physical objects.

> Materialism cannot be true, despite it's seeming simplicity

[citation needed]

The mind is not a physical thing, that's correct, but we need not claim the existence of anything non-material to explain the mind. The mind - or more specifically consciousness is made of information, which is 100% encoded in matter, hence materialism. (See Joscha Bach's detailed description of this.)

> But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.

Yep, and that's platonism in a nutshell, but that doesn't contradict materialism either.

Entities are encoded in our brains.

> The mind is not a physical thing...

You could have stopped there. A thing that is not physical, exists. Bye bye materialism. Materialism is monism, holding that things are only made of one kind of 'stuff', specifically physical stuff. You can't get around that by saying that "you don't need to invoke anything non-material to explain" non-physical things. The mind is the non-material thing. As soon as you say it exists, you've thrown out materialism. The thing you're trying to defend is physicalism, which is an entirely different ball of wax. Physicalism is exactly the sort of 'multiplication of entities' that I was referring to in the first paragraph of my original reply.

> Entities are encoded in our brains.

That doesn't make them physical, any more than '4A' is the same thing as 'J' because that's it's ASCII representation. An encoding is not the thing. The representation in the brain is physical, the thoughts in the mind concerning them as well as the entities themselves aren't.

I'm not familiar with philosophy this much, but it seems strange to assign structure, organization and other conceptual meta-things the same thing status as we assign to matter.

The mind is a description of the organization/structure/function of a chunk of matter. And the matter part completely determines the non-material part, hence materialism, no?

How do we know there is a "loss" of consciousness?

I had some dreams when I was anesthesized once. I do no longer clearly remember them, but I do remember telling the medical people there, that I did dream something. How could I dream without consciousness?

The article discusses this. Some people who are given low doses of anaesthetic, usually due to potential risks, do report some awareness. On the flip side, even though during normal sleep we experience some semi-conscious dream states, there are other phases of sleep that are a complete blank. So conciseness seems to exist on a continuum from full alertness all the way down to nothing.

Consciousness is definitely not an all-or-nothing thing, though I suspect we only typically have access to very narrow band of potential levels of awareness (and can't control it "at will" anyway). But obviously there are some thresholds over which memories are simply not preserved in a sufficiently cohesive form for us to have any sense of maintaining consciousness, and in fact the point at which our brain stops being able to store recallable memories is surely the point at which our consciousness "stops". Having said that, clearly even in a dream state our brains have some ability to store memories, it's just that they're not memories guided by our normal capacity to process external stimuli, as are waking memories.

I'm not actually sure I would agree on not being able to store recallable memories being end of consciousness. Alzheimer and other medical conditions might very well result being unable to make new memories, but processing and reacting to stimuli based on old memories is still possible.

Reasonably I think stop of consciousness is both not storing and not reacting to.

I'd say Alzheimer's is essentially the inability to lay down memories that can be recalled beyond a very short period of time (in extreme cases, seconds). But once your brain can no longer store ANY recallable memories, you're unconscious.

Can you react to stimuli without being able to store any recallable memories? At least somewhat more complex stimuli than pain or bright light.

Sure, I would say it happens quite a lot (certainly while we're infants).

My only point is that to be conscious is tautologically to know that one is conscious. And knowledge is dependent on having (= being able to recall) a memory of something. Yes, colloquially there are instinctual forms of 'knowledge' where you get some vague sense something must be true (despite having no information to determine one way or another), but I'd suggest that's probably a misuse of the term.

I was a first responder for a while and we would record a metric called "Level of consciousness" often abbreviated as LOC - it was rated "times 0" to "times 4" based on how aware of your environment and able to respond to stimulus that you are

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_level_of_consciousness Here's a better source with more levels

The word 'stuporous' is definitely ripe for going viral.

How do you know the dreams didn't happen before you were fully anesthetized or when the anesthetic was wearing off?

I've had dreams when sleeping where in the dream several minutes or even hours seemed to pass where something happens at the start of the dream and the rest of the dream is trying to deal with it, such as an alarm going off. When I wake up, I find that the thing that started the dream, such as an alarm going off, is actually happening for real and it just started a few seconds ago.

It seems then that the time experienced in a dream can be much longer than the time actually spent in the dream, and so it is possible that every dream remembered is one that occurred just before waking up.

I'm a materialist myself, but I can think of one very fun theory that solves this. What if neurons are special antennas that can "connect" to your consciousness, and when you're, say, drunk, those antennas start receiving and transmitting wrong signals. Your consciousness is just fine in its world, but your body can't talk to it properly anymore.

Obviously I'm just making stuff up, and I don't actually believe any of this.

In that scenario, I don’t see why your body containing alcohol would change your conscious experience. Surely that would be like being fully alert and aware, but not able to fully control your body. If your body were in its own world, then there would be no reason for drunkenness to affect your awareness or decision making.

Perhaps consciousness is just an observer of those physical systems that exist in the brain, and under anaesthetic the interface between consciousness and those systems is interfered with. I don't know what I'm getting at.

The Buddhist answer is that all of physical reality is also in the mind. Rather than physical and mental being separate, physical reality itself is constructed by the mind

Right. In Kastrup's idealism, a scalpel, for example, is actually a transpersonal mental process. So it modifies brain-consciousness much like an emotion or thought modifies other thoughts.

No, the scalpel doesn’t actually exist except as an idea in the mind that is attached to, thus it can’t be said to really exist in any way. It is empty of self existence (svahbhava), as is our own mind. Nothing has fundamental essence or identity

Sorry, I'm not a subjective idealist or a solipsist. I believe god consciousness is the final arbiter. And that we can expand our human consciousness to god consciousness. So I'm partial to objective idealism instead.

Yeah sorry, I am a subjective idealist/solipsist

> If consciousness is not generated by my physical brain, how come physical chemicals can manipulate my conscious state? If the brain is a receiver for consciousness, surely my consciousness should exist independently of my brain? Interfering with a radio doesn’t change what’s happening in the recording studio. Why does the state of my brain affect my conscious state at all? If consciousness is fundamental, how can it ever stop?

I loved your analogy. So using the same analogy, is it possible that the radio's frequency tuning is changed (if the brain is a receiver for consciousness) or going under anasthesia is an interference that stops it from receiving things at all (if chemicals can manipulate the conscious state) ?

Your questions are right however you are assuming there is some state of conciousness there isn't it is the state of content of consciousness when all objects are removed from it than what is experienced is what you are calling loss of consciousness but that is not how spiritual text describe it or people who claim to be enlightened describe it unfortunately science has not progressed enough to solve "hard problem of conciousness" but the good news is you can still verify this claim experientially yourself and decide if its true or false for you.

I can't grok why do people have so much issue with accepting the simplest explanation - physical laws still apply and our minds exist within them, as part of that grey goo inside of our skulls. Isn't it already amazing enough that something like that is possible?

I mean we don't believe in fairies and santa claus anymore since we know how and why they were made up, but sure there is some utterly inexplainable magic that breaks all physical laws that we know... just to feel more special? Give our immortality a chance?

I do believe a lot of weird, illogical and sometimes completely fucked up beliefs simply come from common utter dismay of most folks when confronted with their mortality and the very real and perfectly fine chance that once we die that's it, our version of this universe and all of our experiences, loves and fears will simply vanish, forever. Every single religion primarily address this fear, the rest are mostly rituals folks made up early enough for them to stick around and management political structures just like in any other office.

For people brought up in religion this is simply unacceptable, whole world falling apart. Why any parent still does this to their children is completely beyond me, but I guess road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

I may be wrong and most logical solution may not be the right one, and that would make me in fact very happy. But religious people are mentally cornered, they can't accept any other option without their world breaking apart in the seams. That's a position of weakness and fear on the most important topic in life.

I would highly recommend listening to Anil Seth or reading his book "Being You". He is also highly critical of dualism and panpsychism, and justifiably so.

As one of the leading researchers on consciousness, I'm surprised he's not mentioned at all in this. He is extremely fascinated by how consciousness goes away under anesthesia.

Sounds like he's ultimately agnostic on the issue:

" But I’m agnostic about whether at the end of this programme of trying to account in physical terms for properties of experience, there will still be some residue of mystery left, something more to explain."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/21/neuroscienti...

Hedging his bets.

He doesn't believe there is a "hard problem" as described by others and dismisses that as shorthand for there being something mysterious we don't get. In a chat with Sam Harris the two argue that one out in depth.

I have heard him make the analogy to the Unifying Theory of Physics and admitting that even after all his work there could potentially be some aspect that could have weird quantum qualities, or is bound to dimensions of reality outside of perceivable 3d+t.

And while he doesn't agree with Douglas Hoffman as to there being conscience agents outside of space/time, he is fully in agreement with reality as perceived and currently observable being a whole cloth construction with our senses serving to adjust our individual construct.

Reducing the brain to a more complicated version of a pocket calculator doesn't change the platonic ideal of number.

Sure, but isn't the question that which one do we actually have for a mind?

I'm not sure I understand your question. Disclaimer: not an expert. Trying to unravel a thought.

I tried to make the analogy simpler. For thought experiment assume the brain is essentially a pocket calculator. Its lcd screen output is conscious state. It's a state, anyways. Just because you can alter the state you get after "1+2=" (pressing buttons, throwing acid onto the circuit board, etc) doesn't invalidate the number 3. We can agree on the concept of 3 and point to instances of 3. We can output 3 in different instances of calculators, even the human brain (in this experiment, at least, but I've heard even ants can count). The kicker for me is with a big enough lcd screen like one of those fancy graphing calculators you can output not just 3, but a picture of any such ideal, including a picture of the idea of a pocket calculator! Self reference. So what's up with that 3 and always running out of batteries?

Hard to say anything else at this point. Curious about what people may suggest. I'm sure it's not new.

Very good analogy, though I'm completely lost what is what, but it's probably because it's too early here :D

Can we all agree on the concept of 3 though? :) I mean PhD dissertations are written and successfully defended each day pro-and-contra 3.

Do we have a shared concept? Is 3 the same for a research mathematician and a 5 year old?

In practice if it works it works. The same with colors, or music, or ... well, any sort of thing and associated qualia. After all when you say 1/3 + 2/3 most people will say 1 (hopefully, though I have no idea how well known fractions are), but those pesky programmers might just laugh and say that you can't even represent them accurately.

This shows that integers (and the natural numbers) and basic arithmetical are so old in our culture that they truly are probably shared with 99.9% of humans (or let's say English speakers). But if we step a little bit outside of that by taking 4 and 8, then you might like them because they are nice powers of 2, but some Chinese people might not like 4 because it's association with death (but do like 8 because it's association with wealth & success).

And so the question is: the mind that wakes up is the same as the one that went unconscious? Is there even an abstract concept of our minds? (How tied minds are to their physical representation?) Solipsism states that despite everything indicating that there are things independently (materially or not) outside of our mind it doesn't matter because our mind is truly the only thing we have, we are, we'll ever have. (It can be a complete simulation, it can be just a dream, we can never know!)

Joscha Bach's "computationalism" (maybe he doesn't call it that) says that consciousness is evolution's answer to "how to regulate the organism in relation to other self-regulating organisms", so it's a self-directed attention of intelligence (which is also a model of things that we pay attention to). In this regard consciousness is just as part of the population as the genome, so while there are definitely you and me, but at the same time it's the same "evolutionary software" just running on a big shared pool of brains. (Which also means that we could compare every concept via computation - eg. enumerating its properties (and so on the properties required for those properties of course, so infinite regress creeps in), and this means that we can have a shared concept of 3, if it's computationally equivalent.)

I agree with the practicality of thinking of 3 as one ideal that can be emulated by the 5 year old or the PhD. Yes you could argue they're not really the same 3. Just like you'd be hard tasked with finding two identical oranges to the atom scale. But that doesn't feel like it gets me anywhere. I just don't have a straight refutation for it.

Similarly, solipsism feels like trying to reason with the kid that shouts "LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU~" at the start of each sentence.

I'll have to think more about evolutionary pocket calculators and computational equivalence. There's definitely some sneaky stuff at play https://youtu.be/92WHN-pAFCs

"Soap bubbles are computational so everything is computational."

Wait, what?

So get a wood panel, put a few pegs on it, submerge it in soapy water and then slowly raise it from the water.

The soap film that forms between the pegs wants to minimize its surface area (to maximize its energy) so it forms a Steiner tree beteween the pegs, but .. not always!

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1720 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=122

> solipsism feels like

Yes, exactly, yet it's unfalsifiable. Which makes it unscientific, but doesn't make it incorrect. It's just a maximally useless (trivial) model of the world.

This thread reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's 'Who shoves whom around inside the careenium? OR What is the meaning of the word "I"?' https://jsomers.net/careenium.pdf

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