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Comment by CloudRecondite | Hacker News Reader

I often wonder if humans spent as much time studying the brain as we do getting people to click on ads how much progress we could make in understanding consciousness. Seems like there is so much low hanging fruit and very few real breakthroughs. The biggest mystery in the universe is staring us right in the face.

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We've got a small army of philosophers of mind, and then another of neuroscience researchers working on this stuff.

But the philosophers don't have a ton to do without more experiments from neuroscience, and neuroscience is doing the best it can with currently available technology.

Studying the brain is really friggin' hard. I don't know where exactly you think the low-hanging fruit is, but trying to measure a brain operating at a neural level without killing it is pretty limited by our current tech.

Let me tell you about cerebral organoids my dude

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

The Vedantic perspective is that Consciousness is not understandable in a “subject-object” manner because it is the ultimate subject of all understandings which are objects appearing in Consciousness.

Itself, it cannot be objectified and understood thus.

There is a way of “knowing” it (Enlightenment) but this does not occur in the subject-object mode and thus this knowledge is not transferrable through language or symbols.

It has to be experienced by the individual.

Huh, I guess that's where Schopenhauer gets it

quite literally!

http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0353-5738/2004/0353-57380...

My understanding, prior to briefly reading that paper, was that Schopenhauer came up with the core of his philosophy before he came across the upanishads. When he did read them, he was delighted to find that they contained many of the same ideas that he had arrived at independently. He saw this as evidence for the deep truths in his own thinking.

Whatever the true genealogy of the ideas, I think there is a considerable convergence of thought in trying to solve the same problems.

If memory serves, he does mention in the preface to “The World as Will and Representation” that the Vedic scholar would be best placed to understand what he is trying to say

I have some takes on this topic. The reason why I think we find consciousness so mysterious is because we are so intimately biased that we are blinded by what’s plainly understandable.

Consciousness is an emergent property of nervous systems.

https://bower.sh/what-is-consciousness

Consciousness as an emergent property of the billions of neurons and trillions of connections between them (and the complex chemical soup they slosh around in) makes sense to me as well.

There was an interesting article on HN a while ago about memory and its relationship to the aggregate electrical field generated by our neurons - https://picower.mit.edu/news/neurons-are-fickle-electric-fie...

Which I suppose, if people are looking for a singular "entity" to ascribe consciousness to, then something like an emergent electrical field might be a good candidate?

And software is an emergent property of transistors? Math must be an emergent property of paper, then.

Emergent property through evolutionary selection, do you not believe in evolution?

If the brain is just processing things in complete chaos an animal would be completely useless, but with a part/thread dedicated to processing inputs and checking memory I think it is very obvious this function of consciousness would emerge through natural evolution.

You should read about philosophical zombies if you haven’t heard the concept

Yes, to me they sound like similar questions as can a human-level AGI robot experience consciousness like we do, or is consciousness a purely physical thing. My opinion is yes to both but I guess i'm a physicalist/materialist.

Actually another comment points out something interesting, when we get black-out drunk we are basically in this zombie-state. We can talk and hit our head and physically our brain still reacts, but it was like we aren't actually there and our body is just on autopilot mode.

I think so too, and the fact we put human consciousness far above other animals like elephants and dolphins is human ego imo. If we really believe in evolution then what else could the answer be?

It's a processing loop that helps with executive function, self-reflection etc. which I think lots of animals have some basic version of.

No one here is saying animals aren’t conscious. An interesting question is when does it start? Is a worm conscious, an insect, a single cell, an atom? There’s no obvious dividing line which is what makes it so mysterious. What is the building block that enables more complex conscious beings?

The answer provided to the hard question doesn't answer the hard question. There is no reason we're aware of that a ton of computations should lead to a subjective experience, it's akin to people saying flies spontaneously generate around decaying food because they do. At the time it was plausible, but insisting it's the answer to the question is human arrogance

I can see how it might seem like it doesn’t explain the hard problem, but what I’m trying to articulate is that awareness or the self or subjective experience is just that system I described happening really fast. There’s nothing mystical happening here. It’s chaos theory sitting on top of a information processing system that has memory, decision making models, and the ability to learn.

Again we are searching for something more that doesn’t need to be there.

And what I'm saying is, you have absolutely no evidence or way to prove that. I'm not saying it's not possible, but I am saying it has as much scientific evidence as spontaneous generation did

Of course, articulating what the subjective experience being referred to is another problems on its own. All of your comment can exist independent of that perception that's being described. There's no reason for us to have a centralized feeling of it all happening, and the fact that it can be turned off temporarily while the rest mainly still functions is actually mild evidence against the idea that they're one and the same

the deeper I dig into buddhism the more i begin to see i am just scratching the surface of this world

The answers are out there waiting to be found. History tells us they’re equal parts bizarre and beautiful.

Just so long as it's not all the same people.

Are these really two different topics though?

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