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Comment by BaculumMeumEst | Hacker News Reader

that is absolutely fascinating and also makes me extremely uncomfortable

Neurology is full of very uncomfortable facts. Here's one for you: there are patients who believe their arm is gone even though it's still there. When the doctor asks whose arm that is, they reply it must be someone else's. The brain can simply refuse to know something, and will adopt whatever delusions and contortions are necessary. Which of course leads to the realization that there could be things we're all incapable of knowing. There could be things right in front of our faces we simply refuse to perceive and we'd never know it.

Famously, our nose is literally right in front of our faces and the brain simply "post-processes" it out of the view.

After breaking my arm, split in two, pinching the nerve and making me unable to move it for about a year, I still feel as if the arm is "someone else's", as if I am moving an object in VR, not something which is "me" or "mine".

Oliver Sacks' A Leg To Stand On is a lengthy discussion of that, including his own experiences after breaking a leg---IIRC, at one point after surgery but before he starts physical therapy, he wakes up convinced that a medical student has played a prank by removing his leg and attaching one from a cadaver, or at least sticking a cadaver's leg under his blanket. (ISTR he tries to throw it out of bed and ends up on the floor.)

It's probably way worse than we can imagine.

Reading/listening to someone like Robert Sapolsky [1] makes me laugh I could have ever hallucinated about such a muddy, not even wrong concept as "free will".

Furthermore, between the brain and, say, the liver there is only a difference of speed/data integrity inasmuch as one cares to look for information processing as basal cognition: neurons firing in the brain, voltage-gated ion channels and gap junctions controlling bioelectrical gradients in the liver, and almost everywhere in the body. Why does only the brain has a "feels like" sensation? The liver may have one as well, but the brain being an autarchic dictator perhaps suppresses the feeling of the liver, it certainly abstracts away the thousands of highly specialized decisions the liver takes each second solving adequately the complex problem space of blood processing. Perhaps Thomas Nagel shouldn't have asked "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" [2] but what is it like to be a liver.

[1] "Robert Sapolsky: Justice and morality in the absence of free will", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhvAAvwS-UA

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

The biggest problem with the current popular idea of “free will” is that people think it means they’re ineffably unpredictable. They’re uncomfortable with the notion that if you were to simulate their brain in sufficient detail, you could predict thoughts and reaction. They take refuge in pseudoscientific mumbling about the links to the Quantum, for they have heard it is special and unpredictable.

And that’s just the polar opposite of having a meaningful will at all. It is good that you are pretty much deterministic. You shouldn’t be deciding meaningful things randomly. If you made 20 copies of yourself and asked them to support or oppose some essential and important political question (about human rights, or war, or what-have-you) they should all come down on the same side. What kind of a Will would that be that chose randomly?

This is why I suggest that curious individuals try a hallucinogen at least once*. It really makes the fragility of our perception, and how it’s held up mostly by itself, very apparent.

* in a safe setting with support, of course.

I can confirm lucid dreaming does the same.

Same. We are so, so profoundly not what it feels like we are, to most of us anyway.

I am morbidly curious how people are going to creatively explain away the more challenging insights AI gives us in to what consciousness is.

If that makes you uncomfortable you definitely should not go reading the evidence supporting the notion that conscious free will is an illusion.

https://www.mpg.de/research/unconscious-decisions-in-the-bra...

My impression is that the understanding of that research that comes up with statements like "But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings" is based on dualistic reasoning.

The idea that there should not be any neural activity before a conscious decision is straight-up dualism---the intangible soul makes a decision and neural activity follows it to carry out the decision.

An alternative way of understanding that result is that the neural activity that precedes the "conscious decision" is the brain's mechanism of coming up with that decision. The "conscious mind" is the result of neural activity, right?

i always thought that the concept of free will didnt bother me. but it turns out i just didn’t understand what it implied. oh dear.

if it turns out that true, it’s truly amazing how well we convince ourselves that we’re in control.

but if our brain controls our actions and not our consciousness, then what is the purpose of consciousness?

Perhaps there is no purpose to consciousness.

Perhaps it's a phenomenon that somehow arises independently ex nihilo from sufficiently complex systems, only ever able to observe, unable to act.

Weird to think about.

Can conscious experience ever arise from matter? Even if the said matter is neural networks? This seems utterly nonsensical to me.

Do you consist of matter? Are you conscious? Are you aware the brain is a neural network?

Let's assume the premise that a form of neural network is necessary but insufficient to give rise to conscious experience. Then might it not matter whether the medium is physical or digital?

If you answer this with anything other than "we don't yet know", then you'll be wrong, because you'll be asserting a position beyond what science is able to currently provide; all of this is an open question. But hint: the evidence is mounting that yes, the medium might not matter.

Once you take on an information theoretic view of consciousness, a lot of possibilities and avenues of research open up.

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

Sorry, my english is not the best and I don't think there is a word for the thing I'm trying to explain. Meaning of 'consciousness' is too messy.

I know brain is a neural network. I just don't understand how cold, hard matter can result in this experience of consciousness we are living right now. The experience. Me. You. Perceiving. Right now.

I'm not talking about the relation between the brain and our conscious experience. It's obvious that brain is collecting and computing data every second for us to live this conscious experience. The very experience of perceiving, being conscious? The thing we take for granted the most, for that we're not without it any time, except when we're asleep?

Matter is what it is. A bunch of carbon and hydrogen atoms. How does the experience arise from matter? It can't. It is a bunch of atoms. I know how NNs and biological neurons work, still I don't see any way matter can do that. There must be some sort of non-matter essence, soul or something like that.

Is a bunch of electrochemical charges this thing/experience I am living right now? How can it be? Is Boltzmann brain [1] a sensible idea at all?

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

You are referring to qualia [1]: feeling something as-is, subjectively. I had similar metaphysics just a few years ago, but in the end, it's just that: bad metaphysics. And it's not even your or my fault: with 2,400+ years of bad metaphysics it's almost only luck to be able to pierce the veil into the metaphysics of tomorrow.

The main point is that with the tremendous discoveries of people such as Church/Turing (matter can be organized in such a fashion as to produce computation) [2] and those forgotten from the first page of history, such as Harold Saxton Burr (matter can be animated through bioelectricity), we no longer are bound to a static metaphysics where objects are made from a material which just sits there. It was obviously never the case, but fighting the phantasms of our own speculation is the hardest fight.

Therefore, no, matter is neither cold, nor hard, and we are surely very far from comprehending all the uses and forms of matter. Just look at all the wood objects around you and think how the same material was available also to Aristotle, 2,400 years ago, and to Descartes, 400 years ago, when they were writing their bad metaphysics, yet they were completely unable to think 1% of the wood objects you have readily available nowadays, cardboard and toothpicks included.

And also, yes, you are electrochemical charges, we all are, what else could we be? We looked insanely deep into the brain [4], there is no magic going on. A caveat would be that, yes, probably, we are not running on the first layer, at the level of sodium ions and neurotransmitters, but that the machinery, the brain, gives rise to a simulation: "only a simulation can be conscious, not physical systems" [5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Saxton_Burr

[4] "The Insane Engineering of MRI Machines", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlYXqRG7lus

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyVyirT6Cyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbNqHSjwhfs

I did not mean qualia, I knew qualia. I meant that my experience is not matter. Matter is matter and charges are charges, my experience right now is neither. Your perception, the act of you experiencing life right now is not matter.

> We looked insanely deep into the brain [4], there is no magic going on.

Indeed all computation and input collection and such happen in the brain. I just don't understand how I can experience anything if I'm composed only of matter. How come there happens to be a mind? Indeed the electrochemical charges from visual receptors in the eye will be transmitted and computed and memory and dopamine and all the neurons will fire regardless of whether I'm only matter or not. But how can the experiencing consciousness, 'me' arise from matter?

> only a simulation can be conscious, not physical systems

This is what I'm talking about, only that I don't see why simulations are not physical systems.

> yes, you are electrochemical charges, we all are, what else could we be?

It's nonsensical and unscientific to completely rule out the possibility that we can be something else as well, especially when we can't study it directly, like in the example of soul.

Simulations are physical systems just as much as running a "Hello World" program on your computer is a physical system: somewhere some transistors flip, but they are not relevant for the level of description we are interested when running the program, the program output, as simple or complex as it could be. Somewhere in the brain some molecules do "stuff", as a result of the "stuff" the brain sustains one agent, or more [1]. How exactly, in an engineering sense, the agent is constructed is yet to be discovered, hopefully we are only a few years, a few decades, away from building synthetic agents.

Sure, we have about 2,700 years of tradition speaking of souls (considering the major religions: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism). Where did those 2,700 years got us? Has any religion been able to build a conscious agent starting from basic materials (whatever they consider basic, pixie dust if they will)? Have all this years speaking of souls managed to achieve something meaningful, even as a side effect, that actually improves the quality of life? I'm talking hay [2], indoor plumbing, hook-and-loop fasteners, ibuprofen, GPS, voltmeters, extreme ultraviolet lithography, things that you and I can use and rely on daily. I have read pretty much all the major texts of the major traditions, from Mahābhārata to Summa Theologiae, call it intellectual curiosity. If not for the "bragging rights" to say that I know what filioque or bodhipakkhiyādhammā means, I would regret it, wasted time and pointless eye strain. So no, it's not nonsensical and unscientific to rule out a not even hypothesis such as the "soul" after 2,700+ years without any kind of results and absolute incompatibility with the way we actually interact with the world, scientifically or not: photons, atoms, electromagnetic fields and the like.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder

[2] "The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay.", https://quotepark.com/quotes/1924489-freeman-dyson-like-many...

We are composed of matter and we are conscious, we take this as being axiomatic. Given we have one certain example, the question is then how does the body do it, and how could we do it in other substrates: how do we go from "just physics" to mind [1].

The short answer is: chemical reactions start a chain reaction of abstraction towards higher and higher forms of collective intelligence.

For some reason, perhaps something with the way the Hilbert space vector obeying the Schrödinger equation which we usually call "the universe" is [2], but also given the ridiculous breadth and depth of possible explorations of the biological pathways [3], "chunks" of matter tend to group together, they group and form stars and planets, but they also group and form formaldehydes and acetaldehydes and many more. Given enough tries, across multiple environments, in some lucky hydrothermal vents abiogenesis was probably started [4]. Once we had the first agential "chunk" of matter, a group of matter which has a definition of the boundary between a "self", no matter how tiny [5], and an exterior environment, it was more of a game of waiting (~4 billion years) for this tiny agent to grow into an agent with higher-order thinking, self-referentiality, metacognition, and the likes.

Neural networks, as in matrix multiplications, are not conscious because they have no mechanism for deciding what is the environment and what is their own, they are a hammer, sitting there, expecting to be used, not a lacrymaria olor [6], exploring the environment for survival and fun. Could we have neural networks in an agent-like architecture starting to behave more like thermostats, setting goals for themselves? Probably.

[1] "From physics to mind - Prof. Michael Levin", https://youtu.be/_QICRPFWDpg?t=85

[2] "Sean Carroll: Extracting the universe from the wave function", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOssfva2IBo

[3] "Nick Lane, 'Transformer : The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death'", https://youtu.be/bEFzUx_j7tA?t=279

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physarum_polycephalum

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq6Y54mxjOg

Please see my reply to your sister comment. Thanks for the links, especially 1 btw.

Just wait until you notice how much humans do this day to day

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