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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the same boat. It feels wrong to contemplate that our consciousness might not be a magical independent agent with supernatural powers, but is rather an emergent property of complex-but-deterministic actions and reactions.

Like it somehow diminishes us. Reduces us to cogs and levers and such.

But I can't imagine how it could be otherwise, though. I'm still baffled by the existence of qualia, phenomenology, etc. Awareness. But bafflement on that front isn't a good reason to reject the possibility that the only thing that separates me from a computer is the level of complexity. Or the structure of the computation. Sometimes things are just weird.

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I don't think we're ever going to arrive at a satisfactory answer for where qualia comes from, for much the same reason it's impossible to test the quantum suicide hypothesis without actually putting yourself through it enough times to convince yourself statistically.

The only "real" evidence of qualia you have is your own running stream of it; you can try to carefully pour yourself, like a jug of water, into the body of another, and if you go carefully enough you may even succeed to carry that qualia-stream with you. But it's also possible that you pour too quickly, or that you get bumped in the middle of the pouring, and poof - the qualia is just gone. You're left with a p-zombie.

Or maybe not. Maybe it comes right back as soon as the transfer is done, like the final piece of a torrented movie. The important part is you won't know unless you try - and past success never guarantees future success. Maybe you just got lucky on the first pour.

> emergent property of complex-but-deterministic actions and reactions

I think you mean non-deterministic. The last century of physics was dominated by work showing how deterministic systems emerged from non-deterministic foundations. It seems that probability and statistics were the branches of maths behind everything. Who would have thought.

Thanks. I did actually mean to use "deterministic", but only as it sits in opposition to "free will". Is there a better word for what I meant?

Of course there is randomness as well. So, yeah, I should clarify: We don't impose upon the world any kind of "uncaused cause", even if it feels like we do. Everything we think and do is a direct result of some other action. Sometimes that action can trace its lineage to a random particle decay. (Maybe—ultimately—all of them can?) Maybe we even have a source of True Randomness inherent in our minds. But even so, that doesn't lend any support to the common notion of our minds and consciousnesses as being somehow separate from the physical world or the chains of information that run through everything.

I get what you are saying. I was just thinking about the stochastic parrot analogy for consciousness, but I see your comment is more about there not being special sauce to conciousness. But hey, the fact that such behaviour can emerge from simple processes is still pretty damn cool.

I think "deterministic" is the more correct option.

Yes, of course deep down there's unimaginable numbers of atoms randomly bumping around. But so far everything suggests that biological organisms do their damnedest to abstract that away and operate on a deterministic basis.

Think like how you keep changing -- gaining and losing cells, changing chemical balance, and on the whole it takes a lot of damage, even brain damage, to produce measurable results.

Indeed our consciousness is an emergent property from a complex system, however the complexity of that system - the human brain - is almost unfathomably beyond the complexity of anything we might make in silicon now or in the foreseeable future.

For example, it is possible to write down a (natural/whole) number that completely describes the state of an LLM - its connections and weights etc - for example by simply taking the memory space and converting into a number as a very long sequence of 1s and 0s. The number will be very big, but still indescribably smaller than a number that could perfectly describe the state of a human brain - not least as that number is likely to lie on the real line, or beyond, even if it was calculable. See Cantor for a discussion on the various infinities and their respective cardinalities.

Under the assumption that human brains are limited by our current understanding of physics, their state is finite - infinities are forbidden by definition.

( See the relationship between information theory and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that results in the law of paraconservation of information : http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy-more.html#sec-pha... )

Not true. The idea that QM discretises our universe is incorrect.

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