Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

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One of my issues with panpsychism is the question of causation. The behaviours of particles can be entirely explained in terms of physical dynamics, there is no behaviour left that needs explanation. If they do have experience, it doesn’t seem to be causal in that it doesn’t seem to have any consequences.

We’re not quite there yet with galaxies, but there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle.

This means any experience these phenomena might have would be purely epiphenomenal, and therefore lacking in consequences, or explanatory power, and be unprovable. It would be pure speculation, maybe so, maybe not, maybe something else, just an exercise in imagination. Thats not a reliable route to knowledge.

With humans we have social, emotional and intellectual behaviour predicated on the existence of personal experience. We talk and write about having interior experiences. That is a causal phenomenon in the world that needs to be explained, aside from our personal first person experience of it.

The hard problem of consciousness wonders why we seem to have consciousness when we could instead be input/output automata. You could imagine such a ‘zombie’ with our same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior (even pretending to have inner experiences) that doesn’t actually have Qualia. The existence of consciousness is not clearly causal, which is part of the mystery of why we seem to have it.

It doesn't seem plausible for something to have same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior without experiencing "qualia", because much of our behavior is expressing and talking about those experiences. I see "qualia" just as a second-order perception of the sensory-information processing within our brains. A little like a program profiler profiling its own process would observe parts of its own execution and process that information. I see no particular mystery in such an inner self-perception. At the same time, given what influences human behavior, it is an essential part for explaining that behavior. Philosophical zombies are an impossibility.

> there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle.

Except we do see multiple inconsistencies at a galactic scale. The hubble tension, the absence of explanation of dark matter, the models which point to 75% of fundamental components of the universe being unobservable? There doesn't seem to be a direct extrapolation from our models to galactic-scale explanations.

It is extremely unlikely that these concerns will undo anything we think we know in the realm of biology, such as how metabolism and reproduction work.

Consciousness is different, as we don't know how it works, but we have no evidence suggesting either that it will require a complete rewrite of fundamental physics to explain, or that a rewrite of fundamental physics to resolve the issues you raise would also provide the missing information needed to explain consciousness.

> Consciousness is different, as we don't know how it works, but we have no evidence suggesting either that it will require a complete rewrite of fundamental physics to explain

Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, something which is not supported by physics.

Either consciousness is incorrect, or physics is, and I don't think I've ever met a physicist who believes they're incorrect on their omniscient knowledge. Seems like wherever you look in reality there are paradoxes like this that spring up, which makes me wonder what reality is.

> Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is...

My initial reaction to this was "not in my experience", but on reflection, I really have no idea what you are saying here. Conscious entities may have opinions, but consciousness itself, at least as it is usually conceived of, does not.

> but consciousness itself, at least as it is usually conceived of, does not.

What are "you" saying here, and how do you know this to be true?

If you can show any examples of consciousness regularly/usually claiming to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, or even someone other than yourself saying that consciousness regularly/usually does so, I would be most interested - in my studies of what's written and said about it, I have never come across this view before.

A simple search should be sufficient to establish that the most common usage of 'consciousness' is as being an aspect of perception - and more specifically, the subjective aspect of it.

Furthermore, I am at a loss to figure out how this claim could have any relevance to the sentence of mine that you quoted in your first reply to me.

> If you can show any examples of consciousness regularly/usually claiming to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, or even someone other than yourself saying that consciousness regularly/usually does so, I would be most interested

And if I do not, can you still be interested?

> in my studies of what's written and said about it, I have never come across this view before.

Consider what exists now, compared to what existed at the Big Bang. Then do today vs tomorrow, also taking into consideration whether inactivity or non-exploitation of the realm of possibility plays a role.

> A simple search should be sufficient to establish that the most common usage of 'consciousness' is as being an aspect of perception - and more specifically, the subjective aspect of it.

Consider what common perception (which manifests at runtime as Truth) was of African Americans, or gay people, 30 or so years ago.

> Furthermore, I am at a loss to figure out how this claim could have any relevance to the sentence of mine that you quoted in your first reply to me.

"...but consciousness itself, at least as it is usually conceived of, does not."

It isn't possible for you to know how consciousness is commonly conceived, but your consciousness would have you believe otherwise. Consciousness is shaped by culture, and your culture has taught you to think this way, it is the proper way to think here in 2024.

Maybe an analogy would help:

Consider the aggregate (adjusted to remove affects of population size) quality & power of human cognitive capability before and after the enlightenment, comprehensively, but also with respect to a certain phenomenon: faith based thinking. Then, consider where we may currently sit on an absolute scale, and what the distribution of faith based thinking is (actually, opposed to virtually) throughout the system. How likely does it seem that humans have produced the perfect methodology, even without considering the state of affairs we see all around us?

Basically, I'm kind of asking (teasing may be a better word) that physicists, and science in general, to expand their theories to include explanations for their implicit claims of omniscience, or stop engaging in it, or at least stop taking cheap shots at and claiming (without proof or even substantial evidence) comprehensive objective superiority to other competing frameworks/methodologies/etc.

> And if I do not, can you still be interested?

I could be, but not by this rather idiosyncratic diatribe against intellectual arrogance, a domain which is in any case far from being exclusively populated by physicists.

> I could be....

Could you (are you willing to, and will in fact do it) describe at least one set of conditions where you could be?

> ...but not by this rather idiosyncratic diatribe against intellectual arrogance

Can you explain why you believe this is necessarily (presumably) the case?

Meta:

- Is there a way or tone I could write in such that I could achieve the same level of logical rigour, but somehow bypass the natural, fundamental aversion to this sort of dialogue?

- Do you believe it to be optimal that you can criticize/insult my performance, but my criticism/inquiry into particular details of of yours is ~non-valid/inappropriate/etc (I am assuming something like this is the case, please correct me if I am wrong)?

sorry, what do you mean by "Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, something which is not supported by physics."? i do not follow what you mean by consciousness claiming to know something - consciousness is not an entity that sense? Your usage of consciousness as an entity doesn't seem to make sense to me.

Allegedly, consciousness is what powers these forum discussions, and these forum discussions are filled with numerous implicit supernatural claims, one of them being omniscience. It's an interesting phenomenon in various ways, one of them being that it can be explained away as unimportant in fact, even if that cannot technically be known to be true (demonstrating that facts do not always need to be factual), and it is funny because the conversations occur within a programming forum (the irony of it is funny).

It is as apparently almost everything else a choice between 2 options.

The current Western approach to science is strictly that subjective measure is fully informative of objective reality, and (equally if not more importantly) that perception is a mechanism operating within objective reality, an object within reality, and that object is subject to natural laws.

The other possibility -- there is really no way to refute or prove either definitively as in all of these dual ontological choices -- is that consciousness is peering into a construct of a universal conscious intellect (something like logos or tao) and the nature of conscious intellect is entirely unlike the nature of the construct, which is an image. This flavor of paradigm offers the possibility for "consciousness" (aka God) to claim omniscient powers, including time dilation (alpha omega) and other matter.

What helps these models to persist are entirely distinct. The former maps well to shared experiences (modulo group psi phenomena) and is reassuringly direct and simple. The latter persists since it maps well to non-rational content of our minds which the former simply must dismiss as garbage collection or (LLM like) ramblings, void of meaning.

Physics can't be incorrect but it can be misinterpreted. Last century witnessed a wonderful case in point where Quantum physics provided analytical tools to "perfectly predict" outcomes of experiments but until eventually settled allowed physicists to have preferences (read: belief systems) regarding which interpretation of the quantum phenomena (Einstein or Bohr) was correct.

That Bohr's interpretation proved to be the correct interpretation has bearing on this discussion in more than one sense.

(Apologies for taking my anger at the system out on you, no hate intended on a personal level.)

> The current Western approach to science is strictly that subjective measure is fully informative of objective reality, and (equally if not more importantly) that perception is a mechanism operating within objective reality, an object within reality, and that object is subject to natural laws.

Sometimes, sure. But science/scientists also has knowledge of Indirect Realism, but only sometimes:

- when discussing Indirect Realism from an abstract perspective

- when criticizing the object level quality of ideas other than their own (when it is their ideas the underlying service seems to become disabled, and often even access to memory is blocked)

> The other possibility...

Classic western scientific (as it is manifest at the object level) thinking: framing things as false dichotomies.

>... there is really no way to refute or prove either definitively

Disagree.

Take your perfectly reasonable (by current standards of proper thinking, [highlighting] problematic portions for emphasis): "subjective [measure] [is] [fully] [informative] of [objective] [reality], and ([equally] if not more importantly) that [perception] [is] a mechanism [operating within] [objective] [reality], an [object] [within] [reality], and that object [is] [subject to] [natural] [laws]."

This whole phenomenon takes place within reality, this "is" "true", but the content of reality (comprehensive reality at a given snapshot in time) is also the consequence of it. So while it "is true" that these mechanisms operate within "objective reality", they also produce objective reality (much of which is simultaneously subjective, objectively).

Also: while convenient techniques like "and that object is subject to natural laws" can be useful, they can also be harmful, like when one forgets that "natural laws" (and various other things within the problem space) is virtualized/hallucinated, but appears to not be (there's an easy way to tell: pick someone out of a forum and ask them questions: you will almost always find that they genuinely believe that what seems to be true to them is true; and, they'll often even link to a proof: a claim that it is true, that has no accompanying proof).

> as in all of these dual ontological choices -- is that consciousness is peering into a construct of a universal conscious intellect (something like logos or tao) and the nature of conscious intellect is entirely unlike the nature of the construct, which is an image. This flavor of paradigm offers the possibility for "consciousness" (aka God) to claim omniscient powers, including time dilation (alpha omega) and other matter.

I can see the possibility from an abstract theory perspective, but I cannot see how a complete object level implementation would be possible, even removing science's silly restrictive object level (science as it manifests) restrictions like an absence of evidence is proof of absence. (Are Godel's Incompleteness Theorems relevant here maybe?)

> What helps these models to persist are entirely distinct. The former maps well to shared experiences (modulo group psi phenomena) and is reassuringly direct and simple. The latter persists since it maps well to non-rational content of our minds which the former simply must dismiss as garbage collection or (LLM like) ramblings, void of meaning.

I think training of LLM's is much better analogy, and I also believe that that may be literally the comprehensively correct answer. If you simply pay close attention to how humans (both dumb and the very smartest) talk, if you take them at their literal word, I can't see much flaw: human belief of what is true is a function of what they were trained to believe is true. (Self-referential irony noted....indeed, I think it is possible to think oneself out of the illusion, at least to some degree, sometimes.)

> Physics can't be incorrect but it can be misinterpreted.

This is a perfect example - scientific scripture and even object level scientific work disagrees with this...and yet, one can commonly find highly qualified scientists who make such claims with sincerity and seriousness, if not downright concern for the well being of others who are not able to think in their incorrect yet correct way of thinking. Usually, science would notice anomalies like this and wonder what is the underlying cause...but it seems like there are certain ideas/domains/realms that they have a strong aversion to studying.

I'll even give an example: Whorfism or Linguistic Relativity - this topic is practically guaranteed to trigger predictable cognitive error in a human mind, and the more educated the mind is the larger the effect (more powerful base cognition can produce error of a larger magnitude).

> That Bohr's interpretation proved to be the correct interpretation has bearing on this discussion in more than one sense.

Science also uses very important and very complex words like "correct" colloquially when it serves their purpose, which is contrary to their scriptures, which they regularly use as a proof of the comprehensive superiority of their ideology.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

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