Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

I read Consciousness Explained 30 years ago and at first I was miffed that it didn't touch on the possibilties of Quantum mechanics and consciousness, a buzzword idea that I was keen on at the time. But then every chapter was so fascinating - blindsight, p-zombies, Libet, the cartesian theatre.

If I can sum up in a very simple way, as a philosopher he was pointing to a simple but hard to grasp idea:

Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is. Most of our preconceptions about it are likely wrong. Because we're right in it all the time, it seems like we 'know' things about it. But we don't. Quick example: our visual consciousness seems continuous. But we know from saccades that it can't be.

View on HN

For the record, 30 years later most consciousness researchers still believe it's unlikely that quantum mechanics plays a special role in consciousness. It of course remains plausible, since we still don't have the true answers yet, but hypotheses like Penrose's have not yet been found to be credible.

I really like your summary of some of his ideas, though.

I bet we'll find there's more computation going on in neurons (and possibly other brain cells) than we currently know about which will necessarily be happening at much smaller scales than synapse firing.

I think this is likely, yes. I think there are already some leads pointing in that direction. I think it likely won't depend on quantum mechanics, though. (But of course, this is all idle speculation from a complete amateur.)

Each neuron is itself a complex organism. They're unicellular, but each is still a robust lifeform.

We don't know from saccades that consciousness can't be continuous. We just know that the physical impressions on our retina do not map 1 to 1 to our visual conscious experience. The brain does all sorts of things to the raw information it receives before that information rises to the level of phenomenal consciousness.

this is just silly pedantry. The comment you're replying to was clearly, if implicitly stating "visual conscious experience cannot simply be the experience of the patterns of light falling on our retina, even though we experience it as such, because of saccadic motion, which is occuring constantly but which we rarely perceive".

The point is that our intuition (for centuries!) about what visual conscious experience is driven by is wrong. You've summarized what we know now succinctly and usefully, but that in no way invalidates the point the comment was making.

>p-zombies

I looked up what he said about p-zombies on the p-zombies wiki and am happy to see he has a position I agree with.

>Dennett argues that "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition".

Wouldn't ChatGPT be a p-zombie? Unless of course one thinks it's conscious.

No. A p-zombie is a very specific hypothetical construct: something absolutely 100% identical to some equivalent conscious being in every way except that it has no consciousness.

Essentially an NPC on a script Vs the player in the game

> Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is

This is nonsense. Consciousness is exactly what it is. The only real that ever existed is the fact there's there there. Everything else can be an illusion, as you said. There's no reason why red appears they way it is.

But the fact that i can seem to experience red cannot be denied. The seeming cannot be a mistake.

What if it isn’t exactly what it appears to be to us? If the answer was that simple, thousands of years of deep thinking would have been for nothing. I believe it’s actually a difficult, perhaps even impossible question to answer.

The experience of consciousness, or that it’s like something to be you, doesn’t necessarily mean anything about how or why that’s possible or occurring in the first place.

Perhaps our defintion of consciousness doesn't match. What I think of consciousness is something that can experience. It is not even experience, feelings, emotions, these are secondary things that arise in "consciousness".

What you cannot deny is the fact there's something at all. You cannot doubt that there's something. If you doubt that, there's a contradiction. Not what is that something, but simply the fact that _there is_ something.

So the fact there's something is something that has to be true. The question "I doubt there's something in this universe" doesn't make sense.

I think you’re just saying “cogito, ergo sum”.

Yours sounds more like, “something seeming therefore something seeming”.

You misunderstand me. Consciousness definitely exists, but its workings are likely different to our preconceptions of how it should work. I offer saccadic masking as an example of how aspects of how it works are 'hidden' from us. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

Reply on news.ycombinator.com