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Comment by prolyxis | Hacker News Reader

I am hopeful that advances in brain-computer interfaces will start to provide a partial answer to the question of "what's there" and why it's there. It seems to me the ability to controllably augment one's own consciousness with precision will tremendously clarify the necessary ingredients for consciousness.

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Neuroscience has already done lots of investigations as to what's there and why. We know which structures in the brain do what (including "consciousness") at an increasingly fine level. We can observe all sorts of brain disorders and dysfunctions and their effect on consciousness. You can do drugs yourself to alter the ingredients of consciousness.

I think people just don't like how boring the answer is.

No, I don't think you understand how fundamentally hard the question is. See the hard problem of consciousness[1]. When you think about gravity, you can imagine a universe where gravity is reversed. All of the physics seems mechanical, or probabilistics or whatever. But "there's there there" is a completely different phenomena that I think we will never have an answer for.

There doesn't seem to be a continuity, either something is there, or there isn't. You can be drunk, hallucinating, feel extremely dizzy, trapped in a vat, trapped inside another universe inside vat, trapped as a figment of reality of other beings, but the fact that "there's there there" is binary. It is something that cannot be divided or peeked into. A kind of fundamental atomic property.

1. https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/

I understand the hard problem. There clearly is a continuum of "consciousness" from simple insects on up to primates & cetaceans, and the complexity of that consciousness is correlated with the structural complexity of the brain. Creating minds is just what brains do.

Anyway, I was specifically responding to the parent comment statements about the research needed, pointing out that we already have it.

I don't think neural correlates of consciousness have been identified, so clearly there remains research to be done. I'm not in touch with the neuroscience literature, but acknowledging the hard problem of consciousness means one should accept there is a lot of work remaining. That being said, I believe the hard problem is surmountable. In my mind the situation is similar to computer science before Turing's description of the Turing machine: there were imprecise notions abound about what computation meant that needed to be clarified through a concrete model. My view is simply that finer control over conscious experience would aid understanding enormously. But you're right, I should probably skim the real research more.

I think the main ingredient is a living being.

Why?

Because the evidence strongly indicates so: we haven't found a single instance in the entire universe of a conscious entity that wasn't also a living being.

And 200 years ago only living being could fly, but now we have machines that can fly higher and faster than any bird, even to Mars. But back then you could have said flight requires a living being because that's all we've ever seen.

A hundred years ago computers didn't exist and now they've been beating us at chess for some time. That you haven't seen a conscious computer yet in no way proves that it's not possible is principle.

I never said that the evidence proves that conscious machines are impossible. I said it strongly suggests that it's impossible. Also I disagree that air-planes can fly, for the same reason that I don't agree that boats can swim. The term "can" implies agency, and machines don't have that. All the technological progress during the last 200 years doesn't appear to have brought machines any closer to having such capability.

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