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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

The idea that subjective consciousness has to casual power in decision-making seems eminently silly to me. Sure, it's fairly obvious it's not the only or even always primary thing involved in how people decide what to do, but it seems absurd to me to say that, for example, someone's inner train of thought comparing and contrasting two choices at length has nothing to do with which choice they actually make.

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Most of the time we are on autopilot and our brain retconns the reason for an action, decision, or emotion after the fact.

But it seems clear that at times we consciously steer our autopilot in a new direction by choice. Some number of repetitions and that becomes the new autopilot behavior.

Actual conscious thought and control is too metabolically expensive and slow to use much of the time but it has its uses.

From what I read it's actually the opposite. Studies seem to show that while our attention makes us feel in charge and at the helm, the decisions and the thoughts that arise happen way before our ability to influence them consciously. It appears that our consciousness is mostly a rationalization layer after the fact.

That's why there is a problem explaining consciousness in the first place. The more we dig the more elusive it is

As far as I know, those studies all look at minor "decisions", such as pressing the left or the right button after a sound is heard. They find that they can predict which button will be pressed earlier than the conscious decision to pick one was experienced.

However, there is no actual "decision" to be made there. It's a random choice, and it's not that random choices are not conscious decisions.

It's much harder to devise an experiment that looks at actual, meaningful, decisions. And I'm not talking about something extreme like "do I love this person" or whatever, just a real decision, like the ones you might make in an RPG ("do I help or kill this NPC").

I'm puzzled by the downvotes. Am I saying something obscene or against the rules of polite discourse? I mean, I could be wrong sure but I don't think downvotes are for disagreeing with what somebody says but for punishing behavior that lowers the standards of the forum. Am I really doing that with this comment? Do I need to cite all the articles and books I read to form this opinion or else I cannot state an opinion?

> Actual conscious thought and control is too metabolically expensive and slow to use much of the time but it has its uses.

I was about to write some long winded reply to why this doesn't make sense . Is this such a crazy thought? Do people really feel like they are in control of themselves? After spending a lot of time thinking about this, I cannot understand how I make decisions.

I literally cannot tell you what I am going to do next. I can say that I am going to end this reply. But I have no idea when or why I am going to stop here.

Same, and this is why I think I'm also not much more than an LLM or a next token predictor. All of my actions could be continuous domino pieces. It all seems just to be falling naturally. I'm not trying to be humble or anything. It just seems obvious how the life is. All I do could be autopiloted, I do have an unexplained special sense of consciousness, but I'm not actually seeing a strong need for it. I happen to be or feel like I am and that I'm somehow special, but it seems like I could also operate at the same or even better efficiency without that.

It's absurd to believe that consciousness is in any way responsible for decision making. There's no plausible scientific model that would allow for that to take place without breaking causality. Instead, we have strong evidence that points to consciousness being an epiphenomenon of brain activity, completely detached from action.

What about this conclusion then:

It's absurd to believe quantum physics can in any way be the right theory of the world at a small scale.

Why?

> There's no plausible scientific model that would allow for that to take place without breaking causality.

Indefinite causal structures show up quantum theory [1].

All hinges on what is meant by the opaque "breaking causality".

[1] e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys2930

What a dangerous thought, so mathematical learning is predetermined what biological factors? Is not the conservation of the body’s metabolism in the utility of communication served more physically? The ability to fast and ascetic rituals are self-evident demonstration of human motor neural control away from baseline biological processes. Unless you can please explain a hypothesis for the development of motor control habits, e.g. for healthy socializing? I suppose better group balance by controlling the body’s autonomic nerves is an adaptive response, but who is the one to get the chain of being started? To the conscious activity the answer is: through random genetic assortment?

At the very least, consciousness causes enough impact on reality to result in the concept of “consciousness” to make it into dictionaries. If it was truly an epiphenomenon, such real-world impacts would be acausal.

It may sound absurd, but that doesn't make it so. There are good reasons to believe that at least in many cases (some of them being complex decisions), the conscious thought process is either ineffective or counterproductive.

Obligatory reference to Peter Watts' Blindsight, as well.

And the Echopraxia sequel too. Anyway, consciousness shouldn't be so bad in the real world of we as a species were successful so far despite of it. Of course with the hindsight of the next million years some future species could say that we were doomed by our consciousness, but we can't know that right now.

> The story follows a crew of astronauts sent to investigate a trans-Neptunian comet that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology.

> Blindsight is available online under a Creative Commons license.

Here's the novel:

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm (HTML)

https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Blindsight.pd... (PDF)

http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Blindsight-v1.... (ePUB)

> someone's inner train of thought comparing and contrasting two choices at length has nothing to do with which choice they actually make.

Even that is illusory most of the time. It takes deliberate effort and method to limit bias and personal preference.

Having personal preference doesn't make a decision illusory. I have a preference for vanilla ice cream, doesn't mean I can't legitimately consider or even choose chocolate.

That’s one of the points made in the article - intuitively it feels mad.

But there are experiments out there that have shows ‘conscious decisions’ about an action coming after the action rather than before.

What sort of 'actions' do those studies pertain to, though? Simple stimulus-response exercises? If so, I don't think anyone is denying the existence of reflexive or conditioned responses to external stimuli, but that in itself does not disprove that we retain the capacity to insert conscious reasoning between stimulus and response.

It seems to be a common pattern when encountering novel situations to analyze them consciously, make deliberate choices prior to taking action, but then to recall those prior decisions in future situations that involve equivalent inputs, repeating the same actions over time, to the point that we effectively "store" our past decisions as conditioned responses that the subconscious can apply directly. Things become "second nature" over time, and develop into habituated actions, but that doesn't mean that there was no conscious thought involved in the experiences that formed them in the first place.

"to casual" -> "causal", right?

That was supposed to be "no causal", but I only caught the typo after it was too late to edit it.

Yeah I’m definitely inclined to consider consciousness as more of a mechanism for feedback at the end of the chain, rather than the primary way of generating decisions.

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