No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about
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duncancarroll.tumblr.com
Since then, even the Copenhagen interpretation basically says that the "observation" happens already at the Geiger counter: "Analysis of an actual experiment found that measurement alone (for example by a Geiger counter) is sufficient to collapse a quantum wave function before there is any conscious observation of the measurement" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat#Copenh...
Consciousness might be worth thinking about. If it exists independently of the brain, it still must have effects on the brain, to have effects on human actions. These effects on the brain could be measurable. "This voltage here went up for an unknown reason".
Further, it pushes the question to another unobservable "magical" world. So, the consciousness exists in another world which is not directly measurable. Can we measure it indirectly? What is the structure of consciousness in the astral plane or however you are going to call it? If the whole goal of arguing that the consciousness exists in the astral plane is that "we can't study it", then that sounds a bit non-serious.
All you need to know at the end is that the bigger / more energy a system has, the less time it can stay superimposed before collapsing by itself into one state. For anything macro-scale this timeline is basically zero.
> My response: who said anything about metaphysical?
Well, the original author did. The entire article is, at its core, an argument for dualism. Dualism is a metaphysical theory.
As for the accusation that I intended to imply that consciousness was a solved problem, all I can say is "What?" Seriously, how did you get that from what I said?
The problem with the article, and the reason that people responded negatively (although, I think, for the most part thoughtfully), is not that everybody thinks the problem of consciousness is easy, or that it has been solved. It's that the arguments presented were weak and not particularly interesting or novel.
I agree that discussion on HN should be thoughtful and polite. But I don't think that means we should be constantly patting each other on the back and blowing up each other's egos.
I also don't really think the quote mining here was helpful. Here's the comment that was quoted simply as "Not a useful concept": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195854
Huh, it actually looks like that comment went on to bring up the concept of zombies, and linked to further reading. I guess quoting that part of the comment wouldn't have supported your indignant outrage though.
Finally, the position that consciousness is not a useful concept is an important part of this discussion. How can we even have a meaningful conversation about consciousness without first addressing whether what we're talking about is real?
I think in a conversation about consciousness, it's very important to define exactly what it is you're talking about. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I get the impression that within the field, "consciousness" refers to specific patterns of brain activity. (Some neuroscientist on here can correct me if I'm wrong.) These patterns can be be studied experimentally, simulated computationally, or theorized about mathematically. All fall well into the modern definition of what science encompasses. Testable predictions about reality can be made and understood.
Then the author of the first piece uses a different word a little later in the article:
> Experience - "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?"
This, in my opinion, is a whole different idea. As a scientist myself (my research is in molecular-dynamics and quantum monte carlo), "experience" is not something that can be assessed at all by the scientific method. Many people argue that "experience" doesn't even exist (see the concept of p-zombies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie). As for me personally, I'm certain that it does, for if you removed all of my faculties and senses with the exception of leaving my mind intact, I would still experience existence. The curious thing about this is that there's no way for me to tell whether other people (you all) exist in the same way that I do, not even in theory. How do I know if you actually experience existence or are simply a collection of particles following the same rules of physics that everything else does? For then if I was you, I wouldn't be me anymore. One prerequisite for something being scientific is that it must be testable, and this sort of thing is not. So it's not science and I don't waste time conflating it with what actually is science. It's an interesting philosophical question. It's been debated for centuries, and it will continue to be debated for centuries (along the same lines as qualia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) but there will never be any kind of resolution to the issue.
Consciousness appears to be the ultimate mystery. There is something very fundamental about it that we don't understand at all. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the type of people that would like to turn Science into a religion. We just don't know, and it's intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.
What is the origin of awareness itself? It is the very activities one is aware of. The activities produce energy which we call consciousness. The dimension that the consciousness can see is determined by the quality of the very activities.
Consciousness is thus not solely generated by neurological activities.
Before denying this because of your first impression, please confirm if what I'm saying is true or not, and whether it is confirmed by all evidence or if there is in fact any evidence which contradicts it. What I've said here doesn't come from my thoughts or ideas.
1. Can you define consciousness? Or is consciousness = awareness? Is that what you meant?
2. You ask "What is the origin of awareness itself?". I really don't understand this question. What is awareness? I can't even comprehend what you mean when you ask "what is the origin of [it]?". Colloquially, physical things have "origins", which is to say that at some point some physical thing was "created" or "crafted". My intuitive idea of awareness is that it is an experience, it's not something physical.
2. The 'origin' of a phenomenon refers the causes that generate the phenomenon. In math, as well as philosophy, the question is the origin of the answer. I'll give you an example. Where does the light from a lightbulb come from? Does it come from the bulb or does it come from the electricity itself? The bulb is simply the object which converts the electrical energy to EM radiation, not the origin of the light itself. Where does the electricity come from? The activities of the generator. So, mind is like light and consciousness is like an electrical wave.
3. Awareness of a fact means that you see a fact. It means that you receive the fact as it is. The dichotomy between experiential and physical things is illusory. It's simply that you experience the physical things from your own perspective, which is formulated by everything that has happened to you and everything you have done in the past - all of which were originated by activities as well. If we compare to a physical object, your consciousness is like the driver of a car (where your body is like the car), and when you are driving a car you can see through the windshield and you can feel feedback through the steering wheel. Hope this makes sense. This is not so easy to understand at first listen so please feel free to ask me continuous questions as I can help you to make your understanding more concrete.
"The bulb is simply the object which converts the electrical energy to EM radiation, not the origin of the light itself."
If you were to ignore the particle interactions, then yes, the light originates from the light bulb. It certainly does not originate from electricity. Where the electricity comes from is irrelevant.
"It means that you receive the fact as it is."
I have no idea what that means.
"The dichotomy between experiential and physical things is illusory. It's simply that you experience the physical things from your own perspective,"
Oh, I know.
I still don't think you defined awareness precisely enough.
frankly i think our science just isn't very advanced at the moment. particularly lacking is our understanding of anything that isn't linear
This is not the same as describing what it "feels like" from the inside. From your comment, I infer that you are rejecting the explanatory powers of neuroscience because you are expecting it to speak to the "feels like" question.
None? Ever? Consciousness could just be a free floating quantum mechanical genie attached to my back?
Hogcock.
We are only brains. If your brain gets squished, you don't really care because you'll cease to exist in this light cone.
Guess what, his consciousness is you and you will close the game and walk away. In a consciousness dimension your character can't even imagine.
This is absolutely unrooted parable, except that consciousness remains a mystery. What does it hide? We don't know.
There's always the reductive argument of "Well, we could be running in a computer simulation and when you die here you're perfectly recreated in another simulated universe."
But, we're not.
What distinction are you claiming exists between your own subjective experience and that of a video game character? (follow-up question: why do you believe this?)
Your soul could be observing your body and being affected by it. While your memories and feelings are in the body, your subjective experience of them may not be.
This isn't a one time affair. Every human carries DNA explaining exactly how to create more intelligent conscious creatures. It doesn't take "special conditions." It happens in squalor, mud huts, ice, desert, famine, over excess—everywhere. We are self-replacing nanomachines looking like individual discrete entities on a macro scale.
Your soul could be observing your body and being affected by it.
Nope. Not possible. You are entirely your brain. Nothing more, nothing less.
You cannot reasonably claim to know this. Of course, your parent comment cannot know that "no arrangement of physical parts has come close to qualitatively being the same as a subjective experience" either, as long as he only has access to his own subjective experience.
Clearly I am only a portion of my brain since if you remove some of it I am still me. But then, if you start killing the neurons in my brain one by one, at what point do I stop being me?
Can this connection be distorted or interrupted? What are the effects of doing so?
If you accept that a drug-induced solipsistic, out-of-body effect[1] is an alteration of subjective experience, are you then going to argue that "While your memories, feelings, and subjective experience are in the body, your X may not be." What would X be?
On the other hand, having "uncaused effects" has been found in quantum mechanics, but it's too much of a leap to suppose that your consciousness controls your body through quantum mechanical probability. Although there's something eerie about the waveform collapse having to do with conscious observers.
Fortunately, it doesn't. Any measurement of a system constitutes an "observer", conscious or not.
It's exactly the same for us, making the observation - from our perspective we observed one result or the other, collapsing the wavefunction. But to an outside observer we entangled our own state with that of the cat and the sample, and we're in a superposition of (observed cat dead, observed cat alive) - and will be until they observe us, at which point our wavefunction will collapse to one or the other. And so on.
I agree with you. However, we both have to give serious consideration to the objection that our brains are a necessary but not sufficient condition of consciousness.
We do not know, as of yet, that our brains are not merely some sort of wireless router for some higher existential consciousness. I don't think it is, but intellectual integrity demands that it's seriously considered.
really, it is quite an adequate solution for a species with our current level of philosophical and scientific understanding.
That doesn't mean it is right, and doesn't discount potentially other options such as something that, despite my own strong scientific background, I have a fondness for through buddhism and meditation - and which is mentioned in the original article - that there is just one consciousness we all share in.
despite my fondness for this, the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex neural network is supported by the evidence that shows that damage to the brain will impair an entity's level of consciousness.
Therefore, the idea that consciousness in LIFE doesn't require the brain, or vice versa, is simply mysticism and denying the truth that we all experience
I agree with you that consciousness is quite a mystery, but in terms of the ultimate mystery I feel very strongly that the question of life, consciousness and why there is something instead of nothing is a question that goes together and that they are all intricately linked
It turns out that it is precisely the claim that consciousness emerges from the brain -- given our present state of knowledge -- that is mysticism. The only possible scientific position here is to say "I don't know".
Some problems. Why is there any reason to assume that intelligent behaviour and consciousness aren't the same thing? If a vegetative human with next to no brain function is going to be considered conscious for all intents and purposes according to what you have written above, then you are suggesting that consciousness resides somewhere else, perhaps as an artefact of 'living'.
In my more deeply reflective moments I've sometimes thought that maybe even very simpl chemical reactions, such as the conversion of carbon compounds to carbon dioxide and water, may be a form of consciousness - basically, consciousness exists where there are energy gradients and is thus deeply tied with entropy and thermodynamics.
So, that could be true, but that is different from the meaning of being human, and of having a conscious existence that is rich with relationships with friends, activities and memories, plans etc... Consciousness without memory would not be productive in our present incantations as humans- a conscious being without memory would have no language, no concept of how to act, or why, so if such an entity exists, or exists when we sleep, could you really call it conscious? What wouldn't be observing? What would it be comparing and contrasting its experiences to?
I said before that, for a species of our current level of philosophical and scientific understanding, the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal activity seems appropriate, even if it isn't complete. It is not true that this is mysticism, because in order to suggest they consciousness doesn't correlate with intelligent behaviour, you are actively claiming things that we don't know and have no proof of in order to suggest that consciousness is something other, and intelligence a subset of.
As a species we generally agree that consciousness is a property possessed by things with neural networks, and the more complex the neural network, corrected for body size, the more advanced the level of consciousness and level of self awareness. So intelligence is basically included in this definition, and although we can't really measure either well, we do know that it is the activity of neurons that leads to one, and despite the oft-pointed out incompleteness of this layer of definitions, it is both supported by available evidence and not so much of a problem, given that these are enormous questions that civilisation shall likely struggle to fully understand for as long as there are humans about to think on it
There is loads of evidence from studying states that alter the brain.
For example, damage to certain parts of the brain produces hemispatial neglect. The person loses awareness of not just one half of the universe but the concept of that half. This is not consistent with an incorporeal soul, which would continue to make judgements about the full universe albeit with hemispatial blindness.
Then there are dissociative states, as with some migraine auras, where some aspect of self-awareness is lost, leaving the person with the sense that they are watching their own actions in the third person, but with otherwise intact behavior.
There are the dissociative anesthetics like nitrous oxide and ketamine, which create a solipsistic disconnection from the outside world without abolishing self awareness.
The memory function can become disconnected while consciousnes remains, as with some sleep disorders and drugs.
There are delirious states, seen in illness and with some drugs, where the person is conscious but experiencing imagination on the same footing as reality.
The corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the cerebrum can be severed, leaving each side with an independent partially-disconnected consciousness.
So neurons fire and we see this pattern of activity in a state of wakefulness etc, etc... well, okay but WHY?
I would say it will never be explained until we can recreate a consciousness artificially, and since it's next to impossible to experience another's consciousness, it might be an unsolvable problem.
We see ones and zeroes go into our ALU and the result is an operating system. Okay, but WHY?
Or, we see two molecules joining... and the result is a human baby! Okay, but WHY?
You can't necessarily see the entire outside system from micro-components.
Right, but we can answer those questions. We can explain how the high-level OS is written in lower-level primitives, how these correspond to machine instructions, and how those correspond to electrical impulses. You wouldn't say "oh yeah, an OS is just electrical pulses firing, there's nothing you don't already understand here", or "oh, you understand basic organic chemistry, now you understand all animals".
I'm not saying there's anything mystical to it, but there's this great big chunk that we don't understand yet, and saying "oh it's all electrical impulses" doesn't really shed any light on that.
Even then it would probably end up being an emergent phenomena not necessarily understanble. As in you can simulate a brain perhaps in the distant future and well you have consciousness by some metrics we choose to measure it. So what? We put these bits of code in, we ran this training input set on it, and now consciousness comes out of the other end, we won't necessarily understand how and what it is.
You make an interesting point, however I think the case could be made that consciousness emerging from neural activity could be the result of emergence.
Nothing terribly wrong, but consider this:
a) images on the television emerge from electrical activity in the television set;
b) break the television and the the images cease.
If we didn't already know that televisions receive signals, we might suppose that one day, after our science had progressed far enough, we might understand how televisions produce all that endless content.
But we can agree that the images on the TV screen are caused by the configuration of physical matter making up the TV, just like our consciousness is caused by the physical matter making up our brain.
Granted, people have subjective (i.e. feel-happy) reasons to throw out Occam's razor and suppose we have e.g. an eternal soul, but the search for the soul-receiver in the brain will just give you fits (not so bold prediction: they'll never find it, because it doesn't exist).
I could be wrong, but as an European my understanding is that there are people in the States who actually believe in non-science things like Adam and Eve and all that, so that when you begin to say that maybe Science doesn't or can't have all the answers (for example just the other day I was thinking "hey, has anyone proved that mathematical induction is really intellectually honest? or was Hume actually right and it's all make-believe?") you're immediately tagged as "a lunatic guy who believes the Earth is 6,000 years old" by Science-loving American redditors (HN is a little bit more forgiving), doesn't matter that I may be an agnostic and that I'm amazed that things like "God" are brought into a discussion which tries to make sense of the things around us.
It would also help if people would have a little more knowledge of the history of Science itself, this way they'd know about guys like La Mettrie or the French positivists who lived in the 19th century, meaning this discussion has happened many times before.
I don't see how providing antagonizing labels based on nationality helps your argument at all.
I completely understand what paganel said: nationality and culture play an important role here. There are cultures or subcultures that accept that we can be completely wrong in our assertions (are we just dreaming?), or they are based on mysticism, or they are relativists, or they are scientific.
There are prejudices against you in the scientific environment if you have doubts about things like God or consciousness.
Mathematical induction is different from the type of induction that Hume was concerned with, and it's just as sound as any other method of mathematical proof.
Consciousness is associated with thought, emotion, and sensation. Yet as neuroscience progresses, I think we will eventually functionalize thought, emotion, and sensation as biological processes.
Some may argue that our mental processes are fundamentally differently perceived from our external senses. But as a human being, we have internal sensations as well. We can feel internal pain and stomachaches. These have a fundamentally different sensation from the sensations that can be externally induced in us. Extrapolating further, we can say that thinking and feeling and other mental activity are mere sensations of the consciousness induced by the brain.
Before physics, there was a large role for divinities in the world. Gods and the Abrahamic God ruled Nature and Fortune, the parts of the world that we do not understand. But as human beings gained mastery and confidence over the external world, the domain of divinities shrank and shrank. We now attribute causes of phenomena to the natural world, rather than divinities; divinities used to be the natural law of the universe, today they have to be content with the supernatural.
Regardless of the philosophical justifications of consciousness, I see it going the way of divinities. The popularity of consciousness will wane as mental functions and mental states and cognition are understood. Societies will begin to use neuroscientific explanations to justify perception and behavior that provide actionable innovation and correction instead of attributing them to black-box consciousness.
When that happens, the idea of consciousness will, I think, seem as absurd as divinities.
That, my friend, is your little divinity. Keep the faith!
If philosophers were going to solve this problem they would have done so already, given that they have been at it for 2500 years or so with no real signs of progress.
Science on the other hand has made enormous progress in understanding living things. Recall for example that only 100 years ago many or most people adhered to "vitalism" ie the view that living things contained an "elan vital" which distinguished them from inorganic matter. Enter biochemistry.
However, we are in the process of understanding, and there has yet to be any proof or indication that that process will end before we conquer that knowledge. Given what we already know, and that we're in the infancy of real research in this area, there's every reason to believe that we're going to solve this mystery in the near future.
And it's intellectually cowardice to pretend otherwise.
It's simply wrong to state that research into consciousness is at the state of "it emerges from neural activity".
Also, it may not be science but it is still philosophy and extremely important. Science is based on philosophy too.
David Chalmers discusses this possibility in his book, and doesn't believe that it invalidates the zombie argument, but personally, I would prefer to think that the fact that I am sitting here writing about consciousness is somehow related to the fact that I am conscious. I'm still thinking this through, and have been for some time, but I think this requires that consciousness be physical in nature.
EDIT: Ok I think I see a counterargument. Perhaps belief in consciousness is purely physical, and actual consciousness is just perception of this belief, and a perception of choice in acting on it, whereas our actions are deterministic. Seems like a strange scheme, but I suppose it's possible.
For a most amusing take on the p-zombie idea, see:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/pn/zombies_the_movie/
(Though humorous, it's the capstone to a series of articles on p-zombies: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Zombies_(sequence) )
As a dualist, I agree that the question of whether experience exists (and whether there is a soul of some type powering it) is not answerable by science. But many of the people I discuss this with take the attitude that because it can't be answered by science, it's not even worth discussing as a possibility. It feels like a physicist approaching a mathematician with a theory based on experimental results, and being rebuffed for not having a proof.
I haven't even read the original article, much less the HN comments, but based on what I've read here (and on my past experience discussing similar subjects on HN), a similar attitude is likely to be at play.
The article mostly takes three mysterious things: time, quantum mechanics, and consciousness and gives them one hand-waving "consciousness was always there and will always be there" answer. It's tidy in a way, but that's not science and it's completely opposed to the spirit of science.
Not to mention a non-physicist drawing conclusions about unrelated fields using difficult to understand theories is new-age mysticism. It's the same pseudoscience people like Deepak Chopra have been spouting for years. A physicist would be quick to point out that observation affects the quantum realm regardless of whether there is a human being checking the output of his instruments or not (although as I'm not a physicist, I may be too rash in drawing even that conclusion.) Or in Harris's words, the moon doesn't go away when nobody's looking at it.
Consciousness is indeed a mystery, but the article adds little of substance to the discussion.
It fundamentally comes from asking the question, "What am I if you strip away everything that is impermanent?" Emotions are impermanent, thoughts are impermanent, sensations are impermanent... but cognizance -- if you take that away, there is no longer anything. It is the most fundamental.
I didn't notice the earlier post on this, but I think all people should think deeply on this. It is not just sophomoric philosophy, it's deeply practical, and few people bashing it understand it. That lack of understanding leads incredibly often to, well, suffering.
Acknowledging the nature of existence intellectually isn't enough, you need to experience it. I see this very often in people of any age. Fear of death, fear of loss, fear of love, fear of change. But at the root, no matter what happens if you are comfortable with the nature of your own existence, you know that no one can take that cognizance away. Buddhists monks manage to light themselves calmly on fire in the interest of helping others.
Anyway. I obviously have many thoughts on this. It's something I've been thinking about and meditating on a great deal for over a decade. I will just end with a famous quote by Pascal.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
EDIT: I also hate it when philosophers abuse physics. I'm a physicist, so every time I hear "quantum mechanics" in a philosophical context I put down the book to avoid throwing it. As a friend put it, as soon as Buddhist monks can derive the ground state of the hydrogen atom, I'll give them credit for understanding quantum mechanics. I think that people who suggest that Buddhism is related to these sorts of things know neither physics nor Buddhism.
Amen. We need to stop letting the comments devolve into such a miasma and use each story as a jumping off point for intelligent conversation -- why can't we be friends?
Continuing on the meta-topic at hand... A flaw that seems to occur in many intelligent people's minds is that as soon as we're able to form an opinion on a particular subject, we assume everyone else has too. Let's take a moment to appreciate that we don't all have state-of-the-art knowledge on every single topic. Our aim should be to help each other move further along, not shoot down attempts to learn.
Indeed. Here, have an upvote to counteract the downvotes. It looks like this thread is heading to be derailed just as much as the last one unfortunately. HN is cool when it's about concrete subjects like tech/programming/business, but anything more abstract than that is really unnerving to watch unfold around here, and I'm sure we both wish it wasn't so. Honestly, the only reason I even comment on HN is to try and invoke these sorts of underrepresented viewpoints into conversation, but it's quite overwhelming to even try sometimes.
OP states that "[consciousness is] a situation where a root cause is murky and escapes testability", which is simply special pleading. If you cannot test your hypothesis, what is more likely - that you have discovered a completely unique and mysterious phenomenon, or that your hypothesis is inadequate?
It appears to me that the whole argument is predisposed upon that sort of special pleading. We have no clear evidence for the existence of consciousness, but it must exist because my subjective perception tells me it does. That perception different from the subjective perception of god or auras or the buddha-nature because... it just is.
Bluntly, go away and come back when you have a null hypothesis.
What is there besides one's own subjective perception? Hello! This is a figment of your imagination calling.
Why do I feel pain when the atoms in my brain are in a specific configuration? Current state-of-the-art physical models can't possibly explain that. And it's even impossible to describe what feeling of pain is in physical terms. (No, I don't mean neural activity during pain, I mean the feeling of pain.)
Every physical theory is based solely on consciouss experience. Everything we know about the world is through consciousness.
It's not that we can only discover things via science. It's just that we shouldn't trust discoveries made via flashes of insight, clairvoyance, intuition, guesswork, divine inspiration, etc.
If we can't trust discoveries through non-scientific means, than it seems to me you are saying we can only discover things via science. So if I have continuing experience of something so far yet to be confined within an ordered model of falsifiable hypotheses, what am I to do?
There are very solid arguments suggesting that consciousness is outside of the scope of current physics. But it's hard to proof that objectively, because consciousness is inherently subjective.
"but it must exist because my subjective perception tells me it does." seems like a rhetorical trick, consciousness is the underlying mechanism of perception, so it's not my perception of it that tells me it exists, it's the fact that I have perception at all.
As for a null hypothesis, how about this: "If my qualitative experience is no different to the state of a Turing machine, it should be possible to temporarily modify my mental state to remove all qualia -- so that I perceive nothing, but am still able to process everything" (In short, if I'm running code like sensoryData.processWithFeedbackTo(consciousness.Perception), it should be possible to do sensoryData.processWithFeedbackTo(null) temporarily)
But the internals of your mind might contain some sort of consciousness that isn't understood yet scientifically.
One of the things I love about the comment section is that people treat each other like adults who are capable of handling criticism. This isn't the office, this is HN.
Not being able to handle criticism is a debilitating personality trait for someone who wants to achieve a high level of success in any sort of intellectual pursuit; and that is the reason why I strongly disagree with the desire on the part of some to change this aspect of the community.
Indeed, I think effective criticism is bound up with kindness. I know the times I've been an ass while criticizing somebody aren't about fixing the problem; they're about me looking smart at somebody else's expense. At best, I'm making them work past my obnoxiousness to get to the hopefully valuable bits. At worst, they discard the criticism as pure meanness.
On the other hand, if I'm really delivering criticism because I'd like someone to get better, then it usually works best when I make it easy to see that I'm on their side.
I often find HN discussions... not sure how to describe it... I guess I just don't like many of the commenters for some unconscious reason. It could be: passive-agressiveness, people who are not emotionally mature (pg), overall negativity, stupid people who try to sound smart. Or something else.
The atmosphere on other online communities is more positive, which is a good thing. You can disagree without being negative.
I also noticed that for some strange unconsciouss reason, I really dislike people who use cliché phrases like: "Just to play devil's advocate." or "X and Y are orthogonal".
(This comment is intentionally quite negative because you sound like an adult capable of taking criticism.)
I'm assuming this is meant to be ironic and to try and prove something. But I challenge you to find a serious comment on HN that is this over the top negative and backs it up with as little as you do. It really doesn't bother me to be told I'm wrong, if I'm saying something stupid I want to be told that in no uncertain terms so that I don't repeat the same mistake again. But most of all, I want to know why what I said was wrong.
>The atmosphere on other online communities is more positive, which is a good thing. You can disagree without being negative.
I don't disagree that HN comments are different from places like reddit, but you haven't really explained why it's "a good thing". I personally don't find a lot of value in being praised, because I don't learn anything and the danger is I might get a big ego. However, I do find enormous value in constructive criticism. When I have a young student without a ton of self-confidence, then I am generous with giving praise; but when a colleague who I respect comes to me with a bad idea, I treat them with respect by telling them why I think they are wrong.
I absolutely agree that if you think people are wrong, it doesn't make sense to lie to them and say that you think they're right.
But the problem is when poeople focus on the negatives – ie, someone made a pretty cool product and half of HN is complaining about some small insignificant issue. Very often, critticism is not motivated by a genuine attempt to help the person. Instead, it's motivated by the pleasant feeling some people get from correcting other people and finding problems in their arguments (http://xkcd.com/386/).
I like the atmosphere on Quora much more. It's more positive and the people are more diverse.
There's a difference between intelligent criticism and nit-picking for nit-picking's sake. There's basically a guarantee that no matter how widely accepted a comment or post is, there will be a group of pedants ready to rip it apart in the comments section.
I'm not saying that changing the attitude of the community is necessary, or even possible, but it does get in the way of what otherwise might be stimulating discussion to have all the weeds of "oh you said Z comes after Y, but actually the alphabet has no concept of space, and you're a god damned idiot who should feel ashamed for even suggesting such a thing."
The community wasn't the way it is right now even a year or two ago. Nothing wrong with trying to change it back to civilized discussion away from a malaise more fitting in /r/programming.
As you say, this is HN.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Even Patricia Churchland thinks there is a lot here. Philosophers of the mind have dedicated their whole professional careers and lives to thinking about this.
In fact, a tiny minority of the comments in that thread were dismissive of consciousness as an interesting topic of thought. Only one of the comments quoted in this post could reasonably be interpreted as dismissive, but even that one had interesting points to make.
By far the most intriguing counter-proposal to the conventional wisdom is the late Julian Jaynes' The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind which is such a monumentally good book that it's worth reading even if it is entirely wrong.
There's a summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_... but relying on the summary is like me telling you that Beethoven's 5th symphony is in C minor, opens with a distinctive motif, and is generally quite dramatic sounding...all true, but absolutely nothing like the experience of actually listening to it.
The book provided me with a completely different model for examination of the world, which is pretty unusual. While I don't feel wholly committed to Jaynes' model, I've found it enormously useful, in the same way as Understanding Media.
Frankly it sometimes upsets me when I do put an extensive amount of time into it and don't end up coming up with anything conclusive; it is depressing. There is (obviously) a incredible amount of ambiguity surrounding the subject, and there is something about this particular issue that is unnerving.
On the other hand if you can stomach the subject matter it is very stimulating, unfortunately it does not lead to concrete conclusions.
The first big bold warning sign is this -
"After reading and listening to David Chalmers, I came
to realize that there is an intelligent argument that
supports the idea that consciousness does not emerge
from the brain.
<big-n-bold>Quantum Mechanics</big-n-bold>"
In the original article, you'll also find this regarding the Schrodinger's cat "paradox" -
"Many physicists today think the many-worlds theory
resolves this paradox by stating that there are actually
infinitely many universes, some in which you are dead and
some in which you are living, and that once the quantum
trigger is measured/observed, a specific universe is
followed."
The problem of "observation" in quantum mechanics is being discussed here without even a mention of "decoherence". AFAIK, the unexplained part of quantum mechanics to date is the Born probabilities - i.e. why does the likelihood of observing an event correspond to the magnitude square of the amplitude we calculate for it. There are some recent insights into this, but I believe this is still unexplained.
The original thing that the article sought to explore is whether it is possible that consciousness does not come from the brain. If that is indeed the primary point to be explored in this essay, the question to be asked is what does "come from the brain" mean? When a current passes through a memory circuit, it toggles from 0 to 1. What does it mean to say this "comes from the circuit"? Does is not also "come from the current"?
We thus reach a point where all we can say is "shut up and compute", for we've fallen into the trappings of everyday language.
edit: typos.
* lots of hand-waving arguments (something along "that is contradictory", even though it is not clear why it should be contradictory) * the evocation of quantum mechanics. Whenever I see someone mention quantum mechanics as an explanation without explaining its association any further, a red flag is raised. Somehow the weirdness of parts of quantum mechanics has lead it to be used as an all-encompassing explanation for all other sorts of phenomena. Homeopathy being a prime example. * the fact that current, "mainstream" research into consciousness has been so easily dismissed without knowing something about it (beyond a youtube video).
Some works that I found particularly inspiring (and well-thought) are Thomas Metzinger's work, e.g., Being No One http://www.amazon.com/Being-No-One-Self-Model-Subjectivity/d..., for the layman Antonio Damasio's work, Christof Koch, Francisco Varela, just to mention a few.
Very crudely, language is just neural network training (due to repeated exposure) and pattern matching on what what was trained. This oversimplified model nevertheless could explain the whole phenomena very well. We do not memorizing grammars, for example, but we are able to distinguish well-formed sentence form nonsense just because it doesn't match the common structure we were trained.
People who started to study their second language as adult would tell you that sentences are not deliberately "constructed" according to the memorized rules as it is when we begin to getting familiar with a new language, but "emerge by itself" after some training. So we have no grammars inside our brain, but a mechanism to train to build up one.
The consciousness, according to the same views, is nothing but a "current working buffer" for ongoing processes, and as some "activity" exceeds some threshold it acquires a "focus" , as if we are "switching" to it.
Minsky have stated many times, that it will require years until people will start using such vocabulary from the world of complex systems in attempts to describe what's going instead of Froidian or common-sense memes.
There is a course based on his Society of Mind book on MIT Open Courseware - very nice talks to listen.
The expression "experiencing consciousness" makes as little sense as "seeing vision" or "tasting flavor". Experiencing is consciousness, seeing is vision and tasting is flavor.
Edit:
Alan Watts talks in depth about these matters. Although these explanations are not scientific or falsifiable -- it's an interesting attempt at understanding our own views of consciousness.
Just because the feelings of love are not falsifiable, does not mean that it does not weave a great story that one tells themselves to keep sane.
On a different subject, recently there were a spasm of interest in fMRI studies that showed that "free" choices could be predicted based on neural activity well before a "conscious choice" was made.[2][3][4]
The general consensus seemed to be "Hah! Take that, free will!"
My take on the results were that they were hardly a surprise, if consciousness is an activity of the brain. You should no more expect to make a conscious decision prior to displaying brain activity relating to the decision than you should expect to perceive a flash of light before the light bulb is lit. It would not necessarily have any negative implications for the existence of free will; those experiments are simply exploring the mechanism of free will.
On the other hand, I believe they do kind of imply that consciousness is a product of the jello in your noggin. Either that or there are some funky delays involved.
Now, as for the third buttock: if consciousness doesn’t come from the brain, how does it work, exactly? I'd like some mechanism with my philosophy, thanks. Presumably, if I'm waving my arms around, you can trace the motor neuron activity from my appendages, up my spinal cord, and into my brain. But "and then a miracle occurs" is a pretty uninteresting way to connect that with the universe deciding that jazz hands are necessary.
[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/
[2] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_d...
[3] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html
[4] http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/09/03/free-choic...
Claiming consciousness does not come from the brain is just silly nonsense from before we had modern biology. Early philosophers thought the brain was for cooling blood. Even if you want to make up quantum superposition nonsense or whatever other big words you can find the place it is occurring is still inarguably the brain.
It's OK to go talk about useless, meaningless, non-diagnostic bullshit after that. But you should realize you are just being religious and not talking about anything worthwhile that then has meaning toward physical structures. You should no longer talk about the brain after that because you are just throwing in physical terms to try to get people who would otherwise dismiss you to pay attention.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197184
We must get a tight definition of consciousness to begin with. Are animals conscious as well (and to what degree)? What about amoeba and plants? If you classify "living" things as conscious, and "dead" things as unconscious, what is your definition of "life"? In their work, various people (notably, Metzinger) have isolated certain characteristics that make up various degrees of consciousness.
The "conscious experience" is a product of evolution: clearly, "self-aware decision makers" have better chances of survival than "hard-coded automatons". In recent evolution, the part that has changed most significantly is the neocortex. Scientifically speaking, it's very easy to figure out what is responsible for a high degree of consciousness: removing neocortex consistently leads to a lower degree of consciousness => the neocortex is responsible for a large part. Dissect, stick electrodes, and get unbiased data: then do a best fit.
Quantum mechanics is quite misunderstood: if you separate out the observer from what is being observed, it looks like humans are operating the universe (because their "observation" causes "collapse", right?). Highly egotistical and inelegant. If you exclude M-theory (because it's not able to make verifiable real-world predictions), a lot of people subscribe to quantum decoherence as an alternative to the classical Copenhagen interpretation.
On conscious computer programs. Essentially, I think of consciousness as a higher degree of interaction with its surroundings (it "learns" from its surroundings and adapts more quickly than it would normally take for natural selection to pick a genetic mutation). Aren't we just describing computer programs that interact with humans via a high-level language?
Since consciousness is an aspect of thought, it ceases to exist when thought stops, such as when you go to sleep or when you die. A new consciousness will be created if you wake up.
A corollary is that I don't think science fiction ideas such as teleportation or mind transfer into a machine give any philosophical problems. A new consciousness is created when the newly created body/software starts to think, the same way that it's created when you wake up in the morning.
anyway, I've written some blog posts with some thoughts on this topic that I'll throw into the mix:
http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/12/consciousness.html
http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/06/dimension-of-interpretati...
(note that these posts were written maybe six months ago)
Will we eventually reach a point where we completely STOP considering pure awareness as a problem...don't know...I guess nobody knows. But this kind of thing happens every so often where a large amount of people stop taking something seriously. At this point e.g. existence of an anthropomorphic god.
I personally think that people that reply indicating that anyone who doesn't believe in the traditional sciences, not including Philosophy but rather using our "accepted body of Physiological and Psychiatric knowledge" as truth, are one step away from Asperger's. I do not mean that in a derogatory sense, since many with Asperger's are highly functioning, but their tendency to clinch onto mathematics and incomplete (but widely accepted) science and use it as the answer for everything is childish. I believe that our universe (the entirety, beyond what we experience) is not completely "rational", but some just cannot accept that. We would not be where we are today without Philosophers like Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. However, if a conservative talk show host came along saying the same thing as these philosophers, they would attempt to beat him/her down for being an idiot.
There is much to be learned by thinking outside of the box and trying to understand others' points of view. I'm a conservative-leaning moderate and independent (U.S.). I actually listen to both sides of the story (or more if possible), and then make up my mind which works with my existing belief system and where I can improve, knowing that both of them are biased and probably neither are completely right or wrong.
I'm not better than anyone else, but I get frustrated, as it is farcical how one-sided conversations here can be, and how little people give and come to terms with each other.
I agree with you about the world not necessarily being entirely rational. I see rationality as a subjective position from which to perceive reality. Another is the self and its intrinsic interests. This is where I seem to fail in my communication with others. This may be a wildly arrogant assertion but I think most people are insanely self obsessed. From this I can understand why empathy is seen as being absolutely necessary. Frankly, I think most people with autism spectrum disorders actually lack the self obsession that would normally be redirected onto others via empathy. This causes a failure to appropriately acknowledge others and with tragic irony a typical individual will ascribe their behavior to self-obsession. Anyway, you mention the learning acquired from considering others points of view. The thought process I've found most rewarding in this regard is to first build up the person's opinion as much as I can and then to attack any weaknesses. The attack is intended to elicit a defense which I cannot conceive. The ultimate aim being to fully understand their position and its legitimacy. Needless to say, this often becomes unpleasant. Likely stemming from my pathological lack of tact :(. The important thing to note is that there are people (at least one person) who are detail oriented. If you want them to "give and come to terms with each other" then you're going to have to endure some ostensible pettifogging. All that being said, there's some straight up nastiness here on HN and much of it is exactly the condescending appeal to immature sciences that you describe.
Oh also, just a note: it's likely that Socrates had aspergers or something similar.
I'm going to try to respond to your response, but know that other than having been diagnosed myself with slight Asperger's like tendencies, I really have no idea what it is like to be you. I really don't understand what it is like to be autistic, but neither do either of us. I still hope that you can better understand my position with this, if it matters.
> I think most people are insanely self obsessed. From this I can understand why empathy is seen as being absolutely necessary. Frankly, I think most people with autism spectrum disorders actually lack the self obsession that would normally be redirected onto others via empathy.
I believe you are right about most people having a love of self and/or selfish needs. In fact the feeling of love and the ability to do more than just try to simulate love involves what is called a "soul" in religion. That is not to say those more into the autism spectrum have less love. Those just that sometimes they know it is there, but they have to work much harder to be able not to ignore conscience since they do not have what others call empathy- because it is not chemical/"feeling". This conscience should not be defined by someone else or others (this is my ultimate point, btw), but it must belong to the person as a very quiet voice (not those in our heads- in fact you will almost never actually hear it as a voice or even a thought- it is what you just know is right when you eliminate the rational calculations/logic and all of the voices).
A completely rational human that tends to good but has no feeling or understanding of self will tend to utilitarianism, eventually. This is NOT conscience. Let's see why...
BTW- I know this is annoying, but as a quick detour, if unfamiliar with the fallacies of communism or socialism or pure capitalism for that matter, they may tend to one of those, but eventually they realize the goal they seek is utilitarianism- which is a goal only reachable by rules and management that cannot be carried out by those that can be corrupted. Ok, now back to utilitarianism...
The only thing capable of instituting pure utilitarianism that has the highest chance of working are altered, non egotistic, fully altruistic humans or non-humans.
We can't get there to start with, so in the short-term we as would-be utilitarians for the non-egotistic fully altrustic good of society institute an electronic/real democracy. Heck, I would.
But this just means the lobbyists have to lobby everyone. This is called marketing. It is already done. Problem solved for the elite that wish to rule rather than be overrun by the people.
So the people rebel again, replacing with a system that learns and manages humanity, if it does not intentionally or unintentionally destroy it in the process, of course.
So, then (long after we die when they institute it), we would have pure utilitarianism, which is a paradox- it is "perfection in survival and existence", but, in its pure form, it abhors the self (the "ego") to a fault, leading to some very nasty things that "must be done for the good of humanity". There is no conscience here, because any voice, quiet or not, belonging to an individual is wrong utilitarian "utopian" (really dystopian) world if it conflicts with the majority of others.
I very much appreciate the rest of what you said. I think your sense of self is stronger than you are giving yourself credit for, as you are certainly self-aware. Please don't take that as an afront to asperger's- I think it is a benefit to have self-understanding, no matter how your mind works.
Good luck in your future, and feel free to shoot any of this down if you must.
I tend toward utilitarianism myself but I agree with the inadequacy of any rigidly executed system. I'm aware of conclusions supported by utilitarianism that make me uncomfortable. I assume this feeling is an aspect of what you're calling soul. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I'll try to summarize the relevant portion of my world view: There are certain personality temperaments which lend themselves to the acquisition of power and ultimately to "actualizing" themselves and receiving social recognition. People tend to select subordinates they can see themselves in. This creates a feedback effect and over time we've seen certain temperaments receive the dominant share of social attention. This warps the perspective we all have on the behavior of others. Temperaments which have been adversely affected by this are experiencing the negative side of the feedback loop. Everyone is forced to repress their true selves a bit to meet this ideal. Some much more than others unfortunately. This explains so many of the "losers" we've disposed of in society (of which I am not, but only by the extreme fortune of being particularly intelligent). Advancements in science and social policy are bringing a number of marginalized temperaments into mainstream awareness. Women and the LGBT community apparently got first dibs. Aspergers will get more attention sooner or later (other than it's present infamy that is). Hopefully in the future people will stop hazing aspies into the compensatory narcissism you see in characters like Sheldon Cooper. It's not an essential component of aspergers. It's a reflection of modern social arrogance. It's just so hard to assert that everyone else is wrong... and so tragic when it's true.
Now, it is from this perspective that I very deeply agree with your statements toward the end of your response. The voice of the individual must be allowed to assert itself. For instance, I have a large family that enjoys loud family gatherings. It took a full on melt down when I was a child for them to understand that they were hurting me by being so loud. When I asked them nicely they just ignored me. When I kept nagging at them they thought I was just being bitter and trying to spoil their fun (On some level they knew they didn't treat me so well and then they'd throw stuff like this at me as some sort of victim shaming; It likely wasn't deliberate but it was still infuriating and hard to defend against at 8). In utilitarianism it may have made sense to displace their collective annoyance onto the upset child. We'd have to measure the utils (love that word) but it may have served the "greater good". Some part of me just knows this is wrong.
I'm almost positive I don't lack empathy. I can see where many aspies would fall prey to personality disorders at a greater rate than the general population and consequently lose empathy. Additionally most people just can't identify with me and that is fundamental to empathy. I'm left to do all the work since most people gain little from learning to accommodate 1-2% of the population. Society needs some outlet for progress. The "soul" (however we intellectualize it so we can communicate) deserves more respect than a purely intellectual system is capable of. If aspies seem overly inclined towards such a system it's only because they desperately fear the Lord of the Flies alternative.
I'd be happy to have any of this criticized. You seem like you've thought about things and I'd value your opinion.
Most animals, even single celled, need to have some way to handle the separation between "me" and "the rest of the world". I look at say my cat - it definitely has this concept somewhere in its brain circuitry. What human has is just more neurons.
As for your analogy, it is true that microorganisms can perform wonderful feats, but it is a bit misleading to equate that to general intelligence. It is like saying a compiler is smarter than a programmer, because its design incorporates tricks the human may not know. (The bacteria being "designed" by the trial-and-error process of natural selection, rather than an intelligent entity, of course.)
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/what-is-conscious...
Indeed. It is quite discerning to see smart people fighting against what they believe to be anti-intellectualism with a fair share of anti-intellectualism of their own. I believe it might have more to do with a lack of exposure to varied subjects rather than a definite lack of intellectual curiosity in general however. Because many hackers are quite intellectually curious in their own domain, yet can still be susceptible to being as cynical and myopic as religious fundamentalists in other areas for some reason. The quality of thinking critically doesn't always seem to transcend domains, so I'm guessing it's a side-effect of living in a filtered environment beyond some developmental milestone of a person's curiosity. The string of comments in this other recent thread showcases this type of odd adherence to lack of understanding quite nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194276
It really is odd how when philosophy is explicitly brought up, it is generally labeled as a useless endeavor, yet in most other discussions you see philosophical questions being raised all the time with the intention of using them as 'appeals to ambiguousness', when (as you mentioned) most of these questions have already been asked and thoroughly answered by philosophers ages ago. Not that there's anything wrong in not knowing about this, but clearly there's an interest to know these types of answers that arises organically, which makes the dismissal of philosophy an ultimately misguided exercise in cognitive dissonance. Throw in all the (literally ancient) logical fallacies you see being thrown around amongst smart, well-educated people, and it just makes the whole situation even more confusing.
While I admittedly haven't read deeply enough into the psychology behind the Meyer-Briggs personality types, they do define and elaborate on types of people that could logically lead to these kinds of odd views. The easiest example is of the classic INTP vs INTJ types, both of which are strikingly similar, yet supposedly differ in one general crucial area. INTP's take all the input they can about the world and evolve their framework of understanding around it, while INTJ's supposedly form their elaborate framework of understanding first, then explore their inputs that correspond to it. I'm only somewhat partial to this explanation because I line up as a perfect INTP on all counts, but it honestly might as well be astrology at this point for all I know. Still a fun thought experiment though.
EDIT: I realize that most on HN like speaking in more concrete terms, such as about the neurological basis for the notions of 'consciousness' and all that, however abstract argumentation and analysis does have use when talking about the act of argumentation itself. So I hope those who downvoted me at least provide an explanation within that context, because I am admittedly curious about what other perspectives there are on this matter.
The top comment that was disingenuously quoted as only as "Sophomoric philosophy", was actually a well thought out dissection of several of the arguments presented. The poster of this rant has been shamefully dishonest in misrepresenting the comments he quoted, cherry picking phrases from them to put them in the worst possible light.
As a side note, you might want to know that Myers-Briggs is pretty much pseudoscience. It has low retest reliability, meaning that people who take are tested more than once often show different results. In addition, the Myers-Briggs profiles are similar to astrological readings in that each of them could apply to almost anybody.
That's good to know. I still think the term 'pseudoscience' is thrown around a bit too loosely though. There's falsifiability as a criterion for scientific theories sure, but building to a full out 'theory' requires quite a bit of maturity on the part of the 'science'. Some ideas fail at the onset like homeopathy, but others might have to be investigated more thoroughly before knowing for sure. The only thing I generally have against the 'pseudoscience' label is the effect it has on people that dissuade them from following anything approaching a certain line of reasoning sometimes. As with personality types, the Myers-Briggs framework might be bunk, but the underlying idea could be feasible, thinking of it as the emergence of certain patterns and algorithms from genetics and neurological connections; after all, we are seeing something that might end up being quite like this in the realm of IQ. But I digress.
The point is that we are approaching a future that is going to need more and more cross-disciplinary knowledge and approaches to really figure things out, and the loud belittlement and stigmatization of general approaches is a bit discerning to see around circles of intellectual people.
Do you have examples? As a scientist I'm inclined to see science as the true heir to ancient philosophy, and the part that still calls itself "philosophy" as, well, an inferior branch. When I spoke to philosophy students at university they seemed to study a really weird mix of things - about 1/3 history, 1/3 mathematical logic but covered less formally (which was intensely irritating when we shared lecturers because if there's one field where you really need to be formal it's mathematical logic), and 1/3 these very... abstract arguments that felt like they might say something interesting if any of the terms they used were defined rigorously and the arguments were written out symbolically, with small pieces of what should be science thrown in almost at random, but it was missing the desire to connect all this up and actually perform experiments to see what was right.
Any major breakthroughs in philosophy are almost certainly going to come from philosophically-minded specialists (e.g. scientists/engineers/politicians/linguists/mathematicians/etc) in the future. But just because it doesn't carry the big overarching label of "philosophy" doesn't mean that it is not. I mean, the definition of philosophy itself is so vague, that you could say that it is simply the byproduct of any exploration that uses philosophical tools (e.g. formal logic/logical fallacies), so it really doesn't go against what you're saying at all.
I agree that if all one's doing now is studying philosophy, and philosophy only, it's gonna be hard to contribute anything terribly useful to society (unless you can get a job as a historian). But the tools that philosophy gives us should never be discarded because they are ultimately the atomic building blocks that let us know whether we're on the right track or not, and thus, thinking philosophically is of critical importance. And that is where philosophy is now. It is not a field of it's own, it is scattered throughout several other fields, but the art is still very much in tact. It this bad misconception that gives philosophy these lazy/useless/idealist connotations. And that is unfortunate, because there is much people can learn from thinking philosophically, that they do not (unfortunately) seem to gain just from thinking 'scientifically'. I'm going to blame this on training/education rather than the designation of the field itself, since science should teach how to think critically, but the practice of this does not seem to extend beyond the student's specific/applied area from my experience. Philosophy helps here because the whole point of it is to train a person's entire outlook to process information critically, rather than only apply that approach to certain specific/narrow areas.
tl;dr: Philosophy is the mathematical language of reason, and good reasoning skills should be important for everybody. However, applied philosophy within specific domains (e.g. ethics/math/politics/etc) is likely to be the only way we will continue to make more philosophical advancements in the future. Arguing that we don't need philosophy anymore because now we have science, is like arguing that we don't need math anymore because now we have programming; both are important in their own specialized ways because of the approaches they allow.
Every one of us experiences consciousness - subjectivity, qualitative awareness, 'what it is like to be a me' - directly. We gain one type of knowledge about consciousness by studying and poking the brain, and by observing people with abnormal brains. But that can only take us part of the way.
We gain another kind of knowledge about consciousness by making subjectivity into an object. We can do that via means such as meditation, LSD, DMT, mushrooms, marijuana, some types of physical exertion, and perhaps more esoteric means like astral travel, or involuntarily by near-death experiences. These give insights by allowing us to become aware of awareness, to perturb, or to side-step normal consciousness.