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Comment by strgrd | Hacker News Reader

It's so clear that you didn't read a single word of the paper. Even if you want to argue that consciousness is somehow unknowable and not worth discussing scientifically because humanity is still too dumb (lol, wat), the authors provide a perfectly reasonable working definition of consciousness.

The theory proposes that consciousness is an information processing phenomenon and can thus be quantiﬁed in terms of a systems’ organizational structure, speciﬁcally its capacity to integrate information... What we mean when we say that the human brain produces consciousness is that it integrates information, thus producing behaviour which reﬂects the actions of a uniﬁed, singular system.

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I'm not saying anyone is dumb; I'm saying we as a society haven't made understanding the mind a priority.

Also, I did read it. That "workable" definition is so presumptuous about the nature of consciousness. What I'm saying, and many others are as well, as that we still need to have a discussion about what we're even talking about. The mind may not even be able to be understood or measured in the "realm of science". That is, we may have to use alternative language to explain something like the mind.

We as a society haven't answered fundamental questions such as what is the mind, why does it exist, where does come from, is it a physical/nonphysical phenomenon, etc.

We can't really solve(especially "compute it") the mind problem if we don't fully understand the problem domain.

> why does it exist, where does come from, is it a nonphysical property of the body or vice versa

Are any of these actual debated questions? Outside of religious arguments I don't think anyone can question that (in order) the answers are

It doesn't need a why/It was the best tool our ancestors evolved for their niche

It comes from electrochemical reactions in your brain

Of course it isn't you die when you are killed, getting head injuries can change your personality/memories.

Since your brain exists in physical reality the question "can we run a perfect simulation of physics" is also exactly "can we compute conciousness". Since it's looking pretty good that we can run a simulation of reality at the level we work at it's also looking pretty good for that whole "mind" in a computer thing.

Certainly they aren't debated outside of naturalist circles. But even amongst "non-religious" people, it's somewhat of an open question whether our physical, observable universe is the only thing that exists.

Since your brain exists in physical reality...

Beyond the religious arguments we don't know if the brain exists only in the physical reality in the sense that you can't prove/disprove this hypothesis.

>It comes from electrochemical reactions in your brain

This isn't an explanation. None of it answers the interesting questions.

How and why do computers work? Well they are made of atoms and run on electricity. They do useful work and we call it computation.

This is all true and important to understand, but it is filling a slot that needs to be filled with things like computability theory.

I'm not sure what was meant by nonphysical property, but many materialists disagree over whether consciousness can be copied like a text, or is necessarily destroyed as a book is.

It sounds like you subscribe to Materialism [1].

In fact, these are widely debated questions. Materialism is only one of many philosophies that seek to answer these questions (e.g. dualism). Be careful about accepting answers like that if you haven't examined at least the major alternatives.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

Widely debated by whom? These other philosophies are useless for trying to figure out how consciousness (or anything, for that matter) actually works, as nothing they explain is falsifiable in any way.

I may as well argue about how many angels fit on the head of pin—some will find the topic fascinating, but at the end of the day it doesn't actually reveal anything useful about the world.

I hope you don't take this as a personal attack, but your comments read to me like a bunch of mystical nonsense.

Have we conclusively defined what "consciousness" is? No. But we haven't, as a society, conclusively defined what a chair is either. That doesn't stop us from accurately and precisely measuring and modeling all sorts of chair and chair-like objects.

Measuring and modeling get more difficult when it comes to information. Take the Bible and rearrange the letters alphabetically and it will be the same size, same weight, same chemical composition, etc.--but contain a lot less information.

A lot of the things that seem weird about the mind are not that different from most information systems. But we're learning to measure and model those too.

Sadly the more you think about the "Hard Consciousness Problem" the more it becomes like "mystical nonsense". The more you reduce the mind into being computable physical process the more it becomes a choice (or a frustrating cycle back and forth) between consciousness not being computable no matter what including in our brain making us zombies living under some sort of illusion or consciousness being totally computable by computer or anything in which case any system could have some sort or consciousness, even human given the correct configuration, e.g. computer, a flock of specially trained neuron like birds. Where would that consciousness "be" in the flock of birds. Also could the consciousness exist on a non human time frame? Would it still exist because it was being computed even slowly? And what happens to it when it hits a breakpoint? Have you captured an instant of consciousness or has it disappeared?

I am convinced that almost all the "problems" with a computable consciousness are really the emotional problems of us humans coming to terms with our status as just another animal, which is just another pattern of matter and energy.

Yes, it implies that other animals and systems might be conscious too. Why is that a problem?

> Why is that a problem?

Totally not a problem, except you very quickly fall down the slippery slope of mystical nonsense :D

If we cannot define the boundary of consciousness (the smallest conscious system) eg, we take a conscious human and take one neuron away at a time, at what point is he not conscious? I’m not talking about not being able to communicate with us to tell us he is not conscious. I’m asking at what point are then just a lump of triggering neurons and nothing more than a machine. Is it a hard boundary or sliding scale of levels of consciousness that goes all the way down to a small system of neurons, single neuron, atom or even further?

If we can assume consciousness can take forms (given the appropriate computational configuration), such as existing at different scales such as a system of birds or a star sized metal machine made of cogs computing the same system as brain does but “experiencing consciousness” at 1 human second taking billions of years (Or a super computer experiencing a lifetime in a microsecond). Or still be conscious while not being “human conscious”, eg animals, accidentally (brain damage) or planned (augmentation) reconfigured brain, or just some totally different novel system such as a galaxy.

Just those two examples of thinking about consciousness very quickly get you down the rabbit hole of stuff that sounds like mystical nonsense. Eg Could the universe be conscious in some form at some size and time scale?

btw.. I'm not saying those assumptions are correct but I would hope they are reasonable to think about.

EDIT: (the smallest unconscious system) -> (the smallest conscious system)

Well, this is the problem with our society as a whole. In particular, and most importantly, the problem with intellectuals. They tend to gloss over the inexplicable things like consciousness and the mind. It's just too hairy and scary to try to tackle and try to understand. I think that's why we've distanced ourselves, ironically, from ourselves for so long.

We need to really take a long look at ourselves and try to understand what's going in our mind.

Modeling and measuring are different from genesis. Where is the mind? Should we even be asking "where"? What about "why"? Can we even ask that? Do we even know which questions make sense to ask about the mind? Maybe we can't use language to talk about it. After all language seems(again we have no real empirical basis for this) deeply coupled with the mind so we're going to use the mind to understand the mind? It's microscopes all the way down then I guess.

It is mystical simply because most people haven't really shed much light on it. So the mind remains a mystery. The mind just really, truly does not make sense. It baffles philosophers, scientists, biologists, lay people, etc. We'd rather tackle something like the inner-workings of quarks or the interactions of black holes with dark matter than even attempt to answer the question: what is even allowing me to communicate with myself and answer any of these other questions? Why do I think?

We can talk about personalities. We can talk about the brain. We can talk about language. But how do we work backward from those attributes of the mind to get to the point of genesis; where is the mouse in the wheel creating the thoughts writing this sentence.

No one knows. We don't kinda know. We, truly, have no fucking clue. We think it's related to the brain. That's it.

I don't take it as a personal attack because honestly our understanding is mystical nonsense.

I don't think this argument makes sense unless you believe that the mind, or consciousness, is a special "thing" that must be investigated--which is begging the question.

Consider the possibility that the mind does not exist; that instead it is just a collective noun we use to refer to a group of observed behaviors, the way we use words like "climate" or "weather" or "wave."

What is the smallest part of a wave that is still a wave? We can talk about the chemical characteristics of water, about momentum and turbulence, about gravity, but those all apply equally well to flat water too. Where does the wave come from? Does the concept of a wave make sense in the absence of fluid?

These seem like silly questions because we know how waves work. But similar questions don't get any less silly just because we don't know how the brain works yet.

Yes we can capture a cubic meter of a wave at an instant of time and explain everything about it being a wave. We could do the same with a brain, freeze it in an instant of time. We might me able to tell what memories it is recalling now, what it is about to say, how you are feeling. Where specific memories are located, what behavioral traits you have. Neural correlates are the easy bit.

But having captured and frozen the brains system state have we captured an instant of mind, consciousness or qualia? Can we say anything reasonable about those properties? Or do they suddenly stop existing when the state has frozen? Are we dead at that point? Could we step through consciousness like a debugger? Does conciseness or the mind only exist in between the break points, or state changes. Is consciousnesses the transition between two quantum states, and a lump of meat while nothing is going on? Slightly tougher questions.

Understanding the mind has been a priority for Buddhists for 2500 years.

Many state of the art understandings of mind do not assume any sort of objective reality. So, questions like "where does mind come from", "is it a physical/nonphysical phenomenon", which are based in on a materialistic theory of reality, may not be valid when talking about theories of reality that are based on perception.

That you're satisfied with the definition supplied astounds me. The words are loose as can be. Amoebae integrate information and produce behavior reflecting the actions of a unified singular system insofar as those undefined words mean anything.

Somehow unknowable indeed. "While neuroscience might shed light on the input and output functions of the brain, the quantiﬁcation for integrated information we have presented here implies that it will be unable to shed light on the complex tangle that is core consciousness."

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