[HN Gopher] What's so hard about understanding consciousness?
___________________________________________________________________
What's so hard about understanding consciousness?
Author : CapitalistCartr
Score : 145 points
Date : 2022-02-03 10:44 UTC (1 days ago)
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| hsnewman wrote:
| I've been studying consciousness recently, specifically the
| question of how physics can explain it. It turns out there is a
| Strong Emergence theory, which physics shows only consciousness
| as proof. I find it a fascinating theory. It is strong emergence
| if "The whole is other than the sum of its parts."
| ncmncm wrote:
| I.e., "The speed is other than the sum of the car parts." There
| is nothing there.
| hsnewman wrote:
| That would be weak emergence.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It's table stakes. If you can't process that, you are
| guaranteed to understand no more.
| pandoro wrote:
| Consciousness cannot be understood or known in the
| epistemological sense of the term since it is, by definition, the
| ultimate subject. It also cannot be experienced as an object. It
| sounds very hand-wavy and esoteric but if you think hard about
| it, it is absolutely and undeniably the only tenable logical
| position.
|
| Put in another way: if you somehow claim to be able to observe or
| measure consciousness as an object, then what is it that is doing
| the observing?
|
| Similarly, consciousness is unchanging and without beginning or
| end, for noticing and knowing any change you need consciousness.
| Murazik wrote:
| fn1 wrote:
| Why is consciousness always assumed to be a constant? Why not
| rather call it introspection?
|
| If you zone out, are you still conscious? Or if you are watching
| a movie and not thinking about yourself, are you still conscious?
| Bolkan wrote:
| I am become chromebook.
| xpuente wrote:
| The right analogy is trying to understand why your favorite OS
| works, by trying to understand why certain window appears when
| you click in certain region of the screen. You need to understand
| up to certain level the underlying mechanisms (e.g. if you want
| to understand how an OS works, you need how a syscall works, then
| you need to understand how the processor works).
|
| All this philosophical labyrinth of words seems futile. We need
| to have a right system level model of the cortex and subcortical
| structures to progress. I feel like we are trying to resolve this
| problem looking at the quantum effects in the transistors (using
| the previously cited analogy) [neuroscience] and looking to a
| datacenter [cognitive science]. We need to choose the right level
| of abstraction. We haven't figured out what is the right one in
| the last 100 year. We will do... and perhaps discover that
| Cortico-thalamic pathway in the von Neumman base of our OS...
| colordrops wrote:
| It's hard to understand consciousness, but it's not hard to
| understand why it's hard to understand consciousness. The problem
| is we are trying to understand consciousness by using
| consciousness. We can't step outside of it. Just like you can't
| directly look at your own eyes. You can see them in a mirror, and
| you can infer properties of consciousness by observing external
| phenomena, but you can't directly experience it, because you
| _are_ it (at least from a materialist viewpoint - there are
| spiritualist traditions that say otherwise).
| chasd00 wrote:
| I'm no philosopher but feel the same way, the most advanced
| technology and thinking we have still has to be processed and
| understood by our own consciousness. It reminds me of the
| brain-in-a-vat problem. If you ever discovered you were
| actually just a simulation then the simulation would be paused,
| the bug fixed, and restarted. There's only so much that can be
| done with the perception available to us.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Consciousness is byproduct of high intelligence and result of
| evolution. As your intelligence increases generation over
| generation it is evolutionary "logical" to be conscious and aware
| to increase your survival rate.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| I don't think we understand how the brain implements computation
| well enough yet.
|
| We won't solve how the mind works untill then.
| zubspace wrote:
| What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems to
| be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you inside of
| your body and not in someone elses?
|
| The article poses this question, but leaves it unanswered.
|
| For me it begs the question: If conscousness is bound to a
| location, is it possible to transfer consciousness from one
| entity to another? Is there some kind of thing we did not yet
| detect? What happens when you die or someone is born?
|
| Or maybe, we all (humans, animals and things) share a single
| consciousness and for each Planck time duration switch through
| all of them without knowing?
|
| I love to think about stuff like this, but are those questions
| even answerable?
| dTal wrote:
| >Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses?
|
| This seems definitionally incoherent, on the level of "if I had
| been Shakespeare, who would he have been?"
|
| If "you" were "in" "someone else's" body... you'd be them, not
| you.
| visarga wrote:
| Can human GPT-3? Yes, human can GPT-3 too.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| My consciousness does not seem bound to my body; my senses do,
| but it is trivial to travel to other imaginary places with
| consciousness.
| naasking wrote:
| > What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems
| to be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you
| inside of your body and not in someone elses?
|
| This seems no more puzzling or interesting than asking why your
| web browser is running on your computer rather than mine. Of
| course the computation must be contained within the
| computational system that's running it.
| davidhs wrote:
| > What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems
| to be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you
| inside of your body and not in someone elses?
|
| From what I can best tell, consciousness is a property or a set
| of simulated properties, I don't really know what it is and I
| guess we won't have good answers for it until we will be able
| to properly simulate something like a brain and have better
| brain theories to explain it.
|
| But the world you find yourself is a simulation, and your body
| is simulated. Everything you consciously experience is
| simulated. This simulation is running inside your brain. Part
| of your brain is trying to explain its input so it makes models
| to predict its inputs. I think it learns a model of your body,
| and your mind, and how these thing relate to each other and how
| they relate to what you experience "out there".
|
| > I love to think about stuff like this, but are those
| questions even answerable?
|
| Yes. (I think so)
| krapp wrote:
| This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non-
| supernatural or non-metaphysical definition of consciousness.
| Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when
| consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process
| bound to the brain.
|
| Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because
| their brain is bound inside their skull.
|
| Why are you inside your body and not someone else's? Because
| your brain is inside your body and not someone else's.
|
| Is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to
| another? _transfer,_ no, because consciousness is inextricably
| linked to the brain. There 's no separation between the
| hardware and the "software."
|
| What happens when you die or someone is born? Nothing. No
| afterlife, to karma, no reincarnation, no bardo, nothing.
|
| And finally, are those questions even answerable?
|
| Yes, I believe they are, but many people are uncomfortable with
| the ramifications of the answer as best supported by available
| evidence - we are purely physical beings existing within a
| purely physical universe. Despite all of the evidence from
| biology, neurology, chemistry, physics, etc. failing to show
| any credible evidence of a supernatural or non-biological
| component of consciousness apart from the brain, many people
| keep hoping someone will discover the soul someday and be free
| of the prison of material reality.
| dkersten wrote:
| > Is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to
| another? transfer, no, because consciousness is inextricably
| linked to the brain.
|
| What if we can transplant the brain itself? The consciousness
| is still contained in and created by the same brain, but
| every other part of the experience (sensory input) are from
| another body _effectively_ transferring consciousness between
| bodies.
| aeternum wrote:
| It takes surprisingly little effort to trick your
| consciousness. VR isn't even that good yet in terms of
| resolution and it's quite convincing. If you were put in a
| VR headset as a child and given a dogs body or something
| it's doubtful you could tell the difference.
|
| A similar feeling is present when flying FPV drones. A good
| pilot typically feels like they are the drone. Your mind
| immediately separates the drone from the rest of the
| environment because it responds to your control input and
| matches visual perception.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The universe is incredibly intelligible and follows invisible
| laws. That, per definition, is a supernatural observation
| since we can't touch the invisible laws.
| krapp wrote:
| >That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since
| we can't touch the invisible laws.
|
| The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside
| of the order of nature, not that which is only explicitly
| tangible. Natural laws are human-created abstractions which
| explain the observed behaviors of the natural world, which
| by definition makes them natural, not supernatural.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " The definition of supernatural is that which exists
| outside of the order of nature."
|
| Natural laws exist without humans, unless one believes
| the universe disappears without the human to collapse the
| wave function.
|
| Nature follows these laws, so the laws are abstractly
| outside of nature.
| krapp wrote:
| Again, your definitions of "natural" and "supernatural"
| are not ones that anyone else uses.
|
| Natural laws are observed within nature, which makes them
| a part of nature. To claim that natural laws are
| supernatural simply because they're abstractions, and
| that consciousness is therefore supernatural regardless
| of its nature, is absurd. It's a rhetorical cheat, not an
| argument.
| zubspace wrote:
| I can completely follow your logic. And I completely agree
| that going supernatural or decending into a soul-debate is
| not constructive. That was not my intent.
|
| Still, you and I can probably agree to some extent, that
| there is an inner eye inside of our heads looking outside. It
| also makes sense to me, that those processes could spawn from
| a feedback loop inside of a brain. Still. why did this inner
| eye spawn in this head we are in? There are 8 billion heads,
| why this one?
|
| I'm not arguing for a soul or something. But I find it
| intruiging, that there had to be a mechanism which made your
| inner eye spawn at the place, where it now is. Only, what
| mechanism? Can it be explained physically? In my opinion it
| has to be, but maybe we missed it up to now
| weeblewobble wrote:
| I think when you learn your brain creates symbols -- neural
| pathways corresponding to real world objects or concepts,
| with further pathways linking together related symbols. One
| of these symbols corresponds to the system itself, a self-
| reference. That's the "inner eye", and it wouldn't make
| sense for it to be in someone else's head because then it
| wouldn't be self-referential.
| foobarian wrote:
| I have a lot of trouble with that exact question. It's no
| wonder the concept of a 'soul' is so pervasive over the
| ages - it explains things so neatly. It's like there is a
| cosmic Kubernetes cluster and at birth a process gets
| randomly assigned to a CPU.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Once you decide whether you believe in free will, which
| is supernatural by any interesting definition, things
| fall into place:)
| visarga wrote:
| Yeah, it's called evolution. You are one bet in a pool of
| bets for future survival. A single, uninterrupted, open-
| ended process that created all life on this planet. How
| many of our creations can lead to such diversity in one
| single run?
| spupe wrote:
| Your "mind's eye" is getting information from your actual
| eyes through your optic nerves and cortex. This is how we
| know it is a physical mechanism, we can affect it in
| predictable ways with lesions, drugs and other physical
| methods.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| >Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this head we are
| in? There are 8 billion heads, why this one?
|
| I get what you are saying, but honestly that question
| doesn't make sense. You are this one because that is how
| your brain developed.. just like you physically look how
| you are because of how your body developed. To say "why am
| I how I am" to me is no different than "why do I look this
| way?"
|
| >Can it be explained physically?
|
| Well.. if I smash you in the head with a hammer, your
| "consciousness" would most likely be affected because I
| damaged your brain, right? Seems pretty straightforward
| that we can indirectly say that yes it can be explained
| physically. We may not be able to explain the details.. but
| seems like we can say it's just simply what our brain
| evolved to do. Just like how our physical looks evolved for
| various reasons / chance.
| foobarian wrote:
| The question is, why did the FPV-experiencing
| consciousness happen to bind to the body you are in? And
| why does it stick?
|
| I guess it would be interesting to look at why it
| persists through sleep. And whether there were ever
| instances of people who wake up with different
| personalities. Also edge cases around coma/near-death
| restarts.
|
| Or maybe things work like coroutines, and no matter which
| thread you get assigned to the state is all in the
| context. I mean it looks like that is 99.9% the case
| given what we know about memory formation, physical brain
| structures etc.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> The question is, why did the FPV-experiencing
| consciousness happen to bind to the body you are in? And
| why does it stick?_
|
| You're asking questions equivalent to "why does the
| interior of a box happen to bind to that particular piece
| of folded cardboard? And why is the same interior there
| when the box is closed and reopened?"
|
| If each brain has a consciousness, and each is uniquely
| generated by that brain, the 'binding' and 'sticking'
| questions go away.
| foobarian wrote:
| That line of explanation doesn't do it for me, because
| there is only one brain that has my FPV consciousness.
| Why this particular one? I think it's a question related
| to the topics of breaking symmetry, or nondeterminism.
| It's also a great unsolved question that many smarter
| people than me couldn't answer so I'm not hopeful I'll
| live to see it answered. But I will continue to wonder at
| it now and then, like when articles like this pop up. :-)
| chasd00 wrote:
| > there is only one brain that has my FPV consciousness.
| Why this particular one?
|
| to me, the answer is because you were born with that one.
|
| Maybe it's better to think about how your FPV
| consciousness didn't exist prior to your birth. It came
| into being when you came into being. I don't think
| there's a separation between your FPV consciousness and
| physical brain. If your metabolism stops your FPV
| consciousness stops
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > Maybe it's better to think about how your FPV
| consciousness didn't exist prior to your birth
|
| That is unknowable though. You may just not remember it.
| Is memory what makes consciousness?
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| >That line of explanation doesn't do it for me
|
| I don't mean to be rude, but you are flat out wrong
| here.. you are not accepting the "simplicity" of what is
| actually happening- you want to make it something
| complicated and metaphysical, which is why the
| explanation doesn't do it for you.
|
| >me, because there is only one brain that has my FPV
| consciousness. Why this particular one?
|
| Well.. why do you look the way you do? Why doesn't
| everyone look exactly the same? Because there are tiny
| bits of random evolution/changes in our biological
| bodies. The same is happening in the brain- no one has
| exactly the same functioning brain. You have your FPV
| consciousness because that's the one you have.
|
| If you are looking for some other answer.. then it's just
| philosophical nonsense at some point. It's like saying
| "Why does Uranus look the way it does, while Neptune
| looks different?". It's just what happened.. if Uranus
| and Neptune switched how they looked to us from the
| beginning, you would never know and be asking the same
| question that doesn't make sense.
| visarga wrote:
| > This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non
| supernatural or non metaphysical definition of consciousness.
|
| That's a failure to appreciate the beauty, complexity and
| wonders of our brains, bodies and environment. No effort on
| appreciating, but still wanting to feel special. Thus,
| consciousness simply has to have a supernatural element. It
| wouldn't be fun otherwise.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| Completely strange people downvote this comment. It is
| completely logical, and if you disagree with any of this- it
| is up to you to prove otherwise.
|
| Obviously it does make people uncomfortable talking like
| this.. I don't understand why, I guess they are scared of the
| simple truth that we are simply the most evolved animals on
| our planet- but still animals. There is nothing special about
| our brain (compared to other species), it's just a bit more
| advanced. And we have physical features that have basically
| allowed us to take advantage of our brain power and continue
| to grow.
|
| We are animals. So anyone who wants to talk about
| consciousness being on something like a 'soul' or whatever
| better be just as prepared to talk about how my cat also has
| a soul.. and dolphins have a soul.. and why is this dolphin's
| consciousness in dolphin A instead of dolphin B.
|
| I think the truth is a lot less interesting than people want
| to believe..
| chasd00 wrote:
| It's pretty straightforward to follow when consciousness
| ends, with death. In my mind, a harder question is when does
| it begin? After one cell, two cells, a trillion cells? If a
| scientist can pin down the moment it starts then that may
| lead to more progress on the other questions.
| abernard1 wrote:
| > Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when
| consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process
| bound to the brain.
|
| If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via
| knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way.
|
| We... need it be said... cannot. We can't even describe what
| consciousness is in a way it can be measured or analyzed. We
| can make things that do things, sure. We can even impart some
| of our own "consciousness" into these doer machines like
| robots. But we have no useful way of understanding the
| phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot,
| or a cat, or a bat, or whatever.
|
| > Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because
| their brain is bound inside their skull.
|
| We might as well ask: why is software in a robot the way it
| is? Because the software is on that CPU in that physical case
| over there. It's a non-answer and a diversion. Software _can_
| be transferred to other hardware, and there are many
| questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and
| also what the nature of that consciousness is given that
| there 's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s)
| different than the material reality of the electrons pumping
| through silicon.
| zubspace wrote:
| Well said. I think one of the problems is, that most just
| think that consciousness is a given and have a hard time to
| acknowledge, that we actually have no damn clue what it
| really is.
|
| It's easy to say, that believing in a soul or something
| like it is hogwash, but just closing your eyes and telling
| yourself "I think and therefore I am" does not bring us any
| closer to an answer.
|
| We have to assume that all unfalsifiable arguments could be
| true until we have proof, that they are incorrect. That is
| the only scientific approach.
| krapp wrote:
| >If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities
| via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way.
|
| I wasn't claiming the problem of consciousness as a whole
| was trivial, rather the specific questions being asked in
| the above comment become trivial when a biological origin
| of consciousness is assumed.
|
| > But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena
| we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat,
| or a bat, or whatever.
|
| This isn't entirely true. We've studied the brain and the
| relationship between the brain and consciousness for
| decades. We may not understand exactly how consciousness
| arises in the brain, or even why it exists, but there is
| absolutely a pile of evidence that _consciousness is
| something the brain creates_ and that it doesn 't exist
| apart from the brain.
|
| >Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there
| are many questions to be had whether software is
| consciousness, and also what the nature of that
| consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of
| representation (1s and 0s) different than the material
| reality of the electrons pumping through silicon.
|
| If you want to be pedantic, software isn't ever
| transferred, only copied.
|
| Also, while the "brain as computer" metaphor is tempting, I
| think it's also misleading. Decades of failure to produce a
| general AI demonstrate how alien one architecture is from
| another. Brains just don't operate enough like computers
| for comparisons of biological consciousness to software to
| be meaningful.
|
| And that 'layer of representation' is an illusion. There
| are no 1s and 0s separate from the material reality of
| electrons and silicon, that's an entirely human abstraction
| that doesn't exist in the hardware, certainly not at the
| physical level where quantum effects become relevant and
| everything is just a charge that does or doesn't meet a
| tolerance.
| abernard1 wrote:
| > the specific questions being asked in the above comment
| become trivial when a biological origin of consciousness
| is assumed.
|
| But unless there are complementary answers, they're
| trivial in the "useless" sense. They (1) don't provide
| any explanatory power, and (2) may very well be wrong--
| because as we've established--we have no clue.
|
| It's of the same argumentative caliber as the anthropic
| principle: "Well, we're here because that's just the way
| we do things here in UniverseCorp."
|
| I too could assume that consciousness is due to a
| particularly fascinating arrangement of angels dancing on
| physical atomic pins. I could say that every person is
| localized to a certain angel, or maybe a soul, and
| vociferously call it trivial because if you assume this
| thing then it naturally follows. _But I don 't want to
| assume that thing_ because that thing is totally useless
| at describing anything. Which is still where we are with
| consciousness, and the history of science is filled with
| whiplash and disappointment at finding older more
| primitive beliefs were more "true."
|
| > There are no 1s and 0s separate from the material
| reality of electrons and silicon, that's an entirely
| human abstraction that doesn't exist in the hardware
|
| There are 1s and 0s that are going across the world right
| now from you to me, and they're being transferred into
| electrons and photons and who knows what else afterwards.
| They may be emergent phenomena, but they exist, just like
| molecules exist as combinations of atoms: they have
| rules, those rules are exact and can be understood. Those
| rules are also _not materially real_ , and yet they can
| be made immanent. We as tiny humans have built a real
| system where we have separated representation from
| reality, and we have not yet determined whether The
| Universe (TM) has made a comparable innovation.
| svachalek wrote:
| For all the fancy words here, I don't find any substance.
| The evidence that consciousness is tied to the physical
| brain is overwhelming, and evidence that it exists
| outside the brain is nonexistent.
| agent008t wrote:
| Why is it bound to your location? You are just getting sensory
| input from a particular set of devices: eyes, ears, tactile,
| brain (thoughts/feelings/memories). But 'you' are not any of
| these. 'You', the observer receiving and experiencing all these
| readings, can be anywhere.
|
| With meditation, you can get a clearer sense of what is really
| 'you', and what is just being observed/experienced by 'you'.
| But 'you' are not your body, or your thoughts, or your
| memories, or your feelings. Distilled, the 'you' of all living
| things could well be exactly the same - it is just what is fed
| to them by the hardware differs.
| visarga wrote:
| > But 'you' are not any of these.
|
| Ha ha, without eyes, ears, tactile, and the rest of senses
| what would be left? Brain a in vat, is THAT the real you?
|
| The self is an actor in a game, you are your game, not the
| "observer", a weird concept if I may say so. As if it is not
| related to the game it observes. Its very existence is on the
| line, though, one missed observation and it could be dead.
| You are the actor, not the observer, because you got skin in
| the game.
| agent008t wrote:
| Just try a simple experiment. It will only take 10 minutes.
|
| Set an alarm on your phone for 10 minutes. Sit down in a
| quiet room. Close your eyes. Your goal is to observe the
| physical sensations produced by natural breathing in your
| nose for the 10 minutes. Give it your full attention and
| not miss a single breath, and really feel how each breath
| in and out feels at the tip of your nose as the air passes
| it. Easy, right?
|
| Except you will probably find that before long, instead of
| having your attention on the breath like you fully
| intended, your attention will be on some thoughts. Where
| did the thoughts come from? Were 'you' thinking them? Or
| did the thoughts just arise and steal your attention,
| despite YOU fully intending to be paying attention to the
| breath for the 10 minutes? What is then your relationship
| to 'your' thoughts?
| nvegater wrote:
| I think 'you' (consciousness) are a combination of all of
| those things you mention (body, thoughts, memories, feelings
| etc..). I dont think you can do a distillation of the 'you',
| without removing consciousness. If you perform this
| distillation the only thing left is a dead body. (maybe thats
| what you mean when you say that all living beings could well
| be the same if 'you' is removed).
|
| But I'm not very trained in this topic, so I'm not sure what
| I am saying its coherent, but I like and agree with Antonio
| Damasio's perspective and I find it refreshing. That is where
| my comment is coming from.
| grishka wrote:
| To me it's obvious: since consciousness arises from external
| and internal stimuli of the body, part of the physical world
| that it could perceive and affect is limited by the physical
| capabilities of the body. If there was a technology to hook up
| a computer to your brain and you could then have it feed you
| data from a sensor located somewhere far away, you would
| effectively extend the physical capabilities of your body, thus
| extending the spatial presence of your consciousness.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i wonder if the reverse is true. If you were very old and
| floating in space after the last blackhole has evaporated,
| entropy is evenly distributed, and time becomes meaningless
| would your consciousness end? Without any input there would
| be no output.
|
| edit: i suppose a counter point would be sensory deprivation
| tanks should reduce your consciousness however most report it
| to be enhanced during the experience.
| [deleted]
| pasabagi wrote:
| One troubling analogy would be occasionalism.
|
| Occasionalists believe that in order for cause and effect to
| work, God has to intercede. This rather elegantly deals with a
| whole load of theoretical problems around causal realism.
|
| If you were an occasionalist, you might think, if such a thing as
| a 'god-of-the-gaps' exist, it should be possible to build a
| device that mimics its powers, a 'god machine'. Such a device
| would be very useful.
|
| Except, if occasionalism is wrong, and the universe simply
| doesn't work like that, it's obviously going to be totally
| impossible to build a machine that replicates the effect, or to
| understand how the effect could function.
|
| What if consciousness is just another 'god-of-the-gaps', and we
| can't replicate it or understand it, because it's fundamentally a
| nonsensical concept?
| davidhs wrote:
| What if we have the misconception of thinking we are a physical
| person in a physical world that has access to a weird mind?
| What if instead they physical brain is simulating the universe
| we find ourselves individually in, and we are only simulated,
| and we infer a physical world.
|
| You can at least scientifically model and test this.
| yetihehe wrote:
| > If you were an occasionalist, you might think, if such a
| thing as a 'god-of-the-gaps' exist, it should be possible to
| build a device that mimics its powers, a 'god machine'.
|
| Then that occasionalist god might interfere and break your
| machine and maybe break you too for trying to emulate a god.
| randallsquared wrote:
| This is Dan Dennett's "illusion of consciousness".
| [deleted]
| ccbccccbbcccbb wrote:
| > What's So Hard About Understanding Consciousness?
|
| It's the same kind of hard that stands in the way of programs
| debugging themselves.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| Probably the lack of an appropriate viewpoint to analyse it from.
| [deleted]
| nathias wrote:
| the hard problem of consciousness is just an symptom of logical
| positivism, which is false in its entirety
| throwawayguy7 wrote:
| What this article and most others lack is an adult treatment of
| why serious neuroscientists and philosphers of the mind feel the
| problem is in fact, hard.
|
| To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked
| is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an
| otherwise difficult problem. This is not a scientifically
| rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the other side
| seriously.
|
| As a younger guy, I read Dennet and mistook him for a serious
| thinker. Then I read his rebuttals of his opponents and all he
| did was accuse them of 'residual christianity' and make profane
| acrostic poems. These guys just aren't taking the other side
| seriously and it's kinda silly honestly.
| [deleted]
| tablespoon wrote:
| > To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being
| invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to
| dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. This is not a
| scientifically rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the
| other side seriously.
|
| Yeah. IIRC, some people say the passage of time is an illusion
| too. It's pretty hard for me to take seriously anyone who
| defends their favored theory or interpretation by hand-waving
| away contrary but fundamental observations as illusions.
| visarga wrote:
| > some people say the passage of time is an illusion too
|
| Well, as the article says, the brain makes top-down
| predictions about our future. So the experience of time is a
| controlled illusion updated frequently with sense data.
| naasking wrote:
| > To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being
| invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to
| dismiss an otherwise difficult problem.
|
| Dennett doesn't dismiss the difficulty of the problem, he just
| dismisses that the difficulty is where people think it is. For
| instance, he would fully agree that the brain is insanely
| complex and just elaborating _how_ information processing works
| will be very, very challenging. His opponents then say from
| this position of ignorance on how this works, "but even if you
| explain all of this, there's _still something left to explain_!
| "
|
| Is there really though? How could they possibly know this? It's
| a classic god of the gaps argument/argument from ignorance that
| theists use to cling to their deities or support intelligent
| design, hence "residual christianity". After all of this time
| debating consciousness, the very best arguments we have for
| qualia that cannot be captured mechanistically are thought
| experiments that are easily dismissed as circular (and which
| Dennett has ably deconstructed to show their vacuousness).
|
| Frankly, I find Dennett's rebuttals are brutally logical and
| pragmatic.
| GeorgeKangas wrote:
| If one is a "phenomenological zombie", i.e. does not have
| subjective experience (SE), then Dennett's position is the
| only one that makes any sense. The only thing to explain, is
| why _others_ are believing this SE illusion.
|
| Those of us who _do_ have SE, and have recognized it, know
| something the zombies _cannot_ know: that SE _must_ exist.
| naasking wrote:
| No, you have a perception that you think entails subjective
| experience. Surely you would acknowledge the many ways you
| or others could fool your other perceptions, but it's
| frankly confusing that you think this simply cannot happen
| to your perception of subjective awareness. The fact is, if
| this illusion was adaptive in evolutionary terms, which it
| arguably is, then you _would_ have developed such an
| illusory perception.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| >but it's frankly confusing that you think this simply
| cannot happen to your perception of subjective awareness
|
| Because subjective awareness is not a perception, they're
| two entirely different kinds of of concepts. Equating the
| two would seems stranger to me than equating say the
| feeling of pain with the concept of a needle. You could
| convince me both the needle and the pain are illusionary,
| but not that my experience is. That you seem to be
| genuinely convinced that subjective experience and our
| flawed sensory apparatuses are even in the same ballpark
| implies to me that you probably either do not have that
| experience, or that unlike in my case, your experience is
| somehow not connected to the output that typing fingers
| can produce
| davidhs wrote:
| Well, I think in some sense it's all just "controlled"
| hallucination, but, to me, it doesn't say much.
|
| Sometimes I think people have some intuitive sense of how
| things ought to work but but they can't reconcile it with
| physics description of the world. For example, how is it
| possible that a physical system such as a brain can have
| experiences, such as colors, love, objects, music, etc.
|
| I think the simplest answer to that conundrum is that, yes,
| physical systems can not have these sorts of experiences, they
| do not follow from the theories or descriptions. But what you
| can do instead is simulate a world with such magical qualities.
| This is what I think some parts of the brain do, is to simulate
| the world that we personally find ourselves in.
|
| Then the real question is how does the brain do that? How does
| it work? What are its learning rules? What does it end up
| learning?
|
| My guess is that it ends up describing this universe (including
| ourselves) that we find ourselves in.
|
| Why? You could imagine that the signals coming into the brain
| from the rest of the body are just a bit array that is changing
| all the time. What does it mean? That's for the brain to find
| out, so it's always in the process of making and updating
| predictive models of its input. Why? So that the biological
| robot that you are in control of navigate successfully in the
| physical world and meet the needs of the organism, e.g. eat
| food, drink water, keep itself in the right temperature, keep
| itself from being harmed, and such.
| jokoon wrote:
| Sometimes it seems wordd don't have good definitions, at least
| when they can be challenged by science.
|
| Language is mostly usage. For example we don't have a good
| definition of what intelligence is, on the scientific level. It
| might be the same thing for consciousness.
|
| We only understand intelligence or consciousness as what we see
| as a soul or ghost, but nothing much.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > One point on which you both clearly agree is that consciousness
| is an embodied phenomenon,
|
| It probably is but I wouldn't be so sure it is. I have neither a
| feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an
| intuitive guess.
|
| > we have the ineffable experience of being alive in this world
|
| The experience of being, and the experience of attributes like
| "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separate things.
| AFAIK the latter even is attributed to specific parts of the
| brain scientifically and it's known these can be broken. I
| certainly feel like "I am" but I have no idea of whether I am
| alive and in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm
| clock rings. I feel my being and also have visual perception but
| judgement/semantics in what I see emerges 0.5-10 seconds later.
| noduerme wrote:
| Well, being on delay doesn't detract from consciousness. Think
| of it this way: No matter how incredibly fast a monstrous AI
| ever becomes, it will always suffer some delay.
|
| >> in which world I am the first seconds after the alarm clock
| rings.
|
| Do you actually believe those are real, other worlds? I'm
| tempted to, sometimes. But if they are, it's more an argument
| that consciousness is real and something even grander than we
| acknowledge, if it can flip states and universes like that.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > Do you actually believe those are real, other worlds?
|
| Logically this depends of how do you define a world. Even if
| you imagine them as parallel universes with physics similar
| or mindboggingly dissimilar to that of our world, you can
| still say there is just one world in which all these sub-
| worlds exist. So, talking seriously I wouldn't say there are
| other worlds or there are not. I would just say "observable
| world" and assume there are many things beyond what we can
| comprehend or imagine. Even if we agree, just for the sake of
| argument, that the very consciousness itself is not a product
| of the material brain, our abilities to perceive, memorize
| and reason surely are and this way have limitations.
| Believing these limitations don't render us futile in trying
| to understand all the phenomena of existing universe and
| their nature seems absurdly naive to me.
|
| Practically I just mean I have no idea (or even question)
| about the world or anything the moment I wake up. As soon as
| I wake up I feel like "I am" but not "I am in this world".
| The idea of where I am comes after a variable non-zero delay.
| misja111 wrote:
| > I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of
| this idea. It's just an intuitive guess.
|
| This intuition, that there is something special and unique
| about what 'we' are, is baked into our brains by many thousands
| of years of evolution, and this makes it so extremely difficult
| for us to believe that there's nothing more to us then a bunch
| of molecules. This is why people have invented theories about
| souls, reincarnation, collective consciousness and what not.
| stevofolife wrote:
| We are unique as humans if you compare us to any biological
| being. Saying we are not is a very big understatement.
| Layke1123 wrote:
| cgriswald wrote:
| My interpretation of the GP's use of 'unique' here isn't
| specific necessarily to humans, just to conscious beings.
|
| Still, if you take the set _H_ of properties of humans and
| the set _B_ of the properties of all other Earth creatures,
| you 'll find that _H_ is a proper subset of _B_. What makes
| humans 'unique' in the regard you mean isn't kind, but
| scale and combination.
| bcgraham wrote:
| Aren't you describing exactly the kind of "intuitive guess"
| he referred to, for why consciousness is embodied?
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| It's difficult to believe we are nothing more to us then a
| bunch of molecules because I still am me if I loose an arm, a
| memory or any given part of my brain. One can gradually
| replace every tiny part of his body with prosthetics and the
| point at which he will stop being them and become an
| imitation both exists and does not. What's the difference
| between me and a perfect imitation? I believe I am going to
| remain where I was if someone just makes an atom-perfect copy
| of mine and puts it near so the copy will probably have
| exactly the same memories I have and believe it is me but
| will not be me actually.
| Layke1123 wrote:
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| I understand your point, but if we truly are "Ships of
| Thesus" in meat form, then is consciousness only a present
| moment phenomena that can merely tap into our biological
| record-keeping?
|
| We may be relying too heavily on the basis that our
| experience and our sense of being are a combination that
| begets consciousness; when they may just as likely be
| separate systems.
| [deleted]
| davidhs wrote:
| I don't think consciousness is an embodied phenomenon. It's
| probably just a property or set of properties of the simulated
| world that we find ourselves in (the simulated world running on
| the brain).
|
| To me, embodiment such and such seems pseudoscientific. How is
| it possible at this point in time that anything inside your
| pinky toe might be influencing the activity of your brain
| without sending nerve signals to the brain or secreting
| something into its surrounding which might eventually signal
| the brain? By some spooky magic?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The experience of being, and the experience of attributes
| like "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separate
| things.
|
| Yes, you can have the former without the latter - it's a key
| component of attaining "enlightenment" or "stream entry", which
| is perhaps most feasibly achieved through _vipassana_
| meditation. This gives you a reasonably direct experience of
| _anatta_ or "non-self" (where 'self' actually means something
| like personal identity and the attributes thereof, not
| phenomenological experience per se).
| erokar wrote:
| If consciousness is not embodied that would imply metaphysics
| and body/mind dualism, e.i. something countrary what one might
| term the scientific world view.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The most common naive view among scientists is in fact quite
| close to body/mind dualism, much as phrased by Descartes.
| People who have examined the problem in depth tend to go for
| some form of pan-protopsychism, where the substrate for
| subjective phenomenology has to somehow be a part of the
| physical universe (since it clearly enters into causal
| relations with the rest of it!) but can also be expected to
| be rather physically simple, so that it can be consistently
| endowed with both "physical" and "subjectively experienced,
| phenomenological" features or states.
| derbOac wrote:
| This is kind of where I'm at. To me clearly qualia are part
| of the physical world, but no amount of understanding of
| neurophysiology is going to account for their existence
| without positing "something else".
|
| My best guess is qualia and consciousness are like an EM
| field, something that exists and has some relationship with
| known physical entities but is distinct at the same time.
| It may be amplified by, say, some computational structure,
| but exists independent of it.
|
| At one time I had convinced myself that qualia were related
| to time, in the sense that it was the "substantive"
| manifestation of time as a dimension, but now I'm not sure
| what I was thinking.
|
| I suspect in the end consciousness will end up in the
| domain of physics rather than neurobiology and psychology
| alone.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Can consciousness be a part of "what one might term the
| scientific world view" at all? Is there an instrument (or a
| human expert) capable to measure consciousness and reliably
| tell a really good neural network vs a conscious human apart?
| What about a conscious vs an unconscious human?
|
| "what one might term the scientific world view" is great and
| very practical but not perfect. There certainly are
| legitimate questions it probably has no way to address.
|
| I feel pretty skeptical about exploring the nature of
| consciousness without employing techniques available in
| Buddhism, psychonetics[1] or something like that. These are
| fundamentally unscientific (although not imaginary -
| execution of the practices can be easily detected with EEG)
| but can at least let us observe the object of the study with
| at least some basic degree of objectivity, reason about it
| and do something useful with it.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838445
| snikeris wrote:
| What are some evolutionary explanations for consciousness? What
| does the organism gain by expending energy to make its
| experiences conscious?
| ncmncm wrote:
| That was surprisingly not complete bollocks. Bollocks is the norm
| when anybody talks about the "problem of consciousness'.
|
| There are legitimate questions to ask about consciousness, but
| nobody asks them. How does the perception of being conscious aid
| in survival and/or reproduction? It's kind of like wondering
| about what good being beautiful does for a blind, microscopic
| worm: not necessarily answerable, but anyway worth asking.
| xweber wrote:
| Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much
| like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience
| reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But
| then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I
| suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism
| more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness
| offer over just taking in sensory input and making predictions
| without having qualia (much like a computer does)?
| tgv wrote:
| > we don't experience reality directly
|
| That muddies the water, IMO. We do experience reality directly:
| our nerve endings do. The next step is processing, which is
| somewhat mediated by low-level expectations. This takes place
| at sub-conscious levels. Conscious perception comes much later,
| and is obviously more filtered. To call it a hallucination is
| word play.
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| There are fixed patterns in still images that appear to move
| when we perceive them. "We don't experience reality directly"
| and calling it a hallucination seems apt - the thing we
| experience when we look at things is less "what's actually
| there" and more "the best guess our brain can construct about
| what's there".
|
| Additional examples of this include the non-perception of the
| visual blind spot, how the brain fills in details in the
| middle of saccades, and how task-specific training causes
| perceptual differences (eg, thrown baseballs look bigger to
| professional batters).
| pwm wrote:
| > We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do.
|
| Depending on how you define "reality" we only experience a
| tiny subset of it. We can only see/hear/touch/smell/taste a
| very restricted universe, only what our "antennas" can
| detect. In fact I would argue that we experience close to 0%
| of all of reality. On top of this extremely restricted input
| our processing of it is imperfect which means some of what we
| experience has nothing to do with reality.
| tgv wrote:
| Restricted as it may be, we experience reality.
| Experiencing reality completely is impossible anyway.
|
| And in the context of hallucination, what we can't
| experience doesn't matter.
| pwm wrote:
| Sure, I don't disagree but (to me anyway) it's important
| to point out the difference between reality vs. our
| potential intake from it. The blind men and the elephant
| parable applies.
| davidhs wrote:
| I think what you mean by reality is physical reality, if so
| then it is impossible for us to directly experience it. You are
| a simulated being in a simulated world. The simulated world
| runs on a physical brain. Everything you experience is
| "hallucinations," but if your physical brain works normally
| then they will be constrained to explain the input to the
| brain. Consciousness is most likely a property or set of
| properties of this simulation. Some part of your brain make
| predictive models of its input, and the things that it models
| is yourself, your current environment, other stuff going on
| (the mind), how these things relate to each other and such. My
| guess is that qualia is something like primitives to this
| simulated world.
| raducu wrote:
| We obviously don't have the full picture about sensations --
| they might be a side effect of specialized (biochemical) neural
| architectures, but more likely there is something intrinsic to
| them that grants advantages to sensations.
|
| There's something to making things really "personal" to an
| individual system having sensations that make it act in its
| best interest.
|
| Sensations are also very flexible biochemical abstractions and
| solutions to problems across aeons.
|
| It would have been quite hard for organisms to evolve without
| such abstractions -- like a worm recoiling in pain and a human
| quickly rettacting his burnt hand or avoiding certain kinds of
| people who have hurt him before.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Explanations like "consciousness is a controlled hallucination"
| or "consciousness is just an illusion" don't answer anything
| for me.
|
| To be able to have a hallucination or an illusion, you still
| need the consciousness experiencing that. Explain that
| consciousness.
|
| > I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an
| organism more capable than one who doesn't.
|
| You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik), and it's
| behavior that makes organisms more capable
| grumbel wrote:
| > "consciousness is just an illusion"
|
| Replace "illusion" with "perception" and it will make a lot
| more sense.
|
| Consciousness does obviously exist in one form or another,
| but when people think intuitively about consciousness they
| imagine it as an actor. A little guy in your head that looks
| at the world and makes decisions.
|
| That's the illusion. That "little guy", that "self", isn't
| the one doing the work, your brain is the one doing the work.
| The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of
| itself.
|
| Just like photons hitting your eyeballs might be interpreted
| as cats and dogs out there in the world, the brain interprets
| or perceives whatever it is doing internally as a "self".
|
| > You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik)
|
| Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty
| difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell
| itself apart from the rest of the world.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of
| itself.
|
| That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Though I
| think there are many different interpretations and
| definitions for the word consciousness so we might be
| talking about a different one.
|
| > Without some sens of self any creature would have a
| pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to
| tell itself apart from the rest of the world.
|
| A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in
| it happen to do
| grumbel wrote:
| > That still doesn't explain consciousness itself.
|
| Well, which part doesn't it explain? It's pretty
| conclusive as far as I am concerned. As among other
| things, you can explain why philosophers would even ask
| that question in the first place.
|
| > A cell just replicates because that's what the
| molecules in it happen to do
|
| And transistors just go on and off, yet people still
| spend years studying computer science. The existence of
| simple mechanism at one level doesn't prevent higher
| order mechanism at another, quite the opposite. Those
| cells aren't going to do much replicating when you get
| killed by a tiger, some awareness of yourself and the
| environment helps prevent that.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > Well, which part doesn't it explain?
|
| It doesn't explain how consciousness emerges from this.
| Brains/computers/processes can self-reference or self-
| explain all they want, that still doesn't say how doing
| so results in having the actual consciousness you
| experience.
|
| It's not a trivial thing we're talking about here: there
| could be a brain just executing logic and making
| decisions, or there could be that same brain but it's
| actually aware of that fact, not just aware in the sense
| that it's processing inputs including the inputs from
| which it can derive that it itself exists, but aware like
| you are there and the one in that brain.
|
| The only one that you can know for sure has consciousness
| is yourself, but can you explain why you have it?
|
| If the brain is an electromechanical process that works
| on its own, and consciousness is just observing it, then
| it doesn't need this observer, the process already does
| the same on its own.
| grumbel wrote:
| > there could be a brain just executing logic and making
| decisions, or there could be that same brain but it's
| actually aware of that fact
|
| But here is the thing: You are not aware of any of this!
| You are only aware of the world around you and yourself
| in the form of a high level description. You are aware of
| cats, dogs, your arms and legs, etc. But that's
| perception, not processes being magically self aware. You
| have no clue what your brain is actually doing, that's
| completely invisible to you.
|
| And that's the illusion. The process you are trying to
| explain doesn't exist. Consciousness is _not_ processes
| being self aware. Consciousness is a process that tries
| to model the world in a way your brain can use to make
| sense of the world. And just like it does it with cats
| and dogs, so does it with itself. The thing you call
| "yourself" is a perception generated by the brain, it's
| not a thing that exist and does stuff.
| tremon wrote:
| If you have a model that says the brain is a singular
| entity there will always be problems how to phrase meta-
| activity such as self-awareness and consciousness. If the
| brain is singular, what does the observing? Does the
| observing part belong to the brain or not? If the brain
| is observing itself, which part does the observing and
| which is the observed? Can we change the roles, and make
| the observee the observer? How does "the brain" decide
| what "the brain" is thinking about?
|
| The problem with this model is that it's regarding the
| brain as a whole as if it's a single processing entity,
| since that's how we experience it, but physically that's
| far from the truth: the brain is a highly segmented
| parallel processing machine and (for as far as I know)
| there is no clear control hierarchy within the brain to
| point at a single location to say "this is where
| [thought/sensation/self] originates".
|
| So my theory is that consciousness is the emergent
| property of many separate specialized brain areas
| responding to and interacting with each other: either
| directly (neuronal links), via the body (flexing a muscle
| tightens the skin, creating a sensory feedback loop), and
| through the world (turning your head changes what your
| eyes perceive).
|
| So speaking in terms of functionality, there is no
| "brain" as a single entity. The brain is like an ant
| colony, using hormones and electrical impulses to keep
| its disparate parts acting in unity. Under this model,
| consciousness can be defined as the push and pull between
| these parts, and self-awareness as the consensus model
| under which the separate parts reached some equilibrium.
| You won't have problems defining which parts do the
| observing and which parts are observed: what we
| "experience" as our mind is the tug-of-war between the
| processing areas, not the processor activities
| themselves. And similarly, what we experience as
| consciousness is the ability of our "mind" to drown out
| that cacophony and purposefully cede control ("focus") to
| different brain areas at different times.
|
| Of course, there's no evidence that any of this is true,
| and there's still plenty of questions about the mechanism
| through which this would happen, but for me personally
| this model has allowed me to move on from the vicious
| cycle of having to first define "brain" in order to
| define "thought" in order to define "awareness" in order
| to define "mind" in order to define "self" in order to
| define "brain".
| wruza wrote:
| Is it the fact that a computer doesn't have one of a sort?
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I think the important part is that you can represent more
| things in consciousness than just "five-sense data", ie. exotic
| sense data like emotions, reactions, imagination, memory,
| impulses, selfhood, and correlate them with the ordinary
| sensory data. A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get
| scared, but I don't know if it knows that it's scared _because
| of_ the predator. I think you need an integrated space for both
| direct data and metadata for that.
|
| Also, in humans, I'd presume that consciousness, being
| introspectable, relates to our ability to understand our own
| interests and behaviors, and those of others, in symbolic terms
| and express them with language. It's how we close the circle
| between thinking and "I think".
|
| (I agree with the article that people vastly overestimate the
| mystery of consciousness.)
|
| PS: I think consciousness being introspectable is very
| underrated. We can perceive memories of perception, we can feel
| nostalgic for having felt a certain way in the past, and we can
| realize and name that we are doing this. The "reentrancy" of
| consciousness is a core aspect of our cognitive and strategic
| flexibility.
| tremon wrote:
| _A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared_
|
| This is maybe just a matter of definition, but I find it
| highly unlikely that that scenario exists. "Seeing" a
| predator already requires so much higher-level processing
| (not just the visual cues, but the analysis and
| classification) that I find it unlikely the animal does not
| have a working distinction between intra-body and outside-
| world sensations.
|
| The problem with defining "consciousness" is that we do not
| have reliable inter-species communication to compare notes
| between species, so our definition of consciousness itself is
| hampered by the ability to communicate that sense of
| consciousness to each other. Already in your post, there's
| seven different interpretations of what "consciousness" could
| actually mean:
|
| - ability to recall past experiences ("emotions", "memory")
|
| - awareness of the self ("impulses", "selfhood")
|
| - ability to conceive experiences that do not correspond with
| sensory inputs ("imagination")
|
| - meta-awareness of instinctual reactions ("if it knows that
| it's scared because of the predator")
|
| - introspection ("our ability to understand our own interests
| and behaviors")
|
| - empathy ("and those of others")
|
| - communicating our sense of self to others ("express them
| with language")
|
| Personally, I think we should assume that all animal species
| possess the first four, all large mammals can do the first
| five, and many species have the ability to do the sixth (it's
| been proven in dogs, apes, parrots, crows, and dolphins --
| and probably others).
| mrkramer wrote:
| All the things you mentioned are products of evolution
| invented for the purpose of increasing survival rate. For
| example emotions serve us mammals to bond with each other,
| bring us closer together so that we help each other in
| order to survive.
| noiv wrote:
| I think the most simple explanation is the brain runs a
| simulation of its environment and at some point after birth it
| puts its human into this simulation. That's probably when
| children start using the word 'I' and raise a consciousness.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| The hallucination analogy is useful I think in some ways, in
| that it could allow access to a view of reality that has
| important parts represented in a meaningful way. But, surely a
| hallucination requires an underlying consciousness to
| experience it? So for me it's not very useful in explaining the
| phenonmenon of consciousness itself. It seems that it's not far
| removed from the old "theatre" analogy, which requires an
| unexplained "homunculus" (and probably homunculi ad infinitum).
| ikrenji wrote:
| maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena.
| once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a
| scale)... also are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in
| us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it
| / let it play out...
| watercooler_guy wrote:
| >maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena.
| once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on
| a scale)
|
| This is my feeling too. Since the brain is just physical
| matter arranged a certain way, doing a certain type of
| processing, I really think it possible that some computer
| programs we use today are also doing the right kind of
| processing to grant them a simple subjective inner
| experience. Of course most programs don't have a way to tell
| us if that's the case, except maybe GPT-3 :)
|
| > are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates
| the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it
| play out
|
| I have evidence for it being the latter: our higher brain
| functions let us rationalize, to ourselves, the decisions
| that were deterministically made by our subconscious, so it
| feels like "you" made the decisions "because you wanted to".
| People who have the connection between their brain
| hemispheres severed can unconsciously reach a decision in one
| hemisphere, but then consciously rationalize it in the other
| hemisphere, without having experienced the making of the
| decision [0]:
|
| >In one example of this kind of test, a picture of a chicken
| claw was flashed to the left hemisphere and a picture of a
| snow scene to the right hemisphere. Of the array of pictures
| placed in front of the subject, the obviously correct
| association is a chicken for the chicken claw and a shovel
| for the snow scene. Patient P.S. responded by choosing the
| shovel with the left hand and the chicken with the right.
| When asked why he chose these items, his left hemisphere
| replied `Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the
| chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken
| shed'. Here the left brain, observing the left hand's
| response, interprets that response in a context consistent
| with its sphere of knowledge--one that does not include
| information about the left hemifield snow scene.
|
| [0] https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106
| ed-209 wrote:
| Theorizing about the nature of consciousness without having been
| subjected to it's multitude of altered states is an obvious waste
| of time. If you can't or won't venture into the "field", then at
| least have the humility to address the aggregate experiential
| data of those who have.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| The trouble is that the sort of drug-induced insight (or
| pseudo-insight as some would call it) you refer to is usually
| accompanied by strong euphoric effects, which impairs your
| ability to dryly reason about those experiences even a long
| time after the fact. Nor can I completely shake the impression
| that those who believe a e.g. a DMT trip offers genuine insight
| into the nature of consciousness simply had an insufficient
| grasp of the subject beforehand.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| There are altered states (jhana) that are neither solely
| induced by drugs nor "strongly euphoric" in any real sense.
| felix318 wrote:
| There are altered states of consciousness that occur
| naturally and don't lead to a sense of euphoria. Sleep
| paralysis for example. It happened to me once and it made me
| see things differently, nothing religious or mystical, just
| an enhanced perspective.
|
| To give an example, during my episode I had what is usually
| described as an out-of-body experience. I felt myself walking
| around my bedroom as if I were awake, only to find out that
| my body never left the bed. Now if the sense of being "out of
| the body" is an illusion, how can we be sure that being "in
| the body" is not just the same illusion? (I'm tempted to
| think we are not anywhere and that space itself is the
| illusion, but that is beside the point)
| bondarchuk wrote:
| One can easily arrive at the same insight (i.e. being in
| the body is just an illusion) without actually experiencing
| it. Of course, if you have such an experience and you get
| knowledge or inspiration from it, so much the better. But
| to say that theorizing about consciousness is a waste of
| time if you haven't experienced altered states is myopic.
|
| (sleep paralysis is a good example though)
| felix318 wrote:
| I don't think it's a waste of time (I'm not OP by the
| way) but you would surely be missing data.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| From how I see it, understanding consciousness is impossible
| because it's difficult to define and even harder to explain.
|
| Go back a couple billion years before we had life on Earth. There
| was no life until abiogenesis
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis) occurred. Somehow,
| over the course of a couple billion years, self-replicating
| molecules turns into single-celled life, then multicellular life,
| and eventually the complex lifeforms we see today.
|
| But...that still doesn't explain consciousness.
|
| To an external observer, a brain is just a very complex set of
| electrical and chemical reactions. But to that person, there's a
| consciousness behind it all. But that consciousness can be
| altered by drugs and physical injury. It calls into question if
| anybody actually truly has free will, or if a sufficiently
| advanced computer could perfectly simulate exactly how a person
| would react to anything given a perfect snapshot of the wiring of
| their neurons and states of synapses.
|
| I don't know how to define consciousness in a way that couldn't
| also be applied to a sufficiently advanced AI/AGI.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > understanding consciousness is impossible because it's
| difficult to define and even harder to explain.
|
| For sure there isn't one agreed upon definition of
| consciousness. On the odd occasion I get in a discussion about
| it, the first thing I say is: what is your definition of
| consciousness.
|
| I think given _a_ definition of consciousness, it can be
| discussed and progress can be made explaining that particular
| definition. But if the two parties don 't agree to a definition
| up front, then it is likely to result in a trainwreck.
| ca98am79 wrote:
| I think it is impossible to understand Consciousness because
| Consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe.
|
| If you think of Consciousness as the thing that is first and
| which creates all the rest, it answers a lot of hard questions -
| questions like why is it so hard to even define Consciousness?
|
| Or weird paradoxes in QM.
|
| Or things like: why do we all share the present moment?
|
| Once you start to see Consciousness as the foundation of
| everything, it all makes a lot more sense. Everything fits
| together much more easily.
|
| A lot of religions have also come to this conclusion.
|
| There is a book called Biocentrism by Robert Lanza, which I
| thought was really good and went into details about this.
| stevofolife wrote:
| Replace the word "Consciousness" with "God" and it will equally
| make sense.
| davidhs wrote:
| > I think it is impossible to understand Consciousness because
| Consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe.
|
| I think it's much more likely that consciousness is a result of
| brain activity. For example, if consciousness creates the brain
| and the whole universe, why don't I have any reliable access to
| what is going on except partially in my immediate vicinity?
| Also, how can it create such a wonderfully consistent world out
| there and I can not reliably drive to store because my mind is
| preoccupied and the rest of me goes on autopilot.
|
| I think you would require fewer bits to explain it the other
| way around.
| hibernator149 wrote:
| My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not
| a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem.
|
| On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard
| time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained
| materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of
| everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself.
| Reminds me of Godel's incompleteness theorem.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Qualia may be operating on a different system of reasoning. I
| have always wondered why new qualia felt so familiar like there
| was nothing new to learn, but if time is as illusory as every
| theory says it is then it makes more sense.
|
| To answer the hard part.... To be completely honest, I think
| qualia are dualistic emanations of the One Source of Truth and
| understanding, and describable as convex optimizations in the
| kinds of spaces that Incompleteness deals with. I think love
| and honor are hyperparameters for the hypercomputers that we
| refer to as our hearts and that simulation is much more likely
| than material because of dichotomy / reality gap.
| matt-attack wrote:
| What's really interesting is that the materialistic view is
| sufficient to describe everything _else_ in the world including
| all other humans. But the one thing it fails to explain is
| yourself and your own subjective experience.
|
| I frankly have zero evidence that anyone else but me is
| experiencing consciousness. And there's nothing you can utter
| that can change that.
| psyc wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I've written this exact comment before. I'd
| have so much more respect for philosophers who simply admit
| that nobody has made any progress on the hard problem (other
| than increased clarity on what it is) than those who dismiss,
| minimize, or otherwise pooh-pooh the hard problem. The fact
| that the problem is "unproductive" is not a problem with the
| hard problem, it's only a problem for philosophers' career
| advancement.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Count me as a P-Zombie. I think the reason that consciousness
| is a hard problem is that it's largely used as a word referring
| to nothing in particular, and as such can be argued about
| endlessly.
|
| The real problem is locality. Why am I located in me instead of
| in you? Why is it so much easier for me to see out of my eyes
| than it is for me to see out of yours? What's the connection
| between my perspective and my body?
|
| The idea that self-awareness/consciousness ("I am me") is the
| big problem is weird. I have no problem locating that in the
| material world. If I program a computer to poll all of its
| peripherals, report on its RAM and processors, and adjust how
| it runs its programs based on that, that's as much self-
| awareness as I have, if not more.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > What's the connection between my perspective and my body?
|
| Your body is doing the experiencing. It is what's perceiving.
|
| Your mind is just your body's UI for the world and your body
| is the user.
| zubspace wrote:
| The interesting bit is not the sensory input. We mostly
| know how the sensors work and how they are triggered.
|
| The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those
| sensors and _experiences_ them and where is the location of
| that thing?
|
| It's like we're sitting with a VR headset in our brain,
| playing that game we call life. But, where exactly are _we_
| and how is that headset connected to our sensors?
| guerrilla wrote:
| > The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those
| sensors and experiences them and where is the location of
| that thing?
|
| Again, your body.
|
| Think about it. Your body is experiencing what your brain
| has generated out of your sensory input.
|
| You don't need a homunculus, you are a body. You are your
| body and there's nothing else to you.
| pessimizer wrote:
| For me it's worse. I don't think theres any reason to
| identify my perspective with any homunculus. It's
| watching somebody play a game, not playing it. My
| question is this: I "know" there are a lot of games being
| played - why am I watching this one?
| guerrilla wrote:
| It's the one your body generated. Your body took all its
| data, generated your mind out of that and experiences
| your mind. For anything else to happen, you'd have to
| pipe the signal of your mind (that your body generated)
| into someone else's brain.
|
| It's like you're asking why is this computer that I
| generated this data visualization from this data on this
| computer displaying this data visualization on this
| computer. Umm, because that's what you asked it to do and
| that's the default? For anything else to have happened,
| you would have had to redirect the output to a network
| and then go receive it on a different computer.
| pessimizer wrote:
| What does it mean for a body to be "mine?" As a
| materialist, I accept that my body is an assemblage of
| physical influences. I have no reason to doubt that it
| has as much self-control as water flowing down a hill. So
| - does water flowing down a hill have a perspective?
| Where is it located? It doesn't have a nervous system to
| blame things on. Is it infinitely divisible? Is it
| distinct from me? If I pour water from one cup into
| another, can I say that I'm any less the water as I am my
| hands, even though I'm controlling the water, getting
| feedback from the water, subjecting the water as much to
| my nervous system as I am subjecting my hand itself? What
| about when I shake your hand? What if I'm blind and I ask
| you what you can see, then react based on that?
| guerrilla wrote:
| Don't gish gallop.
|
| > What does it mean for a body to be "mine?"
|
| You are your body.
|
| > So - does water flowing down a hill have a perspective?
| Where is it located?
|
| Why would it? Does it sense and produce a mind? Not that
| I'm aware of. You could go the pansychism route if you
| want though. See David Chalmers or something.
|
| > can I say that I'm any less the water as I am my hands,
| even though I'm controlling the water, getting feedback
| from the water, subjecting the water as much to my
| nervous system as I am subjecting my hand itself?
|
| According to enactivism, no. [1] In general, see embodied
| minds theory. [2]
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm not intending to. I wasn't proposing all of that as
| separable questions. I was proposing it as a series of
| statements that I have no material means to say anything
| about.
|
| > Why would it? Does it sense and produce a mind?
|
| I don't know what a mind is supposed to be in this
| context, or its importance. I don't identify my
| perspective with my thoughts. My thoughts are something a
| body does. My perspective is just my location. After
| death, my thoughts will cease. My location will not
| change.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I cannot guess what point you are trying to make here,
| but I do know that 'location' is not a synonym for
| 'perspective'.
|
| If you are going to ask questions, you should at least be
| able to justify their relevance, if asked.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I understand that. It's my body that's doing the thinking,
| and my body that's typing this comment. The question is why
| there's some sort of proximity that I have with my comment
| that I don't have to yours.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > The question is why there's some sort of proximity that
| I have with my comment that I don't have to yours.
|
| Because it expresses your thoughts. Your mind has access
| to them in a way that it does not have access to anyone
| else's thoughts.
|
| In particular, that access includes memories of having
| them and taking the actions necessary to post them. If
| you lost those memories, and your words were not
| identified as being yours, you would no longer regard
| them any differently than you do anyone else's (it is not
| even certain that you would agree with them.)
|
| Note that the above statements involve no presupposition
| of materialism, but they are consistent with it. In
| particular, from a physical point of view, it is obvious
| why one would only have privileged access to one's own
| thoughts and experiences.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I can't conceive of how there couldn't be. Your body gets
| sensory input, generates your mind and then your body
| experiences your mind. How could that possibly be
| dislocated from your body... The very idea is nonsense.
| pessimizer wrote:
| But this is dualism. I don't accept a difference between
| mind and body as a materialist.
|
| edit: I can use a computer to remind me to use a computer
| to remind me about something. I can lose the use of my
| hands and eyes by severing biological wires. I can't
| pinpoint a distinction between me and the computer. I
| can't pinpoint a distinction between me and you, other
| than distance and mechanical connection (which we
| currently have, with some latency and signal distortion.)
| guerrilla wrote:
| > But this is dualism
|
| No, you cannot deduce dualism from what I said. You
| filled in assumptions that aren't present and which I
| don't assert. It's just physicalism (materialism is an
| outdated term[1]) but would also work for neutral
| monism[2].
|
| > I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and the
| computer. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and
| you, other than distance and mechanical connection (which
| we currently have, with some latency and signal
| distortion.)
|
| What? Maybe you need a psychiatrist now? This sounds like
| dpersonalization or derealization.
|
| 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
|
| 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/
| pessimizer wrote:
| Don't diagnose me, I'm not saying anything that alarms
| me, causes me discomfort, or makes me enjoy life any
| less. I just don't hold to the idea of "myself" being a
| cause as axiomatic. You're free to express the
| distinction between my control of the computer and my
| control of my hand, but don't call me crazy, it's rude.
| ncmncm wrote:
| "What is the difference between the speed and the car?"
|
| The car is a thing, like your body. The speed is what the
| car is doing, like your mind is something your brain is
| doing. No problem, nothing to accept.
|
| My own mind is something I am doing, just as I am typing
| just now. It should be obvious enough that neither is
| something you are doing.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I simply don't subscribe to self-causation.
| ncmncm wrote:
| OK, don't.
|
| "Causation" is purely interpretation; the universe has
| nothing to do with that. People invented causation to
| help understand the universe, but there is nothing
| fundamental about it. So long as you think you need
| causation of any kind to understand consciousness, you
| will get nowhere.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| And then step into the Star Trek transporter. :)
|
| You're obliterated, then perfectly reassembled on the other
| side. Is that still "you", "subjectively"? Should you or
| others even care about that question? And, if not, damn,
| that's ego-killing af.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Here's a thought experiment. You're going to use a Star
| Trek teleporter-like device to make an exact copy of
| yourself. What are the odds that _you_ end up being the
| copy? Or rather, what should you believe the odds are
| that _you_ will be the copy?
|
| Of course, _I_ , the original, will not be the copy, but
| if I go in knowing I'm not the copy, the the copy will
| come out knowing he's not the copy. Thus, you should go
| in believing there's a 50% chance you are the copy, and
| then both the original and the copy will come out with a
| logically consistent belief.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Or even without transporters: what evidence do I have
| that the me that ended this sentence is the same me that
| began it? If anything, I have material evidence that it
| _isn 't_.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yeah, you need a theory of identity to answer your
| questions, first year philosophy sutff [1].
|
| 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
| pessimizer wrote:
| Exactly. But having a theory of identity is just a
| declaration that you subscribe to one, not anything
| meaningful.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Umm, no. Having a theory of identity allows you to deduce
| the answers to your questions.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Based on an arbitrary choice. I can deduce as many
| answers to my questions as theories of identity that I
| can count. None of them will give me any insight into the
| question of subjectivity.
| guerrilla wrote:
| My answer is yes but it depends on your theory of
| identity. Unless you're positing a soul or something
| though, your answer is probably going to have to be yes.
| ncmncm wrote:
| A copy is a copy. The copy remembers everything you
| remember. The copy can spend your money. The copy can
| have sex with your spouse. Is the copy "you"? Technically
| no, but it doesn't matter because there are no
| transporters.
|
| But you go to sleep every night. Is the person who wakes
| up "you"? Many of the atoms in the person who woke up
| were in that person's stomach, and many of the atoms in
| the person who went to sleep are in the air. Does the
| difference from the transporter thing matter? No reason
| it should. The person who went to sleep is not here. The
| one who woke up can spend that person's money, wear that
| person's clothes, remember passwords. Close enough is
| close enough.
|
| You might choose not to spend that person's money, next
| day. But they won't be needing it, and you do. So, no
| problem.
|
| If you perceive a problem, you are just tying yourself in
| knots, and are guaranteed to make no progress.
| stevofolife wrote:
| Is a computer going to ask why am I operating on this
| specific CPU and not on the other CPU that is located in a
| server rack 2 meters away from it?
|
| To be honest, I don't get what you are really trying to
| understand or find out here.
| abernard1 wrote:
| > I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience
| can't be explained materialistically.
|
| I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems
| than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural
| philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a
| materialistic worldview.
|
| Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described
| as a highly precise _description_ of what happens, but at the
| expense of forcibly ignoring the essence of what constitutes
| material reality. In the case of QM, the "just run the
| equations" view of the world has been dominant since Einstein
| reluctantly ceded ground on this issue. To put a finer point on
| it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation
| for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very
| much in an ethereal, immaterial world.
|
| (fwiw, I am something of a materialist, which is why I have
| thought of this problem beforehand.)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Entanglement is _part_ of material reality - the "classical"
| world where there is no entanglement is a simplified
| approximation. The fact that it might feel less "material" to
| us is an irrelevant feature of improperly-applied intuition.
| It's no different than someting like e.g. the wave nature of
| light.
|
| In fact, complex entangled states made of many interrelated
| "qubits" or degrees of freedom are one of the most promising
| candidates for the physical correlate of similarly-complex
| phenomenological experience. Complex-enough quantum computers
| might just _feel_ stuff, as a matter of basic reality.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Entanglement as an explanation for anything about
| consciouness is exactly the same as saying "it's all
| magic", and exactly as meaningless, leaving nothing to talk
| about.
| abernard1 wrote:
| > Entanglement is part of material reality
|
| Yes, but what _is_ material reality?
|
| The current understanding of entanglement in QM is
| indistinguishable from math. And then we need to ask: are
| the equations _real_? Seriously, are they? Or are they just
| an approximate description of something we don 't
| understand that well?
|
| Because if entanglement _is_ part of material reality as
| defined by the good ol ' gauge theorists and the equations,
| then we really do live in a math equation, and it's not
| clear how or why that math equation runs the way it does.
| Or what it runs on for that matter. Or if it exists at all
| and our senses are just hallucinating this. This is
| fundamentally different from the understanding of
| philosophical, physical materialism.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > The current understanding of entanglement in QM is
| indistinguishable from math. And then we need to ask: are
| the equations real?
|
| Well, they predict what we observe, which is not a
| property of math in general.
| simonh wrote:
| For me, material reality is tied to the notion that the
| world is consistent and conducive to analytical
| reasoning, that it functions like a machine. It has
| components which relate to each other in consistent ways
| that we can model and understand. The fact that these
| components are best described by field equations rather
| than newtonian mechanics is incidental.
|
| The main alternative viewpoint to materialism, dualism,
| posits some further 'external' influence that acts on the
| world to account for phenomena we poorly understand like
| consciousness, and for some people psychic or religious
| phenomena. I think that's just fuzzy thinking, and I
| don't even really know what they mean. How can something
| not 'of the world' interact with the world? Surely 'the
| world' is everything that can act on or influence each
| other, right? I'm not sure how else to define it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm pragmatically a materialist, just because I don't
| find use in speculating about the immaterial (by
| definition.) But although I thought I was so much smarter
| than Descartes when I was younger, I still can't figure
| out why I'm in me and not as much in you, and somehow
| partially in the computer I'm typing on. That I'm more in
| my head than in my hands, but I'm in both.
|
| I really have no access to that. I've just taken a couple
| of extreme positions, and hope that one day somebody can
| come up with some way to reduce or test them materially,
| although I accept that I can't even speculate about a way
| to do it.
|
| One is a panpsychism. The material world exists within a
| substrate of perspectives, and as material objects pass
| through them, the perspectives momentarily attach to
| those objects, and whatever is mechanically connected to
| them. This happens at an arbitrary rate (depending on the
| density of the perspective substrate and the relative
| speed of the material passing through it.) If we call the
| amount of time that a perspective is located "centrally"
| enough in a human nervous system to have access to it a
| "moment," then for a moment, that perspective thinks it
| is me. This assumes that perspectives are distinct for
| purposes of explanation, but they don't have to be -
| maybe an infinite number of perspectives think that they
| are me at any particular moment, and in the next moment,
| an entirely different set.
|
| The other is that there's a particular geometry of
| electromagnetic activity that captures perspectives, and
| minds happen to conform to that geometry.
|
| I don't think these are any more insightful than "the
| soul talks to bodies through the pineal gland." I can
| only hold onto them as more abstract and generalized.
| There's no material way to tell when you've captured a
| perspective, and we each only know of the existence of
| one with certainty. We could be Buddhist and say that the
| universe is one fragmented confused perspective, or say
| that we're a bunch of islands; either way, we have no
| material basis for those beliefs. The only thing we know
| is that we're not P-Zombies. We don't know that others
| aren't P-Zombies, just us.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a
| materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction
| collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial
| world.
|
| Maybe the lesson of physics is that the material world is not
| like how we might imagine it, based on our everyday
| intuitions. If you accept that the world is not moving and
| not flat, that bodies continue in motion unless acted on by a
| force, and that Lorentz transformations represent the
| relationship between different inertial frames, then you
| already accept things that are counter to everyday
| intuitions. Hopes for explanations that are not ultimately
| grounded in "that, as far as we know, is just how things are"
| might be wishful thinking.
| hibernator149 wrote:
| Yes, I agree with your points. Superdeterminism could be a
| way to salvage my worldview.
|
| Even so, accepting non-determinism from QM does not cause me
| as much cognitive dissonance than the problem of
| conscioussness.
| abernard1 wrote:
| > accepting non-determinism from QM
|
| I think it's deeper than non-determinism. We can imagine an
| extraordinarily precise "random" number generator that is
| software, more than capable of fooling all measurements we
| as humans make of it. It would also be non-deterministic.
| It would also, importantly, _not be real._
|
| Until we can confidently say that the equations of physics
| are not actually themselves reality, we can't say
| materialism is even a thing. To be a materialist requires
| belief that what we know is a description of reality and
| not reality itself, and that would be true even if we had a
| deterministic "Newtonian" pre-QM view of the world coupled
| with advanced theory.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Very funny, of course, but one can easily reply that those who
| do believe consciousness is a hard problem are just deluding
| themselves. Especially when (as is usually the case) a clear
| definition of the concept "hard problem" is not even given.
| psyc wrote:
| I hardly think Chalmers (and others) forgot to define what
| the problem is. It's more likely you haven't read and/or
| understood them.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| The definition given in Chalmers (1995, _facing up to..._ )
| following Nagel, i.e. using the linguistic construction
| "what it is like", is incomprehensible and ill-defined. I
| believe this is the origin of the term "hard problem". Some
| other arguments for the existence of a hard problem build
| on the dogma that "philosophical zombies" are conceivable
| (which we can deny by saying they aren't). Others depend on
| inverted qualia thought experiments, which we can deflate
| by denying that inverted qualia are possible at all (or by
| denying that "qualia" is a coherent and well-defined
| concept). If there's an unambiguous and clear explanation
| of the concept of "hard problem of consciousness", or a
| clear argument for the existence of such a problem not
| built on shaky assumptions, I'd love to hear it.
|
| By the way, there is a whole line of debate on the sense or
| nonsense of the ever-present "what it is like" phrasing:
|
| > _'What it is like' talk ('WIL-talk') -- the use of
| phrases such as 'what it is like' -- is ubiquitous in
| discussions of phenomenal consciousness. It is used to
| define, make claims about, and to offer arguments
| concerning consciousness. But what this talk means is
| unclear, as is how it means what it does: how, by putting
| these words in this order, we communicate something about
| consciousness. Without a good account of WIL-talk, we
| cannot be sure this talk sheds light, rather than casts
| shadows, on our investigations of consciousness._
|
| (Jonathan Farrell - 'What it is Like' Talk is not Technical
| Talk)
| GeorgeKangas wrote:
| If you start with material mechanisms, you'll never get
| subjective experience (SE) as a conclusion.
|
| Start instead with SE, and then _any_ sort of material universe
| can be the contents of it.
| jsnodlin wrote:
| It's not particularly hard to see consciousness and our
| emotions purely a result of concoctions released into our
| brains.
| misja111 wrote:
| Your comment reminds me of religious people, whose argument
| that God exists is similar: that you will realize that He
| exists as soon as you believe in Him. And that you can't
| possibly understand it otherwise.
|
| Consciousness is a hard problem until you realize that most of
| it is an illusion. Which is the very reason that it is so hard
| to understand: there's nothing to understand, because it's not
| real.
| whaaswijk wrote:
| Serious question: how can consciousness be an illusion? I'm
| not even sure what that would mean. One could argue that many
| things are illusory (e.g. the external world). But it's quite
| hard to dismiss the notion of actual experience occurring in
| the world. Our experiences could lead us to false
| conclusions, sure, but we cannot deny their existence.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Either it's inane wordplay or it's obviously nonsense for
| most definitions of conscious. An illusion must be
| perceived, so in that sense the proposition is self-
| refuting. Also, you have empirical evidence against it: you
| know when you're conscious and that sometimes you aren't
| (and that it's a spectrum.) Thirdly, you can behaviorally
| define conscious. Fourthly, if I'm not mistaken, you can
| measure its presence neurologically. To say that all of
| this is an illusion is stupidity or being very obtuse for
| attention (like clickbait.)
| jbotz wrote:
| The experiences are real, but the homunculus behind your
| eyes that you think of as yourself is an illusion. In
| reality there are a bunch of fairly independent processes
| talking to each other, sharing the perceptions, reacting to
| them, feedback from those reactions again become a
| perception, a "narrator" process that often gives running
| commentary in your mother-tongue, etc. The interaction of
| those processes feels like a unified thing, "you", and
| that's the illusion. This illusion has adaptive advantages,
| because it helps the organism take care of its needs, so
| evolution selects for it.
|
| That's my take, maybe not exactly the same as Damasio and
| Seth's, but compatible with theirs.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think they were referring to Daniel Dennett, not
| Antonio Damasio or Anil Seth. Damasio is interested in
| how the self is constructed (so, similar to your idea)
| while Seth is saying that experience is a controlled
| hallucination. Dennett is the one claiming consciousness
| is an illusion. These are three very distinct research
| programs.
| jbotz wrote:
| Except that they all agree that there is no "hard problem
| of consciousness", that's the part that's illusory. I
| think Dennett takes the illusion position too far, so I
| think I'm somewhere between those three. But there are
| others who take it further even, such as Graziano in
| "Consciouness and the Social Brain" whose "consciousness
| is an attention schema" position seems so nonsensical to
| me that I can't even explain it despite having the read
| the book.
| whaaswijk wrote:
| If I understand correctly, you're referring to the "easy"
| problem of consciousness, i.e. the "mechanistic"
| explanation of how a self could be constructed by the
| brain. That's an interesting question and I think your
| take is a coherent and plausible one (from a
| materialistic perspective). However, I still think this
| doesn't get around the hard problem of why these
| interactions actually _feel_ like anything. I 've never
| heard a satisfying materialistic explanation of that. Do
| you believe the interactions could in principle be
| implemented on any Turing machine? Or are they substrate
| dependent?
| ncmncm wrote:
| You haven't explained why you think they shouldn't "feel
| like anything". How do you distinguish "feeling like
| anything" from anything else you experience?
| whaaswijk wrote:
| Well, as far as I'm aware notions of feeling or
| experiencing are not accounted for in our current
| physical models. Does an electron feel anything? On the
| one hand, if it does, it seems to me like physical models
| have to be extended to include some primitive form of
| consciousness. This would be something like panpsychism.
| On the other hand, if single electrons do not have
| consciousness, why do large collections of them in
| specific structures have it? Note that, to me, it seems
| insufficient to say that collections of electrons can be
| used to model or compute with. Namely because it raises
| the question of why this modeling has a feeling tone
| (qualia) to it.
|
| Finally, I don't know if I can make a meaningful
| distinction between feeling and experiencing. I believe a
| feeling is an experience.
| jbotz wrote:
| Actually I do; but... 1) such a Turing machine may have
| to be a lot more powerful than anything we currently
| have. With or without invoking QM mechanisms, there is
| reason to believe that every single neuron does a lot
| more computation than our simplistic models in current ML
| neural nets. 2) it may not be possible to "program" a
| machine to be conscious in the way we feel consciopus,
| we'd probably have to literally evolve it, i.e. in a rich
| simulate environment starting with simple artificial
| "organisms" that "feel" this environment and then getting
| progressively more complex.
|
| But I do believe in Wolfram's "principle of computational
| equivalence", and thus that anything that can implement a
| turing machine can also implement any other complex
| system, including consciousness.
| whaaswijk wrote:
| I guess this is where we differ. I don't see a sufficient
| reason to believe that increasing computational
| capacity/complexity alone gives rise to consciousness.
| Moreover, I think there are common sense reasons to
| believe that consciousness is not substrate independent.
| Therefore, I don't see it as obvious that Turing
| completeness is sufficient for consciousness. For
| example, as someone else on this post has pointed out, a
| sufficiently complex water pipeline can implement a
| Turing machine. However, I doubt it would ever be
| conscious, no matter how large we make it. I think
| representing and processing information is orthogonal to
| experiencing.
| blueflow wrote:
| Believing in God is a good coping mechanism if you cant deal
| with the fact that things, both good and bad, happen for no
| reason all the time. Knowing "why" gives comfort in the vast
| chaos that is reality.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Plenty of people believe in God(s) yet don't think that
| things are controlled or predestined.
| simonh wrote:
| Fellow materialist here. For me materialism, and more
| specifically a strong degree of determinism, is the only
| coherent solution to the problem of responsibility and agency.
|
| After all, if my decisions do not flow from my state, including
| my experience, memories, preferences, etc, how can we say they
| are meaningfully mine? I fully accept a degree of randomness in
| the process, quantum mechanics is a thing, but randomness is
| just noise. No determinism, no agency.
| davidhs wrote:
| I was a physicalist (and in some sense still am). In a nutshell
| your self and everything you experience and can experience is
| simulated. I live inside a simulation. The simulation is
| running on a physical brain, part of a physical human which is
| part of a physical universe.
|
| This can also be probed with science. If we know how the brain
| wires itself, what it is computing and representing then I
| think we'll find these patterns in the brain.
|
| This is how I best understand these things. I can also go into
| more detail how I came to think about this this way and how I
| got to this point.
| carapace wrote:
| > people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are
| P-Zombies that can't experience the problem
|
| I've come to the same conclusion. Meaning no disrespect or
| insult to them, it seems to me that it must be the case that
| some folks just haven't noticed themselves.
|
| P.D. Ouspensky talks about learning to "remember myself" in "In
| Search of the Miraculous" and describes how it was for him to
| practice changing from thinking one is self-aware to actually
| becoming self-aware moment-to-moment. There's a passage...
|
| > Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far
| away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The sensation
| of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I
| came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been
| walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering
| myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this
| thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep
| sleep.
|
| I suspect people who think that consciousness is not a hard
| problem must be still "asleep" in this sense, effectively
| P-Zombies, although the potential is there to become self-aware
| beings.
|
| - - - -
|
| > as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my
| self/experience can't be explained materialistically.
|
| Okay, fair enough, but then you have the infinite regress
| problem. How do you explain material itself materialistically?
| ncmncm wrote:
| > "some folks just haven't noticed themselves"
|
| Some folks don't enjoy tying themselves in knots. You are
| absolutely welcome to spend your precious seconds of limited
| life on it, but it doesn't make you superior, however much
| you would like to think it does. It's just a choice, like
| between working and playing.
| psyc wrote:
| This is such a non-sequitur. I can't tell if you're
| referring to people choosing not to be conscious (I doubt
| that's possible) or choosing not to ponder on it (I don't
| think that's relevant). If people don't want to think about
| it, that's easily avoided. What we're talking about is
| people expending serious thought, "tying themselves in
| knots" as you say, to write essays and sometimes tomes
| dissuading _others_ from pondering it either because
| "there's no hard problem" or "it's not productive."
| ncmncm wrote:
| I am talking about choosing to tie yourself in knots and
| thereby preventing any further progress toward
| understanding what you are talking about.
|
| You could also choose _not_ to tie yourself in knots, and
| then you would not be blocked, and could begin to make
| sense.
| psyc wrote:
| That makes more sense, thanks. But philosophers of mind,
| neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and all could just
| as well pursue other lines of inquiry without protesting
| too much that there's no hard problem.
| ncmncm wrote:
| If you think there is a hard problem, it is on you to
| articulate one. Thus far I have not encountered one that
| does not depend on undefined words or circular arguments,
| i.e. knots.
| rytill wrote:
| Do you think there is such a thing as objective morality?
| Not just human ethics, or social norms or whatever, but
| that some things that occur are "better" than other
| things in some important sense. Or maybe, that certain
| actions are "good" and others are "bad"?
|
| Like for instance, the experience a human would have when
| relaxing in a hot tub with their friends, is "better" in
| some important, real sense compared to the experience of
| dying in a trench in WWI?
|
| If not, I probably can't convince you that there is a
| hard problem having to do with consciousness where we'd
| benefit from knowing all the answers. But if so, I could
| give it a try.
| carapace wrote:
| I didn't say anything about "superior".
|
| Is being a "P-Zombie" inferior to being self-aware? By what
| metric could such a comparison be made? Is the water
| inferior to the wave?
|
| Also, "tying themselves in knots" != "noticed themselves",
| if anything it's the opposite: all knots untie.
| ncmncm wrote:
| All knots can be untied, if that is what you choose to
| do. But not everybody chooses that. Thus far you have not
| chosen that.
|
| "Noticing yourself" is something _literally everyone_
| does. Not everyone ties themselves in knots. The
| alternative to tying yourself in knots is to think
| clearly without inventing falsehoods.
|
| "P-zombies" is just another word for solipsism. The
| moment somebody proposes either, you know there will be
| no more clear thought.
| hiacynt wrote:
| P-zombies and solipsism are two totally different things.
| calebm wrote:
| A program running in a computer would have a difficult time
| distinguishing itself from the computer hardware on which it
| runs. And it would have no direct perception of the programmer.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| You might not be very far off- apparently many people do not
| have an inner voice.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue#Absence_of_...
|
| I now worry about some form of future cyborg racism where those
| without the gift are considered untouched by god or subhuman
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Had you ever experienced an OBE?
|
| PS: I like your P-Zombie joke :D
| Osiris wrote:
| I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a common submission technique is to
| cut off blood flow to the brain (known as a blood choke).
|
| I've lost consciousness twice after being put into a blood choke.
| The experience of regaining consciousness is visceral. For those
| that haven't experienced it, it's very much like a turning on a
| computer.
|
| Initially, your brain does not (or cannot) process input like
| vision, sound, touch, etc. Slowly, over about 30-60 seconds, you
| begin to see and hear but they don't make any sense. You've
| completely lost the context of who and where you are. Then you
| begin to recognize colors and shapes, sounds of voices, etc.
| Eventually, you see and hear everything but still haven't built a
| concept of the context. Lastly, your brain seems to begin making
| sense of all the inputs and you regain full conscious awareness.
|
| If you think it's just like waking up from a dream or from a nap,
| you're wrong. It's a completely different experience, one that's
| so profound that I distinctly remember the entire episode even
| years later (and I have poor memory recall generally).
| taylodl wrote:
| I've had the same experience doing Brazilian Jie Jitsu. Very
| strange experience indeed.
| serpix wrote:
| if you did not have full conscious awareness when regaining
| first sensations, then what was it that remembers this
| experience? I'm saying that there was full consciousness
| already present as you remember everything.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| That sounds like a slow motion version of waking from
| anesthesia.
|
| Waking from sleep feels very fast, but I've been put under for
| surgery more than once now, and coming around from surgery
| doesn't feel like waking up. It feels like something else
| completely.
| bigcat123 wrote:
| bitexploder wrote:
| I slept once on the mats. I literally remember feeling like I
| was in a fuzzy and comfortable dream and waking up to my
| partner shaking me and asking if I am alright. I blurted out
| something like "What are we doing?" and I was wondering why my
| partner was sitting next to me and where I was and what was
| going on. But not in a panicked or concerned way. Like some
| parts of my brain knew what was happening. But the thinking me
| was trying to put together all the sub-conscious streams again
| and get them routed correctly.
|
| Turns out his cross collar choke was tighter than I thought. It
| was not unpleasant and I had a mild buzzy/headache-y feel for
| the rest of the day. It all felt a little dreamy and is one of
| the strongest memories I have had in recent years. Definitely
| something I remember clearly.
|
| Also: if anyone is in the Denver area we have mats at our
| office :)
| Osiris wrote:
| I live just south of Denver! What a coincidence.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I once woke up in the high school bathroom, laying on the
| floor. I was alone. I have no idea how I got there, what
| happened before, and how long the thing had happened. It
| seemed unlikely that you could be in a high school bathroom
| THAT LONG without someone else showing up.
|
| It's not happened since. A one-time event. The confusion I
| woke up with so profound and complete and slow... I think
| about it often. I think about how the brain, and its
| consciousness, can have a bug or a crash.
| Hokusai wrote:
| Fainting works in reverse for me. Everything becomes harder to
| understand, sound becomes muffled like in low motion, vision
| starts to fade until you are in total darkness. And it's not
| similar at all to fall asleep, it's quite scary.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_syncope
| p_noumenon wrote:
| What you just described sounds exactly like waking up from a
| dream.
| jm__87 wrote:
| Definitely not the same. I feel when you dream you feel some
| time has passed. I've lost consciousness a number of times
| for different reasons and the common feeling is it doesn't
| feel like any time has passed. One moment I was awake and the
| very next I'm on the ground, my head hurts and have no idea
| what is going on.. for the first 30 seconds I wouldn't be
| able to tell you my name, where I am, what I was doing, etc.
| Then it all just comes back after a minute or two and you
| realize what happened.
| alar44 wrote:
| It's nothing like that. Your memory is wiped out, you don't
| know who you are, you don't know when you are. It's like
| you're in an alien world, nothing looks familiar. Your ears
| are kind of buzzing and ringing, your visual field is fucked
| up, etc. The last layers of your neural network aren't turned
| on yet. It's pretty weird.
| p_noumenon wrote:
| ...sounds exactly like waking up from a dream.
| rland wrote:
| I've had the same, but in the opposite direction -- and then
| back again -- from hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). Over a much
| longer time period (several hours). Craziest thing I have ever
| experienced.
|
| Basically, when you have hypoglycemia, you lose "fine" things
| first, and you sort of lose things in order, from "fine"
| (picking things up, balancing, seeing small details) towards
| "coarse" (talking, walking) and then of course to very "coarse"
| things, like being able to wake up/see.
|
| And the physical symptoms are exactly mirrored by the mental
| symptoms. "fine" mental things are like the ability to
| formulate a complex thought with a lot of abstraction: do a
| math problem, talk about the future or the past, etc. "Coarser
| things" are like being able to think verbally or interpret the
| basic meaning of things -- like, what is that thing over there
| called? Then, you lose extremely "course" things, like being
| able to reason at all about what is going on in the world
| around you.
|
| Oddly enough, the last thing that goes is emotion. Emotion is
| the baseline of how every piece of context is categorized.
| Things feel good or they feel bad at a level far below anything
| resembling _what they are_. At a level below speaking, having
| distinct thoughts about distinct objects or people, having any
| sense of time, place, or meaning. Emotion is always there.
|
| It really is impossible to articulate, because words are a
| complete fiction.
|
| I wish everyone could go through that, because it really makes
| you realize the fiction of your own "self" as a real thing.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I had something similar on nitrous oxide, except that there was
| this sense that there were _parts_ , like crystals, which were
| made to slot together and they were hooking back to each other,
| one by one, and each addition added some kind of functionality.
| Unfortunately, the whole thing was rather fast -- I come out of
| general anesthesia like a shot, I am told -- and I was unable
| to observe more than that.
| davidhs wrote:
| I have orthostatic hypotension, which doesn't affect me as much
| since I've gained weight, and I've lost consciousness from
| standing to quickly up, but sometimes it doesn't all go away. I
| black out, a moment later I am somewhere, I don't know who I am
| or where I am, a moment later the rest fills in.
|
| The way I understand it as the blood pressure drops your brain
| stops to function properly but it might still somewhat
| function. As blood pressure goes back up more parts of the
| brain resume normal function but the "functional" state of the
| brain might still be abnormal. The current state is unstable,
| especially when new functionality starts to come back online
| and resume normal behavior, and the state of the brain quickly
| moves from a unstable state to a more stable normal state.
| lisper wrote:
| > If you are feeling pain, for example, this gives you very
| actionable knowledge about what you should do next in order to
| survive.
|
| This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of
| pain exists precisely in order to _bypass_ your conscious
| decision-making. When you 're hurting, your body doesn't want you
| to start weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action,
| it wants you to deal with the injury _right now_. That is the
| reason that pain feels very different -- much more urgent and
| harder to ignore -- than (say) getting a text message informing
| you that you have been hurt.
| alecst wrote:
| Sounds like you're in agreement then? I don't see how it's
| backwards. The quoted text says nothing about decision-making
| or weighing pros and cons.
| naasking wrote:
| > This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of
| pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious
| decision-making.
|
| That quote is not about conscious decision making, it's about
| how the _experience_ of pain _motivates action_ that is
| adaptive to survival. If pain didn 't feel like anything, but
| was instead just some light bulb that went off in your head,
| your ancestors could easily ignore it to their evolutionary
| detriment.
|
| Therefore it makes sense that pain feels like something you
| want to avoid so it's not something you can just ignore without
| considerable effort.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >When you're hurting, your body doesn't want you to start
| weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action, it
| wants you to deal with the injury right now.
|
| This is called instinct. It is evolutionary mechanism so you
| don't have to think what to do when you are getting hurt and
| your life is in danger. You react instantaneously.
| davidhs wrote:
| Certain kinds of pain stimulus causes you automatically to move
| away from it, such as when you put your hand on a stove.
|
| But parts of your body might be sending pain signals into the
| brain for which there are no automatic actions for, e.g. you
| are in a sauna and it's too much.
|
| The state of the simulation that you are in is updated with
| this pain signal. So, now, you might experience discomfort in
| the sauna and it is repellent so you might want to construct an
| action plan to move away from the source that is causing the
| pain (the fact you're in a sauna). But you might want to resist
| that for a moment and ignore the pain, maybe you have another
| conflicting goal which is to try to stay longer in the sauna
| than you're used to. Eventually the discomfort and pain might
| become overwhelming so you move out of the sauna.
| asveikau wrote:
| I've read some things suggesting that nonphysical pain can be
| registered in the brain similar to physical pain. A text
| message can certainly impact you in a similar way.
|
| Just as an example... Imagine somebody with PTSD. Let's say
| they get a text message that suggests to them, even indirectly,
| that their trauma is about to repeat. They may feel pretty
| intense physical danger and an urgency to intervene that makes
| no logical sense.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| I agree with you. But it seems that pain probably existed
| before higher reasoning (since it's a associated with the older
| parts of the brain), so it's a bit of a puzzle. Maybe early on
| the pain mechanisms existed without the associated qualia, or
| maybe pain also forces other control systems to be bypassed.
| aeternum wrote:
| An imperfect but generally good model of the brain is the
| basic/reptilian portion still in control by default, but with
| the higher reasoning able to act as an override.
|
| This is why it takes effort to do something like ignore pain,
| say no to candy bars, etc.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " Consciousness is simpler than we make it. There's no hard
| problem. "
|
| Certainly the hard problem goes away when you define it to be
| simpler.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| I believe people with psychedelic experiences can attest to the
| controlled hallucination theory of consciousness. But only those
| with a materialist world view while idealists may posit souls or
| alternate realities.
|
| Imagination is also a part in probabilistic decision making, an
| unhinged prediction machine.
| agent008t wrote:
| The fact that we experience what is being fed to 'us' by the
| various hardware devices, and not reality itself, is not
| controversial. The question is, what is the nature of the
| 'experiencer'?
| Dangeranger wrote:
| My completely uneducated opinion on this, is that our
| consciousness is an emergent property of our subconscious, and
| that our subconscious is an emergent property of the physics of
| our brain's electrical signals.
|
| This opinion is almost certainly wrong, but it's helped me while
| thinking about my own mind and experiences.
| CallidusAsinus wrote:
| In my experience, when reading about consciousness there are a
| couple types of claims you should be cautious of:
|
| 1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily
| explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these
| explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be
| linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific
| when scrutinized closely.
|
| 2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist. These arguments often
| feel like semantic nitpicking, and employ the word "illusion" as
| though it's somehow useful for explaining why you experience.
|
| My pet criteria for whether a statement about consciousness is
| useful is: "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge
| consciousness with someone (or something) else?" To me, this
| feels like a tangible measurement for how materially useful a
| claim about consciousness might be. An example is literature on
| "Split-Brain" patients (such as
| https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a).
|
| edit: Another category to be wary of is:
|
| 3) Claims that we cannot understand consciousness. Usually these
| boil down to "how can consciousness understand itself?". Poetic
| and poignant, but not particularly useful or scientifically
| grounded.
| contravariant wrote:
| I suppose if consciousness is indeed an illusion then that
| would at least explain why it's so hard to understand. Or
| rather it may not be that it's hard to understand but
| understanding an illusion usually means dispelling it, which is
| _problematic_ when that illusion is consciousness.
|
| Then again claiming something is an illusion is usually less
| than helpful. Colour is an illusion of sorts (or a qualia if
| we're being technical), but 'colour is an illusion' is an
| unhelpful answer to the question 'why is the sky blue?'.
| p_noumenon wrote:
| Consciousness is literally the only thing which can't be an
| illusion, because it's through consciousness that illusions
| are perceived in the first place. Cogito ergo sum; you can
| doubt what you are experiencing as much as you like, maybe
| it's a dream, maybe it's a simulation, maybe there's an evil
| demon deceiving you through magical means, but you can't
| doubt the fact that you are experiencing at all, even doubt
| itself is part of the experience.
| [deleted]
| CallidusAsinus wrote:
| Agreed. "I think therefore I am" is still foundational,
| last I heard.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's kind of pointless to consider whether it's an illusion,
| because it still comes to the question of who is it an
| illusion for? Heh
| CallidusAsinus wrote:
| Precisely. There seems to be much debate about consciousness
| and what it is, but much of it is often unhelpful.
| [deleted]
| PeterisP wrote:
| > "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness
| with someone (or something) else?"
|
| Wait, what? Why do you suppose that you can merge consciousness
| with someone (or something) else, can you elaborate on that?
| The split-brain patients are cases with presumably separate
| consciousnesses that are not merged and AFAIK never get merged,
| especially after corpus callosotomy which would make it
| physically impossible, wouldn't it?
| CallidusAsinus wrote:
| Yours is a very reasonable question. First of all, merging
| consciousness is admittedly a bit woo-woo; however, I feel
| it's worth considering.
|
| According to the literature, when the corpus callosum is
| severed, it appears that the verbal part of the patient loses
| conscious access to parts of their body. However, those lost
| parts continue functioning independently, and are able to
| communicate non-verbally.
|
| Put another way, it seems plausible that a conscious system
| is split into two conscious systems. This could imply the
| corpus callosum is involved in unifying conscious systems.
| ffhhj wrote:
| Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I am "conscious" of my
| position in the room but the position of walls, windows, the
| closet, etc. doesn't match, sudendly I feel like I'm instantly
| turned around in space! Then I realize that my belief was wrong,
| and it feels like I was sleeping in another orientation on the
| bed.
|
| Recently I bought a telescope and took some pictures of the moon.
| Then I searched for a map of the moon, and to my surprise the
| orientation didn't match my photos. I imagined myself stading on
| the right side of the planet, looking at the moon which was also
| at the right. I realized that my "up" is actually the "side", and
| my photos and the map made sense. That was like the reorientation
| feeling, but softer.
|
| That made me think whether one thing is having a theory of this
| world, and another very different when a theory is deep in our
| consciousness.
| FailMore wrote:
| How does everyone find the interview format of the article?
|
| I am building a platform for online interviews
| (https://taaalk.co/) so am curious to know your experience of
| reading discussions vs. reading an article.
| miika wrote:
| Who thinks it's hard? When you have answer to that then you
| understand consciousness.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Like Dennett in "Consciousness Explained", both of these authors
| seem almost entirely focused on _what we are conscious of_ rather
| than the fact that we are conscious of anything at all. Their
| descriptions of their work are all centered on the question of
| what it is that we actually experience. This is is a fascinating
| question, and entirely worthy of investigation.
|
| But it is not the same question as: how is it possible that we
| have any experience at all?
| davidhs wrote:
| Well, the reason we have experience at all is because that is
| being simulated by the brain. For me a more interesting
| question is how it is being simulated by the brain.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| If what I'm having is a "simulated experience," then where do
| "real experiences" exist?
| davidhs wrote:
| The simulated experience is the real experience.
| mckeed wrote:
| Isn't that just layering an extraneous concept on top without
| explaining anything? Is there a difference between
| experiencing something (real) and having a "simulated"
| experience of experiencing it?
| justinpombrio wrote:
| Yes. If not for that, we wouldn't have so many bloody
| articles about consciousness.
| davidhs wrote:
| I mean "simulated" in the same sense as how computational
| machines can simulate any other computational machine, as
| in you can define some arbitrary state and arbitrary rules
| and with such a machine apply those rules to the state to
| change it.
|
| I say that because of that's what I best understand the
| neocortex doing (it does that and probably something more).
| If you buy in what the Numenta people are talking about,
| then certain neurons in your neocortex configure themselves
| to be able to predict their inputs better, so they start to
| form a model of their input. In aggregate, these neurons
| probably start to learn multiple sequential models of their
| input.
|
| My guess it that these models in the brain interact with
| each other. I think some of the larger models that the
| brain models is us (individually), the environment we find
| ourselves in, our mind, how we relate to it, the 3D space
| that we find ourselves in, and such.
|
| This is a simulation to explain what is going on "out
| there" (the physical world) so that the physical organism
| can successfully navigate "out there".
|
| This simulated world, body, and such, is what is "real" to
| us.
| neosat wrote:
| exactly ^. The first central question is "how is it possible
| that we have any experience at all?" That leads naturally to
| the other important question "who is the observer that's aware"
| i.e. who is the "we"/I that is aware.
|
| It's telling that science has made incredible progress (e.g. in
| the last 100 years) but on questions such as these above, we
| know little more than people knew then. Although we do know a
| lot more about the mechanics of what and how we experiences
| things.
| webmaven wrote:
| Personally, I think that "who" is somewhat beside the point.
| "What" and "how" are the more interesting questions.
|
| The answer to "who" just becomes "a specific instance of X"
| that perhaps has some low probability combination of minor
| characteristics compared to other Xs.
| visarga wrote:
| "Who is the observer" is not consistent. Maybe "what part of
| myself is the observer".
| GonzaloRizzo wrote:
| who is the observer who is observing myself?
| visarga wrote:
| Let's try to replace "who" with "computer". Who is the
| computer that observes itself? all of them. A computer is
| not passive, a brain is not passive. It can observe
| itself. In other words, the parts communicate.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| A city is not passive. The parts communicate. Is there
| consciousness there?
| [deleted]
| visarga wrote:
| > But it is not the same question as: how is it possible that
| we have any experience at all?
|
| Let me send this ball straight back to you.
|
| In the morning when you wake up what happens? You might take
| something to eat. How would you find the kitchen, how would you
| recognise the food, or even know you need it? Of course, you
| are conscious. That's how.
|
| It is possible to be conscious because otherwise your body
| wouldn't be able to survive. It's essential for avoiding death.
| We are self replicators in a limited resource environment,
| after all. This balance between self replication and death
| evolved consciousness as an evolutionary advantage.
|
| Being exposed to your internal and external environment is the
| source of consciousness. Even a single cell can seek nutrients
| or avoid bad places, or decide when to replicate, it has a
| rudiment of consciousness. But panpsychism? It's one step away
| from new age babble. Stones are just stones.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You don't think it's possible to seek nutrients without
| having experiences?
| abletonlive wrote:
| I don't believe it is. This is the problem w/ the
| philosophical zombies, they are self defeating examples and
| can't exist in anything but a thought experiment. The fact
| that you're seeking nutrients at all means you can
| distinguish between sensory input, and therefore are
| experiencing something. If you can't distinguish between
| sensory input, then you are not experiencing anything. How
| can you be an effective seeker of nutrients if you don't
| experience anything and get feedback on whether you've
| found the nutrient or not?
|
| This is why I think the hard problem of consciousness is
| silly and only exists because language is so imperfect that
| philosophers have invented a problem which they can't even
| decide is actually a problem or not. Can any of us even
| agree on what an "experience" is?
|
| You can tell this is so because every conversation about
| the hard problem of consciousness starts off by trying to
| convince people there is a problem to talk about and use
| the same tired examples. We can "experience" red. There is
| an "experience" of being a bat.
| mckeed wrote:
| There sure seems to be a distinction between having
| sensory input and being able to reflect on that
| experience. How else could you explain the phenomenon of
| blindsight?
|
| I agree philosophical zombies are impossible, but only
| because they wouldn't be able to reliably talk about
| consciousness without a conscious "zombie master". See
| https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/zombies-sequence
| harperlee wrote:
| > you can distinguish between sensory input, and
| therefore are experiencing something
|
| You are assuming "you" is a unique, atomic thing here.
|
| When your fingers curl due to being immersed in water
| (which is a neurological thing, not a physical thing!),
| your conscious mind does not experience the humidity, the
| finger curling system does. You just experience the
| effect of the skin curling through sight and touch,
| afterwards.
|
| There are several other systems in our body that react to
| an environment that we are barely conscious of, and
| "barely" is being generous. Those seems like a
| counterexample of your "we can't not be conscious if we
| experience".
| abletonlive wrote:
| Yes but see, in your example, I would then say your
| fingers are conscious, too. Or that there is an
| experience of being a finger. Who, besides the finger,
| could say otherwise? Just because you've moved the
| experience from me having it, to the finger having it,
| doesn't mean that the experience disappeared.
|
| The problem is yet again w/ the definition of having an
| experience, as I said in my reply to the parent. It's
| just language, and the reason why we find ourselves in
| some kind of linguistic paradox trying to explain it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It's not just language. I doubt that you think it is like
| anything to be a rock. You do think that it is like
| something to be a person (or even a finger)! Those are
| two different states of existence, one with
| experiences/qualia (i.e. it is like something to be that
| thing) and one without. How do we explain the difference.
|
| ps. interesting user name.
| abletonlive wrote:
| Why do you think there is not like anything to be a rock?
| Surely it's wildly different from being a finger or a
| person, and perhaps, very boring from a human's
| perspective. I'm not sure why everybody insists you can
| have qualia or you can't, as if it's a binary thing.
| Perhaps it's a gradient. I would say there is something
| like being a plant, or something like being a computer
| program. Just because we are unable to imagine it as
| humans does not mean that it doesn't exist.
|
| What makes my experience of seeing red any more special
| than the experience of a plant reacting to light? The
| fact that I can type about it on hackernews and the plant
| can't?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If I have a material that tightens or loosens based on
| temperature or chemical gradient, does that count as
| "sensory input"? I wouldn't say so, since nothing is
| receiving a signal from it to distinguish, and I also
| wouldn't say it's causing experiences, but it _is_ enough
| to seek nutrients for a bacteria or a jellyfish-like
| creature.
| visarga wrote:
| You're right, a bacteria would sense and follow chemical
| gradients and light. And that would be a primitive form
| of consciousness.
|
| A piece of material is not conscious because it doesn't
| need to. You see, bacterias are self replicators, humans
| too. And self replication is resource intensive, while
| resources are limited. So life becomes a competition.
| That is why agents need to become more attuned to their
| state and possible actions and outcomes.
|
| Is that good enough to be called consciousness? Taking
| sensory inputs, representing your state, taking actions,
| observing effect, learning from it. Your goal - to exist,
| to make copies of yourself. If you're not aware of
| essential information, or don't understand your
| situation, you die. If you live, it's because you are
| aware.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If it's only one protein, is that protein primitively
| conscious?
|
| It's not interacting with anything else to make those
| decisions, it's completely autonomous.
|
| > observing effect, learning from it
|
| If something is meaningfully doing _that_ , then we're
| getting to consciousness. But I'll note that I don't
| count natural selection as "learning" here.
|
| And observing the results of decisions and learning is
| not mandatory to survive and reproduce.
| visarga wrote:
| Natural selection is the outer loop, reinforcement
| learning the inner loop. Agents, by living or dying, send
| signals into the system, guiding the process.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Natural selection is not conscious, and agents don't need
| to have reinforcement.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "consciousness" as a philosophical question is not about
| the ability to detect state in the world (including your
| own state) and reacting to it. it is not about self-
| replication.
|
| It is about having subjective experience aka "qualia". It
| is about "it being like something to be you", contrasted
| with, e.g. being a rock (which most people agree, it is
| not like anything to be).
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| There are chemical reactions that follow gradients in
| chemical potential to self sustain and survive from our
| standpoint. Not sure one would argue that the chemical
| reaction has consciousness.
| _moof wrote:
| You're talking about a different sense of the word
| "conscious." What you're describing might better be called
| "reactivity" or something. (Don't get too hung up on the
| specific word; the point is there are several different
| meanings of the word "conscious" and the distinctions are
| critical.) There is no obvious reason why useful interaction
| with one's environment requires conscious _experience_ ,
| which is the phenomenon we're discussing here.
| simonh wrote:
| This is an argument that an amobea must be concious, no?
| visarga wrote:
| Any self replicator can be. I am not sure about non-
| replicating agents like some AIs.
|
| Besides having a way to copy what it learns into the
| future, self replication also provides a goal, a guiding
| force - of course, the goal is to avoid death before
| replication. Another great quality of self replication is
| its open-endedness. It can become anything as long as it
| keeps replicating.
|
| For these three qualities I consider self replication the
| basic process behind consciousness. They create the means
| by which open ended learning can evolve.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " It is possible to be conscious because otherwise your body
| wouldn't be able to survive."
|
| False, we can program a roomba to seek out electricity to
| 'survive'. E.g. zombies
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Well said. There is another harder problem of consciousness: A
| lot of people miss the point of the hard problem of
| consciousness.
| beardedetim wrote:
| I think they're two sides of the same coin.
|
| _How_ do we have any experience will be more easily answered
| the more we know about _what_ we actually experience. And
| _what_ we experience is predicated upon _how_ we experience it.
| I agree both need investigating.
|
| The _bigger_ question I see the coin representing is _who or
| what_ is experiencing in the first place? The way I see it,
| it's not really _a thing_ experiencing _something_ but instead
| _things_ experiencing _things_ at _times_.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| That presupposes that (a) panpsychism or semi-panpsychism is
| false (i.e. that qualia are not inherent properties of either
| anything at all, nor of "any sufficiently complex system")
| and that (b) there is a "how" that can be answered.
|
| I agree with you about the "things experiencing things at
| times".
| dibujante wrote:
| Yeah, this is the real question. I'm sure I could program an AI
| agent to respond to (dis-)incentives in a fuzzy way. Is it
| consciously experiencing pain and pleasure at that point? The
| answer would be "no" unless we could prove it.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I am sure someone, perhaps you, could create an AI (or just a
| simple hard-coded program) that responds to (dis)incentives
| that clearly doesn't experience pain or pleasure.
|
| But that isn't the question. The question it possible that a
| sufficiently complex program could ever be able to have the
| experiences in the same way that humans have them (AKA
| "qualia").
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > But it is not the same question
|
| This is debatable. If you subscribe to the idea that
| consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, then it makes sense as
| an avenue to the answer.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If your answer to "how can anything be conscious" is "it just
| can, if the system meets these requirements", then obviously,
| that's the only answer and you may as well move on to "what
| are we conscious of?"
|
| At this point, I'm not willing to regard consciousness as
| something like gravity or the weak force, though I concede
| that it could turn out that way.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| My personal train of thought is this: 1) We know
| consciousness exists (as far as evidence goes it has more
| than anything else since it is the conduit to everything
| else) and 2) We know it is composed, in some way and to
| some degree, of information.
|
| Information might be a small piece, and it might be the
| thing itself, but it's the only tangible avenue we have to
| pursue, so I don't think it's a matter of them answering or
| discussing a different question, I think it's them framing
| the same question with slightly different assumptions.
| jostmey wrote:
| What is consciousness? Self-awareness seems like a good
| definition that can be explained in the context of artificial
| intelligence research. What is the _experience_ of
| consciousness? The _experience_ of an emotion? To me, this
| seems beyond the reach of our current understanding
| visarga wrote:
| Well, at the very least there has to be a "space" of
| experiences where they can be represented and related to each
| other. This representation space needs to also include
| possible outcomes for the agent goals, this will color every
| perception into shades of "good" and "bad". This would
| explain how we can represent and value our experiences. Why
| do they feel like anything then? I bet it's because we have
| evolved hardware for it, and equally because we're playing a
| game with real stakes (the human game of life).
| [deleted]
| naasking wrote:
| > But it is not the same question as: how is it possible that
| we have any experience at all?
|
| You're right, it's not the same question. Dennett answers that
| question too though: you don't have conscious experience, you
| only think you do.
|
| Thus, the questions he and these authors address are the only
| ones worth investigating. In time, exploring these questions
| will reveal the illusion behind consciousness, just like the
| progressive elaboration of the biochemistry of life revealed
| the fiction people tried to spin around how living matter
| simply had to have something different than non-living matter
| ("elan vital" in vitalism).
| GeorgeKangas wrote:
| "you don't have conscious experience, you only think you do."
|
| That's what _illusionism_ , the position of Keith Frankish,
| asserts. Dennett mostly seems to support it, as you note, but
| more equivocally than Frankish.
|
| For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and are
| aware of it: SE is _the_ thing, which we know _must_ exist
| (as noted by Descartes).
|
| Anyone doubting the existence of SE, either is not having SE
| (i.e. is a "phenomenological zombie"), or (more likely, IMO)
| has not identified his own SE.
| naasking wrote:
| > Dennett mostly seems to support it, as you note, but more
| equivocally than Frankish.
|
| I believe Dennett is an eliminative materialist, so he
| would consider qualia to be an illusion.
|
| > For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and
| are aware of it: SE is the thing, which we know must exist
| (as noted by Descsartes).
|
| Descartes begged the question. Just deconstruct it: " _I_
| think therefore _I_ am " presupposes the existence of "I"
| right at the very start. Except everybody knows there is no
| "I", you're just a bundle of atoms, and a bundle that's
| changing from moment to moment. Where are "you" exactly?
| The argument is fallacious and implies fallacious
| conclusions which led to mind/body dualism.
|
| The non-fallacious version is "this is a thought, therefore
| thoughts exist". This is undeniably true, and yet it does
| not imply the existence of an "I" or any kind of dualism
| between mind and matter. A thought would then simply be a
| specific material structure (edit: or rather, it's a
| particular logical structure that can be embodied as a
| material structure).
|
| > Anyone doubting the existence of SE, either is not having
| SE (i.e. is a "phenomenological zombie"), or (more likely,
| IMO) has not identified his own SE.
|
| Anyone doubting subjective experience has simply recognized
| that every prior claim to human specialness has failed
| spectacularly, that science has repeatedly shown that our
| obvious and intuitive grasp of perception and truth is
| fatally flawed in numerous ways, and therefore that we
| should not in a million years trust anything that we
| immediately perceive as completely obvious when it can be
| demonstrated quite easily that these perceptions are vague
| and often false.
|
| For christ's sake, your senses are telling you that water
| breaks pencils [1], and that you're burning up when you're
| dying of cold [2], and you're telling me that your internal
| perceptions of your subjective experience, arguably the
| most sophisticated part of your brain, is some kind factual
| oracle? Sorry, that's just nonsense. You should be
| immensely skeptical of your perceptions, looking both for
| justification that they are true or explanations for _why
| you think they are true_ , you should _not_ be treating
| them as simply a priori true.
|
| [1] https://scienceathomekids.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/06/IMG...
|
| [2] https://psichologyanswers.com/library/lecture/read/7662
| 4-do-...
| GeorgeKangas wrote:
| Very well then: _you_ either don 't have SE, or don't
| recognize your own SE. My guess is the latter.
|
| I don't think SE is exclusive to humans, but only humans
| _talk_ about it, as far as we know.
| loganmhb wrote:
| The question is not whether perceptions are true --
| that's irrelevant. Undoubtedly perceptions present a
| skewed and unreliable view onto reality. It's whether
| they exist at all. You can't trick someone who isn't
| looking.
|
| > Except everybody knows there is no "I", you're just a
| bundle of atoms, and a bundle that's changing from moment
| to moment.
|
| This is begging the question in the other direction.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I believe Dennett is an eliminative materialist, so he
| would consider qualia to be an illusion.
|
| That's correct, mostly, but it also means this position
| is nonsensical.
|
| What is notable about qualia is that it is possible to
| have them at all. An illusion is definitionally a qualia.
| You cannot have an illusion without qualia existing.
|
| Dennett tries to finesse this, but in my opinion fails. I
| think he wants it to be possible that you can somehow
| experience things in a non-mysterious way, and this this
| non-mysterious experience explains the mysterious
| experience stuff. I think he's wrong.
| GeorgeKangas wrote:
| Dennett's position makes perfect sense -- _if_ Dennett is
| a zombie. For a zombie, to whom subjective experience
| (SE) is not even a thing, the "hard problem" can only
| mean: why do people _talk about_ SE? So that 's what they
| set about explaining.
|
| However, I don't think Dennett (or any human) is actually
| a zombie. The difficulty, is getting people to
| _recognize_ their own SE. Our vocabulary, all about
| material and mechanisms, can 't actually define SE.
| Instead, we have a few _ostensions_ by which an attentive
| experiencer _might_ recognize his own SE:
|
| [Descartes] SE is that _one_ thing, which _absolutely
| must_ exist.
|
| [Nagel] SE is "what it's like, to be...". He adds, that
| all our science is fully consistent with SE not existing.
| That's why it makes perfect sense _for a zombie_ to
| believe it doesn 't exist.
|
| [Jackson]: Mary knows what seeing red is like, _only_
| when she has seen red.
| pcwalton wrote:
| I always found illusionism completely nonsensical, for
| the reasons that Galen Strawson put forth in "Realistic
| Monism" [1] (emphasis mine):
|
| > Some of them -- Dennett is a prime example -- are so in
| thrall to the fundamental intuition of dualism, the
| intuition that the experiential and the physical are
| utterly and irreconcilably different, that they are
| prepared to deny the existence of experience, more or
| less (c)overtly, because they are committed to
| physicalism, i.e. physicSalism.
|
| > "'They are prepared to deny the existence of
| experience.' At this we should stop and wonder. I think
| we should feel very sober, and a little afraid, at the
| power of human credulity, the capacity of human minds to
| be gripped by theory, by faith. _For this particular
| denial is the strangest thing that has ever happened in
| the whole history of human thought, not just the whole
| history of philosophy._ It falls, unfortunately, to
| philosophy, not religion, to reveal the deepest woo-woo
| of the human mind. I find this grievous, but, next to
| this denial, every known religious belief is only a
| little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.
|
| [1]: https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/
| s0/Reali...
| yboris wrote:
| My favorite read on this topic is _Consciousness Explained_ by
| Daniel C. Dennett
|
| He's a philosopher who has spent a lifetime thinking about this
| problem, informed by the latest science of the day. Plus he's an
| excellent, lucid writer. He is a materialist, optimistic about
| being able to have as-satisfactory of an explanation of
| consciousness in the future as we do for life (no "elan vital"
| needed).
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denn...
| Sosh101 wrote:
| Or as some like to call it _Consciousness Denied_ :)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| What's more amazing is why a person is selected as your
| consciousness?
| willis936 wrote:
| If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to
| face some tough truths.
|
| There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent
| behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| And in this complexity lies incredible beauty
| misja111 wrote:
| This. There's nothing magic about consciousness, and if you
| think it is, it's because your brains are hardwired to be
| convinced that you're special. But we're not. In the article,
| this is said very well:
|
| > Would you say that these more complicated states of emotion
| represent higher or more complex "levels" of consciousness?
|
| > Seth: I'm personally very skeptical of this kind of labeling,
| of higher and lower levels of consciousness. There is a little
| truth to it, of course. Unless we can agree that human beings
| are in some sense, more conscious than, say, an ant, we're
| missing some very important things about the nature of
| consciousness.
| bekantan wrote:
| Honest question: following this argument, is it to be expected
| that a sufficiently complex water pipeline can become
| conscious?
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Of course. This is table stakes and has been since the early
| 1700's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap
| toshk wrote:
| From one of the dominant theories of a material view indeed an
| emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.
|
| But from our daily experiences actually reality is an emergent
| property from our consciousness (or awareness).
|
| What we do feel, smell, hear, forms into concept, meaning,
| experiences forms our "reality".
|
| There might be a theoretical other "reality" or it might be a
| bit different many think it is now, but it doesn't make it more
| or less real, in the sense of actual experience it's less real.
| psyc wrote:
| I won't be disappointed if it turns out to be an illusion. I
| suspect it's in the nature of consciousness to be comprised of
| many illusions, in fact. But I'm still waiting on an
| explanation for the illusion. Now, if you tell me the illusions
| prevents us from ever understanding the illusion, then I will
| be disappointed.
| spupe wrote:
| Consciousness is not an illusion, it is a real phenomenon that
| is experienced daily by almost every human. You might be
| referring to free will and its subjective experience, which is
| a different story.
| misja111 wrote:
| It depends what you mean with 'real'. The experience or
| feeling of having consciousness is real, that's true. But the
| fact that humans experience consciousness doesn't make it a
| real physical phenomenon. Not so long ago most people
| believed that the Earth was flat because that's what they
| experienced when they looked around them. Many people believe
| in ghosts. Still this doesn't make them real.
| spupe wrote:
| > The experience or feeling of having consciousness is
| real, that's true. But the fact that humans experience
| consciousness doesn't make it a real physical phenomenon.
|
| Unless you believe in supranatural explanations for it,
| yes, it does. The beliefs you mention, like a flat Earth,
| were/are real and also false. So in this analogy,
| consciousness is real, but many of the explanations for it
| or powers ascribed to it are false.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| How can you have an illusion without an observer? An illusion
| is by definition a subjective experience - it doesn't explain
| the thing doing the experiencing at all. You say there is no
| magic, but your explanation might as well be "it's just magic".
| misja111 wrote:
| An illusion is a belief or perception which does not match
| reality. A belief is something that is stored in memory. So
| there is nothing to 'observe' about an illusion; an illusion
| is an error in either memory or perception of the observer
| himself.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| I think I understand what gp means. He is trying to point
| to a contradiction in ggp reasoning. The question is in the
| definition of words "subjective" and "observer". You cannot
| define an observer using the concept of observer, that's
| circular reasoning. "Incredibly complex neural automata" is
| just handwaving the problem away. Equivalent of saying
| "here the magic happens", not an explanation.
| willis936 wrote:
| It isn't handwaving. I'm saying the act of observation is
| not special. It's matter knowing it's matter.
| "Observation" and "knowing" are simply emergent behaviors
| of the matter. There is no divine step between matter and
| consciousness. I'm saying there is nothing to explain
| because consciousness should not be viewed through the
| lens of it being special.
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