[HN Gopher] Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
___________________________________________________________________
Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-09-30 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| uoaei wrote:
| Especially considering recent advances in the neurosciences, and
| where they intersect with systems theory (see: Friston), it seems
| inevitable to conclude that learning systems -- mammalian nervous
| systems being quite architecturally specialized but nonetheless
| made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe -- generally
| experience consciousness.
|
| Note for the layperson: consciousness is not necessarily
| _awareness_ (modeling sensory perceptions) nor _sentience_
| (recognizing oneself as an agent) but merely "subjective
| phenomenological experience". So the experience may not
| necessarily be very complex nor even recognized as such by the
| experiencer, but it is experience nonetheless.
|
| Also worth noting there are a few flavors of panpsychism and some
| vigorous debate within the sub-sub-field as to which one is most
| reasonable. I dug deep into this a couple years ago and disagreed
| with some but not all of Goff's positions.
|
| The argument from him that stuck with me and forms part of the
| basis of my attachment to panpsychism now is just an application
| of the scientific method: if we _know_ we are conscious, and we
| _don 't know_ whether anything else is conscious or not, the null
| hypothesis states that everything should be considered conscious
| until proven otherwise.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > he null hypothesis states that everything should be
| considered conscious until proven otherwise.
|
| Sorry, no. The null hypothesis is generally assumed to remain
| possibly true.
|
| So, the null hypothesis states that everything should be
| considered possibly conscious until proven otherwise.
| uoaei wrote:
| What you pose is just the basis for the question, not a
| possible answer to it. A null hypothesis must still be a
| hypothesis, not a subtly vague hedge that doesn't actually
| posit anything.
|
| It may be that the tools science provides are inadequate for
| this question in which case the question is ill-posed, but in
| any case your interpretation of what a hypothesis is, is
| simply incorrect.
| mannykannot wrote:
| In reply to both yourself and FollowingTheDao: the concept
| of a null hypothesis is from the analysis of quantitative
| data. For either of the null hypotheses posited in this
| thread, what are the corresponding data?
| tgv wrote:
| > it seems inevitable to conclude that learning systems ...
| generally experience consciousness.
|
| I don't think so. There's no reason to assume a nematode or an
| LLM is conscious. The latter doesn't even have anything to be
| conscious of.
|
| Ages ago, Minksy has half-jokingly said that consciousness is
| probably a feedback loop. It makes sense, but it does require
| the learning system to be able to observe itself in sufficient
| detail and have sufficient power to model that observation.
|
| The remark about the null hypothesis doesn't make sense. It's a
| bad practice from NHST (the very model that led to the
| reproducibility crisis), and is generally assumed to be the
| hypothesis to test against. It's not the hypothesis we know to
| be true. And experience informs us that consciousness is not
| universal, so it's not our best hypothesis about life or
| matter.
| uoaei wrote:
| > There's no reason to assume a nematode or an LLM is
| conscious.
|
| It has inputs. It need not necessarily _understand_ them --
| that is a separate question to that of consciousness. See the
| note for laypeople.
|
| > It's not the hypothesis we know to be true.
|
| I don't think this is a best-faith response to my comment. If
| I was unclear I can clarify: in absence of further evidence
| it's a good starting place. I don't think I implied anything
| about truth.
|
| > And experience informs us that consciousness is not
| universal
|
| How is it possible you know this with such certainty? People
| whose lives and careers begin and end with this question
| don't have any such knowledge.
| tgv wrote:
| The best starting point is the one that seems most likely.
| We've never observed consciousness, not even in people. I
| (i.e., the first person perspective) can talk to them and
| get convinced others feel the same, so it's fair to assume
| most people are conscious (in particular because small
| children seem to lack this capacity). In higher mammals
| it's uncertain, and we can't communicate at all with
| anything else, but observation hasn't revealed much. There
| is no evidence of consciousness in other animals or dead
| matter, despite people looking for it. It also wouldn't
| have any evolutionary advantage for a fly to be conscious,
| nor does it make neurological sense. A fly's behavior
| doesn't reveal much thought, how could it ever have a
| consciousness? Just because it is somewhat capable of
| learning? It takes us many years to get to the point, and
| it requires a lot of social interaction, and a lot of
| understanding. So the starting point is: consciousness in
| most other species is most likely missing, and certainly in
| dead matter.
|
| > How is it possible you know this with such certainty?
| People whose lives and careers begin and end with this
| question don't have any such knowledge.
|
| It is technically unknown, because there isn't a
| definition, certainly not an operationalizable one.
| Assuming consciousness is another physical force makes it
| fundamentally unknowable. It is the easy way out.
| uoaei wrote:
| Simply ignoring the entire field of philosophy of mind
| and imposing your own definitions is not going to get you
| anywhere.
|
| Thought is not required for consciousness, only
| experience. I strongly suggest you read the literature
| and traditions of thought so you may be more informed
| about the things of which you speak.
|
| > there isn't a definition
|
| There is, and I quoted it directly above. If you have an
| issue with the definition I suggest you bring it up with
| the community that came up with it, namely, professional
| philosophers. I suspect they already have a precise term
| for the thing you're referring to as 'consciousness'.
|
| However the most ridiculous part of your reply is this:
|
| > We've never observed consciousness
|
| You have never experienced color? Taste? I consider it
| pretty important for someone with such strong opinions on
| the matter to have personal... ahem, _experience_... in
| it.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I was really hoping to see descriptions of some experiments being
| done to test this theory. What is a situation where a photon
| would act differently if it has consciousness than if it is
| merely an unthinking artifact of physical laws? Or a berry, or a
| fish, or a small plastic statue of a dragon, or a bong?
|
| Of course there may also be the problem that experiments that
| _confirm_ this theory can very quickly lead you down a path to
| publishing a paper whose tl,dr is "I think I just confirmed that
| 'magic' works" and that is _very_ definitely not a route to
| tenure and /or further funding; Bengston's "The Energy Cure" is a
| pretty good example of what happens when you start doing that.
| nico wrote:
| > Bengston's "The Energy Cure" is a pretty good example of what
| happens when you start doing that
|
| Curious about this. Could you explain a bit more what happened?
| Thank you
| [deleted]
| swader999 wrote:
| Take a look at Tom Campbell's current iteration of the double
| slit. (I am loosely/poorly summarizing). He's predicting that
| you'll get wave like behavior with an observer at the slit if
| the recorder for the observer is turned off. The observer is
| still turned on. Fascinating implications.
|
| Should have results in the coming year. Preliminary reports are
| encouraging.
|
| He's crowd funded this setup and its ongoing:
| https://youtu.be/72qVppAoCc8?feature=shared
|
| More in depth:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OZUqtxdT0QY&pp=ygUYVG9tIENhbXB...
|
| He's got an update from this August but it's just about waiting
| on labs and universities to complete it.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I keep on thinking I should get ahold of his book. Oh hey I
| just checked his site and it's not only on Amazon any more,
| now a copy is on its way. :)
| swader999 wrote:
| My Big Toe? It's a tedious frustrating slog. His MBT
| YouTube series from Calgary is much more rewarding at about
| 1.5x speed.
| choxi wrote:
| Isn't the measurement problem still potentially linked to
| consciousness? We don't know why we experience one thing when
| reality is actually in a superposition of possibilities. It
| could be that our measurement devices cause quantum collapse,
| or they too exist in a superposition until we measure the
| measuring device.
| swader999 wrote:
| See Tom Campbell above re new Double Slit experiments, he's
| addressing your specific issue here.
| curation wrote:
| No.Consciousness is the remainder left over after the creation of
| the universe. It is not fabric-like but more like an impossible
| kernal that, like reality, cannot ever be finalized.
| layer8 wrote:
| I think it's useful to think in terms of what we are conscious
| _of_. Meaning, that there is a subject and an object of
| consciousness. For example, I'd argue that qualia is not an
| inherent part of consciousness, it's merely something we are
| conscious _of_. It's plausible that qualia are inner workings in
| our brain that our brain is itself perceiving, and thus is
| conscious of. What I think confuses people is that we are also
| conscious of our consciousness. That doesn't need to mean that
| the subject and the object of consciousness are the same in that
| case: it could also mean that the "of", i.e. the arrow between
| subject and object, is itself an object of consciousness. Now,
| it's very plausible that this "of" arrow in general is not a
| simple arrow, but rather a complex graph or network. Given the
| complexity of the brain, there is certainly ample space for
| myriads of such arrow-networks. The Buddhist conception of no-
| self can be taken as there being no singular conscious subject.
| Instead, there are really just the "of" arrows, which partially
| form a self-recursion by partially pointing to each other, and
| this structure is what forms the apparent "self".
|
| Put slightly differently, there is no consciousness without the
| objects of consciousness, without the things we are consciousness
| _of_. At the time, we manifestly can't get a grasp on the subject
| without making it an object of consciousness. Or rather, we would
| be completely unaware of it if it wasn't also an object. From
| this one may conclude that what actually exists is only the "of"
| relation, and that the conscious subject is really just formed
| out of those.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > It's plausible that qualia are inner workings in our brain
| that our brain is itself perceiving, and thus is conscious of.
|
| This seems circular. Why would those inner workings not
| themselves give rise to consciousness, in the way you suppose
| second-order workings of the brain do?
|
| > we are also conscious of our consciousness. That doesn't need
| to mean that the subject and the object of consciousness are
| the same in that case: it could also mean that the "of", i.e.
| the arrow between subject and object, is itself an object of
| consciousness.
|
| Those are two different things, no? You can think about your
| consciousness, or you can think about your ability to think
| about your consciousness.
|
| > Now, it's very plausible that this "of" arrow in general is
| not a simple arrow, but rather a complex graph or network.
| Given the complexity of the brain, there is certainly ample
| space for myriads of such arrow-networks.
|
| Meaning what? You're describing a different graph, I don't see
| how it bears on the simple one we started with.
|
| > we manifestly can't get a grasp on the subject without making
| it an object of consciousness
|
| Again this seems circular. If you think about consciousness,
| then by definition the thing you're thinking about is
| consciousness.
|
| > we would be completely unaware of it if it wasn't also an
| object
|
| Same again. If you aren't thinking about consciousness, then
| consciousness isn't currently something that you're thinking
| about. I'm not seeing the point here.
|
| > what actually exists is only the "of" relation, and that the
| conscious subject is really just formed out of those
|
| I'm not convinced. Our ability to be conscious of our
| consciousness is of no particular relevance to the deeper
| question of how consciousness arises. Many animal species
| clearly have some form of consciousness, but are probably
| incapable of the sort of abstract reasoning needed to be
| conscious of their consciousness. I'm skeptical of any theory
| whose starting point is the human ability to do so.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Why would those inner workings not themselves give rise to
| consciousness, in the way you suppose second-order workings
| of the brain do?
|
| I don't think that "consciousness" exists other than in the
| form of "perceiving inner workings". (That's basically the
| point I was trying to make. And that "perceiving" itself
| constitutes "inner workings", and is thus partly subject to
| itself.) In that sense, there is nothing that arises. I'm one
| of those who don't think there's a hard problem of
| consciousness. My impression is that, for the most part, it's
| the recursivity that leads us to believe there is something
| extra there which really there isn't.
| [deleted]
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Psychology, and specifically DBT practitioners seem to have the
| belief that consciousness is at odds with emotions, and that one
| must struggle to access their own consciousness. There is the
| emotional, intellectual, and 'wise' minds, and then you, with
| agency to give credence towards one or another. To be an observer
| of your thoughts... while this may lead to healthy outcomes, I've
| found the model disturbing. Who is that agent making that
| decision, and what makes it distinct and authoritative?
| hn72774 wrote:
| I'm not an expert but I think there's a distinction between
| self awareness and consciousness.
|
| To be an observer of your thoughts, feelings, and emotions is
| not a practice that's limited to DBT or psychology. It has
| roots in Eastern spiritual practices.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I have been imersing myself in this subject and the gist of what
| I got is that consciousness collapses under the reductionist
| process currently employed in the scientific method.
|
| Moreover, the very framework in which the current scientific work
| is done might well be just an emergent data structure used by
| what we understand as consciousness to navigate whatever the
| objective reality is in a way that is simpler and more effective
| than having to access quantum states and particle trajectories
| through senses.
|
| That being said, I think that there is something intrinsically
| insufficient in language itself to describe this wholistic
| relationship between consciousness, qualia and the perceived
| world. My take is that for anything to be communicated through
| symbols it has to undergo a reduction process which is essential
| to the flow of information to occur, otherwise you would have to
| communicate the entire universe at once, which is just
| impossible. You have to reduce reality to a set of symbols for
| the symbols itself to make sense. That is the whole premise of
| language, that a word has meaning only when immersed in other
| words (cow represents a cow insofar it doesn't represent anything
| else besides a cow).
|
| If this is true, and Godel incompleteness Theorem is essential,
| then this whole talk might take us closer to representing the
| experience of consciousness but there might never be a unifying
| theory, because for that to exist, that has to be a language that
| represents everything without reducing it to none of its parts, a
| theory without postulates.
| swader999 wrote:
| You have a good grasp on this. Have you looked at Tom Campbell?
| He has a separate angle than Hoffman but very similar
| conclusions.
|
| The batshit crazy thing about Tom is that he shows you ways
| that you can individually experiment and prove through your own
| experiences the things he's positing. His My Big Toe trilogy
| goes into all this, but I shudder to recommend it. Tedious
| slog.
|
| If you really want to prove it to yourself, it's not too hard.
| This book by Kenneth Daz, "The Last Astral Projection Book
| You'll Ever Need", is the best way I've found, he's read
| endlessly and summarized it into a hundred pages.
|
| So far I've rolled out of my body twice now. Floated through my
| front door and got down my road a fair ways. Fully conscious,
| able to make choices, full memory after returning to my body.
| No psychedelics involved. You can't of course talk to anyone
| about this. My wife knows but she's been naturally OBE'ing
| since she's a kid.
|
| (Edit, I can't believe I'm not being down voted to oblivion
| here. Love HN).
| smokel wrote:
| A thing with Out-of-Body-Experiences is that if you were able
| to shift outside of your body, then why would you still be
| constrained to the body of the earth?
|
| If you were able to roam around free of physics, then
| certainly you would leave not only your human body, but you
| would have to take account of the earth moving around the sun
| as well (at breakneck speed, mind you). You'd probably be
| either a few kilometers inside our planet or up in the air,
| and then in space, in practically no time.
|
| So, call me unconvinced about OBE's. It's most likely just
| your mind playing tricks on you.
| swader999 wrote:
| The thing that convinced Campbell it was real was when he
| and a colleague met up during them and recounted the shared
| experiences after. I'm not that motivated to go to the moon
| but people said that's no big deal to do that.
| czbond wrote:
| I've been interested for some time in Astral, thanks for
| mentioning it. I've had very intelligent, credible people
| suggest it is possible. Similar for remote viewing
|
| In the crux of Tom's argument - what can one prove via
| Astral?
| fishtacos wrote:
| If I could, I would. Most of what you wrote is anathema to
| evidential scientific conversation. If you've got no evidence
| for it besides the subjective, then it's not provable.
|
| I've no idea who Tom is, so I followed up on what you wrote
| and believe I have enough of a glimpse to see he's a crackpot
| theorist. Being a physicist doesn't abscond one of the burden
| of proof. Apparently he's been cooking up a new double slit
| experiment for the past decade+.
|
| Yeah... OK... let's not even get started on falsifiability.
| swader999 wrote:
| Yeah all fair critism, except that experiment is involved
| and it does take that long to get rigerous results.
|
| You can actually do this. Takes about ten or so tries over
| a few weeks for most. I haven't tried to fly like a bird
| yet. Hopefully I'll get to experience that next.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| They way you sell it, I gotta say, even if it's all
| imagination I want to try it.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I think maybe the only thing separating the guesswork
| involved in producing things like the amplituhedron is the
| fact that they are able to reproduce results in space-time
| that we can understand and verify. However, if this is true
| that we perceive space and time through the evolution of
| senses that are bounded by fitness functions unrelated to
| the real world, then the only verification method could
| deceive us.
|
| Maybe other expressions that don't match our observations
| might not be entirely invalid, they might just represent
| different emergent worlds not unlike the one we perceive
| through our senses. Maybe they could map to these
| transcendental or mystical experiences, I don't know, only
| guessing here.
|
| In any case, it serves us well to have untainted clarity in
| our objectives. If we intend to create abstractions that
| correlate to the real world and help us create tools that
| somehow explain or help manipulate the perceived reality
| (which I believe is the only reasonable goal), then
| falsifiability and proof in this sense is essential, and I
| have to agree with you.
| fishtacos wrote:
| Separating this question from the rest of the
| conversation:
|
| Do you think it's plausible we live in a simulated
| existence? If so, how? If not, why not? (very broad
| questions, am aware; simply wanted to get an input on
| your perspective).
| gchamonlive wrote:
| It's plausible, even probable, given the arguments layed
| out in Nick Bolstrom essay "Are you living in a computer
| simulation?".
|
| I used to think the question that should preclude this
| one is if the universe is even able to host a simulation
| of itself, but given that we know it is probable we live
| in a perceived reality that not only is separated from
| what we think as objective reality, that this perceived
| reality is, for the sake of survival, a much simplified
| version of the objective reality, then it isn't
| impossible that a base objective reality might harbor
| countless simulations not unlike the one we possibly live
| in.
|
| This is however an interesting experiment in a way to
| guide moral decisions when we encounter technological
| leaps, like if we ever develop the capability of
| producing an ASI. I don't think, however, that these
| considerations are falsifiable, because we can't just
| "break out" of our possible simulation to see what is
| what. What might that even mean? Would we be able to tell
| if we broke out of our simulation? It breeds all sorts of
| speculations that at the end of the day adds very little
| to the overall discussion.
|
| What I personally think is that there is something to be
| perceived and explored ousite of the realm of human
| concern, in the silence of the absence of the endless
| chatter of the cognitive consciousness, that is hard to
| experience and hard to describe, even though it is
| accessible to everyone, maybe in the form of a question,
| like "what is really keeping you from experiencing the
| dharma body of the Buddha?".
|
| I know this is all really esoteric and mystic, but I am
| really trying very hard to maintain a certain level of
| philosophical scrutiny here, if only whoever reads this
| might give me the benefit of the doubt. All in all this
| is my take on the subject and I hope I don't disappoint
| you too deeply.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| > what is really keeping you from experiencing the dharma
| body of the Buddha
|
| What makes you think dharma body is more real than Santa
| Claus?
| gchamonlive wrote:
| If you think quality is real then you probably saw the
| dharma body's reflection already. It is as real as all
| the ghosts we perceive with our consciousness mind knife.
| Gravity, light, music... are they real? Why? Because they
| affect the world we perceive in meaningful ways? Then why
| is Santa not real when it manifests itself in the holiday
| every year? If the idea of the spaghetti monster makes
| you fast every fortnight it has a real impact on you, the
| same way that believing earth was the center of the
| universe influenced the people around Galileo at the time
| until he proved it was a meaningless ghost.
| swader999 wrote:
| I have a hard time thinking that its simulated, like we
| are stuck inside a computer in Tron. But I do believe
| what we interact with is not the essence, its only a
| small part of everything else that underlies, that we
| just can't sense is there.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Yeah it seems like what others see as a simulation , you
| can also see that as just the limit of what we currently
| know. Like, there are things we don't know. In one
| hundred years, we will find out more and that will now be
| part of our base reality. Just because there are things
| we don't know doesn't mean they're part of some objective
| outside reality. They're just not discovered yet.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I think it is because this is the few times where mysticism
| and science meet and wrestle. How to communicate something
| inherently transcendental without talking about this inward
| journey through consciousness? It might take sometime to
| separate fact from fiction, but at this point we are in,
| untethered exploration is essential.
| jancsika wrote:
| > If you really want to prove it to yourself, it's not too
| hard.
|
| Perhaps.
|
| But proving it to _anyone else at all_ is a hell of a leap in
| difficulty from there.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| Have you ever conducted a simple experiment to prove you were
| not just lucid dreaming? It is a pretty easily falsifiable
| claim
| swader999 wrote:
| That's something I wonder myself. I need to do a few more,
| maybe up to fifty before I have enough subjective data to
| be certain. What is this experiment to prove I'm not lucid
| dreaming? You can put your fingers on your nostrils and
| blow through fingers in lucid dream, irl the air stops, but
| in OBE, you might not have a full body. One time I did,
| other time I was just like a shadow, half formed. Really
| weird.
|
| There's a progression I've experienced which I don't think
| is something a lucid dream is characterized by. Got a hand
| out, fell out and quickly went back because it scared me.
| Got out and couldn't see and gave up. Got out and out the
| front door and that freaked me out. Then finally a half
| mile down the road.
|
| My next journey I'm going to go farther in my area to
| places that I've never been and see what they compare to on
| a fully conscious visit.
|
| One thing that shocked me though was going through my front
| door. At the time in the OBE I thought this isn't the same
| front door, particularly the stained glass. Then I went and
| looked at it in real life after and I realized my OBE
| recollection was more accurate than my previous knowledge
| or memory of it.
| blacksqr wrote:
| >What is this experiment to prove I'm not lucid dreaming?
|
| For decades magician and debunker of supernatural claims
| James Randi placed a new object on his dining table every
| month, and offered a million dollar prize to anyone who
| could tell him what the current object was. Of course the
| prize was never claimed.
|
| Ask a friend down your block to put something on their
| dining table. Do your OBE thing and write down what you
| saw. If you're right you'll have proven you're not lucid
| dreaming and be world famous for demonstrating the
| reality of psychic phenomena.
| swader999 wrote:
| Yeah I could try something like that. Maybe even stick a
| playing card that I don't look at somewhere.
|
| I don't really care about proving this to anyone else. My
| main reason is to try to talk to my daughter I lost last
| year. Been really hard...
| sohamssd wrote:
| A simple experiment would be to have someone else write
| down a number on a piece of paper while you weren't in
| that room, have you do your OBE thingy and then
| accurately tell that number several times.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Even just once would be near proof, assuming care was
| taken to ensure the secret didn't "leak" somehow. Maybe
| have an open-minded neighbor put a sticky note on the
| wall by his bed. If you find the number, you'll know it's
| real.
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| I mean you could ask someone to leave a note (maybe a
| couple of random sentences or a password) somewhere that
| you have never seen. Go read it when OBE then when back
| in your body write it down and then get your friend to
| compare the note you wrote to the original.
| lend000 wrote:
| You can see what's going on on your roof perhaps? I'm
| very interested in the subject and spend a lot of time
| meditating but have yet to experience anything one might
| consider mystical, outside of the use of psychedelics.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Easy. Have someone go to the other room. OBE yourself into
| that room and see how many fingers they're holding up.
| Confirm if you were correct.
| nico wrote:
| Great take. Alan Watts described the issue pretty eloquently:
|
| > It's beyond all categorization whatsoever, and so the
| Upanishads say, "all we can say of it positively is the
| negative." Neti neti; 'it is not this, not that.
|
| The above was specifically referring to "god", however it's
| pretty much the same concept. Anything we can symbolize is
| effectively not the ineffable thing that we want to represent
| with the symbols
| Animats wrote:
| But humans are _special_. They have to be special. Right? Not
| just what happens once nematodes evolve to survive better.
| Otherwise, why are we here?
|
| It gets worse for this kind of philosophy as machine learning
| gets better. Machine learning is a rather simple operation
| replicated a huge number of times, fed with lightly filtered data
| about the world. As you add more units and feed in more raw data,
| it gets smarter.
|
| Now we have a clue about how intelligence really works, and it's
| upsetting some people.
| badrabbit wrote:
| You are confusing accurate automation with intelligence. And I
| suspect you haven't thought too deeply about consciousness.
| Intelligence and consciousness are not the same, chicken have
| consciousness and dream.
|
| The classic childish confusion of how vs what is also something
| to be wary of.
|
| Imagine a program in a computer figuring out it is made out of
| instructions and bits and bytes, that's how its world works but
| what exactly is that program? Information? A bunch of complex
| logic gates? An encoding of logic according to the conscious
| intent of the programmer? Are programs really at the end of the
| day a representation of human intent?
|
| Much in the same way, this complex piece of software that we
| are and our limited awareness of our world such as
| understanding quantum mechanics (like the program understanding
| bits and instructions) is just describing how things are not
| what we, the consciousness (not the one ones) ultimately are.
|
| I suspect a lot of the quantum weirdness might be humans
| looking at the equivalent of "transistor current" , at such a
| low level that meaning is obscured where at a higher level
| things just work in bits represented by low/high volage
| (digital), without minding specific voltage sampling (analog).
| Just my unfounded speculation though.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics?
| This isn't physics this is just regular philosophy with some
| scientific sounding language. I feel like this is people reaching
| for religion but not wanting to admit it to themselves.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the
| universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces
| -- and physics is concerned with describing the laws of the
| universe.
|
| How could consciousness _not_ be lumped in with physics, from
| this perspective?
|
| It doesn't matter whether consciousness pervades the universe
| in a form of panpsychism, or is emergent out of interactions we
| already understand. Fluid mechanics is emergent too, in a sense
| -- that doesn't put it outside of physics.
| some_furry wrote:
| > Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of
| the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental
| forces -- and physics is concerned with describing the laws
| of the universe.
|
| Why do you believe this to be true?
|
| If it's a self-evident observation, try explaining it to me
| like I'm 5.
| jemmyw wrote:
| Funny because the whole argument does work better if you
| imagine the proponents are 5. "I'm special therefore the
| universe must care about me and my thoughts"
| crazygringo wrote:
| Sure, ELI5: the only things we actually know are from our
| conscious experience. Everything else we have to logically
| infer from those conscious experiences. Literally
| everything is built upon our conscious awareness. We have
| direct experience of our conscious awareness before we can
| even do physics to determine the four fundamental forces at
| all.
|
| To clarify, consciousness isn't just _a_ fundamental aspect
| of the universe -- for our human minds, it 's _the most_
| fundamental aspect.
|
| If you want to take this to an extreme:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism
| fatfingerd wrote:
| You've just demonstrated the anthropic principle.
| Intelligent contemplation requires a lot of things so we
| will see them and can see them as fundamental, but they
| might be obscure in the universe.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
| some_furry wrote:
| That's an interesting philosophy, but I don't see how
| consciousness is implied by the standard model or the
| current investigations into physics beyond the standard
| model.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It isn't. It still has to be integrated with it, that's
| the whole point. We don't know how gravity is implied by
| the standard model either, but we still know it's there.
|
| The point is that, at the end of the day, it's still
| necessarily going to be physics.
| some_furry wrote:
| I'm not a philosopher. I did study physics in college.
|
| I do not see it necessary for consciousness to be as
| fundamental as electroweak interactions and so on. In my
| mind, it's perfectly possible for consciousness to be an
| emergent property of a complex system that itself is not
| conscious in any meaningful way.
|
| Look at other examples of this; i.e. tensegrity.
|
| To conclude that consciousness is as fundamental as
| bosons or gravity needs a _lot_ of evidence.
|
| Since you said so definitively that you believe that
| conclusion is true, I was hoping you had specific
| evidence on hand.
| mindok wrote:
| How can you conceive of bosons or gravity without
| consciousness? How can you possibly prove objective
| reality through the filter of subjective consciousness?
| some_furry wrote:
| It doesn't matter how I conceive of anything. They
| existed for billions of years before I came around.
|
| Even if, like, I take a solipsistic approach to life,
| objective reality has a sort of object permanence to it
| that's more stable than e.g. my dreams. So even if
| everything is a hallucination, the mechanism for
| preserving the information is the closest to "real" I can
| identify.
|
| And from studying the things we call real, we understand
| physics. And from physics, I see nowhere that
| necessitates consciousness at a super low level.
|
| Care to cite and explain the specific mechanisms that I'm
| not aware of that do necessitate it?
| amelius wrote:
| Not the parent commenter, but perhaps this helps:
|
| 1. Some people believe that conscious awareness exists on
| top of physics. I.e., something happens and conscious
| awareness notes that it happens. Here there is a flow of
| information going from physics to (our) conscious
| awareness. But not necessarily in the other direction.
|
| 2. The above (1) is not likely to be the true. We discuss
| conscious awareness in this physical world. Hence physics
| "knows" that conscious awareness exists, and thus there is
| at least also a flow of information in the other direction.
|
| One might go further, and start questioning whether it is
| physics that does not really exist, and only our conscious
| awareness exists ...
| some_furry wrote:
| What about physics implies consciousness?
|
| I've often heard some hand-wavy remarks about quantum
| physics, but they're largely unconvincing.
|
| For example, a wavefunction will collapse because we use
| e.g. photons to measure a particle as it enters one of
| two slits. It's the act of measurement, not the
| introduction of a conscious mind, that causes the
| collapse. So that doesn't track.
| yongjik wrote:
| Fluid mechanics might actually be a good analogy. We know
| that fluid mechanics happens, and it's entirely made of
| already known physical interactions, yet the phenomenon is so
| complicated that it deserves to be its own field of study.
|
| On the other hand, asking something like "Is viscosity a part
| of the fabric of the universe?" would be meaningless, because
| viscosity is not a property of any elementary particle or
| force. The complication arises out of how those groups of
| particles interact with each other.
|
| At least, with fluid mechanics, there's a good physical
| abstraction that reduces real world phenomena into partial
| differential equations which work surprisingly well. When it
| comes to consciousness, we can't even ask "What's the
| consciousness per gram of this substance?" and I doubt such a
| question will become meaningful any time soon.
| bradleyishungry wrote:
| I think the neuroscientists who question why a first-person-
| perspective happens in the brain generally assume it comes
| about from the physical formation of electromagnetic fields.
| Most don't believe there's some unexplored part of the universe
| that forms it, just that its something to do with the
| structure. So its still physics, just not pseudoscience.
|
| I am certainly not well versed on the field though and have
| only read a paper on the topic, and it could have been bad
| science, but I did find it informative when I read it.
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.7676...
| jemmyw wrote:
| It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind of
| pseudoscience. There's no evidence that consciousness is
| anything other than a state arising from the physical processes
| in our bodies. I'm open minded to hypothesis that are
| potentially testable, but people keep just repeating the
| implausible.
|
| I also hate that I keep reading that consciousness, or anything
| else, is a universe "hack" which is several levels of stupid.
| From the language level, you cannot apply that word to a non
| engineered system with no purpose because it implies subverting
| the purpose.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| >There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other
| than a state arising from the physical processes in our
| bodies
|
| Actually this is backward, "I think therefore I am". There's
| no reason to believe consciousness is a state arising from a
| physical process, our experience of consciousness precedes
| our experience of sensory input and therefore the physical
| world.
|
| There is more evidence for the reality of consciousness than
| there is for the physical world, in fact we know for a fact
| that our understanding of the physical world is aberrational.
|
| edit: evidently alot of empiricists aren't very happy with
| this comment hahaha
| orwin wrote:
| No. Or rather what do you mean?
|
| We are able to track down and physically explain (thanks to
| MRI) the sentation, the objective part of consciousness
| (Chalmers's 'easy problems of consciousness'). That really
| exist and we can prove it (or we have an idea about
| experiments to run to prove it)
|
| I suppose here you're talking about the subjective
| sentation, the phenomenal experience, the 'hard problem',
| and you reference the 'cogito' not because you are a
| dualists, but because you truly think Descartes was right
| on this point (and this point only, the rest was extremely
| weak).
|
| I will argue that you're wrong. There is absolutely no
| evidence to the cogito, at most billions of anecdata from
| homo sapiens who all have similar brains and reactions!
|
| Some people believe subjective experience do not really
| exist [0][1]. A simple explanation would be: if we are
| somehow able to predict, by pure observation of predictable
| physical reactions, how an organism will act and react,
| including the fact that he will believe in a subjective
| experience, then we do not need to think subjective
| experience really exist. This is merely a tool for our
| bodies to create a sense of self unique through time,
| created from our own continuous perceptions, to allow our
| brains to strategize and avoid dangers.
|
| [0]https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02071-y
|
| [1]https://github.com/keithfrankish/articles/blob/master/Fr
| anki...
| jemmyw wrote:
| There are plenty of reasons to believe it's physical. I
| mean, in some ways I can't believe I'm having to write
| "there are no ghosts" to a technically minded community.
|
| If consciousness was not physical then where is it? Why
| would it switch on and off with physical changes to brains?
| Why would you be able to get altered states of
| consciousness with chemicals, disease and age? Why would be
| be able to marry some conscious activity with MRI scans?
|
| There's quite a few bits of evidence to suggest it's
| physical even if we don't know how it works. There doesn't
| appear to be any evidence of another... what is a non
| physical process anyway? Surely there's only two options:
| the physics we know and the physics we don't know?
| orwin wrote:
| I think consciousness emerge from physical processes. Imho
| consciousness is necessary to have a sense of self, and
| especially of self through time. This imply any living being
| capable of improvising new strategies (not randomly through
| chance and genetic lottery) is 'conscious' in the same sense
| that we are.
| kklisura wrote:
| > It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind
| of pseudoscience.
|
| You have Roger Penrose [1] interested in link to say between
| consciousness and physics [2]. Would you consider that to be
| pseudoscience?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose
|
| [2] https://nautil.us/roger-penrose-on-why-consciousness-
| does-no...
| jemmyw wrote:
| I have watched and read his opinions and yes, he has, in my
| opinion, veered into pseudoscience. It's not exactly
| without precedence for an established and respected
| scientist to go all philosophical with age.
|
| I would put his current position somewhere like "I really
| want free will to be true therefore..." rather than an
| observational approach.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Penrose, like it or not, has developed a fairly rigorous,
| if not flawed hypothesis that is quite a stark contrast
| between many philosophers who espouse such ideas as pan
| psychism.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, Roger Penrose, despite his extraordinary career and
| contributions to science, has more recently been engaging
| more in this type of pseudoscience.
|
| It can and has happened to other extraordinary minds as
| well - Linus Pauling, one of the forefathers of quantum
| chemistry and molecular biology, but also a promoter of
| vitamin C as a panacea in his later years.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think that there is such a groundswell of articles about
| 'consciousness', right now, is because of the surge in AI and
| GPT.
|
| If this is true. >"state arising from the physical processes"
|
| Then nothing prevents silicon from eventually also being
| 'conscious'.
|
| Carbon or Silicon, they are both a physical processes.
| Electrical potentials.
|
| So the section of population that just can't abide that AI
| could be 'conscious' are finding all these more esoteric
| arguments about the universe being 'consciousness', quantum
| something or other, etc... To find 'some spark' in the human,
| some metaphysical argument, to keep us special.
| orwin wrote:
| Agree. I'll also say it's a lot further away than your
| comment implies. Once ChatGPT4 can add metonymy by itself
| in a random discussion, talking about consciousness in
| silicon can be interesting.
| jemmyw wrote:
| > Then nothing prevents silicon from eventually also being
| 'conscious'.
|
| I would agree except "nothing we know" because we still
| don't know how consciousness works.
| baz00 wrote:
| It's down at the bottom of the stack.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| I hate that most education systems don't teach that physics has
| its roots in philosophy and some of the most rigorous recent
| math stems from philosophy (Godel) leading to vacuous
| gatekeeping comments like this.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| I'm well aware the physics is just 'natural philosophy', that
| doesn't make it anymore reasonable to start using it as the
| tool for metaphysics. It's a clear category error, like
| trying to use food chemistry to elucidate cognitive
| psychology in a literal sense.
| krapp wrote:
| Chemistry has its roots in alchemy, but that doesn't mean
| alchemy deserves to be treated with the same respect and
| seriousness as chemistry.
|
| Medicine has its roots in witchcraft but that doesn't mean
| witchcraft deserves to be treated with the same respect and
| seriousness as medicine.
|
| Astronomy has its roots in astrology, but that doesn't mean
| astrology deserves to be treated with the same respect and
| seriousness as astronomy.
|
| Philosophy isn't physics, and philosophy doesn't deserve to
| be treated like physics. The premise that panpsychism - which
| is essentially the basis for all animist and shamanic
| religions (the belief that all things have an innate mind or
| will) should be treated as a peer to relativity or quantum
| mechanics is absurd.
|
| I mean, quoting directly from TFA: Part of
| the appeal of panpsychism is that it appears to provide a
| workaround to the question posed by Chalmers: we no longer
| have to worry about how inanimate matter forms minds because
| mindedness was there all along, residing in the fabric of the
| universe. Chalmers himself has embraced a form of panpsychism
| and even suggested that individual particles might be somehow
| aware. He said in a TED Talk that a photon "might have some
| element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor
| to consciousness."
|
| We're to take seriously, as a scientific claim, that
| individual particles are aware and have feelings. That when a
| ball rolls downhill, it's because the ball _wants_ to roll
| downhill. That when it rains, it 's because Mother Earth
| weeps. It isn't gatekeeping to reject such nonsense, it's
| simply garbage collection.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Citations needed
| krapp wrote:
| Citations needed for what? The last 5000 years of human
| history? The individual developmental history of every
| branch of philosophy and science, their relationships and
| the iterative models of reality each developed over the
| centuries? You need citations to prove that witchcraft,
| astrology and alchemy do not provide valid models of
| reality?
|
| No, do that yourself, if you're so inclined.
| rvba wrote:
| I thought physics has its roots in mathmatics, but those
| religious articles never show any equations.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| We can construct an analytical language to interrogate
| these claims, but that wouldn't change the underlying fact
| that it is not physics or math.
| opportune wrote:
| Godel was a logician, which is practically mathematics.
| "Philosophy" includes everything from that to stoned Berkeley
| undergrads convincing each other that getting stoned must
| have been what led humans to develop consciousness from other
| apes
| calibas wrote:
| It's not just physics, all of modern science is built upon
| empiricist philosophy.
| orwin wrote:
| When a philosophy has enough proofs and credibility, it
| becomes a science. Also, I do not think you can call logician
| philosophers. Lewis Carroll wouldn't.
|
| Agree that the gatekeeping is a bit much, but doesn't
| warranted a swipe imho.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| >When a philosophy has enough proofs and credibility, it
| becomes a science
|
| I completely disagree with this notion of science. To me
| science is the practice of analysing findings from
| controlled experimentation and then deriving predictive,
| reproducible and falsifiable hypotheses.
| saled wrote:
| Why do you think that collecting evidence from
| experiments leads to truth though? What about the process
| gives you certainty?
|
| What evidence is important to making progress and what
| evidence is irrelevant?
|
| What does progress in understanding an area look like?
| Why should we undertake it?
|
| These are questions of philosophy, no experiments can
| answer them.
| user_7832 wrote:
| For anyone interested in learning more about this I would
| recommend advait vedant.
| nico wrote:
| > many phenomena that can't be inferred from the goings-on at the
| microscopic level, it is nonetheless a real, emergent feature of
| the macroscopic world. He offered the physics of gases as a
| parallel example. At the micro level, one talks of atoms,
| molecules and forces; at the macro level, one speaks of pressure,
| volume and temperature. These are two kinds of explanations,
| depending on the "level" being studied
|
| Putting aside the issue of consciousness for a moment, this is
| actually a great insight
|
| I wonder if something like this should be applied in
| physics/astronomy to solve the whole dark matter issue
|
| At a "micro level", we can talk about planets, stars and gravity,
| but maybe at a "macro level", those concepts stop being useful to
| describe the behavior of the universe, and different models might
| be needed
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| No, it's not a great insight - unless you have not studied
| physics before.
|
| It's the standard context for thermodynamics (macro) and
| statistical mechanics (micro) explanations. Sometimes called
| _coarse-graining_ and _fine-graining._
|
| For dark matter there are 3 potential levels:
|
| - _micro_ would be be new dark subatomic particles (WIMPs), or
| sterile right-handed neutrinos in the Standard Model (see
| Turok);
|
| - _meso_ is macroscopic clumps of those particles (dark stars)
| /OR/ no micro, but dark conventional matter objects, like naked
| black holes, neutron stars or brown dwarves (MACHOs), or
| perhaps just lots of dust;
|
| - _macro_ would be the truly cosmological state of the whole
| universe (a stat mech theory over the micro /meso). Think dark
| matter fluids, and phase changes to dark superfluids, that
| might have MONDian effects on gravity at the galactic level -
| _and beyond!_
| nico wrote:
| So according to you, nothing that anyone has discovered
| before is a great insight?
|
| Now, regarding the dark matter issue, maybe there are more
| levels that models can be separated in. It seems overly
| simplistic to separate the whole immensity of the universe in
| only 3 levels
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| It was a great insight by Boltzmann, and his intellectual
| heirs.
|
| But that was _circa_ 1877, around 150 years ago. It is not
| a great insight today. Please keep up.
| nico wrote:
| You mean it's not a novel insight to you
|
| It's still a great insight, regardless of who is
| remembered in history for coming up with it first
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| It _was_ a great insight, but now it is common knowledge
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| [flagged]
| nico wrote:
| Says the troll that has nothing to add to the
| conversation except crapping on other people's ideas
| without actually saying anything insightful at all. Well
| done
| Kerb_ wrote:
| Not gonna lie, GPT accusations, especially
| unsubstantiated GPT accusations, should be automatically
| flagged. There are better ways to disagree with a user,
| better ways to report GPT written spam comments, and
| better ways to shut down a conversation that you don't
| want to have.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| That's not a novel insight, it's a standard way of
| interrogating systems at various levels and has been in common
| intellectual discourse for some time now.
| meristohm wrote:
| Novel to them, and that's okay; I don't assume anyone knows
| everything. Your content is helpful in clarifying that this
| insight has been novel to many others already.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| That's a bit of a problem when you're presenting yourself
| as someone who knows anything at all.
| nico wrote:
| So? What's your point? That it can't be used for anything
| else because some people, including you, already knew about
| it, hence it can't be applied in novel ways?
|
| Btw, no one said it was a novel insight
| boringuser2 wrote:
| The problem is that every concept is novel to someone that
| doesn't know anything.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| It's not a great insight for you today, or a recent
| workshop on consciousness.
|
| It is ~150 years old and it's a well-known foundation for
| all current discussion of _emergence_ in general, and
| consciousness in particular.
| ducharmdev wrote:
| I was not expecting panpsychism to pop up on HN. Years ago I
| explored the topic out of curiosity; at first it seems pretty
| absurd, but you can find some interesting discussions and
| insights about it. At the very least, it can encourage you to
| think differently about consciousness, and perhaps even question
| some of your own assumptions about consciousness.
| swader999 wrote:
| Donald Hoffman and Tom Campbell are interesting YouTube forays in
| this area.
| zzzmarcus wrote:
| and Bernardo Kastrup.
| choxi wrote:
| I watched Hoffman's Lex Fridman interview, it sounds like his
| idea is that our perceptions are like a user interface that
| abstracts reality so we don't perceive reality as it actually
| is.
|
| Isn't that well accepted already? We know we don't sense
| everything, and our brains give us a highly compressed version
| of the senses we do have. But none of that matters when we use
| tools like cameras or microphones because they're not
| constrained the way our senses are.
|
| Is there anything more to his idea than that?
| swader999 wrote:
| Yes that's a fair take. He has done a lot of work to show
| that these perceptions couldn't have evolved to see the truth
| or see objective reality. He has a lot of rigorous math and
| simulation data on this angle.
|
| He goes further than this but has less proof so far. Says
| consciousness is fundamental, not physical reality, not
| quantum world. Says that these are projections that eminate
| from something more fundamental.
| strogonoff wrote:
| I see little in common between Hoffman's interface theory of
| consciousness and merely stating that our minds filter out
| (lossily compress, etc.) information about reality. Hoffman
| appears to effectively suggest Kantian idealism: by claiming
| that perceived time-space and phenomena in it are more like
| icons on a screen, a representation of some abstract network
| of conscious agents, he takes a stab at the hard problem and
| turns materialistic understanding of causality ("neurones
| fire, therefore I think") on its head ("I think, and it
| manifests itself as neurones firing"). Rather than filtering
| information about some external reality, minds _are_ reality,
| whereas perceived time-space is a product of them filtering
| /compressing information about themselves.
|
| Idealism of this sort is quite different from and has farther
| reaching implications than sticking to materialistic monism
| and likening our brains to meaty computers that have to
| filter out input about supposedly objectively existing space-
| time that they are a product of.
| randallsquared wrote:
| This has the feel of Michelson's assertion in the 1890s that all
| the principles had been discovered. LLMs and AGI seem poised to
| give us a huge and expanding space in which to discover how
| consciousness works, and predeclaring that _nothing_ will be
| found seems like a voluntary mistake.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > LLMs and AGI seem poised to give us a huge and expanding
| space in which to discover how consciousness works
|
| How?
|
| My own intuition is that LLMs will contribute precisely nothing
| to the philosophy of consciousness. Philosophers have been
| considering the consequences of intelligent machines for some
| time.
| randallsquared wrote:
| Philosophers have largely only been able to run thought
| experiments. While those can help clarify what we know, any
| apparently new knowledge generated thereby has to be
| confirmed by physical experiment. Physical experiments on
| human consciousness can only be done in very limited ways
| without ethical issues -- we don't have the technology to
| press the pause or undo buttons for human brains, and we
| don't have direct access to the full state of the brain.
| Assuming we develop (apparently) conscious minds on our
| current trajectory, there will be opportunities to run
| experiments in parallel, have real controls, and AGI
| researchers will, hypothetically, be able to self-introspect
| all the way down to the most basic level.
|
| You may object that there's no way to _really_ know that
| another mind is conscious, and that no volume of physical
| evidence will prove it, and that will continue to be true
| even as we learn how it all works, in the same way that
| solipsism is both fully irrefutable and essentially ignored
| by anyone who wants to know more about how the world works.
| notamy wrote:
| > Assuming we develop (apparently) conscious minds on our
| current trajectory, there will be opportunities to run
| experiments in parallel, have real controls, and AGI
| researchers will, hypothetically, be able to self-
| introspect all the way down to the most basic level.
|
| If a hypothetical AGI is truly believed to be conscious,
| how could it ever possibly be ethical to experiment on such
| a thing?
| randallsquared wrote:
| Consent plus the ability to reset make it at least
| possible to respect ethics in such experiments, unlike
| with biological organisms.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly. Consciousness is about _qualia_ -- the color of red,
| the texture of sand, and so forth. It 's _awareness_.
|
| There's nothing we know now that suggests consciousness has
| anything whatsoever to do with intelligence.
|
| We are _aware_ (or conscious) of our intelligent trains of
| thought (at least up to a certain point), in the same way we
| 're aware of a pain in our knee. We are conscious of watching
| ourselves weigh the pros and cons of a decision we have to
| make. But there's nothing whatsoever to suggest that
| consciousness plays a role in intelligent thought itself, at
| least not yet.
|
| We know that we ourselves are both conscious and intelligent,
| but it's entirely possible that's a total coincidence.
| jasfi wrote:
| I suspect so. But we need a way to find out what it's made of and
| measure it. It seems to be very elusive in that regard.
| uoaei wrote:
| The purpose of Goff's choice for the title of his book _Galileo
| 's Error_ is explained in the introduction: that Galileo
| limited science to only things that are quantifiable, and
| completely ignores qualitative factors. Note the common
| etymology with the word _qualia_. Some way to expose evidence
| of consciousness to external observers may be necessary or it
| may be impossible given the apparati that science currently
| provides.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It is quite clear, from his own work, that Goff is just
| casting around to find something about science and the
| scientific method which might account for a belief (that
| consciousness is not a physical phenomenon) that he has come
| to by other means. This view is intrinsic to a doctrine of
| "Russellian Monism" which asserts that the physical sciences
| can only talk of the relationship between entities, and not
| their intrinsic natures.
|
| How Goff hopes to discover anything substantive about
| supposed intrinsic natures that do not reveal themselves by
| participating in relations, or how they can account for
| consciousness apparently being causal in the physical world,
| has not been revealed to us by him, or anyone else.
| nico wrote:
| Maybe some things are just inmensurable
|
| Consciousness is not even well defined, in that sense it is
| ineffable
| swader999 wrote:
| Individual consciousness: self aware, memory, can make
| choices and remember.
| emmender1 wrote:
| suprised that cs peirce is not brought into this debate. he
| provided a coherent (almost scientific) theory of consciousness -
| sadly, he remains a forgotten philosopher due to his fragmentary
| writings.
| DFHippie wrote:
| "Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does
| nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the
| way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything
| about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why
| consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general
| anaesthesia, and coma." -- Anil Seth, from the article
|
| This bit -- "nor why consciousness is lost in states such as
| dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma" -- begs the
| question. We don't actually know that consciousness is lost in
| these states, just that people report no memory of consciousness
| when emerging from these states. This is a fact about memory, not
| consciousness.
|
| And this comes back to the basic problem of consciousness: we
| have no test of it other than personal report. If you assume that
| anything that does not tell you it is conscious is not conscious,
| then you're left with consciousness being an emergent property.
| Somehow Bob was without consciousness and now he has it again!
| What changed? But you don't actually have proof of this, it's
| just an assumption. And a reason to be suspicious of it is that
| it is a flattering and convenient assumption. It means many
| things and beings have no moral valence. You can leave them out
| of your ethics. Arguably it isn't consciousness but suffering or
| pleasure that is relevant here, but consciousness is a necessary
| ingredient. "That lobster looks like it suffers when it is
| plunged into boiling water, but it isn't conscious, just a
| zombie. I can do what I want with it."
|
| It seems to me the Occam's razor solution is not that
| consciousness is an emergent behavior. The modeling of the world
| in neurons is a physical thing that we can measure, and replicate
| in software. But with this we haven't gotten any closer to
| explaining why sensation is associated with some such models and
| not others, that there are two states: consciousness and
| unconsciousness. The added bit that Occam's razor trims away is
| the assertion that there are two states, not just the one
| observed state: consciousness. Panpsychism -- or cosmopsychism or
| whatever -- is the Occam's razor solution.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > Panpsychism -- or cosmopsychism or whatever -- is the Occam's
| razor solution.
|
| Occam's razor (the choice of the most parsimonious explanation)
| does not apply until you have candidate explanations, and at
| this point we don't have any. Simply supposing that
| consciousness is fundamental in some way is no more of an
| explanation than, say, simply supposing it to be an emergent
| phenomenon in certain complex physical systems.
| wafer_thin wrote:
| very astute and interesting point about memory. It occurs that
| memory is a fundamental component of the consciousness we all
| know and love. There would be no ability to even register
| "blue" without memory, there would just be moments in time
| where there was stimulus, each packet of info having no bearing
| on the last, and thus completely new and novel
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| My running conspiracy theory is that qualia is actually some kind
| of jailbreak on physical reality. Enough of the systems I've seen
| in real life are leaky at their edge cases that I wouldn't be
| totally surprised if even the ones I consider most fundamental
| are too.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Leaky in what sense? Got an example?
| passion__desire wrote:
| I remember one philosopher giving an analogy
|
| "If material world is like 3 points of a triangle then
| consciousness can be as inscribed circle"
| boringuser2 wrote:
| This is called metaphysics and generally isn't substantive by
| definition.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| If consciousness is "the state of being awake and aware of one's
| surroundings" then it depends on dualism, ie, this and that.
|
| Is the fabric of the universe dual or non-dual? If it is non-dual
| it can have no consciousness. Because the universe would be able
| to see a "non-universe".
|
| IMHO, consciousness arises out of the universe via the creation
| of duality by the human mind.
|
| The fabric is unknowable and that frustrates scientists so they
| make up theories like panpsychism. But is it really just the same
| sort of anthropomorphic delusions that they have always suffered
| from. "If I am aware, then so the universe." Guess what, we are
| not Gods, we are humans.
|
| Adding that consciousness is just when my brain compares a new
| sense object with an already brain encoded sense object (memory).
| nico wrote:
| Unfortunately we will never truly know, as the only way we can
| experience the universe is through our consciousness, in that
| sense, from a human perception perspective, the universe and
| our consciousness are inextricably intertwined and any theory
| or explanation we try to come up with is just our own
| subjective observations
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| No, there is another way (perhaps the only way) to find some
| objective knowledge - by the interaction of many
| consciousnesses. This is the scientific method.
|
| Comparison of experiences, with agreement, or refutation, can
| produce more reliable knowledge than any individual. See
| Popper, Lakatos, _et_ many _al_ that you seem unaware of.
| nico wrote:
| Which you will never be able to prove because we can never
| experience anything outside of our consciousness
|
| You can speculate all you want and create as many models as
| you please, yet you can never know what reality is to
| anyone else but yourself, nor what reality is outside of
| your own consciousness
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Exactly. I do not know why this is so hard to understand.
| If conciseness was everywhere I would be able to know
| what someone else's reality is. Since I cannot, there is
| something separating my consciousness from someone
| else's.
|
| We create consciousness.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| We do not experience the universe through our consciousness.
| We cannot comprehend the universe through consciousness.
| Consciousness is a subset of the universe.
| nico wrote:
| What I meant is that whatever we experience of the universe
| (thinking in dualistic terms as us being a separate thing
| from "the rest of the universe"), then that experience is
| happening through, or in, our consciousness
|
| And sure, we are technically not separate from the
| universe, we are very much immersed in, and inseparable
| from it
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| Are you really Philosophy TrollGPT?
|
| That is certainly how your utterances appear. All
| language games, as Wittgenstein might have said.
|
| No more discussion with you, just downvotes, troll.
| nico wrote:
| If you are not open to discussing any ideas except
| asserting your opposing view of mine, then who's the
| troll?
|
| What you are doing is the very behavior that makes HN a
| toxic place and why so many end up avoiding discussion
|
| You can't control your emotions regarding an online
| conversation so you lash out and have a meltdown like a
| toddler, blindly downvoting someone that won't agree with
| you
| Kerb_ wrote:
| Saying it again because I'm seeing it again. GPT
| accusations, especially unsubstantiated GPT accusations,
| should be automatically flagged. There are better ways to
| disagree with a user, better ways to report GPT written
| spam comments, and better ways to shut down a
| conversation that you don't want to have. And, on a
| personal level, it really makes it seem like you don't
| know what you're talking about when you resort to this
| type of comment, even if your previous statements held
| some weight.
| asdff wrote:
| Say you have photographic memory, you take a big heavy book and
| read its contents end to end, converting written thought into
| conscious thought. How is this reaction balanced, if at all? Do
| thoughts have a mass? Are they able to be expanded infinitely
| without constraint? Are they even bound by laws like conservation
| of energy?
| mainpassathome wrote:
| what if i digitize said book, and write it to a solid state
| drive? somehow, it doesn't get heavier. Must be a higher power.
| wrftaylor wrote:
| Unfalsifiable speculation has no place in a publication calling
| itself "Scientific".
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| Indeed, this stinks of woo-woo
| nico wrote:
| > Since Galileo's time the physical sciences have leaped forward,
| explaining the workings of the tiniest quarks to the largest
| galaxy clusters. But explaining things that reside "only in
| consciousness"
|
| Everything we know about anything is mediated through our
| subjective understanding and perception. Be it mathematical
| formulas that describe the universe or feelings about something.
| If you remove people, we don't know what there is, because we
| have no way of knowing
|
| Sure you can remove some people and have others observe, but that
| is still mediated by people
|
| We can never truly know anything that we don't perceive ourselves
| - so it is just impossible to know anything about a universe that
| doesn't include our perception of it
| bashinator wrote:
| > impossible to know anything about a universe that doesn't
| include our perception of it
|
| The optimistic take for me is that this is a fundamental
| feature of the Universe.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Sounds true but is it? We can't perceive neutrinos.
| jayd16 wrote:
| > it is just impossible to know anything about a universe that
| doesn't include our perception of it
|
| Is this true? What about logical deductions? Can't you use math
| and logic to know things without perceiving them?
| nico wrote:
| To me, the quote and your questions seem like different
| concepts
|
| Regarding your questions:
|
| There is a difference between intellectual knowledge and
| experience
|
| Sometimes the concept of gnosis is used to differentiate them
|
| So for example, you can read a book about riding a bike,
| maybe the book is very detailed and tells you everything
| there is to "know" about riding a bike, but unless you
| actually ride a bike, you can never "truly know" (experience)
| what riding a bike is
|
| Now regarding our perception and the universe:
|
| We live in the universe, we are part of it, we can't ever
| separate ourselves from it
|
| Then how would we ever be able to remove our perception from
| it? It's impossible to truly know
|
| Of course we can speculate and we can come up with endless
| ideas, but we can never truly know anything that we don't
| experience
|
| In that sense, even our ideas are mediated through our inner
| perception of them
|
| And of course this is my own subjective perception of my
| reality, as it is all I have
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > So for example, you can read a book about riding a bike,
| maybe the book is very detailed and tells you everything
| there is to "know" about riding a bike, but unless you
| actually ride a bike, you can never "truly know"
| (experience) what riding a bike is
|
| This is often asserted, but I don't see any reason to
| believe it is true. Just like we can picture creatures that
| have never existed, and even draw elaborate images of them,
| with enough detail and introspection we can picture an
| experience.
|
| And even if we really couldn't, this would at best be a
| limitation of our wiring, there would be no reason to think
| it's a limitation of any conscious being. After all, a
| computer is perfectly able to simulate itself and to
| simulate any input it could receive, so it can clearly
| simulate any possible experience it could have given enough
| details. By the same token, the fact that we can't control
| our optic nerves (nor other senses) as precisely is an
| accident of our genetic makeup, not some fundamental
| property.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Hmm I think we've moved the goal post from "know anything"
| to "truly know" (whatever that means).
| raydiatian wrote:
| "Since Galileo's time the physical sciences have leaped forward"
|
| Wow, who is letting high school students write for Scientific
| American these days?
| leshokunin wrote:
| I went to a talk by John Cleese, of Monty Python. He made a point
| about a recent thought that he landed through meditation.
|
| He said he believes less and less that consciousness is in the
| brain. Maybe it's something external, shared, and our brains work
| more like a camera, and make whatever is out there our own.
|
| It made an impression on me.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Many people arrive at the same idea/perception, be it through
| meditation and/or with the help of psychedelics.
|
| I think it was Terrence McKenna who described the brain as an
| antenna that tunes in to a certain band of the universal
| consciousness, and that's what we consider to be the thoughts
| of an individual.
|
| More or less same idea, slightly different way of phrasing it.
|
| I believe some buddhist practitioners also have a similar way
| of thinking.
| wafer_thin wrote:
| I've wondered about this and whether it might someday be
| testable. One thing I keep coming back to is the brain's
| apparent search power: you see a 5s video clip and can recall
| the show. This means your brain can trawl all your memories
| of all the movies and shows that you've ever seen, without
| generating a fraction of the heat energy of search done in a
| computer. It's pretty weird to think our brains can actually
| do this without help...
| slothtrop wrote:
| The most miraculous thing to me is being thrown into the world
| as an individual, and I think this idea of a tapped
| consciousness is meant to reconcile with that. There's the
| perspective also that it's entirely illusory like the self, but
| that's not satisfying by itself. Life in other things seems
| abstracted away, like machines running on electricity, but
| being _me_ , right now, you can't help but ask things like "why
| am I in this body and _reduced_ to an individual? How is it
| that I can experience this, and presumably, others can too? ".
| It's crazy.
| nico wrote:
| This is an excellent observation
|
| The idea has been somewhat famously illustrated in the concept
| of the muse, an external entity or influence that is the actual
| source of the ideas that we then channel into our reality
|
| Similar also to what Michelangelo once said:
|
| > The sculpture is already complete within the marble block,
| before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to
| chisel away the superfluous material.
|
| On a similar vein of the "not in the brain" concept, there are
| many proponents of the "embodied" consciousness, meaning that
| consciousness is in the whole body, not just our brain/nervous
| system (this is also very briefly touched upon in one episode
| of the AppleTV series Extrapolations)
| euroderf wrote:
| I would posit that human consciousness is not limited to the
| interior of the skull, nor even to an individual's nervous
| system.
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