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This article was a little confusing for me. When I read "consciousness," I think of private, subjective experience—qualia. This meaning of consciousness is a ve

This article was a little confusing for me. When I read "consciousness," I think of private, subjective experience—qualia. This meaning of consciousness is a very hard problem indeed, and any new theory is bound to be interesting. (See Chalmers for a great summary: http://consc.net/papers/facing.html http://consc.net/papers/facing.html) But the article seems to be talking about meta-cognition, not conscious experience. Meta-cognition is interesting in its own right I suppose, but far less so than what I normally think of as consciousness.

codeulike 10y ago
Someone like Daniel Dennett would argue that meta-cognition and consciousness are pretty much the same thing.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  Maybe they will come here and do so?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - codeulike 10y ago
    Perhaps start with this: http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm (1988)
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  I think Denett is right about that -- and yet I side with Chalmers saying there is a "hard" problem. Or if not a hard one, at least one that is a different problem from what neuroscientists work on. Meta-cognition or any other natural process might be "the same thing" as conciousness; but is nontheless a physical thing that somehow has qualia. Where that equivalence comes from is an interesting question that Dennet & co. seem determined to dodge.
  - abritinthebay 10y ago
    Until someone proves that qualia are even coherent it's a bit moot. Qualia are a great shorthand but they aren't even shown to exist in any real capacity other than the euphemistic way they are defined. The fact that qualia lead to incoherent rubbish like p-zombies should be enough to place the concept solidly in the same place as most of Deepak Chopra's ramblings.
    - adrianratnapala 10y ago
      Ok, I put my hand up to using "qualia" as a shorthand -- as concrete entities I expect they are indeed incoherent. But in a discussion with poeple who have it least heard the term, saying "qualia" is a lot clearer than stumbling about with terms like "subjective reality", "bare expereince" and whatever. But those who determined to dodge Chalmers' hard problem can always choose to say "bare expereince, I don't know what you mean!" It's still a just a dodge.
      - codeulike 10y ago
        But if you accept that consciousness arises within the brain and we posit that there's no special unknown branch of physics involved ... then the only possible explanation is that a complex enough system arranged in the right way can become self aware. What would it be 'like' to be a self-aware system? Would it be 'like' anything at all? I guess it would.
        mh-cx 10y ago
        This. Blatatantly quoting myself [1]: "Experience or qualia is what the process of simulation of reality feels like. Or to put it in another way: Conciousness is the process of simulating reality." So I'd agree: If you reach a certain complexity in your inner model, qualia will "magically" emerge. Another interesting point the article makes is the relation to the theory of mind. I wonder if you could even say, that we first had an inner model for the complex inner model of others and then, by applying that inner model on ourselves developed what we call conscioussness. You could probably assume that many animals are not able to take this final step and that this is what separates our consciousness from those of animals. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826593
thinkloop 10y ago
I felt the same, it doesn't try to address the "hard" problem of consciousness, as described in the article you linked. It's such an interesting problem because for one, its hard/impossible to prove consciousness. If you built an android that had every if-statement imaginable coded into it so that it behaved exactly like a human, including answering the question of whether it is conscious affirmatively, and showing signs of pain and suffering in bad situations, how will you ever know if it's all just a simulation, or if real feelies are behind it. At what point does it cross over from an extremely complex and useful behavior machine, to one that experiences actual qualia. Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings. The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. People will be polarized, with some championing android rights because they seem to be conscious, while others will be adamant that they are just complex machines that can be treated any which way. Personally I'd probably err on the side conscious, just in case.
- codeulike 10y ago
  In a few decades I think the use of very sophisticated ais in computer games could become an ethical issue.
- fpvracing 10y ago
  > The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. Do you really think it will take a thousand years for that situation to arise? I'm betting on less than fifty.
  - thinkloop 10y ago
    The last 10% always looks really tough for me. For example we kind'of have self-driving cars right now - but when will we have self-driving cars without a driver's cockpit where I can play poker in the back with complete faith that it will handle all situations intelligently, navigate any terrain and manage any situation - seems like 50+ years to me for just that.
joe_the_user 10y ago
Chalmers from your link: There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. There's nothing harder than explaining a delusional idea - while still accepting that it's true. Most individuals in this society take "consciousness" as some, often unique, mix of subjectivity, meta-cognition and other stuffs. It's also commonly taken as a quality characterizing humanness despite no agreement on what it is. Thus I'd say "the hard problem of consciousness" is exactly the sort of problem science has learned to discard. It's hard like the problem of explaining astronomy in terms of astrology, the hard problem of reworking astronomy in terms of earth-centered coordinates and any science that attempts to carry-on without clarifying terms.
- sbardle 10y ago
  Are you saying that consciousness does not exist?
  - Marazan 10y ago
    They are saying consciousness is not some special thing. I.e. not Dualism.
- chanakya 10y ago
  There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first-person experience exists and is the basis of all science, but is very hard to connect with the scientific view of the universe. If science has to "discard" this fact as inconvenient, that says more about science than the fact.
  - joe_the_user 10y ago
    There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first person experience exists and is the basis of all science The most commonly agreed thing is the people agree they have first-person experiences. That this is "the basis of all science" is a fine example of how people jump from this highly value quality to any old thing - I've also heard that subjective experience refutes all materialism, shows humans aren't computers, proves the existence of God and so-forth.
dovin 10y ago
So his attention schema theory is actually about consciousness as a whole, not just metacognition. Here's a quote from his book Consciousness and the Social Brain: >The attention schema theory could be said to lie half-way between two common views. In his groundbreaking book in 1991, Dennett explored a cognitive approach to consciousness, suggesting that the concept of qualia, of the inner, private experiences, is incoherent and thus we cannot truly have them. Others, such as Searle, suggested that the inner, subjective state exists by definition and is immune to attempts to explain it away. The present view lies somewhere in between; or perhaps, in the present view, the distinction between Dennett and Searle becomes moot. In the attention schema theory, the brain contains a representation, a rich informational description. The thing depicted in such nuance is experienceness. Is it real? Is it not? Does it matter? If it is depicted then doesn’t it have a type of simulated reality? His stance is basically that theories of consciousness rely on way too much magical thinking, and that this is the most scientifically responsible position to take. That consciousness is entirely information, rather than some sort of spontaneous emergence from the processing of information.
- acqq 10y ago
  Also Graziano, 2015 paper: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00... "According to this theory, there is, of course, no actual mystery. Attention does have a real physical basis, but the mechanistic details of the process of attention are not included in the only relevant information to which the brain has access." "This view, that the problem of subjective experience consists only in explaining why and how the brain concludes that it contains an apparently non-physical property, has been proposed before (Dennett, 1991). The attention schema theory goes beyond this idea in providing a specific functional use for the brain to compute that type of information. The heart of the attention schema theory is that there is an adaptive value for a brain to build the construct of awareness: it serves as a model of attention." "A third advantage of this theory is that it provides testable predictions. If awareness is the internal model of attention, used to help control attention, then without awareness, attention should still be possible but should suffer deficits in control. In this article, we review the existing literature on the relationship between attention and awareness, and suggest that at least some of the predictions of the theory are borne out by the evidence."
saint-loup 10y ago
Influential theories precisely equate meta-cognition and consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_theories_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_theories_of_consc...
ttctciyf 10y ago
I agree - it seems to be another variety of "nothing buttery." I don't see how locating the production of experience in attention schemas (which seem, inasmuch as they're scientifically respectable, to be indistinguishable from advanced signal processing) gets us any further with the hard problem of understanding how any subjective experience at all is necessitated or implied by what the brain does functionally. It's often occurred to me that the very difficulty we have discussing the nature of subjective experience (inverse spectrum, etc.) points to some superfluity there - giving you a precise description of retinal state, a color code, the frequencies of light, etc., isn't enough for you to tell whether my experience of red is like yours - but what description would suffice? On this line, I occasionally indulge in the thought that "qualia" are a necessary but irrelevant tokenisation of our experience, a bit like variable names: you need a bucket to put that data in, but the particular name you give to the bucket doesn't matter.
Xcelerate 10y ago
I find that lately the term "consciousness" is being overloaded to mean something that I don't think it originally meant. Because of that, I like to distinguish between neurobiological consciousness (which can be studied, probed, and predicted) and experiential consciousness (subjective experience).
blueprint 10y ago
What you refer to as qualia are not "private", even though they're subjective. When we say a person is enlightened it means they realize what kind of effect a certain kind of thing has on the "eyesight" of a person's consciousness, and they also can see what kinds of causes people carry within their own consciousnesses. The reason why you may have heard they're private is that a true enlightened being only comes to world extremely rarely – once in every few thousand years.
- blueprint 10y ago
  What's with the downvotes? What I said is true. If you disagree but cannot form a cogent retort, downvoting is a rather transparent method by which to display the lack of legitimacy of your point of view. After all, what I said is concrete and sincere, and therefore quite convenient to form a useful debate around.

codeulike 10y ago

Someone like Daniel Dennett would argue that meta-cognition and consciousness are pretty much the same thing.

jsprogrammer 10y ago
Maybe they will come here and do so?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- codeulike 10y ago
  Perhaps start with this: http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm (1988)
adrianratnapala 10y ago
I think Denett is right about that -- and yet I side with Chalmers saying there is a "hard" problem. Or if not a hard one, at least one that is a different problem from what neuroscientists work on. Meta-cognition or any other natural process might be "the same thing" as conciousness; but is nontheless a physical thing that somehow has qualia. Where that equivalence comes from is an interesting question that Dennet & co. seem determined to dodge.
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  Until someone proves that qualia are even coherent it's a bit moot. Qualia are a great shorthand but they aren't even shown to exist in any real capacity other than the euphemistic way they are defined. The fact that qualia lead to incoherent rubbish like p-zombies should be enough to place the concept solidly in the same place as most of Deepak Chopra's ramblings.
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    Ok, I put my hand up to using "qualia" as a shorthand -- as concrete entities I expect they are indeed incoherent. But in a discussion with poeple who have it least heard the term, saying "qualia" is a lot clearer than stumbling about with terms like "subjective reality", "bare expereince" and whatever. But those who determined to dodge Chalmers' hard problem can always choose to say "bare expereince, I don't know what you mean!" It's still a just a dodge.
    - codeulike 10y ago
      But if you accept that consciousness arises within the brain and we posit that there's no special unknown branch of physics involved ... then the only possible explanation is that a complex enough system arranged in the right way can become self aware. What would it be 'like' to be a self-aware system? Would it be 'like' anything at all? I guess it would.
      - mh-cx 10y ago
        This. Blatatantly quoting myself [1]: "Experience or qualia is what the process of simulation of reality feels like. Or to put it in another way: Conciousness is the process of simulating reality." So I'd agree: If you reach a certain complexity in your inner model, qualia will "magically" emerge. Another interesting point the article makes is the relation to the theory of mind. I wonder if you could even say, that we first had an inner model for the complex inner model of others and then, by applying that inner model on ourselves developed what we call conscioussness. You could probably assume that many animals are not able to take this final step and that this is what separates our consciousness from those of animals. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826593

thinkloop 10y ago

I felt the same, it doesn't try to address the "hard" problem of consciousness, as described in the article you linked. It's such an interesting problem because for one, its hard/impossible to prove consciousness. If you built an android that had every if-statement imaginable coded into it so that it behaved exactly like a human, including answering the question of whether it is conscious affirmatively, and showing signs of pain and suffering in bad situations, how will you ever know if it's all just a simulation, or if real feelies are behind it. At what point does it cross over from an extremely complex and useful behavior machine, to one that experiences actual qualia. Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings. The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. People will be polarized, with some championing android rights because they seem to be conscious, while others will be adamant that they are just complex machines that can be treated any which way. Personally I'd probably err on the side conscious, just in case.

codeulike 10y ago
In a few decades I think the use of very sophisticated ais in computer games could become an ethical issue.
fpvracing 10y ago
> The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. Do you really think it will take a thousand years for that situation to arise? I'm betting on less than fifty.
- thinkloop 10y ago
  The last 10% always looks really tough for me. For example we kind'of have self-driving cars right now - but when will we have self-driving cars without a driver's cockpit where I can play poker in the back with complete faith that it will handle all situations intelligently, navigate any terrain and manage any situation - seems like 50+ years to me for just that.

joe_the_user 10y ago

Chalmers from your link: There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. There's nothing harder than explaining a delusional idea - while still accepting that it's true. Most individuals in this society take "consciousness" as some, often unique, mix of subjectivity, meta-cognition and other stuffs. It's also commonly taken as a quality characterizing humanness despite no agreement on what it is. Thus I'd say "the hard problem of consciousness" is exactly the sort of problem science has learned to discard. It's hard like the problem of explaining astronomy in terms of astrology, the hard problem of reworking astronomy in terms of earth-centered coordinates and any science that attempts to carry-on without clarifying terms.

sbardle 10y ago
Are you saying that consciousness does not exist?
- Marazan 10y ago
  They are saying consciousness is not some special thing. I.e. not Dualism.
chanakya 10y ago
There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first-person experience exists and is the basis of all science, but is very hard to connect with the scientific view of the universe. If science has to "discard" this fact as inconvenient, that says more about science than the fact.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first person experience exists and is the basis of all science The most commonly agreed thing is the people agree they have first-person experiences. That this is "the basis of all science" is a fine example of how people jump from this highly value quality to any old thing - I've also heard that subjective experience refutes all materialism, shows humans aren't computers, proves the existence of God and so-forth.

dovin 10y ago

So his attention schema theory is actually about consciousness as a whole, not just metacognition. Here's a quote from his book Consciousness and the Social Brain: >The attention schema theory could be said to lie half-way between two common views. In his groundbreaking book in 1991, Dennett explored a cognitive approach to consciousness, suggesting that the concept of qualia, of the inner, private experiences, is incoherent and thus we cannot truly have them. Others, such as Searle, suggested that the inner, subjective state exists by definition and is immune to attempts to explain it away. The present view lies somewhere in between; or perhaps, in the present view, the distinction between Dennett and Searle becomes moot. In the attention schema theory, the brain contains a representation, a rich informational description. The thing depicted in such nuance is experienceness. Is it real? Is it not? Does it matter? If it is depicted then doesn’t it have a type of simulated reality? His stance is basically that theories of consciousness rely on way too much magical thinking, and that this is the most scientifically responsible position to take. That consciousness is entirely information, rather than some sort of spontaneous emergence from the processing of information.

acqq 10y ago
Also Graziano, 2015 paper: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00... "According to this theory, there is, of course, no actual mystery. Attention does have a real physical basis, but the mechanistic details of the process of attention are not included in the only relevant information to which the brain has access." "This view, that the problem of subjective experience consists only in explaining why and how the brain concludes that it contains an apparently non-physical property, has been proposed before (Dennett, 1991). The attention schema theory goes beyond this idea in providing a specific functional use for the brain to compute that type of information. The heart of the attention schema theory is that there is an adaptive value for a brain to build the construct of awareness: it serves as a model of attention." "A third advantage of this theory is that it provides testable predictions. If awareness is the internal model of attention, used to help control attention, then without awareness, attention should still be possible but should suffer deficits in control. In this article, we review the existing literature on the relationship between attention and awareness, and suggest that at least some of the predictions of the theory are borne out by the evidence."

saint-loup 10y ago

Influential theories precisely equate meta-cognition and consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_theories_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_theories_of_consc...

ttctciyf 10y ago

I agree - it seems to be another variety of "nothing buttery." I don't see how locating the production of experience in attention schemas (which seem, inasmuch as they're scientifically respectable, to be indistinguishable from advanced signal processing) gets us any further with the hard problem of understanding how any subjective experience at all is necessitated or implied by what the brain does functionally. It's often occurred to me that the very difficulty we have discussing the nature of subjective experience (inverse spectrum, etc.) points to some superfluity there - giving you a precise description of retinal state, a color code, the frequencies of light, etc., isn't enough for you to tell whether my experience of red is like yours - but what description would suffice? On this line, I occasionally indulge in the thought that "qualia" are a necessary but irrelevant tokenisation of our experience, a bit like variable names: you need a bucket to put that data in, but the particular name you give to the bucket doesn't matter.

Xcelerate 10y ago

I find that lately the term "consciousness" is being overloaded to mean something that I don't think it originally meant. Because of that, I like to distinguish between neurobiological consciousness (which can be studied, probed, and predicted) and experiential consciousness (subjective experience).

blueprint 10y ago

What you refer to as qualia are not "private", even though they're subjective. When we say a person is enlightened it means they realize what kind of effect a certain kind of thing has on the "eyesight" of a person's consciousness, and they also can see what kinds of causes people carry within their own consciousnesses. The reason why you may have heard they're private is that a true enlightened being only comes to world extremely rarely – once in every few thousand years.

blueprint 10y ago
What's with the downvotes? What I said is true. If you disagree but cannot form a cogent retort, downvoting is a rather transparent method by which to display the lack of legitimacy of your point of view. After all, what I said is concrete and sincere, and therefore quite convenient to form a useful debate around.