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Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
- callesgg 10y agoMy personal theory of what consciousness is that it is a feedback loop. I have major issues explaining why i think that but somehow it fits my model. When thinking of consciousness as a feedback loop, stuff sort of makes sense. I have been unable to poke holes in the theory but also unable to add strength to it.
- 0x100000 10y agoYou might be interested in reading Douglas Hofstadter's book I Am A Strange Loop.
- ccvannorman 10y agoGodel Escher Bach also touches on this as well as the relationship between the impossibility of absolute formal logic reductionism v holism, and consciousness.
- callesgg 10y agoOrdered a copy, thank you.
- carapace 10y agoFWIW, this book gave me the idea that consciousness could be some sort of feedback loop involving the whole Universe (including you and me and everybody else) possibly via quantum entanglement. I know that's terribly hand-wavey and soupy, sorry about that, just felt I should mention it. Related: meditation (at least some kinds) seems to operate by turning the subjective awareness back onto itself, becoming aware of becoming aware of... etc... A little like a camera hooked up to a monitor that it's pointed at, you get an infinite regression. In the camera-monitor system there is a physical loop of information from the lens-to-screen-to-lens-to... When you do it with you awareness, there must be something looping somewhere, regardless of the physicality or otherwise of consciousness, eh?
- roywiggins 10y agoI'm not sure you need entanglement. Embedded/embodied cognition runs with the argument that a brain isn't intelligent without a universe, and brains-in-vats models are missing something fundamental, which is all the useful stuff we offload to the body and world around us.
- wyager 10y ago> FWIW, this book gave me the idea that consciousness could be some sort of feedback loop involving the whole Universe (including you and me and everybody else) possibly via quantum entanglement Then this book sounds like it's not worth reading. There is absolutely no need to invoke pseudo-quantum mumbo-jumbo to investigate consciousness. We don't understand the chemical operation of neurons well enough to say whether quantum effects are necessary for neural functioning (although they probably aren't). Most "quantum-looking" (i.e. obviously non-classical) processes happen at much smaller space and energy scales than the chemical processes we know are involved in cognition. Quantum entanglement almost certainly isn't involved because it can't be used to transmit information and it requires high degrees of precision to make use of in the first place. The brain's thermal noise floor is vastly larger than the scale of most "interesting" quantum effects.
- carapace 10y agoDon't pan G.E.B. due to my wild-eyed speculation. I'm the one saying "quantum!" and waving my hands here, not Hofstadter. ;-)
- kowdermeister 10y agoI have come to the same conclusion, but I have some ideas how to back it up. My only concern with packaging it up as a theory is that probably few would take me seriously because I don't have any neuroscience and psychology background.
- RivieraKid 10y agoFeedback loop is a very abstract concept and I honestly do not see any connection to consciousness.
- oscilloscope 10y agoFeedback loops aren't that abstract. There are many examples in the physical world, especially in the brain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback#Applications
- RivieraKid 10y agoYes, I know that there are many examples, including the brain, it's a very general concept. What's the connection to consciousness though?
- callesgg 10y agoIf thoughts that you have can go back in the beginning of the thought cycle, you remember that you have had them you don't actually need to be "conscious" to think you are "conscious". Well technically you will be conscious, but the meaning/description of conscious in your head wont fit what it actually is.
- kanzure 10y ago> Those who make the Very Large Mistake (of thinking they know enough about the nature of the physical to know that consciousness can’t be physical) tend to split into two groups. Members of the first group remain unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become “dualists.” Members of the second group, passionately committed to the idea that everything is physical, make the most extraordinary move that has ever been made in the history of human thought. They deny the existence of consciousness: They become “eliminativists.” What's problematic about the "say no to consciousness" case? It seems to be based on their preference for other descriptions of human brain activity, especially when the alternative description (consciousness) has been so ambiguous, vague and unhelpful. > You cannot describe first-hand facts using only third-hand facts. This is the core philosophical dilemma in the hard problem of consciousness. from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12381348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12381348 (or more accurately, I think third-hand factual systems could probably posit first-hand facts-- but be unable to assert validity or something. I am not a philosopher.)
- tgflynn 10y ago> What's problematic about the "say no to consciousness" case? It denies the most fundamental fact of human experience, the existence of that experience itself.
- stcredzero 10y agoThere are problems with our experience of experience. We think consciousness is continuous, but it can be clearly demonstrated that it's fragmentary. Daniel Dennett demonstrates this using alternating images in his TED talks. However, just because our experience of experience doesn't have 100% fidelity, it doesn't follow that our experience doesn't exist. That would be like saying our vision doesn't exist because it doesn't have 100% fidelity. I think Daniel Dennett and many other consciousness deniers make this mistake. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness?l...
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- noiv 10y agoI think more interesting is the question: What has consciousness? Or from what point on humans carry one?
- catshirt 10y agoi'm struggling to identify the point of the article. mystery and matter have never been mutually exclusive. depending on it's configuration, matter can lead to some mysterious things. "it's matter" is a bad answer to pretty much every question.
- shawkinaw 10y agoThe point I got is this: Just because we can't figure out a physical picture of consciousness doesn't mean there isn't one. Furthermore, it is the physical part that is the big mystery, rather than the consciousness part.
- collyw 10y agoJust because we can't figure out a physical picture of consciousness it seems quite unwise to assume that it is without any evidence.
- goatlover 10y agoThe evidence is that consciousness is tied to the physical somehow (via brains at least). What this means, we haven't been able to figure out. Or at least, there is no consensus.
- collyw 10y agoI am not denying it is tied to the physical, that seems fairly obvious, but it doesn't mean that it is a only physical phenomenon. A radio is not the same as the channel that it is playing and one is tied to the other.
- narag 10y agoMaybe you would sound more clear if you explained what else, different from "physical" there is that conciousness, or anything else for that matter, could be attributed to.
- collyw 10y ago"Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and in particular the brain." Is there any proof of this? The while article seems to hinge on this assumption and then go on from there. We can't see or measure consciousness (brain activity yes, consciousness no). We only experience it. The article makes far to many naive assumptions without any proof.
- nitrogen 10y agoAll the proof you need is the existence of psychoactive chemicals, the effectiveness of transcranial magnetic stimulation, evidence from fMRI studies, and the selective personality alterations that occur in cases of localized brain damage.
- RivieraKid 10y agoAll of those only imply that the physical state of the brain affects consciousness, which both camps agree on.
- nitrogen 10y agoBut physicalism explains it while dualism has to work around it, violating Occam's razor. More points in favor of physicalism: scientists' ability to alter rat neurons to be photosensitive and attach them to fiber optic cables, the ability to implant memories in rats by altering a neuron, the mapping of place neurons in rats -- or perhaps the fact that brains are produced entirely from matter consumed by the mother during gestation and by the creature afterward, so where does the dualistic mind get a chance to insert itself? I'll note that I used to be a staunch dualist for religious reasons, but became convinced of physicalism over a period of years of semi-active reading.
- ZeroFries 10y agoOr, matter is entirely imagined. Neurons are imagined. Atoms are imagined. Reality is inseparable. Only one thing exists, as you say.
- mynegation 10y agoTo echo callesgg elsewhere in this thread, my own pet "theory" is that conciousness is a metacomputation, i.e. not just a process of neural reactions to outside events, but reaction to a process of reaction. For example, understanding the need to convey acquired information to another being to the same species eventually led to the development of language. Figuring out that brain forgets information led to the development of storytelling (hoping that someone else will remember) and eventually writing. And so on. Conciousness to me is not black and white but instead a spectrum of traits made possible by thinking about thinking.
- ffwd 10y agoBut how does this explain the direct subjective experience that we have through our senses (also called the hard problem)?
- kordless 10y agoThere's meta computation and meta storage - the global consciousness is all computable Wisdom, but done with sacredness (delay). Space, or the creation of it, is networking or data exchange between the computation layer and the "storage" layer. We are here because of the causality happening between the layers.
- ilaksh 10y ago"metacomputation" -- that reminded me of this from Wikipedia on metasystem transition: "Turchin has applied the concept of metasystem transition in the domain of computing, via the notion of metacompilation or supercompilation. A supercompiler is a compiler program that compiles its own code, thus increasing its own efficiency, producing a remarkable speedup in its execution."
- lohankin 10y agoFrom other news: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Backpropagation
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- p1esk 10y agoThis is the most interesting comment in this thread.
- RivieraKid 10y agoMaybe, but it makes little sense.
- p1esk 10y agoMakes perfect sense to me. Consciousness is how the process of backpropagation feels to a sufficiently complex neural network.
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- jack9 10y ago> I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is I guess it's solved. I'm glad the NY Times is where I go for my scientific analyses.
- azernik 10y agoThis is an almost stereotypical reductionist view - yes, we know a lot of fine details of how consciousness and cognition and experience work, but we absolutely do not understand their nature. That's like saying chemistry is all you need to understand how a bacterium works. You'll be able to decipher a lot of the mechanisms, but how the system developed and how the pieces fit together is always going to remain beyond your grasp without more specific research.
- RivieraKid 10y agoThis is how I see it: - Consciousness is out of the scope of physics. You have to leave the common "physics is everything" perspective to understand consciousness, however counterintuitive that is. - Physics is just a tool to describe the patterns of our subjective experience / consciousness. - The hard problem is, why does positioning atoms in a piece of matter (brain) trigger the perception of color or pain? - Dualism and solipsism are approximately correct, depending on the specific definitions, which vary a lot.
- mruniverse 10y agoPhysics seeks to find out how things work. Questions might not be answerable but that doesn't put it out of the scope of physics. The hard problem you pose (positioning atoms... triggering perception of color or pain), what else is that but a physics problem?
- 7373737373 10y agoIntegrated Information Theory[0][1] is the first approach to solving these problems that make sense for me. It takes an axiomatic approach and provides a computable method to associate both a level of consciousness and the content of the experience to an arbitrary causal system. Unlike all these unscientific philosophical considerations it can actually be used to create testable hypotheses. [0] http://integratedinformationtheory.org/ http://integratedinformationtheory.org/ [1] http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588 http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...
- ajkjk 10y agoI don't see why any of that is necessary. It seems just as mystical and hand wavey as other attempts to talk about consciousness, from what I've browsed.
- 7373737373 10y agoThere isn't anything mystical about it, though - if close to the truth - it would have some interesting implications. I would be interested in seeing different approaches with similar explanatory power.
- davmre 10y agoHave you read Scott Aaronson's "Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist" (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799)? He commends IIT for making falsifiable predictions, but argues that some of those predictions are, in fact, false.
- 7373737373 10y agoYes. In the follow-up linked above he also describes the authors' responses to this. The predictions are not de facto false. He argues that they are intuitively false, which is a matter of personal belief but not empirical research. The same goes for some counterarguments.
- Madmallard 10y agoPeople with mitochondrial disease get autistic symptoms autism is like lacking of part of the conscious experience of interpersonal interaction your cells are processing reality for you and when you lack the energy you will lack some of that processing
- paulsutter 10y agoConsciousness is a suitcase word, which makes it challenging to debate. From [1]: "In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky discusses suitcase words—words that contain a variety of meanings packed into them, such as conscience, emotions, consciousness, experience, thinking, morality, right, and wrong. "The word ‘consciousness’ is used to describe a wide range of activities, such as “how we reason and make decisions, how we represent our intentions, and how we know what we’ve recently done [p128].” If we want to better understand the various meanings of consciousness we need to analyse each one separately, rather than treating it as a single concept. [1] https://alexvermeer.com/unpacking-suitcase-words/ https://alexvermeer.com/unpacking-suitcase-words/
- astazangasta 10y agoEvery word is a suitcase word.
- mcguire 10y agoMy words mean exactly what I wish them to mean.
- coldtea 10y agoI got the Alice reference, but not the point of the comment. Obviously they don't, and it's not up to the one saying the words but to the listener too.
- kefka 10y agoPrecisely. Every word has emotional meaning alongside it. It's packed in via various ways: culture, history, happenings, social group. The bad part, is words unintended to carry bad emotional meaning can cause significant problems.
- RileyKyeden 10y agoThis sounds similar to thought-terminating cliche.
- aminok 10y agoGiven the world is analog, with states never reaching a state of absolute zero (e.g. there is no distance from a nucleus at which there is zero probability that an orbiting electron will be found), I think consciousness does not ever diminish to nothingness at physical states simpler than our own. It could therefore be reasoned that all matter in the universe is conscious.
- VLM 10y agoIf consciousness is just a complicated computation, which seems the simplest explanation, then it can be analogous to the attitude toward "old computer science beliefs". As a side issue, someday much like people make furniture using 300 year old technology there will be craftsman making programs using no algorithm discovered (learned? found? created?) post 1970. Its a good thing we invented computers in recorded history and they're not prehistorical or delivered from space aliens, or we'd be having the same sophistry about philosophical discussions about computers as we do about consciousness. What, you claim a mere arrangement of impure silicon atoms implements the majesty and beauty of the lambda and the red black tree? When you think of binding a value to a variable, how do you propose to do that with mere atoms alone? So you think you can build a computer completely out of NOR gates, well, that's very nice but seeing as computers came from space aliens and no human has ever made a computer we'll wait on that theory until we see you run "hello world" on it. Surely an "intelligent designer" created computers and such complexity cannot operate via mere atoms, much like mere atoms arranged in peculiar shapes makes hard steel. Something like this already almost exists between the EE/microcontroller type people vs the CS/algo people. Note my plethora of weasel words, something, almost, etc. Aside from the philosophical analogies being entertaining by themselves, it would make interesting hard sci fi. Imagine a world where god is blamed for giving us clay tablets containing most of automata theory. Wouldn't that be an interesting sci fi setting?
- myflash13 10y agoThe problem with claiming that consciousness is just a complicated computation is not merely that we simply haven't advanced our study enough to understand it. The problem is that what we know so far about the nature of computation seems to directly contradict and falsify the notion that consciousness is just computation. To put it simply: our knowledge of computational complexity, algorithms, and general problem solving shows that our human intelligence performs far more sophisticated operations than are possible given the number of neurons that exist in our brains (unless there are some super-fast algorithms that we haven't discovered yet, which would have massive implications on the P=NP problem, and our understanding of physics). Related video about why we don't have AI yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3of7xYoMQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3of7xYoMQM
- mcguire 10y ago"I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious. "The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour." The author seems to be traveling a road very close to solipsism. If the only thing you can know is your own consciousness...
- visarga 10y agoEven though solipsism is considered unfalsifiable, it can't explain why the world is so regular and yet complex, much more complex than human imagination. We can feel the limits of our imagination, but reality is much more complex. So there is the proof that there is an external world. It's not all in our imagination, because our imagination is less complex than the world we experience. If we said that our own imagination created the world, then it must be a Godly power. Basically we attribute divine powers to our own minds, which is absurd.
- mcguire 10y agoIn what way do you feel the limits of your imagination?
- visarga 10y agoIt's easy: there are many systems that are more complicated than what we usually can imagine. For example, the detailed structure of a material, or the internal structure of a language. We don't usually imagine coherent systems of such complexity. If there ever was a man trying to imagine something hugely complex, then he was surely Tolkien with LOTR. He imagined languages, countries and peoples in an amazing detail. But that shows how hard it would be to try to imagine something as complex as the real world. Our minds don't have such generative powers, thus the world doesn't come from our imagination.
- paolomaffei 10y agoScientific rationalism at its worst: trying to apply logic for something that is beyond logic, and all the way not realizing the basic mistake of thinking that everything in experience can be expressed or understood with logic, thought and scientific experiments. The writer (and a very large part of society) is so oblivious to the unconscious dogma "Everything can be explained in a consistent scientific system" that he doesn't even see it he's holding it - precisely like a Christian will tell you "Look stuff is like this, it says so in the bible". All this mental masturbation about trying to locate consciousness in the brain/body is utterly ridicoulous. Why do you think you haven't found it yet? Hello? But according to scientific rationalism everything that exist is matter (for only matter can be PROVED to exist with a scientific experiment...), so consciousness must be there too right? Just like a man who's lost his keys outside, but the street is very dark and cold, so he decided to search for them in his house, which has lights to see better and is much more comfortable.
- carapace 10y agoThis is terrible. Is is even an argument? I was reading "Hard problem of consciousness" Wikipedia article this morning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness I'm not sure this adds anything to that. The author seems to want to say that consciousness is primary and that the physical universe, matter, is consciousness somehow, so poof no more mystery. But this doesn't touch the "hard problem" so who cares? There is what I like to call the flux: form and movement. I lump together "external" and "internal" experience, including all proprioceptive experience, etc. Then there is the subjective awareness. It is primary. As the author points out, every other fact we know is contingent upon the fact of subjective awareness. Everything is content to this whatever-it-is observer. This awareness itself seems not to have any qualities or properties whatsoever, making it extremely difficult to talk about (and rendering it forever beyond any scientific treatment!) Somehow, this awareness is our "self". (It may or may not also be tied into the quantum "Measurement Problem" but that is a whole 'nother story.) You have a body but you're not your body; you have emotions but you aren't your emotions; you have thoughts but you aren't your thoughts; you are that awareness. Now, if that awareness created or creates the physical world (as the Bhagavad Gita seems to state) that would be pretty amazing and I'd love to read about it. This article doesn't really expand on that.
- nighthawk24 10y agoThe Upanishads describe consciousness with amazing realizations about self. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanishads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanishads https://www.amazon.com/Upanishads-Classic-Indian-Spirituality/dp/1586380214 https://www.amazon.com/Upanishads-Classic-Indian-Spiritualit...
- radarsat1 10y ago> You have a body but you're not your body Not only that, but you're you because you're not someone else's body. That sounds tautological but I think it's important. I think a big part of what gives someone consciousness is identity, and what gives us identity, is the idea of us being an island isolotated within our body and therefore distinct from other conciousnesses. Which sounds pointless, but I think it's actually significant if you start to consider the eventual effect of identity on "shared consciousness" via technologically-enabled telepathy, which we may actually see one day in the far future.
- smegel 10y ago> where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever Really? Most people I know would throw self-awareness into the mix. When you make such a bad start, the rest of your article isn't worth reading.
- coldtea 10y ago>The reply is simple. We know what conscious experience is because the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is. That's sidestepping the issue. Of course we know what consciousness is in this sense. What we don't know, and what we actually mean when we say we don't know what consciousness is, is what causes it and how it emerges.
- azakai 10y agoYou ask what causes consciousness and how it emerges, which presupposes something before consciousness - something that can cause it and it can emerge from. Most likely you intend the physical world. Why is consciousness in need of being explained in that manner, is what I think the author would ask. It's similar to saying that physical matter or energy are hard problems, as we don't know what causes them or how they emerge - not in the sense of conversion from one form of energy or matter to another, but what generated matter or energy in the first place. (With that said, I do think there are strong arguments for favoring the physical world, and that pose a challenge for the author's position.)
- coldtea 10y ago>You ask what causes consciousness and how it emerges, which presupposes something before consciousness - something that can cause it and it can emerge from. And why not? Most (all?) including rocks, have a cause and constituent elements that need to be arranged in a certain way for them to have a particular function. The strange thing would be to presuppose consciousness as without something before it. Which would be like what Christians for example consider for the "soul".
- themgt 10y agoI feel like a lot of the replies here are missing what's actually a quite subtle, thoughtful argument: The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made the point vividly in 1714. Perception or consciousness, he wrote, is “inexplicable on mechanical principles, i.e. by shapes and movements. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and be conscious, we can conceive of it being enlarged in such a way that we can go inside it like a mill” — think of the 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage,” or imagine the ultimate brain scanner. Leibniz continued, “Suppose we do: visiting its insides, we will never find anything but parts pushing each other — never anything that could explain a conscious state.” ... Many make the same mistake today — the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can’t be physical. We don’t. We don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff.. We find this idea extremely difficult because we’re so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can’t be physical. We don’t see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it’s what matter is — what the physical is. People making computer analogies below are engaging in the exact fallacy the piece is arguing against. A turing machine is a mathematical model for symbolic manipulation, and yet it's assumed one could somehow "map" consciousness 1-to-1 onto such a machine. The fact we can't simulate a single protein fold on a supercomputer gives me real pause in believing we've begun to grasp or have the ability to digitally emulate the kind of tricks life used to bootstrap consciousness out of matter. I know the "no real evidence" / "too warm & wet & macro" arguments against quantum consciousness, but that to me looks like by far the most fruitful path to investigate to break out of dualist/"eliminativist" dilemma we find ourselves in. Recent research on quantum biology already makes clear life makes is far more quantum than I think almost anyone would have believed possible a decade or two ago. Considering just photosynthesis, arguably no life as we know it on earth would be possible without clever non-classical hacks by nature.
- roywiggins 10y agoHow does making it quantum help? A PRNG in my head makes me unpredictable until someone finds the seed; what benefits other than true randomness does a quantum brain actually "buy"? It's all still physical stuff bumping around, just a little bit nonlocal.
- vinceguidry 10y agoThis article just kicks around concepts with no real insight. It's easy to demonstrate that consciousness is matter. Put a bullet through someone's brain and that person will cease to be conscious. What is difficult to demonstrate is if that is all there is to it. For this we can turn to math. Do the intricacies of the rules of mathematics actually exist anywhere? Obviously not, unless you consider words and symbols written in books to qualify. Math exists everywhere, because you can use it to describe the physical, and it exists nowhere, because there is no literal physical representation of it anywhere. But we can actually build physical representations of particular math equations, inputting them as programs into a computer. The representations obey the rules of mathematics, as well as the rules of the physical world, if you destroy the computer, you also destroy the operation of the program. But yet there is more to these programs than meets the eye physically. There are hidden rules that they operate by, more than just the physical affects them. These are the rules of math. We can analyze the programs using various mathematical techniques and prove things regarding them. It is the same way with consciousness. We only see the physical affects because that's what we're looking for. We don't see the countless hidden rules that also affect consciousness. They are so numerous and manifold that they look wholly continuous with the physical world and physical rules. What are these rules? In a word, they are ideas. Ideas have logic to them and can be compared with other ideas. We can say that one course of action is good or bad, when compared to other courses of action. Ideas and thoughts themselves are so comparable to computer programs that it's amazing to me that we programmers scoff at the idea of thinking machines. You analyze thoughts with other thoughts, with tools of logic. You analyze computer programs with the rules of math, many times those rules are implemented with other computer programs. The question, "what is consciousness," is purely the domain of philosophy. Biology and physics can only takes us so far in our quest to understand ourselves. To attempt to do so would be like trying to analyze a running computer system by smashing it apart and looking at the silicon under a microscope. It fundamentally mistakes what a computer program is. And knowing that it is just electrical signals traveling across transistor gates doesn't get you very far either. Even analyzing the voltage levels across the entire running system isn't going to tell you much either.
- sp527 10y agoI didn't realize until reading this comment section that there's an entire demographic of intelligent people in denial about why we are conscious (generic cognition is an evolutionary advantage in responding to circumstances that are too dynamic to be accounted for by a process measured in generations) and whether it persists beyond death (no, because it's hooked up to the brain). And by the way, it clearly worked : we colonized the planet. And now we have arrived at a juncture wherein we are left having to explain our existence when the reality is that our only identifiable purpose is to reproduce. Everything else is incidental.
- sebastianconcpt 10y agoYou are talking about behavior. Qualia is something else. Why does it exists?
- sp527 10y agoBecause evolution ultimately reduces entropy in response to stimuli. This process, combined with time, can yield complexity. Countless studies abound ascertaining rudimentary aspects of cognition in even fairly primitive organisms. It's hardly a trait upon which humans hold an exclusive claim - we just evolved the best version of it.
- CuriouslyC 10y agoHe's asking why we aren't just philosophical zombies. There's no reason that systems that display intelligence have to experience existence.
- sp527 10y agoThat's another way of asking if we could (theoretically) simulate intelligence. Scientific consensus offers an emphatic 'yes' to this question. We debate the when and how (not the whether) of AGI.
- tim333 10y ago
- ygmelnikova 10y agoWell, after reading these comments, it's perfectly clear what consciousness is. Guess we can all just move along now.
- sebastianconcpt 10y agoMechanicists confuse Consciousness with behavior. Of course we have behavior (mind) and that, in a mechanistic world, is enough to survive and reproduce. But Consciousness is something else. We are not Philosophical Zombies. Qualia is there and is a hard problem that resist most hypotesis.
- ilaksh 10y agoAfter reading all of the interesting comments and debates, I think that as far as having fun wasting time with amateur philosophy, consciousness can be quite a fun topic. But beyond that I think I just want to echo what paulsutter said in his comment -- consciousness is a suitcase word with too many different meanings. To have a 'real' discussion you would need to unpack all of the different meanings at the beginning, but no one is going to do that. Also, the word consciousness is directly tied into belief systems, so if you want to understand someone's belief system, you can ask them about it, but the nature of beliefs is that you are not going to have a constructive conversation. If anyone is curious about my own beliefs, I think that we can generally answer the Leibniz machine question with 'emergence' so perhaps I am an emergentist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism I like the general explanation of how something like consciousness arises from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasystem_transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasystem_transition
- danielam 10y ago"philosophers have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness” Many philosophers today, including materialists, are heirs to Cartesian metaphysics, the same metaphysics that brought us the mind-body problem and the problem of qualia. The difficulties the author has in mind are very much bound up with this Cartesian (and Galilean) legacy. The idea that material beings can be conscious is often treated like it's some new and shocking claim. The reason for that is, again, the broadly Cartesian heritage at work. For Descartes, it takes an immaterial "res cogitans" to be conscious. The material body, as a desiccated "res extensa", is incapable of functioning as a substrate for anything we might call "consciousness". And because Descartes holds that only human beings possess minds understood as "res cogitans", only human beings can possess consciousness. Furthermore, "res extensa" lacks sensory qualities like color or sound. As a result, these qualities are located in the "res cogitans" as immaterial "qualia". Materialism does not escape the Cartesian paradigm. Instead, it denies the "res cogitans" and tries to locate what was ascribed to the "res cogitans" back in the "res extensa" while maintaining many of the metaphysical and methodological tenets of Cartesianism. This is where the problem of qualia occurs. The problem is insurmountable as long as the Cartesian suppositions are maintained. No amount of "keeping at it" with the current methods will ever resolve the issue. (See Nagel for more.) For what it's worth, Aristotelian metaphysics encounters no such difficulties because it does not adhere to the dualism of Cartesian metaphysics (though sadly, few philosophers understand Aristotelian metaphysics; there seems to be a resurgence of interest, however). Indeed, for Aristotle, "consciousness" (though he does not use this term) is part and parcel of what it means to be an animal, human or otherwise. (See Jaworski and Feser for more.) "It’s true that people can make all sorts of mistakes about what is going on when they have experience, but none of them threaten the fundamental sense in which we know exactly what experience is just in having it." If there was any doubt about the Cartesian flavor of the author's reasoning, this statement should have dispelled it. "Members of the first group remain unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become 'dualists.' Members of the second group, passionately committed to the idea that everything is physical, make the most extraordinary move that has ever been made in the history of human thought. They deny the existence of consciousness: They become 'eliminativists.'" Ah, but the eliminativists haven't escaped the legacy of Cartesian dualism either! They've eliminated not only the "res cogitans", but the facts of experience (e.g., "qualia") altogether! It's a notoriously incoherent position. Strawson says he's a panpsychic physicalist, but that falls into the dualist camp once you get down to it. He offers no third way between Cartesian dualism and eliminativism.
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- kazinator 10y agoIf consciousness is just matter, why isn't yours accessible to me. There is something deeper at play. I have a hypothesis that a consciousness is a function of a universe. Each universe has just one consciousness. Another person's consciousness is inaccessible because it's in a different universe. Only the matter part of that is projected in your universe, not the actual identity. Without a hypothesis like this, we are left with postulating hidden variables: some hidden context pointer which resolves to you or me or such.
- gooserock 10y ago> If consciousness is just matter, why isn't yours accessible to me. Because my matter and your matter aren't in close enough physical proximity or the appropriate configuration to have any communication with one another. Same way that you and I both live in houses, but my front door doesn't open into your living room.
- kazinator 10y agoYou can visit someone's home, or move to a new one. I think that being locked to a particular consciousness and having no access to another one is on par with not having access to parallel universes. I'm going to click Update right now. In another universe, a parallel me closes the page without clicking Update. I have no access to that.
- gooserock 10y agoPerhaps I'm just not smart enough to understand what the hell this article is driving at. But I'm pretty confident in my personal understanding of "consciousness": it's a word that we use to describe our "experiencing" of the physical world, which is an emergent property of our incredibly complex neurological infrastructure. Is this article agreeing with me, or disagreeing with me? I can't honestly tell.
- thyrsus 10y ago"[T]here is a fundamental respect in which ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us — except insofar as it is consciousness" I think the article finds "emergent property" mysterious. It intuits that there is a link between knowing what the "stuff" is that behaves as physics describes it, and "consciousness", by which we know there is something rather than nothing. I think that's a mistake: it's like thinking you couldn't understand an article on the web without directly observing all the electronics that created it. I don't believe that fundamental particles (e.g., quarks) have any identifier attached to them to distinguish them from other fundamental particles, except those that describe their behavior: (probability distribution of) location, (probability distribution of) momentum, (probability distribution of) mass, etc. There is no "stuff" that is not behavior. Physics works to refine our model of the fundamental particles; everything after that is "emergent property". A sorting algorithm in a high level language doesn't depend on what CPU it runs on, given sufficient RAM and that there are no hardware faults. It may have been designed by a human, but it may also have been generated by simulated evolution (genetic algorithm). Fundamental particles/waves don't have hardware faults, but they do have probability distributions. Atoms are an emergent property of their constituents and decay when their constituents reach a low probability state incompatible with the constitution of the atom. Molecules are an emergent property of atoms and become different molecules when their constituents decay or their components react to some external force (usually the electromagnetic forces of another molecule). Cells are an emergent property of some kinds of molecules, and so on up the complexity scale. Consciousness is perhaps the top of the pyramid.
- jwatte 10y agoThe article postulates that "everyones" definition of consciousness is "experience of any kind whatever." That's not my definition at all. My camera is not conscious because it experiences images. My speakers aren't conscious because they experience the sound vibration they emit. Consciousness may be an important part in us humans interpreting our experiences in some context, but it is totally different from those experiences. I can be conscious for a while in a sensory deprivation tank! Separately, saying we "know nothing" about physics, just because we have to experience physics through our senses, is somewhere between disingenuous and false. We know how to predict the behaviour of physical systems very well. We know much less about how to predict conscious systems. So, if by "knowledge" you mean "ability to predict outcomes, possibly as result of stimuli," we know physics much more than consciousness. Or, perhaps, we know simpler physical systems, but but the complex systems that give rise to consciousness -- again, we know more about physics than consciousness, but not enough physics to explain consciousness as a physical system. Finally, arguing that the mind is just its physical/chemical make up requires a lot more proof than we currently have. That argument reduces to "there is no free will." It may be true, but we don't know enough of quantum processes in the brains function to say that for sure. We certainly can't simulate or predict a couscous human brain yet.
- walter_bishop 10y ago"It’s ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the ground that everything is physical, and that consciousness can’t possibly be physical)" We don't doubt that consciousness exists, what we do call into question is the assertion that it is of a non-corporeal nature. Therefore it has to be physical in nature. panpsychism: 'the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.'