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The Challenge of Consciousness

106 points by lermontov 10y ago

breckinloggins 10y ago
I promised myself I wouldn't follow the Chalmerian rabbit down the consciousness rabbit hole for a while (one eventually gets tired of being dizzy no matter how fascinating the reason). Every time I swear to myself that I'll give it a rest for a few months, something like this pops up on HN and it starts all over again. Here's as far as I got last time. I'm almost certainly wrong, but hey, when it comes to consciousness, we know so little that being able to pinpoint why someone is wrong is still progress. - Time is real but not "absolute". The universe exists as a causally connected network of ever-present nows. We aren't "slices of the Minkowski spacetime" experiencing itself. That's a fantastic model of reality at certain scales, but it's not reality. - Ensembles of causally connected physical systems evolving in the now are "ontoglogically real" in the sense that something about them actually exists above and beyond their parts. - Certain evolving physical systems have "an interior". It feels like something to be the interior of such a system. - We don't experience the world, we experience being the interior of a certain kind of evolving physical system whose job it is to create, process, and manipulate representations. "We" at any moment are the interior of the gestalt representation of that moment. - Evolution selected and maximized interiority for a reason. It has a purpose. How it has a purpose I have no idea, and any solutions smack of dualism. However, the closest thing I have to a hypothesis that isn't completely crazy is that what we call "the physical" and "the mental" are simply two projections of some "actual" underlying structure that is something like a Hilbert space. If that's the case, then it's possible that putting the physical system into a certain state causes the interior of that system to "feel" something which, in turn, causes some kind of "pressure" on the physical again. I have no clue how this could work, but I do like the strategy of starting with the commonsensical but heretical idea that we wouldn't be conscious if evolution didn't find a use for that property, and then going from there. Anybody else have any crazy thoughts so we can at least talk about why we're wrong about them?
- justinpombrio 10y ago
  Is your "interior" just the mental model we have of the world (including ourselves)? If so, it's not surprising that evolution selected for it. It's advantageous to be able to make predictions about the world (including ourselves), and to make predictions about a thing you need a model of the thing.
  - breckinloggins 10y ago
    True, but what is surprising is that there is something "it is like" to be that interior. As an example: CPUs can perform calculations on data we consider "representations". The outcome of those calculations, in turn, affect the world. We suspect that they do this without there ever being something it is like to be a CPU. At first blush, we would suppose that neurons firing this way and that to create actionable representations would have the same property. Evolution would be happy. But there's something extra there: it FEELS like something to be a neural network in a sequence of evolving states. Why? The heretical hypothesis is that the feeling itself had a purpose and was part of the system.
    - david-given 10y ago
      > True, but what is surprising is that there is something "it is like" to be that interior. I don't know; is there? How do I tell? I mean, I know what I experience, but I'm not an objective observer. There's evidence that what we perceive as the continuous stream of events is actually assembled in our memory after the fact from various out-of-order sensory inputs. How do I know that what I perceive as consciousness (and remember, I have no way of knowing whether it's the same as what anyone else perceives, or whether they perceive it at all) is anything more than just wishful thinking? And that's a serious question to which I really want an answer.
      - projektir 10y ago
        That seems more relevant to the quality of information being felt, not the feeling itself. Even if it's just assembled in memory later, it's still felt, there is still a "it is like". The presence of feeling is rather obvious when you feel things like pain. Can't exactly make that up. That's definitely there. A lot of problems are grounded in feeling itself and wouldn't exist if nobody felt anything. Proving its presence in other people is impossible, but it would seem very strange that you work one way and everyone else works a completely different way without some outside system tinkering with it.
- emtel 10y ago
  I think saying that "evolution selected consciousness for a reason" is a potential category error. It seems a bit like saying that evolution selected blood pressure. Evolution selected circulatory systems - blood pressure is an inevitable phenomenon of a circulatory system. Similarly, it might be that evolution selected information processing and decision making systems, and that consciousness might be an inevitable phenomenon of sufficiently complex information processing systems.
  - breckinloggins 10y ago
    That's why I labelled the idea "heretical". I think your explanation is by far the most popular one in science. The idea is that consciousness is an "epiphenomenon" - the "steam of the locomotive". It has no functional purpose. I'm simply suggesting that we try seeing where we go if we reject this hypothesis and instead treat consciousness as a thing that itself has survival utility. Doing so does cause dualism to creep in awfully quickly, but I'm not really so ideologically committed to pure physicalism that I'm unwilling to take the thought experiment seriously.
    - untoreh 10y ago
      consciousness can be seen as the counterweight to emotions, so it can have survival utility
      - robotresearcher 10y ago
        There is no widely agreed upon functional utility of being conscious. The zombie thought experiments are about this.
    - sooheon 10y ago
      I can't make the leap from evolution selecting for consciousness for some utility to dualism. Can you make that more explicit for me? What you've stimulated for me is the question of whether brains and their processes could have the same utility without the quality of interiority? We can make obvious observations like "the pain of intense heat incentivizes the animal to stop touching fires". Was it necessary that the animal feel the pain, or could the exact same behavioral modification have been duly recorded in some neural adjustment without the interior experience? My personal intuition is that 1. it is possible for a machine with the right interfaces running a sophisticated enough turing machine to replicate the above, and 2. such a turing machine would not have the same quality of interiority that we have. This suggests that consciousness doesn't have some inherent utility. Except! From my internal observations, consciousness seems to have the quality that it focuses inputs and computation. I filter out noise, center my reasoning/recall/attention on one or two things at a time. Perhaps this ability to filter and focus allows for more peak "thought" or "processing" given equal grey matter mass or energy input. So my thesis is that the evolutionary advantage of consciousness is that it was a software based way to extract more performance out of brains given hardware limitations.
- illvm 10y ago
  What about the idea often proposed by Graham Hancock where consciousness is not generated in the brain but rather the brain is a sort receiver for it?
  - projektir 10y ago
    That leaves the question of where is consciousness, then.
  - gnaritas 10y ago
    That's an idea with zero evidence and thus indistinguishable from fantasy.
  - AgentME 10y ago
    Hard to square that idea away with observable concepts like how hormones and brain damage affect people. One could say that the brain does all the computation, and the link to consciousness is one-way, but if that consciousness-link isn't affecting the physical computation, then that doesn't explain why our brain makes us talk about being conscious. That consciousness-link-thing would be entirely unrelated to why we talk about being conscious and should be called something else.
  - simonh 10y ago
    Then we should be able to detect the transmissions and build other receivers. Or we should be able to block the transmissions, or generate new ones. If this hypothesis were true, it should be very easy to construct tests for it but as far as I am aware nothing is forthcoming.
- rubberstamp 10y ago
  Isn't time what we experience because we have memory? I think my consciousness is the state I got into because of the experiences I had due to interactions. Brain is finite state machine. Finite because it is limited to states of universe. Even if I live near a black hole I may only live 70 years in local time experienced, which may equal to like 1000 years in Earth's local time experienced. I think its the underlying physics that shapes our thinking. Basically its all physics rules how particles/sub-particles/super-particles interact and the energy flowing through it. Now am "I" in control of making decision to do one thing and not the other? Or was it inevitable that the decision was made as that was the only possible outcome of particles inter acting in my brain at that moment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012952 I was watching videos of elephants in wild. They are just the same like us. I saw a group of elephants finding a waterhole, but the food was scarce. They could water the plants in nearby area to produce more food. They just haven't figured it out yet. Just like us they pass around information using their language. They do not have language for what they have not figured out yet. They will have that capability once they figure out something and find the need to communicate it. Any organism I take I see behavior that is very much ours if we too lacked such knowledge and technique. Our communication latencies are decreasing steadily with advancement of tech as we figure out more things. Now when we have the tech to naturally communicate with each other the exact same thought with all the context of that thought to somebody instant or in realtime as it happens, then we are essentially a super organism. Each of us can be equated to neurons in brain with each of us having many neurons with each neuron having many molecules interacting with each which has atoms interacting. HN is like a place where I find information I value more. Many quality ideas from all around Earth. When I try communicate with my sister to clarify some doubt she has, I often tries to explain to her why something is so with all the context. She couldn't intake all the data I provide as fast as I provide it(keep up with me) and within a minute or two she's like STOP! People want just exactly only what they ask for. Everything else is considered noise.
aaimnr 10y ago
I always point to David Chalmers when someone wants to understand the problem of consciousness. I like how casual he is about possible solutions and gives credibility to all the options (unlike eg. Daniel Dennett, who seems almost religious about how revolutionary his "there's no problem at all" approach is). I really recommend this podcast in which Sam Harris talks with Chalmers about all the options currently in the game: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-light-of-the-mind https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-light-of-the-mind One of the most promising theories (discussed in the podcast) assumes that consciousness is a fundamental attribute of reality, the other side of the coin (matter being the first one). Which leads to the conclusions, that consciousness is everywhere, but not as 'condensed' as in the brain. Seems crazy at first, but the more you think about it the more plausible it seems. Here's a nice paper about it: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1668/20140167 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1668/2014... Within this paradigm it starts to make sense to call the reality "The Mind", as some Buddhist schools do. There's also the crazy part, about how under some conditions it could potentially lead to experiencing other peoples' minds. For the more adventurous, here's a talk by Culadasa, very experienced meditator and a neuroscience professor, in which he shares some thoughts about the problem and also some of these crazy experiences he had: http://s3.amazonaws.com/dharmatreasure/150430-tcmc--culadasa--dharma-talk.mp3 http://s3.amazonaws.com/dharmatreasure/150430-tcmc--culadasa...
- elorant 10y ago
  I first came upon the consciousness as reality theme when I read “The self-aware universe” [0] by Goswami which introduces the idea of monistic idealism. Penrose also contemplates with the idea in the “Emperor’s New Mind” [1]. I highly recommend both books to anyone interested in exploring alternate theories. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Self-Aware-Universe-Consciousness-Creates-Material/dp/0874777984 https://www.amazon.com/Self-Aware-Universe-Consciousness-Cre... [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computers/dp/0198784929 https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computer...
  - aaimnr 10y ago
    Just to be clear, what you are talking about is different to what Chalmers and others are talking about. The "idealistic" monism assumes that matter doesn't actually exists, while "neutral" monism assumes that matter and consciousness have similar ontological status as they are irreducible properties of the 'real stuff' [0]. BTW it may be appealing to the HN crowd that Bertrand Russell, the uber geek, subscribed to neutral monism as well. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_monism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_monism
RobertoG 10y ago
Most of the times I read about this subject I get the feeling that every person in the discussion is talking about different things. For a prosaic view of consciousness I would recommend the book "Consciousness and the Brain" by cognitive psychologist Stanisas Dehaene. The experiments described in the book do, in my opinion, a good job in delimiting the problem and in facilitating accurate definitions about what conscience is. We should start there, otherwise we are talking about how many angels can dance in the head of a pin (1). (1) - Actually that problem has been solved already: http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i3/angels-7-3.htm http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i3/an...
- breckinloggins 10y ago
  That's one reason why I've started using the term "interiority" to describe the bedrock "existence of a feeling of what it is like" phenomenon. It's the smallest word I can think of that still conveys the essence of the hard part of the hard problem. Put another way, I'm of the belief (and I think Chalmers and many others share it) that if you can demonstrate to me that C. Elegans feels itself wiggling around, and you can show me why it feels anything at all and why it feels this way vs that way, then you have solved the hard problem. I could take your technical specifications for basic interiority (the solution to the hard problem) and then give you human-level reflective consciousness in a few years given a handful of engineers and sufficiently powerful hardware. This isn't necessarily a popular opinion, though. I once read Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and was really frustrated that the author spent the entire book explaining how we became "conscious" by listening to one half of our brain talking to the other half. How much time did he spend trying to explain how there was anything doing the "hearing" to begin with? Nearly zero. Maddening.
  - naasking 10y ago
    > That's one reason why I've started using the term "interiority" to describe the bedrock "existence of a feeling of what it is like" phenomenon. It's the smallest word I can think of that still conveys the essence of the hard part of the hard problem. A more widely used term is "subjectivity". > How much time did he spend trying to explain how there was anything doing the "hearing" to begin with? Nearly zero. Maddening. This seems like a common sentiment, but I'm not sure it's justified. You're already assuming the existence of a subject just because of an observation, but that needs justification. That belief is just an inference, a chain of thoughts sourced from a thought and yielding the final thought "I experienced X". The question is really whether that chain of inference is valid or fallacious, in which case subjectivity is an illusion. I suggest reading some scientific attempts to account for subjectivity [1]. Our approaches to consciousness amounts to marvelling at a pencil sitting in a glass of water [2] and trying to figure out how water seems able to break and reconstitute the pencil, when we should really be developing the theory of light refraction. Like biology did to vitalism, all this mysticism surrounding consciousness will soon just fade into history. [1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00... [2] http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in-cup-of-water_medium.jpg http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in-cup-o...
SubiculumCode 10y ago
You can cut off any part of the body and still have consciousness as long as blood, oxygen, etc reach the brain. That seems a little stronger evidence of causality than mere correlation. Still it could be, I suppose, that the brain does not hold consciousness, but is in fact merely an antenna to send and recieve consciousness... probably from a lab at NASA, via interactions with virtual particles, providing propellentless mental acceleration across space and time
- drdeca 10y ago
  And of course, there's occasionalism, which holds that the mind and the body (Including the brain) match up without the mind actually having a causal influence on the body at all. I don't think this removes responsibility for actions though, because even if this is true, whatever we choose to do is still what our bodies do,so we can still choose our actions. Like how two superrational players of the prisoners dilemma can choose the action of their coplayer by choosing their own action.
- aaimnr 10y ago
  Keep in mind that causality can be understood in multiple ways in your example: 1) consciousness is merely something that emerges from matter (eg. functionalism) 2) consciousness and matter coexist everywhere, but in some configurations of matter consciousness is 'condensed' and gives rise to our subjective experience (eg. Integrated Information Theory by Tononi and Koch)
brianberns 10y ago
How can the room I am sitting in be simultaneously out there and, as it were, inside my head, my experience? We still have no answer to that question. Really? It seems quite obvious that events "out there" can affect what's going on "in here" (i.e. my brain) via sound, light, direct contact, etc. Consciousness is a difficult problem, yes, but there's no need to make it seem even more difficult than it actually is.
- breckinloggins 10y ago
  I share your confusion with this part of an otherwise-excellent article. It was such a surprise to read it that I fear I'm missing something. It seems obvious that what we're experiencing isn't the world or any so-called "objects" in it, but a structured representation of the whole and its parts. The hard part is understanding why: 1. Representations experience themselves at all 2. Representations seem to feel different depending on their structure and relationships to other representations Does anyone have a better interpretation of this paragraph that highlights the supposed mystery about our connection to "the real world"?
  - aaimnr 10y ago
    If you both want to see the mystery replace 'the real world' with 'noumenon' and read some Immanuel Kant. He wrote awfully lot about the 'supposed mystery' :) BTW. your parent seems to mistake "inside" with "the brain" which seems like a category error. "It seems obvious that what we're experiencing isn't the world or any so-called "objects" in it, but a structured representation of the whole and its parts." What do you mean by "the whole and its parts"? Do you mean that what we experience for our whole life is just a play of representations created by our mind? Because it seems to be the case. And when you think about it, it is as mindfucky as possible. It may be obvious for you (is it?), but most people act as if it were very far from obvious as in each action most of us attribute real, independent existence to most constructs of our minds that, under scrutiny, are completely arbitrary. Once you understand that you construct the whole world, you also start to understand how many ways to construct it are there (Sapir-Whorf etc.). Once you understand how fundamentally these possible understandings may differ, you start to appreciate how arbitrary 'your world' is. And then you start to wonder WTF is 'real world'? What is 'out there'? Is there anything at all? Just a loose association, but isn't your question a bit like asking "what's wrong with this picture" ? http://personalpages.to.infn.it/~fiorenti/escher/pgallery.gif http://personalpages.to.infn.it/~fiorenti/escher/pgallery.gi... On the other hand I understand your question perfectly. It's even hard to tell whether there is something strange about it or not.
exolymph 10y ago
A similar discussion that might interest some of you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956101
johndoe4589 10y ago
Riccardo Manzotti has some pretty cool Philosophical Cartoons on his site: http://www.consciousness.it/RM_Cartoons.php http://www.consciousness.it/RM_Cartoons.php His "spread mind" site is great too: http://www.thespreadmind.com/ http://www.thespreadmind.com/ As a "seeker" I sometimes wonder if he figured out something close to what nonduality teaches, only in a more technical language (ie. consciousnsss is not located inside anymore than it is outside, therefore somewhat blurring the lines between I and the world). I think his example of the rainbow is such a great metaphor. Bernardo Kastrup has his theories as well with his whirlpool" metaphor but to me it sounds like it makes sense only to him, and I don't get much out of his metaphor. Whereas Riccardo's pointers are reminiscent of older teachings in that they really invite the reader to examine direct experience (Just my interpretation of his theory).
visarga 10y ago
Consciousness is a suitcase word, poorly defined. Instead of consciousness, how about we consider more clear notions such as perception, decision, reward, action, memory and attention - all of them developed through learning. Such notions can describe the "mind" completely. They are much more concrete, and are being investigated in AI (reinforcement learning). We are just self replicating, self preserving processes. The main function is to maintain equilibrium in the face of entropy. We need food, water, shelter and companionship to survive. In order to get those, we need to learn to operate in the world and reason about it. It's nothing magical, just reinforcement learning and other kinds of learning - a little semi-supervised learning, for example, and a lot of unsupervised learning. All this grand system exists for the sole purpose of protecting its existence. It protects its own life and self replicates, which is another kind of survival. Consciousness is that which protects the body, that is its sole purpose. If you are not conscious in the morning, you don't drink and eat, and in 3 days you're dead. That's why you need to be conscious every day. That's the greatest miracle of consciousness. Our species would not exist without it. But it's better to work with clear cut notions, like perception, action and reward.
- aaimnr 10y ago
  There's an easy and a hard problem of consciousness. You're addressing the easy one. These are technical terms, you can look them up.
  - visarga 10y ago
    The hard problem is "why do we have qualia?" and it is explained by neural nets. You input sensations and you get latent representations that are mapped into a space of possible representations. So all those ineffable perceptions are just values in this space of representations. Thus, qualia appear by neural net processing of sensations, and are fed into a recurrent network that judges them moment to moment and updates its internal state, as well as perform actions. That is why we feel a stream of perceptions, not just separate moments. Qualia appear to be irreducible because the mapping from perceptions to representations is nonlinear - even if we can duplicate it in neural nets, we still can't assign semantic value to each neuron and weight in the network. So it appears magical because it is of a level of complexity that exceeds the human working memory. But it is not so magical that we can't replicate it. We can recognize objects better than humans on certain datasets, and we have word embeddings built on huge corpora of text that are being used for translation. We can compute the "feel" of a word or image.
logicallee 10y ago
you can read the thread where I report what I consider to be basic truth about consciousness here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12878939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12878939 there are no challenges, and even simple numbers can be conscious. we have sequenced DNA today, you can download it right now: http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/downloads/human/ http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/downloads/human/ After downloading it go ahead and take a checksum. within 500 years (a ridiculous overestimation) someone will build a simulation that simulates (emulates) part of the brain that is described in that genome. Whether at full speed or one-tenth speed it will be done, and for test purposes someone might do it in a determinstic VM of sorts. They can take that checksum, let's say it's: 3ad235db427e566bbb31097c77882d20f30db779ff8f3896cb35bb43ebf76dd164e084109bf2bcb8a9ba1bc7477c1eeb3dfcf699bc3f8e7f4d96aceeaa080003 (That's an SHA-512 hash). I'll tell you what I hashed. All I hashed was "I'm a brain". Instead of a text string, within 500 years someone will hash a VM that contains as much data as a human brain, is human for practical purposes, and reports the same thing. For me personally, this is beyond even discussion and I personally consider the matter closed. However, at hte HN link at the top of this comment I report a state of affairs under which I would be wrong. I don't consider it even worth thinking about though. I don't consider any question around this area to be "open". We just have to accept what we deduced. if you don't like it or don't agree with it, you can wait until someone simulates an adult brain reporting self-consciousness, and then you will be forced to say, "oh well, I was wrong." There is no conceivable scenario under which I would have to say, "oh well, I was wrong." (Above, I outline such a scenario though. It's not going to happen.)
ozy 10y ago
Consciousness is the way your brain self corrects. That is my personal theory. On a few time scales you brain makes plans. It uses beliefs and a model of the world to make those plans. It stores those plans and the actions it has taken. And then checks if actions had their intended effects, and if plans reached their intended goals. Updating its model of the world, its beliefs, and what useful actions are. This is a constant process reflecting upon the current situation, and upon the recent past of actions and plans. It is like an observer observing itself. This is the root of consciousness, I think. Probably abstract thinking and language, enough intelligence, and a theory of mind, leads to self awareness. If this is correct, we can formulate some necessary parts for a system to be conscious: * recognition of the environment * a model of the environment * ability to reason about actions, their consequences, and how to achieve goals * memory of past plans and goals and outcomes * a process of executing actions, making new plans, and learning from the outcomes
- aaimnr 10y ago
  Self-awareness and consciousness are different things. Sometimes when you wake up you don't know who you are, where you are, what you are, but there is a conscious experience. Consciousness is much more fundamental than your level of reasoning allows to explain. Here's a list of things that you are adressing and that are not dealing with the hard problem of consciousness ('easy problems'): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#Easy_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...
  - ozy 10y ago
    An observer observing itself, would that not feel like something to the observer? What you describe is when the observer is disconnected from longer term memory.
    - aaimnr 10y ago
      OK, let me rephrase my objection. "This is a constant process reflecting upon the current situation, and upon the recent past of actions and plans. It is like an observer observing itself. This is the root of consciousness, I think." Your description seems to fall under "the ability of a system to access its own internal states" and/or "the reportability of mental states" from the 'easy problems' section of the wiki pages I linked to. Both could be possible without consciousness at all. We could imagine (or even program) a robot that in response to external stimuli modifies its state. It could also have second order algorithms, eg. it could check what state it's in and if it remains in the same state for too long, the state changes randomly. It would be the same as 'observer observing itself'. This functional explanation in any way doesn't lead to the phenomena of consciousness, which would require the robot to have some specific first-hand 'experience' of the world and itself. That's the difference between the easy and the hard problem of consciousness.
mehwoot 10y ago
Is this an ongoing series or something? It stops abruptly at the end...
andy 10y ago
According to the article, there are 85 billion neurons in the brain. Bill Gates has a net worth of 85 billion dollars. That's interesting I think. When I read 85 billion neurons I thought that's not really that much considering.... and I wonder how much Mark Zuckerberg is worth - then I Googled who's the richest and saw Bill Gates had 85B.

106 points by lermontov 10y ago

I promised myself I wouldn't follow the Chalmerian rabbit down the consciousness rabbit hole for a while (one eventually gets tired of being dizzy no matter how fascinating the reason). Every time I swear to myself that I'll give it a rest for a few months, something like this pops up on HN and it starts all over again. Here's as far as I got last time. I'm almost certainly wrong, but hey, when it comes to consciousness, we know so little that being able to pinpoint why someone is wrong is still progress. - Time is real but not "absolute". The universe exists as a causally connected network of ever-present nows. We aren't "slices of the Minkowski spacetime" experiencing itself. That's a fantastic model of reality at certain scales, but it's not reality. - Ensembles of causally connected physical systems evolving in the now are "ontoglogically real" in the sense that something about them actually exists above and beyond their parts. - Certain evolving physical systems have "an interior". It feels like something to be the interior of such a system. - We don't experience the world, we experience being the interior of a certain kind of evolving physical system whose job it is to create, process, and manipulate representations. "We" at any moment are the interior of the gestalt representation of that moment. - Evolution selected and maximized interiority for a reason. It has a purpose. How it has a purpose I have no idea, and any solutions smack of dualism. However, the closest thing I have to a hypothesis that isn't completely crazy is that what we call "the physical" and "the mental" are simply two projections of some "actual" underlying structure that is something like a Hilbert space. If that's the case, then it's possible that putting the physical system into a certain state causes the interior of that system to "feel" something which, in turn, causes some kind of "pressure" on the physical again. I have no clue how this could work, but I do like the strategy of starting with the commonsensical but heretical idea that we wouldn't be conscious if evolution didn't find a use for that property, and then going from there. Anybody else have any crazy thoughts so we can at least talk about why we're wrong about them?

justinpombrio 10y ago
Is your "interior" just the mental model we have of the world (including ourselves)? If so, it's not surprising that evolution selected for it. It's advantageous to be able to make predictions about the world (including ourselves), and to make predictions about a thing you need a model of the thing.
- breckinloggins 10y ago
  True, but what is surprising is that there is something "it is like" to be that interior. As an example: CPUs can perform calculations on data we consider "representations". The outcome of those calculations, in turn, affect the world. We suspect that they do this without there ever being something it is like to be a CPU. At first blush, we would suppose that neurons firing this way and that to create actionable representations would have the same property. Evolution would be happy. But there's something extra there: it FEELS like something to be a neural network in a sequence of evolving states. Why? The heretical hypothesis is that the feeling itself had a purpose and was part of the system.
  - david-given 10y ago
    > True, but what is surprising is that there is something "it is like" to be that interior. I don't know; is there? How do I tell? I mean, I know what I experience, but I'm not an objective observer. There's evidence that what we perceive as the continuous stream of events is actually assembled in our memory after the fact from various out-of-order sensory inputs. How do I know that what I perceive as consciousness (and remember, I have no way of knowing whether it's the same as what anyone else perceives, or whether they perceive it at all) is anything more than just wishful thinking? And that's a serious question to which I really want an answer.
    - projektir 10y ago
      That seems more relevant to the quality of information being felt, not the feeling itself. Even if it's just assembled in memory later, it's still felt, there is still a "it is like". The presence of feeling is rather obvious when you feel things like pain. Can't exactly make that up. That's definitely there. A lot of problems are grounded in feeling itself and wouldn't exist if nobody felt anything. Proving its presence in other people is impossible, but it would seem very strange that you work one way and everyone else works a completely different way without some outside system tinkering with it.
emtel 10y ago
I think saying that "evolution selected consciousness for a reason" is a potential category error. It seems a bit like saying that evolution selected blood pressure. Evolution selected circulatory systems - blood pressure is an inevitable phenomenon of a circulatory system. Similarly, it might be that evolution selected information processing and decision making systems, and that consciousness might be an inevitable phenomenon of sufficiently complex information processing systems.
- breckinloggins 10y ago
  That's why I labelled the idea "heretical". I think your explanation is by far the most popular one in science. The idea is that consciousness is an "epiphenomenon" - the "steam of the locomotive". It has no functional purpose. I'm simply suggesting that we try seeing where we go if we reject this hypothesis and instead treat consciousness as a thing that itself has survival utility. Doing so does cause dualism to creep in awfully quickly, but I'm not really so ideologically committed to pure physicalism that I'm unwilling to take the thought experiment seriously.
  - untoreh 10y ago
    consciousness can be seen as the counterweight to emotions, so it can have survival utility
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      There is no widely agreed upon functional utility of being conscious. The zombie thought experiments are about this.
  - sooheon 10y ago
    I can't make the leap from evolution selecting for consciousness for some utility to dualism. Can you make that more explicit for me? What you've stimulated for me is the question of whether brains and their processes could have the same utility without the quality of interiority? We can make obvious observations like "the pain of intense heat incentivizes the animal to stop touching fires". Was it necessary that the animal feel the pain, or could the exact same behavioral modification have been duly recorded in some neural adjustment without the interior experience? My personal intuition is that 1. it is possible for a machine with the right interfaces running a sophisticated enough turing machine to replicate the above, and 2. such a turing machine would not have the same quality of interiority that we have. This suggests that consciousness doesn't have some inherent utility. Except! From my internal observations, consciousness seems to have the quality that it focuses inputs and computation. I filter out noise, center my reasoning/recall/attention on one or two things at a time. Perhaps this ability to filter and focus allows for more peak "thought" or "processing" given equal grey matter mass or energy input. So my thesis is that the evolutionary advantage of consciousness is that it was a software based way to extract more performance out of brains given hardware limitations.
illvm 10y ago
What about the idea often proposed by Graham Hancock where consciousness is not generated in the brain but rather the brain is a sort receiver for it?
- projektir 10y ago
  That leaves the question of where is consciousness, then.
- gnaritas 10y ago
  That's an idea with zero evidence and thus indistinguishable from fantasy.
- AgentME 10y ago
  Hard to square that idea away with observable concepts like how hormones and brain damage affect people. One could say that the brain does all the computation, and the link to consciousness is one-way, but if that consciousness-link isn't affecting the physical computation, then that doesn't explain why our brain makes us talk about being conscious. That consciousness-link-thing would be entirely unrelated to why we talk about being conscious and should be called something else.
- simonh 10y ago
  Then we should be able to detect the transmissions and build other receivers. Or we should be able to block the transmissions, or generate new ones. If this hypothesis were true, it should be very easy to construct tests for it but as far as I am aware nothing is forthcoming.
rubberstamp 10y ago
Isn't time what we experience because we have memory? I think my consciousness is the state I got into because of the experiences I had due to interactions. Brain is finite state machine. Finite because it is limited to states of universe. Even if I live near a black hole I may only live 70 years in local time experienced, which may equal to like 1000 years in Earth's local time experienced. I think its the underlying physics that shapes our thinking. Basically its all physics rules how particles/sub-particles/super-particles interact and the energy flowing through it. Now am "I" in control of making decision to do one thing and not the other? Or was it inevitable that the decision was made as that was the only possible outcome of particles inter acting in my brain at that moment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012952 I was watching videos of elephants in wild. They are just the same like us. I saw a group of elephants finding a waterhole, but the food was scarce. They could water the plants in nearby area to produce more food. They just haven't figured it out yet. Just like us they pass around information using their language. They do not have language for what they have not figured out yet. They will have that capability once they figure out something and find the need to communicate it. Any organism I take I see behavior that is very much ours if we too lacked such knowledge and technique. Our communication latencies are decreasing steadily with advancement of tech as we figure out more things. Now when we have the tech to naturally communicate with each other the exact same thought with all the context of that thought to somebody instant or in realtime as it happens, then we are essentially a super organism. Each of us can be equated to neurons in brain with each of us having many neurons with each neuron having many molecules interacting with each which has atoms interacting. HN is like a place where I find information I value more. Many quality ideas from all around Earth. When I try communicate with my sister to clarify some doubt she has, I often tries to explain to her why something is so with all the context. She couldn't intake all the data I provide as fast as I provide it(keep up with me) and within a minute or two she's like STOP! People want just exactly only what they ask for. Everything else is considered noise.

aaimnr 10y ago

I always point to David Chalmers when someone wants to understand the problem of consciousness. I like how casual he is about possible solutions and gives credibility to all the options (unlike eg. Daniel Dennett, who seems almost religious about how revolutionary his "there's no problem at all" approach is). I really recommend this podcast in which Sam Harris talks with Chalmers about all the options currently in the game: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-light-of-the-mind https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-light-of-the-mind One of the most promising theories (discussed in the podcast) assumes that consciousness is a fundamental attribute of reality, the other side of the coin (matter being the first one). Which leads to the conclusions, that consciousness is everywhere, but not as 'condensed' as in the brain. Seems crazy at first, but the more you think about it the more plausible it seems. Here's a nice paper about it: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1668/20140167 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1668/2014... Within this paradigm it starts to make sense to call the reality "The Mind", as some Buddhist schools do. There's also the crazy part, about how under some conditions it could potentially lead to experiencing other peoples' minds. For the more adventurous, here's a talk by Culadasa, very experienced meditator and a neuroscience professor, in which he shares some thoughts about the problem and also some of these crazy experiences he had: http://s3.amazonaws.com/dharmatreasure/150430-tcmc--culadasa--dharma-talk.mp3 http://s3.amazonaws.com/dharmatreasure/150430-tcmc--culadasa...

elorant 10y ago
I first came upon the consciousness as reality theme when I read “The self-aware universe” [0] by Goswami which introduces the idea of monistic idealism. Penrose also contemplates with the idea in the “Emperor’s New Mind” [1]. I highly recommend both books to anyone interested in exploring alternate theories. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Self-Aware-Universe-Consciousness-Creates-Material/dp/0874777984 https://www.amazon.com/Self-Aware-Universe-Consciousness-Cre... [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computers/dp/0198784929 https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computer...
- aaimnr 10y ago
  Just to be clear, what you are talking about is different to what Chalmers and others are talking about. The "idealistic" monism assumes that matter doesn't actually exists, while "neutral" monism assumes that matter and consciousness have similar ontological status as they are irreducible properties of the 'real stuff' [0]. BTW it may be appealing to the HN crowd that Bertrand Russell, the uber geek, subscribed to neutral monism as well. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_monism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_monism

RobertoG 10y ago

Most of the times I read about this subject I get the feeling that every person in the discussion is talking about different things. For a prosaic view of consciousness I would recommend the book "Consciousness and the Brain" by cognitive psychologist Stanisas Dehaene. The experiments described in the book do, in my opinion, a good job in delimiting the problem and in facilitating accurate definitions about what conscience is. We should start there, otherwise we are talking about how many angels can dance in the head of a pin (1). (1) - Actually that problem has been solved already: http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i3/angels-7-3.htm http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i3/an...

breckinloggins 10y ago
That's one reason why I've started using the term "interiority" to describe the bedrock "existence of a feeling of what it is like" phenomenon. It's the smallest word I can think of that still conveys the essence of the hard part of the hard problem. Put another way, I'm of the belief (and I think Chalmers and many others share it) that if you can demonstrate to me that C. Elegans feels itself wiggling around, and you can show me why it feels anything at all and why it feels this way vs that way, then you have solved the hard problem. I could take your technical specifications for basic interiority (the solution to the hard problem) and then give you human-level reflective consciousness in a few years given a handful of engineers and sufficiently powerful hardware. This isn't necessarily a popular opinion, though. I once read Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and was really frustrated that the author spent the entire book explaining how we became "conscious" by listening to one half of our brain talking to the other half. How much time did he spend trying to explain how there was anything doing the "hearing" to begin with? Nearly zero. Maddening.
- naasking 10y ago
  > That's one reason why I've started using the term "interiority" to describe the bedrock "existence of a feeling of what it is like" phenomenon. It's the smallest word I can think of that still conveys the essence of the hard part of the hard problem. A more widely used term is "subjectivity". > How much time did he spend trying to explain how there was anything doing the "hearing" to begin with? Nearly zero. Maddening. This seems like a common sentiment, but I'm not sure it's justified. You're already assuming the existence of a subject just because of an observation, but that needs justification. That belief is just an inference, a chain of thoughts sourced from a thought and yielding the final thought "I experienced X". The question is really whether that chain of inference is valid or fallacious, in which case subjectivity is an illusion. I suggest reading some scientific attempts to account for subjectivity [1]. Our approaches to consciousness amounts to marvelling at a pencil sitting in a glass of water [2] and trying to figure out how water seems able to break and reconstitute the pencil, when we should really be developing the theory of light refraction. Like biology did to vitalism, all this mysticism surrounding consciousness will soon just fade into history. [1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00... [2] http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in-cup-of-water_medium.jpg http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in-cup-o...

SubiculumCode 10y ago

You can cut off any part of the body and still have consciousness as long as blood, oxygen, etc reach the brain. That seems a little stronger evidence of causality than mere correlation. Still it could be, I suppose, that the brain does not hold consciousness, but is in fact merely an antenna to send and recieve consciousness... probably from a lab at NASA, via interactions with virtual particles, providing propellentless mental acceleration across space and time

drdeca 10y ago
And of course, there's occasionalism, which holds that the mind and the body (Including the brain) match up without the mind actually having a causal influence on the body at all. I don't think this removes responsibility for actions though, because even if this is true, whatever we choose to do is still what our bodies do,so we can still choose our actions. Like how two superrational players of the prisoners dilemma can choose the action of their coplayer by choosing their own action.
aaimnr 10y ago
Keep in mind that causality can be understood in multiple ways in your example: 1) consciousness is merely something that emerges from matter (eg. functionalism) 2) consciousness and matter coexist everywhere, but in some configurations of matter consciousness is 'condensed' and gives rise to our subjective experience (eg. Integrated Information Theory by Tononi and Koch)

brianberns 10y ago

How can the room I am sitting in be simultaneously out there and, as it were, inside my head, my experience? We still have no answer to that question. Really? It seems quite obvious that events "out there" can affect what's going on "in here" (i.e. my brain) via sound, light, direct contact, etc. Consciousness is a difficult problem, yes, but there's no need to make it seem even more difficult than it actually is.

breckinloggins 10y ago
I share your confusion with this part of an otherwise-excellent article. It was such a surprise to read it that I fear I'm missing something. It seems obvious that what we're experiencing isn't the world or any so-called "objects" in it, but a structured representation of the whole and its parts. The hard part is understanding why: 1. Representations experience themselves at all 2. Representations seem to feel different depending on their structure and relationships to other representations Does anyone have a better interpretation of this paragraph that highlights the supposed mystery about our connection to "the real world"?
- aaimnr 10y ago
  If you both want to see the mystery replace 'the real world' with 'noumenon' and read some Immanuel Kant. He wrote awfully lot about the 'supposed mystery' :) BTW. your parent seems to mistake "inside" with "the brain" which seems like a category error. "It seems obvious that what we're experiencing isn't the world or any so-called "objects" in it, but a structured representation of the whole and its parts." What do you mean by "the whole and its parts"? Do you mean that what we experience for our whole life is just a play of representations created by our mind? Because it seems to be the case. And when you think about it, it is as mindfucky as possible. It may be obvious for you (is it?), but most people act as if it were very far from obvious as in each action most of us attribute real, independent existence to most constructs of our minds that, under scrutiny, are completely arbitrary. Once you understand that you construct the whole world, you also start to understand how many ways to construct it are there (Sapir-Whorf etc.). Once you understand how fundamentally these possible understandings may differ, you start to appreciate how arbitrary 'your world' is. And then you start to wonder WTF is 'real world'? What is 'out there'? Is there anything at all? Just a loose association, but isn't your question a bit like asking "what's wrong with this picture" ? http://personalpages.to.infn.it/~fiorenti/escher/pgallery.gif http://personalpages.to.infn.it/~fiorenti/escher/pgallery.gi... On the other hand I understand your question perfectly. It's even hard to tell whether there is something strange about it or not.

exolymph 10y ago

A similar discussion that might interest some of you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956101

johndoe4589 10y ago

Riccardo Manzotti has some pretty cool Philosophical Cartoons on his site: http://www.consciousness.it/RM_Cartoons.php http://www.consciousness.it/RM_Cartoons.php His "spread mind" site is great too: http://www.thespreadmind.com/ http://www.thespreadmind.com/ As a "seeker" I sometimes wonder if he figured out something close to what nonduality teaches, only in a more technical language (ie. consciousnsss is not located inside anymore than it is outside, therefore somewhat blurring the lines between I and the world). I think his example of the rainbow is such a great metaphor. Bernardo Kastrup has his theories as well with his whirlpool" metaphor but to me it sounds like it makes sense only to him, and I don't get much out of his metaphor. Whereas Riccardo's pointers are reminiscent of older teachings in that they really invite the reader to examine direct experience (Just my interpretation of his theory).

visarga 10y ago

Consciousness is a suitcase word, poorly defined. Instead of consciousness, how about we consider more clear notions such as perception, decision, reward, action, memory and attention - all of them developed through learning. Such notions can describe the "mind" completely. They are much more concrete, and are being investigated in AI (reinforcement learning). We are just self replicating, self preserving processes. The main function is to maintain equilibrium in the face of entropy. We need food, water, shelter and companionship to survive. In order to get those, we need to learn to operate in the world and reason about it. It's nothing magical, just reinforcement learning and other kinds of learning - a little semi-supervised learning, for example, and a lot of unsupervised learning. All this grand system exists for the sole purpose of protecting its existence. It protects its own life and self replicates, which is another kind of survival. Consciousness is that which protects the body, that is its sole purpose. If you are not conscious in the morning, you don't drink and eat, and in 3 days you're dead. That's why you need to be conscious every day. That's the greatest miracle of consciousness. Our species would not exist without it. But it's better to work with clear cut notions, like perception, action and reward.

aaimnr 10y ago
There's an easy and a hard problem of consciousness. You're addressing the easy one. These are technical terms, you can look them up.
- visarga 10y ago
  The hard problem is "why do we have qualia?" and it is explained by neural nets. You input sensations and you get latent representations that are mapped into a space of possible representations. So all those ineffable perceptions are just values in this space of representations. Thus, qualia appear by neural net processing of sensations, and are fed into a recurrent network that judges them moment to moment and updates its internal state, as well as perform actions. That is why we feel a stream of perceptions, not just separate moments. Qualia appear to be irreducible because the mapping from perceptions to representations is nonlinear - even if we can duplicate it in neural nets, we still can't assign semantic value to each neuron and weight in the network. So it appears magical because it is of a level of complexity that exceeds the human working memory. But it is not so magical that we can't replicate it. We can recognize objects better than humans on certain datasets, and we have word embeddings built on huge corpora of text that are being used for translation. We can compute the "feel" of a word or image.

logicallee 10y ago

you can read the thread where I report what I consider to be basic truth about consciousness here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12878939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12878939 there are no challenges, and even simple numbers can be conscious. we have sequenced DNA today, you can download it right now: http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/downloads/human/ http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/downloads/human/ After downloading it go ahead and take a checksum. within 500 years (a ridiculous overestimation) someone will build a simulation that simulates (emulates) part of the brain that is described in that genome. Whether at full speed or one-tenth speed it will be done, and for test purposes someone might do it in a determinstic VM of sorts. They can take that checksum, let's say it's: 3ad235db427e566bbb31097c77882d20f30db779ff8f3896cb35bb43ebf76dd164e084109bf2bcb8a9ba1bc7477c1eeb3dfcf699bc3f8e7f4d96aceeaa080003 (That's an SHA-512 hash). I'll tell you what I hashed. All I hashed was "I'm a brain". Instead of a text string, within 500 years someone will hash a VM that contains as much data as a human brain, is human for practical purposes, and reports the same thing. For me personally, this is beyond even discussion and I personally consider the matter closed. However, at hte HN link at the top of this comment I report a state of affairs under which I would be wrong. I don't consider it even worth thinking about though. I don't consider any question around this area to be "open". We just have to accept what we deduced. if you don't like it or don't agree with it, you can wait until someone simulates an adult brain reporting self-consciousness, and then you will be forced to say, "oh well, I was wrong." There is no conceivable scenario under which I would have to say, "oh well, I was wrong." (Above, I outline such a scenario though. It's not going to happen.)

ozy 10y ago

Consciousness is the way your brain self corrects. That is my personal theory. On a few time scales you brain makes plans. It uses beliefs and a model of the world to make those plans. It stores those plans and the actions it has taken. And then checks if actions had their intended effects, and if plans reached their intended goals. Updating its model of the world, its beliefs, and what useful actions are. This is a constant process reflecting upon the current situation, and upon the recent past of actions and plans. It is like an observer observing itself. This is the root of consciousness, I think. Probably abstract thinking and language, enough intelligence, and a theory of mind, leads to self awareness. If this is correct, we can formulate some necessary parts for a system to be conscious: * recognition of the environment * a model of the environment * ability to reason about actions, their consequences, and how to achieve goals * memory of past plans and goals and outcomes * a process of executing actions, making new plans, and learning from the outcomes

aaimnr 10y ago
Self-awareness and consciousness are different things. Sometimes when you wake up you don't know who you are, where you are, what you are, but there is a conscious experience. Consciousness is much more fundamental than your level of reasoning allows to explain. Here's a list of things that you are adressing and that are not dealing with the hard problem of consciousness ('easy problems'): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#Easy_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...
- ozy 10y ago
  An observer observing itself, would that not feel like something to the observer? What you describe is when the observer is disconnected from longer term memory.
  - aaimnr 10y ago
    OK, let me rephrase my objection. "This is a constant process reflecting upon the current situation, and upon the recent past of actions and plans. It is like an observer observing itself. This is the root of consciousness, I think." Your description seems to fall under "the ability of a system to access its own internal states" and/or "the reportability of mental states" from the 'easy problems' section of the wiki pages I linked to. Both could be possible without consciousness at all. We could imagine (or even program) a robot that in response to external stimuli modifies its state. It could also have second order algorithms, eg. it could check what state it's in and if it remains in the same state for too long, the state changes randomly. It would be the same as 'observer observing itself'. This functional explanation in any way doesn't lead to the phenomena of consciousness, which would require the robot to have some specific first-hand 'experience' of the world and itself. That's the difference between the easy and the hard problem of consciousness.

mehwoot 10y ago

Is this an ongoing series or something? It stops abruptly at the end...

andy 10y ago

According to the article, there are 85 billion neurons in the brain. Bill Gates has a net worth of 85 billion dollars. That's interesting I think. When I read 85 billion neurons I thought that's not really that much considering.... and I wonder how much Mark Zuckerberg is worth - then I Googled who's the richest and saw Bill Gates had 85B.