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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

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.
      - 10y ago
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.

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.
    - 10y ago

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.