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Please, no more disdain for people's ideas and hypotheses about a fundamental topic that nobody has an answer for yet.

by psyc 10y ago

lend000 10y ago
Some people do have an answer for it... Schmidhuber's answer: consciousness is a byproduct of data compression. Anyway, there's certainly no evidence to suggest that consciousness requires anything more than our current understanding of physical laws. This article was pretty interesting with its topical exploration of self organization and a more math-based approach, but once it got into quantum physics it started to delve into the realm of pure conjecture and pseudo-science.
- whatshisface 10y ago
  By answer, he meant answer beyond conjecture. I can always wave my hands and suggest that drawing a special medicine wheel in the sand makes consciousness, or that arranging some information-theoretic properties in a certain way makes consciousness, depending on how mathematically difficult I'd like my pseudospirituality to be!
  - joe_the_user 10y ago
    Well, the thing is that quite possibly professional swimmers say, might claim that the theory of hydrodynamics doesn't explain how moving through water feels to them and so say hydrodynamics doesn't answer the question of water movement "beyond conjecture". An experience people would label "conscious" exists in the sense that many people would label their state of mind with it. A scientific explanation would involve describing why people are attracted to this position and might or might-not involve describing actual brain states could be considered "consciousness states". There's no reason to think such an explanation would be "subjectively satisfying" - that it would make people lean back and say "oh, now I understand". But the problem is the "theory of consciousness" folks want to create a theory that is both scientific and "subjectively satisfying" and indeed they sort of start their argument with a unit of that thing that's subjectively satisfying and try to go from there. That seems like recipe for non-science.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- RivieraKid 10y ago
  Well, people have lot of different answers, some of them pretty ridiculous. One fundamental reason why this is such a controversial and confusing topic with a wide range of opinions is that consciousness is meta-physical phenomenon. I.e. it's out of the scope of science in a way. But the concept that there's something beyond science is completely unintuitive to many people (by "beyond science" I obviously don't mean BS like spirituality etc., it's from a purely rational perspective). So trying to understand consciousness with science only will inevitably fail.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    Why is it beyond the scope of science? No experiments have shown that consciousness can violate the laws of physics and steady progress has been made in explaining consciousness from neuroscience.
    - monktastic1 10y ago
      In another sense, no progress has been made. We may have explained why consciousness is experiencing sadness as opposed to happiness right now, or red instead of blue, but not why "it is like something" to be conscious in the first place (i.e., the "hard problem").
    - placebo 10y ago
      You are referring to the soft problem of consciousness, which is not what the argument is about. I too am convinced that the hard problem of consciousness is beyond the scope of science. It is beyond science not in the sense that it violates the laws of physics but because when you get right down to it, your consciousness is the only "real" thing that you can ever know about. Everything else you supposedly "know" - every concept, every derived "laws" of physics are thought models which you only know by being conscious of them. A very crude analogy would be to say that consciousness is like a camera that enables science to be done, but the camera can't take a picture of itself.
      - RivieraKid 10y ago
joe_the_user 10y ago
I don't know about disdain but I think there are good arguments for rejecting approaches like this "a priori" if you want to engage in science. Conscious is a subjective experience. There's no clear definition of it in terms of measurable and repeating phenomena however much a given person feels sure they experience it (go head, give a definition that's subjectively satisfying for consciousness. Notice the whole "philosophical zombie" schema rests on nothing about consciousness being measurable or verifiable). Psychology, linguistics or neuroscience may indeed come up with one at some point. But as far as I can tell, the argument of the article and of theories of this sort, is that since consciousness is "real", it should be taken as a building block of one's model of the universe. The problem here is that using an ill-defined thing as a building block makes exact science impossible - unless your basic model is itself predictable, you cannot actually say whether your experimental results follow the model or not. It's not simply that an approach like this may be wrong - science is wrong all the time. It's that an approach like is injecting an atom of "anything-you-want-tium" into the mixture, a situation that let's you claim any result verifies your theory ("God does it all" would satisfying Occam's Razor for the simple "explanation of everything" if we let the inherently unexplainable into the competition). So in this sense, scientists have every reason to keep approaches like this entirely outside the realm of "legitimate science". This may sound positivist and one may say that a lot of science is looser than a pure positivism. Sort-of but every serious scientific discipline has to boil down to verification of predictive models by experiment specifically because it's easy for things to move "in the clouds" for periods of time and the verification is needed to weed-out models without predictiveness at all (string theorists have speculated a long and gotten kudos but the call for predictiveness is there is getting louder - but with string theory, things may be abstract however no "unexplainable" is taken as a given).
- psyc 10y ago
  Simple solution: drop the science schtick for two seconds while discussing consciousness. I think the Hacker News culture betrays an unspoken terror of being wrong about anything for any length of time, and that's why it will admit no other tool for thought or investigation, other than its collective idiosyncratic caricature of science.
jamesrcole 10y ago
> Please, no more disdain for people's ideas and hypotheses about a fundamental topic that nobody has an answer for yet. Leaving aside the specific ideas being outlined here, and the specific reasons for disdain some people have for it.... ...while we may not know the truth regarding this topic, there may be demonstrable flaws in people's ideas and hypotheses! Flaws in there reasoning, or empirical flaws, or whatever.

Please, no more disdain for people's ideas and hypotheses about a fundamental topic that nobody has an answer for yet.

by psyc 10y ago

Please, no more disdain for people's ideas and hypotheses about a fundamental topic that nobody has an answer for yet.

Some people do have an answer for it... Schmidhuber's answer: consciousness is a byproduct of data compression. Anyway, there's certainly no evidence to suggest that consciousness requires anything more than our current understanding of physical laws. This article was pretty interesting with its topical exploration of self organization and a more math-based approach, but once it got into quantum physics it started to delve into the realm of pure conjecture and pseudo-science.

whatshisface 10y ago
By answer, he meant answer beyond conjecture. I can always wave my hands and suggest that drawing a special medicine wheel in the sand makes consciousness, or that arranging some information-theoretic properties in a certain way makes consciousness, depending on how mathematically difficult I'd like my pseudospirituality to be!
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  Well, the thing is that quite possibly professional swimmers say, might claim that the theory of hydrodynamics doesn't explain how moving through water feels to them and so say hydrodynamics doesn't answer the question of water movement "beyond conjecture". An experience people would label "conscious" exists in the sense that many people would label their state of mind with it. A scientific explanation would involve describing why people are attracted to this position and might or might-not involve describing actual brain states could be considered "consciousness states". There's no reason to think such an explanation would be "subjectively satisfying" - that it would make people lean back and say "oh, now I understand". But the problem is the "theory of consciousness" folks want to create a theory that is both scientific and "subjectively satisfying" and indeed they sort of start their argument with a unit of that thing that's subjectively satisfying and try to go from there. That seems like recipe for non-science.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
RivieraKid 10y ago
Well, people have lot of different answers, some of them pretty ridiculous. One fundamental reason why this is such a controversial and confusing topic with a wide range of opinions is that consciousness is meta-physical phenomenon. I.e. it's out of the scope of science in a way. But the concept that there's something beyond science is completely unintuitive to many people (by "beyond science" I obviously don't mean BS like spirituality etc., it's from a purely rational perspective). So trying to understand consciousness with science only will inevitably fail.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Why is it beyond the scope of science? No experiments have shown that consciousness can violate the laws of physics and steady progress has been made in explaining consciousness from neuroscience.
  - monktastic1 10y ago
    In another sense, no progress has been made. We may have explained why consciousness is experiencing sadness as opposed to happiness right now, or red instead of blue, but not why "it is like something" to be conscious in the first place (i.e., the "hard problem").
  - placebo 10y ago
    You are referring to the soft problem of consciousness, which is not what the argument is about. I too am convinced that the hard problem of consciousness is beyond the scope of science. It is beyond science not in the sense that it violates the laws of physics but because when you get right down to it, your consciousness is the only "real" thing that you can ever know about. Everything else you supposedly "know" - every concept, every derived "laws" of physics are thought models which you only know by being conscious of them. A very crude analogy would be to say that consciousness is like a camera that enables science to be done, but the camera can't take a picture of itself.
    - RivieraKid 10y ago

joe_the_user 10y ago

I don't know about disdain but I think there are good arguments for rejecting approaches like this "a priori" if you want to engage in science. Conscious is a subjective experience. There's no clear definition of it in terms of measurable and repeating phenomena however much a given person feels sure they experience it (go head, give a definition that's subjectively satisfying for consciousness. Notice the whole "philosophical zombie" schema rests on nothing about consciousness being measurable or verifiable). Psychology, linguistics or neuroscience may indeed come up with one at some point. But as far as I can tell, the argument of the article and of theories of this sort, is that since consciousness is "real", it should be taken as a building block of one's model of the universe. The problem here is that using an ill-defined thing as a building block makes exact science impossible - unless your basic model is itself predictable, you cannot actually say whether your experimental results follow the model or not. It's not simply that an approach like this may be wrong - science is wrong all the time. It's that an approach like is injecting an atom of "anything-you-want-tium" into the mixture, a situation that let's you claim any result verifies your theory ("God does it all" would satisfying Occam's Razor for the simple "explanation of everything" if we let the inherently unexplainable into the competition). So in this sense, scientists have every reason to keep approaches like this entirely outside the realm of "legitimate science". This may sound positivist and one may say that a lot of science is looser than a pure positivism. Sort-of but every serious scientific discipline has to boil down to verification of predictive models by experiment specifically because it's easy for things to move "in the clouds" for periods of time and the verification is needed to weed-out models without predictiveness at all (string theorists have speculated a long and gotten kudos but the call for predictiveness is there is getting louder - but with string theory, things may be abstract however no "unexplainable" is taken as a given).

psyc 10y ago
Simple solution: drop the science schtick for two seconds while discussing consciousness. I think the Hacker News culture betrays an unspoken terror of being wrong about anything for any length of time, and that's why it will admit no other tool for thought or investigation, other than its collective idiosyncratic caricature of science.

jamesrcole 10y ago

> Please, no more disdain for people's ideas and hypotheses about a fundamental topic that nobody has an answer for yet. Leaving aside the specific ideas being outlined here, and the specific reasons for disdain some people have for it.... ...while we may not know the truth regarding this topic, there may be demonstrable flaws in people's ideas and hypotheses! Flaws in there reasoning, or empirical flaws, or whatever.