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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 sugges
by 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 agoBy 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 agoWell, 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 agoWell, 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 agoWhy 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 agoIn 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 agoYou 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