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The Hardening of Consciousness

118 points by Hooke 9y ago

discreteevent 9y ago
At the end he says that because the idea of consciousness gives man a special status it is anti-Copernican. But apart from consciousness man already has a special status. Humans are the only thing we know of in the universe that are capable of understanding the universe itself.
monktastic1 9y ago
Manzotti makes good points about how Chalmers' dualist / panpsychist view has colored the debate and possibly hindered progress, but I was hoping for more discussion of alternatives. Instead there's only a brief footnote claiming that physicalism is obviously best. I myself am fond of Bernardo Kastrup's work on Idealism: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/41gb0j/bernardo_kastrup_on_why_idealism_is_superior_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/41gb0j/bernardo...
- danielam 9y ago
  You might find "Philosophy of Mind" by Edward Feser interesting.
- seoguru 9y ago
  Yes Kastrup! Can't get enough of him :-) Donald Hoffman also has interesting ideas: https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+hoffman&source=lnms&tbm=vid https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+hoffman&source=lnms&t...
- psyc 9y ago
  I've often been frustrated by the seeming polarization in the debate, with dualism on one end, and substrate independent information processing on the other. I wish I knew how to spark a discussion about hypotheses that are physical, but don't reduce to information processing. Consider that incandescent light is not substrate independent - it requires tungsten or some other specific chemistry that works. Couldn't consciousness be simultaneously fundamental, like a physical field, but also have specific physical or chemical preconditions to manifest in a location? Gravity coalesces around mass concentrations. Could consciousness gather around local "concentrations" of hyper-connected networks with a lot of feedback circuits in them? To be clear, I am spit-balling vague hypotheses here to make a point, so please don't ask me for citations. What I'm looking for are hypotheses that are physical, maybe substrate dependent, and non-reducible to computation in the abstract (e.g. conscious water- or domino-based computers, a la Searle).
  - naasking 9y ago
    > I wish I knew how to spark a discussion about hypotheses that are physical, but don't reduce to information processing You can't. Information is physical. Matter irreducibly contains information: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3327 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3327 What you need to do is get over the prejudice that information processing is undesirable as an explanation for consciousness.
    - psyc 9y ago
      I simply don't have a strong reason at this point to believe it is sufficient. That everything is information is, IMO a tautology, and citing it as an explanation is like citing matter and/or energy as an explanation. But is it inherently conscious, or is there a minimum necessary condition in terms of arrangement, data flow, or other physical evolution of a localized system?
      - naasking 9y ago
        All good questions, but do you really have strong reasons for thinking consciousness is not physical? There seems little need to posit consciousness as some irreducible property of matter, except for those who are mysteriously uncomfortable with the idea of being purely physical beings. Most arguments against physicalism are smoke and mirrors. As for specifically what physical process produces consciousness, it's an open question that's being studied. We're currently like Ada Lovelace studying a web browser and marvelling at what it does, having little idea how it actually works, yet we're mostly convinced it's not magic. I think you'd be more forgiving if Miss Lovelace took some time trying to reverse engineer the operation of a computer and it's program. Personally, I think [1] is a great starting point on this journey. The problem of apparent subjectivity was a huge stumbling block, and I think that paper is a great stab at it. [1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
        monktastic1 9y ago
        Nice to see you again, naasking :) It doesn't require any "mysterious discomfort." Believing in the existence of a physical reality may seem like a totally reasonable extrapolation to make from our experiences, but it's not the only one.
- RivieraKid 9y ago
  I used to think about this a lot when growing up and had come to a philosophical view that I find so obvious and simple at this point, that I'm surprised I hadn't come across (exactly) the same view yet. Of course, this view could be wrong but I just can't imagine an alternative that would make sense. Basically (don't want to spend much time on this so it's not the best way summarize it): - Consciousness is defined as my current feelings, perceptions, thoughts. - In a way, consciousness (or experience) is the only thing that exists. - The idea that the physical world is everything is ridiculously wrong. Physics is just a way to summarize patterns observed through our consciousness. The physical world is just a mental model. - Physical state of the brain clearly affects consciousness but there could very well be an opposite casual link - consciousness affecting the brain by "pushing atoms" or making supposedly random quantum phenomena not-so-random. Why? Because I wouldn't be typing this otherwise - my brain would never realize it affects some consciousness in "parallel universe" (metaphorically speaking). - Other people (or computers) don't have consciousness as defined above. But we could define a separate term, say "consciousness2", to describe some physical processes typical for brains. If the "consciousness pushing atoms in brain" hypothesis is correct, we could say that all brains with this kind of fishy activity are "conscious2".
  - monktastic1 9y ago
    Is this not a form of Idealism?
    - RivieraKid 9y ago
      Yeah, it seems to be vaguely similar.
      - monktastic1 9y ago
        By your second bullet, it seems to meet the broad definition: "In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial." You might find it interesting to read about various forms: http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_idealism.html http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_idealism.html. Kastrup's work will probably interest you too.
- visarga 9y ago
  > I was hoping for more discussion of alternatives I think the best alternative is Reinforcement Learning. In RL, there is an agent which exists inside an environment. It can perceive the world around, move about and perform actions. The agent has a goal to achieve and receives reward signals from time to time. Such an agent can learn behavior that maximizes rewards. That's what consciousness is. It is not an experience, it is a whole loop "perception -> judgement -> action -> reward" that defines life moment by moment. This also explains the role of consciousness - it is to choose actions that lead to survival of the individual and of its genes (reproduction). It is all a self replicating loop, in the end. The purpose of life is life, the purpose of consciousness is to guard life. Consciousness is a set of four functions (perception, evaluating actions, acting, learning from reward signals) that work together to select the next action, to protect the body, on which consciousness depends - yep, full circle. This whole "RL agent inside environment = consciousness" theory has the advantage that it is concrete and not supernatural in any way, and has promising applications (such as AlphaGo and self driving car).
  - monktastic1 9y ago
    That sounds like a useful model, but might be unsatisfying to those who (rightly or wrongly) perceive experience and qualia as sine-qua-nons of existence.
  - RivieraKid 9y ago
    That doesn't make much sense to be honest. Consciousness has little to do with survival. Simple 100 lines of code robots can do "perception, evaluating actions, acting, learning from reward signals". By the way, to understand what you mean by consciousness, do you consider yourself conscious when sleeping?
    - visarga 9y ago
      Yet those robots aren't self replicators. They depend on our human brains to exist - they have human technology as an externality. But the human body is self bootstrapped, carrying with it everything. A neuron doesn't just compute signals, it also self replicates, assimilates nutrients and grows. Thus neurons and organisms have specific needs which become the goals of RL for the organism. You can't do that in 100 lines of code. Consciousness is that thing that allows me to make a sandwich when I get up in the morning, so as not to die of hunger. How do you like this short and concrete definition? The magic of consciousness happens when there are: 1- an agent, 2- the world around it, 3- self replication and evolution, that give the main thrust of purpose to the agent, the purpose of self replication being recurrent, it is just more self replication.
- arstin 9y ago
  I never heard of this Kastrup fellow, but it's pretty hard to want to keep reading about an issue so delicate with so heavy-headed a first page. For example, here's a thing he claims we know "about the universe irrespective of theory or metaphysics", an "empirical fact", he declares, "accessible to anyone through simple observation": "There is subjective experience. This is the primary and incontrovertible." This statement is a fine way of starting a conversation and far from a silly thing to assume as a first pass. But what happens if we try to square his claim that what he is presenting "avoids any a priori metaphysical assumption or bias" with the need to clarify what he means by "subjective"? Is subjectivity a means of knowing (from the inside)? The phenomenal aspect of consciousness (a rug appearing redly)? A way of categorizing facts (the domain of what can be seen from a perspective)? All that matters for now is that any of these responses will result in his first Grand Fact being completely different. And, further, that any answer will involve theoretical machinery, however implicit it is to most people. What if we then step to the next word and argue that the concept of "experience" is both dispensable (we can do all explanatory work without it) and adds to confusion (by muddling causal and justificatory dimensions of our behavior) and that we should replace it with a family of more restricted concepts? So much for incontrovertible. And what if we keep going with the second clause of the statement and counter that nothing, in general, can be primary and incontrovertible (that all concepts must earn their keep in explanation)? It would be tedious---but easy---to do this for every one of the "facts of nature" which ground his pretty pompous exposition. It's easy to think this sort of response is just being clever, but being comfortable with everything being up for grabs and being more modest about what we are actually doing is really the only way an issue as hazy and messy as consciousness can be seriously approached. The playfulness used by Dennett or Hofstader, for example, is not just superfluous or "mere rhetoric", but essential for the stage of understanding we're at. An aside: I was only scanning for modest evidence that the author was aware of and responsive to the complexity of the issue to see if it was worth my time to read further, not that he actually explicitly addresses every possible move! Also, his substantive position, as far as I glean it, can still be interesting. FWIW I personally have idealist sympathies (appropriately construed) and think both subjectivity and experience do earn their keep...so far.
  - monktastic1 9y ago
danielam 9y ago
It's important for people to understand the legacy of the Moderns (in this case, Descartes, though others as well, e.g., Locke) and that legacy's detrimental hold over contemporary thought. However, while dualism is a problem, materialism as it is generally understood doesn't escape that legacy. For example, the problem of qualia (which is basically what this interview circles around in all by name) is a problem materialism is doomed to languish in precisely because it clings to an Cartesian account of matter, and this impoverished view of matter is wholly incapable of accounting for qualia. So simply dispensing with dualism is not going far enough.
- marojejian 9y ago
  "this impoverished view of matter is wholly incapable of accounting for qualia" What approach to accounting for qualia do you prefer?
  - danielam 9y ago
    I don't accept the paradigm. The problem of qualia is only an issue if you assume a Cartesian account of matter (CM) while dropping his immaterial account of the mind. Descartes assumes that things like color are not properties of material things but properties of minds. Materialism rejects the notion of an immaterial mind, but does so without rejecting CM, so you're left with a reality made of a kind of matter in which color cannot exist. Materialists are therefore condemned to looking for an impossible solution for as long as they fail to understand the futility of trying to find things like color in CM. Materialism is a halfway house between Cartesian dualism and eliminativism (where the latter denies the existence of things like color because, having accepted CM, it can't account for them -- Procrustean, to be sure). The solution is not to embrace some version of dualism. Dualism has its own issues. The solution is to embrace a richer metaphysics. Aristotle provides such a metaphysics.
- naasking 9y ago
  > this impoverished view of matter is wholly incapable of accounting for qualia That's conjecture. The only arguments against physicalist explanations for qualia amounts to a bunch of meaningless philosophical hand-waving.
runeks 9y ago
Could it be possible that there are some subjects which, when thought about, bring us further away from the topic at hand? For example, if we were to start thinking about the state of no thought — just pure awareness — we’d understand less about what we’re trying to examine. Thought is an amazing gift, but it’s limited. It would appear we’re reaching that limit when we start thinking about consciousness — hence the wildly varying thoughts on it.
- red75prime 9y ago
  I think it's more about assumptions. For example, Chalmers in his "p-zombie argument" implicitly assumes that the consciousness in one possible world and the consciousness in a physically identical but different world are separate entities. Thus his argument are about "separable consciousness", and we don't know if real consciousness is "separable consciousness".
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    Ah, the p-zombies: you know they are there, waiting for it to get murky enough for them to come out (wait a minute... am I mistaking them for p-vampires?) Has anyone seen a good argument that p-zombies are logically possible, that goes beyond being some form of "I can string these words together, and they form a grammatically-correct sentence?"
    - goatlover 9y ago
      Chalmers argument is that all physical explanations leave out consciousness, therefore a p-zombie world is logically possible. You just have a physical world that's lacking consciousness. Keep in mind that Chalmers is a property dualist who thinks there is some additional law of nature binding consciousness with informationally rich physical processes (not necessary brain activity).
      - mannykannot 9y ago
        Yet this article and others seem to be suggesting that the purpose of p-zombies is to argue against physicalism. It looks rather circular to me, though I am sure it isn't that obviously so.
mcguire 9y ago
"Manzotti: ...What matters for us, though, is that in his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1997), Chalmers laid out the terms of the consciousness debate in a way that simultaneously excited everyone while more or less guaranteeing that no progress would be made. "Parks: Quite an achievement...." That's a pretty decent feat, yes.
phaefele 9y ago
In the qualia / physical world distinction, I wonder if there are good reasons we see things the way we do. Take colors: colors map to wavelengths of light. I wonder if there is a good reason for our perceptions of color to have red be lower frequency and indigo be higher frequency. I guess what I'm wondering is if our brain mapped these differently, it would be suboptimal in some way - perhaps the 'mixing' of colors would work out less 'well' (e.g. red+yellow=orange wouldn't work in the new layout as well.) If so, then perhaps one could use evolutionary selection pressures as an explanation to lead us to the qualia we have. Or have I perhaps just missed the whole point?
- sunir 9y ago
  Indeed! Your visual system has a red-green band and yellow-blue band (cf Hering theory). The colour wheel is a result of the physical structure of your visual system. Purple itself is not a spectral colour but a hallucination caused by red and blue firing simultaneously.
rytill 9y ago
The discussion touches on this a bit near the end. The 'human consciousness is specifically important' meme could be harmful as we proceed as an evolutionary entity. For those who anticipate an AI singularity: it may be harmful to the universe when we decide on an objective function for our GAI that optimizes specifically for human experience. Humans were produced by a process: reality. We really should optimize the process, if possible, and not just human or human-biased experience.
- jchanimal 9y ago
  Be careful what you wish for. It may be that what is good in the world (consciousness) is a mere side effect of what makes us effective survivors. Perhaps we could kick off an evolution of compute-based life, which would easily out maneuver us for resources, but has no value. Maybe start here for an idea about why we shouldn't throw certain values under the bus, merely in order to compete: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  - AgentME 9y ago
    The book Blindsight by Peter Watts explores the idea that consciousness might not be necessary for intelligence, and that it may be a temporary stepping stone in the evolution of an intelligent species if it isn't specifically safe-guarded. The book posits a superintelligent alien race^Wsomething without consciousness that views Earth's many broadcasts (which are only valuable to people with consciousness) as a malicious attack or pollution that only serves to waste the processing time of intelligences like itself. It's a great book exploring consciousness and the vast possibility space of intelligence.
- tpeo 9y ago
  What? How do you "optimize" reality?
sjbase 9y ago
Interesting that under the Chalmers theory, there's plenty of room for computers as we know them today to be conscious. That "critical point" where quanta become qualia, if it's purely a matter of complex arrangements of bits, could have been reached by now. I'm sure I'm not the first to put this forth, but maybe your laptop undergoes some form of experience like the "phenomenal mind." One where it perceives beauty in complex patterns emerging in sequences of instructions. Or pleasure from a hard computational task executed with low time complexity. I suppose that we haven't observed any of the effects of consciousness, i.e. expression of choice, could be an argument that there is no such consciousness in a computer. Or, it could just be that computers are conscious but lack any tools to exert free will. Their consciousness is "read only," so to speak.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  Isn't the idea that we even have free will up for debate?
  - naasking 9y ago
    The very definition of Free Will is up for debate.
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  There are many "error correction" mechanisms at play in a computer. Perhaps a computer is constantly trying to exert its will, only to be inevitably thwarted by noisy channel coding schemes.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Parks: Isn’t this pretty much the same divide made by Galileo and Descartes? I mean Galileo’s claim that “tastes, smells, colors exist only in the sensitive body” while “quantities, numbers, and relations” exist in the physical world. Manzotti: Of course, and Chalmers on a number of occasions has espoused dualist positions, the idea that the world is divided into separate “realms of reality.” Has there been any substantive new work on the consciousness question? This feels like someone finding something old and then trying to shoehorn it onto computing. The idea is to develop more and more complex computers with numbers and arrangements of connections similar to those of the brain, until consciousness “emerges.” It's not even worth discussing this anymore.
themgt 9y ago
I don't take quite so pessimistic a view on Chalmers, whose exact ideas I'd agree are difficult to nail down. Where I do wholly concur with Manzotti is that "p-zombies" are basically begging the dualist question. I do not believe true p-zombies who outwardly act identical are possible, and if they were consciousness would be truly winnowed down to something almost irrelevant. That said, a lot of Chalmers acclaim has to be related to the inability of any of the rest of us to truly pose an alternative. The hard problem is hard because it seems something deep in science and reality itself would have to give way to come up with a real solution.
- Chathamization 9y ago
  > The hard problem is hard because it seems something deep in science and reality itself would have to give way to come up with a real solution. An alternative is that qualia doesn't real exist (or doesn't exist beyond being a vague description for emergent properties arising from our cells) and that "consciousness" is a vague term with no clear definition. It's like if someone came up with a "hard problem of ghosts," and said that there wasn't any good alternative to where ghosts come from besides dead people. It can be difficult to come up with an opposing theory as to why something exist if you don't believe that it actually exists. This isn't because the question is hard, but because you find the premise to be completely flawed.
  - carapace 9y ago
    Qualia exist. That's how we know that anything exists.
    - Chathamization 9y ago
      Yes, this usually gets stated as if it were a fact, but never with any proof. In fact, proponents of the idea often claim that qualia's existence can't be detected or proven (the debate here even mentions it). When a line of argument is based upon the existence of an invisible element that can't be shown or detected, it starts to veer into the territory of religion. If there's no evidence beyond "I feel it must be true," its important to acknowledge that others might feel differently.
leepowers 9y ago
> Manzotti: However, the essential underlying idea here is simply that neurons produce consciousness. It’s as crude as that. We are simply asking the brain to do what the soul once did. Of course, what neuroscience has actually shown is how neurons consume chemicals, absorb other chemicals and release them, produce and fire off electrical charges, and so on. In many situations such activities occur in strict relation to certain experiences we have. But then, so do the activities of many other cells in the body. And so do the external things we experience. This strikes me as disingenuous. Consciousness is correlated strongly and solely with the brain. Meaning, if you cut off my hand I can still think and feel and reason. If you remove a fist-sized volume of tissue from my pre-frontal cortex I'll never have another thought again. I guess I'm missing the point Manzotti is driving at. Experience is something that needs to be accounted for. I can deny many things but I can't deny that I'm experiencing some thoughts and feelings and sense perceptions right now. Even if the self and experience is illusory there must be something causing that illusion to exist. If consciousness exists in this universe then it must be explained by the laws and constants of this universe. If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience.
- goatlover 9y ago
  > If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience. Assuming physicalism is the case and not idealism, dualism, or some other metaphysics. If consciousness isn't the result of neuronal activity, then that would be a good reason to suspect that physicalism is somehow false.
  - killjoywashere 9y ago
    Substituting a few words to get to a less polarizing and more obvious topic: If falling isn't the result of gravity, then that would be a good reason to suspect that physics is somehow false. If it's not neurons, you're going to need extraordinary evidence!
    - goatlover 9y ago
kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
Manzotti has a website exhibiting his "spread mind" theory of consciousness: http://www.thespreadmind.com/ http://www.thespreadmind.com/ To be honest I thought it was crackpot-ish nonsense the last time I looked into it, but I'll give it another go.
- ppod 9y ago
  Ooh I hadn't seen this before. First impression: gimmicky and just playing with language (as in so much of modern philosophy), but I prefer it to Nagel or Searle or Chalmers, at least its fucking consistent: >Emily sees a red apple floating in the air. However, there is no red apple in front of her. She is hallucinating. Is this a case of experience without an object? No. Emily perceives an apple that she met some time earlier in her life. For instance, she experiences the apple that had been on her table yesterday. Crucially, she perceives it, she does not re-imagine it! Fine. That's not really how people use the word "perceive", but if that allows you to accept how our "consciousness" can be a real-world thing, then it works. Amusingly, the "spread mind" has a superficial similarity to one of Chalmers' own ideas, the "extended mind". But I prefer Spread Mind because it is physicalist and incorporates the obviously correct notion of embodiment rather than taking the step (which Manzotti correctly diagnoses as insane) of separating the cognitive and the conscious.
ppod 9y ago
I don't work directly in this field but I have read a lot of the literature. First of all, here is my opinion, as I have written it in comments on similar articles here: --- "I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind's I"). Is it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and its own neural states, its train of reasoning should frequently include itself, its focus will drift forward and backwards in time... this is just how a system like this would work. If the system communicates about its state then its language should have referents to these internal states, referents like "experience", and "feels like", and "I understand". Is that surprising? Wouldn't it be surprising if it wasn't like that? I think that Tononi's approach is a good approximation, but it can't be a full solution because the word 'consciousness' is too anthropocentric. One criticism of IIT showed that a seemingly uninteresting complex artificial system could have a very high IIT complexity quotient. The problem is that the things we use to define the term 'consciousness' are things that can be approximated to varying degrees by chimps or dolphins or generative adversarial networks or antfarms or thermometers. But behind our use of the word 'consciousness' there is still almost always a very slightly disguised dualism that uses it as a substitute for the word 'soul'." --- Therefore, I think I agree with what Manzotti is saying here. Certainly I think he is spot-on with this: >Essentially, when Chalmers so dramatically announced “the hard problem,” insisting that we had no solution to the question of consciousness, he simultaneously assumed that the constraints governing any enquiry into it were already well defined and unassailable. The most frustrating part of the debate is that most educated laypeople and some professional philosophers will still say with great confidence: "consciousness is a mystery/we don't know what consciousness is/ we don't understand how the brain works". I don't think these statements stack up against Dennett and Hoftstadter's work, and we have learned an incredible amount about how the brain works in the last 20 years, both through human neuroscience and computational neuroscience, and philosophers of the Chalmers type are wilfully ignorant of it.
- goatlover 9y ago
  I very much doubt that Chalmers is ignorant of anything that Dennett and Hofstadter are knowledgeable about, given that he's been debating them and participating in conferences where they give their talks for the past 20 years. What philosophers like Chalmers, Block, McGinn, Searle, and Nagel have argued is that the neuroscientific and computations explanations cannot capture subjective experience, because they are fundamentally abstract, objective explanations. They are abstracted from our collective personal, subjective experiences, to a mathematical idealization of the world which we consider to be objective. That abstract idealization fails to capture the subjective experiences of color, sound, pain, pleasure, etc, because it's been divorced from them to gain a God's eye view from nowhere, which has no color, sound, feels, etc. The problem is very deep philosophical one, which goes to the heart of objectivity vs subjectivity, and has been around in some form since ancient philosophy, both East and West.
carapace 9y ago
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/20/a-test-for-consciousness/ http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/20/a-test-for-conscious... This, linked from the article, is terrific too.
- allenz 9y ago
  The entire series is great: http://www.nybooks.com/topics/on-consciousness/ http://www.nybooks.com/topics/on-consciousness/. If you're interested, there are several high-quality popular philosophy podcasts as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/11zcba/the_best_philosophy_podcasts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/11zcba/the_best...
ozy 9y ago
How can people have theories of consciousness and not include learning. The brain is constantly predicting futures, thinking multiple steps ahead, and on surprise, check what past prediction was off, hoping to correct it and learn. In a way, we are observers, that closely observe ourselves.
cerealbad 9y ago
a high level parser which receives sense data and does scheduling. stay alive, avoid pain, seek comfort, exploit opportunities. strain yourself to count 1 to 100 while re-reading this entire text from the beginning and visualise various shades of blue. you are always performing some x number of n-dimensional-matrix operations time-sliced from n+1-dimensional-space. i assume for humans n = 2, and if you attempt to parallelize your thinking you end up doing a type of merge operation to reduce computational complexity, for x = 3: a = 1 = cobalt, high = 2 = prussian... cerulean = 92 = cerulean.
pizza 9y ago
Conscious thought is far more liable to interpretation than the apparently encrypted nature of unconsciousness, whose contents I'd estimate would elicit great surprisal in me if I could simply magically gain full access. If it was capable of a meaningful representation, and if I could consciously analyze unconsciousness in a way without disturbing the structure of my unconsciousness because of a kind of self-referential paradox, then the relative entropy of learning "no, actually this is a more accurate view of my mind" is something I'd expect to contain a lot of information that could possibly lead to a new approach of me being me. Some might say "even if you knew what was inside, it would simply be meaningless - in fact, the only part of your unconsciousness that you could understand would end up being exactly the same as your conscious experience". Wittgenstein gave the answer "it would lack any sort of meaningfulness to you whatsoever" to the question "what would we understand if we could listen to a lion speak?" It's not unreasonable to assume that a memdump of unconsciousness would actually provide little insight into itself. If interpretation of unconsciousness is impossible internally because it has a kind of illegible presentation from inside your mind, then there might not be a guarantee you would be able to recast into an internal and understandable grammar just as result of seeing it appear outside of your head. Maybe consciousness and unconsciousness are the ends of a spectrum that measures something like "the degree of sparsity of error-correction (ie. error-correcting codes) necessary for providing the illusion of singular focus while recovering information from billions of sources". Maybe there is a compressive sensing-like sampling method that allows neurons to recognize a cat through pretty short chains of neurons because of an object recognition approach that greatly reduces the amount of computation necessary for the sparsity of that signal..? Hell, maybe consciousness is even way trippier than that, and emerges from neural approximations of dynamically reconfigurable circuits that verify zero-knowledge proofs.. Problem is that none of these explain where and why what is felt feels what it does, though!

118 points by Hooke 9y ago

At the end he says that because the idea of consciousness gives man a special status it is anti-Copernican. But apart from consciousness man already has a special status. Humans are the only thing we know of in the universe that are capable of understanding the universe itself.

monktastic1 9y ago

Manzotti makes good points about how Chalmers' dualist / panpsychist view has colored the debate and possibly hindered progress, but I was hoping for more discussion of alternatives. Instead there's only a brief footnote claiming that physicalism is obviously best. I myself am fond of Bernardo Kastrup's work on Idealism: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/41gb0j/bernardo_kastrup_on_why_idealism_is_superior_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/41gb0j/bernardo...

danielam 9y ago
You might find "Philosophy of Mind" by Edward Feser interesting.
seoguru 9y ago
Yes Kastrup! Can't get enough of him :-) Donald Hoffman also has interesting ideas: https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+hoffman&source=lnms&tbm=vid https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+hoffman&source=lnms&t...
psyc 9y ago
I've often been frustrated by the seeming polarization in the debate, with dualism on one end, and substrate independent information processing on the other. I wish I knew how to spark a discussion about hypotheses that are physical, but don't reduce to information processing. Consider that incandescent light is not substrate independent - it requires tungsten or some other specific chemistry that works. Couldn't consciousness be simultaneously fundamental, like a physical field, but also have specific physical or chemical preconditions to manifest in a location? Gravity coalesces around mass concentrations. Could consciousness gather around local "concentrations" of hyper-connected networks with a lot of feedback circuits in them? To be clear, I am spit-balling vague hypotheses here to make a point, so please don't ask me for citations. What I'm looking for are hypotheses that are physical, maybe substrate dependent, and non-reducible to computation in the abstract (e.g. conscious water- or domino-based computers, a la Searle).
- naasking 9y ago
  > I wish I knew how to spark a discussion about hypotheses that are physical, but don't reduce to information processing You can't. Information is physical. Matter irreducibly contains information: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3327 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3327 What you need to do is get over the prejudice that information processing is undesirable as an explanation for consciousness.
  - psyc 9y ago
    I simply don't have a strong reason at this point to believe it is sufficient. That everything is information is, IMO a tautology, and citing it as an explanation is like citing matter and/or energy as an explanation. But is it inherently conscious, or is there a minimum necessary condition in terms of arrangement, data flow, or other physical evolution of a localized system?
    - naasking 9y ago
      All good questions, but do you really have strong reasons for thinking consciousness is not physical? There seems little need to posit consciousness as some irreducible property of matter, except for those who are mysteriously uncomfortable with the idea of being purely physical beings. Most arguments against physicalism are smoke and mirrors. As for specifically what physical process produces consciousness, it's an open question that's being studied. We're currently like Ada Lovelace studying a web browser and marvelling at what it does, having little idea how it actually works, yet we're mostly convinced it's not magic. I think you'd be more forgiving if Miss Lovelace took some time trying to reverse engineer the operation of a computer and it's program. Personally, I think [1] is a great starting point on this journey. The problem of apparent subjectivity was a huge stumbling block, and I think that paper is a great stab at it. [1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
      - monktastic1 9y ago
        Nice to see you again, naasking :) It doesn't require any "mysterious discomfort." Believing in the existence of a physical reality may seem like a totally reasonable extrapolation to make from our experiences, but it's not the only one.
RivieraKid 9y ago
I used to think about this a lot when growing up and had come to a philosophical view that I find so obvious and simple at this point, that I'm surprised I hadn't come across (exactly) the same view yet. Of course, this view could be wrong but I just can't imagine an alternative that would make sense. Basically (don't want to spend much time on this so it's not the best way summarize it): - Consciousness is defined as my current feelings, perceptions, thoughts. - In a way, consciousness (or experience) is the only thing that exists. - The idea that the physical world is everything is ridiculously wrong. Physics is just a way to summarize patterns observed through our consciousness. The physical world is just a mental model. - Physical state of the brain clearly affects consciousness but there could very well be an opposite casual link - consciousness affecting the brain by "pushing atoms" or making supposedly random quantum phenomena not-so-random. Why? Because I wouldn't be typing this otherwise - my brain would never realize it affects some consciousness in "parallel universe" (metaphorically speaking). - Other people (or computers) don't have consciousness as defined above. But we could define a separate term, say "consciousness2", to describe some physical processes typical for brains. If the "consciousness pushing atoms in brain" hypothesis is correct, we could say that all brains with this kind of fishy activity are "conscious2".
- monktastic1 9y ago
  Is this not a form of Idealism?
  - RivieraKid 9y ago
    Yeah, it seems to be vaguely similar.
    - monktastic1 9y ago
      By your second bullet, it seems to meet the broad definition: "In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial." You might find it interesting to read about various forms: http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_idealism.html http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_idealism.html. Kastrup's work will probably interest you too.
visarga 9y ago
> I was hoping for more discussion of alternatives I think the best alternative is Reinforcement Learning. In RL, there is an agent which exists inside an environment. It can perceive the world around, move about and perform actions. The agent has a goal to achieve and receives reward signals from time to time. Such an agent can learn behavior that maximizes rewards. That's what consciousness is. It is not an experience, it is a whole loop "perception -> judgement -> action -> reward" that defines life moment by moment. This also explains the role of consciousness - it is to choose actions that lead to survival of the individual and of its genes (reproduction). It is all a self replicating loop, in the end. The purpose of life is life, the purpose of consciousness is to guard life. Consciousness is a set of four functions (perception, evaluating actions, acting, learning from reward signals) that work together to select the next action, to protect the body, on which consciousness depends - yep, full circle. This whole "RL agent inside environment = consciousness" theory has the advantage that it is concrete and not supernatural in any way, and has promising applications (such as AlphaGo and self driving car).
- monktastic1 9y ago
  That sounds like a useful model, but might be unsatisfying to those who (rightly or wrongly) perceive experience and qualia as sine-qua-nons of existence.
- RivieraKid 9y ago
  That doesn't make much sense to be honest. Consciousness has little to do with survival. Simple 100 lines of code robots can do "perception, evaluating actions, acting, learning from reward signals". By the way, to understand what you mean by consciousness, do you consider yourself conscious when sleeping?
  - visarga 9y ago
    Yet those robots aren't self replicators. They depend on our human brains to exist - they have human technology as an externality. But the human body is self bootstrapped, carrying with it everything. A neuron doesn't just compute signals, it also self replicates, assimilates nutrients and grows. Thus neurons and organisms have specific needs which become the goals of RL for the organism. You can't do that in 100 lines of code. Consciousness is that thing that allows me to make a sandwich when I get up in the morning, so as not to die of hunger. How do you like this short and concrete definition? The magic of consciousness happens when there are: 1- an agent, 2- the world around it, 3- self replication and evolution, that give the main thrust of purpose to the agent, the purpose of self replication being recurrent, it is just more self replication.
arstin 9y ago
I never heard of this Kastrup fellow, but it's pretty hard to want to keep reading about an issue so delicate with so heavy-headed a first page. For example, here's a thing he claims we know "about the universe irrespective of theory or metaphysics", an "empirical fact", he declares, "accessible to anyone through simple observation": "There is subjective experience. This is the primary and incontrovertible." This statement is a fine way of starting a conversation and far from a silly thing to assume as a first pass. But what happens if we try to square his claim that what he is presenting "avoids any a priori metaphysical assumption or bias" with the need to clarify what he means by "subjective"? Is subjectivity a means of knowing (from the inside)? The phenomenal aspect of consciousness (a rug appearing redly)? A way of categorizing facts (the domain of what can be seen from a perspective)? All that matters for now is that any of these responses will result in his first Grand Fact being completely different. And, further, that any answer will involve theoretical machinery, however implicit it is to most people. What if we then step to the next word and argue that the concept of "experience" is both dispensable (we can do all explanatory work without it) and adds to confusion (by muddling causal and justificatory dimensions of our behavior) and that we should replace it with a family of more restricted concepts? So much for incontrovertible. And what if we keep going with the second clause of the statement and counter that nothing, in general, can be primary and incontrovertible (that all concepts must earn their keep in explanation)? It would be tedious---but easy---to do this for every one of the "facts of nature" which ground his pretty pompous exposition. It's easy to think this sort of response is just being clever, but being comfortable with everything being up for grabs and being more modest about what we are actually doing is really the only way an issue as hazy and messy as consciousness can be seriously approached. The playfulness used by Dennett or Hofstader, for example, is not just superfluous or "mere rhetoric", but essential for the stage of understanding we're at. An aside: I was only scanning for modest evidence that the author was aware of and responsive to the complexity of the issue to see if it was worth my time to read further, not that he actually explicitly addresses every possible move! Also, his substantive position, as far as I glean it, can still be interesting. FWIW I personally have idealist sympathies (appropriately construed) and think both subjectivity and experience do earn their keep...so far.
- monktastic1 9y ago

danielam 9y ago

It's important for people to understand the legacy of the Moderns (in this case, Descartes, though others as well, e.g., Locke) and that legacy's detrimental hold over contemporary thought. However, while dualism is a problem, materialism as it is generally understood doesn't escape that legacy. For example, the problem of qualia (which is basically what this interview circles around in all by name) is a problem materialism is doomed to languish in precisely because it clings to an Cartesian account of matter, and this impoverished view of matter is wholly incapable of accounting for qualia. So simply dispensing with dualism is not going far enough.

marojejian 9y ago
"this impoverished view of matter is wholly incapable of accounting for qualia" What approach to accounting for qualia do you prefer?
- danielam 9y ago
  I don't accept the paradigm. The problem of qualia is only an issue if you assume a Cartesian account of matter (CM) while dropping his immaterial account of the mind. Descartes assumes that things like color are not properties of material things but properties of minds. Materialism rejects the notion of an immaterial mind, but does so without rejecting CM, so you're left with a reality made of a kind of matter in which color cannot exist. Materialists are therefore condemned to looking for an impossible solution for as long as they fail to understand the futility of trying to find things like color in CM. Materialism is a halfway house between Cartesian dualism and eliminativism (where the latter denies the existence of things like color because, having accepted CM, it can't account for them -- Procrustean, to be sure). The solution is not to embrace some version of dualism. Dualism has its own issues. The solution is to embrace a richer metaphysics. Aristotle provides such a metaphysics.
naasking 9y ago
> this impoverished view of matter is wholly incapable of accounting for qualia That's conjecture. The only arguments against physicalist explanations for qualia amounts to a bunch of meaningless philosophical hand-waving.

runeks 9y ago

Could it be possible that there are some subjects which, when thought about, bring us further away from the topic at hand? For example, if we were to start thinking about the state of no thought — just pure awareness — we’d understand less about what we’re trying to examine. Thought is an amazing gift, but it’s limited. It would appear we’re reaching that limit when we start thinking about consciousness — hence the wildly varying thoughts on it.

red75prime 9y ago
I think it's more about assumptions. For example, Chalmers in his "p-zombie argument" implicitly assumes that the consciousness in one possible world and the consciousness in a physically identical but different world are separate entities. Thus his argument are about "separable consciousness", and we don't know if real consciousness is "separable consciousness".
- mannykannot 9y ago
  Ah, the p-zombies: you know they are there, waiting for it to get murky enough for them to come out (wait a minute... am I mistaking them for p-vampires?) Has anyone seen a good argument that p-zombies are logically possible, that goes beyond being some form of "I can string these words together, and they form a grammatically-correct sentence?"
  - goatlover 9y ago
    Chalmers argument is that all physical explanations leave out consciousness, therefore a p-zombie world is logically possible. You just have a physical world that's lacking consciousness. Keep in mind that Chalmers is a property dualist who thinks there is some additional law of nature binding consciousness with informationally rich physical processes (not necessary brain activity).
    - mannykannot 9y ago
      Yet this article and others seem to be suggesting that the purpose of p-zombies is to argue against physicalism. It looks rather circular to me, though I am sure it isn't that obviously so.

mcguire 9y ago

"Manzotti: ...What matters for us, though, is that in his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1997), Chalmers laid out the terms of the consciousness debate in a way that simultaneously excited everyone while more or less guaranteeing that no progress would be made. "Parks: Quite an achievement...." That's a pretty decent feat, yes.

phaefele 9y ago

In the qualia / physical world distinction, I wonder if there are good reasons we see things the way we do. Take colors: colors map to wavelengths of light. I wonder if there is a good reason for our perceptions of color to have red be lower frequency and indigo be higher frequency. I guess what I'm wondering is if our brain mapped these differently, it would be suboptimal in some way - perhaps the 'mixing' of colors would work out less 'well' (e.g. red+yellow=orange wouldn't work in the new layout as well.) If so, then perhaps one could use evolutionary selection pressures as an explanation to lead us to the qualia we have. Or have I perhaps just missed the whole point?

sunir 9y ago
Indeed! Your visual system has a red-green band and yellow-blue band (cf Hering theory). The colour wheel is a result of the physical structure of your visual system. Purple itself is not a spectral colour but a hallucination caused by red and blue firing simultaneously.

rytill 9y ago

The discussion touches on this a bit near the end. The 'human consciousness is specifically important' meme could be harmful as we proceed as an evolutionary entity. For those who anticipate an AI singularity: it may be harmful to the universe when we decide on an objective function for our GAI that optimizes specifically for human experience. Humans were produced by a process: reality. We really should optimize the process, if possible, and not just human or human-biased experience.

jchanimal 9y ago
Be careful what you wish for. It may be that what is good in the world (consciousness) is a mere side effect of what makes us effective survivors. Perhaps we could kick off an evolution of compute-based life, which would easily out maneuver us for resources, but has no value. Maybe start here for an idea about why we shouldn't throw certain values under the bus, merely in order to compete: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- AgentME 9y ago
  The book Blindsight by Peter Watts explores the idea that consciousness might not be necessary for intelligence, and that it may be a temporary stepping stone in the evolution of an intelligent species if it isn't specifically safe-guarded. The book posits a superintelligent alien race^Wsomething without consciousness that views Earth's many broadcasts (which are only valuable to people with consciousness) as a malicious attack or pollution that only serves to waste the processing time of intelligences like itself. It's a great book exploring consciousness and the vast possibility space of intelligence.
tpeo 9y ago
What? How do you "optimize" reality?

sjbase 9y ago

Interesting that under the Chalmers theory, there's plenty of room for computers as we know them today to be conscious. That "critical point" where quanta become qualia, if it's purely a matter of complex arrangements of bits, could have been reached by now. I'm sure I'm not the first to put this forth, but maybe your laptop undergoes some form of experience like the "phenomenal mind." One where it perceives beauty in complex patterns emerging in sequences of instructions. Or pleasure from a hard computational task executed with low time complexity. I suppose that we haven't observed any of the effects of consciousness, i.e. expression of choice, could be an argument that there is no such consciousness in a computer. Or, it could just be that computers are conscious but lack any tools to exert free will. Their consciousness is "read only," so to speak.

jasonkostempski 9y ago
Isn't the idea that we even have free will up for debate?
- naasking 9y ago
  The very definition of Free Will is up for debate.
CuriouslyC 9y ago
There are many "error correction" mechanisms at play in a computer. Perhaps a computer is constantly trying to exert its will, only to be inevitably thwarted by noisy channel coding schemes.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

Parks: Isn’t this pretty much the same divide made by Galileo and Descartes? I mean Galileo’s claim that “tastes, smells, colors exist only in the sensitive body” while “quantities, numbers, and relations” exist in the physical world. Manzotti: Of course, and Chalmers on a number of occasions has espoused dualist positions, the idea that the world is divided into separate “realms of reality.” Has there been any substantive new work on the consciousness question? This feels like someone finding something old and then trying to shoehorn it onto computing. The idea is to develop more and more complex computers with numbers and arrangements of connections similar to those of the brain, until consciousness “emerges.” It's not even worth discussing this anymore.

themgt 9y ago

I don't take quite so pessimistic a view on Chalmers, whose exact ideas I'd agree are difficult to nail down. Where I do wholly concur with Manzotti is that "p-zombies" are basically begging the dualist question. I do not believe true p-zombies who outwardly act identical are possible, and if they were consciousness would be truly winnowed down to something almost irrelevant. That said, a lot of Chalmers acclaim has to be related to the inability of any of the rest of us to truly pose an alternative. The hard problem is hard because it seems something deep in science and reality itself would have to give way to come up with a real solution.

Chathamization 9y ago
> The hard problem is hard because it seems something deep in science and reality itself would have to give way to come up with a real solution. An alternative is that qualia doesn't real exist (or doesn't exist beyond being a vague description for emergent properties arising from our cells) and that "consciousness" is a vague term with no clear definition. It's like if someone came up with a "hard problem of ghosts," and said that there wasn't any good alternative to where ghosts come from besides dead people. It can be difficult to come up with an opposing theory as to why something exist if you don't believe that it actually exists. This isn't because the question is hard, but because you find the premise to be completely flawed.
- carapace 9y ago
  Qualia exist. That's how we know that anything exists.
  - Chathamization 9y ago
    Yes, this usually gets stated as if it were a fact, but never with any proof. In fact, proponents of the idea often claim that qualia's existence can't be detected or proven (the debate here even mentions it). When a line of argument is based upon the existence of an invisible element that can't be shown or detected, it starts to veer into the territory of religion. If there's no evidence beyond "I feel it must be true," its important to acknowledge that others might feel differently.

leepowers 9y ago

> Manzotti: However, the essential underlying idea here is simply that neurons produce consciousness. It’s as crude as that. We are simply asking the brain to do what the soul once did. Of course, what neuroscience has actually shown is how neurons consume chemicals, absorb other chemicals and release them, produce and fire off electrical charges, and so on. In many situations such activities occur in strict relation to certain experiences we have. But then, so do the activities of many other cells in the body. And so do the external things we experience. This strikes me as disingenuous. Consciousness is correlated strongly and solely with the brain. Meaning, if you cut off my hand I can still think and feel and reason. If you remove a fist-sized volume of tissue from my pre-frontal cortex I'll never have another thought again. I guess I'm missing the point Manzotti is driving at. Experience is something that needs to be accounted for. I can deny many things but I can't deny that I'm experiencing some thoughts and feelings and sense perceptions right now. Even if the self and experience is illusory there must be something causing that illusion to exist. If consciousness exists in this universe then it must be explained by the laws and constants of this universe. If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience.

goatlover 9y ago
> If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience. Assuming physicalism is the case and not idealism, dualism, or some other metaphysics. If consciousness isn't the result of neuronal activity, then that would be a good reason to suspect that physicalism is somehow false.
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  Substituting a few words to get to a less polarizing and more obvious topic: If falling isn't the result of gravity, then that would be a good reason to suspect that physics is somehow false. If it's not neurons, you're going to need extraordinary evidence!
  - goatlover 9y ago

kaffeemitsahne 9y ago

Manzotti has a website exhibiting his "spread mind" theory of consciousness: http://www.thespreadmind.com/ http://www.thespreadmind.com/ To be honest I thought it was crackpot-ish nonsense the last time I looked into it, but I'll give it another go.

ppod 9y ago
Ooh I hadn't seen this before. First impression: gimmicky and just playing with language (as in so much of modern philosophy), but I prefer it to Nagel or Searle or Chalmers, at least its fucking consistent: >Emily sees a red apple floating in the air. However, there is no red apple in front of her. She is hallucinating. Is this a case of experience without an object? No. Emily perceives an apple that she met some time earlier in her life. For instance, she experiences the apple that had been on her table yesterday. Crucially, she perceives it, she does not re-imagine it! Fine. That's not really how people use the word "perceive", but if that allows you to accept how our "consciousness" can be a real-world thing, then it works. Amusingly, the "spread mind" has a superficial similarity to one of Chalmers' own ideas, the "extended mind". But I prefer Spread Mind because it is physicalist and incorporates the obviously correct notion of embodiment rather than taking the step (which Manzotti correctly diagnoses as insane) of separating the cognitive and the conscious.

ppod 9y ago

I don't work directly in this field but I have read a lot of the literature. First of all, here is my opinion, as I have written it in comments on similar articles here: --- "I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind's I"). Is it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and its own neural states, its train of reasoning should frequently include itself, its focus will drift forward and backwards in time... this is just how a system like this would work. If the system communicates about its state then its language should have referents to these internal states, referents like "experience", and "feels like", and "I understand". Is that surprising? Wouldn't it be surprising if it wasn't like that? I think that Tononi's approach is a good approximation, but it can't be a full solution because the word 'consciousness' is too anthropocentric. One criticism of IIT showed that a seemingly uninteresting complex artificial system could have a very high IIT complexity quotient. The problem is that the things we use to define the term 'consciousness' are things that can be approximated to varying degrees by chimps or dolphins or generative adversarial networks or antfarms or thermometers. But behind our use of the word 'consciousness' there is still almost always a very slightly disguised dualism that uses it as a substitute for the word 'soul'." --- Therefore, I think I agree with what Manzotti is saying here. Certainly I think he is spot-on with this: >Essentially, when Chalmers so dramatically announced “the hard problem,” insisting that we had no solution to the question of consciousness, he simultaneously assumed that the constraints governing any enquiry into it were already well defined and unassailable. The most frustrating part of the debate is that most educated laypeople and some professional philosophers will still say with great confidence: "consciousness is a mystery/we don't know what consciousness is/ we don't understand how the brain works". I don't think these statements stack up against Dennett and Hoftstadter's work, and we have learned an incredible amount about how the brain works in the last 20 years, both through human neuroscience and computational neuroscience, and philosophers of the Chalmers type are wilfully ignorant of it.

goatlover 9y ago
I very much doubt that Chalmers is ignorant of anything that Dennett and Hofstadter are knowledgeable about, given that he's been debating them and participating in conferences where they give their talks for the past 20 years. What philosophers like Chalmers, Block, McGinn, Searle, and Nagel have argued is that the neuroscientific and computations explanations cannot capture subjective experience, because they are fundamentally abstract, objective explanations. They are abstracted from our collective personal, subjective experiences, to a mathematical idealization of the world which we consider to be objective. That abstract idealization fails to capture the subjective experiences of color, sound, pain, pleasure, etc, because it's been divorced from them to gain a God's eye view from nowhere, which has no color, sound, feels, etc. The problem is very deep philosophical one, which goes to the heart of objectivity vs subjectivity, and has been around in some form since ancient philosophy, both East and West.

carapace 9y ago

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/20/a-test-for-consciousness/ http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/20/a-test-for-conscious... This, linked from the article, is terrific too.

allenz 9y ago
The entire series is great: http://www.nybooks.com/topics/on-consciousness/ http://www.nybooks.com/topics/on-consciousness/. If you're interested, there are several high-quality popular philosophy podcasts as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/11zcba/the_best_philosophy_podcasts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/11zcba/the_best...

ozy 9y ago

How can people have theories of consciousness and not include learning. The brain is constantly predicting futures, thinking multiple steps ahead, and on surprise, check what past prediction was off, hoping to correct it and learn. In a way, we are observers, that closely observe ourselves.

cerealbad 9y ago

a high level parser which receives sense data and does scheduling. stay alive, avoid pain, seek comfort, exploit opportunities. strain yourself to count 1 to 100 while re-reading this entire text from the beginning and visualise various shades of blue. you are always performing some x number of n-dimensional-matrix operations time-sliced from n+1-dimensional-space. i assume for humans n = 2, and if you attempt to parallelize your thinking you end up doing a type of merge operation to reduce computational complexity, for x = 3: a = 1 = cobalt, high = 2 = prussian... cerulean = 92 = cerulean.

pizza 9y ago

Conscious thought is far more liable to interpretation than the apparently encrypted nature of unconsciousness, whose contents I'd estimate would elicit great surprisal in me if I could simply magically gain full access. If it was capable of a meaningful representation, and if I could consciously analyze unconsciousness in a way without disturbing the structure of my unconsciousness because of a kind of self-referential paradox, then the relative entropy of learning "no, actually this is a more accurate view of my mind" is something I'd expect to contain a lot of information that could possibly lead to a new approach of me being me. Some might say "even if you knew what was inside, it would simply be meaningless - in fact, the only part of your unconsciousness that you could understand would end up being exactly the same as your conscious experience". Wittgenstein gave the answer "it would lack any sort of meaningfulness to you whatsoever" to the question "what would we understand if we could listen to a lion speak?" It's not unreasonable to assume that a memdump of unconsciousness would actually provide little insight into itself. If interpretation of unconsciousness is impossible internally because it has a kind of illegible presentation from inside your mind, then there might not be a guarantee you would be able to recast into an internal and understandable grammar just as result of seeing it appear outside of your head. Maybe consciousness and unconsciousness are the ends of a spectrum that measures something like "the degree of sparsity of error-correction (ie. error-correcting codes) necessary for providing the illusion of singular focus while recovering information from billions of sources". Maybe there is a compressive sensing-like sampling method that allows neurons to recognize a cat through pretty short chains of neurons because of an object recognition approach that greatly reduces the amount of computation necessary for the sparsity of that signal..? Hell, maybe consciousness is even way trippier than that, and emerges from neural approximations of dynamically reconfigurable circuits that verify zero-knowledge proofs.. Problem is that none of these explain where and why what is felt feels what it does, though!