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Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness
- bra-ket 8y agotoo philosophical, how about figuring out first how we identify objects, parse sentences or recall things from memory before talking about consciousness
- kadenshep 8y agoWe can work on figuring out all of those in parallel.
- Reactionary_ 8y agoThere is a functional and descriptive science of the apparatus of our consciousness, i.e. the things you describe. There is also the profound mystery of how individually 'unconscious' physical constituents of our nervous system can give rise to our conscious experience of the world. The domain of the first is neuroscience and will yield its mysteries to us in time. As for the Hard Problem of Consciousness as I've described it above, I have resigned myself to the belief that we will never be able to peel back that fundamental mystery. One could (and many have) write volumes on why this is the case, but I believe the simplest explanation of why the Hard Problem is Hard is that we are unable to even state the nature of the problem in a satisfactory way. Our language (our comprehension) fails when we try to probe at the root of consciousness.
- naasking 8y ago> One could (and many have) write volumes on why this is the case, but I believe the simplest explanation of why the Hard Problem is Hard is that we are unable to even state the nature of the problem in a satisfactory way. Or the nature of our perceptions simply fools us into thinking there's actually a problem to solve.
- throwaway37585 8y agoElaborate?
- naasking 8y agoThe problem of qualia stems from taking certain properties of our perceptions at face value. Like subjectivity, which can't be explained by an appeal to third-person objective facts. But subjectivity could very well be an illusion. Like how single CPU computers simulate multitasking, the maelstrom of conflicting signals constantly vying for dominance could create an illusion of "inner" and "outer" that we mistake for subjectivity, because we don't have a lens with which to observe this inner process. See the following for a possible mechanistic explanation of subjectivity: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050...
- throwaway37585 8y ago> But subjectivity could very well be an illusion. This sounds like a contradiction. What is being illuded? If there is no subject, there can't be an illusion.
- naasking 8y agoMan, If I had a nickel every time someone used that reply... > If there is no subject, there can't be an illusion. A common misconception, but incorrect. An illusion is simply a fact that, when taken at face value, entails a false conclusion. There is no reason a computer system can't be deceived by an illusion too, even one without "consciousness".
- throwaway37585 8y ago> Man, If I had a nickel every time someone used that reply... Perhaps the reason you see it so frequently is because it's obvious? > An illusion is simply a fact that, when taken at face value, entails a false conclusion. An illusion is simply what fact? What does it mean to take it at "face value"? What "false conclusion" does it entail? > There is no reason a computer system can't be deceived by an illusion too, even one without "consciousness". I think you're equivocating here. What definition of illusion are you using?
- AQuantized 8y agoCould it be that the inability to state the hard problem sensibly is because there is no such problem? I understand it's a somewhat unsatisfactory Dennetian response, but there is the possibility that as neuroscience untangles the softer problems of consciousness, the alleged hard problem will melt away.
- Reactionary_ 8y agoI'm inclined to disagree with that view. A complete physical understanding of the structure and dynamics of the brain and all of its parts would never indicate some subjective experience of consciousness. We only assume that because we know from our own experience that consciousness exists (for ourselves). Saying it's not a problem is hand wavy. Go touch a hot stovetop and tell me that consciousness does not have a quality and value all its own, beyond the electrochemical correlates of the experience of pain.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoIt's the difference between watching audio waveforms on an oscilloscope and listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. These are not equivalent experiences, no matter how accurately the oscilloscope reproduces the waveform.
- AstralStorm 8y agoI'd call it waxing poetic. How do you know if your senses and modeling is not actually getting the data for the symphony from advanced oscilloscope? Good old brain-in-a-jar experiment applies.
- AstralStorm 8y agoSensing pain is not a prerequisite for consciousness. We do not even know if having any senses is - though complete lack thereof will cause problems with detecting consciousness. Due to lack of response. The intriguing part here is to consider if a person in a sensory deprivation apparatus is actually conscious.
- resource0x 8y agoThere's s a simple theory about the root of our consciousness: it's a property of individual cell. Something like this: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/jonathan-edwards/publications/conscpropcells http://www.ucl.ac.uk/jonathan-edwards/publications/conscprop... If this is true (I personally believe so), we need to focus on individual cells/bacteria for the answers.
- lioeters 8y agoI enjoyed the linked article. In the introduction is a proposal/suggestion that "every neuron has at least some form of sentience." The author describes this word "sentience" as a more primitive (primary, basic, ancestral) kind of consciousness. Something that has: "simultaneous access to many elements of information in defined inter-relationships, i.e. access to a pattern" "in which the accessible pattern includes a useful map of some other 'outer' environment, normally the outside of a human being, with a sense of time and, in its fullest form, adult consciousness, a sense of self" ..which seems like a range/spectrum from sentient to fully conscious. With such a definition, a cell could be considered "sentient", and organisms from molds, plants, animals to humans all demonstrate higher sentience.. I wonder how low it can go: since patterns and relationships are mentioned, could a standing wave be considered to have a low level of "sentience"?
- red75prime 8y agoSure, everything has zero-sentience. Zero-sentience correctly reflects the lack of a sense of itself. Some structures have other levels of sentience in addition to zero-sentience.
- eternalban 8y ago> There is also the profound mystery of how individually 'unconscious' physical constituents of our nervous system can give rise to our conscious experience of the world. The simplest explanation is that consciousness is a sort of fundamental field.
- haskellandchill 8y agoHaha eventually with all this theory they will just declare "this is what consciousness is!" and tell all of us that our experiences of consciousness are invalid. Most likely we will sit down and take it, like ok, you win scientists. Then we will be replaced by dumb but efficient robots. Yay.
- naasking 8y agoKind of like they declared "this is what life is", and they were probably right to do so. Vitalism and dualistic theories of consciousness both belong in the dustbin of history.
- haskellandchill 8y agoI belong in the dustbin of history, we're hanging out in the dustbin and I'm throwing a party. Everyone can come wrestle in the mud.
- resource0x 8y agoExpect a huge turnout. You will be amazed at how many of us are going to come :)
- lifthearth 8y agoI wonder sometimes if scientists will solve consciousness and realize that we should have just been partying and having fun with each other the whole time.
- financialsub 8y agoWe picked capitalism, it was a choice, and it says some people get to party sometimes, but not all of the time, unless they did a really good job once.
- taxicabjesus 8y ago> Vitalism and dualistic theories of consciousness both belong in the dustbin of history. Science adopted materialism as it's guiding philosophy prematurely. We've since added electromagnetism and quantum theory to science, but still the hope for the falsification of vitalism persists.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoOur medical ethics prevents us from directly studying consciousness in a way that would give us strong casual explanation. I'm unsure if we'd ever allow it actually. We might get around the edges, but until you can show you can directly turn consciousness off (and back on again probably) in vivo, in the same way we try to do with every other "effective" medical treatment, the strength of any proof is going to be inconclusive. The closest we'll probably get is eventually creating some system which convincingly displays the characteristics that humans recognize as "Consciousness." Hopefully we can stop talking about it then.
- lisper 8y ago> until you can show you can directly turn consciousness off (and back on again But we can, and we do -- every day. That's exactly what general anesthetics do. It's also what happens during sleep.
- haskellandchill 8y agoHm really? Try more drugs, like ketamine. Dissociatives in general will give you an interesting perspective on these issues. Personally, I feel conscious in my dreams while sleeping. Also there are gradations of sleep state, such as the one where you don't get high quality sleep because you partially monitor your scary environment.
- sewercake 8y agoEvan Thompson explores these ideas further in his book 'Waking, Dreaming, Being' if you're so keen. A brilliant guy, who successfully integrates information from various cognitive disciplines, though he can be dry at times.
- vilhelm_s 8y ago"The only thing we know about consciousness is that it is soluble in chloroform" ---Luca Turin
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
- lisper 8y agoI found that Dan Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" really resonated with me. His thesis is (as best I can condense a whole book to fit in an HN comment) that consciousness is essentially an illusion produced by the brain as the best model it can construct of the sensory input it receives. But the model actually lags behind the present, and its history can be rewritten when new information comes in. Dennett describes it much better than I do, and provides a lot of experimental evidence. If nothing else, the experiments he describes will make you see your own consciousness in a new light. I recommend reading the book.
- lifthearth 8y agoIf you like Dennett check out Julian Jayne's "the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" which was highly influential for Dennett. Jayne does a fantastic job pinning down what consciousness is and what it isn't.
- Florin_Andrei 8y agoJayne is a fascinating character. He's so wrong, and yet you can't put the book down.
- Nav_Panel 8y agoWhy is he wrong?
- mrfusion 8y agoAn illusion to whom though?
- lisper 8y agoTo you, obviously. That's kind of the point: your own consciousness isn't really what you think it is. Yes, I know that sounds really weird to the point of being a logical impossibility, but trust me: there's experimental data to back it up.
- igammarays 8y agoJohn Vervaeke argues that much of our trouble with studying or defining consciousness is due to its fundamentally recursive nature. Start with the definition: A conscious being is one which is conscious of itself. Seems circular, but there is really no good non-recursive definition. This definition also seems to "ring" perfectly well with random people on the street. It has been argued that any attempt at a non-recursive definition of consciousness includes things which most people don't consider to be conscious, see for example the paper titled "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious". Which leads to the problem of identification: how do we know that rocks are NOT conscious? Or, more interestingly, how I know the universe itself in its totality is not conscious? The universe certainly must have all the requisite "components" of consciousness, whatever those components are. Once again, the process of identifying is recursive. A conscious being can only identify, with 100% certainty, its own consciousness. Any "other" thing could theoretically be a p-zombie or a Turing Test. Corollary: No conscious being can know, with 100% certainty, that a particular entity is NOT conscious. Could we have a science of a recursive thing? Perhaps, but only if we are willing and able to accept a recursive model with circular arguments.
- modzu 8y agofor what it's worth, vervaeke is best known for his work on relevance, and in particular for demonstrating how the "turing test" (currently the most accepted "test" of consciousness) is insufficient http://www.ipsi.utoronto.ca/sdis/Relevance-Published.pdf http://www.ipsi.utoronto.ca/sdis/Relevance-Published.pdf
- cam_l 8y agoI always thought the Turing test was more performance art than scientific enquiry. Meant as much to illustrate the tenuous nature of consciousness as test computer literacy.
- kuwze 8y agoWhy would you start with a circular definition? You can't use a word in it's own definition! Consciousness: the degree to which something is self-aware. Self-aware: being conscious. There you go. /s
- syphilis2 8y agoIs there a simple explanation for why consciousness (as an idea, or something distinct from unconsciousness) is necessary? I think my wording was poor. I don't mean necessary for things that may exhibit consciousness. I mean why should consciousness even be considered to exist? Why is it a necessary complication to understanding the mind?
- tim333 8y agoPerhaps from an evolutionary perspective being conscious helps you survive better than being unconscious?
- Florin_Andrei 8y agoI've a different question: why talk about necessity? Not all things that are, are "necessary". Also, necessity has a hint of teleology, which brings along its own host of issues. It may just be a feature of this Universe, gradually being uncovered.
- hackinthebochs 8y agoDoes the idea of consciousness have any explanatory power? Does it pick out something substantively different than unconscious processes? If we were to replace all talk about consciousness with talk about molecules swirling about, would we lose something? I think the answer to these questions is yes. It seems that consciousness is a necessary feature of a complete explanation of the world in the same way trees and tables are. That is, even if these things can be reduced to more fundamental things, talk of tress and tables, and consciousness is still important.
- AstralStorm 8y agoYou could probably use few more specific words to a greater effect. Such as self-model, world model, memory, information processing, directed action, responsiveness. Consciousness is a bit too underdefined a word. It is probably not as much of a whole as a tree or human as an organism is - it is not even persistent nor stable - and leaves no persistent traces in the world. You don't get a consciousness carcass left behind or a "monad" as some current theorists postulated. At least we haven't found any.
- wu-ikkyu 8y agoIf controlling and isolating variables is crucial to objective science, and using our own consciousness is a requirement to test/observe consciousness, is it even possible for us to objectively test consciousness?
- tim333 8y agoI seems to me the way forward to understand consciousness scientifically is making computer simulation of parts of conscious awareness and comparing with how it works in real brains until the results are similar. "What I cannot create, I do not understand" as Feynman had on his blackboard. https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-said-What-I-cannot-create-I-do-not-understand https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-... Neural scene representation and rendering (deepmind.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937 seems a step in that direction.
- rixed 8y ago> What I cannot create, I do not understand Does not imply that you necessarily understand what you can create. In this instance, I feel creating something that behaves like a normal brain would not straightforwardly lead to an understanding. In the contrary, it may left us with more questions than answers.
- ythn 8y ago> In this instance, I feel creating something that behaves like a normal brain would not straightforwardly lead to an understanding. In the contrary, it may left us with more questions than answers. Depends on what level of abstraction you create it. Two examples: 1. a person creates a complex video game using assembly language (Roller Coaster Tycoon). It can probably be said this person understands very intimately how every aspect of his game works at every level of the computer. 2. a person creates a complex video game using <Unity, Unreal, etc.>. It can probably be said that the person understands how their game works at a high level, but lower levels (memory, OS, graphics) are still magic to that person.
- kolpa 8y ago#1 certainly not. Chaotic systems (such as the game of life) are easy to build from scratch, but very hard to understand. Reduction is not understanding.
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- laurex 8y agoI recently read Bruce Hood's The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. I think there are some interesting ideas there and in Matthew Lieberman's Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect about the evolutionary value of consciousness that are a bit of a different take, in that consciousness's advantage might be seen as an improvement to collaboration and that identity is more of a means to that end than an end in itself.
- modzu 8y agothe many problems in the study of consciousness are well documented (hence why this thread begins with "toward a...") -- so of course it must be studied in an interdisciplinary manner (what cognitive science attempts to do). can somebody more familiar with this work in particular explain what it contributes, or summarize the idea behind MICS for us?
- remir 8y agoI always found fascinating how, given enough time, organic matter evolved to the point where it became aware of itself, created mental forms to communicate with itself (language), named and categorized itself (human beings, plants, animals, rocks, etc) to try to understand itself. The water that I drink has been inside countless beings for eons. My body is composed of elements that have been on this planet for eons. I think I'm separate from the rest of the planet, of the system, but am I, really? I am like a VM inside an hypervisor. I think I'm separate from the whole, but that's only an illusion. Our senses are powerful and allow us to navigate the world, but if we train ourselves to go beyond them, beyond the language we collectively created, beyond even our memories and thoughts/feelings associated with them, what will we find? Perhaps consciousness is something that should be studied individually?
- stillsut 8y agoA good start towards defining consciousness is to box it in with edge cases: a person in coma? a severely mentally retarded person? a person on hallucinogenic drugs? a dog? The answers to these edge cases can help us separate possibly entangled concepts that seem to come under the umbrella of consciousness. I would concentrate on collecting empirical evidence, at the expense of developing further theoretical speculation along the lines of "p-zombies". I could see a Darwin-like figure traveling widely and recording detail minutely, and using it to make the case for simple unifying force behind an enormous spectrum of variation.
- anon1253 8y ago2011 "Explicit memory as a framework for the neural correlate of consciousness" https://www.dropbox.com/s/huol1vf4j1fs1ll/mind_matters.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/huol1vf4j1fs1ll/mind_matters.pdf?d...
- planck01 8y agoA pet hypothesis of mine: I think consciousness comes from our evolved brain capability to simulate and predict the behavior of others for the purpose of recognizing if we are conned. Consiousness then is being able to apply this capability to ourselves.
- fsiefken 8y agoCheck the ideas of Bernardo Kastrup. https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/are-we-all-multiple-personalities-of-universal-consciousness https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/are-we-all-multiple-person... https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html